Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  At the invitation, her inner eyebrows went up. Could he be hitting on her? The twinkle in his blue eyes said yes, but he was a friendly guy. So maybe he always twinkled.

  Before she could reply, the restaurant’s front door opened and another man came in: tall, dark-haired, sharp-featured. His deep-set eyes scanned the dining room swiftly before finding her.

  Then his harsh face softened. Every woman in the place, old or young, watched him cross the room; he was just that way, loose-limbed and easy in his well-cut jacket and dark slacks.

  Comfortable in his skin. Quickly, she banished the memories this thought evoked: Oh, his skin …

  Hoping Chevrier and Washburn hadn’t noticed her reaction, she drank some of the watery Coke at the bottom of her glass to wet her mouth. But the new arrival had noticed, of course.

  He always did. As he approached the booth, his lips moved subtly in a small, utterly outrageous imitation of a kiss.

  Damn, damn, damn, she thought.

  It was Dylan Hudson.

  Her new place was a rented house on a dead-end street on the easternmost edge of Bearkill, a tiny ranch-style structure with a mildewed porch awning, a small plate-glass picture window, and a concrete birdbath lying on its side in the unkempt front yard.

  Half an hour after showing up in the diner, Dylan eyed her appreciatively as she strode up the front walk and let herself in with her new key.

  “Looking good, Lizzie,” he said.

  The landlord, with whom she’d only spoken once on the phone, had left the key for her in the mailbox mounted on a post at the end of the front walk; yet another astonishing difference from the way things were done back in Boston, she thought.

  “Oh, shut up,” she snapped crossly at Dylan, pushing the front door open. The air inside smelled stale but otherwise okay.

  “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

  She looked around, meanwhile thinking that in a moment she’d be alone in here with him, and that she’d rented the place fully furnished. And that last time she’d checked, the word furnished implied a bed …

  Behind her, Dylan waltzed in without being invited. But then she didn’t have to invite him, did she? He knew perfectly well that he’d been invited wherever she was, pretty much from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.

  “Answer my question, please,” she told him as he bent to plump one of the cushions on the upholstered sofa: brown plaid tweed with big shiny wooden armrest knobs, truly ghastly looking.

  Cheap pottery lamps, wood-laminate end tables … the place had been decorated out of Walmart, it looked like. But it was better than nothing, and anyway, furniture shopping wasn’t on her agenda.

  Finding Nicki was. Dylan stood innocently a few feet away. “I mean what, did you think I need babysitting or something?” she went on.

  He turned, the look in his dark eyes mischievous. The faint scent of his cologne, some very subtle champagne-y thing that was emphatically not Old Spice, floated in the still air; he’d been wearing it when they first …

  No. No, don’t go there, she instructed herself firmly.

  Dylan grinned wickedly. “Babysitting, huh? That could be fun.” But then his expression changed. “Come on, Lizzie. I just wanted to help you get settled in, you know me.”

  After she’d said goodbye to the veterinarian Trey Washburn and turned down his invitation, she and Chevrier had driven back to Bearkill, with Dylan following in his own car.

  Chevrier and Hudson knew each other pretty well, somewhat to her surprise; Maine State Police detectives like Dylan worked often with the rural sheriffs here, it seemed, unlike back in the big city, where in her experience the relationship was more often competitive, to put it mildly.

  “Yeah, I know you,” she answered Dylan now, a pain she’d thought healed suddenly sharp in her chest. “You’re the guy who swore to me that your wife was already getting a divorce.”

  She crossed the small knotty-pine-paneled living room and drew the flimsy-feeling dark red curtains back from the picture window. Weak autumn light filtered in, the sun at a long, low angle already even this early in the afternoon.

  Dylan came up behind her, gazing out at a tiny lawn thickly carpeted with fallen leaves. The other houses on the street were just like this one, small ranches set well back in postage-stamp yards.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “Come on, I thought we’d settled all that.”

