The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  “Where did you get the wood?” said the chief.

  “It was on the floor by the girl’s bed,” she said. “I saw it when I was trying to figure out how she did it.”

  She handed him the fragment of pine. The chief tested it with his finger, then went to the bed and found the spot from which it had been taken.

  “Looks new,” he said.

  “She hasn’t been gone but an hour,” said Erin.

  “Uh-huh.” Chief Morland took the stick in both hands and snapped it. It was the first outward demonstration that he had given of the rage he was feeling.

  “You still haven’t told us if you found her,” said Harry.

  “Oh, we found her all right,” said the chief.

  “Where is she?”

  “In the trunk of my car.”

  “Is she—?”

  “Is she what?”

  “Is she . . . dead?”

  The chief didn’t answer immediately. He closed his eyes and wiped his face with his right hand. His shoulders sank. That was when Harry knew that they were okay, for now.

  “Yes, she’s dead,” said Morland finally. “Just not the right kind of dead. You got a shovel?”

  “Sure,” said Harry. “In my toolshed.”

  “Good,” said the chief. “Because you’re going to help me bury her.”

  CHAPTER

  VI

  I had a ticket for the 8:55 P.M. flight with US Airways out of Philadelphia, if I chose to use it, but I realized that I would either kill myself trying to make it or end up with a ticket for speeding. Neither possibility particularly appealed to me, so I changed my flight to 9:30 A.M. the following morning and checked into a motel off Bartram Avenue. I had dinner in a bar that was one step up from eating food off the street, but I didn’t care. Once the adrenaline had stopped flowing after the events in Newark, I experienced a comedown that left me shaking and nauseated. It didn’t matter what I ate: it would have tasted foul anyway, but I thought I needed something in my stomach. In the end, I left most of the food on the plate, and what I ate didn’t stay in my system for long once I was back in my room.

  In truth, such reactions were becoming increasingly common as the years went on. I suppose I had always been frightened as I faced situations like that night’s—anyone who has found himself looking down the barrel of a gun, or confronting the possibility of injury or death, and claims to have done so without fear is either a liar or insane—but the more often you do it and survive, the more aware you become that the odds are inevitably swinging against you. If cats could count, they’d start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.

  I also wanted to watch Sam, my daughter, grow up. She was long past those early years when children, though cute, don’t do a whole lot except babble and fall over, much like a certain type of really old person. I found her endlessly fascinating, and regretted the fact that I was no longer with Rachel, her mother, although I didn’t think Rachel was about to move back in just so that I could spend more time with Sam. Then again, I didn’t want Rachel to move back in, so the feeling was mutual. Still, with Rachel and Sam in Vermont, and me in Portland, arranging to spend time with my daughter took some planning. I supposed that I could always move to Vermont, but then I’d have to start voting socialist, and finding excuses to secede from the Union. Anyway, I liked Portland, and being close to the sea. Staring out over Vermont’s Lake Bomoseen wasn’t quite the same thing.

  I checked my cell phone messages as I lay on the bed. There was only one, from a man in Portland named Jude. He was one of a handful of the local street folk who’d proved helpful to me in the past, by providing either information or the occasional discreet surveillance service, as people tended not to notice the homeless, or pretended not to. Naturally there was no callback number for Jude. Instead, he had suggested leaving a message with the folk at the Portland Help Center or on the bulletin board at the Amistad Community on State Street to let him know when I might be available to meet.

  I hadn’t seen Jude around in a while, but then I hadn’t really been looking out for him. Like most of Portland’s homeless, he did his best to stay off the streets in winter. To do otherwise was to risk being found frozen in a doorway.

  Me, I wasn’t doing so badly. Work had picked up over the winter because I’d developed a nice sideline in process serving. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it paid reasonably well, and occasionally required the exercise of more than a handful of brain cells. The day before I headed down to Newark to join Angel and Louis, I’d cashed a check for two thousand dollars, including a goodwill bonus payment, for just one job. The subject of the subpoena was an investment analyst named Hyram P. Taylor, who was involved in the initial stages of serious and hostile divorce proceedings with his wife, who was represented by my lawyer—and, for the most part, my friend—Aimee Price. Hyram was such a compulsive fornicator that even his own lawyer had privately acknowledged the possibility of his client’s possessing a penis shaped like a corkscrew, and eventually his wife had just become tired of the humiliation. As soon as she filed for divorce, Hyram set about hiding all records relating to his wealth, and moving said wealth as far as possible from his wife’s reach. He even abandoned his office in South Portland and tried to go to ground, but I tracked him down to the apartment of one of his girlfriends, a woman called Brandi, who, despite having a stripper’s name, worked as an accountant in New Hampshire.

  The problem was that Hyram wouldn’t so much as pick up a piece of paper from the street for fear that it might be attached to an unseen piece of string ending in the hand of a process server. He didn’t go anywhere without Brandi in tow, and she was the one who paid cash for newspapers, groceries, and drinks in bars. Hyram didn’t put his hand on anything if he could help it. He probably had Brandi check him before he peed in the morning, just in case someone had attached a subpoena to his manhood while he slept.

