Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Finally, he spoke. “Sign him.”

  Her heart did a tumble. “What?”

  “You heard me. Sign him.”

  “Sign him.”

  “We’re editors, Valjean,” Peter barked into the phone, cutting her off while she sputtered. “Whatever’s amiss with Charlie’s memoirs, we’ll fix it.”

  “Amiss?” She yelled into the phone. “He calls Dixon Foote a womanizing hammer monkey who doesn’t pay his taxes and has a secret taste for little boys.”

  “It’s a joke. He’s joking.”

  “It’s libel.”

  “I can finesse that kind of thing.”

  “But you won’t have to, Peter.” She took a deep breath. “There’s condition number two of Charlie Cable’s handing us his space junk thriller—”

  “Namely?”

  “I have to edit the piece of crap memoirs. Me. Not you, not yoga girl, Peter, not some schizo bad poet you rescue. Me.”

  He was silent for a long moment. “Fir Na Tine needs The Asteroid Mandate, Val.” His voice dropped. “And I’m not entirely sure even Charlie Cable can keep us afloat.”

  She got a little chill. And as all the spaces between his words got filled in, she saw she was left with a strange choice. Refuse to meet Charlie Cable’s demands for the thriller and leave her job at Fir Na Tine, or meet Charlie Cable’s demands and possibly lose her job anyway.

  “Please,” said Peter Hathaway softly and let it hang there.

  With a sigh, she finally said, “I’ll try to change his mind.”

  “About the memoirs?”

  “About my editing them.” She knew there was no chance Charlie Cable would give up on the memoirs altogether—he was too irrationally attached to them.

  A beat. “And if you can’t?”

  “I don’t want my name anywhere near the book.”

  “Fine. Fine. You got it. You’ll see, Val, it won’t be so bad.” Val stared unblinking at the raised pattern on the duvet cover until it was all she could see, while the maddening man she loved was nattering on about how squeaky clean Charlie Cable is—

  Squeaky clean? There was that little bothersome matter of his threats against Leslie Decker. Should she mention it now? Why wasn’t she mentioning it?

  “—which,” Peter was saying, “would certainly go far in terms of establishing Charlie’s creds as a memoirist. It’ll give the libel lawyers fits.”

  And then what suddenly came to her was the sort of bargain she had never before struck. She piped up, “Then I want The Asteroid Mandate.”

  He didn’t understand. Libel, yes. Business in the toilet, yes. Peppermint foot baths, yes. This, no. “What do you mean?”

  “I want to edit The Asteroid Mandate.” Not really, but it would look good on her c.v. if she either left her job at Fir Na Tine…or Fir Na Tine collapsed right out from under her. “Be the publisher, Peter,” Val went on, reasonably, noting how plain it all sounded. “You don’t need to edit it too.” When he didn’t say anything, she went on, “That’s my price.”

  While she listened to him huff and sigh a few times, she rolled her eyes, counting just how many fingernails she had broken—five—on the canoe trip from Hell. And without her even trying particularly hard, a plan appeared before her like the opening credits of a movie. Try to get Cable to change his mind about the editing of his mem-WAHRS without drawing his suspicion about how much she hated them. And dig into the murder of Leslie Decker, despite Wade Decker’s stonewalling, because all bets were off if she could lay the deed at Charlie Cable’s feet. Finally, update her c.v.

  Peter Hathaway’s voice came over the line. “Deal.” And just as Val’s heart lifted the way it had when she and Decker had reached Charlie Cable’s wilderness cabin and she thought her hardships were at an end, Peter Hathaway attached a condition to the deal. She had until the end of the day to fax him a signed contract with Charles Cable, or he would come up to Lake Wendaban and damn well get the job done himself—and, if that happened, Valjean Cameron would be out of a job. Fir Na Tine needed team players. “And, for your information,” he ended prissily, “Daria Flottner is not a schizo poet, she’s a schizo performance artist.”

