The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  The ground began to slope upward as she neared the road. She stumbled slightly as her feet hit a rock, and there was a terrible, sharp pain. She’d broken the big toe of her right foot. She was sure of it. It slowed her down, but it didn’t stop her. The truck was still some distance away, but she would reach the highway long before it passed her spot. She was prepared to stand in the middle of the road and risk being hit if that was what it took. She’d rather die quickly under its wheels than be taken back to that basement.

  Something pushed her from behind, and she fell to the ground. An instant later, she heard the shot, and there was a pressure in her chest, followed by a burning that set her lungs on fire. She lay on her side and tried to speak, but only blood flowed from between her lips. The truck passed barely an arm’s length from where she lay, the driver oblivious of her dying. She stretched her fingers toward it, and felt the breeze of its passing. The burning inside her was no longer fiery but cold. Her hands and feet were growing numb, the ice spreading inward to the core of her being, freezing her limbs and turning her blood to crystals.

  Footsteps approached, and then two men were looking down at her. One was the limping cop, the other the old man who had given her his coat. He was holding a hunting rifle in his arms. She could see the rest of his friends following behind. She smiled.

  I got away. I escaped. This wasn’t the ending that you wanted.

  I beat you, you fuckers.

  I . . .

  BEN PEARSON WATCHED THE life depart the girl, her body deflating as its final breath left it. He shook his head in sorrow.

  “And she was a good one too,” he said. “She was scrawny, but they were fattening her up. If we were lucky, we could have got ten years or more out of her.”

  Chief Morland walked to the road. There were no more vehicles coming their way. There was no chance that they would be seen. But what a mess, what a godawful mess. Somebody would answer for it.

  He rejoined the others. Thomas Souleby was closest to him in height. These things mattered when you were dealing with a body.

  “Thomas,” he said, “you take her arms. I’ll take her legs. Let’s get this all cleaned up.”

  And together the two men carried the remains of Annie Broyer, lost daughter of the man named Jude, back to the store.

  CHAPTER

  V

  They saw the cars pull into their drive and knew that they were in trouble.

  Chief Morland was leading, driving his unmarked Crown Vic. The dash light wasn’t flashing, though. The chief wasn’t advertising his presence.

  The chief’s car was followed by Thomas Souleby’s Prius. A lot of folk in Prosperous drove a Prius or some other similarly eco-­conscious car. Big SUVs were frowned upon. It had to do with the ethos of the town, and the importance of maintaining a sustainable environment in which to raise generations of children. Everybody knew the rules, unofficial or otherwise, and they were rarely broken.

  As the cars pulled up outside the house, Erin gripped her husband’s hand. Harry Dixon was not a tall man, or a particularly handsome one. He was overweight, his hair was receding, and he snored like a drill when he slept on his back, but he was her man, and a good one too. Sometimes she wished that they had been blessed with children, but it was not to be. They had waited too late after marriage, she often thought, and by the time it became clear that the actions of nature alone would not enable her to conceive they had settled into a routine in which each was enough for the other. Oh, they might always have wished for more, but there was a lot to be said for “enough.”

  But these were troubled times, and the idyllic middle age they had imagined for themselves was under threat. Until the start of the decade, Harry’s construction company had weathered the worst of the recession by cutting back on its full-time employees and paring quotes to the bone, but 2011 had seen the company’s virtual collapse. It was said that the state had lost forty-eight hundred jobs in March of that year alone, which contributed to making Maine the nation’s leader in lost jobs. They’d both read about the arguments between the Maine Department of Labor and the Maine Center for Economic Policy, the latter basing its figures on higher Bureau of Labor Statistics job loss figures that the former refuted. As far as the Dixons were concerned, that was just the state’s Department of Labor trying to sweep the mess under the carpet. It was like telling a man that his feet are dry when he can feel the water lapping at his chin.

  Now Harry’s company was little more than a one-man operation, with Harry quoting for small jobs that he could complete with cheap labor, and bringing in skilled contractors by the hour as he needed them. They could still pay their mortgage, just about, but they’d cut back on a lot of luxuries, and they did more and more of their buying outside Prosperous.

  Erin’s half sister, Dianne, and her surgeon husband had helped them out with a small lump sum. They were both hospital consultants, and were doing okay. They could afford to lend a hand, but it had hurt the couple’s pride to approach them for a loan—a loan, what’s more, that was unlikely to be repaid anytime soon.

  They had also tapped the town’s discretionary fund, which was used to support townsfolk who found themselves in temporary financial trouble. Ben Pearson, who was regarded as one of the board’s more approachable members, had taken care of the details, and the money—just over two thousand dollars—had helped the Dixons out a little, but Ben had made it clear that it would have to be paid back, in cash or in kind. If it wasn’t, the board would start delving more deeply into their situation, and if the board started snooping it might well find out about Dianne. That was why the Dixons had agreed, however reluctantly, to keep the girl. It would serve as repayment of the loan, and keep their relationship with Dianne a secret.

