“Yeah,” Maggie replied. “Our talisman.”
If there was more to tell him, Maggie couldn’t think of what it might be. Neal reached out, took the evidence bag, and looked it over for a long moment of consideration. “Okay,” he said with a nod. “So, what do you have in mind?”
Maggie shrugged. “I guess you’d call it a stake out.”
“A stake out,” Neal echoed. “Sounds like pretty standard stuff.”
“Standard as it gets,” Maggie replied.
Neal nodded. “If you need me, radio.”
“I will,” she replied, “if I need you. But if I don’t, Neal, promise me that once you’re done with Desilva, you’ll get some sleep.”
For a moment, Neal looked like he might have some sparkling reply, but when he opened his mouth to respond, nothing came out. A deep frown crept across his face, and for a moment, the exhaustion and anxiety of the case seemed to turn his laugh lines into wrinkles before Maggie’s eyes. She’d worked for Neal for just over a decade, and he had never once looked his age to her. But now, as he handed the lock of hair back to her, Neal looked for the first time like a man who was struggling to keep up, a man who would one day have to rest. The thought left Maggie feeling hollow. Finally, Neal patted her shoulder. “It’s gonna be a cold one, Maggie. Take a Thermos of black coffee.”
“Heck, I’ll take two, boss man,” she replied, and with that, Neal was gone.
It was full dark by the time Maggie pulled into the parking lot next to the school playground. She caught the news at the top of the hour from a local station. The evening temperature was just 18 degrees, and it would be dropping throughout the night. Regardless of the cold and the dark, Maggie still found a handful of neighborhood kids tearing around the playground in a game of something that vacillated between hide and seek and a snowball fight. Over the course of the next half hour, Maggie watched as the cold slowly weeded the group down one by one until finally the last of them abandoned the playground and left Maggie alone with the cold and the darkness.
For the first hour or so, Maggie kept an eye on the tree line of the woods between the school and the edge of the Little Horn River and did two of the hardest things she had to do in her job—she waited, and she watched. Early in her career, when she and Neal had been staking out a local drug dealer, Neal had broken a long silence with a comment that Maggie hoped she’d never forget. “Deputy,” he told her, “after twenty years in law enforcement, I’ve come to find that when nothing happens, it always happens in spades.” For a long time, nothing happened in spades. From time to time, radio chatter broke the silence in Maggie’s cruiser. Someone called in a prowler downtown, but when Henry checked it out, it was just a couple teenagers with a six-pack an older brother had given them as “an early Christmas present.” Someone else called in a possible burglary that ended up being some visiting relatives with Indiana plates that had apparently seemed very suspicious to the caller. Another call came in to report carolers out in one of the moneyed neighborhoods near the hospital. There was no mistaken identity here, just a caller who didn’t care for “a bunch of screeching about nonsense.” All in all, it was a typical night in Burgettsville.
Though Maggie didn’t regret missing any of these calls in particular, some part of her couldn’t help but envy the fact that Henry was at least chasing red herrings that made sense. Maggie, on the other hand, found herself going through weird notes about “ectoplasm” and “funnel ghosts.” As the night wore on, she found herself wondering what in the world she should even be looking out for. While the description of the apparition she’d gotten from Holly had been clear enough, Maggie’s own natural skepticism kept her from drawing any picture too vividly in her mind. In the years that Maggie had been working the graveyard shift, she’d never seen anything she could be sure was a ghost, though she’d dealt with more than a few terrified citizens who were certain that’s exactly what they had seen. Maggie never knew for sure what to expect on the graveyard shift, and as the hours passed, she found herself wondering if there was really anything at all out there in the dark.
By midnight, Maggie was nearly dropping off in her cruiser, so she got out to stretch her legs. The cold day had given way to a frigid night, and a stiff, dry wind woke Maggie up as soon as she stepped out of the car. It was a cloudless night, and the moon was waxing gibbous, so Maggie didn’t need her flashlight as she left the parking lot and crossed the playground. When she reached the edge of the woods, Maggie snapped on her Maglite and trudged into the trees.
