I went in through the shed, grabbed a Ballantine ale from the fridge, and headed upstairs. Sophie was in bed, books piled around her like she’d dug her way out of a library. Roxanne was sitting beside her, listening to her read. Blueberries for Sal. There was a contest in the second grade. The student who read the most books got a gift certificate to the bookstore in Belfast. Sophie said she was in the lead.
“Dad,” she said, and she kicked the covers off, took two hops, and gave me a hug around the waist. “Did you see it’s snowing again?”
“I sure did.”
“Can we get the toboggan out?”
“Tomorrow,” Roxanne said. “After Daddy picks up the new toilet.”
“Can we get one that has heat? Cilla’s grammy has one that gets warm so when you sit down you don’t freeze your buns.”
“Wow,” I said. “Cilla’s grammy is living large.”
“She lives in New York,” Sophie said. “They go to visit her.”
“Be worth it,” I said. “A toilet like that.”
Roxanne smiled, patted the bed beside her. “Bedtime,” she said.
Sophie sprang back onto the bed and crawled back to her place and read.
Sal made friends with the bear cub in the blueberry barren. All was well with the world, his and ours.
When she was done, we gave her hugs and kisses and then Roxanne turned out the light and we left the room, the door ajar.
Downstairs Roxanne got a bottle of white out of the refrigerator and a glass from the cupboard. She poured and we sat down at the kitchen table. Touched glass and can.
“To love,” I said.
She looked at me.
“What?”
“I’m hoping that’s what Louis is in.”
Roxanne froze in mid-sip, swallowed. “He found someone?”
“More like she found him.”
I told her about Marta from high school.
“Louis is on Facebook?” Roxanne said.
I nodded.
“So all weekend they were—”
“Making up for lost time,” I said. I raised my eyebrows up and down. “If you catch my drift.”
“Huh,” Roxanne said. “So what does she look like?”
“Very attractive. Dark hair sort of to here.” I touched my shoulder blades. “A good figure, as they say.”
“Was she nice?”
I hesitated.
“Once she put the gun away.”
I told her about the Sig. The explanation for why Marta might be jumpy.
“My God,” Roxanne said. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah. But it wasn’t like she was devastated with grief.”
I went through it—the parents dying in Ukraine. Brought to the US by her uncle. Goes to college mostly so she can latch on to a rich guy.
“Very 1950s,” Roxanne said.
“It worked,” I said.
I told her about how Nigel turns out to be domineering and abusive. And he won’t tie the knot. And he’s in some shady business that gets him killed by Russians. Marta not sorry to see him gone, but feels guilty for thinking it. In the end she gets screwed out of the money.
Roxanne was reaching for the bottle. I got up and took a box of stoned-wheat crackers from the cupboard, a block of Irish cheddar from the fridge. Sat back down and took out a stack of crackers. Sliced a piece of cheese with my Swiss Army knife. Offered it to Roxanne, who took it and held it. I made one of my own. We crunched.
“How much does Louis have?” Roxanne said. “Millions?”
“Several, be my guess.”
“And she knows that?”
“Knew his family fifteen years ago,” I said, “and clearly he hasn’t spent it. I’ll bet she can do the appreciation in her head.”
“Huh,” Roxanne said.
“Yup.”
“You worried about him?”
“A little,” I said. “But mostly that’s Clair’s job.”
“Right,” Roxanne said. “And remember what we decided.”
“Compartmentalize,” I said.
“Right. Nobody’s gonna get past the firewall.”
“No way, no how,” I said.
She smiled, reached across the table, and touched my hand. She was beautiful, her hair mussed from the pillow at Sophie’s bedtime, her sweater rumpled. Our eyes locked.
“The toilets are on sale at Home Department,” she said. “Kohler Classic, two-piece. I considered beige but I think we should stick to white. The new ones use way less water, which even with a well—”
“I love you,” I said.
Roxanne paused.
