Alyssa Ingalls Baron wasn’t a friend in the intimate sense of the word; she was more a fixture of Renata’s tiny hometown. She was of Renata’s mother’s generation, though the two had not been particularly close. Everybody knew Alyssa, at least by name, and everybody liked her, even if they were a bit jealous of her family’s wealth. Renata’s family had been in the area just as long, but since for the past four generations they’d unpretentiously run a farm that barely broke even, nobody had ever paid much attention to the Meyers. The Ingalls clan, on the other hand, had the Midas touch. They owned land and a thriving business, and kept a guiding hand in local politics. Fortunately, Alyssa wasn’t snooty about her wealth and power—she was a sweet and gentle person—but when she suggested, as she had to Renata, that a Tylerite “volunteer” to do something for the good of the town, it somehow felt like an order.
Renata had loved the warmth of her hometown as a child and hated it as a teenager. She hadn’t been Tyler’s wild child as a girl—Alyssa’s younger daughter, Liza, had sewn up that title—but she had been a bit eccentric in the town’s eyes.
Renata had always been more interested in painting than pom-poms. When the rest of her high school classmates were swimming in the summer or skating on winter ice, Renata was alone at her easel. Kicking local tradition in the teeth, she had skipped the junior prom, the senior homecoming game and one of the Ingallses’ Christmas parties—by accident—when she’d started painting after dinner and forgotten about the world till after midnight. Tyler people still teased Renata about her early paintings and her dramatic choice of clothes. She couldn’t wear her paintings, so she tried to make a statement with fabric art whenever she could. And when she couldn’t do that, she usually found herself wearing a paint-spattered T-shirt and watercolored jeans.
There had been times when she’d found herself in such bad straights that she’d had to return to live in Tyler for several months—once it was a whole year—but Renata had never been poor enough to consider selling the old place. Regardless of the demands of her ambition and her art, she took deep comfort and joy from the knowledge that twelve acres of lush farmland had remained in her family’s hands for nearly 150 years. Granted, the house was old and drafty—a two-story box with a pair of upstairs bedrooms, one bathroom with a hand-held shower, an old-fashioned parlor and a kitchen that hadn’t been updated since World War II. Every time she came home, Renata vowed to start remodeling the old place, but she was never there long enough to justify the expense. Someday she knew she’d want to come home for good, but at the moment it would be too inconvenient to live in Tyler full-time.
And too lonely.
She pulled up at the mailbox and rolled down the window of her old red truck before she remembered that one of the Hansen kids picked up her mail once a week when he checked over her house, watered her roses and mowed the lawn. She couldn’t really afford to pay him, but his mother, Britt, was so strapped since her husband’s death that Renata hadn’t been able to turn Matt down when he made the offer. Even knowing that the mailbox ought to be empty, Renata felt a twinge of sadness to find it that way. When her parents were still living, a mound of good tidings and junk mail had arrived every day.
Before she had time to get maudlin, Renata was startled by an eerie, distant sound. At first she thought it was merely the whisper of the storm, but it almost sounded like humming. No, it wasn’t humming. Not exactly. But she couldn’t exactly call it singing, either. It sounded human. Well, not human so much as not-animal. Sort of other-worldly.
Heyeh, heyeh, heyeh, hiyayayayayaya, heyeh, heyeh. It was a chant of some sort, a weird, eerie chant that made Renata’s flesh crawl. It was soft, which either meant it was loud at the source and very far away, or else...or else it was coming from just up the road.
And the only house up this deserted gravel road was Renata’s.
Maybe it’s just the rain, she told herself stoutly. Sometimes the trees creak in a high wind and sound like someone moaning.
It was a reassuring notion, but Renata didn’t really think the noise had anything to do with the weather. Someone—friend or foe—must be up at her place, expressing himself or herself in some kind of bizarre mantra. But the sound of one voice didn’t mean that there was only one person. It could be one of those devil-worshiping cults! Renata hadn’t been home in a long time, and everybody who lived in Tyler knew it. What better place for weird cult gatherings than an isolated spot like this?
But what kind of a cult gathers at nine a.m. in the rain? a more rational voice asked. Maybe it was just Matt Hansen, humming whatever was hip among the high school crowd these days.
In the end her curiosity overcame her apprehension. After all, Renata prided herself on her acceptance of new things. She’d always been a bit of a radical, moving through life at her own pace to a drumbeat of her own. She wasn’t a rebel, in that she didn’t fight society anymore; she just ignored it when it got in her way. Renata sought her own brand of happiness, and she pursued it with joyful glee every day of her life. She wanted no less for the people around her, but she never tried to force her ways on them.
As she drove on toward the house, she realized vaguely that it was starting to rain more heavily. But she didn’t care. She was too consumed with curiosity to roll up her window. Curiosity tinged with a tiny bit of fear.
Concern and awe washed away the fear the instant she pulled into the gravel driveway and got a good look at her front lawn. Renata had to blink a couple of times. She couldn’t believe what she saw.
Under the shaggy oak tree sat an old man—a very, very old man—hunched cross-legged on a tattered blanket that was drenched and saturated with watery mud. He was wearing buckskin leggings, moccasins and some kind of beaded deerskin shirt. He wore several strands of bones and shells—bears’ teeth, maybe?—around his wrinkled, leathery neck. Feathers dangled from the two long braids that hung halfway down his chest.
Renata knew that Tyler had once been part of the hunting grounds of the local Indians—she couldn’t recall which tribe—and she knew that her grandfather had loved to tell stories about running into them now and again as a child. He even had a collection of old Indian artifacts he’d found on the property; it was still somewhere down in the basement along with the beading loom kit Renata had fussed with as a child. But in Renata’s lifetime, Tyler had been virtually devoid of Indians. She knew some native people in Milwaukee, of course—had taken art classes with more than one—but they were, for all practical purposes, assimilated. She couldn’t imagine any of them sitting on a blanket in buckskin in the rain, chanting to...well, to whatever deity this leathery-skinned Methuselah was probably directing some sort of tribal prayer.
Renata did not particularly care that the old man was trespassing. She wasn’t even dying to know what he thought he was doing or why he’d chosen her place. At the moment her thoughts were more practical and pressing. This old fellow looked as frail as parchment and he was obviously soaked to the bone. There was no telling how long he’d been here, but it took no genius to realize that he was in danger of getting pneumonia. She had to get him dried off and warmed up at once. And that meant she had to get him inside.
His eyes were open and he was more or less facing her way, but he showed no sign of seeing Renata. She wondered if he might be blind. She wondered if he might be crazy. She wondered how on earth he’d gotten here without a car. Surely nobody would have left this old man out here all alone!
She took a few steps forward, then crouched before him. The lawn was saturated now and the rain was lashing the ground again. She knew that if she didn’t move him soon, she’d end up drenched as well.
“Excuse me, sir,” Renata said quietly, afraid to startle the spooky old fellow. “I’m Renata Meyer. I live here. I’ve got warm blankets inside and I can have some hot coffee going in no time. Wouldn’t you like to come in and dry