The woods led downhill no more than fifteen or twenty feet before Maggie reached the water’s edge. She panned the bright white beam of her Maglite all around in the trees, and she found herself almost laughing at the thought of someone finding her there. You looking for criminals tonight, Deputy Dell? No, huh? Just ghosts? Carry on. Maggie pushed her way through some dried-out shrubs that lined the edge of the woods and stepped down onto the stony embankment at the river’s edge.
Though she knew that the temperature had been steadily dropping, she was nevertheless surprised for a moment to find that the Little Horn had at least partially frozen. Though black patches of unfrozen water still slithered down the center of the waterway, long patches of ice crowded the bank. Maggie tested the ice at the edge of the water with one foot, and it held up. As she stood shivering at the water’s edge, Maggie peered upriver toward downtown. In the moonlight, the frozen surface of the Little Horn almost seemed to glow as if lit from underneath.
About a quarter mile downriver, Christmas lights twinkled along the length of the South Street Bridge. The holiday decorations on the bridge had been a tradition in town since Jerry had been a kid, and the sight always made Maggie think of her first visit to Briarwood County over Christmas of their junior year. At the time, she and Jerry had been together for a year, and though they still had a way to go until graduation, there were already talking about their plans for after school. Jerry had always intended to come home to Briarwood County. To Jerry, Columbus had been the big city, and as he showed Maggie around Burgettsville on that first visit, she sensed how much he wanted to impress her.
In the seven years since she’d lost Jerry, Maggie had learned to reflect on her memories of him without losing herself in her sorrow. On this night, however, her mind wandered from the thought of kissing Jerry under the South Street Bridge to the conversation she’d had with Jake Harriman and what he’d said about Jerry’s death. If I’d known how it was going to shake out with Jeffers, I’d have happily put a slug in his brain. As surprising as it was to hear such a thing out of a stranger’s mouth, it was far from the first time she’d heard a similar sentiment from someone she barely knew. During Jeffers’ trial, Maggie was approached by enough strangers who shared their hope for a death penalty conviction that she became almost inured to the sentiment.
What Maggie didn’t share with any of these vengeful well-wishers was the fact that for the first few months after Jerry’s death, she had fantasized incessantly about killing Taggart Jeffers herself. These were no mere passing fancies. These were fantasies so fully imagined they could almost be called plans. Before Jeffers’ trial, she imagined herself going to the courthouse in her smartest suit—the same dark gray one she had worn for her interview with Neal Graham only four years previous. She would be wearing the tiny string of pearls Jerry had bought for her birthday their first year together, back before he realized that Maggie rarely wore jewelry, and never pearls. To finish the outfit, Maggie would be wearing the shoulder holster she had inherited from her Uncle Will.
Maggie shivered at the water’s edge remembering how vividly she’d seen it play out in her head. In the past year, the department had switched from revolvers to the fancy little 9mm semi-automatic Glocks that Neal was so enthusiastic about. “They can shoot underwater, Maggie!” he’d told her as he pushed the ugly little chunk of black plastic across his desk to her. “Underwater!”
But back in ‘83, Maggie hadn’t been fantasizing about a g
arish piece of space-age polymer. In her mind, she saw herself sliding her uncle’s Smith and Wesson Model 40 into her shoulder holster. Prior to meeting Jerry Dell, Maggie’s uncle Will had been one of the few good men Maggie had ever had in her life. Will had been the youngest of three brothers, and the only one of the Hayes boys to be worth a plugged nickel. It had been Will who had stepped into the vacancy left by Maggie’s father during the many breaks he took from family life to disappear into a bottle. The Model 40 was the same weapon Will had used to teach Maggie to shoot, and when he’d dropped dead of a brain aneurysm at the unconscionably young age of thirty-eight, the gun and its holster was one of the few possessions Will left behind. Had her father been any less lost in booze, he likely would have stepped in and tried to take the weapon for himself, but since he responded to his brother’s death with the same escape mechanism with which he responded to all stressors, he was nowhere to be seen in the weeks after Will’s funeral when Maggie’s grandmother had given her the Smith & Wesson.
