Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  When he’d come to, his vision had been blocked with a blindfold drawn tight as a vise, and his coat and boots had been removed. The floor beneath his feet felt gritty, and the temperature wasn’t much warmer than outside. Ned fought to put together where he might be. Some kind of unheated shed? The basement of an abandoned building?

  There were smells—a reek of perspiration and fear, the sweet stink of sudden bodily effluence—and an iron tang in his mouth that Ned couldn’t wash out no matter how often he spat. He was scared at first that the blow to his head had left him bleeding internally, but after a terrified couple of seconds, bringing his fingers to his ears and his nose, he reassured himself that the damage must be relatively superficial. He was in pain—his head and face felt as if they’d been smashed—but his mind was starting to clear.

  Then a voice crawled out of the darkness. Ned hadn’t been able to place it, and he wasn’t sure if that was because he didn’t know the guy, or because his brain was still foggy.

  “You’re gonna lay off now,” came the command.

  Ned kept silent, hoping the person would give him something he could use.

  “Say something, asshole,” the voice continued. “Or are you too used to other people talking?”

  Ned still didn’t speak. The next thing he heard was a whistling through the air. Was that the whicker of rope, or reins maybe? Ned felt something streak past him, whipping his arm so hard and so fast that at first he didn’t realize he’d been cut. His shirtsleeve was not just torn, but split apart. Blood spilled from the wound on his arm.

  Ned howled, a sound that somehow seemed to belong with the appalling animal stink of this place.

  That voice came again, low and terrible. “I can stay here all night. Or you can stop this right now.”

  Ned could think of only one play, one way he might be able to get himself out of here. And if it didn’t work—Ned didn’t want to think about that whip coming at him again. His insides cramped with fear as he forced words out. “Stop what?”

  This time the silence came from his oppressor. There was a long pause before the voice spoke again. “What you’re doing, asshole.”

  “What am I doing?”

  Silence again.

  The effort to speak had brought to life a pulsing in his head. Ned was going to be sick—Jesus, he couldn’t be sick right now—

  “The fucking story you’re working on.”

  Ned knew the Chief’s voice, and Lurcquer’s. He’d spoken to Mitchell from time to time. This wasn’t any of them. Landry, then. How much did he know? Had Lurcquer been made?

  Ned forced out a laugh, dragging it past the nausea in his throat. “What’s wrong with my story? What’s it to you?”

  This time nothing filled the silence.

  Ned fought to speak again. “What’s the big deal? It’s a human interest piece. About ancient history.”

  The voice that returned was dreadful, but it also planted a tiny little spark of hope in Ned. Because it sounded unsure.

  “You kidding me? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Ned aped patience. “I’m talking about my story. The one you saw fit to smack me around over.” If he made light of what happened, he’d be in better straits. Landry might feel less threatened. “What don’t you like about it?”

  A pause. “It’s—” The voice broke off. “What’s the story about?”

  Here was the moment. Here was his play. And it had to be done just right.

  “See for yourself. You burned up most of my hard copies, okay? But there are a few things left. Look in my coat.” He’d shoved these papers deep in his pocket after meeting with Nora, and as far as he recalled, never taken them out.

  Good Lord, he’d better never have taken them out.

  The effort of putting the words together had left him shaky and queasy. Ned leaned over, trying to lower his head, and a rush of air against his arm set it aflame. He stifled a groan.

  Then he heard something that distracted him momentarily. Boots thumping, shuffling sounds, things being shifted around, the whish of fabric. Finally, a crackle of paper, which made Ned’s heart give a strong, relieved beat.

  He straightened up.

  Landry spoke in a tone of total disbelief from where he had located Ned’s coat. “That ice-fishing accident? Some kid died?”

  “Right,” Ned answered, a pulse starting anew in his head. If Landry saw through the bluff, he knew what awaited. He fought to get words out. “It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary. Paper wanted me to do a follow-up in honor of it.”

  “Fucking A.”

