At nine o'clock on the iciest night of December, a stranger knocked on Opal Burkhart's door with frost in his beard and a long white scar across his right palm, and Opal was sure she had seen that scar before.
She could not have said where. She only knew it the way you know a song from the first two notes.
"Ma'am, I'm sorry," he said. "My truck went in the ditch up on Route 9. My phone's got no signal. I saw your light."
He was a big man, maybe fifty-five, in a canvas work coat with a trucking company patch on it. Behind him, the freezing rain hissed on the porch roof. Every tree on Creek Road was bowed over under the ice, and Opal could hear branches cracking in the dark like gunshots.
"Come in," she said. "Before you freeze to my porch."
Opal was seventy-two. She had moved to Pine Hollow in June, after her husband passed, into a little white house on Creek Road that had been his mother's. She had been an emergency room nurse at the hospital in Marietta for thirty-nine years.
People on Creek Road were friendly to her, but careful. Tyler Kessler at the diner had come out in September to set up her new phone, and he had given her a talk about strangers at the door that she had listened to politely. She had worked nights in an emergency room for thirty-nine years. She had a good idea who was dangerous and who was just cold.
This man was cold. She could see it in how he held his hands.
"Wes Kincaid," he said, and shook the ice off his coat on the mat. "I haul for a lumber yard out of Zanesville. I'm grateful, ma'am. Truly."
"Opal Burkhart." She handed him a towel. "Sit by the stove. I'll get coffee."
The power had gone out at seven, along with most of the county. Opal's house had a woodstove, which was the reason her mother-in-law had never left it. The kitchen glowed orange from the open stove door. Opal had a kettle on the top and two oil lamps lit on the table.
She watched him drink his coffee. He held the cup in both hands, the right hand curled a little stiff, the way a hand gets when a tendon has been repaired.
She had stitched a lot of hands. Thirty-nine years of them. Fishhooks and table saws and kitchen knives, broken windows and bar fights, and one man who had tried to catch a falling chainsaw. She could still remember some of them by the shape of the scar, the way a teacher remembers handwriting.
This one was long and curved, from the base of the thumb nearly to the little finger, with a small hook at the end where the glass had turned.
"How'd you get that scar?" she asked.
He looked down at it. "Window, when I was a kid," he said. "Long story. Not a good one."
He did not say anything more, and she did not ask. In the emergency room, she had learned that some stories need to come out in their own time.
At a quarter to ten, her landline rang. It was the only phone on Creek Road still working, because it was old copper and Opal had refused to let Tyler talk her out of it.
It was Floyd Eckert's daughter, calling from Columbus.
"Mrs. Burkhart, I'm so sorry to bother you," she said. Her voice was tight. "Dad isn't answering. His power's out, and his phone's the cordless kind, so it won't work. He's eighty-four. He uses a walker. He was supposed to go to the church when the storm came, but he told me he'd be fine." She stopped. "He always says he'll be fine."
Floyd's house was a quarter mile up Creek Road. Opal could not see it through the ice. She could not see any lights up that way at all.
"I'll go check on him," Opal said.
"In this?"
"I'll call you back within the hour," Opal said, and hung up.
Wes was already standing when she turned around.
"You're not going up there by yourself," he said.
"I've walked into worse."
"Not at night on a road covered in ice, with trees coming down." He was buttoning his coat. "I've got chains in my coat pocket. The kind you strap on your boots. I'll go first. You hold onto my belt."
Opal looked at him for a long moment. Then she went to the closet for her old nurse's bag and her husband's heavy flashlight.
The quarter mile took them twenty-five minutes.
Wes went first, slowly, with the boot chains biting into the ice. Opal held his belt with one hand and the flashlight with the other. The rain froze on her glasses. Twice they stopped while a limb came crashing down somewhere in the dark ahead of them.
Floyd's house was black. No lamp, no candle, no smoke from the chimney.
Opal climbed the porch steps and knocked hard.
"Floyd. It's Opal Burkhart from down the road. Floyd, can you hear me?"
No answer.
She tried the door. It was locked. She went to the front window and wiped the ice off with her sleeve and put the flashlight against the glass.
The inside of the window was white with frost.
And through the frost, beside his overturned walker on the living room floor, Floyd Eckert lay on his side and did not move when the light found him.