The House on Pink Elephant Road

The House on Pink Elephant Road

An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken

What your look meant then.

—Hugh MacDiarmid, “The Watergaw

 

 

I
Motet

The house had been there a long, long time, along the paved portion of Pink Elephant, the section before and after it turned to gravel at either end and dwindled into dusty trails with other less colorful names. It was a boxy cottage covered in bright blue siding. People in the small community of Covington drove by it every day, year in, year out, and most never saw it. Though it was right there, if you looked. Even some letter carriers new to the route missed the house and returned its mail to the Post Office with an undeliverable stamp, though for that, at least, there was a valid reason: the houses on that part of Pink Elephant were misnumbered. The blue house had a number altogether unrelated to anything around it—a single digit, where the other addresses had four.

It was a 6. Or maybe a 9 and the board on the post at the end of the drive had been nailed upside down. Or maybe the character on the sign, done in a curious, tilting freehand, was not intended to be a number at all but a seed with a sprout pushing up from it and curving, bending, from the weight of the casing. There was an old story about the house that only a handful of locals remembered: a story about a seed that had been hidden in it a long time ago, an apple seed that had come from the first apple trees in America. One version of the story went that it had magical properties. Another version said the seed produced a mysterious, polyphonic music like an ancient choir.

When Wyatt Wright signed the closing paperwork, the house was listed as 6; but most of the mail addressed to him just came to “Blue House, Pink Elephant.” He had bought the house because he drove by it on the day of his job interview for band director in the Covington K-12 schools. There was a FSBO sign in front, and he decided that if they gave him the job, he would buy it. It looked like a house where a French horn player would live. He didn’t know then about the seed or the music.

The strange thing was, he’d grown up in Covington and had never noticed the house. All the years of high school, driving around gravel-roading on weekends, he’d been up and down Pink Elephant a million times. He could have driven it blind—had driven it once, stupidly, blind drunk. He knew the cheerful brick ranch with the carport and basketball goal across and down thirty yards. The Koenigs lived there. He and Alex Koenig were the best brass players Covington had produced in twenty years, and they’d both gone off to college to major in music. Alex was working on a master’s in performance; but Wyatt had a harder time deciding on his direction. It was because Tony Arcand, the creepy art teacher, had frightened him one day in fifth-grade art with a weird thing he’d said about Wyatt’s pastel drawing, and Wyatt had been afraid of the future ever since.

Arcand was around forty then, and he scared the hell out of the fifth graders with his gaunt intensity, like something out of Lemony Snickett. He had an aversion to looking at anyone straight on. And his strange eyes, that you could only catch on the slant because his glance was always sliding away from you. He was still teaching thirteen years later, when Wyatt got the job, still the only art teacher for K-12.

Back then, in Wyatt’s elementary years, Arcand had a habit of coming over and tapping on your work-in-progress if it caught his attention. Tap-tap. Tap. You both did and didn’t want that attention; it was like catching the notice of a charismatic tyrant or a capricious bully who could, rarely, be nice. And you felt unctuous, too, if a grade-schooler could feel such a thing, for wanting it. On the day in question, he’d stopped at Wyatt’s desk and gazed at Wyatt’s bad pastel rendition of the poem he was drawing. They’d been told to find a short poem or a stanza of a longer one to illustrate and to copy it neatly; it would be attached to their drawings. Wyatt had chosen part of “The Watergaw,” out of a book his mom had, for its musical Scottish dialect and the image his mother had explained to him of the broken rainbow, the “watergaw.” And the sadness of it! The poet spoke of someone who had given a “last wild look” before they died. The words haunted him, though it would be years before he knew why.

Arcand tap-tapped and mumbled something about color and started pacing away, but then he stopped, turned. Came back, looked again. He pointed to a shape on Wyatt’s paper, an ambiguous prone figure that Wyatt didn’t remember drawing. It looked like someone sleeping—or dead—at the base of the fractured rainbow.

“Do you know what this is?” Arcand had said.

“No,” Wyatt replied, suddenly anxious. It was too upsetting, to think someone had been tampering with his picture, drawing a dead person on it.

“It’s your future,” said Arcand. He stared another minute and muttered something and then went on, looking over the others’ work but not tapping on anyone else’s. The next week, when they received their revision rubrics for the poetry part, Arcand had written in the comments section: There’s another poem that goes with this better. I want you to copy that one and use it instead: “The coward waits/Till it’s too late.” Wyatt was too intimidated by Mr. Arcand to argue or to ask what that other poem had to do with his picture, and when his drawing was given back at the end of the semester with the doggerel verse attached, he tore it up and tried to forget what had happened.

Wyatt was an only child, and Myrna, his mom, was single: Wyatt’s dad had left them when Wyatt was in seventh grade—well after the pastel incident—for a dissolute life with a trashy second cousin he claimed he had been in love with since they were kindergartners. Her name was Melissa, and she was Tony Arcand’s wife. Wyatt’s fear of the art teacher was exacerbated by this, but he actually felt more frightened of Arcand’s children, Chelsey and Caleb, who were unpredictable loners like their dad. They were twins, and a year ahead of him. It wasn’t hard to steer clear of Caleb; his classes were mostly remedial. But Chelsey was a different story, and all through the remainder of middle school and high school, he had to work at avoiding her. Wyatt’s name was still Toomsen, but eventually, after Melissa Arcand divorced Tony and became Melissa Toomsen and his mother went back to her maiden name, Wright, he changed his legally to match hers. He liked Wyatt Wright better. The alliteration felt poetic.

Wyatt didn’t need to come back to Covington and be a K-12 band teacher. As it turned out, there was no reason to return. Myrna had died during his junior year of college, in a freakish tragedy: she had pulled over and gotten out of her car on the driver’s side on the Interstate off-ramp at the second Covington exit to look at a low tire, and from what anyone could reconstruct, a driver had veered over, mowed her down and run over her head, and driven away. If her head had not been smashed, it would have been clear cut, a simple hit-and-run. But the head took it to a higher level of possible malice—even homicide. There were no witnesses, and the driver had not been apprehended. Wyatt was in the middle of a heavy exam week when it happened, and because she wanted just a plain cremation and no service or burial, and because there was nothing to be done except wait for the other driver to be found (they never were), he did not come home then, and there was no closure.

He’d decided to follow the lead of Alex Koenig, whose music career was blossoming, and go on to graduate school. Wyatt had been accepted into a graduate program in music history. After Myrna died, he received a modest inheritance. It was enough to pay off loans and give him freedom. He thought of the great musicians who’d taken risks: innovators, rebels, exiles, maniacs. His own ambition was tame by comparison. The program was in Edinburgh, a daring step for a kid from Covington but not really all that adventurous. Wyatt lacked the drive for performance, but he had turned out to be intuitive and even passionate when it came to digging around in libraries, and he had a knack for score analysis.

So when he heard that his old band teacher back in Covington, Mr. Stanek, was retiring, he wondered who would replace him but didn’t think about it beyond that. Until early summer, when he received, via old-fashioned snail mail, a handwritten note, signed illegibly, that said that they’d had no luck filling the position. Would he consider applying?

A few days later he called Stanek, who expressed delight that Wyatt was going on in music history. “You were always one of the smart ones. I have an old friend, Chick Bey, over at BSU who’s a music historian—quite a character. No, I didn’t send the letter. We’ve had a good response to the posting. We’ll be doing interviews in two weeks. If you wanted to throw your hat in the ring, we’d definitely give you an interview. If it were me, though? I’d go to Scotland.”

“Yeah, that’s the plan. I just wondered if you’d sent the letter,” said Wyatt.

“That’s a weird thing. Nope. But it’s good to hear from you,” said Stanek.

“Good to talk to you, too,” Wyatt agreed.

He had just gotten a Facebook account—Facebook was still newish then. He already had over a hundred “friends,” and out of curiosity a couple of evenings later, he looked up his few Covington friends and looked at their friends, and their friends’ friends—all old connections that in just four short years had become people out of a hazy past he would not return to. Most of them had gained weight and had kids. The pictures they shared featured beer or dead deer or trucks and tractors.

Suddenly he thought of Henegar. Henegar, with his flat-top and really terrible trumpet playing, and an appetite that was legendary. On marching-band competition days, when they took the bus to Norristown or Railer, Henegar never stopped eating. He could eat five McChickens and not gain a pound. His nickname was “Hummingbird,” because he apparently had to eat half his weight daily to keep in motion. He was also so dumb that he was periodically brilliant. If an impossible problem presented itself, it was Henegar who proposed a solution so off-the-wall that you couldn’t believe anyone would suggest it. And then it turned out to be the answer that had eluded all the teachers and smart kids, because you had to be too stupid to put the kibosh on the impossible if you wanted to see that solution—the one Henegar saw.

Wyatt figured that Henegar had either made it and gotten away from Covington by some fluke or had become some younger girl’s baby daddy and was living with her in a basement house, raising a slow kid like himself. Good naturedly, though; he was a nice guy. Back in high school, if you were hungry, he would have given you all his McChickens on the spot and found some other food.

He searched for Henegar’s account, and it popped right up. Henegar was day manager at the bottle factory. A decent job. He looked at Henegar’s handful of friends, an odd mixture of old band nerds and scantily dressed women. Henegar was friends with Randall Martin, which was a surprise: Wyatt couldn’t imagine why Randall, an eccentric middle-aged junk dealer, would be on Facebook. Hardly anyone knew Randall Martin. He lived on the edge of town and made a living buying and selling what no one else wanted. He was poor but not criminal and had a reputation as a deceptively affable driver of smart bargains. Wyatt had seen him only a handful of times, driving around in his pickup heaped with metal and old furniture, but he was like gum on your memory if you’d ever encountered him.

Wyatt clicked on Randall Martin’s profile.

Martin had eleven friends. Not much on his timeline, either. A school band concert picture—he had a girl in band! There she was, with her clarinet. Wyatt remembered a little girl riding around in the truck with Randall years ago. This was her. She was fourteen or so, with the impeccable full-face makeup that these small-town girls knew how to execute. She didn’t look like the poor, futureless girl she was—so maybe she was figuring out a way to survive being a Martin.

There were two or three other timeline pictures of random stuff he was trying to sell, and another of the girl, who had a little brother or cousin. Wyatt was about to hit the Back button when he thought about Randall’s house. It was said to be a hoarder paradise. Maybe there was a picture. Curious, he clicked on Photos.

There were just a few: the profile pic (an old wringer washer) and the pictures of the kids.

And her.

He looked at her for a while, trying to figure it out. A daughter from an earlier marriage? She was very young, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and was wearing a calf-length, flecked gray dress with long sleeves and a headband with fuchsia flowers. The flowers were placed asymmetrically, over her ear. It looked like a wedding photo, except for her extreme youth and the fact that she was very pregnant. Her hair was mid-length, gently waved, light in color, and made him think of soft ornamental grasses. He went back to Randall’s timeline—but almost immediately he clicked on Photos again. This time he clicked on the woman’s photo to enlarge it and realized it was a scan, not a recent image. There were four comments. One said, Just beautiful, Adrianna! How many years has it been? The other three congratulated Randall on his anniversary.

Adrianna Martin, thought Wyatt. The nutty old junk dealer had married a striking, if not beautiful, woman. But she was probably forty or more now. It didn’t take much imagination to picture what even a no-holds-barred beauty would look like after decades of poverty in a junk man’s shack on the edge of town.

