The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 3

by Nora Roberts

  She went straight into Nate’s office. Here she risked the overhead lights, flipping them on before crossing to the covered corkboard.

  She removed the blanket carefully. And it fell to the floor from her numb hands as she took one wavering step in retreat.

  She’d seen death before and had never known it to be pretty. But those stark and graphic photos of Max Hawbaker had her breath whistling out.

  Best not to think about it, not quite yet. Better to take the photo of her father—how much cleaner his death seemed—and take it to Charlene.

  She slid the photo inside her jacket, turned the lights off and went back out the way she came.

  Charlene was in her room, answered the door wearing a floral robe. There was a scent of whiskey, smoke, perfume.

  “You’d better be alone,” Meg said.

  “I am. I sent him on. Where is it? Did you get it?”

  “You’re going to look, then I’m taking it back and I don’t want to hear any more about this.”

  “Let me see. Let me see him.”

  Meg drew it out. “No, you can’t touch it. You wrinkle it up or anything, Nate will know.” She turned the photo face front.

  “Oh. Oh.” Charlene stumbled back, much as Meg had at the corkboard. “God. No!” She shot a hand out to stop Meg from putting the picture away again. “I need to . . .”

  She stepped forward again and, at Meg’s warning look, clasped her hands behind her back. “He . . . he looks the same. How can that be? He looks the same. All these years, and he looks the same.”

  “He never had a chance to look different.”

  “It would’ve been quick, do you think? Would it have been quick?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was wearing that parka when he left. He was wearing it the last time I saw him.” She turned, cupped her elbows with her hands. “Go away now.” She shuddered, then pressed both hands to her mouth. “Meg,” she began and spun around.

  But Meg was already gone.

  Alone, Charlene walked into the bath, turned on the lights and studied herself in the hard glare.

  He’d looked the same, she thought again. So young.

  And she didn’t. She never would again.

  IT WAS MARCH IN ALASKA, but the longer days didn’t make him think of approaching spring, however close the calendar crept toward the official day.

  Nate awoke to daylight now and most often on the left side of Meg’s bed. When he walked through town, he saw more of people’s faces and less of sheltering hoods.

  The plastic eggs hanging from the branches of snow-draped trees, the plastic bunnies crouched on white carpets of lawn didn’t make him think spring, either.

  But his first breakup did.

  He watched, with a kind of buzzy wonder, the little cracks creeping along the icy ribbon of river, like crazed zippers. Unlike the overflow, these didn’t fill in and freeze up. It astonished him so much that it took him twenty minutes to stop staring and head back to the office.

  “There are cracks in the river,” he told Otto.

  “Yeah? Little early for breakup, but we’ve had a warm spell.”

  Maybe, Nate thought, if he lived in Lunacy for, oh, a hundred years, he’d think of a few days of forties and damp, chilly lower fifties as a warm spell. “I want signs posted. I don’t want a bunch of kids playing hockey falling through the ice.”

  “Kids got more sense than to—”

  “I want signs posted, like we did for overflow, but more so. Check at The Corner Store, see if they’ve got any more sign board. Either Peach or Peter needs to write them. Ah, ‘No skating, thin ice.’ ”

  “It’s not so much thin as—”

  “Otto, just go get me a half dozen signs.”

  He grumbled, but he went. And Nate noticed Peach’s lips were folded tight on a smile she was trying to suppress.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. I think it’s a fine idea. Shows we’ve got concern for our citizenship, and order. But I think you could just write, ‘Breakup, and steer clear.’ ”

  “Write whatever you think best. Just write it.” He started through the station to head out the back and find what he could use for stakes. “And don’t let Otto write it.”

  When he was satisfied the signs were under way, he wrote and printed fliers off his computer and set out to distribute them.

  He pinned them up in the post office, the bank, the school, worked his way to The Lodge.

  There, Bing came over and read behind his shoulder—and snorted.

  Saying nothing, Nate read his own words.