  Silence from Lizzie. She’d thought so, too.

  Sort of. He went on. “Anyway, it’s not so bad here. Maine’s a fine place. You’ll enjoy it when you get used to it.”

  “Sure,” she replied scathingly. Right now back in Boston, the afternoon light would be on the river, turning the rowers whose shells skated like water bugs over the golden surface to slender silhouettes, their joints articulating in unison.

  But no, don’t think of that, either.

  Stepping away from him, she went into the kitchen, which like the rest of what she’d seen of the house was outdated but clean and perfectly acceptable.

  All it needs is one of those cat clocks with moving eyes and a swinging tail-pendulum, she thought before spotting one on the wall over the ancient electric stove; it had been hidden by the corner of the round-shouldered old Frigidaire.

  She pushed back the sheer panel at the window over the sink, wondering again what the hell she thought she was doing here; the plain, small house full of mass-produced furnishings felt like a trap suddenly. But then she drew in an amazed breath.

  Dylan stepped up beside her. “See, what did I tell you? Not too shabby, huh?”

  The field behind the house had been an orchard at one time, the squat, thick-trunked trees now ancient and their rough bark charcoal-gray. Set out in even rows, they bore masses of red-gold apples on their topmost banches but were nearly bare lower down.

  “Oh,” she breathed. Despite the late season, green grass still spread under the old trees, and here and there a thicket of deep-purple asters mixed in among stands of goldenrod.

  The sun’s slanting rays burnished each apple to glowing red.

  “Deer eat all the lower ones,” Dylan said. “They can stand up on their hind legs, did you know that?”

  “No,” she managed, aware of his hand on her shoulder. And of the rest of him. “Dylan, I really think you’d better—”

  Over a year ago, they’d said goodbye; the minute she’d found out he was married, he was history. That she’d gotten the news from his wife when she’d burst in on them together had made the discovery more shocking, but it couldn’t have been more painful.

  Only a month later he’d learned of his wife’s illness. Then came the desperate attempts to save her life, unsuccessful, followed soon after her death by his departure to Maine and a job with the state cops. She’d convinced herself she was glad—not about his wife’s death, but about his absence—and had continued her own life, though there had been no one else. He and Lizzie had seen each other again for the first time only a few weeks ago; it was a meeting he’d engineered, luring her to Maine by saying that he’d found possible new clues to her missing niece Nicki’s whereabouts.

  That he, too, had gotten a photograph from some anonymous tipster. And although some of Dylan’s story had turned out to be a lie, just part of his plan to somehow see her again, the photos themselves were not.

  And now he was here. With her. She felt him watching her. It seemed she could feel his heart beat. “Dylan. I really think—”

  “Look.” She followed his gaze, saw the deer stepping from the thicket at the field’s end. No antlers; it was a doe, plump and well muscled after a summer of good grazing. Approaching an apple tree, the animal reared up …

  “Oh,” Lizzie breathed again as the deer plucked a red fruit with her front teeth and munched it, then picked one more before slowly lowering herself back down onto delicate front hooves.

  “And see, closer in here you’ve got a fence. You could even have a dog,” said Dylan.

  He
knew very well that she had no wish for a dog, never had. She might not even be here long enough to consider the idea; who knew what might happen? But his half-joking suggestion implied that he would like her to be.

  And that he still knew how to push her buttons. Oh, does he ever.

  The doe’s eyes were huge, like pools of dark liquid, its nose deep velvet black. Only when Lizzie turned did she realize that Dylan was no longer beside her.

  “This won’t do,” he said, frowning, opening cabinet doors one after another, exposing the emptiness within.

  The refrigerator hadn’t even been turned on yet. An opened box of baking soda stood on the narrow top shelf. Without further comment he strode past her to the living room, returned with his jacket on already.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go to the store.”

