Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  The maison jaune … The girl followed her gaze. “Oh, you were looking for that house? It’s why you’re here?”

  She sounded troubled, suddenly. Smart as well as pretty, Lizzie thought.

  “Poor Michel,” the girl went on. She pronounced the name the French way. “He was a nice man. I used to see him in the yard. All alone. I tried to be friendly to him, but then last September he died very suddenly.”

  She turned to Lizzie. “You want to go in, yes?”

  No, Lizzie thought suddenly. She’d thought she did, but now that she was here … Not even a little bit.

  The cramped-looking bungalow, its yellow paint not quite negating the impression of darkness from within, glowered at her. The blank, empty windows piercing the facade reminded her of the multiple eyes of some malevolent insect. No one would want to go in there.

  No one. “How did you know I wanted to see inside?” she stalled.

  The girl smiled. “I watch people’s eyes. When I take their picture, when they look at my pictures.”

  She smoothed Rascal’s ear. “Yours, they look at the house like they want to … like they want to invade it.”

  I’ve come all this way, Lizzie told herself, still eyeing the place reluctantly. Really, it looked …

  “And I have,” the girl offered brightly, “the key!”

  “Okay,” said Lizzie reluctantly. She was a cop, after all. An experienced flic who could take care of herself. “Lead on.”

  Inside, the house smelled of dampness, of rooms unheated and sink traps with water standing too long in them. A front hall held a coat tree with a blue cotton jacket hung on it, a table bearing a jug of long-dead flowers, and a wicker basket full of sympathy cards.

  On the loss of your wife … The cards’ front illustrations were of somber skyscapes, lone doves, and funeral-tinted blooms, purple iris and marine-blue roses. The house had been empty for months, yet no one had touched them or anything else, it seemed.

  “This way!” the girl called from the front parlor; Lizzie followed to where a worn brown recliner, a large, not-very-new TV, and a red velvet settee made up the furnishings. On the walls, framed cross-stitched portraits depicted various saints; a white china statue of the Virgin Mary’s veiled head rested in a nest of spun glass on the mantelpiece. On the hearth sat a grate-fronted propane heater.

  Rascal sniffed uneasily, then sat, plopping himself down on the tan rug with a resigned groan. You and me both, buddy, Lizzie thought. In the kitchen, more evidence of a solitary life: one plate, one cup, one set of cutlery on the drainboard.

  A saucepan on the stove held the gray powder residue of water heated a cup at a time, morning after morning, likely for the instant coffee a jar of which now held a solid, blackish lump that stuck to the glass like hardened molasses.

  The bathroom: no shade on the lightbulb over the sink, a worndown toothbrush, and a single towel. It struck Lizzie that if she had to live like this day after day, she might start thinking of a way out, too. Only not if she thought the act would condemn her to a fiery eternity …

  Or if it meant I’d never see Dylan again. The thought caught her unprepared, showing her the painful truth of what she’d been trying so hard to ignore: that he’d been lying to her again, that he’d been looking her in the eye and lying.

  By omission, at least. And that it was killing her. Grimly she turned from the thought, back to the business of today.

  “How did he do it?” she murmured. “How did he—”

  The girl looked up from the counter’s sad kit of dishware. She’d been eyeing it with calculation; for a photograph, perhaps.

  “He hung himself. In there.” She angled her dark head at the only room they hadn’t entered. “From the bedroom door.”

  The girl hadn’t asked why Lizzie wanted to come in here. Too young to be suspicious of others’ motives, she was so curious and eager about everything herself that it probably didn’t occur to her that not everyone else was.

  Or that their motives might be other than artistic. “How come you have a key?” Lizzie asked, approaching the door from whose knob Fontine must’ve suspended the rope.

  Then he’d have thrown the looped end over the other side, stood on a chair, and—

  The victim’s feet only had to be a couple of inches off the floor, she knew from unhappy professional experience. She stepped into the room.

  “He gave it to me,” the girl replied. “He just wanted someone to have one, for safety’s sake, he said. In case he was ever away and needed someone to go in. He had my phone number to call, if that ever happened,” she said from the kitchen.

