Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  After that, registration went smoothly, and I let myself into room number 12, keeping the door open an extra few seconds despite the cold.

  Dave lifted one thickly gloved hand, waving goodbye as he clomped across the lot.

  I waited to leave until he had driven off.

  I thought of Ned’s sudden, soundless disappearance. The police could do pretty much anything, but their tactics seemed to involve subterfuge and misdirection. Fires that might’ve been accidents. A death that could’ve been a bungled robbery in a dark house in the middle of the night. Here at the motel where the cops had stashed me—where they might stash everyone who was giving them trouble, for all I knew—I was a sitting duck.

  How had I gone from considering the police my husband’s second family to suspecting them of arson, abduction, and murder? The thought that this whole thing was some sort of grief-induced psychosis beckoned like a warm quilt. And Ned is suffering the same delusion? demanded the internal Teggie.

  Better safe than sorry. I wouldn’t let a desire to turn away get me killed.

  But it wasn’t as if alternatives abounded. My own house was gone, and the house Ned had just hired me to work on wasn’t in a much better state. Jean had been the only member of the family who could stand me, and now she was gone, too. And I’d never really made any friends of my own up here. I took in a choking gulp of air as the fact of my aloneness descended, as deep as the cold that encased this part of the world, seeming permanent by now, as if spring would never come again.

  There weren’t other motels, not anywhere nearby. And you couldn’t exactly check into one of Wedeskyull’s quaint inns at this hour.

  The temperature precluded trying to last out the aborted remainder of the night in my car. I’d be dead by morning.

  And then a possible place occurred to me.

  Ned had never given up his cabin on Squall Lake. He’d been going to occupy it himself after the first fire. If it wasn’t still rented, then I might just be able to hunker down there for a night. Decide tomorrow what to do.

  I hadn’t been to the cabin before, but Ned had mentioned its location, and it was easy enough to find. The road had been kept clear by a private service used by vacation residents and owners of rental units. No vehicle sat in the drive, and the cabin was lightless. Its door was locked, but a window opened without difficulty, and I hoisted myself up and crawled through.

  It was almost as cold inside as out. The rough wood walls gave off vapor, and I stared longingly at the logs crisscrossed by the stove. But I was wary of revealing my location even by as unlikely a hint as smoke curling up from a distant chimney.

  I realized I was starving, and entered the kitchen. The last renters had left it in pretty good shape, except for a few cabinet doors hanging loose on their hinges. But those cabinets contained tins of ready-to-eat food, and I gobbled their contents gratefully.

  A closet held blankets, and once I got settled beneath them, with the food in my belly, I didn’t even feel all that cold.

  I fell asleep.

  I awoke with a stunned sort of sense of well-being. Aunt Jean was dead, and Ned had gone missing. I had no home and no belongings. And no one to turn to for help with any of it. But I had eaten, and I’d slept.

  And I had figured out what to do next.

  A gap in the blankets exposed me, and frigid air bit my neck and arms.

  My tools were lost, but I was fairly sure, given the well-stocked nature of this cabin, Ned would have a screwdriver somewhere. Trusting that he would be back one day to see, I straightened every one of those sagging cabinet doors.

  TACTICS

  Gil Landry was the only cop on the force without a family connection. He wasn’t the Chief’s fucking brother. His old man sure hadn’t been on the job. Gil didn’t even know his old man. For as long as he could remember, it had been just him and his ma.

  Which was okay. They were a team, always had been, except when Gil had enlisted. He didn’t know what would’ve happened if he hadn’t washed out. The look on his ma’s face when he came home—well, it made the whole fucked-up situation worth it.

  The day after the fat lady’s death, the Chief called Gil into his office. Early, before anyone else had come in. Thick snow was falling outside. Gil hated snow, he always had. The snow got you in a choke-hold and didn’t let go for seven months. But no matter how cold Gil got, he always stood staunchly, body straight as a rifle stock, refusing to shiver.