  Ned kept his face expressionless beneath the blindfold. He had no idea which way Landry might be looking. It was easy to stay still anyway—motion started a three-alarm blaze in his head.

  Then he heard the sound of papers being tossed down, and a queasy wave of hope rolled over him.

  Landry didn’t bother to return his coat or boots before pulling Ned out into the frigid night air. He opened a car door and kneed Ned into the backseat. This was a cruiser all right.

  They drove for a long time. Then the rear door was pulled open, and Ned dumped out.

  Seconds later, he felt the muzzle of a gun on his temple.

  “If I ever see you in Wedeskyull again,” Landry said, “you will wish I’d shot you tonight. You will wish that you’d begged me to shoot you. Got it?”

  Ned heard a car door slam and realized that the cold bite of the gun had been replaced by icy air at the side of his head.

  He waited until the engine noise had dissipated to pull off his blindfold.

  The road was utterly empty. No houses were lit up in the distance, which left Ned no choice but to trudge along in his stocking feet. They had started to tingle and burn—which he knew was a far sight better than the next stage, when all feeling would be lost—by the time a pickup truck came along.

  Ned flagged it down, watching as the truck rolled to a halt a quarter mile up the road.

  The driver cranked down his window and leaned out. He frowned, taking in the sight of Ned’s missing shoes and coat, the blood on him, and his torn shirt.

  Ned finally pitched forward, and he began to retch.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  The unlit light bar atop the cop’s car was the most ominous detail of all. He didn’t want anyone to observe him coming for us.

  The car sped up, a shadowy blur of gray.

  Dugger pressed on the gas, turning a few corners and losing the SUV. But the patrol car remained, and it was gaining on us.

  I tightened my seat belt across my chest. My car was doing speeds on snow-narrowed roads I hadn’t known it was capable of. Dugger took a corner, spinning the wheel with one hand, and lodging the other arm in front of me like a barricade. He winced when he did it, and I wasn’t sure why.

  We made a turn that threatened to send us both flying across the interior, if not roll the car altogether, and only Dugger held me in place. I panted in gratitude but he didn’t even look at me, setting both hands down on the wheel as the tires squealed. Whoever was behind us wasn’t managing the turns as well. Dugger increased his speed, flooring it now.

  The car crested a hill, and for a second I thought there was nothing on the other side, not anything a car could take anyway. The road was so steep that the rear tires rose off the ground as we plummeted over the top.

  My body actually left the seat for a second, and again Dugger was bracing me, his own form miraculously steady. Then I slapped back down with a jaw-cracking bounce. My tongue tasted blood, and a steely pain pierced my head. At last my car seemed to be feeling the chase, riding low on one side, slip-sliding in the snow.

  “Dugger,” I gasped.

  His brow was set in furrows of concentration and he didn’t answer.

  The tires caught with a zigzagging wave as Dugger raced around another bend. The rear of the car swung out as if it were on a hitch. I stifled a scream and clamped my hands against the dash, holding myself this time. Dugger’s fists
were wrapped around the wheel; he needed them both. But the other set of tires behind us was no longer squealing. It was the only sign I had that we might have lost him.

  Dugger also seemed to be slowing minutely, another indicator. Then finally he spoke. “Sorry, Missus. I had to lead him this way.”

  I looked at him, trying to steady my breaths. “What are you talking about?”

  He was glowering at the dirt and gravel spraying up beside us as he pumped the brakes.

  “Lead him what way? Where are we?”

  We had arrived on a stretch of unpaved road that dead-ended at a mountainside. The steep slope was glossed with white and studded all over by trees. I had no idea where we were, dense forest somewhere. There was another car parked across the road, a nondescript sedan.

  Dugger came to an abrupt stop. He flinched again, undoing his belt, although there’d been no contact this time.

  “Dugger?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “My arm, Missus,” he responded. His bright eyes momentarily darkened. “It got hurt.”

  “Hurt?” I echoed. “How?”

