Violet never thought about staying home that night.  She’d listened to the forecast on KLIV, and, yes, they were predicting heavy rains for the valley. But whether the blame lay with the weather bureau or the radio station itself, the forecasts had been wrong so many times before that she paid no attention to them. Mondays were choir practice night, and she was going. After all, she had only ever missed one because of the weather, and that was thirty years ago. Why should tonight be any different?
            Had she listened to the radio a few minutes more, she would have found out why. The regular weekly rehearsal for the Princedale Reform Church choir had, indeed, been postponed. However, it was not because of the storm.  Pastor Ben MacPherson, who had been rector and choir director at the church since God knows when, had finally been captured by the Grim Reaper.
            That afternoon, Pastor MacPherson had suffered a fatal heart attack while writing his Sunday sermon, which he had ironically titled “Life in the Hereafter”.
           Word had spread quickly around the village of the dear Pastor’s demise, but not fast enough to reach Violet’s ears. At six forty-five, she headed out of the house toward her car, battling the howling wind and rain, unaware that the church would be locked and deserted when she arrived.
            Princedale is a small town where everyone knows everyone else. For the most part, there was never any trouble that the local two-man police force couldn’t handle. There was the occasional Saturday night party that got out of hand and landed some poor local in the lockup, but it had been years since there was any major crime.
          Violet lived about a mile and a half out of town. To get to church, she had to turn left off Jordon Road to Highway Six, which became Docking Street a mile later, at the town line. It was a road of few houses and even fewer streetlights, a dark and foreboding place for an elderly woman on a stormy night such as this. For anyone else, the drive would have taken only moments to complete. For Violet, who arguably was the slowest driver in the county, it took considerably longer. With her speedometer rarely venturing above twenty, it was nearly seven by the time she made the sweeping right turn into the church driveway.
            As Violet pulled in, she became confused by the sights that greeted her. The church, which was usually illuminated at this time on Monday night, was in darkness. The only light was outside, above the front steps. The parking lot was empty.
          Violet spent the next few minutes searching for a reason to explain the absence of her fellow choir members from the church. At first, she thought that perhaps her clocks at home were wrong. Maybe a power outage had occurred that she was unaware of while she napped that afternoon.
         “Oh, darn! I’ve missed it!” she said to herself, as she pushed up the sleeve of her coat and strained to view the hands of her wristwatch in the dim glow of the dash lights.
         It was seven o’clock.  She turned her attention to the weather outside. The practice, she thought, may have been cancelled because of the storm. Her own common sense, however, led her to believe that this simply could not be the case. Over the years, there had been far worse storms than this one in the valley. Only once had the choir not met.
            “No,” she thought. “There had to be another reason.”
            Suddenly, she was distracted by a piece of paper, snapping in the wind as it hung from the front door of the church. She inched the car closer to the steps of the church hall and slid out from behind the wheel.  Grabbing the stair rail with one hand, and grasping her hat with the other, she climbed upwards to the door of the building. The note had been soaked by windswept rain, and parts were illegible, but she understood the message.
            “Practice cancelled. Pastor MacPherson.. something..,” Violet read. “ I wonder what happened ?”
            Her momentary curiosity gave way to anger, and she castigated the other members of the group to herself for their lack of consideration.
            “There’s no one here. Everybody else must have known about this.. this.. whatever it is ! At least someone could have called me !” she fumed.
            Just then a gust of wind pulled her hat from her hand and whisked it away into the blackness.
             As she turned on the doorstep to ascertain the direction taken by her wayward hat, Violet froze. There, in the headlights of her car, was the silhouette of a man. Anger turned quickly to fear.
            “Oh, my goodness...” she whispered.  Her voice trailed off as she suddenly realized the uncertainty of her situation.
            The man stepped toward her, climbing the stairs to the doorstep, his matted hair dripping from the rain.
            “It went that way, lady,” he said, pointing toward the field on the other side of the church.
            “What?” she replied.
            “Your hat,” he said. “It blew over there. Probably long gone by now.”
            “Yes... I suppose it would be.”
            Violet’s mind began to race. She had never seen this man before. She didn’t know what he was doing in a little place like Princedale on a miserable night like this. She wondered what, if anything, he had in mind for her.
            “Is that your car?” the man asked.
            She shook her head.
            “Thought so. Could you drive me to Graywood? I got a cousin up there I ain’t seen in years.”
            “Graywood?”
            “Yeah. I don’t think it’s far.”
            “Yes, not far... eight, ten miles,” Violet replied.
            “Can you take me, lady?” the stranger asked.
            Violet weighed her options. None, it seems, were very practical, or pleasant. If the stranger was an escaped convict and she turned down his request, he would kill her on the spot and just take the car. On the other hand, if she agreed to drive, the sunrise would likely find her lifeless body lying in a ditch somewhere between there and Graywood. Either way, it was an unpleasant proposition.
            There was, of course, a third possibility, that she was over-reacting. All of this could be just nonsense, conjured up by an active imagination, the result of watching too many police shows on television. The man sounded harmless enough and hadn’t threatened her. Violet had seen lots of murder mysteries, and she knew that killers usually turned out to be the most unlikely people.
            It’s the ones who you think are  killers that aren’t, she thought.
            Seeing that her options were really no options at all, she decided to take a chance.
            “Yes, young man.” she said. “Get in the car. I’ll drive you to Graywood.”
            The two got into Violet’s black sedan, and she turned toward the main road.
            “Lady,” the stranger said. “Excuse me, but is this the right way?”
            “Yes... Oh, yes.. I know a shortcut,” Violet said.
            Her plan was to travel the Old Pine Road. There were no lights or houses on it, but the drive was shorter, and she felt it gave the stranger less time to harm her, if indeed, that were his intentions.
            Moments later, as she turned off Highway six, Violet’s glance happened to fall on the seat beside her.  She gasped. There, peering out from under the armrest of the seat between them, was the barrel of a handgun.
            The stranger glanced over at Violet, followed her stare to the protruding object and raised his eyebrows. Violet swallowed hard as she realized that her time may have come a bit earlier than she had anticipated.
            “Let’s pull over here.”
            The voice was cold and unfeeling.
            She slowed the Buick to a stop.
            “Get out.”
            This is it, she thought.
            Violet remembered from television and murder mysteries that no two killers are the same. Some, she knew, liked to torture their victims, the way a cat toys with a mouse. Others preferred it to be swift and efficient – methodical, even - so as not to leave any clues.
            For Violet that night, murder proved to be cold and callous. One shot to the back of the head and it was over. The body slumped to the ditch, the killer jumped back into the car and drove away, leaving a small community in shock the next morning.  It had been a long time since anyone was murdered in Princedale. Thirty years, to be exact.
The circumstances surrounding that crime were very similar to this one. The victim was found on Old Pine Road, shot to death execution style, in the back of the head.
          No murder weapon was ever found, no one was ever charged, and the case drifted into the unsolved files at the local police department.  Choir practice had been cancelled that night too, when the worst storm in years hit town.  One might think that no one would ever make a connection between that murder and this one.
            And no one ever did, except Violet, as she turned the car around that night and headed home.