Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I thumbed buttons on my cell as I drove home, Weekend silent in the backseat. I had to send a crew out to Ned’s house immediately now that I had opened that makeshift barrier. I hadn’t spent a moment fiddling with it once I’d freed Weekend—I didn’t even stand the plywood back up. I had simply gotten the two of us away from there.

  Turning the car into my snow-slicked drive, I parked and got out. Then I opened Weekend’s door. The dog moved in his new, hesitant manner, setting his front paws on the ground, before easing the rest of his body out and trailing behind me slowly.

  I had just begun to twist the knob on the front door when a low, deep rumble started in Weekend’s throat. I wasn’t sure if it was the aftereffects of his entrapment, or something else.

  I placed my hand on his neck to calm him. “It’s okay,” I murmured. “You’re okay now.”

  The dog’s black lips rolled backwards, exposing a fierce V of teeth. I could feel the vibration of his growls against my palm. I let go, and Weekend scooted back a little, but didn’t leave my side. “Week?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  I must’ve loosened the latch just enough that when the wind gusted, the front entry swung open. Weekend’s snarl split into a volley of barking, so alarming that I yanked the door shut and began to back away, down the porch steps. “What is it, boy?” I whispered. He was sliding after me, claws scrabbling on the snowy steps. “Is there someone in the house?”

  I saw a shape appear behind the curtain at one of the windows.

  Teggie and Gabriel—they’d come back—was the thought in my head. No one else had the right to enter my house without permission. Not even Club, returned early for his dog.

  But that shape didn’t belong to my sister or her boyfriend—or to Club, for that matter. It was shorter, and tousle-topped. I looked again, and my shoulders slumped in relief. I should’ve known; I’d had cause to consider this possibility earlier today.

  Weekend was huddled close to me on a hump of snow, and I reached down and patted him. “It’s all right, boy. That’s Dugger Mackenzie. It’s just Dugger.”

  “You scared us,” I said, when both the dog and I were safely ensconced inside.

  “Sorry, Missus,” Dugger said calmly. Then his face split into a grin. “That’s Club’s, right? Club’s pet?”

  I nodded. “Club’s working, so I’m watching Weekend.”

  Dugger’s face changed. “Something happened.” I was wondering how—or what—to tell him when he said, “Cloak, smoke, poke,” and I realized how Weekend and I must look, and smell, how badly we both needed baths.

  “There was a fire,” I said, and Dugger’s glance slid away.

  “Did you get my present, Missus?”

  Weekend gave a shuddering shake, and Dugger looked at him.

  “Yes,” I said, suppressing my own shiver. “I did.”

  “Dog needs water,” Dugger said. “Food, too.”

  I glanced up.

  “He had himself a fright.”

  “He was scared when you were in the house—”

  “No,” Dugger broke in. “Worse than that.”

  As my eyes narrowed—how did Dugger know these things?—he went on, “You want to get him back to normal quick. Quick, lick—”

  “Okay,” I broke in. The advice made sense. But I wasn’t sure how to follow it. I didn’t have any dog food, and the grocer in town was about to close up for the night.

  Dugger ducked away behind me, a sudden, graceful move, occupying a space I wouldn’t have thought big enough to hold anyone. Then I heard the suck of the refrigerator door. Dugger returned with a package of hamburger my mother must’ve supplied. Not the freshest, then, but the first barks I’d heard in hours began as Dugger tore away the cellophane, and placed the pound of meat on the floor.

  “Okay?” he asked me. The dog had lowered his snout, and was ripping pink coils apart. I nodded, and Dugger went on. “Now we can go and listen?”

  Something inside me winced at the idea of being upstairs alone with Dugger. I felt shame for my reaction, then dumb for being ashamed. I hardly knew this person. And one thing I did know was that his brain didn’t work in the usual way. But I also feared saying no. Dugger had never been anything but kind to me. But if I made him angry—or even if he simply got upset again and had none of that medication along with him—then things might truly go bad.

