Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  Something else struck me then with alarm. My back went rigid, and I looked down at the book. This hadn’t belonged to Brendan after all. I’d better return it to Eileen’s before my act was discovered; it seemed as if she might look the journal over quite frequently.

  I opened it up again, skimming the rest of the entries. There weren’t many of them, and they didn’t offer anything but the same grief-soaked musings. Bill had written that he’d never before been a chronicler of his days or thoughts, and it seemed he had dropped the habit quickly.

  The phone rang again, and I answered, expecting no reply.

  “Nora? Are you okay?”

  It took me a second to place the voice as Ned Kramer’s. “I’m fine.”

  A pause. “Sure about that?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Again, he didn’t answer for a moment. “How could you be fine?”

  His tone angered me, and I snapped at him. “It’s a politeness, okay? You’re not supposed to analyze it.” We were bickering like an old married couple, and something inside me went brittle.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. But then, “I just meant that you don’t have to pretend with me. If you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want anything,” I muttered.

  There was another careful pause, Ned picking his way around the grenades I had scattered. “Nothing you can have, right?”

  “What?” Tears filled my throat, a salty, nauseating wash. “What?” Ned didn’t answer for so long that I burst out, “Right! That’s right. There’s no way I can get what I want!”

  Ned gave a sigh I could hear, and I exhaled a shuddery breath as well. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t feel the need to, either, although neither of us made a move to hang up. After a while, I began pacing around, thinking of what I knew about Ned. “You work at the paper, don’t you? You must know a lot about this town.”

  “I guess so,” he said. “Anyone who works at a small-town pub has to prove familiarity with the things newsworthy there. Or what passes for newsworthy.”

  I let out a laugh, at the same time thinking fast. Surely familiarity wouldn’t extend all the way back twenty-five years. But just because Ned might not know offhand what happened didn’t mean he couldn’t find out.

  “Why?” he asked. “Something I can help you with?”

  “I think so,” I replied. “That is, if you have access to old copies of the paper.”

  DROPPED

  Ned Kramer reversed out of his long driveway with a feeling at once strange and familiar. It was like finding a friend online whom you hadn’t seen since childhood. Hey, you wanted to say. I know you.

  When you first started working on a story, everything was scattered. Just pieces here and there that you hoped one day would turn out to form a cohesive narrative. It was your job as a journalist to find ways to link the pieces together. That was what Ned was trying to do now.

  His tires cradled by ruts of snow, Ned backed up and entered the road.

  Nora Hamilton wanted something from him that suggested she might be asking some pretty hard questions. And if she was asking those questions, it was possible that some piece of information had come her way. It was also possible she knew something without even knowing she knew it.

  But somebody else had contacted him first, and set up a meeting. Just to talk, this person had said. Feel you out about some things.

  Shades of Ned’s former life. There were times before when he’d had to decide between two pressing leads.

  He had moved up here because in a small town everything would be more manageable, on a smaller scale. He’d wanted that to be so anyway, although it was proving less true than he had anticipated. Of course, in the deepest sense, everything would always be small potatoes, no matter what happened from here.

  When the measure was your family, entire kingdoms could topple and you wouldn’t even feel the thud.

  He stared down at the directions he had scrawled. He wouldn’t rely on the GPS, which still got confused way out here. Not for something as important as this had the potential to be.

  Two o’clock exactly, his contact had said. I won’t be able to stick around long.

  Out of the way, had been another condition. We can’t be anywhere—anywhere—someone might see. Are you okay in the snow?

  Ned had said that he was.

  Ten minutes later he slowed to a crawl and began wending his way along a narrow backcountry road. These roads weren’t plowed very often, and the Subaru was having a bad time of it. Ned actually had doubts that the car—purchased just for his move north—was going to make it. He was tabulating the risks of getting out and completing the trip on foot, when a gray body appeared in front of his windshield.

  “Shit.” The word escaped him as he jammed both boots on the brake.

  Lucky he’d been going slow.

  The Subaru bucked to a halt, snow flying up in waves. Then the cop was there to one side, indicating with a rapid roll of his fist that Ned should let his window down.

  “This road is closed, sir.”

  As Ned studied him, another cop appeared, the tense, twitchy one who always seemed to be riding a wave of adrenaline.

  A curveball. No one else was supposed to be here.

  That had been the final condition.

  “All right,” Ned said after a moment.

  “Turn yourself around,” his contact said. “Just take it nice and slow.”

  “Right,” Ned said again. He was craning his head to try to, windows fogging up from the differential between the heated air within and the frigid temps outside.

  The cop let a hand fall to his side. He could’ve been reaching for something, radio or gun, or simply giving his leg a scratch. The gesture held no hint of intent. He gave the lowered window two hard raps, telling Ned to go.

  Ned shifted into reverse and began to execute his turn.

  He was a quarter mile up the road before he noticed that something had been dropped into his car.

  A wedge of paper, tightly folded. Ned opened it to reveal a hand-drawn map.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  These days, entire afternoons often gave way to sodden sleep. It didn’t matter where I was, which room I happened to be in, although the naps mostly took place on the living room couch instead of upstairs. I figured I was sleeping in the daytime for the first time since childhood because my nights were so restless and uneasy. These naps offered no more refreshment than the nighttime did, though. I awoke as if I’d been hit over the head and was just coming to. For hours afterward, I stumbled around, the threat of sleep still tugging at my heels.