If he had logged out of his account then, he might never have returned to Covington. But on impulse he looked for the band teacher, Stanek, and discovered that he had made a Facebook for the band and posted photos from marching season of last year. Wyatt flipped through them quickly, thinking that the job was a shit ton of work. All those early morning marching practices on the football field in the cold, wet autumns. The long loud bus rides, and the kids who couldn’t play or didn’t practice, and the band couples who were in each other’s pants at every event, and you had to be the one to pour cold water on it. He was glad there were applicants, or after his phone call to Stanek he might have felt obligated to apply. He kept flipping through the photos, and then he’d seen them all and clicked on the first one to make sure he was back to the beginning. It was a wide-angle picture of the band room after class. Kids were putting up their instruments. There was one percussionist who was disabled, and someone was helping him. All the special-needs kids had paras, who were local moms. The kid was standing by means of a mobility device, and his assistant was helping him with a snare drum.

It was Adrianna Martin. The para was her, in this blurred photo from last fall. A little older than in the wedding photo on Randall’s page. But she wasn’t fat and forty.

He closed his browser window and went to find that letter of invitation among the piled credit-card pitches and brass catalogs that he should recycle but hung on to out of misplaced caution in case he suddenly had to buy a mouthpiece and couldn’t find one on the Internet.

It wasn’t anywhere. He wasn’t the most organized person, another reason why he didn’t belong teaching K-12 band. On his last day in Covington before he left for college, he’d been running around trying to get everything together, and Myrna laughed and said something about “artists” and “organization” not being in the same playbook.

And then she’d looked at him. A look that encompassed his first piano lesson, his father’s desertion, and every note he’d played while practicing from fourth grade on. All through school, from the very beginning, he went down to the basement on the pretense of staking out his privacy; but he knew she was upstairs, working but listening. She listened critically, and when he came back upstairs, she’d say, “You sounded good,” his confirmation that the practicing had a purpose. Or “You sounded good, but on that last piece . . .” He got angry when she said that; but he also doubled down.

An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied/Afore ye deed! The words came into his head, and it took him a second to remember where they were from: the poem that was the original basis for his fifth-grade pastel, the verse Mr. Arcand had made him replace.

He started to cry. No one had seen her last look. She’d died on the side of the road. He’d been busy with exams and hadn’t talked to her for days preceding.

He knew it would not be true in the future, but at this point on his lifeline, where he was now—twenty-three years old and on the brink of his career—he had spent more time with Myrna than with anyone else. You weren’t supposed to lose your mother when you were just breaking away because then you were left like this: without a root, and without a point to launch from.

He only cried for a minute. Then he stopped and put it away.

The next day, he called Stanek and said he was throwing his hat in the ring. The old band teacher was startled, but he made a good recovery and feigned enthusiasm; and at Wyatt’s job interview with the school board and the Covington High principal, Mr. Fincke, Stanek gave an extemporaneous and glowing encomium about Wyatt’s musicality and work ethic.

He got the job and bought the blue house that lay back from the road. Even after he’d lived there a while, there were times when he almost drove past because he didn’t see it. A few times, he overshot it and had to turn around. It was there when he looked again, but a disconcerting superstition began to trouble him: he believed that by looking for the house, he summoned it.

And if he didn’t look?

He still didn’t know about the seed and the magic . . . or was it music?

There was another surge of grief at graduation. He’d thought about inviting his father, but what a poor substitute that would have been for Myrna, who’d been so proud of him. So he celebrated with friends and their parents, stayed in the city through his lease period, sold his furniture, and moved back.

He had viewed the house twice before he bought it, and there was a walk-through at closing, but once he was in it, he discovered things he hadn’t noticed. Just as it hovered on the edge of visibility outside, on the inside the floor plan kept tricking him. Even things like wall colors and the width of floorboards. He tore up the carpet in the living room and master bedroom and hall, the only carpeted areas. The ancient Berber was glued down, and the glue left a yellow cast where it had adhered. But within the week, the yellow faded, and he wondered if he was misremembering; he could see where carpet tacks had been now, and the wood looked pretty good. It must not have been glued after all. He could live with the floors, though eventually he’d refinish them.

Myrna was in her urn on the mantel in the front room. He didn’t think about her excessively. Then, in July, right before teachers were to start back and band leadership camp would begin, he found himself behind Chelsey Arcand, his old art teacher’s daughter, at Casey’s. She had chopped off her hair but otherwise looked the same. When she turned around, she recognized him. They hadn’t spoken since they were sixteen.

“Hello, Wyatt,” she said. “I heard you were coming back to teach band. That’s a surprise. I thought you were gone for good.”

“It kind of surprised me, too,” he said.

“Seen your dad and my mom lately?” Chelsey asked pointedly, reminding him of what he tried to forget: what a shit his father was, running out on his mom, running off with the art teacher’s wife.

“I don’t have anything to do with my father. Ever.”

“Huh. Well, if you do happen to see them sometime, tell my mom I gave her deer rifle to Kyle Potter a long time ago. I dream about it sometimes, that it’s come back to haunt me. She needs to get it back before that fuckup decides to shoot someone with it.”

“Who’s Kyle Potter?” he said, confused.

She shrugged. “A piece of trash. Watch out for his daughter, too. Dad has her in art class at the middle school. He says she’s a statutory charge waiting to happen.”

He winced and wanted to cover his ears. He didn’t need to hear about sexually advanced middle-schoolers. And he had no idea what Chelsey meant about a gun that belonged to her mother, or why it should make any difference to him. He remembered again, suddenly, the weird thing with the pastel in fifth grade, the prone figure someone had drawn on his picture, and Mr. Arcand’s insistence that he replace his chosen stanza from “The Watergaw” with that silly cautionary rhyme. He wished he still had the picture now: he’d like to see why it had scared him.

Because it had scared him when Mr. Arcand had said, “It’s your future.”

When he got home that night, shaken by the encounter with Chelsey and the memory it had dredged up, he noticed the pewter urn on the mantel. His mother and her “last wild look” that he would never see. She would have wanted to be dispersed somewhere peaceful, but here she was, stuck in a jar. A kind of mania seized him to free her. He took the urn and tried to pull the top off, but it was stuck, and he ended up banging it on the concrete porch until the urn was covered with dents and the lid finally loosened. He sprinkled her ashes all through the yard, trying not to walk on them. There was more of her than he’d expected, but eventually he had completely emptied the urn. Later, a wind blew up that swirled some of her away, and then a burst of hard rain pounded the rest into the ground. This was the closure he needed. She was backdrop now; he would always love her—as much as you could love someone who was no longer. He had decided he was going to marry Adrianna Martin. If something happened to Randall Martin—something had to happen to him—he would marry her and live here and have babies with her—babies who would play in the yard on their grandmother, diffused in the earth.

When school began, it turned out he was wrong about a lot of things: the work was even harder than he’d thought. The middle school gig was the hardest because the kids were busting out with hormones. The boys’ voices were all over the place—thank god he didn’t teach choir. The Martin girl he’d seen on Randall’s Facebook was twelve, not fourteen. It surprised him on the first day of school to see her walk into the middle school band room. The makeup made her look years older—that and a very precocious figure. Her best friend was the Potter girl, Kenzie, who was even more precocious and who in no time had such an obvious crush on him that he was always a nervous wreck in that class. He couldn’t forget what Chelsey had said about her: “a statutory charge waiting to happen.” What if someone noticed the way she looked at him and thought he was molesting her?

Adrianna Martin, when he met her at the high school, was coarse. She was only thirty or so, but her face was showing fine lines. Her diction was all country. She laughed a lot—a raspy, unfeminine snort. Her hair was cheaply dyed. She looked like her Facebook picture, but the picture had not captured an uncouth vitality that shocked him. He was disappointed—more so because he had naively expected her to recognize him and be thunderstruck, but instead she treated him like a green replacement for Mr. Stanek, whom she’d revered. She didn’t find Wyatt worth hanging around to talk to after high school band, the last hour of the day, when the mother of the kid she assisted picked him up from the band room.

It wasn’t until well into marching season that he noticed how deeply invested she was in the boy she helped. It was beyond motherly. But this profusion of caring was hard to see because (he suspected) she didn’t want people to see it. Then he noticed that she was quite funny. And handy at fixing broken stands or risers, disassembling a sink to dig a lost necklace out of a P-trap—maybe that came from living with a junk dealer. Her preferred look: jeans and boots. She was tall with wide hips that he started to watch. The way she talked to the kids was funny and genuine. He got used to her country speech, and it didn’t grate so much.

The boy she helped was in choir as well as band, so she was in the music room fifth hour, Wyatt’s free hour. One day he was working while choir was going on, in his office with the glass window that looked out into the band room. The kid, Corey, had laryngitis and was sitting out the singing and turning pages for the pianist. Wyatt was entering grades, but when there was a commotion, he looked up through the office glass. Adrianna was on the risers in her jeans and cowboy boots with the tenors, announcing that since Corey couldn’t sing, she would fill in. The choir director, Ms. Hatton, shrugged and laughed and said, “How low can you go, Mrs. Martin?”

“Low as I need to,” said Adrianna.

“I guess you know the part; you’ve heard it enough,” said Ms. Hatton, and she nodded to the pianist, who gave the choir a starting chord; then Ms. Hatton led them through their warmup of solfege arpeggios.

Wyatt was alert now, listening. Indeed, Adrianna could go as low, or as high, as she needed to. Though unpracticed, her voice was clear and not the least off key. She’d probably sung in choir herself as a kid but quit music, as all but a handful of people did when they grew up.

After band that day, as she was heading out the door, he summoned his courage and said, “I heard you singing today. You’ve got a nice voice.” He didn’t say her name. He’d been unsure from the beginning what to call her.

“The tenors sounded like shit with one missing,” she said. “I thought it would make Corey feel better.”

“Thank you for taking care of him so professionally,” he said and then thought that sounded utterly stupid.

“Yeah. I guess. I get paid to help him, you know, so don’t thank me. Y’all need to quit looking at me. I got a husband,” she said.

After that, he started calling her “Mrs. Martin” and made a habit of going to the teachers’ workroom during his free hour.

The hard parts of his job got easier. It was middle school in the mornings, elementary just before lunch. Then out to the high school—the most work because of marching and competition, but the most rewarding part. He learned to look over, around, and past Kenzie Potter, though there seemed no way to firmly douse her prepubescent desire. He made it a point not to walk near her. He noticed she got jealous if he talked to other girls in the class, which worried him. He couldn’t not teach the girls, but he did his best to seem professional and remote around them.

After marching season, he spent more time on his house, which had a personality like an irritable old elf. It was always grumbling. Never neutral. Wyatt’s indoor projects did not always come out right, and sometimes the house seemed to be actively working against him. He still didn’t know about the seed. He planned to refinish the floors, but it didn’t feel like a good time yet.

Unnerved by the weird contrariness of the house, he made most of his improvements to the exterior. He built a patio and invited some of his colleagues and old friends over to inaugurate it. Not many came, and afterward people said they’d been unable to find him, though he’d sent everyone a map and explained that the numbers were out of order on Pink Elephant. Henegar was one who didn’t show. Wyatt had wanted to ask him what he knew about Randall and Adrianna.

One person who did show up was the new algebra teacher, Carmen Lausso. She was a sexy, stuck-up nerd with glasses and a tight, narrow figure like a curvy string. They hit it off enough to date, and since Adrianna had rebuffed him (and was married), Wyatt ended up sleeping with Carmen for several months—long enough for her to complain about the recurring dream she had at his house, of a burrito-like figure lying under the floorboards in the hall. In her dream, it intoned ancient words that had never been uttered. She woke up crying, it made her feel so inferior and banal. One night after they’d gotten into it about politics (she was frustratingly partisan), they went to bed and ended up having the only really good sex they’d had. Deep in the early hours of the morning, Wyatt had Carmen’s dream—or something like it: under the subfloor in the hall, somewhere among the joists, lay an ages-old figure; it was chanting a sacred polyphony, somehow managing to do several voices.

