Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  Instead of hanging around here spying on me, she thought but did not add; she hadn’t minded having him show up when he did.

  “I had some things to do.” He opened the refrigerator. “Hung out with Chevrier for a while, and he tried talking me into going moose hunting with him.”

  “What’d you say?” Nothing in the fridge interested him. Of course it didn’t; he’d only opened it as a stalling maneuver.

  “Told him I’d as soon stand in a pasture and shoot a cow.”

  Then he looked at her, knowing what she was thinking as he always had; he was thinking it, too. Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t just lie down with him again, get it over with.

  The rest of the time, though, she remembered walking around in a daze of misery: wanting him, hating him. Another long moment passed while he waited to see what she might do. Then:

  He closed the fridge. “You going to call the cops?”

  She shook her head, having had a few minutes to think about it. “I’ll tell the Bearkill guys in the morning, but I think I know what this was. The house was vacant for quite a while.”

  Thus the tall grass, untrimmed shrubberies, and the unaired smell inside. “Probably some kid didn’t get the memo about a new tenant, you know? Wanted a party spot.”

  Pursed lips, raised eyebrow: that notion wasn’t flying with Dylan. After what Missy had said about the effectiveness of the Bearkill gossip wire, it didn’t with Lizzie, either; not really.

  But summoning Mutt and Jeff over here seemed pointless at this juncture, and anyway she was very tired; Dylan tipped his head skeptically at her, but in reply she folded her arms.

  “Look, I’ll keep the Glock out on my bedside table, okay? Besides, who ever heard of a housebreaker who comes back?”

  Because even if it wasn’t local teenagers just wanting a place where they could drink a few beers and maybe smoke a few joints, it was something along those lines. Had to be; after all, what else was there in Bearkill?

  “Okay.” He gave in finally as she walked him to the door. Outside, the night was silent, no cars moving and not even a plane overhead.

  People lived like this, in this stillness so huge that it felt like an actual presence. “See you tomorrow, maybe,” he said.

  “You’ll be around?” Keeping her voice even.

  “Yeah,” he said vaguely. “For a little while, anyway.”

  Then he turned and strode off, crossing the lawn to his car.

  Closing the front door, she leaned her forehead against it in relief. Only after she turned to confront the empty house and her aloneness in it did she realize: Dylan, you slick bastard.

  He’d never answered her question about what he was doing in Bearkill in the first place.

  He waited until everyone else in the house was asleep. His mom, tired from her job as a cashier at the Food King, had gone upstairs to escape the TV, still blaring in the living room, with his dad conked out on the sofa in front of it.

  What the old man might be tired from, nobody knew. The only other person at home, a fourteen-year-old cousin who was staying here this year due to various family troubles, snored in a chair.

  He tiptoed down the hall toward the back door, then froze at his father’s voice: “Spud.”

  “Yeah?” He hated the nickname, acquired when he was a baby because his head, supposedly, had looked like a potato, all lumpy and misshapen. It still did, a little, and the name had stuck.

  “Where you goin’ so late?” Spud didn’t reply. Maybe the old man would just fall back asleep. But no such luck:

  “Don’t you be gettin’ another damned tattoo, hear?”

  Yeah, right. Bearkill, Maine, middle of the night, there’d be a place to get inked. Sure there would.

  Although Spud would have done it, if there had been. Body art and piercings had become his way of escaping everything drab and ugly about his life, which in daylight was just about all of it. At night, though …

  “Spud!” his father yelled once more, sounding as if his mood was getting uglier. “Dammit, you get in here!”

  But instead of obeying, Spud snatched his jacket and slipped out, grabbed his bike from where it leaned on the trash cans by the falling-down garage, and coasted down the dirt driveway.

  Moments later he was flying along the asphalt between farm fields, bare earth on one side with the oats and the broccoli all harvested for the year, the other side thick with withered potato vines, the crop ready to be dug. The night was clear and cold with an icy sliver of moon hanging in it like a curved claw; Spud paused on a hilltop to survey the barns, pastures, and clumps of dark forest that went on all the way to the western horizon.