  His weakness—and they all have a weakness—was his car. That was how I found him. He drove a six-liter black Bentley Flying Spur Speed: ten miles to the gallon in the city, 0–60 in 4.8 seconds, and $200,000 worth of vehicle, at the very least. It was his pride and joy, which was probably why he stood up so suddenly that he spilled coffee over himself when I walked into the Starbucks on Andrews Road and asked if anyone owned a hell of a nice Bentley, because I’d just knocked off the wing mirror on the driver’s side.

  Hyram wasn’t a slim man, but he could move fast when the need arose, even with hot coffee scalding his thighs. He went past me at full sail and arrived at his car to find that, sure enough, the mirror was hanging on to the body of the car only by wires. It had been harder to knock off than I’d anticipated, requiring two blows from a hammer. The Bentley may have been expensive, but it was clearly built well.

  “I’m real sorry,” I told him when I found him stroking the car as though it were a wounded animal that he was trying to console. “I just wasn’t looking. If it’s any help, I got a brother who runs an auto shop. He’d probably give you a good deal.”

  Hyram seemed to be having trouble speaking. His mouth just kept opening and closing without a sound. I could see Brandi hurrying across the parking lot, still trying to struggle into her coat while juggling her coffee and Hyram’s jacket. Hyram had left her in his wake, but she’d be with us within seconds. I needed to hook Hyram before she got here, and while he was still in shock.

  “Look,” I said, “here are my insurance details, but if you could see your way clear to just letting me pay cash to cover the damages I’d surely be grateful.”

  Hyram reached out for the paper in my hand without thinking. I heard Brandi cry out a warning to him, but by then it was too late. His fingers had closed on the subpoena.

  “Mr. Taylor,” I said, “it’s my pleasure to inform you that you’ve just been served.”

  It said a lot about Hyram P. Taylor’s relationship with his car
that he still seemed more upset by the damage to it than he was by being in receipt of the subpoena, but that situation didn’t last long. He was swearing at me by the time I got to my own car, and the last I saw of him was Brandi flinging her coffee at his chest and walking away in tears. I even felt a little sorry for Hyram. He was a jerk, but he wasn’t a bad guy, whatever his wife might have thought of him. He was just weak and selfish. Badness was something else. I knew that better than most. After all, I’d just burned a man’s house down.

  I made a note to get in touch with Jude, then turned out the light. The post-adrenaline dip had passed. I was now just exhausted. I slept soundly as, back in Portland, Jude twisted on his basement rope.

  CHAPTER

  VII

  Harry Dixon and Chief Lucas Morland drove to the burial site in Morland’s car. There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation between them. The last body Harry had seen was that of his own mother, and she was eighty-five when she passed on. She died in a hospice in the middle of an October night. The call had come to Harry at 3 A.M., informing him that his mother’s last hours on earth were approaching and perhaps he might like to be with her when she went, but by the time he got to her she was already dead. She was still warm, though. That was what Harry remembered the most, the nurse telling him that he ought to touch her, to feel his mother’s warmth, as though warmth equated to life and there might still be something of her inside that shell. So he placed his hand on her shoulder, for that appeared to be what was expected of him, and felt the heat gradually leave her, the spirit slowly departing until at last there was nothing left but cold.

  He had never, he realized, seen anyone who wasn’t supposed to be dead. No, that wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put it any better to himself. It had been his mother’s time to go. She was sick, and old. Her final years had mostly been spent sleeping, misremembering, or forgetting entirely. Only once in her last months of life could he recall her speaking with any lucidity, and then he had just been thankful that they were alone together in the room. He wondered if, in her dementia, she had spoken of such matters to the nurses. If she did, they must have dismissed them as the ravings of an old woman on her way to the grave, for nobody had ever mentioned them to him. Those words came back to him now.

  “I saw them do it once,” she had said, as he sat beside her in an uncomfortable hospice chair. “I wanted to look. I wanted to know.”

  “Really?” he replied, only half listening, practiced in the art of nodding and ignoring. He was thinking of his business, and money, and how it had all gone so wrong for Erin and him when it continued to go well for so many others, both within and beyond the boundaries of Prosperous. After all, he and Erin played their part in the business of the town. They did as they were asked, and did not complain. How come they were suffering? Weren’t the benefits of living in Prosperous supposed to be distributed equally among all? If not, what was the point of being part of the community in the first place?

  And now his mother was rambling again, dredging up some inconsequential detail from the mud of her memories.

  “I saw them take a girl. I saw them tie her up and leave her, and then—”

  By now he was listening to her. Oh, he was listening for sure, even as he cast a glance over his shoulder to make sure that the door was closed.

  “What?” he said. “Then what?” He knew of that which she spoke. He had never seen it himself, and didn’t want to see it. You weren’t supposed to ask; that was one of the rules. If you wanted to be certain, you could become a selectman, but selectmen in Prosperous were chosen carefully. You didn’t put yourself forward. You waited to be approached. But Harry didn’t want to be approached. In a way, the less he knew, the better. But that didn’t stop him wondering.