  Erin had only discovered her half sister’s existence some three years earlier. Erin’s father had left Prosperous when she was little more than an infant, and her mother had subsequently remarried—to a cousin of Thomas Souleby’s, as it happened. Her father hadn’t been heard from again, and then, at the end of 2009, Dianne had somehow tracked Erin down, and a tentative if genuine affection had sprung up between them. It seemed that their father had created a whole new identity for himself after he left Prosperous, and he never mentioned the town to his new wife or to their child. It was only following his death, and the death of her mother, that Dianne had come across documents among her father’s possessions that explained the truth about his background. By then she was on her second marriage—to a man who, coincidentally or through the actions of fate, lived in the same state that had spawned her father, and not too far from the town and the life that he had fled.

  Erin had professed complete ignorance of the reasons that their father might have gone to such lengths to hide his identity, but when Dianne persisted she hinted at some affair with a woman from Lewiston, and her father’s fear of retribution from his wife’s family. None of it was true, of course—well, none of the stuff about the affair. Her father’s fear of retribution was another matter. Nevertheless, she made it clear to Dianne that it would be for the best if she kept her distance from Prosperous and didn’t go delving into the past of their shared father.

  “Old towns have long memories,” Erin told Dianne. “They don’t forget slights.”

  And Dianne, though bemused, had consented to leaving Prosperous to its own business, aided in part by her half sister’s willingness to share with her what she knew of their father’s past, even if, unbeknownst to Dianne, Erin had carefully purged all the information she offered of any but the most innocuous details.

  So Erin and Harry were the poor relatives, bound to Dianne and her husband by the shade of a father. They were content to play that role, though, and to keep the existence of Dianne and her husband hidden from the citizens of Prosperous. Unspoken between them was the fact that they might have need of Dianne at some point in the future, and not only for money, for the Dixons wanted nothing mor
e than to leave Prosperous, and that would be no easy task. The board would want to know why. The board would investigate. The board would almost certainly find out about Dianne, and the board would wonder what secrets Erin Dixon might have shared with her half sister, the daughter of a man who had turned his back on the town, who had stolen its money and, perhaps, whispered of the deal it had made to secure itself.

  Keeping all their fears from Dianne and her husband wasn’t easy. To further complicate matters, Harry and Erin had asked that the money be paid in cash. She could still remember the look on Dianne’s face: puzzlement, followed by the dawning realization that something was very wrong here.

  “What kind of trouble are you two in?” Dianne asked them, as her husband poured the last of the wine and gave them the kind of disapproving look he probably reserved for patients who neglected to follow his postoperative advice and then seemed surprised when they started coughing blood. His name was Magnus Madsen, and he was of Danish extraction. He insisted on the pronunciation of his first name as “Mau-nus,” without sounding the “g,” and had resigned himself to correcting Harry’s literal pronunciation whenever they met. Harry just couldn’t seem to manage “Mau-nus,” though. That damned “g” kept intruding. Anyway, it wasn’t as if Magnus Madsen was fresh off a Viking longship. There were rocks that hadn’t been in Maine as long as the Madsens. His family had been given plenty of time to learn to speak English properly, and drop whatever airs they’d brought with them from the Old Country.

  “We’d just prefer it if people in Prosperous didn’t know that we were having serious difficulties,” said Harry. “It’s a small town, and if word got out it might affect my chances of bidding successfully for work. If you pay us in cash, then we can make pretty regular lodgments into our account until we find our feet again, and nobody will be any the wiser.”

  “But surely any dealings you have with your bank are entirely confidential,” said Magnus. “Couldn’t you ask your bank manager for an extended line of credit? I mean, you’re still working, and you must have paid off the bulk of your mortgage by now. That’s a nice house you have, and it’s worth a fair sum, even in these difficult times. It’s hardly like asking for an unsecured loan.”

  There was so much that Harry wanted to say at that point, but it could have been summarized as “You and I do not live in similar worlds.” Those words “unsecured loan” bit at him as well, because that was precisely what they were asking of Magnus and Dianne, but mostly he knew that Magnus had no conception of the way the town of Prosperous worked. If he did, it would turn his hair white.

  And, shortly after that, he’d be dead.

  Magnus and Dianne gave them the money in the end, and Harry used it to pump up the deposits being made at the bank, but the borrowed cash was almost gone now, and he didn’t think that his in-laws could be tapped again. In any normal situation, Harry and Erin would have sold up and moved on. Sure, they’d take a bit of a hit on the house, but with a little luck they might come out of it with a high five- or low six-figure sum once the mortgage was paid off. They could start again, maybe rent for a while until the economy recovered.

  But this wasn’t a normal situation. They knew that they probably weren’t the only ones in the town who were suffering; there were rumors, and more than rumors. Even Prosperous wasn’t entirely immune from the vagaries of the economy, just as, throughout its history, it had never been completely protected from conflict, or financial turmoil, or the wrath of nature. Yet it had always been better protected than most. The town took steps to ensure that this was the case.