  Beyond that lay the Great North Woods, partly tamed in a few places but mostly wild, empty of people, and full of ways to die: you could get lost and starve, sprain your ankle and freeze, or fall off a cliff and get stuck in a ravine, howling yourself hoarse.

  Or if you went out there to kill yourself on purpose, you could do that, too. With, say, your dad’s old deer rifle which he hadn’t used for years, but which still stood in a glass-fronted gun case in the dining room, along with a box of bullets.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight, age eighteen, Spud still had what his high school guidance counselor had called options. Like, he could join the army and go fight whatever war was supposed to be so important this week. Get his ass shot off while firing his weapon at other young guys he had nothing against.

  Yeah, there’s a plan, he thought sourly as he pushed off on the bike again. Like in a movie he’d seen in which poor kids were set to fighting each other in an arena; the winner got food, warm clothes, a chance at a life.

  It was the losers, though, that he’d found fascinating. The looks on their faces as they realized: Not me. I’m not one of the lucky ones. I’m not going to make it.

  He knew that expression. It was the same one he saw in the smeared bathroom mirror each morning when he brushed his teeth. You gotta pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, people said.

  But he wasn’t that stupid. He’d actually been on the college prep track, taking physics and chemistry and doing quite well, thank you, until the old man got nailed with that last DUI and had his license to drive the big rigs yanked.

  The swishing noise heard throughout the household then had been the sound of everyone’s hopes going down the drain, not just Spud’s own. So: no college. Pretty soon he was going to have to find some kind of work just to help support the household.

  But pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps was still against the laws of physics. A guy like Spud, without money or connections, needed a way to get one or preferably both of those things if he was going to escape the living-dead existence that was Bearkill. And now he might’ve found that way: the lady cop.

  His first attempt to profit from her arrival, confronting her in the Food King and practically demanding that she pay him for as-yet-unspecified information, had of course not worked; too ballsy, he told himself as he pedaled. Too fast, she didn’t even know him, and the way he looked—the body art, the nose stud and lip ring, plus his dreads and angry facial blemishes … No wonder she’d figured him for a creep. So he’d rethought his strategy.

  Watch her, the guy in the van had said, coming upon Spud on the street just outside her new office this afternoon. Watch her. And tell me what she gets up to. I’ll pay.

  Spud had seen the guy around town a few times but not often; they weren’t friends. So his first notion had been to tell the new woman cop what he’d been asked to do, maybe try for a reward out of it. But after the way she’d gotten right up in his face, he’d decided it might be simpler—and safer; the guy had a mean vibe about him—just to do what he’d been asked. Watch her—

  Hey, what could it hurt? Spud pedaled hard past the grassy front yard of a farmhouse with its wide freshly graveled driveway that led to the barn and silos. A startled spaniel flew furiously down to the dark road and ran behind him barking, then fell back.

  He passed T
own Hall, a low yellow-brick complex that looked like a reform school; all it needed was loops of razor wire. Next came the town maintenance yard where the snowplows, road graders, and school buses were parked.

  That was another option his counselor had suggested. A town job didn’t pay much, but it came with benefits like health insurance, sick days, pension, and so on. She’d been gazing at him with a look of such concern when she said it that he hadn’t told her what those things—along with the whole idea of plowing snow and mowing grass for a living—made him think of:

  An early grave. Not for the guys who liked it, maybe, but for him it would be better just to get his dad’s rifle.

  Plus one bullet. He coasted into town, past the red-brick library (OPEN M-W-F 10–4 & SA 12–3), the shuttered Tastee-Freez (SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER!) and the ballfield where he’d played Little League until at age eleven, he was already just too big (PLEASE NO DOGS ALLOWED!).

  He didn’t care, though. By then his interests had already shifted from base hits to bass guitars, veering briefly into freebase cocaine when it was plentiful for a while even way out here. But after coke came meth, so poisonous that you had to have something seriously wrong with you to partake of it.