Wyatt dated Carmen up to the cusp of spring. For St. Patrick’s Day they went out to Covington’s bad Mexican restaurant, Dos Arboles, to have a state-of-the-relationship dinner. They both wanted to get married someday but agreed it would not be to one another. They were not as compatible as they’d hoped. In fact, for the past month each, unknown to the other, had been going out of their way to avoid sex, the chemistry was flagging so badly. Having figured this out, Carmen started laughing. Then she came over to his side of the table, kissed Wyatt on the bald spot that was emerging on his head, and slipped away, her sculpted, small behind nothing like Mrs. Martin’s lavish one. He sat with the bill and his half-finished margarita, thinking about her.

“Hey, Wright! I heard you were back home. How’s the band-teacher business?”

It was Henegar. He was there by himself, and he plopped down opposite Wyatt in the booth and started telling him about the past five years. In the midst of his narrative, he ordered a 16-ounce draught and fajitas for two.

“I already ate,” Wyatt said.

“Yeah. I saw.”

Henegar continued his saga. The fajitas arrived, and he ate the entire plate, leaving only a few forkfuls of guac. Wyatt listened politely, thinking Henegar must be lonely and wondering idly, just for a second, if Carmen would be interested in a bottle-factory manager. If not for the differences in class and education, she and Henegar might actually get along very well; they were both super conservative and had a common fixation on Harry Potter.

“So how do you know Randall Martin?” Wyatt asked out of the blue.

Henegar almost choked on his beer. “What?”

“Randall Martin?”

“I don’t know him. Not really,” said Henegar. “But . . . hey, no one told you?”

“What?”

“I was the one who found your mom,” said Henegar. “I’d went to get Chinese for lunch, and it’s faster by Interstate. So I got off at Exit 52 with my go boxes—”

“Boxes?”

“Two. I can pack them pretty full of food. Now and later, you know? Lunch and dinner? I was getting off at Exit 52. And I saw her there, lying all messed up. I jumped out to see what was happening. I was already dialing 911 but then I remembered that when we called EMS for an accident at the factory they spent a half hour scratching their asses before they even left the hospital. I figured it was better to take her right to the ER. But I couldn’t get her in the car all smashed like that.”

Wyatt hadn’t known until now that Myrna had been taken to Covington’s rural hospital by means other than an ambulance. “So she was still alive when you found her?” he said.

“No. I don’t think so. Her head was—sorry. But when you find your band buddy’s mom lying on the road with blood and tire marks all over her, you gotta take her someplace.”

Wyatt was starting to be extremely upset. “How did you get her there?” he said uneasily.

Henegar looked down at the table.

“You know Lucas T.’s junkyard/tow service up the road? I hauled ass over there looking for Lucas, and he was off on a tow job, but Randy Martin was there. I knew Martin’d trade some emergency transport in his pickup for free Chinese for his whole family—I can pack a lot in two boxes. He said he’d do it if I’d also let him go through the dumpster at the bottle factory every so often. We’re not supposed to let anyone go back there, but I said okay. So then we hauled ass back to the exit ramp, and Martin loaded her into the bed of his truck. He’s strong as a camel, and he didn’t mind getting all blood— I mean, you know she was rolled over pretty good, right? I sat in the bed on the way to hold the . . . keep the . . . to keep your mom from getting roughed around. I thought you knew about it,” Henegar said again.

Wyatt closed his eyes. He could never have imagined this terrible scenario: the degrading trade of truck transport to the ER for two stuffed-to-the-brim go boxes of bad Chinese; Myrna’s inert, bloodied, still warm body jolting around in the bed of the junk man’s pickup, with Henegar holding her like a log so she wouldn’t slide around.

His heart felt raw.

He opened his eyes, and Henegar was looking away at the grotesque Mexican-themed art and gulping his beer. If Wyatt could have chosen anyone to find his mother, it would not have been Henegar and Randall Martin. To make it all worse, he realized that Adrianna must have known about this. She’d known even before they met.

“So you don’t know Martin’s family?” Wyatt said finally.

“Nah.”

“His daughter’s in my middle-school band.”

“It’s his wife’s. Not his. Addy got pregnant in high school, and her parents kicked her out. Randall was their neighbor. Next thing I heard, he’d married her. But he’s not the father. Everything he’s got out there at his place is some kind of reject.”

One warm spring Saturday, Wyatt went out on his patio with his French horn. Playing to the audience of lilacs that bordered the neighboring vacant lot was a way to deal with loneliness. It didn’t register with him that he was also playing to Myrna. That she was in the ground, still listening.

He played a while, and it sounded good; maybe he had been good enough for performance. And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a truck turn into the driveway and come roaring up the gravel toward the house. It was Randall Martin’s truck, and it was weaving from edge to edge of the long drive. Then it bucked to a stop, and the engine died.

He set his instrument carefully on the field stone of the patio and stood up.

He’d never seen Adrianna drive the truck; she had a dinged-up little Ford. But it was she who got out. She didn’t see him; she was looking at the vehicle. She walked around it, kicking at the tires and cussing. She banged on the tailgate and swore more loudly. Then she came around to the front of the pickup, and he could see her looking at the blue house, noticing the horn on the patio.

“Mrs. Martin, did something happen to your truck?” he called out.

“Heck if I know.”

They stood together looking under the hood. “It was the weirdest damn thing,” she said. “Randy’s truck just started going over to the side of the road. I couldn’t stop it, it was like a dick on a mission. And then I saw the house; I don’t know why I never saw your house before. The truck just kept pulling. It’s almost like it would of turned in here itself, even without a driver.”

She seemed to know something about cars, and she fiddled around getting her hands black, looking at fluids and spark plugs and dipsticks. Wyatt was clueless, but he gazed with her at the nest of parts under the hood and pretended to agree that it was nothing obvious wrong. With her there in his driveway, it was heaven to be breathing the smell of motor oil and talking about things like water pumps.

“I think Randy’s got Lucas T. in his phone,” said Adrianna, pulling out the cell phone that must be her husband’s. She found the tow service in Contacts and started texting. “He and Randall will work it out in parts and farts,” she explained. She laughed. “You sounded good on that French horn. I heard you from the road. I could listen to that all day.”

A minute later, looking at her phone, she said, “L.T.’s in the middle of a job. He’ll be here as soon as he’s done.” She stuck the phone in her pocket.

“Would you like me to drive you home?” said Wyatt.

“I’d like to hear you play that horn some more,” she said. She turned away from the truck engine and suddenly pulled him over to her by his upper arms and kissed him. The kiss was just like he’d imagined it would be, but his hands flopped around at his sides. He wanted to put them on her ass, which was beautiful, but he was afraid; he wasn’t sure if she was kissing him as a joke or seriously. His body thought it was serious, and he was getting an erection.

She pulled away and said, “I don’t even know why I did that. It’s like someone else was jerking me around.”

“You’re so pretty,” said Wyatt. She was. Even with the dyed hair, and the tracing of lines at the corners of her eyes, and the faint, puffy dark circles under them.

“I’m thirty-one. How come you like me more than that hot algebra teacher?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. Then he told her about seeing her on Randall’s Facebook and how he’d applied for the job and moved back to Covington just on the chance that he would get to know her.

“That’s nuts,” she said. “You knew I was married. What did you think you were going to do? Kidnap me and keep me in a dog kennel?”

“No. I don’t know,” he said.

“I’m married,” she said again. “I promised myself I wouldn’t ever cheat on Randy. He didn’t have to marry me, but he did. He took care of me, and he treats Jammy like his own kid and never hurt anyone.”

“Jammy?”

She looked at him like he was an idiot. “Jasmyn. You’ve got her in class.”

“My dad wrecked a marriage,” said Wyatt. “I always said I would never do that.”

“Then don’t,” she said.

“Come in the house with me. Right now,” said Wyatt.

And she did.

Afterward, they lay in his bed and listened to the clear, sweet singing coming from under the hall floor. “Do you hear it?” he said.

“What is it?”

“I wish I knew. I dream about it sometimes. In my dreams, it’s a body all wrapped up like a burrito. Listen: it’s one voice but it’s three voices. They’re singing a motet.”

She closed her eyes; then she opened them again and got up and went and listened, naked, at the door. “It sure knows how to sing,” she said. “Motet—whatever you said. No COPD in them lungs.”

She got her clothes and started to get dressed. “I need to tell you this about Randy,” she said. “Don’t you think he’s a dumb fuck whose wife you just shagged. He’s really smart. People think he’s a white-trash junk dealer, but you should see him working a deal. He can think rings around the guys he does business with, so he always gets the best bargain. Leaves them in the dust.”

“Why doesn’t he get a real job if he’s so smart? Buying and selling and scrapping isn’t what normal people do.”

“He needs to be available. He can’t do that with a regular job.”

“Available?”

“If you need a fridge hauled, or your car dies and you’re done with it. If a piece of junk that used to be something is getting thrown away and needs rescued. He’s a genius about things that are wrecked up or lost. You can’t do that and do the usual kind of a job.”

Wyatt thought it sounded like a harder life than it needed to be, but he didn’t say anything.

By the time they had both dressed and he’d gotten her a glass of water (not very romantic, but she was thirsty), he had started to feel the weight of impossibility: she was poor; she was older; she was married; she was no one anyone would approve of. The town was one big stew of gossip, and probably half the people in it already knew what had just happened. The sex had been a religious experience: he’d wanted it so badly, for so long. But although she’d seemed to like it, she’d also made fun of him, gently, for his exuberance. He’d wanted to impress her, but in the end, Wyatt understood that she’d mostly wanted him to play the horn for her.

So they went outside, and he played. She listened, closed her eyes, and drank the water.

Soon Lucas T. arrived with his trailer and his border collie, Atwater, the dog he’d pulled out of the river dead and resurrected by CPR. Atwater still rode with him, but the dog was gray and stiff now. Lucas lifted Atwater out of the passenger seat, set him by the truck, and stood talking to Adrianna, whom he apparently knew well; he called her “Addy.” Wyatt felt jealousy flare and start firing like a Roman candle and realized this was what Kenzie Potter felt when he talked to girl students in band. The thought flitted across his consciousness—and then was lost—that such an emotion in an impulsive teenage girl might be dangerous.

While jealousy was still popping out its blazing balls, Atwater ran around the back of the Martins’ truck and started barking. Lucas and Adrianna followed. Then she started screaming.

Wyatt ran after and saw what had upset her, what the dog was barking about: a thin stream of bright red blood dribbled down from the hinge of the tailgate and was dripping onto the ground.

Lucas looked at Wyatt and Adrianna and made a calculation. “You two didn’t knock off Randy and stow him back there, did you?” he said. He laughed gruffly, without sounding amused.

Wyatt’s heart nearly stopped; but Adrianna just punched Lucas T. hard in the arm and told him to shut up, he didn’t know shit, and to mind his business and open the tailgate—which Lucas did.

There was nothing in the truck bed. No junk, and nothing bleeding. The last of the blood dripped from the gate hinge, but it was coming from nowhere. Then Wyatt saw that right where the tailgate met the truck bed, there was an almost invisible dried red spot; it looked like rust.

Atwater stood on his hind legs and sniffed at it.

“What’s that?” said Lucas.

“It’s the last of his mom’s blood, from when Randy picked up her body,” said Adrianna as it dawned on her and Wyatt simultaneously.

“I sprinkled her ashes in the yard,” said Wyatt slowly.

Lucas T. shook his head and said, “Damn, Toomsen—you buy the most haunted house in town and sprinkle a murdered body in the yard.”

“She wasn’t murdered,” said Wyatt. “Just killed.”

“By someone who drove over her head,” muttered Lucas.

“That old blood’s trying to get back to her body, where it belongs. That’s why the truck wanted in here,” said Adrianna. She rubbed away the red patch onto her fingernail. Then she went over and crouched by the patio and scraped the last flakes of Myrna into the earth.