  BREAKUP IN PROGRESS.

  NO SKATING, WALKING OR OTHER ACTIVITIES

  WILL BE PERMITTED ON THE RIVER,

  BY ORDER OF THE LUNACY POLICE DEPARTMENT.

  “I spell something wrong, Bing?”

  “Nope. Just wonder who you think’s stupid enough to go skating around on the river during breakup.”

  “Same sort of person who jumps off a roof to see if he can fly after he’s read a couple Superman comics. How long does breakup take?”

  “Depends, doesn’t it? Winter started early, now spring’s doing the same thing. So we’ll just see. River breaks up every frigging year, so does the lake. Nothing new.”

  “A kid goes out there fooling around, falls through the ice, we could be going to another memorial.”

  Bing pursed his lips thoughtfully as Nate walked out again.

  He still had fliers in his hand when he saw movement behind the display window of The Lunatic.

  He crossed over, found the door was locked. Knocked.

  Carrie studied him through the glass a minute, then opened up.

  “Carrie. I’d like to post one of these in your window here.”

  She took it, read it, then walked to her desk to get tape. “I’ll put it up for you.”

  “Appreciate it.” He glanced around. “You here alone?”

  “Yes.”

  He’d interviewed her twice since the memorial, and each time her thoughts and answers had been scattered and vague. He’d tried to give her time, but time was passing. “Have you been able to remember any more details from that February?”

  “I tried to think about it, write things down like you said, at home.” She taped the flier, face-out on the glass. “I couldn’t do it there. I couldn’t seem to do it at my parents’ when I took the kids down for a couple weeks. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t get the thoughts out or the words down. So I came here. I thought maybe . . .”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I wasn’t sure I could come here. I know Hopp and some of the other women came in and . . . cleaned up after—when they were allowed to, but I wasn’t sure I could come back here.”

  “It’s hard.” He’d gone back to the alley, forced himself to go back. And all he’d felt was numb despair.

  “I had to come back. There hasn’t been a paper since . . . it’s been too long. Max worked so hard, and this meant so much to him.”

  She turned around, drawing careful breaths as she looked around the room. “Doesn’t look like anything really. Doesn’t even look like a real paper. Max and I went to Anchorage, Fairbanks, even Juneau, to tour a real paper, real newsrooms. His eyes would just light up. Doesn’t look like much here, but he was proud of it.”

  “I don’t agree with you. I think it looks like a lot.”

  She struggled to smile, nodded briskly. “I’m going to keep it going. That’s something I decided today. Just today before you came in. I thought I’d let it go, that I just couldn’t do this without him. But when I came back here today, I knew I had to keep it going. I’m going to put an edition together, see if The Professor’s got time to help me, maybe knows a couple of kids who want to work, get some journalist experience.”

  “That’s good, Carrie. I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I’ll write something down for you, Nate, I promise. I’ll think back and I’ll try to remember. I know you wanted to go through his papers
and such. I haven’t been back there yet.”

  She didn’t have to look at the back office for Nate to know she meant the room where Max had been found.

  “You can, if you want.”

  The State cops had been through that room, Nate thought. He still wanted his pass at it, but not now. Not when anyone walking by would see he was inside and wonder why.

  “I’ll come back for that. He kept an office at home?”

  “A little one. I haven’t been through his things. I keep putting it off.”

  “Anybody at your place now?”

  “No. Kids are in school.”

  “Is it all right with you if I go in now, look around? If I need to take anything, I’ll write you up a receipt.”

  “You go ahead.” She went to her purse, fished out keys and took one off a ring. “This is to the back door. You keep it as long as you need it.”

  HE DIDN’T WANT TO PARK in front of the Hawbaker house. Too many people talked about something just that small.

