Cold Wind

by Paige Shelton

  “Can I help you two?” Donner said distractedly.

  “Any chance we can talk to both you and Gril?” I said.

  Donner looked back toward Gril’s open door. Gril stood up behind his desk, his phone’s handset to his ear, and signaled us in. We made our way, crowding the small office.

  “What’s up?” he said, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. “I’m on hold.”

  “We have some things we think you should know,” Orin said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “The Hortons,” Orin said.

  “The folks who lived in the house that burned down? Yes. You said you were looking for them in an apartment building in New York,” Gril said.

  Orin nodded. “Still didn’t find them, but the building’s landlord did just call me back. Their apartment has been empty all these years.”

  “Both theirs and Randy’s apartments have been empty?”

  “Yes.”

  He held up a finger. “Gril Samuels from Benedict. I need to talk to Christine. All right. I’m returning her call. I need to talk to her ASAP. Have her call when she can. Thanks.”

  Gril hung up the phone. “So, Randy and his missing wife are listed as the owners of an apartment in New York City. The Hortons are also listed as owners of an apartment in New York City. Neither family has lived in their apartment for a long time?”

  Orin and I nodded.

  “The apartments are located close to each other. The families might have known each other?” Gril asked Orin.

  “Hard not to wonder. I need to talk to Randy about that. He should be back soon.”

  I raised my hand. The three men looked at me.

  “I think it’s time for me to confess something,” I said.

  Gril’s expressions quickly spanned a spectrum, ending in irritated doubt. “What?”

  “I saw something. I shouldn’t have, but, nevertheless, I did.” I cleared my throat. “I saw some toothbrushes.”

  “What?” Donner said.

  “And three beds,” I said.

  “Spill it, Beth,” Donner said, sounding even less patient than Gril looked.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry, but I trespassed on Randy’s property yesterday, early. I saw some things.”

  Donner and Gril made noises that I purposefully ignored.

  Orin looked at me and smiled. “Atta girl,” he said. “Att-a girl.”

  “I’ll tell you the details, but there’s more. I went to Tex Southern’s house to check on the girls. I saw something that might have been a big old freezer. I told Viola. Did she come talk to you?”

  “Yes,” Gril said. He looked at Donner.

  “I was going to head out there this morning,” Donner said.

  “Viola said she was going to check on it, too,” Gril said.

  They looked at me, waiting.

  “Right. Okay. I know you probably saw the three beds in the loft,” I said.

  “Sure. Randy said he sometimes sleeps up there. Many cabins have lofts, makes it easier when you’re having visitors. Randy said the space heaters keep it warmer up there.”

  “Were the clothes all his?” I asked.

  “There was nothing to indicate they weren’t,” Gril said.

  “I opened the medicine cabinet. There were three toothbrushes inside it. Is … is that normal for some people? Three toothbrushes? One adult size; two were smaller and pink.”

  “I didn’t notice the toothbrushes, but I didn’t look in the medicine cabinet. We’ll ask Randy. Donner, head out to Brayn now. I doubt the freezer is anything, but I think it’s time we insist upon knowing who the girls’ mother is, or who their mothers are.”

  “Wait!” I said.

  Gril and Donner weren’t happy. Orin just smiled at me again.

  “I suspect we’ve all had this thought, but do you think the Horton girl whose body they couldn’t find survived that fire? What if she, Annie, is actually a Horton?”

  “The thought seems to be solidifying some. Son of a bitch.” Gril stood and grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair. “Let’s both go, Donner.”

  A few seconds later, after a whirlwind of gathering guns and coats, Gril and Donner were gone, the sound of Gril’s truck engine firing up and rumbling away. Orin and I stood in the office, alone.

  “I’ll be,” Orin said. “You are full of surprises.”

  “Why would Randy have three toothbrushes?”

  “I admit, that’s weird, but maybe not, Beth. It could just be the way it is. I keep my old toothbrushes to use to clean other things.”

  “Me too, but I don’t keep them with the toothbrush I use on my teeth.”

  Orin nodded. “I just don’t know.”

  “You need to get back to the library,” I said.

  “I do. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. It seems as if I’ve managed to send a group of people out to Brayn. I feel like I should go, too.”

  “I hate to sound like your parent, but I wouldn’t if I were you. The snow is only going to get worse today. Wait for Gril to come back. I bet he tells you what’s going on. All you’ll have to do is ask him.”

  I’d promised Ellen I’d take her to the knitting class anyway.

  We walked outside together and said goodbye. I watched as Orin drove away and stuck his arm out to wave. I looked up at the cloudy sky. It wasn’t dark like night, but dark enough not to feel like day. I shivered, though I wasn’t terribly cold.

  I wouldn’t drive out to Brayn, not today, but I had another idea. Maybe the coming storm wouldn’t be too much of a detriment.