  Which many of his friends, as it turned out, did, and so of course a couple of times he’d tried it, too. He’d gone back to weed pretty quick, though; his acne was bad enough without using some chemical junk to make it worse, and there were a few meth chicks around town by then, too, whose ravaged faces were like living warning signs.

  Now rolling down deserted Main Street no-hands, he pulled a half-smoked roach from his jacket pocket, lit up with a quick, deft flick of his Bic, and, while inhaling the sweet, harsh smoke, approached the turn at the potato barn on the corner.

  The barn loomed huge and silent, the harsh white security light on its rickety porch casting weirdly angled shadows from the posts that held up its shingled overhang. Decades of stomping by the booted feet of laborers had worn deep cups in the granite slabs of its front steps; from its windows, tall and narrow like vertically slitted eyes, he could imagine dark watchers peering.

  Then he was past it and around onto the dark, unpaved lane. Slowing, he rolled past small houses where people were already asleep in front of TVs flickering vividly behind drawn curtains, until at the end he braked his bike silently to a halt.

  This last house on the street was the one the cop lady had rented; he knew because his mother had overheard it in the Food King, and mentioned it at dinner just as a matter of general interest. Now the house was completely dark, nothing moving in it or on the street outside. Standing there finishing up the roach, he thought that most of the people asleep in these houses might as well remain there, dreaming forever.

  If they even remembered how. Certainly there was nothing to dream about in Bearkill, Maine. Nothing to get up for, either. Not unless you really, really wanted something.

  Out, for instance.

  And you’d come up with a way to get it. Turning toward the other end of the street, he spotted a familiar van sitting under the corner streetlight by the hulking shape of the potato barn.

  Watch her.

  THREE

  Lizzie’s office in Bearkill looked no more encouraging the next morning than it had the day before. But she’d already decided what to do about that.

  Getting the hell out of Dodge would be my first choice, she thought wryly, but instead, after switching on the lights for an even better view of the drab space, she went back outside again and walked down the chilly street to the Food King.

  Paying for a coffee from the deli in the store, she met the cashier’s curious gaze. “Do you happen to know anyone around here who does chores? Cleaning, painting?”

  The clerk blinked twice. “You stay right there.”

  The woman in line behind Lizzie wore an oversized U. Maine sweatshirt, pink flannel PJ pants with the silhouette of a black cat and the phrase BAD KITTY repeated on them, and pink plaid sneakers.

  “Hey,” she protested at the delay.

  The cashier held a hand up, the register’s phone to her ear. “I don’t know what it pays,” she said into it in tones of strained patience. “You’ll need to work that out with her.”

  The woman in the pink PJ pants tapped her wrist impatiently with an index finger, then seemed to notice Lizzie.

  “Terrible service in here,” she confided. “I can remember when it was much better.”

  The cashier hung up. “Christ on a crutch, Cynthia, you’re so old you can remember the animals lining up two by two.”

  She thrust change at the woman, who hurried out with her purchases. Then the cashier turned back to Lizzie. “Okay, my kid’s coming down here to work for you.”

  And before Lizzie could protest that she’d meant an adult who had some skills and experience, someone who could do painting and carpet laying and maybe even a few repairs, the woman added:

  “He’s smart.” She said this like it was something Lizzie was going to have to make allowances for.

  “But he’s big, he can lift stuff, and he’s got nothing on his record, not even any points on his driver’s license.”

  “I just need him for chores, not to be a getaway driver,” Lizzie joked. But humor wasn’t the cashier’s strong point.

  “Whatever. I’m just telling you he’s honest, mostly. You won’t have to worry about him ripping you off or anything.”

  On that ringing endorsement, Lizzie agreed to at least talk to the kid, who flew up on his bike out in front of her office ten minutes later, and who turned out to be Tattoo Kid.

  Or Spud, as he informed her that he was called.

  “He was as surprised as I was,” said Lizzie a few hours later, following Cody Chevrier up a long dirt driveway.

