by Lia Matera
The sound of tires grinding over frozen mud sent a wave of panic through her. Had Em assumed all was well because Ava had come inside?
She whirled, slipped on melt from her boot, then all but clawed her way back to her feet. The deep rumble of the snow plow’s engine sounded as loud as a bomb to her.
She had to make sure Em didn’t drive off and leave her. Standing in the open doorway, she made big come-here motions with both arms. But Em was already starting down the road.
Ava rushed down the trailer’s rubber steps, slipping again, spitting out snow as she got to her feet. As the truck picked up speed, Ava launched herself toward it. If Em saw her running, of course she’d stop.
She could feel Em’s eyes on her, she was sure of it. But instead of slowing, Em hit the gas, bumping faster over the scraped ice. Ava ran on, but it was hard to see where she was going with Em’s headlights pointed away from her. She cut a diagonal through deep new snow, trying to reach the moving truck. Surely Em could make out Ava’s dark coat, her motion (slow though it was) across the unbroken white of this field. Why did she keep driving?
Dread squeezed her throat and soured her mouth. The truck had reached the freshly plowed cement of the main road, and it was racing away faster than Ava could possibly move. So fast that it seemed Em was making a getaway, making sure Ava couldn’t catch up.
Finally acknowledging the futility of the chase, Ava stopped, gasping in air so sharp it scoured her lungs. She saw the truck’s top beacon and tail lights recede to small dots. Seconds later, she was standing in blackness so total she might have been thrown into a pool of ink.
Trying not to think too much, not yet, she groped in her bag. She pulled out the flashlight she’d taken from her glove box to help her pick her way to Em’s café. Tears of rage and frustration were frost on her cheeks by the time she reached the trailer again.
Before she went in, she pushed her way around to the back. Nothing there. No car, no tracks showing Aaron had parked here earlier. No crank for a summer awning. No generator, no shed with wood and a snow blower. And when she shone the beam over the vast slope of snow, there was nothing resembling a river—no sparkle of water or flat ice, no winding banks flanked with hummocks of flocked shrubs.
Still trying to keep panic at bay, she stepped back into the trailer. Her flashlight showed two shelves that served as cupboards. They were bare of bottles, cans, dishes, cups. There was no wood stove. There were no provisions. There were two blankets that stank of mildew and, beside them, the nearly-spent glow stick.
The stick could have only one possible purpose, Ava realized—to fool someone into thinking the trailer was occupied. To support Em’s lie long enough for Ava to get too far from the snow plow to chase it down.
Abandoning Ava had been a plan, not an accident. Em had plowed this road earlier today. She’d found a way to light the tiny windows, so she could pretend Aaron had a fire going, so she could say he was cooking Ava a romantic dinner.
Em had set a trap and baited it.
Had she set one for Aaron, too? Had she fooled him as completely as she’d fooled Ava? Maybe she’d encountered him someplace, recognized him, told him she knew a great spot to hide from reporters. If so, he might be alone now, shivering with cold at the end of some other plowed road. He might be waiting for Ava but knowing in his heart he’d been bamboozled.
In her mind’s eye, she saw the hate mail stacking up day after day in her office. Some of it was typed, some scrawled, some barely literate, some so precise and well-worded it gave her nightmares. All of it vilified her for taking Aaron’s case. All of it “just knew” he was a sociopath who’d killed his fiancée for preferring another man. Ava was scum for “trying to get that killer off.” Most of the letters wished horrible fates on both of them. A few did more than wish. They threatened.
You wouldn’t think to look at Bart, Em had said, but he’s had four wives, That’s what a 70-inch TV with satellite reception gets you, up here.
No doubt Em had watched that 70-inch TV with him. She’d recognized Aaron, wherever she’d run into him. She’d gotten him talking. She’d seen a chance to do what hate-filled letter writers could not: Punish him and punish his lawyer.
Shivering on the bench, Ava let her overnight bag drop to the floor. The “why” of it didn’t matter now. What mattered was staying alive. She’d played into the hands of a liar, possibly a would-be murderer, long enough.