“Go see if that truck will start up now, Addy,” said Lucas when she’d finished.

She got in and turned the key. It started right up, and she drove away.

Wyatt stood awkwardly with Lucas T. and the dog, watching her leave. Then Lucas T. opened the passenger door of his tow cab and gave Atwater a lift up.

“I’m sorry we dragged you out here,” said Wyatt. “Do I need to pay you something?”

“No,” said Lucas T. He looked all around the yard. “Pretty place,” he said. “Aren’t you scared of that seed thing under the floor?”

“What?” said Wyatt.

Lucas T. didn’t explain. He just said, “Randy’s brother and I grew up together. I’ve known Randy forever. He’s crazy about Addy.”

Wyatt clamped his eyes shut and grimaced. This was bad. It was just bad.

“I know. I’m sorry,” he said to Lucas T.

A long time passed. The school year ended. During those last weeks, they avoided each other. He only looked at her when he was sure she was too occupied with Corey to notice. Then the long, hot, humid Covington summer, which he’d been dreading; but he got a respite. He reconnected with Alex Koenig, who was playing with a second-tier symphonic band from a southern city. It was doing a summer tour; there was a temporary spot for a horn player. Wyatt practiced like hell and sent off an audition file and ended up making it. So he toured for a month and a half. “You’re good, Wyatt. Not brilliant, but reliable. And good. What are you doing teaching kindergartners?” said Alex.

“Grades five through twelve,” corrected Wyatt. He didn’t know what he was doing. A life with Adrianna was impossible. Even if she was willing to betray Randall and sleep with him, that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to live with her. For a long time.

He should have gone to Edinburgh. He still could if he reapplied. He tried to block the thought of Adrianna, but it kept messing him up at odd moments: he’d be driving along with Alex and see a pickup rattle past and remember standing with her, looking at the tangle under her hood. Or her voice would just walk into his head and start saying the kinds of things only Adrianna would say, in her country speech that had started to sound so sexy.

He wondered if the blue house would be there when he returned. But in late July, after a quick celebratory trip to New Orleans with a few of the band members, he flew back to University City and took the shuttle to Covington. It let him off at the McDonalds, and from there he called a cab, which took him right to the spot on Pink Elephant. And yes, he still had a house.

“I didn’t know that house was there,” said the cab driver.

“It’s kind of hard to see sometimes,” Wyatt agreed.

He’d worried about the mowing while he was gone, since he wasn’t sure, if he paid someone to do it, whether they could find the house. But then he’d realized that the grass never grew higher than three inches. It didn’t look bad now. He unlocked the door and carried his bags and his horn inside. Everything looked like it had when he’d left; but as always, things felt off-kilter, too. Like the house had a mind, and many firm predilections.

He opened the windows to air things out and heard a car coming up the drive.

It was her dinged-up little Ford. She came inside and put her arms around him but didn’t kiss him. “I missed you,” she said.

“You didn’t speak to me for those last seven weeks of school.”

“I was speaking to you in my brain.”

“I don’t want to be like my father.”

“Your dad’s ignorant and he lives off disability because he don’t like working. You’re good and decent like your mom.”

She was right, to a point; and they went to bed, and the thing beneath the hall floor began to sing softly just about the time that Wyatt was becoming flaccid again and telling himself that it was still just as hopeless as it had been three months ago. And that he was really, badly, in love.

Jasmyn was thirteen by then. She was coming into her own. Adrianna was not yet thirty-two. All the times she came to see Wyatt at the house on Pink Elephant, she talked about her kids. She told Wyatt all about Jasmyn, who was mature for her years. And her baby, Isaac, who was seven; he was smart like Randall—and, like Randall, different, which worried her. She didn’t say who Jasmyn’s father was. Though Wyatt wanted desperately to ask.

More than anything, they talked. They slept together, too. Not as often as Wyatt wanted, but he loved her head to toe: her dyed hair; her cesarean scar from having Isaac, who was nine pounds and breech; her ridiculously lithe feet; the slight grittiness to her skin—she said it had to do with being a junk dealer’s wife, but he couldn’t figure out how.

Wyatt couldn’t tell Adrianna what he really wanted: for Randall to die or disappear (in the gentlest way possible, so it wouldn’t cause him any guilt), and for him to step in and be a father to her children, for him and Adrianna to have children of their own. He guessed she knew this, but it was a dream too terrible to articulate because it involved her children losing a father—and he knew what that was like.

It went on for two more years. She came over when she could. He played his horn for her often, and she listened. Never critically, as Myrna had.

He loved her with every atom of himself, though he wouldn’t say it. She loved him, but not that much, he suspected. And she loved Randall, too.

Which was why, one day as she as leaving, she said she wouldn’t come back anymore. “Randy’s depressed. He’s never been depressed since I’ve known him, but I think it’s you and me. He ain’t worked in a while. He knows, but he doesn’t know. So that’s why I’m quitting the high school,” she said. “So we don’t see each other and stay stuck. I hope you get to go away to England.”

“Scotland,” he said.

“Or anywhere.”

Wyatt’s heart skidded and crashed.

“Hold on,” he said, and ran to get something.

He’d started on the floors last week, feeling suddenly, strongly, that it was time. But before he sanded the hall floor, he wanted to know what was under there—what the thing was that Lucas T. had referred to, the thing he and not one but two lovers had heard.

Something drew him to the basement, then to a massive, cobweb-covered joist. The bones of the house. How long had the house been here? The blue siding made it hard to tell an age, and the Realtor’s fact sheet had listed the construction date as unknown.

It took climbing on a high stool to see the notch cut away in the joist. Tucked in it was a rusty metal box like an old lozenge tin. In the tin was a nugget. Something like a seed, but so old it was petrified. When he held the tin in his hand, it felt archaic and full of music, and he could almost see who had killed his mother and almost know—

He brought it now to Adrianna. “You need to take this. It’s the thing that makes music. I want you to take it. It was under the hall floor. If I can’t play for you anymore, maybe it will sing to you.”

She looked at it and backed away. “That don’t belong anywhere but this house,” she said. “You can’t give it away. It’d be bad. You need to put it back.”

They argued about it then. He didn’t want to live in the house, with all its strangeness, without her; she was the only thing that made things make sense after Myrna died. He was thinking this while insisting that she take the tin, and she insisted in turn that he was messing with things you didn’t mess with. He should put it back right now.

“Okay, I’ll put it back. But you have to wait for me. He tromped down to the basement and climbed on the stool. He could hear the voice now. It was the seed inside, singing. The music was very old. The tin pulled toward the joist and slid back, deeply, into the ancient wood, like time was retracting it.

The door shut upstairs; she was gone. He had not told her how much he loved her. He’d been going to tell her forever, and now he never could.

II

The Hen Who Thought She Was God

“So, Wyatt, do you know what’s happened to Jasmyn Martin? She hasn’t been in Humanities or Communication Arts for three days.” Mrs. Prentiss-Gill said. She was helping herself to virgin drunken ranch sausage-queso dip and Doritos from the spread that the PTA brought in once a quarter. Her back was to the eight other teachers in the lounge, but she was using her classroom voice. They all heard.

She put a double-fudge brownie and two stuffed celery sticks on her plate and turned around to face Wyatt Wright, who had gone a deep plum shade and dropped his full plate of queso and meatballs. Everyone was trying not to look at him, except for Ms. Figueroa. Tess. She was the student band teacher. She had been here two months, and she was the only one present who didn’t know that Wyatt had had a long-term affair with Jasmyn Martin’s mother that had recently ended. All she knew about Mrs. Martin was that she’d been a para for one of the band students, but she’d suddenly quit.

Brows knit in puzzlement, Ms. Figueroa stared at Wyatt for a minute and then jumped to his rescue. She squatted over the mess at his feet with a bundle of paper towels and kind intentions, having first swept her hair over one shoulder and shoved it down the back of her shirt to keep it from falling into the food. She had a blazing red mane and a dreamy, creamy baby face and ample, waistless, small-breasted body that looked like Dante Gabriel Rossetti had collaborated with Peter Paul Rubens. She’d immediately endeared herself to the women on the faculty by being fat; and to everyone by her willingness to take on the most detested jobs that the teachers were expected to do in their free hours or after school. She was also a klutz. In the past eight weeks she’d sprained her ankle and dropped the piano lid on her hand; and yesterday she had fallen off one of the choir risers and hit her face square on the corner of a black Manhasset music stand, giving her a polychrome stunner around her left eye.

Wyatt was trying to clean his slacks with some limp wet brown towels from the dispenser above the sink. They left a residue of shredded fiber on his pants and didn’t do much against the queso except smear it around. He gave up and handed the rest of the towels to Ms. Figueroa, who was having better luck cleaning the floor.

“There,” she said cheerfully once she’d finished. She was still squatting at Wyatt’s feet, and she looked up to see the creepy old art teacher, Tony Arcand, assessing the scene. His expression was distant, as always, but Ms. Figueroa imagined some sexually tinged fantasy his lecherous artist’s eye might be creating. She bristled.

But then Arcand did something he never did with anyone: he made eye contact with her. Just a flash. Just long enough for her to see deep inside him and see that it was not sex at all. In fact, she wasn’t sure even he knew what he’d been thinking. She was not prone to mysticism, but she had the sudden curious idea that she was peering directly into Arcand’s unconscious mind and seeing a prophecy. No wonder he never looked directly at anyone, if anyone he looked at could see straight into his subconscious like this. But for just this nanosecond, she was seeing it, and it was like she was watching a very low-res GIF of something yet to happen: there was a girl. A woman. A gun, though it was hard to make out. Someone was shooting. Someone else was falling. A field of brush and stubble, ringed with trees. A house. A free-form patch of red fluid: dark applique over the turf. It was a murder!

That was all, and then he looked away. She caught a trace of a godawful smell. Out of reflex, she sniffed the paper towels she was still holding, but it wasn’t anything she’d wiped off the floor.

And then the moment was gone. Tony Arcand was looking toward Wyatt, just to the side of him. “Even clumsier than your student teacher today, Wyatt,” he said with sly amusement. Something startle you?”

Mr. Wright shook his head slightly. “Tony . . .”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Whether out of malice or idle curiosity, Arcand decided now to push on the knife the teachers all knew was lodged in Wyatt’s heart. Lodged there because he’d hadn’t just been sleeping with Adrianna Martin. He’d been deeply in love with her.

“So what about the Martin girl? She miss band, too? How long’s she been out? This have anything to do with her mother quitting?”

“She’s been out three days,” said Ms. Figueroa helpfully. “She’s second-chair clarinet. You’ve probably seen her. She’s—”

“I know her. Dirty blonde. Lots of makeup. Not as pretty as her mom, but she’s got an incredible—”

“Tony, she’s fifteen,” Mrs. Prentiss-Gill began.

“Yeah? Your point?” His voice edged up.

“I don’t think—”

Arcand cut her off. “No, you don’t, do you? I was talking about her artistic talent. That makeup’s like nothing you ever saw. Girl’s a genius.” He went over to the table, examined the PTA spread, and then announced loudly, “Best thing here is the homemade pimento cheese, but you’re all eating that Doritos-and-sausage crap and box brownies like they’re caviar.” He gulped half a sandwich in two bites and wiped his mouth.

He turned back to Wyatt. “Maybe you better talk to the mom,” he said. “Since you know her so well. See what’s going on with the kid.”

Someone spoke up. “There’s actually an official procedure, Tony. After five absences, Mr. Fincke sends a letter . . .”

“Mr. Fincke!” Arcand started to laugh like something in him had ruptured. “Mr. Fincke!” he roared. “What do you think Fincke’s gonna make of the Martins?”

Then he gave up any pretense of amusement. “Wyatt, if you set a pendulum swinging and walk off, it isn’t stopping,” he said.