  That had been the best part about being on a carrier. No snow in the Gulf. Still, he was glad to be home. Turned out things in the Navy didn’t work like they did in Wedeskyull. And frankly, Gil thought they had it wrapped up better here.

  “I got word from McAllister,” the Chief said from behind his desk.

  The fire chief. Gil kept his hands locked behind his thighs, face expressionless.

  The Chief’s face looked heavier than usual this morning, and his big body slumped in the chair. Too bad it had been Mitchell in that house last night, not him. If some old broad had started giving him trouble, he would’ve done exactly what Mitchell did, but he would’ve done it better and cleaner. If he’d been there, no one ever would’ve found out what had happened.

  Silence hung over the office like a haze. Gil waited patiently.

  “He suspects accelerants on the Queek Pond job. Says if they hadn’t gotten there as fast as they did, the whole place would’ve gone up.”

  Gil’s hands, which had been hanging by his sides, clenched into fists. “The whole place didn’t go up because there was nothing in there worth burning. It was empty as a fucking warehouse. We ignited some papers on a desk and left.”

  “What papers?” the Chief asked. But he was looking away and didn’t really seem to care about the answer.

  “We didn’t take time to read them, Chief,” Gil said.

  The Chief looked at him. “You talking back to me, boy?”

  “No, sir.” He drew a breath and went on. “Whatever they were, they’re gone now. And we took take care of anything else there might be, too.”

  “Yeah,” the Chief responded. “Seems like there’s a lot being taken care of lately.”

  Gil’s vision fuzzed for a second. He was trying to keep up and the effort made his head throb. The Chief was talking, but he wasn’t saying what he meant. That must’ve been a reference to the second fire. But Gil wasn’t to blame for how that had gone down. He knew explosives, a little, but this wasn’t somewhere in towel-head-istan. Torching a private residence was a whole other deal, and he’d told the Chief he was no firebug. Hamilton’s house had to be destroyed anyway. They’d torn every inch of it apart before striking the first match. The reporter who for some reason was crashing there had been out, but who knew when he might return? No way could they have gotten it back in decent shape in time.

  Gil didn’t get the feeling from Hamilton’s old lady that losing her house—losing any house, even though she worked on them, if you could call that work—would make her run away, though. Hamilton had never talked much about her, he was good at keeping his head down and his boots out of the muck. They had hated guys like Hamilton in his class. But his wife wasn’t the same. She kept messing and pushing. Luckily she had no idea what she was looking for.

  There’d been nothing in her house, and nothing in her car. Whatever they’d been trying to find didn’t exist. And maybe the Chief was finally coming to accept that. At least, he sure looked today as if he’d given up.

  “I’ll deal with McAllister’s report,” Gil said. “No one will ever see it.”

  “You’re forgetting the insurance company.”

  Gil’s hands were still clenched. “I have a feeling no claim will ever be filed.”

  “You sure about that?” the Chief said, his tone changing so imperceptibly that at first Gil hardly even noticed. “No surprises?”

  He raised his head, and Gil saw that as slow and plugged as the Chief seemed to be this morning—the same look had deadened Gil’s ma the day Gil left
for boot camp in Great Lakes—he was still sharp as an ax.

  “No surprises, sir.”

  “Like you and Lurcquer were surprised by Mr. Cooper?”

  “Cooper didn’t fucking surprise us,” Gil said, working to restrain himself.

  “No?” the Chief said, voice gleaming with understanding. “I thought you were taking him to get medical treatment.”

  Gil felt a cord start to pulse on his forehead. “You know the state that poor bastard was in? His lungs were fucking barbequed. Charred meat, man. He didn’t stand a chance.”

  The edge disappeared from the Chief’s voice, and his shoulders suddenly sagged. “Look, boy, I don’t care. I don’t care what you did. Just make sure I never hear another word about it.” He paused. “Or about the reporter, either.”

  The Chief gave Gil a look that said he was dismissed, and suddenly Gil wanted nothing more than to lodge his elbow in the Chief’s fleshy neck and break his windpipe. Elbows and knees: the best weapons man would ever possess to extinguish a close, personal threat.