  It was just after noon, the pale blue shadows of the big old trees already beginning to lengthen and the tannic-scented air out here growing even colder.

  “Yeah, well,” said Chevrier over his shoulder. Ahead of him a huge black and tan hound that the sheriff had brought with him ambled along, sniffing. The dog had long, glossy ears and great big black-toenailed paws. Drool hung gleaming from its lips.

  “Spud’s different. Kind of a misfit, all that stuff stuck in him, the jewelry and piercings, and the tattoos. Feel sorry for the kid, tell you the truth. I think he’s got a brain in that big head of his, somewhere.”

  Chevrier paused, considering. “Old man’s a prick, I can tell you that much. But Spud’s never given anybody any serious trouble that I ever heard. You could do worse.”

  The dog scrambled up onto the screened porch of the mobile home at the top of the drive, nosing the screen door open as if he’d done it before and slipping eagerly inside.

  “I hear you had some excitement in town last night,” said Chevrier.

  Area 51, he meant. She still had the little gun. “Yeah. Is there a problem?” They followed the dog in to where a bentwood rocker and a wicker chair faced a table with magazines on it.

  “Nope. Henry’s pretty ticked off, I saw him in the diner this morning. And his knee hurts, I had to talk him out of visiting you about it.”

  Missy had predicted as much. “Yeah, well, he’s lucky it’s just his knee. But seriously, do I need to …”

  Hey, a citizen had been injured, Chevrier could very well be getting flak from somewhere about it.

  But he shook his head. “You’re fine. Missy Brantwell’s a good friend to have. Her dad’s an important guy around here, has a big farm and he keeps a lot of people employed on it.”

  She absorbed this without comment. For one thing, she wasn’t sure Missy felt the least bit friendly. And anyway:

  “Do me a favor. Next time, don’t talk Henry out of visiting me, all right? He’s got a quarrel with me, I’ll deal with it.”

  She pulled Henry’s little gun out of her bag. “Meanwhile you might want to find a reason not to give this back to him.”

  He took it, looking pleased at the discovery that someone had m
anaged to disarm Henry. “Fair enough. He’s got an old felony record, no big deal nowdays, but he’s not supposed to be having one of these at all.”

  But he clearly didn’t want to make an issue of it any more than she did. “Anyway, this is Carl Bogart’s place.”

  Chevrier looked around the screen porch. “He was the sheriff before I got the job, then his wife, Audrey, died not long after he retired. Started reloading shotgun shells and repairing guns for people, putting sights and scopes on them, and so on.”

  He stopped, frowning. “And then about two weeks ago he put a bullet in his head. Supposedly.”

  “Supposedly?” No one had touched the house, or at least not out here on the porch. On the table lay a pair of men’s trifocals with tortoiseshell rims and lenses as thick and distorting as the eyepiece in a security peephole.

  She glanced questioningly at Chevrier, who nodded. “Yeah, he had the cataracts pretty bad. S’posed to get ’em out, but he kept putting it off. Then—”

  He made an explosion gesture with his hands. “Kerblooie. His weapon started looking like a better solution to him. So sayeth our county medical examiner.”

  “Only you don’t think so.” She sat in the wicker chair. The dog padded around the porch, sniffing, then came and dropped his head heavily into her lap, still drooling.

  The dog’s name was Rascal, and he smelled worse than any dog she’d ever met, like old socks mixed with tuna fish.

  “Nope,” said Chevrier. The rocker creaked as he sat.

  “In fact I know he didn’t. Try telling that to anyone else, though,” he added, reaching out to smooth the dog’s long ears.

  “What do you mean?” Lord, but the dog reeked: his breath, mostly, she realized. Lifting the animal’s upper lip with a finger, she exposed his reddened gum line and his teeth, brown with tartar.

  Chevrier sighed. “I mean he wouldn’t have done it, that’s what,” he replied, clearly tired of having to say it.

  Especially when no one listened. It hit her that maybe he was a little nutty on this topic, that maybe he’d gotten her up here to support him in a theory that everyone else had already written off as unbelievable.