“Friction will stop it eventually,” offered Mr. Vance helpfully. He taught science and was the voice that had spoken up a minute ago about Mr. Fincke and official procedures.

Arcand cast an unreadable look in his direction. “Or interference,” he said, but Mr. Vance didn’t get it. “But let’s say it’s your pet cobra, and you let it out for exercise,” said Arcand. “And then it gets away from you, and a couple of people get bit and are pretty sure they’re going to die. What do you do then?”

Mr. Vance looked confused, but Wyatt was listening. Ms. Figueroa could see that he had an idea of what the art teacher was talking about.

Arcand continued: “So, you know, you need to get ahold of some antivenom and apply it, or that bite is deadly. If it was me, I’d get the antivenom and save some lives.”

Wyatt sat stone faced.

“I’d probably talk to the mom,” said Arcand. “But you can do whatever you want. The girl’s not my student, and I ain’t said hey to her mother since I can remember. It’s not my business . . .”

“No,” said Wyatt quietly. He was shaking a little. Ms. Figueroa wasn’t sure whether “No” meant no, he wouldn’t talk to Adrianna Martin or no, it wasn’t Tony Arcand’s business.

“The bell’s going to ring in about thirty seconds,” said Mrs. Prentiss-Gill, tossing her plate in the trash and grabbing a pimento-cheese sandwich for the hall.

“Suit yourself. I’m not—” said Arcand.

“No,” repeated Wyatt.

“—responsible for what you don’t try to fix,” the art teacher finished.

Later that afternoon, Ms. Figueroa and Mr. Wright discussed the fact that the clarinets were no good without Jasmyn. Ms. Figueroa was a coronet player herself, and Mr. Wright was horn and baritone, so the finer points of woodwind synergy sometimes eluded them, especially when it came to the reeds. The flutes were solid. All women. Mostly smart and good all-around students. Leah Lin was first chair; Kesha Thomas was second; they were seniors, both all-district. Third was Kenzie Potter, Jasmyn’s friend, who was not a typical high school flutist. She had family problems and was a little off, but she could play all right. The biggest trouble with Kenzie was her obsession with Wyatt, and from what Ms. Figueroa had learned, it had begun to spin out of control when Mrs. Martin left. It was just short of stalking, the way she lurked in the band room all the time and followed him with her eyes.

Kenzie and Jasmyn were friends, and when Jasmyn was still gone on Friday, Ms. Figueroa wondered if something had happened between them. But when she was gone on Monday again, she knew that Jasmyn was too reliable to skip so many days over a fight—in reality, Ms. Figueroa felt certain, Jasmyn wouldn’t skip even one day for that. And if it was a fight, they would have heard about it from the other students, but no one knew why Jasmyn Martin was missing.

Even Kenzie knew nothing. And, it seemed, had no way of finding out. Jasmyn didn’t have a phone. The only way to contact them was through the father’s cell phone, which he wouldn’t answer. The Martins lived out on edge of town, and Kenzie didn’t drive, and her dad was back from prison and wouldn’t let her go anywhere anyway. Her grandfather, who had bought her the flute and was the only family member who came to her concerts, was in the hospital, or he might have intervened. She had explained some of this when Ms. Figueroa and Mr. Wright asked her on Monday about Jasmyn, looking slyly at Mr. Wright as she spoke.

“Maybe we should try again and see if Kenzie knows anything new,” said Ms. Figueroa on Tuesday afternoon. “If you asked her in private. . . .”

Wyatt gave a shiver and said quickly, “No way.”

In sixth-hour band the next day, Kenzie was wearing a wisp of a blouse and a nude cami underneath that barely met the dress code. Wyatt simply would not look at her, as if the girl did not exist. But she did exist, and something about her today—not her clothes, but something in her attitude—made Ms. Figueroa keep glancing at her nervously.

The district large-ensemble competitions were just three weeks away, but with Jasmyn absent, the clarinets were falling apart. Jasmyn was not the best solo player, but she had excellent rhythm, keeping them all at the right tempo. Without her, the clarinet section shambled through to the end of a piece like soldiers on a plague-ridden anabasis, the players dropping away one by one until the whole thing died. Today, the Fanfare and Allegro went better than it had all week. But then came “The Shark,” a showy experimental piece in two movements, their finale. It featured the trumpets; but it also had a passage of six measures where clarinets were the first to enter. When the tuneless, honking reeds straggled into the movement and fizzled into silence, even the kind, patient Ms. Figueroa wanted to bang her head on something.

At the end of the hour she handed out new sectional schedules and beckoned Kenzie to confer in the office while the students were putting up their instruments. “We’re worried about Jasmyn, Kenzie. You don’t know where she is?” Ms. Figueroa asked.

“Um, at home? You already asked me that,” Kenzie said rudely.

“I thought you might have heard something new.”

“Why are you asking me? You’re not the teacher.”

“Mr. Wright asked me to talk to you,” said Ms. Figueroa. “Aren’t you and Jasmyn friends?”

“Not really.”

“You’re with her in class a lot.”

“Cause our dads are both fuckups and cause I was . . . ” said Kenzie. She stopped.

Ms. Figueroa ignored the profanity. “You were what?”

“Just because,” said the girl and smiled cagily.

Ms. Figueroa stared at her. The sounds came to them of students talking and laughing in the adjoining instrument room. Kenzie giggled and said, “I’ve got to go. I have to be out at the bottle factory.”

“Do you work there?”

Kenzie tossed her hair, which was thin and dyed a box brown. “Yeah, sort of,” she said, and something in her tone gave Ms. Figueroa another twinge of alarm.

Then Kenzie was gone, and the other students were gone, and the silence was louder than anything they’d played all day. Wyatt was messing with a bent valve on their best tuba. It was Wednesday afternoon, the week half over, and they were both tired and discouraged. Ms. Figueroa was going to conduct a piece at competition, and she was nervous about it now, thinking of her black concert pants and how she would look from behind. In middle school, during district band competitions, they’d all laughed at the big lady conductors’ butts wagging around, but she’d gotten bigger herself in college, and that wasn’t going to change in three weeks, even if she dieted like hell. And she just couldn’t conduct in Lycra.

She’d thought about this before, and each time she felt hopeless about it, she tried to talk herself back up. She was only in her twenties, but she’d had an affair with a married man two years ago, and that had taught her a lot. She wasn’t pretty, but she had great hair and a naturally buoyant attitude, and the right amount of ambition and work ethic for her chosen field. She knew she was the best student teacher to help Mr. Wright this semester because she wasn’t afraid to take on jobs she’d never done before, and he was depressed; she’d guessed from the start that he was fragile, but she’d only realized why just last week in the teachers’ lounge. Not from what anyone said, but from what they all didn’t say. And from Mr. Arcand’s insistence that Wyatt ought to talk to Jasmyn’s mother. There’d been an affair with her—an affair that must have ended, she guessed: he was acting the way she’d felt when her married lover stopped answering her texts and then finally told her he was trying to make things work with his wife.

But Wyatt didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Martin. Ms. Figueroa understood this. So she would do it, just as she’d questioned Kenzie a second time when he didn’t want to do that.

“Is there anything I need to know about the Martins before I go there and see what’s up with Jasmyn? Other than how to get there?” she said.

Wyatt looked up from the valve and frowned worriedly. “You can’t do that. Vance is right. There’s an official truancy procedure. It’s legal stuff. Teachers can’t go messing around with that. Anyway, it’s like the Grapes of Wrath out there,” he said. He was staring at her, and she remembered her black eye.

“Sorry, I still look wretched.”

“You don’t, Tess,” he said gloomily. “You look like you lost a fight with a music stand. Anyway, it’s better than it was.” He smiled a weak smile.

Ms. Figueroa started to say something about seeing inside Tony Arcand’s mind, but that sounded crazy now. Instead she said, “What did Mr. Arcand mean about a cobra?”

Wyatt stood to go and put the tuba away. “It was just Tony being melodramatic,” he said and disappeared to the instrument room.

While he was gone, Ms. Figueroa got into the system and looked up the Martins’ address. She knew where it was, sort of—out on the very edge of Covington. She put the address in her phone. Then she finished filing the music she’d started to organize and entered the day’s participation scores; she washed out her coffee mug and got her jacket. Wyatt was on the phone now with the band instrument repairman, sounding stressed; he’d missed scheduling a pickup. He hung up and turned to her just as she was leaving. “Tess? I’m sorry I’m such a shitty mentor. I’m kind of messed up right now. But you’re doing good.”

“Thanks,” she said and blushed.

“You’re doing just fine,” he said again. Then, as an afterthought, “You need to be careful around Kenzie, too.”

“Don’t worry. I will,” she promised. But her mind was on Jasmyn Martin.

By the time she reached the parking lot, she was no longer sure she should do this against Wyatt’s advice. He was right. There was a legal procedure. Jasmyn was probably just down with a cold or a bad menstrual period. What if it got back to Mr. Fincke that she’d violated some regulation and she failed her practicum? Or what if the Martins were gun nuts? Maybe that explained the image that had come to her when she looked into Mr. Arcand’s eyes, a scene that kept playing in her mind and had begun to trouble her sleep.

But then she heard her grandmother Figueroa repeating the annoying fable about the three chickens who wanted to be God. They were sisters, named Don’t, Now, and Wait. It was not a Cuban tale. Ms. Figueroa had no idea where it had come from.

In the end, none of the three hens got to be God because every night when the sun went down, they went into the henhouse to roost (and God never sleeps, or the Devil will take over); but Now started to believe she was God, and she explained this conviction to the others. Every morning Now, who was bold and quick to action, was the first one out of the coop. She got the best of the scraps that were brought to them each day. Proof of her deity: they brought her such lovely offerings of fruits and vegetables. Her feathers were glossy; her eyes were bright. Truly, she told her sisters, she’d been glorified. Don’t, on the other hand, was still a nervous chicken-brain. She hardly went into the yard. She didn’t get any scraps at all, and she was dingy because the spring rains didn’t wash her feathers, though to be fair, she laid good large eggs, and a lot of them. Wait was still a chicken-butt, too fearful to come out until the others had been out in the yard a while, so she only got the dirty leavings after they were trampled in the morning rush. Her yield was good as well: while she waited, she tried to squeeze out an extra egg. Now reveled in her divinity and all that came with it: the best food, the prettiest feathers, the plumpest thighs. She made sure Don’t and Wait knew why she’d been elevated to such heights: Only she was brave and jumped at every chance to seize the good things the universe had to offer. She assured the others that she was on their side and would keep the delicious scraps coming (and the corn, and water, and grit for their gizzards). Then one morning, the coop door opened and Now ran out to pick at a fresh red strawberry top. “That’s the pretty hen that’s not laying much,” called a voice, and before she could swallow her prize, a woman’s hands seized her and pulled her up. Strong hands that twisted her neck, leaving Don’t and Wait cowering in the hen coop, wondering how the same hands that brought them food them had killed God. And what would become of them now that She was dead?

Ms. Figueroa had always taken the fable to heart. She was proud that she wasn’t a fearful chicken-brain or a hesitant chicken-butt. Even though she was often secretly anxious and plagued by low self-esteem, she didn’t let it stop her. That was how she’d ended up sleeping with the married man she’d met online. She’d do this, then. Put fear and hesitation aside. Drive out to the Martins’. Find out what was going on and get Jasmyn back in band class.

She drove out to the edge of town, almost missing the turn, deep into the second loop of a tight S curve. Just as she turned off, it came to her that her grandmother’s fable was not about the virtue of jumping boldly at the first chance, as she had always thought. It was a warning to her about waiting and applying common sense, so you didn’t end up stewed in a pot. Her grandmother often chided her for being so impulsive. Wyatt had told her to leave this alone. Why hadn’t she?