“I know,” she said. “I love you, too.”
“You never know what’s coming.”
“No,” she said.
“One day you’re lying by the pool and the next day you’re running for your life.”
“And you end up in the wilds of Maine.”
“With a guy you haven’t seen or talked to in ten years,” I said.
“But he makes you feel safe.”
“Even if you aren’t.”
We sipped our drinks.
“You think somebody could find her up here?” Roxanne said.
“Depends.”
“On what?” she said.
“On how hard they want to look.”
We stood there for a moment, thinking about it.
“Maybe they had masks on,” Roxanne said.
“Yeah,” I said. “We can only hope.”
At 5:10 a.m. Saturday, I heard the clunk of Clair’s plow dropping, then the scrape of metal on gravel and the rumble of his big Ford as he cleared the driveway. Home Department was in Riverport on Stillwater Avenue, out with the rest of the big-box stores. The store opened at six a.m. My plan was to be on the road by 5:30. I eased out of bed, took clothes from the bureau, went downstairs, and found my boots. I put them on in the kitchen, grabbed my parka off the hook.
And then I turned back, dropped the parka on the table. Went to the study, tapped the laptop on. In the blue glow I typed in Nigel . . . home invasion . . . Virgin Gorda.
Several hits: BVI News said his name was Nigel Dean. He was forty-nine. He died from injuries “sustained at the hands of unidentified intruders.” Burglars broke in after staff had left for their weekly night off. It was the first murder on Virgin Gorda in thirteen years.
And this from the Telegraph: Multimillionaire investor Nigel Dean died in a burglary gone wrong at his estate. Dean was a former SAS officer who ran the private equity firm of Tortola Quay. He had three children and was divorced from Tabitha Wrigglesworth, the fashion magazine editor and daughter of Sir Roger Wrigglesworth, the MP. The crime was under investigation by the Royal Virgin Islands Police.
Nothing about Russians. Nothing about money being drained from accounts. Nothing about torture. Nothing about a witness. Nothing about the woman who had parachuted into our Maine woods from another world.
I sat in the cab and pondered as the truck warmed up, thought how my stories had changed over the years. I’d done drownings, women killed by their abusive husbands, hippie marijuana growers who got in too deep. Lately it had been gangs moving north from Boston, drug dealers trading dope for guns. Shootings where there used to be fistfights. Now someone on the run from the Russian mob holed up in Sanctuary, Maine.
The walls between us and the outside world had been breached. Waldo County didn’t seem so much of a hideaway anymore.
I pushed it all back and pulled out of the drive, flicking the lights on as I turned onto the road. Felt myself sour, pressed the gas and tried to fight it off. But the questions wormed their way back in. Was there an accomplice in Louis’s bed? Had she left a trail of crumbs behind her?
They’d plowed Route 7 northbound out of Brooks, but the west wind w
as blowing across the stubbly cornfields, pushing the snow back onto the road like waves against a beach. I drove through, the truck hitting the drifts with a whump.
I swung east on Route 202 at Dixmont, climbed the hills, and looked out at the broken clouds racing past from the western mountains, the last remnant of the snowstorm. The road passed collapsed dairy barns, crushed by time, double-wides parked next to sinking farmhouses. Ordinarily this would prompt me to consider mortality, the fleeting nature of our accomplishments. But I kept thinking of Louis and Marta, all the way to Newburgh, then north on the interstate.
He was a big boy, as Clair said. He knew what he was doing. They were close, by all appearances, certainly attracted to each other. And why should Louis sleep alone? Or was alone a much safer place?
My gut kept saying Marta was trouble, that she was using sex and their past relationship to work Louis, wrap him around her, take what she wanted. And what did a woman like Marta want? Right now? A place to hide. Long run? Security. Status. Money.
I pulled off the highway and flipped the radio on. BBC News, the usual reports from the yawing deck of the Titanic that is our world. Politicians lying to your face. The planet wrapped in a smoky, ever-warming shroud. Refugees—men, women, children—drowning in the Mediterranean within sight of land. Countries arguing over who should fish out the bodies.