Em expected Ava to huddle in this trailer till dawn, that much was certain. She didn’t know Ava had a flashlight. She’d left a glow stick too weak to light a path. She’d told tales of frostbite and hungry bears. She’d made sure the city girl wouldn’t strike out till morning. Keeping Ava here was an obvious part of Em’s plan, so staying was an obvious thing for Ava to rule out.
She emptied her overnight bag, a stylish rectangle of soft leather, onto the bench. She layered on the two other outfits she’d brought, slacks over slacks, jeans over both. Her blouses were thinner—even three didn’t offer much warmth. She was relieved to pull her coat back on. She peeled off her now-wet socks and replaced them with her two extra pairs. They made her boots tight, but at least for now, her feet (so cold!) were dry. Then, wrinkling her nose at the musty stink of the blankets beside her, she shook them out. She positioned one like a cape, the other over her head and mouth like a hijab. She was still chilled beyond enduring.
She looked down at her satchel. After stuffing her phone and ID into her coat pockets, she settled it over her head. It was wide enough to come down over her shoulders. She wouldn’t be able to raise her arms, except to bend them at the elbow, but she’d have both hands in her pockets anyway. She felt for where her eyes were, pinching marks into the leather there. Then she pulled the bag off and rummaged for nail clippers in her make-up kit. She cut two eyeholes, and repositioned her makeshift hood. Several breaths warmed the inside to near tolerability.
She wedged her flashlight firmly under her arm, angling it slightly downward to illuminate her path. Then, swallowing a jitter of terror, she left the trailer.
“Where are you, Aaron?” she said aloud.
Had he seen through Em? Probably not. For the last year, he’d encountered open hostility. The District Attorney hadn’t bothered keeping the sneer off his lips when he’d looked at him. One of his jailers had squinted with cruel satisfaction whenever he’d tripped his prisoner or slammed him against a wall. Letters to him had come smeared with excrement, coated in powder the writer claimed was poison, adorned with photos of mutilated voodoo dolls. Compared to what Aaron was used to, a pleasant woman smiling with apparent helpfulness wouldn’t raise an alarm.
“Ladies … and gentlemen … of the jury,” Ava murmured, moving a foot with each short phrase. She needed something familiar in this alien place, and she’d spent hours with these words.
“I can tell you about Aaron Bentam,” she went on, more loudly now. “But you don’t have to rely on my portrait.” She tried to ignore the wicked claws of night air. She tried to set a rhythm. It would be easier when she reached the road and the snow wasn’t so deep. “You’ve seen him, you’ve watched him, you’ve thought about him. You know him already.”
Dark clouds pressed down on her, and endless wilderness crowded in beyond her flashlight beam. She felt surrounded by mute giants. She had to assert herself, or she’d fold up.
“I won’t ask you to believe anything you can’t see for yourselves. But I know what you see. I see it, too. I see a kind man. A scholar. Someone whose colleagues vouched for him, right there on the witness stand, testifying with the passion of true belief that he couldn’t hurt anyone. An old-fashioned gentleman, one of them called him. A gentleman and a gentle man. A gentle man who’s already spent a year in prison on evidence so inconclusive that I’ve never, in the course of this trial, even called it ‘circumstantial.’“
That hadn’t been strictly true, but no one could grudg
e a rhetorical flourish in a closing argument. She’d warned Aaron it might seem a little hammy to him. “But it’s for them,” she’d pointed out, “it’s not for you.”
He’d glanced at her, a grin breaking through the look people get when waiting is unbearable. “Imagine if we could sit in a room together, like this, only—” He’d gestured, a wave of the hand that spoke of both hope and hopelessness. Then he’d sighed. “Or maybe after this, I’ll be shipped off.” To state prison, he’d meant. Not the county jail holding him pending the verdict. “And I’ve never … I haven’t really told you all of it. About that hike. And maybe, just in case—”
“No,” she’d interrupted. “No more information. It’s too late. We’ll talk when you’re free.”
He’d winced a little.