  He smiled invitingly, no guile in his expression, which was of course when he was the most dangerous. But in the short time he’d been getting his jacket, she’d felt how empty this house was and how garishly that fluorescent overhead light would shine down on her tonight as she sat alone at the kitchen table.

  “You can tell me about the new job,” he coaxed.

  “Okay.” She gave in, reminding herself not to talk to him about the suspicion Cody Chevrier had begun confiding, the real reason—or so she now assumed—that he wanted an experienced ex–homicide cop for his department’s small-town liaison officer.

  His suspicion, she mentally summed up the sheriff’s fear, that there’s a cop killer way up here in the Great North Woods.

  Outside, Dylan swept open the passenger door of his beloved old red Saab sedan, recently refurbished. The Food King was just a few blocks distant; afterwards she’d have him drop her at her new office where her own car was, she decided.

  Because letting him come back to the house again would be a prescription for …

  For what you need, her mind finished; she shut the thought off brusquely as he pulled into the grocery store lot and slotted the Saab into a parking space. Then he turned to her.

  “Listen,” he said seriously, “I’m going to get a guy up here to sweep the house for you, all right? And that office of yours, too.”

  She was about to protest that they were already cleaner than they would ever be while she was using them when she understood.

  “You mean for … devices? Recorders, phone bugs? But—”

  That’s ridiculous, she was about to finish, and then she got it. “He told you, didn’t he? Chevrier told you about why he wants me here. In Bearkill, I mean.”

  Just saying the town’s name made her feel like laughing. Or crying. Night school, cop academy, street patrol, scrambling up the career ladder to detective. This is what it’s gotten you.

  Your sister’s dead, her kid is missing, you’ve quit the job you wanted more than anything, the big-city murder-cop job that you gave up everything for …

  To get this. A grim little town miles from anywhere, junky office you’ll be stuck in, and at night a crummy rental house on a dead-end street, a house with knotty-pine paneling.

  There probably wasn’t a killer here at all, just Chevrier jumping at shadows. Maybe Nicki wasn’t here, either; maybe it was all a mistake. I hate knotty-pine paneling.

  “About his series of dead ex-cops? Yeah, he told me,” Dylan admitted. “I recommended you to him, in fact. That’s how he found you down in Eastport.”

  He went on a little defensively. “Hey, he needs you, you need to be here …” He half-turned to her, spreading his hands placatingly.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said tiredly, because he was right. To do the kind of investigating that her hunt for Nicki required, she had to be a cop, and she had to be on scene.

  In short, she had to be here whether she liked the place or not. And it had to be now, too; if she waited any longer to look for Nicki, she might as well admit to herself that she was never going to. And if that happened …

  Thinking of it, she saw her future stretching before her: no family, no Dylan. And no one else, either, probably. Just herself all alone and getting older, with nothing but work to keep her warm.

  Which it wouldn’t. Outside in the blue shadows that were already gathering at three in the afternoon, an elderly man rode a motorized chair down Main Street, talking to himself. A squad car with the Town of Bearkill logo on it rolled slowly in the other direction, the cop slumped behind the wheel looking bored.

  Dear God. She unsnapped her seatbelt, holding a hand up to stop Dylan when he began to do likewise. She did not want him trailing her around the grocery store like some hapless husband.

  Or any other kind. “Okay, let them sweep,” she gave in. “But I’m warning you, this whole thing better not have been just a scheme to get me up here nearer where you are,” she told him, and got out, slamming the car door.

  It would be just like him to lure her into his orbit this way, she realized as she stalked across the parking lot. Cook up a story on the thinnest of evidence, get her hopes up, all to get back into her good graces—and that’s not all he wants to get back into—now that he was single again.

  He might even have faked the photographs somebody supposedly had sent, lied about hearing vague stories in Aroostook County about a little girl whose origins no one knew. The sudden thought that maybe it was all just a ruse struck fear into her … but no, even Dylan wasn’t that underhanded—was he?