  “So you haven’t been in here since he—”

  Since he strangled himself to death instead of taking his planned trip. It was another thought worth turning away from: a long, fast drop from a height was one thing. With any luck, the sudden stop would kill you instantly.

  But kicking away a chair was something else again.

  “No” came the girl’s voice, along with the sound of cabinet doors opening and closing; very curious, apparently.

  “No one has. He had no one. I wanted to come in, but I was afraid to, alone. Or—not afraid, exactly. Just …”

  Yeah. Just. In the bedroom all the dead man’s things were where he’d left them: Shoes. Belt. A black leather-bound prayer book lay on the bedside table next to a long-silent windup alarm clock.

  She turned, taking it in: A small deckle-edged mass card was tucked into the prayer book to mark a place; a rosary lay beside it. A ceramic crucifix with a dried palm frond stuck behind it hung over the head of the bed.

  On the dresser lay a manila folder. Inside: a set of papers for new federal employees. From what Lizzie could gather, the man who had lived here had just become a U.S. border crossing guard. But two weeks before the start date noted in the paperwork, he’d decided to put a rope around his neck instead.

  A cry of surprise came from the kitchen. Closing the folder, Lizzie hurried out to where the girl stared into an open utility closet whose door had been camouflaged by the faded wallpaper.

  The door covering matched the walls, and the door itself fitted so closely that no gap had showed. Lizzie had walked right by it, not even realizing it was there.

  And except for the dead man, no one else had, either, at least to judge by the amount of weaponry in it. Two shotguns, a rifle, several handguns, plus boxes of ammo on shelves …

  “Oh,” the girl murmured. “I had no idea of this … No idea at all …”

  An ex-policeman might very well keep such an arsenal, Lizzie supposed, especially if he hunted for sport, as so many Maine men seemed to. The shotguns for birds, the rifle for deer …

  And since he had lived here alone, perhaps he saw no reason to lock his guns up. But …

  “Go on outside, okay?” she told the girl, whose dark eyes were now full of worry. “It’s all right, you’re not going to get in any trouble. Take the dog, too, and put him in my vehicle.”

  Looking relieved to have something to do, the girl obeyed while Lizzie pulled out her cell phone. What she needed, she supposed, was the Van Buren cops to come and take possession of all these weapons; they couldn’t be left in an unsecured house.

  Punching in 911, she described where she was and what she had found. What she did not say, however, was that as far as she was concerned, Cody Chevrier’s suspicions had just been proven correct in at least one instance. Michael Fontine had not killed himself with a rope, a doorknob, and a kitchen chair.

  No one with all those guns would decide instead to torture himself to death. Nor, at least as far as she was concerned, had he done it by any other method; he was just too deeply religious.

  But that wasn’t the point. Michael Fontine had ended up hanging from a rope, and to her mind, someone else had almost certainly put him there.

  Thinking this, she was about to tuck the phone away when it thweeped at her; probably that 911 staffer calling back, she thought, and punched the answer key without lo
oking.

  But instead a familiar voice spoke. “Lizzie? Don’t you ever answer your phone? I’ve been trying to call you all—”

  “Get to it, okay?” she snapped. “I’m a little busy here.”

  A patrol car pulled up out front. Through the kitchen window, Lizzie watched two officers begin the trudge up to the house.

  “Anyone in there?” The first officer reached the front door, yelled in through it, then pounded on the frame.

  A garbled sputter came from the officer’s radio. “Yes, in here,” she called back. Then into the phone:

  “What? Say again, please, Dylan, I—”

  “Lizzie, I think Nicki might’ve been found. This time for real.”

  TEN

  “What’s happened? Are you sure it’s her? Is she all right?” It was nearly three in the afternoon, the snow-filled sky already beginning to get dark, when she got back to Bearkill and found Dylan and Chevrier in her office.

  They didn’t look happy. And Dylan hadn’t said they’d found Nicki alive …

  Dylan got up. “Hey. Good to see you’re in one piece.”