  During the latest of these, I was disturbed by a series of knocks on the front door. When I finally blinked awake, squinting in the low, dull end of daylight and scrubbing at my face, I had the feeling that whoever was here had been knocking for some time.

  I got up, wrapping my arms around my shivering frame. I gave the furnace dial a tweak as I went past and was rewarded by the rumblings of heat throughout the farmhouse.

  There came another loud knock, and I pulled open the door.

  Ned Kramer stood there, a dusting of snow on his cap, which he shook off on the porch while stamping his boots. Then he looked down at me. “I brought you some old papers to look at.”

  He was a tall, lanky man, probably five or six years older than I was, but with a tousle of red-gold hair that gave him a boyish appearance.

  Still fog-brained, I frowned at the sheaf of papers he was holding. It occurred to me to right my sleep-twisted shirt.

  Ned stepped inside, switching the papers to the other hand as he struggled to shed his coat. “Here,” he said, holding them out. “Not one to let sleeping dogs lie, are you?”

  I was reaching for his coat, not the papers, but I stopped. “Why do you say that?”

  Then I began to laugh.

  Ned looked at me curiously.

  “I’m just laugh—laughing,” I told him, more laughter bubbling as I spoke. “Because I
’m the ultimate enabler of sleeping dogs. I usually put them to—to—”

  Ned smiled a bit awkwardly.

  “—to sleep myself, if they seem to be—” I was trying to stop. “—stirring.”

  Finally I was able to taper off.

  “Can I fix you something to drink?” I asked at the same time he said, “So why are you poking at this one?”

  “Anything you’ve got,” he answered swiftly.

  I turned to attend to his request. I didn’t have as ready a response to his question, beyond the obvious.

  Coffee still made my stomach dip and founder. The pot made that horrible morning had been my last. I spied a jug of cider in the fridge and thought to heat it, but that idea didn’t seem too palatable, either. I settled on tea, setting out sugar and milk as the water boiled.

  We sat at the pine farm table.

  “This is nice,” Ned said, planing his hand over the wood. “My parents had a table like this. Did I ever tell you the house I bought looks a lot like the place I grew up in?”

  “You can go home again?”

  Ned inclined his head, acknowledging the remark. “Maybe. I hope so.”

  “You need something a couple of decades newer,” I said. “More refined.”

  It took him a second to realize I was talking about the table. “This is a primitive,” I explained. “You live in a Queen Anne.” Then I remembered the papers Ned had shown up with, and I rose, heading back to the entryway. The sheaf on the sideboard was shiny and slippery. The pieces nearly slid out of my grasp as I tried to get a hold on them.

  “Microfiche printouts,” Ned explained. He had come up behind me. “Slick stuff.”

  I frowned, staring down at the tightly packed lines. The date leapt out at me. January twenty-fourth, twenty-five years ago. The first day Bill wrote in his journal. I looked at Ned, then again at the pile. Headlines appeared out of a garble of words, and with them the answer I’d been looking for.

  TWO-YEAR-OLD BOY DROWNS IN FROZEN POND

  Red Hamilton Falls Through Ice on Patchy Hollow Lake, Drowns

  Ned steered me into the living room, keeping the papers straight so the pile didn’t slither to the floor as we made our way over to the couch.

  “You knew right away, didn’t you?” I choked out. “Was it that obvious? Am I that pathetic?”

  “It’s not obvious, Nora,” Ned said roughly, helping me to sit. “And you’re definitely not pathetic.” His gaze met mine for a second, then slid away.

  I continued to look up at him, tears streaking my cheeks.

  Ned glanced around the room in search of something. “Bathroom,” I muttered, “under the stairs,” and he walked off, returning with a handful of tissues.

  I swiped at my face.

  “I’m a reporter,” Ned said, indicating the papers that now lay in a curl on my lap. “And even so, I didn’t put it together at your husband’s funeral.”

  I looked down.

  “When you told me you were looking into things,” Ned went on gruffly. “That’s when I started thinking about the dates. That day …”

  He trailed off and I waited silently.

  “What happened twenty-five years ago is still one of the worst tragedies this town has ever known. I’m not from around here, but you can’t work at the paper and not know about it. The old salts at the desk still talk about that day sometimes.”

  I placed the pile beside me on the couch, then lifted the first page. Ned settled down on a chair, and I began to read.

  January 24th. Wedeskyull, New York. Gregory (Red) Hamilton, the two and a half year old son of Bill and Eileen Hamilton, drowned yesterday afternoon while in his brother’s care.

  According to Police Chief Franklin Weathers, an ice-fishing hole had been cut and not properly sealed off when the unknown fishermen took a break. “Brendan and Red Hamilton were out together in the worst place at the worst time. The ice is three feet thick right now. Once the little fella went down, he would’ve been sucked right away, then trapped.

