The night Calvin Rusk died, everybody in Bellwether was watching a white Bronco on television. At Video Heaven, where the picture was clearest, nineteen people stood between Action and New Releases and watched a man fail to come home.
I had gone there to return a movie I hadn’t finished. I remember that because later there would be people who said I had arrived on purpose. You should know how easy it is to improve a story by making every accident a plan.
Daniel Voss was on a stepladder behind the counter. He wore a telephone-company shirt with his name stitched above the pocket and had a length of coaxial cable between his teeth. His daughter sat cross-legged on the carpet, peeling the yellow stars off the spine of a rental case.
“Don’t eat those, Leah,” he said.
“I’m nine.”
“All the more reason.”
A customer shushed them. The Bronco kept moving. Outside, somebody had left a pickup running with the door open. The street smelled of hot oil and the sugar they burned making waffle cones next door. It was June 17, and Bellwether had the long evening light that persuaded people in Montana they had been cheated all winter and were finally getting something back.
Daniel climbed down. The television rolled once, then settled.
“Best possible picture,” he said to no one.
His pager sounded. He looked at the number and stopped smiling.
I knew the number before he turned the pager away. The last four digits were 0440. Calvin had chosen them because the repeated circles pleased him. He was a man who liked his arrangements visible, provided you did not know what you were seeing.
“Dad,” Leah said. “You promised.”
“I know.”
He borrowed the counter phone. A clerk with a sunburn and a row of silver earrings pointed to the sign about customer calls. Daniel pointed at the repaired television. They reached an understanding.
He dialed, listened, said, “Mr. Rusk?”
The shop was quiet enough that I heard the answering-machine beep through the receiver. Then something else: three soft notes, descending. Daniel listened for another ten seconds before he hung up.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
“Depends what you mean.” He was looking at my Meridian badge. “You work up there?”
“Records.”
“Then you know your boss likes to have a dial tone at both ends of a conversation.”
I told him I did.
He took his daughter to a booth at the diner next door and ordered her a grilled cheese. I followed him out. Across the street, the hardware store window held flags, barbecue tools, and a cardboard Energizer Bunny beating a drum. Someone had written a new price over an old price on every flag.
“Mr. Rusk asked me to check his private line,” Daniel said. “Keeps getting another conversation underneath his.”
“Crossed pair.”
He looked at me more closely. “That’s what I said.”
I should have returned to the shop. I should have chosen another movie and stood in line with everybody else, pretending the future of the world was occurring on a California freeway. Instead, I asked whether he wanted company.
Calvin’s house stood beyond the reservoir, a low, expensive shape that had been built to look as if it had grown there. The gravel drive had been watered. His wife’s gardener did that before parties. It kept the guests’ shoes clean, and the flowers drank what was left.
The front door was open. No car except Calvin’s was in sight.
Daniel called his name. I could smell lemon polish and the white lilies Ada ordered by the crate. Somewhere in the house a television was playing the same pursuit we had left behind. Its announcer sounded relieved to have something happening slowly enough to describe.
Calvin sat at his desk with one hand on the telephone and the other resting beside an untouched glass of water. He was seventy by his employment records. His tie was loose. His reading glasses had fallen onto his lap, where their lenses reflected two little windows.
Daniel went to him immediately. He checked his neck, swore, and eased him onto the carpet. He knew what to do. That was the first thing I liked about him, before I understood how dangerous it would be to like anything.
“Call an ambulance.”
I took the telephone. There was no dial tone. Beneath the silence, the three descending notes repeated.
I knew what they meant.
“Other room,” Daniel said, and pressed down on Calvin’s chest.
I found a working extension in the kitchen and gave the operator the address. Ada’s shopping list was on the counter. Peaches. Cream. Candles. A hand had crossed out candles and written the same word beneath it in a different color.
When I returned, Daniel was counting. Sweat fell from his chin onto Calvin’s shirt. The television showed the Bronco from above, tiny against the darkening highway.
On the desk lay a cassette in a clear case. Its label said BIRDSONG, in Calvin’s careful block capitals. A pale blue tab covered the write-protection hole.
I put it in my pocket.
That was the first thing I stole from a dead man that summer. It was not the first thing I had stolen for him.
The paramedics arrived twelve minutes later. Daniel stayed on his knees while they took over. He looked older without anything useful to do. I handed him a kitchen towel and he wiped his face with the embroidered corner that said HOME.
“Did he say anything when you called?” I asked.
“Sounded like a roomful of people. Long way away.”
“What were they saying?”
He looked toward the desk. “Somebody laughing.”
The sheriff’s deputy arrived after that. I gave him my name, Nina Mercer, and he wrote it down without asking me to spell it. In Bellwether, a Meridian badge could function as a passport.
We were waiting on the porch when Ellis Reed’s gray sedan came up the drive. He stepped out wearing a dark suit and carrying a paper sack from the bakery. He was younger than Calvin by decades, according to every document a person could reasonably find.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Nobody had told him yet.
Daniel noticed. I saw the small movement of his eyes. Ellis saw it too.
Inside the house, a telephone began to ring. A paramedic lifted the receiver, listened, and frowned. The ring continued after he had picked it up.
Ellis came up the steps and stopped beside me. The sack smelled of cinnamon.
“Where’s the tape, Nina?” he asked quietly.
Down in town, Leah was waiting for her father. Her sandwich would be cold. She had already learned that when an adult said just a minute, the unit of measurement was not time.
“What tape?” I said.