  “What are you waiting for, boy?”

  Gil turned and left the office. He strode to his desk, suppressing an urge to sweep the surface clear of all its fancy gadgets, plastic flying like shrapnel.

  Whatever was about to happen, he was still on the job. He still had his freedom. And a Chief who knew—better than any lieutenant ever had—that if things got bogged down, you had to climb out of the bog using any means available. You didn’t wait around to see if someone was going to lower a hand.

  He wished the other seamen had understood that back at training. He would’ve made a good SEAL.

  Gil Landry knew how to appear out of nowhere, and disappear the same way, so that nobody ever had any idea that he’d been there.

  He knew how to hurt a man so badly he couldn’t draw breath.

  And he knew how to make sure a man never knew that the breath he had just taken would be his last.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Eileen would be gone this morning. She’d have to be; there was no one else to arrange for the funeral. Jean’s last words, about having been silent long enough, came back to me. Silent about what? What had she been intending to do?

  If I let myself think now, I would be paralyzed. I shook my head with a willful jerk.

  When I arrived at the bottom of Patchy Hollow Road, it was clear that I wouldn’t have to do any sneaking around. The emptiness was total. I’d driven up at a crawl, ready to drop back the second I caught a drab glimpse of gray, but not one police car was parked anywhere nearby, and although I circled the perimeter of Jean’s house, no cop was stationed outside.

  I climbed onto the porch, ducking beneath a swag of yellow tape, and peered through the windows into the deserted rooms.

  The lookout and investigation had been pro forma, put on for whatever media coverage Jean’s death drew, or maybe even for me. Nobody was looking into her murder.

  I descended the porch steps and made my way across the snow-packed road to Eileen’s.

  As I had expected, my mother-in-law was gone, too. I had taken two things from Ned’s cabin after deciding on a plan. One was a flashlight. Answers had been found in this house once. Maybe there were others I’d missed.

  Something brushed against the back of my coat as I pushed open the basement door, and began my descent. Stifling a yelp, I barreled down the rest of the steps, the basement less forbidding than the prospect of my mother-in-law behind me.

  Hitting the concrete floor, I whirled around and aimed the flashlight at the top of the stairs. The beam illuminated a rope of dust, swinging from a ceiling light. I went back upstairs on trembling legs and shut the cellar door, closing myself inside.

  What had been a perilous blind-man’s bluff without the light was an easy stride now. I used Ned’s screwdriver to pick the lock, then pushed open the door to Eileen’s cavern. I’d have to search with precision. I had no idea when she might return.

  But what was I looking for this time?

  Surely if Eileen had anything here of value to be found, her house would’ve been burned, too, or its occupant menaced. Maybe she had been; I had no way of knowing. Yet unlike Jean, whose final words had held such portent and intent, Eileen seemed perfectly content to keep things concealed.

  The furnace stood only a few feet away, breathing right outside this room. Sweaty and hot, I stripped off my outer gear, and left it in a pile by the door.

  Something was different. I took a slow look around, considering. The first time I’d come everything had been frosted with dust. Now all the surfaces were clear, swept clean.

  I resisted the urge to throw things around in a desperate hunt, as somebody had done in Jean’s kitchen. Instead I approached it the way I would a job, conducting a methodical examination of all the objects I recalled to make sure nothing was missing, then seeking anything hidden, much as I used to find ceiling medallions beneath asbestos tiles, plaster under wallboard.

  There were the photos, of course, several walls’ worth of them, including one that leapt out: Bill searching beneath the ice for his son. Those canceled checks, made out to cash, but with that baffling word on the memo line. Resurrection. The long paper diagram, rag doll named Pooky, a carton of minuscule clothes. Eileen had replaced Rascal’s fallen clump of hair in the precise spot in which I’d found it.

  I crouched down, but there were no hidden relics under the desk. Standing on tiptoes to locate any concealed spots by the ceiling yielded nothing, either.