  As he hung up on her, Val’s first cold, outraged response was to get yet another copy of the contract faxed from the office, hire the Portage Airlines guy to fly it up to Charlie Cable, get his signature, and fax it back to the office. She could get the repellent job done without having a hand in it. Everybody happy. She’d hang onto her job and find ways of keeping Peter Hathaway out of her line of vision. Off her radar. Out of her office. And most definitely her pants. Val could just head home. But not until she could clear or condemn Charlie Cable for the murder of Leslie Decker. Like stumbling across boulders shouldering a stuffed, sixty-pound dry bag in order to hold her head up while Decker carried the canoe, it was finally maybe just a matter of crazy-headed pride. Getting at the truth of Charlie Cable’s involvement in Leslie Decker’s murder was just one more sixty-pound dry bag. And the boulders were somewhere up ahead.

  18

  Her Aunt Greta Bistritz always told her, “Where you begin is where you end.” Because she lavishly admired this aunt who raised her, Val tended to put this observation right up there at the top of the pithiness scale with Sartre’s “Hell is other people.” And because Val really never understood what the hell Greta meant, she kept waiting for an experience of her own to clarify it. She was still waiting. Greta’s other rules for living included things like “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man.” Greta had hip fifties hair all her life, like a load of medium-length, elegant ash blond commas had been unloaded over her head. She had almond-shaped hazel eyes, a wide, wry mouth, and an acute angle of a nose that was really too large for her face, but nobody cared, least of all Greta.

  A Manhattan office job with the Department of Commerce had somehow brought her, at age forty, Ben Biderman, a bioethicist at Columbia. Val suspected she must have got him drunk, grilled him about his finances, and signed on. Or maybe she didn’t, maybe she ignored all her own advice and just fell in love. For eleven years, he and Greta climbed ruins together, carved turkeys together, and shared each other’s bed every Friday night like clockwork, only they never made a commitment.

  In many ways it suited Greta, who at midlife came to think of inaction as a kind of rest. “Our relationship,” she told Val as they walked into a Zabar’s on Lexington Avenue so she could buy the Baci chocolates she served Ben for dessert every Friday night, “is like treading water. We’re not getting anywhere, but we’ll sink to the bottom if we stop.”

  Maybe from the Bistritz side of the family Val inherited a taste for inertia, riding on her chromosomes like attached earlobes or male pattern baldness. Maybe this inertia genome was what explained her relationship with Peter Hathaway. So she looked to Greta’s life for a clue to her own. And Greta was now sixty-four and alone ever since the day thirteen years ago that Ben Biderman collapsed on the platform of the number six train, effectively ending their decade-long discussion about whether marriage made any sense for two people who didn’t plan on having children—a problem that had long since become moot.

  Where you begin is where you end.

  As Val folded the one spare top she brought with her to this Northwoods gig, she knew she felt shot through with inaction. And—she thought as she jammed the top mercilessly into her laptop case—nothing would change, nothing at all, until the next time her boss turns his countenance upon her…the next time she takes on his most unreasonable demands as her holy mission.

  She heard a boat pull up at the dock. Maybe she’d get lucky and it was a team of waterborne Jehovah’s Witnesses. She could smile politely and tell them no, she hasn’t given much thought to the End of Days. Then they’d leave her a copy of The Watchtower and go. Anybody else meant more trouble than she could handle for however long she remained on Lake
Wendaban. She stood inside the screen door. It was a woman she had never seen, tying up two boats, the one she’d come in and the one she had apparently towed.

  Already Val didn’t like it.

  The newcomer looked early twenties, tops, and had loose black curls held back with a twisted pink bandana. The white cami looked great against her tan and she had a denim skirt that sat low around her hips. Maybe it was just another poet babe who stopped by to see if Peter was around. The Daria Flottner of the Northwoods.

  Val stepped outside.

  “You must be Val,” said the newcomer.

  “Hi.”

  She came across the dock in her negligible little rubber thongs. “I’m Josie Blanton. I’m just coming from Wade’s. He says you need a boat.” She started untying the tow rope.