  Instead, he parked by a bend in the river. He didn’t notice any cracks in the ice and wondered if he’d jumped the gun on the ones in town. He hiked the back way, through a patch of woods. Colder here, he thought, colder under the trees where the sun couldn’t fight through. There were tracks—snowmobile, skis. Cross-country team, he decided, from the high school. He spotted other tracks that weren’t human and hoped he wasn’t going to come face-to-face with the moose he’d run off.

  He didn’t know enough about them to be sure they didn’t hold grudges.

  The snow was deeper than he’d anticipated and made him curse himself for not slapping on his snowshoes. So he did what he could to use the tracks.

  He saw a streak he thought might be a fox and, when he stopped to catch his breath, spotted a herd of shaggy-coated deer. They trudged along, no more than fifteen feet to his north. He could only assume he was downwind as they didn’t so much as give him a glance. So he stood watching them until they wound their way out of sight.

  He worked his way to Carrie’s back door, past what he assumed was a garden or toolshed, around the building on stilts that would be their cache. Someone had cleared the back stoop, and there was a stack of firewood, covered with a tarp, by the door.

  He used the key and stepped inside a combination mudroom and laundry area. Since his boots were wet and caked with snow, he took them off, leaving them and his coat.

  The kitchen was clean, almost to a gleam. Maybe that’s what women did, or some women, when they were coping with grief. They got out the cleanser and the mop. And the polishing cloth, he thought as he continued through the house, the vacuum cleaner. There wasn’t a speck of dust to be found. Nor any of the usual clutter of living.

  Maybe that was the point. She wasn’t ready to live again yet.

  He went up, identified the kids’ room by the posters on the walls, the disorder on the floor. For now, at least, he bypassed the master bedroom where the bed was carefully made and a patchwork throw was draped over the back of a chair.

  Did she sleep there now, unwilling, unable to lie down on the bed she’d shared with her husband?

  Beside the bedroom was Max’s office. And here was the clutter, the dust and debris of normal living. The desk chair had a strip of duct tape along one of the seams—the everyman’s repair job. The desk itself was scarred and battered, an obvious second- or thirdhand purchase. But the computer on it looked new or very well tended.

  There was a desk calendar, one of those cubes that followed a theme and gave you a picture and a saying each day. Max’s was a fishing theme, and it had a cartoon man holding up a minnow-sized fish and claiming it was bigger when he’d hooked it.

  The date was January nineteenth. Max hadn’t made it back home to rip it off to reveal the next day’s joke.

  There was no message written on it, no handy clue such as: Meet [insert name of killer] at midnight.

  Nate bent to go through the trash can under the desk. He found several other pages of the cube, some with notes.

  IDITAROD ART—POV DOG?

  BATHROOM TAP DRIPPING. CARRIE PISSED. FIX!

  And the one from the day before his death, the one covered with scribbles of one word: PAT.

  Nate took it out, placed it on the desk.

  He found several envelopes indicating Max had sat there, paying bills on one of the days shortly before he died, a couple of candy wrappers.

  He went through the desk drawers, found a checkbook—$250.06 on the balance after the bill-paying stint—two days before he died. Three passbooks for savings accounts. One for each of his children, one joint for him and his wife. He and Carrie had a $6,010 nest egg.

  There were envelopes, return address labels. Rubber bands, paper clips, a box of staples. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  In the bottom drawer he found four chapters of a manuscript. The top page indentified it as:

  COLD SNAP

  A Novel

  by Maxwell T. Hawbaker

  Nate put it on the desk and got up to search the shelf unit running along one wall. To his pile, Nate added a box of floppy disks and a scrapbook holding newspaper articles.

  Then he sat down to test his computer skills.

  It wasn’t password-protected, which told him Max hadn’t thought he had anything to hide. A run through the documents netted him a spreadsheet on which Max had carefully listed mortgage and time payments. Family man, Nate thought, responsible with his money.

  Nothing he could find on finances showed any large sums, anything out of the ordinary. If Max had been blackmailing his killer, he hadn’t recorded the income alongside his monthly debits.