  Helplessly scanning the walls once again, I took in a picture I hadn’t spotted before. The unquenchable horror of it glued my eyes, made me forget the time pressure I was under. Someone had taken a shot of the place where Red must have died. An enormous expanse of scabby ice, and the Cyclops eye Red had dropped through at its center. This was a monstrous-sized lake, a body of water of such volume that its frozen three-foot covering might be nothing more than a cap on a giant’s head. I couldn’t stop staring at that hole.

  And then I saw another photograph high up on a corner of wall. If I’d seen it the first time, I hadn’t dwelled on it because I didn’t recognize the person in it. A boy, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with longish, almost flaxen hair. Something about him was familiar. It was his T-shirt.

  I boosted myself onto Eileen’s desk, and walked a few paces down, not caring when I disturbed her displays with my tread. I squinted at the picture, then reached up one hand, picking at the paper’s slick edge. Eileen had used some kind of indomitable glue; I needed my tools. One corner came free and I peeled off some more, standing on tiptoes to look again, be sure.

  The letters on the boy’s shirt spelled out the word Stonelickers. There were a couple of beer logos on the shirt, and beneath them, an address. It was in Cold Kettle, New York.

  The picture came free and I pocketed it. Then I jumped down.

  I had no idea if this was all that was here to be found, but I knew it was important, a link between Eileen’s archeological dig and the contents of Brendan’s box. And I knew one other thing. I was out of time.

  Through the thick, muting walls of the cellar, there came the gust of a car engine.

  I crept up the basement stairs and into the parlor, clicking off my flashlight. Pulling a narrow flap of curtain aside, I peered out into the yard. Eileen’s car was still gone. But a gray vehicle sat in her drive.

  I let the curtain fall and whipped around, breathing hard. I couldn’t tell which cop had come. The possibility that it was Gilbert triggered fear so great that it nearly aborted all motion, the way a child will grind to a halt when she is being chased. Gilbert was about to climb the steps and knock, or more likely he would just enter. And then he would come and get me and do that thing to my shoulder again. Sense memory returned, those fingers grinding down to meat and muscle, and panic threatened to overtake me.

  There was a thud of boots on the walkway outside.

  Withdrawing the photograph from my pocket, where it made a telltale outline, I slid
it down past the waist of my jeans. Then I backed away from the window.

  Upstairs seemed both the most risky and least detectable place to hide. It surely contained numerous spots for concealment. But if the one I chose was discovered, I’d be trapped. I dashed up the stairs anyway. I knew foursquares. I should be able to locate someplace unapparent to the casual seeker.

  Except this seeker wouldn’t be casual. He’d been sent to find me.

  HURT

  Dugger stood in bare feet, wearing only his undershorts. He was looking for something in his room. He picked things up and set them down one at a time. He could only use one hand, so it took him a while. When he had nothing left to pick up, he took a look around. He liked this room. It cost him three hundred dollars every month and Mr. Meter always gave him precisely triple that, so he had no trouble paying for this room.

  He had a few other places in the apartment he could check, but he had to get dressed first. He’d almost forgotten to get dressed. Clothes on, he lifted up the shade on his window and looked out. He never did that before, but now he had to. His arm reminded him.

  He wished that he might see Brendan, driving up, looking in on him. But he knew that wouldn’t happen anymore. Brendan had been a good kind of friend, sometimes standing along the sidelines like Dugger did, making a joke or, since Dugger never laughed, just listening to what he had to say. Dugger wasn’t friends with the other ones, but still, he hadn’t known one of them would hurt him. He never thought someone would do something like that.

  It was funny—funnier than the jokes Brendan used to tell—but even though Brendan came to check on him, really it was Dugger who looked out for Brendan. He had ever since Brendan did something he got into terrible trouble for. Not the punished kind of trouble. The worse kind, when no one even needed to punish you.

  And with Brendan not here anymore to look out for, Dugger would do the next best thing. He would watch out for the person Brendan had loved.