  Thirty

  I didn’t regret leaving Lane’s house the night before. I wasn’t going to apologize to him. If I ran into him again today, on or near his own property, I was more than prepared to behave with zero shame. I’d been bothered and I wanted to leave—I didn’t need to explain myself.

  I was still curious, though. This time, I left a message for Viola, letting her, letting someone, know what I was doing: that I was driving out toward where the mudslide had occurred.

  I had snowshoes in my truck. I had enough winter gear that I wouldn’t freeze to death. At least not right away. This time I wasn’t going to go inside the shed, because there would be no shed to go into; it was in shambles. I wouldn’t go inside any structure I came upon.

  As I drove my truck past the places I had passed by more times over the last few days than in all my days before in Benedict, the snow began to fall again. Big, sticky flakes that accumulated quickly. I looked toward the Petition, and then Randy’s house. He wasn’t home; he might not have made it back from Juneau yet. I was glad the body wasn’t his wife’s, but who in the world was she, this woman who’d been strangled and then hidden away in a frozen grave before being deposited in an old trapper’s shed?

  And where was Wanda? Just because the body found in the shed wasn’t hers didn’t mean she wasn’t out there somewhere, buried or frozen. Lots of bodies got lost in Alaska.

  It was an odd setup inside Randy’s house, but that could mean nothing at all. It could just be the way Randy lived, like Gril said. Maybe he slept in the loft sometimes because it was warmer up there. Maybe he alternated between all the beds and three different toothbrushes, two of them pink. We all had our habits and rituals.

  Even if he didn’t learn about my trespassing, I wondered if I’d be able to look Randy in the eyes again. Would he sense that I’d invaded his space? Would Gril or Donner tell him? Gril might not be done talking to me about it. I felt guilty.

  Mill wouldn’t feel guilty. She wouldn’t be bothered at all. She would say something like, “I just looked. I didn’t touch or destroy anything. I just fucking looked. No harm done.”

  I continued through the snow, and my tires cut a fresh path down the old logging road. I stopped the truck near the collapsed shed and left the engine running again. If Lane wanted to come talk to me, he could. I wasn’t going to hide from him.

  I stepped out of the truck, slipped
on the snowshoes, and made my way, awkwardly, toward the gravestones. I realized quickly that the snowshoes might have been overkill, but I needed practice walking with them anyway.

  I’d gotten in better shape, but I wasn’t in snowshoe shape. You’d think that something used to make walking through snow easier wouldn’t require an extra dose of energy. But by the time I made it to the graves, I was breathing heavily, and warmth had spread underneath my heavy clothing. I slipped out of the snowshoes and dropped to my knees next to the stones. All Lane had said was that family was buried here; it looked as if there were three graves. There were three different stones, the tallest jutting up from the ground a couple of feet. I dug away about seven inches of snow to expose the front.

  All three stones were as is; the edges hadn’t been carved or rounded or shaped, and only the front of one was remedially engraved with sparse information.

  The middle stone read “Beloved Wife.” The left stone didn’t have any visible carving, but the right one did. It read “Together forever.”

  “Who’s together forever?” I said aloud. If this was Lane’s wife, did the epitaph mean that he would be buried here, too, when he died?

  I studied the stones a long time, making sure I wasn’t missing anything important, but found nothing else.

  I looked up and around. There was nothing peaceful about this small cemetery. Nothing violent, either. Only sadness and loneliness, desolation. The ground would freeze solid in the deep winter. I’d heard someone mention that sometimes bodies had to wait until the spring thaw to be buried. Had the body in the shed not shown signs of strangulation, I wondered if that conclusion would have been reached—that she’d been someone who passed in the winter, and for whatever reason, she hadn’t been able to get a proper burial.

  I looked toward Lane’s house but couldn’t see it.

  When I heard a snap that sounded like a twig breaking, my head jerked around and I looked into the dark woods. Hemlock and spruce trees packed in tightly. I squinted and scanned.

  At first I didn’t spot anything unusual. I slipped my feet back into the snowshoes. I wasn’t sure if I could move more quickly with them or without them, but I didn’t want to try to carry them.

  Just as I stood straight up, I saw something—the same color and shape I’d seen three other times.

  The last time I’d seen it—just this morning, seemingly looking at me though my bedroom window at the Benedict House—I’d panicked. I’d had to call my mother. This time, I swallowed some of that same panic. Whoever was out there, it wasn’t Travis Walker. It simply didn’t make sense. Mill had pointed that out, and she’d been right.

  She’d said something else that rang through my mind. She’d been talking about my reactions to people who might recognize me, but it applied to everything now.

  Own it. Own your own life, Beth.

  I wasn’t going to fall apart. Not again. At least not now.

  I had spied quite a few bears in the wild over the past few months, but I didn’t know when they went into hibernation. Why hadn’t I asked someone? I sniffed, but didn’t smell the stink that came with a nearby wild animal.