I turned the radio off. Sighed. Thought maybe I should think of Marta’s arrival as a needed bit of good news. Woman escapes murdering thieves and her abusive boyfriend. Comes to the Maine woods and finds true love.
“Yeah, right,” I said.
The parking lot was nearly empty at seven a.m., a few retired guys looking to get out of the house. A couple of them had women along, and I thought of Louis. Would Marta go everywhere with him? Would he ride in the passenger seat of her Audi? How long had she rented it for? How confident had she been that she’d be able to hook right back up with an old boyfriend after a dozen years?
Very, I thought.
I caught myself. But what if he was just a port in the storm? What if she’d hooked him again, rekindled his feelings for her. And when she’d laid low long enough, she’d be gone. He’d wake up to an empty bed.
Or was I just jealous of this woman muscling in on our territory?
I got out of the truck, grabbed a dolly. A toilet would have some weight to it. As I wheeled the dolly toward the store, a blue SUV cut me off and pulled into a parking spot in front of me. I stopped and the woman behind the wheel gave me a wave.
She buzzed the window down, said, “Sorry.” She was fiftyish, attractive, with an upturned nose and short silver-blonde hair. A small, similarly blonde dog hopped up on her lap and yapped at me furiously.
“Harry, shush,” she told the dog, and pushed him back. She turned back to me and smiled and said, “Sorry. He’s all bark.”
I thought of Louis’s dog, all bite.
“He’s just excitable, I’m sure.”
I paused and reached toward the window. Harry paused from his barking to sniff my fingers.
“He likes you,” the woman said, easing him across her lap and back into the car. She was wearing a white sweater with holly on the front. Christmas.
“He smells pony,” I said.
She stroked the dog. “Harry, the nice man has a pony,” she said.
The woman lifted him into the backseat and he sprang to the front. She gave him another push, and backed out of the door, saying, “I’ll be right back.” I pushed the dolly around the car and heard the door thunk shut, another door open. She was getting her bag out of the backseat as I passed. Black leggings, knee-high wine-red leather boots.
The boots looked expensive.
I heard her call out behind me, “Aren’t we the early birds,” wanting to talk.
I considered waiting for her to catch up but I was rolling along, on schedule. In and out, grab the toilet, have it hooked up by ten. If I stopped to chat with everyone along the way, I’d be an hour behind. I pretended not to hear her, pushed the dolly through the automatic doors.
Inside, the employees were standing in front of the registers like carnival hawkers, smiling and making groggy eye contact with the shoppers, who walked right past. I did, too, down the plumbing aisle, across to the toilets, lined up on a head-high shelf. The toilets looked pretty much the same, so I asked a worker to point me to the Kohler Classic. In white.
She pointed to it and I saw the tattoos on her forearms. Somebody or other, RIP. If you write it on your arm, does that make it happen?
I thanked her and walked over and looked up and established that the toilet looked perfectly usable. There were cartons of them below the display model, and I dragged the first one off the shelf and wrestled it onto the dolly. I pushed the dolly down the toilet aisle, crossed to paint and varnish, took a left by the artificial Christmas trees. They were green, white, and pink, and an inflated Santa looked down on them proudly like he’d grown them from seed. I rolled up to the first register and a guy said, “Find what you need?” I said yes, and he leaned across the counter and pointed a gizmo at the toilet until the gizmo beeped. He was tapping at the register and I was digging for my wallet—
When someone screamed.
We looked up.
It was a woman’s voice. Again. Then again.
5
k
People started to run toward the sound, from the direction of the side door, the one that led to the nursery. There were workers in red shirts and aprons, the guy ahead of me trying to get his phone out. The automatic door to the nursery was sliding back and forth like it had short-circuited, people dodging through.