  But he didn’t answer, just opened the door with his other hand and got out.

  I cracked my door and leaned sideways to thank him for helping me escape Wedeskyull. Saving me maybe. But he gestured me forward. “Hurry, Missus.”

  I glanced up at him.

  “Your car is red,” he said.

  Red dead, red head.

  “We can’t take it.”

  “Take it where?” I asked.

  Dugger got into the other car, and waited for me to follow.

  I stuck the maps and candy bars—melty now, and warm—into the pockets of my new coat. I got out Brendan’s box. And then I approached the driver’s-side door.

  “Dugger,” I whispered. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Dugger opened his mouth and closed it. I watched as a million words seemed to string themselves across his mind. He was fighting not to utter any of them, pressing his lips tightly together until he could finally get out what he wanted to.

  “There’s something you have to—I’m going to show you something.”

  I held his gaze. His eyes were light again and contained all sorts of things. The clarity he’d achieved began to ebb away. I nodded once. “All right.”

  Dugger drove us up the side of the mountain, then down again. We hadn’t seen a single car since losing the police. The roads out here were empty, hardly roads at all, just cutouts with the snow tamped down upon them. The sedan was doing amazingly well, and when I frowned as we drove onto a long lick of unplowed trail, abandoning the last hint of civilization, Dugger responded to my unasked question.

  “Chains,” he explained. “Tires have chains, gains, pains.”

  I glanced at him, but he seemed steady. For now.

  “We have to walk, Missus,” Dugger said, pumping the brakes judiciously. “Can’t go any farther.”

  We’d driven far enough off the road that the freshly fallen layer of snow hadn’t gotten packed down; huge heaps and drifts lay ahead. “You mean we’re stopping?”

  Dugger looked at me. Then he opened his glove compartment and withdrew a fur-rimmed hat and gloves. He handed them over, and I pulled them on over the ones I was already wearing. But that did nothing about my only calf-high boots and lack of waterproof pants.

  “Don’t worry, Missus,” Dugger said, still reading my cues. “This won’t take long.”

  “What won’t?” I asked, but Dugger was already out of the car.

  The road behind us melted into the vast expanse of white, before disappearing altogether. We came to an enormous boulder, cloaked with a fresh covering of snow. Dugger guided me around the stone, its surface mottled like the moon. Then we circumvented a stand of snow-laden firs and started down a path.

  I craned my neck up to the sky. The sun was a cold, silver coin behind a bank of clouds. Even through my new layers of outerwear and the items borrowed from Dugger, I felt gooseflesh rise. It wasn’t just Dugger who was strange now, but the whole environment we were in.

  I took a slow, revolving look around. Tree limbs, those that weren’t skimmed with snow, looked bare as picked-over bones. There were no hoofprints or tiny tracks, not a single bird took flight. It was as if all life had fled this place.

  “See,” Dugger said urgently. “Tree, key, free—”

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming,” I said. Dugger couldn’t get upset. Not out here.

  “Now, Missus,” he said, beginning to kick through the snow.

  “Nora,” I called out, and he turned around. “Call me Nora, okay?”

  “Okay, Missus,” he said.

  I had to hurry to catch up.

  One of Dugger’s loops of hair snagged some hidden pine needles, and a shower of flakes sizzled onto a bit of exposed skin on my face as we passed between another copse of trees.

  It was quiet as a vault all around us. An almost undetectable shushing sound came when snow patties dropped from a tree limb onto the blanket below.

  “How much farther?” I called out, hearing a tremble of cold in my voice.

  Dugger came to such a sudden stop that I walked right into him. We extricated ourselves slowly. “No farther, Missus,” he said. “We’re here.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  I turned around, watching a flock of ancient ash-colored leaves flutter onto the frozen drift with faint, whispering breaths.

  Dugger was looking around, striding forward, then back. “They check,” he told me.

  “Who?” I asked, seizing on the scrap of information. My voice got carried away by a gust of wind, and I spoke louder. “Who checks?”