  But that was all; no smile, no warmth. She looked a question at him; no response. “What’s going on?”

  They had a DeLorme map book open to the page detailing the area just north of Bearkill. “Maine DEA had a plane up there in connection with the meth bust this morning,” said Chevrier.

  “Meth cook operations make heat, so they use infrared cameras to look for heat sources that shouldn’t be there,” he added.

  She frowned. “Wouldn’t the flyovers alert people, defeat the purpose?”

  Chevrier shook his head. “There’s quite a few airfields in the area, some municipal and some private. Small aircraft traffic is pretty common.”

  He put his index finger on the map. “And they got a signal right about … here.” He pointed at a circled area. “Maybe half an hour, forty minutes away in good weather? More, though, on a day like today.”

  Dylan took up the story again. “But what the flyover picked up doesn’t look like a meth cook, or a grow operation like you’d see with marijuana. The heat signature for either one of those is pretty recognizable.”

  He turned to her. “This was hotter. Like, say, a campfire.”

  She felt her shoulders slump, fatigue washing over her. But with it came a pulse of anger; they’d rushed her back here for this? “So what? Somebody’s out there hunting or—”

  “No.” Chevrier sounded certain. “The flyovers started last week, getting ready for this morning, and they’ve gotten the same kind of signal in the same place every time.”

  He looked up at her. “This is no hunter, and it isn’t any temporary camp for a backwoods hiker out there, either. Somebody is living there.”

  She sank into a chair, unconvinced. “Fine. I still don’t see why you’re so sure a child is—”

  Dylan pulled photographs from a manila envelope. “These are why. Flyover photographs of the site.”

  He spread grainy blowups in front of her: bright human shapes, like glowing ghosts. From their relative sizes, it was clear that two adults and two children were at the camp, the smallest one being held in the arms of one of the grown-ups.

  “I sent that down to Augusta, they can fine-tune the detail in photos like this. They take an unsub”—unidentified subject, he meant—“run algorithms to get a pretty accurate read on the subject’s height, weight, and so on.”

  Chevrier took up the recital. “The Brantwell baby had a medical checkup last week, and a lot of those measurements were documented. They wouldn’t have changed much in a few days, and after comparisons, it looks as if that’s him in the photo.”

  “And the other child?” she managed, her mouth suddenly dry. After all this time, could it really be—

  “Uh-huh,” said Dylan. “They can’t be certain, of course, but it sure looks to the techs like that’s a little girl out there, from her size maybe nine or ten years old. Lizzie, it could be that we’ve found her.”

  She couldn’t speak. Chevrier went on into the silence. “And d’you see that little rectangle there?”

  He pointed out a bright spot. “That’s a solar panel. It means whoever it is has power, maybe not a lot but some. He could be monitoring radio transmissions, maybe Internet, too.”

  He pulled on his heavy jacket. “Right now the state police, warden service, and Border Patrol … they’re all waiting to go in. But there’s more snow forecast, getting dark. So they’re waiting for daylight. Safer that way, I guess.”

  He snapped the strap of his fur-lined hat under his chin. “Personally, I’d be going now. Not that far, snow hasn’t had a chance to pile up too bad … and hey, maybe it’ll slow down.”

  “Nope,” said a new voice from behind them. “I just saw the radar on TV a few minutes ago. It’s going to snow like hell.”

  It was Missy Brantwell, and from the look on her face she had been listening for a while. Long enough, anyway:

  “He’s out there, isn’t he?”

  She took a shuddering breath. “My baby’s out there,” she took another breath, “and you’re not going to go get him?”

  She advanced on Chevrier. “You’re just going to leave him there? In the woods, with that …”

  Dylan stepped quickly between Chevrier and the young woman, her eyes wild and her face blotchy with weeping.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s not impossible now, but it is nearly dark, it is snowing, and if we go at him the wrong way, whoever he’s got there could get hurt, even the baby might be injured.”

  Or killed, he didn’t say. He didn’t have to.