And so it was that Maggie Hayes had become the only fifteen-year-old girl she knew whose prized possession was a snub-nosed revolver. That same revolver would serve her well as a widow. Could she get it into the courtroom? With her badge, it wasn’t out of the question. Maggie fantasized about watching the bailiff lead Jeffers in. She would let the bastard sit for just a few minutes thinking about the charges, about whether or not he could beat them. Then, when she was good and ready, she would move calmly but quickly down the aisle, through the swinging door and out of the gallery. She would circle the defendant’s desk and face Jeffers. She would let him see the Smith and Wesson for just a moment, and though she knew it could only be the briefest of moments, it was one which she had played over in her mind on a seemingly endless loop. The first instant of confusion. Then the look of recognition. Then panic, and with it, a microsecond of hope that the bailiff might reach her in time, that escape might somehow be possible.
That was the moment. That’s when Maggie would stroke the trigger and bring the hammer down. After that, there would be that brief ripple of hot gases through which everything would be momentarily distorted, and then Taggart Jeffers would be no more. How many other details had Maggie imagined? Too many too count. Nights alone in her bed, a fresh widow with her toddler sleeping in a crib she’d moved into the master bedroom because of her fear that something would come out of the night and steal him away as well, Maggie had considered the shot in impossible detail. Hovering between consciousness and sleep, she’d pictured the round, a .38 special wadcutter that would shatter Jeffers’s forehead like glass, then expand on its way through his gray matter until it punched a hole the size of Maggie’s fist out of the back of his skull. She’d imagined the fan of blood that would spray into the gallery, the white clots of brain spattered across the carpet, and the bits of bone so small and numerous that even a month later janitors vacuuming the room would hear something rattle its way up into the bag and assume they had caught a tiny pebble or glass fragment someone had tracked in from the outdoors on their shoe.
But for all the lost sleep and the hours spent fantasizing about violence, Maggie kept her rage in check. On the first day of the trial, she left her .38 at home and went to the courthouse to sit with Jerry’s mother, Linda, and watch the wheels of justice slowly spin. Taggart’s wife, Alice, attended every day of the trial as well. The Jeffers had one adult daughter, but word around town was that their relationship had been strained for years, and that Taggart’s arrest had ended it completely. As it happened, Linda and Alice attended the same church, and though they weren’t anything more than nodding acquaintances, Linda heard through shared friends that Alice was shattered by what had happened and was nearing the end of her rope.
The trial started on a Monday. At first, Maggie didn’t let herself so much as glance in Alice’s direction, but when she finally did, she saw a grief writ large in the woman’s eyes that she recognized instantly. By Wednesday, Maggie had reached out to Alice through Linda, and by the end of the week, she and Linda sat side by side with Alice in the gallery. When the final statements were made and the jury returned their verdict, Maggie held Alice’s hand as her husband was sentenced to ten years. Maggie let Alice cry on her shoulder. She hugged her and told her it would be okay, that everything would be okay, and when Alice told her through sobs that she was sorry, so terribly, terribly sorry, Maggie told her she was forgiven.
Standing there at the edge of the frozen Little Horn River, Maggie shivered and blinked away the tears that arose as much from the cold wind as they did from sorrow, and she considered that day. It had been true. Maggie had forgiven Alice. She had even forgiven Taggart. She took the counsel of her minister and the counselor she saw for a few months after the accident. Maggie forgave the Jeffers family, and she forgave Fate and whatever might be overseeing the unrelenting gears that drove the meat grinder of human experience. Be it the Christian God that Pastor Johnson talked about on Sunday morning or someone else’s god or gods altogether, Maggie forgave them all. In her rational mind, Maggie knew there was no way to carry her anger forward and survive from day to day as a mother, a police officer, or even as a human being, so her rational mind forgave and let the anger go.