  “What do you think happened?” Erin now whispered to her husband, as they watched the men approach. “Did she get away?”

  “No,” said Harry. “I don’t believe she did.”

  If she had escaped, these others wouldn’t be here on their doorstep. There were only two possibilities. The first was that the girl had been captured before she could leave Prosperous, in which case the chief was going to be mad as hell with them for failing to keep her locked up, and they could only hope that the girl had sense enough to keep any suspicions about the ease of her escape to herself. The second possibility was that she was dead, and Harry found himself wishing that the latter was true. It would be easier for all of them.

  They didn’t give the chief time to knock on the door. Harry opened it to find Morland with his fist raised, and he flinched instinctively in anticipation of the blow. There was a doorbell, but it wouldn’t have been like Lucas Morland to use it under the circumstances. Psychologically, a sharp knock was far more effective.

  Harry stepped aside to admit them, the chief with his face set hard and Thomas Souleby looking more disappointed than angry, as though Harry and Erin were errant teenagers who had failed some crucial parental test.

  “We know why you’re here,” said Harry.

  “If you know why we’re here,” said the chief, “then why didn’t you call to tell us about the girl?”

  “We only just found out she was gone,” said Erin. “We were about to call, but—”

  She looked to her husband for help.

  “But we were frightened,” he finished for her.

  “Frightened of what?”

  “That we’d let you down—that we’d let the whole town down. We knew you’d be angry.”

  “Did you try looking for her?”

  “Sure,” said Harry. “I mean, no, not yet, but we were about to. See, I’d put my boots on.” He pointed at his feet, which were, indeed, booted. He never wore footwear in the house—Erin bitched about the carpets—but he’d put his boots on that night, just in case it all went to hell. “I was ready to head out when you arrived.”

  “Did you find her?” asked Erin. “Please tell me that you found her.”

  She was good, Harry gave her that. It was just what she should have said, just what the chief would have expected to hear.

  Morland didn’t reply. He was leaving them to stew for a while, waiting to see what they might reveal to him. They’d have to step carefully now. What would the girl have said when she was caught? What would she have told them?

  Nothing, Harry figured. She’d have kept quiet. That was why he and Erin had simply left the doors mostly unsecured and gone about their business. If the girl was caught, they’d have deniability.

  Morland leaned against the kitchen table and folded his arms.

  “How did it happen?” he asked.

  “It was my fault,” said Erin. “I left the door unlocked. I didn’t mean to. Sometimes, if I knew she was asleep, I’d just shoot the bolt and let the shackle hang loose on the mechanism. I was tired, though, and I may have forgotten to put the padlock on. She must have worked the bolt free from the inside. I found a piece of cloth on the floor that she could have used. Maybe she tore it from her nightgown.”

  “How did she know that you hadn’t locked the door?” asked Souleby.

  Damn you, thought Harry. I always felt you were too smart for anyone’s good. Souleby, the miserable bastard, reminded Harry of an old stork: all beak and limbs.

  “I don’t know,” said Erin. “My guess is that she never gave up trying to escape. She probably tested the door every time I left the room, and this time she just got lucky.”

  “Got lucky, huh?” said Morland.

  He permitted himself a little smile.

  “Show me the door,” he said. “Explain it all to me again.”

  They went down to the basement, and Erin showed him the cell, and the bolt, and the padlock. Just as she had told him, there was a piece of white material on the floor, stained with grease from the bolt. The chief examined it, and toyed with the bolt and the padlock for a while.

  “Get inside,” he said to Erin.

  “What?”

  “Go on. Get inside that cell.” He handed her the strip of cloth. “And take this with you.”

  She
did as she was told. The chief closed the door on her and slid the bolt, but did not secure it with the padlock.

  “Now,” he said, “open it.”

  The saliva dried up in Harry’s mouth. He would have prayed, but he had long since stopped believing in God. The continued existence of Prosperous was one of the strongest arguments he could come up with against the possibility of a benevolent deity watching over humankind.

  After a couple of attempts, Erin managed to get the cloth through the gap between the door and the frame, and over the bolt. There was, though, no way that she could pull the other end back in. Harry closed his eyes. This was it.

  A thin shaft of broken wood poked through the gap, caught the strip of cloth, and pulled it back through to the other side of the cell door. Slowly, Erin began to twist it back and forth. The bolt moved: not by much, but it moved. With some perseverance, it would be only a matter of time before Erin managed to unlock the door from the inside, as she claimed the girl had done.

  Morland stared at Harry. Despite what he had witnessed, Harry knew that the chief still didn’t quite believe what he’d been told. If he was expecting Harry to crack, though, he would be disappointed, unless he resorted to torture, and even Morland was probably above that.

  “Let her out,” he told Souleby, and Souleby pulled the bolt.

  Erin stepped out of the cell, flushed but triumphant.