Oh, well. She was almost there now. There was a quarter mile of pavement. A few yards of gravel. Then a narrowing dirt road that ceased right in front of the house.

She stopped and sat in her car, looking. She didn’t know much about architecture, but in the politest parlance, she would have called it a “residential structure” aspiring to be a ’70s ranch. It was long, with a lot of green siding; it was surrounded by a cacophony of salvage. Old wheels were a recurrent theme. There was an outbuilding with a piece of roof gone. Scraps of metal and assorted stalks of vegetation. A wheelbarrow-planter of early pansies. The pansies’ pretty faces dipped demurely on slender necks.

Ms. Figueroa got out of the car and picked her way toward the door. She was looking down to avoid a tangle of extension cord that ran out a window and across the yard to the partially roofed outbuilding when she ran smack into a baker’s rack. She screeched and grabbed for it and fell with it as it crashed onto some paint cans, whiffing the pansies and bending the rack. For a second she lay there, the chrome wire biting into her side. If she’d been bonier or older, the fall might have cracked something. Then she struggled up. Stood and brushed herself off. There was dirt all over her now. Any minute, someone would come flying out the door and cuss her out for smashing the baker’s rack.

But no one came. The front door was open, but the house was dark, and she couldn’t see through the storm door, though she thought she detected some motion.

She looked around for something to wipe the dirt off her. The extension cord that she’d almost tripped on caught her eye, and cautiously she made her way along it to the outbuilding, casting a glance back at the house.

The plug end of the extension cord lay on the shed floor, plugged into nothing. The shed was full of everything imaginable. She fixed her hair in a dirty, webby mirror that was leaned up against a pile of broken garden tools, wincing at the sight of her purplish-green eye. She brushed at her clothes and shoes, getting the worst of the dirt. Then she marched out and up to the Martins’ door and rapped firmly on the glass storm.

No one answered. But she’d come too far and felt too humiliated not to try her best to find Jasmyn. So she stepped inside.

Somewhere, a man’s voice. She was in a hall. To the right was the entry to the living room. She peered in, and there was the man, lying prone on the sofa with a cap on his head, the bill nudged askew. He was the most inert person she’d ever seen. She guessed he was Jasmyn’s father. He groaned something unintelligible, so she knew he was alive, at least.

She backed out of the doorway. On the other side of the hall was an eat-in kitchen. She edged toward it and almost tripped on a loose flap of hall carpet. Damn her clumsiness.

“Hello?” she called. She poked her head in the door.

The woman at the kitchen sink was obscured in dimness. Ms. Figueroa realized now that the house was very dark. She reached for the light switch by habit.

“Power’s turned off. Randy ain’t worked in a while. They’ve went to the food pantry,” said the woman. She did not seem worried that a stranger was standing in her kitchen.

“Pardon?”

The woman stepped closer. She had the bone-deep beauty that doesn’t depend on flesh. Huge eyes and a willowy shape blooming into womanly hips. She looked exhausted and rough but not wrecked. Ms. Figueroa tried to imagine her with Wyatt. Strangely, she could totally see it, and a pang of jealousy hit her like a slug to the jaw.

“What happened to you?” said the woman.

“I fell into a music stand.”

“You’re Wyatt’s student teacher. Jasmyn said he had a college girl with a Spanish name that was a ginger. You’re looking for her, right? Because she ain’t been to school?”

“Is she okay? You’re Mrs. Martin? I’m Tess Figueroa.”

“Jasmyn went to the food pantry with her brother,” said Adrianna. “Neighbor took them. To save us on gas.”

Ms. Figueroa didn’t know what to say. “We’ve been missing her. She’s a great kid. She keeps our clarinets up to speed.”

Adrianna turned back to the sink. She had the faucet assembly dismantled and was repairing something.

“I wish I was handy like that,” Ms. Figueroa said pleasantly. “I need to take a class.”

“You ever tried YouTube?” said Adrianna.

There was a long silence.

What now? It was all so awkward. But Ms. Figueroa thought it would be worse if she left. Then nothing would be solved. So she went over to the table and sat down in the dimness. “It’s okay if I wait for Jasmyn?”

Adrianna was filling the sink now and didn’t hear. At least they had water, even if they didn’t have electricity.

Ms. Figueroa looked around. The kitchen table was wood, with painted legs and four painted chairs. There were ceramic salt and pepper shakers with unicorns on them, and a mug that said ADDY and was half full of coffee. The upper cabinets were rustic open style, no doors, piled to overflowing. Not one dish in them matched. It was obvious there wasn’t money, and that most of this stuff had come from yard sales.

“How long do you think Jasmyn will be?” said Ms. Figueroa after four or five minutes.

“They left just before you got here—you probably passed them. Y’all ought to just to go home,” said Adrianna. “I’ll talk to her.”

A series of groans erupted from the living room. Ms. Figueroa felt suddenly frightened. Instead of leaving, as she’d been instructed to do, she jumped up and ran across the hall.

Randall Martin was still lying on the couch, but he’d turned over. His eyes were wide open, and he started when she stepped into the room. “Who are you?” he said.

“Tess Figueroa. I’m Jasmyn’s student band teacher. I came to check on her.”

“Did he send you out here?”

“No,” she said truthfully. “I’m not supposed to be here, but I was worried about Jasmyn.”

“She’s okay,” said Randall. “The rest ain’t your business. You break that baker’s rack in the yard?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll take ten for it. Since you broke it.”

She had a twenty in her jacket pocket, and she gave it to him, and he smiled briefly and stuck it in the crack of the sofa cushion, muttering, “That won’t get the lights back on.” Then he announced suddenly, angrily, “Why’d you come out here? I seen women like you before. You’re like a bad taste that thinks it’s so good. You’re a redheaded memo-rand-um we didn’t need about the band teacher.”

Ms. Figueroa felt slapped. “I’m sorry.”

Randall continued. “It’s the shittiest time for us since . . . I don’t know since when. Addy’s quit her job. Jasmyn won’t go to school because there’s no good light to put on her makeup. Isaac won’t eat because he’s afraid we’ll run out of food.” He rolled over with his face to the back of the sofa and groaned again. Ms. Figueroa wasn’t sure whether he was serious or being dramatic, but his groans sounded real and full of pain.

While Randall was lying there with face turned, she took advantage of the chance to edge around the room—you couldn’t walk without running into things—and look at the contents. It was dim in this room, too, but there was better sun, from a south window. In addition to the sofa, there was a coffee table made out of a solid wood door, two recliners, a glass-topped display table with a sideways flattened stuffed bird in it, a bookshelf, and an overwhelming number of wall shelves with plastic and ceramic clutter on them. Like the dishes in the kitchen, it all looked like garage-sale goods. She tried to make sense of how anyone could live like this.

She went back to the kitchen.

Adrianna had disappeared, so she took the liberty of peering in the fridge and the bottom cabinets. The fridge was dark, warm, and empty. A cooler was next to it, with melting ice and a package of bologna. There were dried spaghetti and cornbread mix in the cabinet, and some spices and two gravy packets and canned green beans and baked beans. She was shocked. Her Figueroa grandparents lived a very frugal existence on their Social Security and a modest factory pension, but their refrigerator and cupboards were full, and the kitchen always smelled like frying onions. This kitchen smelled, not surprisingly, like a molding refrigerator.

Adrianna returned just as she was closing the fridge. “I thought you went home. What’s wrong with you? Y’all need to go before you get Randy riled up worse.”

“I’m sorry,” she said for the third time. “I’m going now.”

Then she remembered Wyatt, how fragile and sad he seemed, and she turned and said impulsively, “You and Wyatt need some kind of closure. I tried to get him to come and talk to you. I think he really wanted to,” she added and didn’t feel bad that this was a lie.

“It’s all over. You seen what it did to Randy.”

“It’s not over,” said Ms. Figueroa, and she repeated, nearly verbatim what she’d heard Tony Arcand say in the teacher’s lounge about the cobra and the antivenom.

Adrianna went to the door and looked out into the hall, to see if her husband was listening. She turned around. “I’ll go see him at the house on Sunday afternoon. Don’t tell him. If he knows ahead of time, he’ll try to argue with me.”

On Friday, Jasmyn was back at school. She had a full face of makeup, but it wasn’t up to her usual standard. She didn’t offer an explanation for her absence. Unfortunately, though, her return wasn’t going to galvanize the clarinets.

Kenzie’s aggressiveness had dialed up a notch. She loitered in the instrument room before class, trying to catch Wyatt, who continued to avoid her like poison. As they practiced the piece Ms. Figueroa was conducting, Kenzie eyed the student teacher with open hostility, and finally, when she couldn’t get any attention from Wyatt, she slipped away before class was over.

Soon the band room emptied out, and the weekend was just an hour away. Ms. Figueroa had a date the next night, and she was thinking about it. She and Wyatt were tying up loose ends, reviewing the plans for district competitions. She debated whether to tell Wyatt she’d been to see the Martins and decided she might have to; she didn’t want him to miss Adrianna when she came.

“I saw Mrs. Martin. She said she’d stop by your house Sunday.” It pained her to say it.

Wyatt took a second to react. “Okay. Thanks,” he said. He didn’t ask where Ms. Figueroa had seen her. After a minute he said, “She told you what it was about?”

“No,” lied Ms. Figueroa.

Wyatt said nothing. He started looking at something on his phone and didn’t see Kenzie slip out of the instrument room and then out the band room door. Ms. Figueroa was turned in that direction enough to catch the movement, but she was preoccupied with her own guilty conscience, and it didn’t register.

Ms. Figueroa’s Saturday evening date was with a local, a classmate of Wyatt’s who’d met her at a football game and said amiably that he liked redheads. He looked her up and down and asked her if she liked to eat. His name was Henegar.

There was nowhere good to eat in Covington. It was Pizza Casa or Dos Arboles or the Chinese buffet or Famous Plate. So Henegar met her in University City, where she lived. On their way to the restaurant, he realized that she was a college student. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Are you old enough to drink?”

“I’m almost twenty-four.”

She watched him struggle with the math to figure out that he was just four years older. “What does a bottle factory manager do?” she asked; she had the sinking feeling this date was going nowhere.

“I unlock and lock up and make sure we meet our quota and the machines don’t break,” he said.

“Oh.” She feared there was nothing more to say, but Henegar was a conversation by himself. He took her to an Indian place they both liked, with old red booths and dark, stained carpet and really good food for less than anywhere else. While he devoured his food and she listened, he told her about Wyatt’s mother getting run over and about his part in recovering the body. “Her head had tire marks,” he finished.

Something had begun to trouble her. “Does Kenzie Potter work at the bottle factory?”

This started Henegar on a new tear, about Kenzie’s dad’s on-and-off drug and prison career and his hostile wife and borderline twins. “That Kenzie kid is nuts. She’s always out behind the factory target shooting. We’re not in the city limits,” he explained, “So people think they can come out there on all that vacant land and blast away.”

Ms. Figueroa felt her skin prickle all over. “Is she good?”

“You practice anything enough, you get good. That’s why Wyatt’s a band teacher and I ride people’s asses to make more bottles.”

Later, after a movie and a short drive, he took her home and shook her hand at her apartment door. “You and Wyatt will work out better than you and me,” he said. “But I had a nice time.”

Inside, she sighed with relief. She took off her makeup and watched some TV and went to bed; but she couldn’t get Kenzie and the target practice out of her head. She eventually fell asleep, but an hour later she jolted awake, thinking about Wyatt’s mom’s head being run over, which was probably unrelated. More to the point, she shouldn’t have told Wyatt that Adrianna was coming over. She remembered now that someone had been in the instrument room when she told him. She’d seen them flit by the door.

She knew who the shooter was that she’d glimpsed in Tony Arcand’s subconscious, and who got shot.