“I can’t call any more witnesses,” she’d explained, though he knew it. “So if you tell me something I could have used in some way, it’s too late.” He’d shaken his head, and she’d hurried again to forestall him. “And if I wouldn’t have used it … Well, then it’s too early. I can’t hear anything that casts a shadow on our case, not right before closing. Please. Respect that I can only keep so many dishes spinning.”
She still didn’t know what he’d held back. The depth of his anger at his former fiancée, perhaps. Or that their final quarrel had ended in a shoving match. But Ava knew—because she knew Aaron—that he didn’t have it in him to push a woman off a cliff and strand her there to die.
He’d been there before she fell, yes, trying to convince her not to jilt him. By all accounts, he’d been wearing his heart—and his outrage—on his sleeve that week. Opportunity and motive. And some hearsay, too, admissible under the “state of mind” exception. The hardest evidence to explain away had been his skin under three of the dead woman’s nails. She’d stumbled on the path earlier in the hike, and when Aaron caught her, it left scratches on his hand.
Ava had had to trust the jury to believe that. She hadn’t bothered disputing the DNA results, or the testimony about his state of mind, or even the timeline except to insist Aaron had left (yes, in anger) before the accident. Instead, she’d built a defense centered on his character. A dozen witnesses had spoken for him—coworkers, people who did volunteer work with him, friends.
But it had been his own testimony, she was sure, that won him his acquittal. The D.A. hadn’t been able to maneuver him into sounding possessive, sexist, bad-tempered, bitter. Aaron had reacted to the accusations with a baffled squint. He hadn’t tried to mask his shame when the D.A. repeated things Aaron had shouted in middle-of-the-quad arguments. But to the D.A.’s chagrin, statements like “I won’t be dumped for a man who doesn’t know Plato from Pliny” hadn’t struck the jury as threats.
Instead, the jurors (rewarding the time Ava had spent choosing them) had watched Aaron carefully. They’d noted the slight hesitations before he spoke and, she thought, attributed them to a professor’s solemnity, not a killer’s guilt. They’d heard sorrow, not deception, in his voice. They’d seen humility in his thoughtful answers to mortifying questions. They’d accepted him as a man without pretense, a man who looked like what he was—a scholar with finger-combed hair that wouldn’t keep a part, a bookworm who’d shown shock at the suggestion women admired his strong jaw and wide shoulders more than his library. He’d brought to mind an old-fashioned leading man—Cary Grant as the anthropologist in Bringing Up Baby, Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. (Ava had had him dress the part, too, in a 1930s hero’s loose-fitting double-breasted suit and white shirt.)
Aaron had been callous to embarrass his ex with public quarrels. Ava had acknowledged that. He’d been wrong to insist on a break-up talk, then cut it short and walk away. But it had never been his intention to abandon her in the wilderness. He would never have pushed her into a ravine, leaving her to die alone, hours later.
A shiver ran through Ava. A break-up talk. Hadn’t she told Aaron she’d stay with Jess? And here she was, abandoned in the wilderness.
“You don’t need me to tell you know who Aaron Bentam is,” she said, a shade too fiercely. “You don’t need my words to know him.” Her breaths came faster. “I’m the one who needs these words. They’re for me.”
No, Aaron hadn’t put Ava where she was tonight. That had been Em—Em alone. She’d never plowed the road for Aaron. She’d never watched him park behind the trailer. (Unless … could wind have blown away his car tracks?)
Em’s story was pure deceit. How would Aaron even know the trailer existed? It was true he’d grown up in these mountains, but that didn’t mean anything. So had half the people Ava met in the city, including two of her law partners. Jess’s entire engineering team had migrated down to go to university and find good jobs.
“I need these words,” she went on, a little shakily now. “Because in this extraordinary moment, I stand together with you looking at a good and moral and decent man. And that kind of man is worth talking about.”
Praise of his character had been what she could give Aaron, instead of herself. After all those meetings in jail. All the feelings, the glances, the “accidental” touches. And so for a full day and a morning she’d added brush strokes to her portrait of him: What he’d taught, what he’d written, the charities he’d supported, the couple in the courtroom pews every day because he’d taught them to read in a tutoring program.