  Weekend was here, I reasoned. He’d shown the ability to watch out for me. If anything went wrong, the dog would be upstairs in a flash, fangs bared.

  I added a bowl of water to his meal—still far from a dog owner, but figuring things out—then led the way to Brendan’s study.

  The computer was still booted, with Dugger’s device attached. He slid into Brendan’s chair and brought up the long list of files.

  “Which ones did you hear?” he asked, with a white flash of teeth.

  “Um …” The sound came out tonelessly to my ears. “This one.” I pointed, so as not to touch Dugger’s hand on the mouse. “And this—this—all of those.” I traced a row of file names with my finger, deliberately failing to indicate the one called Barn—I didn’t want to reference that—but too late I realized it would’ve been better to say I had already heard it.

  Dugger began playing it without a trace of hesitation or embarrassment. I closed my eyes as the now familiar sounds started—the thumps, that crash, the rhythmic huffing—cringing while I waited for the recording’s final, universal noise of fulfillment. No flush suffused Dugger’s cheeks as he listened until it was over, then quietly lifted the mouse and started scrolling through the files again.

  I leaned against the desk, tired of standing. I felt as if I’d been on my feet for a very long time. Weekend seemed to be okay downstairs, although he must’ve finished eating, for I could hear him pacing around. I wondered when Club would come. Dark was rapidly descending, and I returned my focus to the monitor.

  With Dugger at the helm, the search was focused and concise, whereas mine had been aimless. There was no clicking or false starts. Canned noises and voices came to life, only to be deemed the wrong ones and abruptly aborted. Dugger made the mouse leap over whole lines of titles, circling the cursor as his mind seemed to chug, remembering, then landing precisely on whichever file he’d been seeking. The one he decided on now was called Seconds.

  Second servings? Seconds of time? I couldn’t get a handle on Dugger’s naming scheme.

  Before I could conjecture further, I heard the click of running footsteps on a floor or maybe it was pavement, then a woman’s high-pitched call. “Wait! Baby, stop!”

  Images of Baby leapt into my head—he was tall, good-looking, the woman was chasing after her departing lover—before the next bit of recording almost made me smile.

  “Not in the street! Baby, slow down!”

  A child’s gurgle of laughter confirmed that the woman had no reason to caution her boyfriend about cars. There was a tangle of unintelligible sounds, then the rush of an engine, and behind it, muffled words as if the speaker held a small body up against her face. “Don’t scare me like that again, baby. You have to hold my hand,” she said, and the child let out another burbling laugh.

  I looked down at Dugger. His face was bland, expressionless, his hand immobile on the mouse. “Who are those people, Dugger?” I asked at last. “When was that recording made?”

  An explanation for the identical dates on the files crept up on me. If the recordings had been made on an old technology, and only recently rendered digitally, all the time stamps would be the same. Could “baby” have been Brendan or Red, the only two possibilities that seemed relevant enough for Dugger to want me to hear them? But the loving mother in the recording didn’t sound like Eileen, although I supposed life events could’ve changed her voice along with everything else.

  Dugger was studying the screen again. He clicked. And a file called Heart began to play.

  These sounds too were violent, and my own heart began to hamme
r. What was Dugger interested in, where did his tastes run? A thick swell of nausea lifted my stomach. I realized I hadn’t eaten since those slapped-together sandwiches.

  The woman in this recording was screaming. “I can’t! I can’t! Don’t! Not there, don’t touch me there, don’t make me move, no! Oh, no!” A moan with no pleasure in it, only pain. Then thrashing, and the unmistakable rasp of tearing fabric.

  It was sex, but not consensual sex this time. I was listening to a rape.

  “Dugger, stop it,” I muttered. “Turn this off.”

  “Please, don’t make me—don’t make me do this—” she sobbed. Despair as drawn out as taffy. I had never realized before how intimate were the sounds of suffering. I had no right to be listening to this, to be overhearing.

  I started to turn, walk for the door, but Dugger extended his arm. His fingers settled onto my wrist, as lightly as falling snow, yet the touch compelled me to stay.