  Thinking that if he was, she was definitely going to kill him, she continued to where the shopping carts stood. She had started into the store with one of them when a figure stepped suddenly from the recessed area between two soda machines.

  “Hey,” she said, and swung around, nerves in red-alert mode and her arms already coming up into a defensive position.

  “Stay where you are,” she snapped. But then she realized it was the kid she’d seen on a bike outside her office earlier:

  Tattoo Kid, with a dark blue dragon twining up his neck and a stud in the side of his nostril, a ring in his earlobe. The designs on his arms were so thickly inked into his skin that it was hard to see where one ended and the next one began.

  He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. But I don’t want anyone to see me talking to you. I mean, you’re a cop, right?”

  “Yeah.” She looked out past the store-special posters taped to the big windows. Dylan was still in the car, his back turned so he couldn’t see her.

  “So, d’you pay for tips?”

  The kid was tall, awkward and big-boned, with unfortunate bulbous features, an oddly shaped head, and patches of purplish acne not well hidden by the skimpy blond beard he was trying to grow. The sour smell of woodsmoke drifted off him along with the reek of clothes gone unwashed for too long.

  She found her voice. “Maybe I do. Maybe not. Why, do you have information about a crime?”

  But this was the absolute wrong answer, as she’d known even as it came out of her mouth. The idea was to get civilians to think that you could solve a problem for them, not the other way around.

  And sometimes even to actually solve it. “No. Forget it,” he told her hastily. “Never mind, it was a stupid question.”

  He shoved past her and was gone, leaving her to wonder two things: one, would she ever get control of her own quick-flaring temper?

  Because she hadn’t liked being startled, and even less being hit up for cash as payment for information that decent citizens ought to be providing to the cops gratis. But she might’ve just screwed herself by backing the kid off that way.

  Impatiently she grabbed her cart and went into the store, blinking in the sudden bright lights. In the vegetable section a woman in drab sweats and a scrawny ponytail looked up from the on-sale bags of mixed greens she’d been examining to eye Lizzie incredulously.

  Which brought Lizzie to her second question, because here she was, slim-trousered and high-booted, wearing a leather jacket that was obviously expensive. With her spiky short hair, red lips, and elaborate eye makeup, to the people in Bearkill she probably loo
ked more like an alien from that bar on the corner, Area 51, than anything they imagined might be a police officer. So …

  Milk, bread, coffee, juice, she thought with part of her mind, as the store speakers blared out an elevator-music version of the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” But the rest of her brain went on puzzling over that second question:

  So how’d Tattoo Kid figure out so fast that I’m a cop?

  She went on wondering about it as she picked out cereal, a dozen eggs, and a jar of peanut butter, rejecting the low-fat version for the one human beings could actually eat. She thought about it as she proceeded through the checkout line, then on and off again for most of the remaining afternoon and early evening.

  But its interest paled suddenly a few hours later when she found herself standing in the bar with a beer in front of her, wishing hard that she’d stayed home, and staring seriously at the wrong end of what she could only hope was an unloaded gun.

  And moments later finding out that it wasn’t.

  TWO

  He was big, he was angry, and he was very, very drunk. Also, he had his ham-sized left forearm wrapped tightly around a young woman’s neck, clutching her curly blond head to his chest like she was his favorite teddy bear and he was a toddler having a major tantrum.

  A toddler with a weapon. “Whoa, Nellie,” said the bartender in Area 51.

  “Can’t … breathe …,” sputtered the woman.

  “Sir,” said Lizzie. “Let the lady go, please, sir, and put the gun down so we can talk about this.”

  She’d gotten rid of Dylan finally by telling him she was exhausted, and after a solitary meal of deviled ham and canned baked beans on toast, by seven-thirty she was alone.

  Home at last, she’d told herself sarcastically, sinking onto the ugly plaid sofa. But half an hour later, she was climbing the walls; no TV, no Internet yet, and although she had a phone, there was no one she wanted to call. So a visit to the local watering hole had seemed like a good idea.