She got up and paced around and tried to call Wyatt, but it was two in the morning. She called again at five and six, but his phone was off. She sent an urgent message to his email to call her, and at seven she called her grandfather Johnson, a retired police detective, who still lived right here in University City, to ask a favor. He had a few questions but seemed satisfied with her story about a sketchy neighbor. At eight she accompanied him to Mass, as she often did. Afterward, he gave her one of his handguns and reminded her to be careful with it.

Then she drove to Covington.

She had Wyatt’s address, and she knew what she was going to tell him and what she would do if he didn’t listen or believe her; but she hoped he would. She drove the entire length of Pink Elephant twice and couldn’t find the house. That was when she started to panic.

It was noon by then. Adrianna had said she’d meet Wyatt in the afternoon.

Wyatt still wouldn’t answer. So she texted Henegar. He said he’d never been able to find the house, either. She quit texting and called him and told him what she feared.

“There’s no point calling the police.” He was thinking out loud. “It’s the Keystone Cops. They’ll never find the place, and it’ll just slow things down. I’ll come out.”

They met at the end of Pink Elephant, and she got in his SUV and they drove up and down it two more times. Henegar ate a bag of powdered-sugar donuts while he drove and told her in tedious detail about everything that had ever happened to anyone who lived on Pink Elephant. He offered her a donut, but she declined.

The spring morning was turning to a damp, hot, clotted afternoon.

On the third pass, they found the house. It was there, where before there’d been nothing.

“I don’t know why I didn’t see it. That’s Addy Martin’s car,” said Henegar, pointing to a rattletrap Ford Escort in the long drive.

Adrianna Martin was just getting out of the car. Her legs were so long and graceful, Ms. Figueroa thought enviously. Henegar echoed this: “She’s got those spaghetti-noodle legs that don’t look like they could hold up that pretty caboose.” Then he remembered why they were there and said, “What now? I never tried to stop a murder before.”

Ms. Figueroa watched Adrianna walking toward the blue house. “Let me out there,” she said, pointing to the edge of the field she’d seen in Tony Arcand’s vision. Henegar stopped the vehicle, and she cut cautiously through a stand of prickly small trees and felt them scratching her ankles and worried that she’d fall because she always fell, and the stakes were higher than she was used to.

From here she could see the side of the blue house. Wyatt came out on the deck, where he’d often played his horn for Adrianna. He came down the steps. Ms. Figueroa saw the way he turned to Adrianna, coming toward him. But she didn’t have time to feel anything about this because there was Kenzie.

Right there. With the gun. Facing away from her, toward Wyatt’s house.

Ms. Figueroa started to shout at the girl to stop her; but out of nowhere, that chicken-brain Don’t and chicken-butt Wait flew up and made her hesitate. The girl’s rifle was antique-looking, but Henegar had said she was good with it—what if Kenzie turned around and shot her?

She went forward, as quietly as she could.

And then, when she’d stopped expecting it, she fell, stumbling on all fours in the grass and fumbling with the handgun.

Then she was back up on her feet, just in time to see the rifle raised, hear the loud report, see Adrianna jerking back and falling.

Ms. Figueroa felt sick. This was not happening. She and Henegar were supposed to stop it. But in fact, it was happening. They’d failed. They hadn’t been able to find the house, and then she’d frozen and she’d fallen at exactly the wrong second. She was too far away to see the blood, but in her mind it was the thickness of cream and the dark color of full-blown red roses.

She kept enough presence of mind to refrain from screaming. Kenzie still did not know she was there. She hadn’t moved. She was probably in shock, but Ms. Figueroa did not want to count on anything. There was a crazy girl and a rifle, and who knew what she might do?

Henegar had run up to help Wyatt. They were lifting Adrianna. Henegar put his hand in front of her face to feel for breath.

Ms. Figueroa moved toward Kenzie. She was only a few yards away now. Ms. Figueroa knew how to handle a gun, too. Years of Saturday afternoons shooting with her grandfather Johnson: she actually was quite good. She took one more step toward Kenzie. Then it was the bold hen Now flapping up and grabbing the moment. She took off the safety and aimed her gun.

There was a lot of noise in her head, all competing for attention. She heard her breath, fast and shallow. Her grandmother, in her head, jabbering about chickens. There was traffic on the road behind her, throwing up gravel and a puff of dust. And music? Where was that coming from? It was like the soundtrack to what she’d seen in Mr. Arcand’s face. She had not seen Adrianna. That wasn’t who got shot. (Well, she had been shot, but that wasn’t who Ms. Figueroa had seen.) She’d seen herself. Why hadn’t she recognized herself?

Because you never really believed it could happen to you.

Kenzie was turning around with the gun. She was raising it, aiming at her. What was she supposed to do now? She’d planned to shoot Kenzie, and she just couldn’t do it. She could hit any target right where she wanted, but she couldn’t shoot a child. Ms. Figueroa dropped her arms to her sides, the handgun dangling. Henegar was running to stop Kenzie, but he was still too far away. He was shouting Kenzie’s name. Now Wyatt was streaking after him.

She was shaking. Trying to keep her legs from buckling. Trying to duck or dodge behind a bush. Or run, zigzagging, away. But she was paralyzed; she couldn’t think. Her grandmother was right—she’d always been too quick to jump into things, and then it was a mess.

It was a hot Sunday. She hadn’t expected, this morning, that she’d be sweating this afternoon or she would not have worn long sleeves. It was good that she turned down Henegar’s offer of donuts. The last thing she’d had was the communion host. She didn’t always go to church, but she’d gone today, and it would be a consolation to her grandfather, if she died (was she going to die?) It was one of those churches that used unleavened bread, not wafers, so you had to actually chew the Body.

III

Tess

With Adrianna Martin’s death began a friendship between Wyatt and Henegar that could not have happened otherwise. In almost every way they were so different that there was only a sliver of common ground between them no larger than one of the four-square courts they’d played on in grade school. Henegar reasoned slowly, laboriously, but he was wired to act, to leap instantly to help anyone with anything—though he usually had no idea what he was doing. Wyatt was a nervous overthinker, paralyzed by anxieties; and having two women he loved die violently and a third woman he felt responsible for come very close to death exacerbated these traits. After Adrianna was murdered, he had a breakdown and took a six-month leave of absence from teaching. His old band teacher, Stanek, who was still in the area, filled in as the long-term sub and took the band to district competition. Maybe the judges took pity on them, knowing the circumstances; or maybe, in the wake of the tragedy, the students rose to the challenge of performing minus their two regular teachers and a murdering flutist. In any case, they came home with all 1 ratings.

The first day Wyatt went back to work was late October of the following school year. He’d talked off and on with Stanek, who’d lost an adult daughter to addiction and understood how shock and grief were a constant vampiric sucking drain on everything you had in you. “Listen to music. Constantly,” Stanek said. “I know that sounds silly because you’re doing music all day long. But listen. To everything. There’s no magic like it. You’re a brass guy, but listen to opera. Listen to medieval madrigals. I’m a band guy, too, and I healed myself by listening to the kinds of music I hadn’t listened to since grad school. Listen to string quartets and flamenco guitar. Listen to African thumb piano—any piano. And harpsichord. Vocal. The Renaissance church music was what did the most for me. I discovered a few composers I guarantee you don’t know. Ever hear of Osbert Parsley?” he said and Wyatt thought of the stupid kids’ joke-book joke, “What’s green and sings?”

He went in early the first day to get his bearings. It was 6:55. He’d check in at the high school and then walk over to the middle school to start the day. The custodian had come and gone. The high-school band room was silent. The chairs were empty, the music stands all empty; the risers were empty, and he took a deep breath and thought about the fact that when the students arrived today, they’d all be looking at him, and because of the town gossip, it would be with more knowledge about him and Jasmyn Martin’s mother than he thought he could face. Maybe even the grade-school kids would know.

Wyatt had stopped for a bad latte from T-Cup, and while he sipped it, he tried to put apprehension to the side and thought for a second about Tess, who whenever she was apprehensive had just bulled right ahead fearlessly, no matter what. He smiled at the thought of her; and then he was on the edge of tears. He closed his eyes hard, and his shoulders shook, but he got himself together and went through the things on his desk. Stanek had left him a stack of notes and another stack of CDs, as promised. and he put in the CD of Renaissance choral music. There were several composers’ names in Stanek’s handwriting on the CD. Parsley was one of them.

The music was tinny through his computer speakers, but he turned up the volume anyway. There was a pair of chansons, unfamiliar but soothing—Stanek might be right about their healing power. And then the opening notes of an anthem. As the voices overpowered the silence of his office, he felt goosebumps all over. It was the music he’d heard with Carmen Lausso sometimes, and with Adrianna, and at times alone: the singing that came from the ancient seed under the joists—not the motet he’d heard most often, but another, more complex piece, of which he’d also caught a few notes now and then.

He heard the outer door to the band room open, and he gave a start. Still, after six months, and knowing she was locked up in a juvenile facility, he was afraid of Kenzie Potter.

But it was Tony Arcand, whose schedule was the opposite of Wyatt’s—he started his days at the high school and then went over to middle school. He didn’t teach K-5 anymore. Tony slouched across the band room in his usual black jeans and loose, light shirt. Wyatt paused the music and came out of the office.

“Hey, Tony.” He expected a “Welcome back,” but Tony muttered something he couldn’t hear and then said, “Remember that pastel you drew in my class way back? With the body in the yard?”

“No,” said Wyatt—though of course he remembered it. “I never drew a dead body,” he protested. (That was true, at least.)

“I didn’t say it was dead. It was that redhead of yours. Tess.”

“You’re crazy,” said Wyatt defensively. He was starting to come apart inside. He wanted to call someone like 9-1-1, but all Tony was doing was talking to him. You couldn’t call the police for that. Tony wasn’t threatening.

“You remember,” insisted Tony. “You were shaking in your shoes when I showed you the body, you were so scared. I made you copy that poem?”

“You’re full of shit, Tony. I don’t remember any of this. Why would I be scared of a picture?”

The art teacher laughed sharply. “That’s the smartest thing to be scared of. Nothing as true as a picture. You know, you’re just a coward like your dad. Just a cowardly Toomsen, Wyatt.”

“I’m half Wright,” said Wyatt. He realized the pun when Tony barked out another mean laugh.

“Not even half right,” said Tony. He stared Wyatt down. “I told you to take care of it and get it settled—you had a chance to prevent what you knew way back when was going to happen, but you weren’t paying any attention to the truth that was in that picture. That’s the trouble with the whole piece-of-crap world, Toomsen. Everyone just blows off the things they can’t make sense of. But those are the things that are real to the bone. So real you can only feel them; or see them sideways, or just the edge. And you better watch out for them. That girl, Kenzie? I saw her coming back in third-grade. What was pulling her strings? That was what I wanted to know. You saw that black halo around her too, but you didn’t want to know what it was, so you just pussyfooted around her and tried to ignore it. And look how that went.”

Wyatt wished Tony would shut up and leave.

“Know what an oracle is?” said Tony.

Wyatt shook his head, meaning “Leave me alone,” but Tony took it as a yes.

“You got one in your house. Why didn’t you listen to it? Don’t you believe in it? You better believe in it. Not believing in things kills art. It kills people. It killed Addy. You acted just like a Toomsen. You just stuck your head in a hole and pretended you were being so virtuous by not doing anything. You didn’t listen. I used to love that beautiful lady,” Tony finished angrily.

“Melissa?” said Wyatt, confused. Tony’s ex. The wife his father had stolen away from Tony.

“Not her. Adrianna. And I gave her a baby—yeah, Jasmyn is mine, in case you were wondering. That’s more than you gave her. You didn’t even know her. You just slept with her and stuck your head in a hole, and it killed her,” said Tony.