  The fact that this tanned and slender lovely was coming from Wade Decker’s place at nine thirty in the morning made Val stop in her tracks. “Did he happen to mention why?”

  Josie Blanton looked skyward. “He said to tell you he was betting against your boss’s better nature and that you’d need the little runabout to find Charlie.”

  So now she was totally on her own. “Did he also send along a bloodhound?”

  “You don’t need one.” Josie hooked her thumbs into the beltless loops of her skirt. “Charlie’s coming to town today.”

  “Do tell.” Would the pilot, if she hired him to fly in to get the signature, miss Charlie Cable? Would Val be out of a couple hundred bucks? Was it still tax-deductible?

  “He called Wade late last night on the marine radio—well, it took two relays to get him the message. The MNR’s going to be on the lake a week ahead of schedule and Charlie is meeting with them to go over the loon data.”

  “What’s the MNR?”

  “Ministry of Natural Resources.”

  Val nodded, longing to be back in the place where no one, but no one, ever uttered expressions like loon data. She sauntered over to the boats gently bumping up against the dock. “What do you do for Decker?”

  Josie’s eyebrows shot up. “This here’s the one you can borrow.” She parried Val’s question, then gently pushed her toward the red and white Lund. “Twenty-five horse.” Then her thumbs ran sort of experimentally around the inside of her denim waistband. “As for Wade, I clean, I help with the books, sometimes I shop, cook, garden.” Her brown eyes were serene. “Whatever he needs done.”

  “So, you’re an employee?” Val turned quickly to the other woman as though she was trying to trip her up on the witness stand.

  Josie laughed a trill of fairy queen merriment. “Well,” she said finally, coming damn close to Aunt Greta’s wry smile, “I guess you could call it that.”

  Clearly her camping companion was over the dead Leslie. “So where am I going to get myself to in this…vessel?”

  “Charlie’s renting a houseboat from the marina. The meetings will take two days. He’s got to show them nesting sites. Wade figures you should try Point of No Return ballpark early this afternoon.”

  “Can’t he just take me?” Don’t whine, Cameron.

  Josie’s hand fingered the bandana twist as she shook her head. “He’s got trouble back home. His building in Toronto is melting down. Literally. The air conditioning blew and the HVAC workers are on strike.” She stepped into the Lund. “I’ve got time to get you through the basics, Val, depending on how fast you pick it up, and then I’ve got to get back to Wade’s.”

  “So what is it today, cook or cleaning lady?”

  Bandana Girl actually wrinkled her nose. “It’s more like what you’d call miscellaneous. Don’t you ever do anything for your boss beyond the job description?” Val looked closely at her innocent expression, trying to determine whether Decker had told her to work in a crack about the unreasonable demands of pathetically beloved bosses.

  Josie looked up at her expectantly. “Are you coming?”

  Val stepped inside, scrambled to keep her balance, and sat next to her teacher. As the boat rocked, a tattooed word appeared between Josie’s buoyant little breasts: HERE. And when she reached hard for a life jacket, another tattooed word edged into view, low over her left hip: HERE. A map of secret delights? A GPS for her erogenous zones? Places where Decker had planted his lips?

  For forty-five minutes Josie took her through all the steps to starting out, which went from squeezing the bulb, starting in neutral, choking, pulling the cord, shifting into reverse, shifting into forward, and steering. Val failed the pulling the cord part of the lesson while Josie was barking out suggestive things like “snap it” and “rip it” and she was only imagining her fingers clamped around Peter Hathaway’s nose. But when she switched to picturing her ripping, snapping hand on Wade Decker’s shirt, the motor kicked right in and Josie moved to the middle seat.

  When Val gave it some gas the boat lurched forward away from the dock, slamming across the small waves at an alarming speed. She was afraid to shift her steering arm or let go of what Josie Blanton had called the tiller, so they were on a breakneck course. Josie was yelling to slow down and was patting the air down like a Jets cheerleader at halftime.