  “Then—”

  His mother closed her eyes. For a moment he thought that she might have fallen asleep, but as he watched a tear crept from her right eye and her body began to shake. She was crying, and he had never seen his mother cry, not even when his father died. She was a hard woman. She was old Prosperous stock, and they didn’t show frailty. If they had been frail, the town would not have survived.

  Survived, and bloomed.

  “Mom,” he said. “Mom.”

  He took her right hand in his, but she shook it away, and only then did he realize that she wasn’t crying but laughing, giggling at the memory of what she had witnessed. He hated her for it. Even in her slow dying, she had the capacity to horrify him. She stared at him, and she could see by his face how appalled he was.

  “You were always weak,” she said. “Had your brother lived, he would have been stronger. He would have become a selectman. The best of your father’s seed went into him. Whatever was left dribbled into you.”

  His brother had died in the womb three years before Harry was born. There had been a spate of miscarriages, stillbirths, and crib deaths during the same period, a terrible blight upon the town. But the board of selectmen had taken action, and Prosperous had been blessed with only healthy, live children for many years thereafter. Harry’s mother had never ceased to speak of his dead brother, though. Earl: that was the name she had given him, a melancholy echo of the status he might have attained had he lived. He was the Lost Earl. His royal line had died with him.

  There were times in her dotage when Harry’s mother called him Earl, imagining, in her madness, a life for a son who had never existed, a litany of achievements, a great song of his triumphs. Harry suffered them in silence, just as he had endured them throughout his life. That was why, when his mother’s end approached at last, he had left Erin in bed, put on his clothes, and driven for two hours to get to the hospice on a miserable fall night to be with her. He simply wanted to be certain that she was dead, and few things in their relationship had given him greater pleasure than feeling the warmth leave her body until just the withered husk of her remained. Only consigning her to the flames of the crematorium had been more rewarding.

  “You still awake there?” said Morland.

  “Yes,” said Harry. “I’m awake.”

  He didn’t look at the chief as he spoke. He saw only his own reflection in the glass. I resemble my mother, he thought. In Prosperous, we all look like our parents, and sometimes we look like the children of other folks’ parents too. It’s the gene pool. It’s too small. By rights it shouldn’t be deep enough to drown a kitten, and every family should have a drooling relative locked away in an attic. I guess we’re just blessed, and he smiled so hard, and so bleakly, at his choice of the word “blessed” that he felt his bottom lip crack.

  “You’re very quiet,” said the chief.

  “I never had to bury anyone before.”

  “Me neither.”

  Now Harry did look at him.

  “You serious?” he said.

  “I’m a cop, not an undertaker.”

  “You mean nothing like this has ever happened before?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Seems this may be the first time.”

  It didn’t make Harry feel any better. There would be repercussions. This trip with the chief was only the beginning.

  “You didn’t tell me what happened to the girl,” said Harry.

  “No, I didn’t.” The chief didn’t speak again for a time, stringing Harry along. Then: “Ben Pearson had to shoot her.”

  “Had to?”

  “There was a truck coming. If she’d stopped it—well, we would have had an even more difficult situation than the one we’re currently in.”

  “What would you have done?” asked Harry.

  The chief considered the question.

  “I’d have tried to stop the truck, and I’d have been forced to kill the driver.”

  He turned his gray eyes on Harry for a moment.

  “And then I’d have killed you, and your wife too.”

  Harry wanted to vomit, but he fought the urge. He could taste it at
the back of his throat, though. For the first time since he had gotten into the car with Morland, he felt frightened. They were in the darkness out by Tabart’s Pond, just one of many locations around Prosperous that was named after the original English settlers. There were no Tabarts left now in Prosperous. No Tabarts, no Mabsons, no Quartons, no Poyds. They’d all died early in the history of the settlement, and the rest had seemed set to follow them before the accommodation was reached. Now Harry was about to dig a grave in a place named after the departed, the lost, and a grave could accommodate two as easily as one.

  “Why?” said Harry. “Why would you have killed us?”

  “For forcing me to do something that I didn’t want to do. For making life harder than it already is. For screwing up. As an example to others. You take your pick.”

  The chief made a right turn onto a dirt road.

  “Maybe I’ll have another look at that lock on your basement when we’re done,” he said. “Something about all this doesn’t sit quite right with me. Kinda like the lock itself, it seems.”

  He grinned emptily at Harry. The beams of the headlights caught bare trees, and icy snow, and—

  “What was that?” said Harry. He was looking back over his right shoulder.

  “Huh? I didn’t see nothing.”

  “There was something there. It was big, like an animal of some kind. I saw its eyes shining.”

  But the chief was paying him no attention. As far as Morland was concerned, Harry’s “something” was just a ruse, a clumsy attempt to distract him from the business of the basement door. But Morland wasn’t a man to be turned so easily. He planned to walk both Harry and his wife through their versions of the escape. He’d do it over and over until he was either satisfied with their innocence or convinced of their guilt. He’d been against entrusting the girl to them from the start, but he was overruled. He wasn’t a selectman, even though he could sit in on the board’s meetings. No chief of police had ever been a selectman. It was always felt that it was better to have the law as an instrument of the board’s will.