  On the recording came a bustle of people moving around, a low murmur of excited voices, unclear sounds of objects being moved. Things thrown across the floor. Wheels rolling maybe. There were more than two people on this recording. With a jolt of horror, I realized that there had been other participants, watching, or waiting to join in.

  “No screaming,” ordered one man, while another echoed him in a kindly tone that was somehow worse than all the cries: “Try not to yell, honey.”

  “Oh, ow!” A shriek of pure pain, then an otherworldly howl. “Noooooo!”

  I began, silently, to cry. Forced to listen, I felt violated in some small way myself.

  Dugger looked at me, then at the numbers flashing by on the screen, tiny beacons in some countdown to hell. “Fifty seconds, Missus.”

  “No—” I said, forcing my voice down from the bellows I was hearing in the recording, aware that pushing Dugger had its own risks. “I can’t take any more. Stop it now.”

  The woman had finally gone quiet, but a series of moist, slippery sounds had replaced her screams. I clapped my hands against my ears; that had to be body parts, slapping and mashing together.

  “She’s nearly through,” Dugger said calmly, and I hated him then, for speaking of this poor woman at the same kind of remote remove that allowed the men to do this to her.

  “Almost. Ah—almost. Almost there now. We’re almost done.”

  Incoherent, guttural cries. “Uhn, uhn, uhhhn!”

  “You did it!”

  Impossibly, a woman began speaking, in a tone that could only be described as jocular. “That’s the first time anyone’s gone and ripped the sheets!”

  Then came the high, thin wail of a newborn baby crying.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tears flooded my eyes, too. I had already been crying out of fear and shock, but these sobs came for a whole other reason. Dugger finally seemed unsettled, scrabbling around in his pockets. Of course he hadn’t been frightened before; he knew what he’d recorded. My fear had probably seemed inexplicable to him. With a branding stab of guilt, I recalled the momentary hatred I’d felt toward Dugger for subjecting me to something I was all wrong about.

  “Missus?” Dugger said.

  He was cupping a silver rectangle, aiming its round black eye at me.

  My ears were so clogged I could hardly make out the sound of Dugger’s voice; it was as if he were speaking to me through water or after a suddenly steep airline descent. I had no idea why I was being photographed.

  He must’ve recognized my confusion. “Nobody takes pictures then.”

  The moment of lucidity sliced through the muddiness in my head. “What?” I cried, then lowered my tone, afraid of losing him. “I mean, when? When don’t they take pictures?”

  “The worst,” he said softly. “The cursed, the ones about to burst …”

  It was a rhyme, but not only a rhyme, more of a description.

  I peered at him, frowning. There was meaning here, some import to the photos Dugger chose to snap, the things he saw fit to record.

  Suddenly, he pitched forward, stooping over Brendan’s desk. His hand began racing across buttons on the keyboard, so fast that I couldn’t believe he would accomplish anything. But a series of photographs began to appear on the screen, conjured up by his flying fingers.

  A car wreck, the vehicle accordion-folded, its occupant being lifted into an ambulance on the corner of Water Street.

  The kitchen of a dilapidated house on the outskirts of town, its refrigerator open, empty.

  A man standing in a lot near the consolidated school, where a new foundation was being poured, holding a cold pack to his head with an obvious grimace of pain.

  Someone staring at a shattered figurine on the floor, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Photographs kept scrolling by, Dugger’s fingers slipping, more careless now, closing shots before I really got a look at them. Gray faces, and tired, sloped bodies, caught in places throughout Wedeskyull and poses that seemed to have no connection.

  And then I finally saw the link. All of these people were hurting in some way.

  I raised my face to Dugger. His eyes had gone wide and wild; there was a frenzied look in the whites of them.

  Weekend entered the room at a run, skidding to a halt before his body could bang into either of ours. His hind quarters brushed against a shelf and two books fell over. As I stooped to stand them up, I saw a tiny volume lying between.

  The twin to Bill’s journal. Brendan’s photo album.