However, her rational mind didn’t run the show entirely—not every day, and certainly not on bad nights, the nights when sleep eluded her, and the walls and ceiling closed in around her. On those nights, Maggie shoved her rational mind way down into her guts and let the beast rise back up, the angry, wounded animal that had given up on its own survival and wanted only to dish out as much pain as it could before oblivion. On those nights, Maggie returned to the courtroom, and instead of watching the trial play out, she arose from her seat in the gallery, strode down the aisle and circled the defendant’s table. Taggart Jeffers’s face had changed now. Instead of the spiteful expression Maggie had imagined him wearing before the trial, his face was now awash with the same mournful look he’d worn every day in court— a haggard look that bespoke years of self-neglect and a regret so overwhelming that even Maggie had pitied him. Nevertheless, in her mind, she still drew her weapon, leveled the sights on his forehead and pressed the muzzle in close enough to singe his flesh with the muzzle flash, and then she dropped the hammer.
Maggie was thinking about forgiveness and about vengeance when the sound of the wind started to change. At first, it sounded only like a slight swell, a stiffening breeze, and Maggie hardly noticed it at all. It was only when her thoughts came back from Taggart Jeffers and she remembered what had brought her to the Little Horn that night that she noticed something guttural about the sound. Something human. Maggie jerked out of her reverie and turned to face the moan that arose from the shadows downstream.
The gray woman arose from the frozen river slowly, as if she were being conjured up from the ice by the wind itself. She appeared at roughly a walking pace, as if she were ascending a basement staircase that led somehow down into the river, but she was not walking. The woman drifted up and up, until she stood at roughly the same height Maggie remembered her standing in life.
It was Lucinda, of course. Maggie recognized her from the many times she’d seen her around town. It had been no more than a month before that the two had last crossed paths in the Piggly Wiggly. Maggie had recalled the moment often since the morning of Lucinda’s death, so the image was vivid in her mind. Lucinda had just left frozen foods and was turning toward produce. Her cart was loaded with groceries, and there in the seat before her sat Allie. Lucinda was whispering something to the girl, and she made a silly face to go with it. Whatever she’d said had delighted Allie, and the girl dissolved into the kind of completely uninhibited laughter that only a four-year-old could produce.
As the two crossed Maggie’s path and headed into produce, neither gave her as much as a sidelong glance, but Maggie certainly noticed them. Maggie had only recently heard about Lucinda’s separation from her husband, and while she tried not to pay any mind to the gossips in Burgettsville, s
he had heard that her husband was making it as hard on her as he could. Maggie had known for years about Lucinda’s past troubles, about her partying and the scrapes she’d had with the law in her youth. In a small town like Burgettsville, stories of that sort had a tendency to stick on a person, particularly a young woman, and as Maggie watched Lucinda laughing with her daughter, she felt a sudden spasm of anger for every gossipy word she’d ever heard about the mother who she now saw before her. Maggie knew what Lucinda was up against. She’d sat in more than one seminar about addiction, and she knew the odds addicts faced in regard to relapse and recidivism. Somehow, those odds only made the image of Lucinda and Allie all the more magnificent to Maggie. She would make it. She had to make it. Something way down in Maggie’s guts dug its heels in and wouldn’t allow her to think otherwise.
Now here was Lucinda in the darkness at the frozen edge of Little Horn River, arising out of the ice as if shadows were somehow knitting themselves together into human form. In life, Lucinda’s hair had been auburn. Tonight, at the water’s edge, it looked gray, just as Holly had claimed, and it hung down in a nest of tangles that draped down to her shoulders, then continued along the rest of her body like some ancient winding cloth. The cloth was gray. Her skin was gray.
She was the gray woman.
“Baby,” she called, her voice a guttural moan. “My baby. My baby!” Even Lucinda’s voice was gray. Maggie braced herself at the sight of the approaching specter. The weeping woman had arrived, and as she drifted up the frozen riverbank, she raised her hands up in a gesture of abject supplication.
“My baby! My baby!”
“I’m sorry,” Maggie whispered. The sound of her own voice somehow surprised Maggie, and she spoke again to assert herself in the moment. “I’m so sorry, Lucinda,” she said. “I don’t have your baby.” Her hands were already shaking in the cold, but Maggie pulled off her right glove and reached a fumbling hand into her coat pocket. Lucinda continued forward, and by the time Maggie had produced the object from her pocket and held it up, she stood directly before her, close enough to touch.
Wicked Winters Page 24