I was right with them, heard a woman crying now, sobbing, someone saying, “It’s okay, buddy. Just stay right there.”
A woman was on the floor, her legs splayed open, an arm outstretched. A guy was standing beside her. He was wearing a black knit mask and a black hooded sweatshirt. There was a red V hanging from a cord around his neck, like the scarlet letter upside down. He had a black tomahawk raised over his head and he was shouting, “She has left her mortal body. I assure you, people of Lintukoto, she is no longer a threat.”
It was like they were staging a play, some sort of weird performance art. Four guys in red uniforms were circled around the guy with the hatchet, close to a display of Christmas wreaths. The woman who had directed me to the toilet was on her phone. “Home Department. Oh my God, he chopped this lady! By the Christmas trees. You gotta get here.”
And then the four employees rushed the guy and he swung the tomahawk, hit one guy in the shoulder, and said something like “Hakata” and “Show thy power.” The other three gang-tackled him and he went down, arms above his head, legs kicking. One of the guys pulled at the hatchet, but the guy wouldn’t let go until one of them punched him in the face and another kicked him hard in the groin.
He gasped and dropped the hatchet and the worker who was standing kicked it across the floor toward me, where it skidded to a stop. It was black except for the cutting edge of the blade, which was silver. The reverse side was a metal point like something on a weathervane and on the grip, usa, in small silver letters. The hatchet side was streaked with blood.
I looked toward the woman. She was on her face and a dark pool was spreading from underneath her head. The back of her skull was slashed, her silver-blonde hair matted.
Blood spatter on her white sweater. Embroidered holly, green leaves and red berries, up near the collar.
Wine-colored boots.
“Oh, no,” I said.
It was her.
The woman from the toilet aisle said, “They’re coming,” and moved closer to the woman on the ground, then crouched and scooped up the woman’s bag. It was brown leather and stuff had come out of it.
A phone. Lipstick. Her wallet.
The worker woman stuffed the things back in the bag,
carefully placed it on the floor, like she was neatening things up for company. I was thinking, But I just talked to her. She has a dog in the car.
The guy in black was wearing dark red boots, tall rubber ones like a fisherman would wear, the soles wrapped in bands of silver duct tape. Head pressed to the concrete floor, he shouted something like “Hakata” and “You don’t know!” and “Mortals desist!”
And then two cops ran in from the parking lot, a man and a woman, the woman with her gun drawn. She shouted, “Everybody back the hell off,” and the three guys rolled away. The cop said, “Put your hands out over your head. Now.”
People had phones out, shooting video, which made it seem like a movie set, that somebody would shout, “Cut,” and everybody would get up.
But they didn’t. The ax guy extended his hands over his head, and the closer cop dropped down hard on the guy’s back and grabbed for one of his arms. The guy fought back and the second cop moved in close, screaming, “Stop resisting!” He did, lying still. She hesitated, then holstered her gun. Started toward him. He started shouting again at the cop on his back, twisting to look at him. She yanked her orange Taser loose and leaned in. There was a rattle and the dart sank into the guy’s leg. The guy started thrashing and screaming and still the cop couldn’t get the cuffs on.
The three workers jumped back in, two of them holding the guy down while the other helped the cop pull the guy’s arms to the center of his back. The cop snapped the cuffs on, and the guy started to roll over and the woman cop pepper-sprayed him in the face.
“Your power is nothing,” he screamed, spittle flying.
“Put the fucking phones away,” the guy cop shouted, but nobody did.
The woman cop moved to the woman on the floor and touched her neck. Her head flopped to the side, showing her face. The cop turned to me and said, “You know this person?”
“No,” I said. “I just passed her in the parking lot. She was driving a Honda CR-V. Blue. There’s a little dog inside.”
The woman cop turned back, touched the woman’s neck again. She reached for her shoulder mic, said, “Eleven-three, Home Department victim, severe head injury. I mean, really serious. Severe wound. Hit with an ax.”
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