  He found more of the novel and the start of two more. A check through the floppies showed that Max had conscientiously backed them up. There were a few bookmarked sites—fishing for the most part.

  He found some saved e-mail: fishing buddies, responses from a couple of people regarding sled dogs. Follow-ups, Nate assumed, on the planned Iditarod article.

  He spent an hour threading through, but nothing jumped out and yelled clue!

  Gathering up what he had, he carted it down to the mudroom where he confiscated an empty box to dump it all into.

  He wandered back into the kitchen. The kitchen calendar had a bird theme. No one had thought or bothered to turn it over to February much less March.

  More than half the little squares had notes. PTA meeting, hockey practice, book report due, dentist appointment. Normal family routine. The dentist appointment had been Max’s, Nate noted, and he’d been due for it two days after his death.

  He flipped it up, glanced over February, at March. A lot of notes there, too, with GONE FISHING in large capital letters over the second weekend in March.

  Nate let the page fall again. Routine, normal, ordinary.

  But there was that single calendar page from the trash can upstairs, covered with the name Pat.

  Four pairs of snowshoes hung in the mudroom.

  Studying them, he put on his boots, his coat, hefted the box and started out again.

  He was back in the woods again, up to mid-shin in snow, when the gunshot blasted through the quiet. Instinctively, he dropped the box, dug under the coat for his own weapon. Even as he gripped it, there was a thunder in the woods. A single deer, a thick-bodied, heavily antlered buck leaped into view and continued its leaping gallop.

  With his heart thudding, Nate started moving in the direction it had come from. He’d made it about twenty yards when he saw the figure melt out of the trees—and the long gun it carried.

  They stood for a moment in the echoing stillness, each with a weapon in his hand. Then the figure lifted his left hand, shoved back his hood.

  “He scented you,” Jacob said. “Spooked and ran even as I fired. So I missed.”

  “Missed,” Nate repeated.

  “I’d hoped to take some venison to Rose. David hasn’t been able to hunt lately.” He lowered his gaze, slow and deliberate, to Nate’s sidearm. “Do you hunt,
Chief Burke?”

  “No. But when I hear a gunshot, I don’t go looking for who fired it unarmed.”

  Jacob made an obvious business of clicking on the safety. “You found him, and I go home without meat.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It was the deer’s day, not mine. Do you know your way out?”

  “I can find it.”

  “Well, then.” Jacob nodded, turned and moving with grace and ease in his snowshoes, melted back into the trees.

  Nate kept his weapon out as he walked back, as he picked up the box he’d dropped. He didn’t holster it again until he was back in his car.

  He drove to Meg’s to push the box into the back of a closet. It was something he had to pursue on his own time. Since his pants were wet to the knees, he changed, then went down to the lake with the dogs to check for any sign of breakup before he drove back into town.

  “SIGNS ARE UP,” Otto told him.

  “So I see.”

  “We’ve gotten two complaints already, about minding our own business.”

  “Anybody I need to talk to?”

  “Nope.”

  “You got two calls, chief, from reporters.” Peach tapped the pink While You Were Out notes on her counter. “About Pat Galloway and Max. Follow-up, they said.”

  “They have to catch me first. Peter still on patrol?”

  “We sent him out for lunch. It was his turn.” Otto scratched his chin. “Ordered you an Italian sub.”

  “That’s fine, thanks. Would a man go hunting two, three miles from his own place, when he’s got acres of hunting ground where he lives?”

  “Depends, wouldn’t it?”

  “On what?”

  “What he was hunting, for one.”

  “Yeah. I guess it would depend on that.”

  THE CRACKS IN THE RIVER lengthened and widened as the temperatures held above freezing. From the banks, Nate saw his first sight of the cold, deep blue shimmer between the gleam of white. Fascinated, he watched it spread and heard what sounded like artillery fire. Or the crashing fist of God.

  Plates of ice heaved up, swamped and surrounded by that blue, then floated placidly, like a newborn island.