  Val twisted her wrist and the boat jerked and flew faster, so she twisted her wrist in the opposite direction, which met with a look of long-suffering approval from Bandana Girl, who then pointed violently to the right.

  Val pulled her tiller hand in hard against her, which meant they turned left, fast enough to pitch Josie Blanton off her seat, her legs flying up like an overturned potato bug. Val took a quick look to see if any more HEREs appeared, but apparently she’d have to ramp up the out-of-control boating experience in order to get that piece of information.

  The return trip to Peter Hathaway’s dock was docile. Josie named the five things you have to have on board according to Ontario Boating Regulations—whistle, bailer, thirty-meter buoyant line, paddle, and life jacket—and Josie slipped a shoal map into a plastic case and tied it to one of the stern seat struts. Docking was violent, despite Josie’s sexual instructions, “Easy, easy, take it slow, that’s right, no, don’t speed up,” and resulted in what could only be called splintering of wood.

  As Josie hopped out of the boat she ticked off a few pessimistic observations—“You’re not a cowboy, so don’t act like one,” and “Remember, boating is a serious business”—and Val realized how charming it is when twenty-two-year-olds go all parental. She’d given up the idea of hiring a flyboy to get a contract to Charlie Cable. If Wade Decker was providing her with the tools and the skills to get the job done once and for all, she’d see it through. After all, she was now a woman with a sawed-off bleach bottle bailer. She could handle anything.

  Anything except a motorboat, as it turned out.

  Having wasted half an hour, after Josie left, ripping the pull cord with no success, Val cursed the boat. It turned over once, when she had the choke out, but then it died and she thought if there were some mechanical types standing around they would shake their uncombed heads and agree: “Flooded.” In the end, she riffled through an old phone directory and was about to call a water taxi that advertised WE GET YOU THERE AND KEEP YOU WARM AND DRY when the phone rang.

  It was Decker, calling from Toronto. “I thought you might want a heads up, Valjean.”

  Her mouth thinned at the sound of her full name. “Go on.”

  “I just got a call from Peter.”

  “Hathaway?” She sounded more incredulous than she thought she should.

  “He’s on his way up—”

  “What?” What about the twenty-four hours he’d given her? “Why?”

  “He said something about having to nail down Charlie Cable, no more delays. Apparently there’s a rumor someone named Julian Onnedonk is after him now—”

  Julian Onnedonk. The wunderkind of a small, well-funded indie press. As wily and deadly as a mongoose. No wonder Peter was dropping everythin
g and heading north with dispatch. Damn. Why hadn’t she just signed the maniac when she had been downing his loon stew? Her skin started to tingle with the kind of professional dismay she only felt when some wonderful writer was making noises about one of the “bigger boys” understanding her better. In their weird little worlds, bigger advances made them feel the love. In the world of Valjean Cameron, she wasn’t quite sure what made her feel the love.

  Decker went on, “You should know your boss is bringing what he called his special lady friend.”

  It just kept getting better and better. Somehow the note of apology in Wade Decker’s voice didn’t help. There wasn’t enough apology anywhere to cover her fury at Peter Hathaway’s overriding his own stupid ultimatum in the matter of Charlie Cable. He was dismissing whatever he could—dismissing her competence, dismissing their nights together, dismissing, well, her altogether. From Fir Na Tine. And all because he couldn’t dismiss what had been so damn good about the two of them together. Her heart felt truly sore, there was nothing she could do about it, and the likelihood of losing Cable to Julian Onnedonk was only partly responsible.

  Speaking took too much effort. Words were shrinking. What to do with them had departed as well. When all she could do was stare at the Hathaway floor, Decker finally jumped back in. “And he wanted to know if I could fly them from Toronto.”

  Ah. Val made a futile gesture. She knew better than to ask what Decker had told him. “What time will they get here?”

  “Sometime late this afternoon. I’ve got my hands full right now.”

  “Did he mention me?”

  A beat. “Not directly.”

  “Not directly? Tell me.”

  “I don’t think—”