  I took it out and checked to make sure. The pages wafted by, a rainbow of years. I closed my eyes momentarily. The album had never been taken at all. It had stayed right here in this house, paged through by my husband, perhaps on the last night he was alive.

  There came a low, throaty rumble, and I looked to see Dugger stroking Weekend’s head blindly. He was staring straight ahead, but his eyes were losing that crazed expression. After a moment, I approached them both, bending to bury my face in the dog’s fur. Dugger was calming down, and Weekend also seemed back to normal now. It was I who had changed. I didn’t sneeze as I breathed in warmth from the dog. I wasn’t allergic anymore. It was the only good thing in this whole fathomless mess, the one thing that could distract me from the glimpses of my husband in years gone by, and everything else that I’d just heard and seen.

  Dugger left in the time it took me to lift my head from Weekend. I hadn’t even noticed. How many times had Dugger slipped away unheard, unseen? He seemed to have a gift for such sleight of form.

  I went downstairs, spent, alone except for Weekend, but still hungry. The hamburger meat had been consumed, its Styrofoam tray licked clean. I freshened the dog’s water bowl, then fixed myself a sandwich, which I ate listlessly, one bite after another. The raging in my stomach began to quiet, although my spirit remained unstill.

  I had to get out of here. For a few days at least. I couldn’t stay in this house, concealed by snow, the echo of that baby’s first cries in my ears. A shadowy sense of loss that I couldn’t identify plagued me.

  There was only one place I could think of to go.

  I looked down at Weekend, sniffing for scraps on the floor as I finished off my hasty meal. “Okay, Week,” I said. “Let’s see if your master’s gotten home.” The dog lifted his head. “Just have to throw a few things together first,” I went on. Mentally planning, I added a quick phone call to my list of to-do’s.

  Ned wouldn’t be at home, of course, but the number for his cell might be in the business folder that I’d begun putting together on my computer. I could hardly stand to approach the machine again, sidling over to it as if there might be real monsters contained within, rapists, madmen, unknown others. I forced my eyes to zero in only on my own sparse list of files, ignoring anything imported from Dugger.

  Weekend stood patiently by me, tongue lolling, sides rising and falling as I phoned.

  “This is Ned.”

  I felt an almost irresistible urge to tell him everything, break down in the comfort of his response. We were going ba
ck and forth, the two of us, consoling each other. But I just said, “It’s Nora. Did your cabin turn out to be free?”

  “Nora?” he said. “No. It’s occupied till Saturday.” He hesitated. “A group of ice fishermen actually. I’ll be at the inn in town tonight.” Another pause. “Why?”

  I hesitated only a second. “I’m going away for a few days. Out of town. You’d be welcome to stay here.”

  There was silence again over the line. “Any particular reason you’re leaving town?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “I just feel the need for a little time away.”

  “Straight?” Ned said, and it took me a moment to get what he meant, recall the conversation we’d had in his house, but then I responded, “Straight,” and he said, “Well, then, thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

  Weekend didn’t leave my side as I finished my preparations. In addition to my pack, weighed down with the usual, plus enough clothes for a getaway, I took one other thing from home. Brendan’s box. Something about Dugger’s recordings told me it was time to go through the relics of my husband’s past as well.

  The task might be a little easier away from the home that we’d shared.

  With Weekend straining to get out into the cold night air, I lingered for a moment on my porch. I had left two lights burning for Ned, and the rooms were neat and tidy. They’d always stayed on the spare side, and had only become more so in Brendan’s absence. I had hoped that a tangle of kids would introduce some disorder and chaos one day. Still, they provided a warmth and familiarity I knew I would miss. For a beat of time, I regretted my momentary impulse. This was my home now, and only in the leaving of it did I realize how bereft I would be to live anywhere else.

  Weekend’s claws dug into the porch floor as we emerged from the house. Someone had come by and shoveled off today’s accumulation. Another small-town favor. I wondered if whoever it was had seen Dugger inside, witnessed any of the tumult tonight, and I realized that I didn’t really mind if they had. Somewhere along the line, I’d come to rely on the way people in a small town worried, nosed, and cared.