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face—but not before Ty saw the shine of moisture in his eyes. The sight amazed him. Stoneman, the most cynical old bird he’d ever known, a vigorous atheist, contemptuous of anything approaching sentimentality—turning teary-eyed over a girl’s simple expression of sympathy. Or perhaps it was only the poignant memory of his daughter’s loss. Whatever it was, Tyler had to admit that something childlike and tenderhearted in the note had affected him, too. He cleared his throat. “But she’s a loner, you say?”
    “It’s more that she’s timid,” Stoneman said gruffly, pouring more gin. “Or afraid, more like—not without pretty good cause, either. This is a decent town, but it’s small and it’s got its share of small-mindedness. There’s some around here who don’t take to anybody who’s different.”
    A gust of wind blew an angry handful of sleet against the window; an answering puff of smoke belched from the vent in the coal stove door. Ty shivered, even though the room was warm.
    “Do you know about Carrie’s wildlings?” Stoneman resumed, sitting forward, elbows on his bony knees. “That’s what she calls all the sick animals she takes care of up there on the mountain. Starving orphans, birds with broken wings, gun-shot deer.” He sent Ty another look, as if daring him to laugh. “Sometimes she’s like a wild creature herself. She’s got this way of gathering herself in and withdrawing, shutting down physically when she feels cornered. An instinct, you know, a defense against danger. I’ve seen it,” he declared almost belligerently, although Tyler hadn’t challenged him by so much as a look. “And I’m telling you, it’s enough to break your heart.”
    The two men lapsed into silence. A few minutes later they roused themselves to argue about whether neurotic females outnumbered neurasthenic males, and a little later, about the best way to distinguish typhoid fever from appendicitis before the patient hemorrhaged and died. But their hearts weren’t in disagreeing with each other tonight. Before the clock struck eleven Stoneman stood up, drunk but dignified, and took his leave.
    Tyler put the kitchen light out and got ready for bed. Barefooted, shivering in his nightshirt, he went back into the sitting room to check one more time on Shadow and try to get a last dose of potassium bromide down her throat. The silence warned him, for he knew exactly how death sounded. He lifted the blanket. The black nose was dull and dry, the eyes vacant, lips drawn back in a pitifully harmless snarl. Carrie’s dog had given up the fight.

4
    T YLER’S SHOVEL HIT A rock. Hard. The steely impact jolted up the length of his leg and exploded in the vicinity of the bullet lodged two inches above his kneecap, vibrating pain throughout his body like a struck gong vibrates sound. He stood still, breath gone, waiting for the pain to fade. It did, but the tinny ringing in his ears persisted. He knew too well what that could precede. Gingerly, he stepped up from the rectangular grave he’d just decided was deep enough. Across the yard, a flash of blue caught his eye in the second before the next pain, the real pain, struck.
    Then the shovel slipped from his fingers, and he dropped to his knees. He kept the ground from coming up and hitting him in the face by pressing it back with both palms and gritting his teeth. The unlocalized agony along his nerve endings continued at its own leisurely pace, in the rising and falling pattern he knew by heart; but even at its blistering worst, he was aware that the pain wasn’t as severe this time as it had once been.
    Through the ringing in his ears he heard the fast crunch of snow, and a moment later two arms came around his shoulders. He turned his head. Carrie Wiggins was kneeling beside him, holding tight, anxious-eyed, and trying to read his face. Already the attack was receding—they were shorter in duration than they used to be, too. A minute passed; “I’m all