Peril

SARA

She’d not noticed the place before, but now she saw that it was McPherson’s. Years earlier she’d heard a singer there, a pretty good one, she recalled. The sign in the window said “Singer wanted. Open mike.”

She knew what that meant, every would-be Broadway ingenue in New York would take a turn. They would be young and bright and full of great expectations.

Even so, she walked across the street and peered through the window, expecting to see the latest arrival from Georgia or Minnesota singing her heart out, trying to make an impression on some potbellied agent or well-heeled producer, or perhaps just singing for herself, honing her skills, along with trying to keep hope alive. But the mike stood alone before the old piano, the man at the keys looking down for the most part, absently studying his fingers as if trying to remember what they were for.

She knew that if she were like Della, believed that the Great Something Out There inevitably provided for the lost sheep, the fallen sparrow, she would stride into the little bar, introduce herself, step up to the mike, belt a great number, get a full-time job on the strength of that one performance, and turn her life into grist for some inspirational film.

But Sara believed none of that. Instead, she believed in the raw play of chance, in opportunities as easily missed as seized, the wheel’s random turning. In long walks at the mall, she had argued her position with Della, knowing all the while that no matter how sound her arguments, how proven by the facts, Della would hold to the golden chord of her claim that nothing in the universe was truly accidental, that she had met Mike not by chance at a movie theater but because through past millennia their souls had converged. The meeting at the movie theater, where Della had dropped her change and Mike had picked it up, was merely part of the Plan, the way you achieved the Big Happy Ending.

Through the bar’s hazy window, Sara stared at the vacant mike and the battered old piano and guessed that the bar was barely making ends meet. This was not necessarily bad news, however. For it could be argued that what the bar really needed was a singer to revive it, a voice that drew people in, made them hang around a little longer than they might have otherwise, linger for the final set, maybe even still be there when the barman sounded last call.

Last call.

She heard the wind in the corn, felt her body pushed into the enveloping green, Sheriff Caulfield behind her, telling her she had to play along, keep her mouth shut, which she might as well do anyway, since he ran things in Cumberland County, and who would listen to a white-trash tenant farmer’s daughter?

And so she’d played along and kept her mouth shut, and the thing was done, and she’d pulled herself from the ground and staggered back toward her car, the voice screaming in her ear, Kill him! Kill him now, a voice she’d managed to silence only by promising absolutely and forever that it would never happen again.

She closed her eyes and tried to squeeze all that had happened after that from her mind. When she opened them again, the sign shone dully before her.

Singer wanted. Open mike.

Last chance, she thought, though she wasn’t sure it was even that. Still, it was a job, if she could get it, and at least there’d be no more searching the paper and going on interviews and sitting silently while they looked at her from across their polished desks.

Okay, she decided, why not, and on the wave of that decision walked to the door.