  “We don’t even know who the guy is out there, what he wants or exactly where they are,” he went on. “The aerial shots narrow it down, but we’ll need to pinpoint—”

  Missy’s expression became one of wretched amusement. “You don’t, huh?” She let out a ghastly chuckle. “You don’t know who he is. Or where he is.”

  She was wearing a thick black down jacket, a red wool hat, black quilted ski pants, and thick laced boots. “Well, I do. Who he is, what he thinks …”

  “How would you know all that?” Lizzie demanded.

  Missy stared back. “Because he’s Jeffrey’s father.”

  Steeling herself, she went on. “Two years ago I spent three months with him out there at his camp.”

  She peered at the map. “Yep, that’s it. A summer playing house in the forest. True love, you know?” she asked bitterly.

  Yeah. Yeah, I do, thought Lizzie as the girl went on: “So I know him. I know all about him. I just didn’t know he knew I’d had Jeffrey …”

  “Because if he did know, he’d try to take the baby?” Lizzie guessed. Since after all, it seemed that he had.

  Missy nodded. “Daniel—that’s his name—he wanted a child. Boy or girl, it didn’t matter. He wanted a kid to raise up in the right way, he said. To live off the land, be independent.”

  But at the thought, her composure deserted her. “God,” she cried, “what kind of idiot thinks a baby can live off the land?”

  That explained why she didn’t want to tell anyone who her child’s father was, Lizzie realized; so the father wouldn’t learn about the baby, himself. But now—

  “How do you think he found out?” Lizzie asked.

  “Or maybe he did know,” Chevrier put in. “Are you sure he never saw you with Jeffrey? Does he ever come into town?”

  The girl nodded miserably. “He does. I guess he could have seen me and figured it out. At first I was really careful, but then as time went by and nothing happened …”

  Chevrier nodded. “Sure. You quit worrying so much. It’s just human nature.”

  Then he turned to Dylan and Lizzie. “But Missy’s right, an infant in the wilderness would be a hard project. So maybe he was waiting. Let Missy do the difficult stuff, let the kid get a little bigger, you know? And easier to take care of?”

  Missy laughed bitterly in agreement. “Sounds right to me.
He waited until it was convenient for him to—”

  “I don’t know,” Lizzie interrupted, unconvinced. “If he was going to wait until it was easier, why not wait until spring?”

  She looked around at the others. “I mean, what if he has a reason to want the baby now? Some reason why he can’t wait? If he is planning to leave the area, for instance. He could be getting ready to go right this minute, before the snow really gets cranked up.”

  “Maybe,” Chevrier allowed. “But we don’t know that. Missy,” he added, “we’re going to sit you down with some—”

  Detectives, profilers, maybe a sketch artist, too, Lizzie thought. Kidnapping was a federal crime. But the girl jerked away.

  “Don’t you touch me,” she snarled at Chevrier. “You think I’ll sit around answering questions while you leave my baby boy out there?”

  She backed toward the door. “Well, forget it. I’m going to get him right now. Daniel might think he can take care of a baby out there in the woods in the middle of a snowstorm, but I’m not sitting around waiting to find out if he’s right.”

  “That’s really his name?” Lizzie asked, trying to stall the girl. “Daniel?”

  “Yes, that’s really his name, as in Boone. Perfect for a wilderness enthusiast, huh? The kind of person who prides himself on being able to live out there in the deep woods without modern conveniences.”

  “I see,” Lizzie replied, thinking, Keep her talking. “So he really can live off the land, then?”

  The girl nodded. “Uh-huh. And off a few scavenged things now and then. He’s actually kind of brilliant at it.”

  Great, a brilliant kidnapper, just what we need. But as long as Missy was still here talking, she wasn’t out there freezing to death in the woods.

  Or getting killed by her ex-boyfriend. “And,” Lizzie said, “this Daniel, he was a nice guy? Or he was at first, anyway?”

  Missy’s face softened. “Uh-huh. At first he was wonderful. But …” Her expression said that later, things changed, big-time.

  “I left as soon as I thought I might be pregnant. He got so intense. He thinks he’s the lord of the forest out there.”