Wyatt was relieved when he turned and left. He was quaking so hard he didn’t know if he could make it through the day, but then he went back in the office and took some deep breaths. How had he not seen that Jasmyn looked just like her father? It didn’t take much to picture Tony with Adrianna. And there’d been signs, he realized. Things she’d said that he hadn’t really wanted to hear. He cried for a few minutes. Then he knew he had to suck it up. He played a little more of Stanek’s CD. It did help, actually. He could do this.

He got through the week, and Friday evening, Henegar came over with a Casey’s pizza and a six-pack of diet Sprite. He’d started a low-carb diet and couldn’t drink beer. Wyatt would not have minded a stronger drink. He didn’t ask why pizza was allowed on a low-carb diet, but as it turned out, Henegar ate only the toppings, peeling them off and leaving a vast swath of denuded, puckery moist crust tinted a blush color from the sauce. They sat out on the deck in jackets, shivering. Wyatt told him part of the confrontation with Tony, though not about the pastel of “The Watergaw” or Tony’s accusation that he’d killed Adrianna and stuck his head in a hole.

“Was I partly responsible? What do you think?” he asked Henegar.

“It’s too close up to tell anything,” said Henegar. “That’s what I tell the guys at the factory. “You can’t see a major mechanical failure close up, only a broke bottle. Tony Arcand’s an asshole, Wyatt, That’s why his wife ran off with your dad.”

“My dad’s an asshole,” said Wyatt.

“Out of the frying pan into the hot glue gun and glued to a loser for life. Women do it all the time,” said Henegar.

Wyatt had no reply to this. He went inside, got out his horn and came out and played in the cold. His hands were freezing. This was how cold it must be for the kids, marching at the late fall games; he needed to remember that, not lose patience if they whined, keep more fingerless gloves on hand. He played and thought about a searing desert, and it seemed to warm his hands. He wasn’t just playing for Myrna, in the ground, and Henegar, on the deck, but for Adrianna, whose blood was in the yard now too. He could feel Myrna, listening and assessing. And Adrianna—but she wasn’t evaluating; she’d never offered any opinions about his playing, and it had struck him one day in their second year of being together that she’d probably not played an instrument. She had grown up with nothing; how could her parents have afforded a band instrument? But she was one of those lucky people who by nature were satisfied with only scraps and cast-offs: perfect for Randall. When she found someone who gave her a little—married her (Randall) played horn for her (Wyatt)—her default was surprise, and a tender appreciation.

He stopped playing suddenly. Angrily. He was idealizing her. From the start he’d idealized her. Arcand was right: he had his wires crossed about what was real and what wasn’t. She was dead, and she’d been someone else’s wife and the mother of a different man’s child; he’d hardly known her. And he was responsible.

The thought came to him, unexpected, that one couldn’t rule out a larger, abiding evil, either.

And then Henegar’s voice cut through the dark that had settled over the deck: “You know what I like about Tess Figueroa?”

“What?” said Wyatt.

“She’s kind of brave. I don’t know too many brave people. Do you?”

“No,” said Wyatt. “I don’t.”

Wyatt should have left the job and Covington then and gone to Edinburgh and studied dead composers and antique musical forms. Studied forgotten instruments—museum curiosities that no one played except a handful of experts in period music. But now that Adrianna was dead, he felt an obligation to her children, especially Isaac, who had started in band this year. Isaac was different, as Adrianna had said. And he’d just lost a mother, and Wyatt felt protective toward him and would not go for that reason.

On weekends Wyatt sometimes performed with a brass choir in University City. Sometimes he took an overnight trip to hang out and jam with Alex Koenig, who was now teaching as a PhD candidate in performance in Kansas. Other Friday and Saturday nights Henegar came over and sat on the deck and drank soda and tried to convince him about giving up carbs. After a while, even Henegar ran out of things to talk about, and they sat and looked out at the dark trees and high lilacs. The house had stopped singing for the most part. Its personality was under cover, though it still played games with people who were looking for it. A quiet place. So much quieter than it had been when Adrianna was alive. Sitting and watching the evening trees, Wyatt and Henegar were probably both remembering the same thing. Their little piece of common ground (no larger than a four-square court): they’d carried her together from where she fell. They’d both held her at the last second she was alive and the first second she wasn’t. They’d both tried to save Tess. But it was Henegar who’d tackled Kenzie.

During the months Tess was in the hospital, and later, in a rehab center, Henegar went to see her so faithfully that everyone, even her family, thought he was a lunk of a boyfriend she’d picked up in Covington. They were all relieved to find out he was only a friend. A couple times Wyatt came along, but he found it painful to see Tess. He blamed and hated himself and, in a strange way, hated Adrianna, for having created the mess that ended her life and devastated his and had possibly disabled Tess permanently.

Late in Tess’s months-long course of therapy and before she was discharged and went to live with her grandfather until she could go back to being a music teacher, Henegar went to visit her. In the middle of telling her a long story about a tarantula nest in the bottle factory, he mentioned that Kenzie Potter had killed herself the week before.

Tess was stunned. “Are you serious?”

“Cut her wrists with a razor and bled out,” said Henegar.

“Why didn’t she do that before she started shooting people?” said Tess.

Henegar didn’t get that this was a rhetorical question. “That’s a good point,” he mused. “I’d ask her, if she wasn’t dead.”

Tess had just been told that realistically, she should expect to walk with a cane for the rest of her life. It was bad enough that she was clumsy and fat, but now she’d be a fat, clumsy woman wobbling around with a cane. Would she even be able to conduct?

She tried to remember what had propelled her out to the Martins’, why she’d lied to Adrianna about Wyatt’s desire to see her. But she didn’t know why she’d done it, except she’d wanted to help. She’d wiped up Wyatt’s spilled queso and tried to get Jasmyn back, and tried to help two sad people heal. You could help and it might backfire. There was something bad tunneling under the best intentions, unperceived but inevitable and only visible once it erupted. After she was shot in the leg, and again in the stomach, she’d lain among the rocks and clumps of weeds waiting to die. She was sure this was it. She was trying to pray, but she couldn’t think how. Then voices all around her started singing, like the field was a chapel and the trees were its furnishings. This might have been in her head. She’d wondered if she was going to live instead, and if she and Wyatt would someday get married.

The following year, Henegar married a nurse he’d met and cornered and talked to endlessly while he’d been visiting Tess Figueroa in the rehabilitation center. Wyatt stayed single. He built up the inventory of school band instruments. He worked intermittently on some research about Osbert Parsley, the Renaissance composer Stanek had turned him on to; and it seemed as though every time he put it aside too long and started to not care about it, the house began singing Parsley’s music again, and his interest reawakened.

He was planning a research trip to England, the year he turned thirty-five, when he ran into Ms. Figueroa at a music teachers’ conference. She was teaching now, in a district a fair distance away. If you didn’t know her history, you wouldn’t pick up on the fact that her right leg dragged, just barely. Her hair was still as red and as long, her face not quite as round. She had settled into the assurance of later youth. It was beautiful, Wyatt thought. She was about the age Adrianna had been. He remembered what Henegar had said, about her being brave.

“How’s Covington?” she asked.

“The same, pretty much,” he said. He told her that Henegar was married and Jasmyn had graduated a few years ago. “And you’re engaged,” he said, nodding at her ring.

She laughed. “Not,” she said. “Supposedly it’s a good way to ward off the losers and make the good guys notice. You noticed,” she said. Then she asked him out.

Sometimes, in the year and a half that followed, Wyatt played out on the patio for Myrna and Adrianna. But mostly now he played for Tess, who detected, underneath the voice of his horn, the older, human-like voices from inside the seed in the joists. She recognized them as the music she’d heard after she was shot. She heard them more after she got pregnant. She and Wyatt weren’t married yet—they’d been trying to figure out what to do about her long commute—but when she told him about the baby, he proposed.

She was in labor the evening seven months later when Chelsey Arcand showed up. She was in the living room, in the recliner Wyatt had bought so she could keep her feet elevated. The contractions were staccato punches to the stomach—bearable, not yet knocking the breath out of her. She decided to keep them to herself for a while; she didn’t want to tell Wyatt this early, because he’d freak out.

When he saw who it was at the door, he frowned, but he let Chelsey in and invited her to sit down in the front room. Tess offered for Wyatt to get her a soda, but she passed.

“I have to tell you something about that rifle,” Chelsey told Wyatt.

He suddenly remembered the strange conversation he’d had with her in Casey’s, right after moving back to Covington. It had upset him at the time, and he’d blocked it out almost entirely. Maybe he’d thought it was just another example of the Arcands’ creepy weirdness. He’d never connected it with Kenzie Potter and Adrianna. “That was your mother’s gun?”

Chelsey said, “It’s been eating at me for too long. A lot of years ago, when I was a teenager, I paid Kyle Potter to give me a ride to go hunting. And his car broke down and he went ballistic. So I gave him the gun to shut him up. Right away, I knew it was a mistake, but he got out of there so fast, before I could get it back. Kenzie was just a little kid then. I didn’t know she’d grow up crazy. I didn’t know she’d kill someone with it.

“It was a mistake,” she repeated.

“Kenzie was crazy. She would have found another gun,” said Wyatt; and Tess winced at the memory of what it felt like when the first bullet struck her.

Without preliminary or preamble, Chelsey then said in a rush, “And your dad killed your mom, you know. He asked her for money, and she wouldn’t give it to him, and he killed her over it. Hit her with his car.”

Fear started hammering in Wyatt. The way Chelsey said it, he knew it was true.

“I know someone who knew about it,” she said. “Your dad hit her and then ran over her. This person who knows—” she reddened, so Wyatt realized she meant her mother, and also herself—didn’t actually see it, but they heard something. They didn’t have any real evidence, though. His car was already banged up, and he has a friend who helped him fix it up so no one could tell. So there wasn’t proof, no one saw, and this person who heard something never said anything.” She stared at Wyatt with her strange eyes that were like her father’s. “Some people . . . some families have had enough trouble. And there wasn’t proof.”

Tess was listening and thinking it was a terrible time for this news. Wyatt would have to work through it, which would not be easy for him; he wasn’t like her. And he’d have to decide what to do, or if anything even could be done to bring justice for Myrna.

She didn’t want to disrupt this moment when he was first starting to process another terrible truth; but she couldn’t hold her own news in anymore. The contractions were speeding up and getting harder. She moaned.

At first Wyatt thought she was moaning about all the mistakes—all the death and near-death. Then he looked over at her and understood. He jumped up. His feelings were all over the place. “Is it now? Is it coming? Is the baby coming? Do we need to go?” he shouted.

Chelsey slipped out while Tess was calming him down. That took a while, but the house helped; it hummed, and the familiar music soothed him.

It hummed louder as they got ready. Got Tess’s bag and Wyatt’s keys and billfold; and then her water broke, so towels had to be located and her dress and underwear changed.

It started to sing softly. The ancient, pure voices. With one ear Wyatt was listening and talking to Tess; but the other part of him was listening to the house. Tony Arcand had berated him for not listening, and he’d taken that to heart, so he listened: It was a strange house. It wasn’t quite alive, but it was more alive than its walls and wood. It had opinions. Secret knowledge. It was like any person in that way. And it had that habit of disappearing—of seeming not to be there, when you knew it was. But after all, thought Wyatt as he helped Tess down the steps to the car, wasn’t that pretty much like everything in life? Even life itself. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Evelyn Somers spent thirty-seven years as an editor at the Missouri Review, where she worked with and advocated for hundreds of writers. Her fiction, nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in a wide range of journals. She’s the recipient of a Barbara Deming Foundation Grant and Copper Nickel’s Editors’ Prize, among other recognitions. She teaches literature and women and gender studies and lives and writes in Central Missouri. Her novel Marcia Farrar and Mr. Whiskey Time-Travel to 1997 is forthcoming in 2025.