“Good men wear their hearts on their sleeves, sometimes. Good men take break-ups badly sometimes. The District Attorney wants you to be cynical and decide that’s the behavior of a domestic abuser. Three of his expert witnesses said so. But you know what? It also the behavior of heart-broken professors who spend lonely nights reading Plato and Pliny.”
Her subtext, through those hours of argument, had been, Look at my client. Look at him, and trust what you see.
“Evidence is open to misinterpretation but character is character. Judge with your hearts.”
Jess had smiled to hear her rehearse the “judge with your hearts” line. “I’m an engineer,” he’d said. “If we judged with our hearts, bridges would collapse.”
Jess prided himself on being a problem solver. To him, a problem was an invitation to find an objective solution. But verdicts were subjective. They were interpretations, not solutions.
She stopped, breathless again. The road seemed endless, the cold bottomless. Had Em’s snow plow passed any houses on the way here? Surely there must be houses if there was a road.
After a few seconds of immobility, she felt as if she’d freeze into a statue and never move again. So she hobbled on. On and on like a faltering machine, until she had to stop reciting because her voice sounded like gravel in a tin can.
She didn’t consciously notice the sky brightening to a muzzy gray. She was too consumed by pain and exhaustion, by waves of fear and rage and bone-rattling shivers. But it finally sank in that she didn’t need her flashlight to see snow-flocked trees on either side of the road. She remembered having left wooded land behind fairly early in her ride to the trailer. She was past all those miles of bare snowy hills. Maybe she was close to town, maybe almost there.
That hope almost dropped her to her knees when, in the distance, she made out a faint glow, different from the morning’s thin light. She walked more quickly. It had to be houses and businesses.
She started running, weeping a little with each stride. She’d lost sensation in her feet but every step sent an excruciating jolt through her knees and hips. It was five or ten minutes later (how to gauge it?) when she spotted parked trucks. One was a snow plow. It was Em’s, or at least, it was the same color truck with the same type of blade. It and a few SUVs were under the covered part of a closed gas station, across a street of trampled tracks to and from the back doors of shops. She supposed one of the doors opened into Em’s café.
A moment later, she was looking into the truck’s window. Yes, it was definitely Em’s. She tried the driver’s door. Unlo
cked. The key was in the ignition. Em hadn’t been kidding, it seemed. In a town with only a handful of residents, people didn’t worry about theft.
She considered searching the main street (and side streets, if need be) for her own car. But for all she knew, Em had rolled it off a cliff to give the impression Ava had wandered away from an accident and (if Em was lucky) died in a snow bank.
She pulled off the hood she’d made of her overnight bag, leaving it on the ground. She wanted Em to know who’d taken her truck.
Gasping from the sting of freezing air on her cheeks, she got behind the wheel and slammed the door. Her muscles throbbed with the relief of immobility. Her nose began to run, and her sense of smell returned, though she hasn’t known the cold had stolen it.
She turned the key, and the engine caught. She searched for and found buttons to ratchet up the heat. It blasted in, still mostly chill but warmer than what she’d spent the night trudging through. For a moment, it was all her body cared about.
The radio was on, a weather report predicting a 25-degree plunge in temperature today. 25 degrees. Ava had barely survived the long trek here. If she’d left this morning, if the temperature had dipped so drastically, could she have made it?
That, no doubt, was why Em had wanted to keep Ava in the trailer overnight.
She clicked off the radio and forced herself to focus on getting the truck into gear. It had a huge cranky stick, and Ava needed both hands to shift it into drive. By then, Em had burst outside, leaving the back door of her café open as she ran out, parka in hand. Em was shouting, but Ava, easing off the clutch, didn’t take the time to listen. The truck bucked forward, heating vents pulling in the stench of grinding gears. Ava hit the gas, and Em reached her just in time to thump the back bumper with her fist.
Ava skidded more than once, rounding corners to get onto Main Street. The blade was up too high do any plowing, and Ava didn’t want to stop to fiddle with its dashboard levers. She did her best on ice and new powder, picking up speed. A glance in the rearview showed Em a block behind her, watching but not chasing her.