  “We plan to locate the culprits, although it’s not likely they come from around these parts. A charge of negligent homicide would be in order. Our town will have a hard time getting over a senseless tragedy like this.”

  Suddenly I was back in Eileen’s basement, in that sealed-off room, studying the one lone photograph pasted on an empty strip of wall. When Bill had been crawling along the ice, face pressed down hard enough to draw blood, he’d been looking for his son.

  The futility of his search assailed me: how many miles Patchy Hollow Lake was across, how dark and mottled its surface would’ve been as my late father-in-law blinked to clear his vision, hunting any streak of color going by in all that leaden gray.

  The question occurred to me only belatedly. Who had taken such a ghastly picture—observed Bill in his anguish, held a camera, and clicked?

  “There was a manhunt,” Ned said, watching me. “For whoever had abandoned that hole. They blocked every road leading out of town. The police extended their search across all of Franklin County.”

  I didn’t answer. The articles that followed began to blur together. One after another, citing leads that fizzled out, all boiling down to the same tragic repetition of facts: two brothers alone together. One little and clumsy on the ice. Falls through an unprotected ice-fishing hole. Drowns.

  No arrest was ever made. No one was even brought in for questioning.

  “You’ve lived here long enough to know this is sport country,” Ned said.

  I looked at him. Brendan had been the one who mostly engaged in athletics. Not ice-fishing, though. Never anything that had to do with the ice.

  “Rock-climbing on bald peaks. Bear- and moose-hunting. Skiing or boarding in avalanche regions.” A deliberate pause. “Ice-fishing may seem pretty innocuous, but it’s really not. A hole isn’t big enough for a man to fall into, but even if he just accidentally dunks a foot, if no one’s around and he can’t get to warmth fast, he’ll die. The water will seep up his leg and he’ll freeze. And needless to say, if someone small slipped through …”

  I closed my eyes against the scene my mind had already played out, that thick shelf of ice, impenetrable to tiny, beating hands.

  “My point is that people up here take this stuff very seriously. They have to. They know what nature is capable of, and they have procedures in place to prevent it. In the case of ice-fishing, buddy systems. Lean-tos within so many yards of a hole. How big the sheets of plywood to cover those holes must be and signage up to flag them.” Ned paused, the mental tickings of a man who put his facts together methodically. “For someone to come along and flaunt those safety rules—well, this town was beaten senseless over it. Angry. And it stayed that way for a very long time.”

  His words were a toneless tune in my ears. They didn’t matter. Or rather, they weren’t what mattered to me right then.

  “How did I not know?” I asked numbly.

  Ned looked down at his linked hands.

  “Something this awful—a wife should know.” I heard my voice rise, but seemed to have no control over it. “Maybe I could have kept Brendan from—”

  Ned rose from his chair. His eyes blazed. “There’s no way you could’ve prevented anything.” He leaned down and I reared back. “No one can prevent a suicide. Except the person doing it.”

  The slimy pieces of microfiche printout threatened to slide off my lap, and I grabbed at them. A few more sentences jumped out from the rivers of text.

  Although details are sketchy, due to the shocked condition of Brendan Hamilton, it appears that the older boy left the lake to get some rope from a nearby shed just after his brother fell through. States Eileen Hamilton, “Instead of coming for us, Brendan thought he might pull little Red up. While he was gone, Red drowned.”

  My heart beat at a furious clip, and I blinked to bring into focus Eileen’s scroll of paper, the one with the series of sketches on it and the numbers written underneath. That furiously scribbled-in oval, a small buildi
ng that must’ve held rope, the running boy. Those numbers represented guesses as to time. Eileen had charted how long it would’ve taken Brendan to leave his brother, go in search of rope, and return to the ice-fishing hole. How long Red lay beneath the ice, no help forthcoming except in the form of another terrified child.

  Everything in that sunken room made sense now. It was a tribute, testimony to a mother’s crazed love of one son, sacrificed to sainthood as a toddler. And to her hatred of the other, who in Eileen’s desolate estimation had committed the final, fatal mistake.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ned left sometime in the unknown hours after that. I didn’t remember seeing him out, nor even saying goodbye.

  I’d thought things were as bad as they could get, that the worst had happened. But that was the thing about the worst, wasn’t it? You never quite got there. The worst was a horizon, moving farther and farther away as you approached it.

  How could my husband have carried the incendiary coal of his brother’s death inside him for so long? What I wouldn’t give to have been able to sizzle cool water over that guilt, tell Brendan it wasn’t his fault, only a tragic accident. But he’d never let me know.

  My sister’s voice again: You never tried to find out.

  “Shut up!” I screamed aloud, words reverberating throughout the house.

  Why did Brendan propose the way he did? When he wound my engagement ring on that pair of old skate laces, was he trying to tell me something? Get me to ask? Ned’s refutations aside, I couldn’t suppress the thought that had I asked, had I been more of a questioner when faced with things that didn’t add up, Brendan might be alive today.

  My mother’s voice began speaking on the machine, the words faint, disembodied, from another room. I hadn’t even heard the phone ring.

  “Mom?” I said, snatching up the cordless.

  “Yes, honey,” she said quickly. “Oh, you’re there. What’s wrong?”