  “Checks, wrecks, decks,” he chimed. “But not as much now. Not so often.”

  I frowned, slowly making sense of his words. One thing was clear.

  We might not have much time.

  Dugger’s outstretched finger pointed to a heap of white between a skeletal stand of trees. The mound looked askew, higher than the drifts around it.

  “That pile of snow?”

  Dugger dropped to his knees. He placed his hands in the frozen heap and began to burrow, tossing chunks of white behind him. I dropped into a crouch, and began digging, too.

  I watched his blue eyes glisten, and wondered if Dugger Mackenzie might be crying.

  It was like clawing at boulders. After an untold number of minutes had passed, devoted to the seemingly impossible task, I noticed Dugger periodically leaning over to breathe on the mound. The snow loosened under his exhalations, and he was able to shift some around. I copied his technique, blowing and scooping.

  How I longed for the tools that had been stolen along with my bag. My shoulders ached, felt like twin rocks themselves. I paused for a second to stretch. “Dugger, I don’t know if we can do this without any—”

  He halted my protest, taking both my hands in his and returning them to the mound. “Dig, Missus,” he said. “Before someone comes.”

  We didn’t have to excavate as deeply as I’d feared.

  Still, Dugger and I should’ve torn our hands to shreds, even with our gloves. Somehow we budged the mound. It was frozen, but it had melted at some point after the deep freeze of the season. The hard-packed soil we soon reached shifted too easily as well.

  I concentrated on scooping out brittle flecks of dirt. Soon I was sweating, working hard enough to unzip my coat.

  Floating in the back of my mind was an explanation I didn’t want to face.

  Someone had come out here with power tools to churn up the earth. Heavy equipment maybe. Otherwise Dugger and I couldn’t possibly have made the headway that we did.

  And why would someone have gone to such effort to delve into the ground in winter?

  At first it didn’t register when my gloved fingers rasped against something. But then it did, and I screamed.

  “You found him?” Dugger began scrabbling at the remaining scum of soil.

  I yanked my hands in their filthy gloves away so
that I wouldn’t have to feel the unmistakable roughness of denim again. Then I stood up shakily, unable to take a look at what we’d uncovered. The bony click of denuded tree limbs tapped out a refrain.

  “Dugger,” I said numbly. “What is this?”

  No.

  “Who is this?”

  I thought I knew the answer. I’d known as soon as the question was formed. Whose disappearance had I just heard about, who had also recently vanished? Dugger must have led me to the body of Melanie Cooper’s missing husband.

  I’d been right that with spring would come an end to any hope of uncovering the truth. If not for the concrete earth, this secret would never have lain so shallowly, awaiting winter’s thaw for a more thorough burial.

  The body lay facedown in a rift in the soil.

  But for contemporary clothes, he looked like a piece of statuary, the exposed parts of his skin turned to marble. He wore jeans my fingers would never forget. A few ropes of jewelry—gold and silver links—were knotted around one stony wrist.

  My bleary eyes refused to focus on any of it.

  Even the small, ragged sun in the midst of his coat.

  Brendan’s years on the force had taught me what the entrance wound of a bullet shot from some distance away looked like.

  Like Jean, this person had been murdered while his back was turned.

  “Dugger?” I mumbled. I wondered if he knew, if there was any such thing as guns in his rhyming, riddling world.

  He didn’t reply.

  Were we supposed to heave the body up, somehow carry him out, begin the process of investigation? It wasn’t as if we could call the police. I let out a brittle laugh. It sliced the silence in the woods.

  “Dugger!” I cried.

  Dugger screamed back. “Tree, key, free, see!”

  Bare branches whipped along with our soaring voices.

  I sat down on the ground, some ways from the grave, heedless of the icy bite of snow through my pants. We couldn’t drag the body out. Even if Dugger had the strength—a supposition I could just about believe—there was nowhere to go with it. But I could do something else to ensure future investigation.