A car drove by, its tires crunching across the crystalline snow as it passed between them.

Noah called out to her: “Amelia?”

She looked up, startled, and saw him. She hesitated, glancing up and down the street, as though to assure herself it was safe to proceed. He felt his heart beat faster as she crossed the street to join him.

“Pretty grim in there,” he said.

She nodded. “I couldn’t listen to it anymore. I didn’t want to start crying in front of everyone.”

Neither did I, he thought, but would never admit it.

They stood together in the gloom, not looking at each other, both of them moving their feet to stay warm. Both of them searching for some thread of conversation.

He took a deep breath and said, suddenly, “I hate funerals. They remind me of…

.“ He stopped.

“They remind me of my dad’s funeral, too,” she said softly. And she looked up as snowflakes spiraled down from the darkening sky.

Warren Emerson walked on the side of the road, his boots crunching the frost-stiffened grass. He wore a blaze-orange vest and an orange cap, yet he couldn’t help flinching every time another gun went off in the woods. Bullets, after all, were colorblind. It was cold this morning, far colder than yesterday, and his fingers ached in their thin woolen gloves. He shoved his hands into his pockets and kept trudging, not worried about the cold, knowing that in another mile he would cease to notice it.

He had walked this road over a thousand times, in every season of the year, and could trace his progress by the landmarks he passed. The toppled stone wall was four hundred paces from his front yard. The Murray's’ tumbledown barn was nine hundred fifty paces. At two thousand paces, the turnoff to Toddy Point Road, he reached the halfway mark. The landmarks became more frequent as he approached the outskirts of town. So did the traffic, every so often a car or truck rattling by, tires spitting up dirt.

Local drivers seldom stopped to offer Warren a ride into town. In the summertime he caught plenty of rides, from tourists who considered Warren Emerson, shuffling along in his boots and baggy trousers, an example of living, breathing local color. They’d pull over and invite him to climb in for a lift. During the drive they’d ply him with an endless stream of questions, always the same ones: “What do you folks do in the winter?” “You lived here all your life?” “You ever met Stephen King?” Warren’s answers never went beyond a simple yes or no, an economy of words which the tourists invariably found amusing. They’d pull into town, let him off at the general store, and wave so sincerely you’d think they were saying good-bye to their best friend. Wicked friendly people, those tourists; every autumn, he was sorry to see them go, because it meant another nine months of walking down this road, with not a single driver who’d stop for him.

The townspeople were all afraid.

Were he licensed to drive, he often thought, he would not be so unsympathetic to an old man. But Warren could not drive. He had a perfectly fine old Ford gathering dust in the barn-his father’s car, a 1945, scarcely driven-yet Warren could not use it. A danger to himself and to others. That’s what the doctors had said about his driving.

So the Ford stayed in the barn, over fifty years now, and it was as shiny as the day his father had parked it there. Time was kinder to chrome than it was to a man’s face. To a man’s heart. Jam a danger to myself and to others.

His hands at last were starting to feel warm.

He pulled them from his pockets and swung his arms as he walked, heart pumping faster, sweat gathering under his cap. Even on the most frigid of days, if he walked fast enough, far enough, the cold would cease to matter.

By the time he reached town, he’d unbuttoned his coat and removed the cap. When he walked into Cobb and Morong’s General Store, he found it almost unbearably hot inside.

As soon as the door swung shut behind him, the store seemed to fall silent. The clerk looked up, then looked away. Two women standing by the vegetable bin ceased their chatter. Though no one was staring, he could feel their attention focused on him as he picked up a shopping basket and walked up the aisle, toward the canned goods. He filled his basket with the same items he bought every week.

Cat food.

Chili with beef. Tina. Corn. He went down the next row for the dried beans and oatmeal, then to the vegetable bin for a sack of onions.

He carried the basket, now heavy; to the checkout counter.

The cashier avoided looking at him as she tallied up the items. He stood before the register, his blaze orange vest screaming out to the world, Look at me, look at me. Yet no one did. No one met his gaze.

In silence he paid the cashier, picked up the plastic grocery sacks, and turned to leave, steeling himself for the long walk home. At the door, he stopped.

On the newsstand was this week’s issue of the Tranquility Gazette. There was one copy left. He stared at the headline and suddenly the grocery sacks slipped out of his grasp and thudded to the floor. With shaking hands he reached for the newspaper.

HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING LEAVES TEACHER DEAD, TWO STUDENTS WOUNDED:

14-YEAR-OLD BOY ARRESTED.

“Hey! You gonna pay for that paper?” the clerk called out.

Warren didn’t answer. He just stood by the door, his eyes fixed in horror on a second headline, almost lost in the bottom right corner:

YOUTH BEATS PUPPY TO DEATH: CITED FOR CRUELTY.

And he thought: It’s happening again.

Damaris Horne was stuck in purgatory, and all she could think about was how to get back to Boston. So this is how my editor punishes me, she thought. We get into a tiff, and he assigns me to the story no one else wants. Welcome to Hicksville-by-the-Lake, otherwise known as Tranquility; Maine. Good name. The place was so tranquil, they should issue it a death certificate. She drove up Main Street, thinking that this was the perfect model for how a town would look after a neutron bomb hit it: no people, no signs of life, just standing buildings and deserted sidewalks. Nine hundred ten residents supposedly lived in this town, so where were they all? In the woods, gnawing lichen off the trees?

She drove past Monaghan’s Diner, and through the front window she caught a glimpse of a plaid shirt. Yes! A sighting of the local natives in their ceremonial dress. (What was the mystical significance of plaid, anyway?) Further up the street, she had another sighting: a shabbily dressed old geezer came out of Cobb and Morong’s, clutching his grocery sacks. She stopped to let him cross the street, and he shuffled past, head bent in a look of permanent weariness. She watched him walk along the lakeshore, a slow-moving silhouette laboring across a bleak backdrop of bare trees and gray water.

She drove on, to the Lakeside Bed and Breakfast, her home for the indefinite future. It was the only local inn still open this late in the year, and although she sneeringly referred to it as the Bates Motel, she knew she was lucky to have found any room at all, what with the other regional reporters arriving in town.

She walked into the dining room and saw that most of her competition were still stuffing themselves at the breakfast buffet. Damaris always skipped breakfast, which put her ahead of the game this morning. It was eight A.M., and she’d already been up for two and a half hours. At six, she’d been at the hospital to observe the boy being transferred out to his new home, the Maine Youth Center.

At seven-fifteen, she’d driven over to the high school. There she’d sat in her parked car and watched the kids in their baggy clothes gather in front of the building, waiting for first bell, looking like teenagers everywhere.