  The dark mass was about fifty yards away, its back to me. It was moving, but not like a bear. I took one step closer to the woods.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  The creature stopped and began to turn around, but then moved away, as hurriedly as the snow probably allowed, moving with much more stability and grace than I could have managed.

  I opened my mouth to call out again but thought better of it. I turned and hurried back to the truck. I looked out to the woods one more time, but I couldn’t tell if the creature was still there.

  I started the truck and sat a long moment. Finally, I switched into gear and continued to Lane’s house. Without the snowshoes this time, I trudged along the path leading to the house. Walking was somehow both easier and more difficult without them; I slipped more, but now used less energy.

  There were no prints around the front yard. I knew where the hole in the ground was, and a quick glance made me realize Lane still hadn’t reset the trap, but I was still careful and stayed back from the front porch far enough that my visit couldn’t somehow be misconstrued as threatening.

  “Lane?” I said loudly.

  A few seconds later, the front door opened.

  “Help you?” Lane said as he filled the space. He crossed his arms in front of himself and frowned deeply. “I see you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine. I needed to get home.”

  Lane shrugged. “I wasn’t keeping you prisoner.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Lane’s cheeks were ruddy, but he wasn’t wearing a bearskin coat.

  “What can I do for you, Beth?”

  It was a genuine question. He didn’t ask it with impatience.

  “Were you out in the woods a few minutes ago?” I said. “Out there over by your shed?”

  I watched him closely, and I saw a split second of honesty in the set of his shoulders right before he lied.

  “That was me,” he said as his shoulders loosened some and he ran his hand through his hair quickly. “I was on my way home. I tried to say something to you, but you were too far away.”

  I nodded again. It was an obvious lie, but why? In fact, if I really thought about it, I would realize that it wasn’t truly feasible he could have made it back—was it? Was he able to move that quickly in the snow? Had my journey down the road and then the walking path taken longer than I thought?

  “Okay.” I paused. Was I going to accuse him of lying? No, but I was so thrown that for an instant I couldn’t formulate what I wanted to say next. “Who is buried out there?”

  “Family. I told you.”

  “Your wife? Who else?”

  “I’m going inside. Do you need anything else? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I stared at him, wanting to say something to keep him talking, but not coming up with the right words.

  He turned and made good on his threat—he went inside.

  Riled up but not willing to knock on his door, I accepted defeat for this round. I went back to the truck and once again took the road back to town. It wasn’t difficult during the daytime, but it still wasn’t easy. My mind whirled as I drove.

  Who was buried there? Was there a child next to Lane’s wife—and had that child been theirs or someone else’s?

  I couldn’t let go of this new idea—one of the Hortons’ girls had disappeared. Her remains hadn’t been found. Where was she? Was she still alive and with Tex, or dead, perhaps buried on Lane’s property? I couldn’t piece together how either might have occurred.

  Perhaps her body had burned away to ashes that had either been overlooked or not found, but I was convinced that the other two options needed more exploration before I could give real credence to the last one.

  While Gril was in Brayn, checking on the freezer and hopefully coming to understand the girls’ background, their mother, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the baby clothes and the gravesite. Losing a child is the worst thing imaginable; maybe Lane couldn’t bring himself to discuss such a tragedy.

  Nevertheless, a child had gone missing six years earlier. Maybe I didn’t want to believe that she had burned to unrecognizable or ignored ashes. I believed that, though maybe no one had meant to be negligent, someone had done a hurried and sloppy investigation. There was a child out there somewhere—dead or alive—and it was time the truth was uncovered.

  The mudslide was trying to tell us something. I was trying very hard to listen.

  Thirty-One

  “Ellen? You okay?” I said as I waved away some white fog.

  The frantic woman looked up from the dough she’d been kneading. She was covered in flour, her ponytail a nest of flyaways.

  “Oh, thank God.” She stood up straight. “I … oh, thank God.”

  She wiped her hands on her jeans and came around the table. She pulled me into a tight hug.

 
“Hey.” I patted her back uncertainly. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was afraid of what I would do. I was afraid to be alone.” She was on the verge of sobbing.

  I was not equipped for this moment. I held the hug for a few more seconds and then pulled back, taking hold of her arms.

  “You’re okay,” I said with a confident smile. “Look, you did it. You were alone and you didn’t do anything harmful.”

  She laughed, a strangled sound. “That’s only because I had the bread to bake. I think my arms will be sore for weeks.”

  I smiled again, thinking Viola must have known what she was doing by suggesting Ellen cook and bake. “That’s how you do it. One day, one sore muscle at a time. There’s always something better to do than drugs. If you have to make thousands of loaves, then so be it.”

  She blinked, her eyes still searching for an answer, something that would be easier than the obvious one of not using anymore.

  “All right.” I patted her arms. “Where are you with the bread? Knitting starts in an hour. What do we need—I mean knead, ha-ha—to do before we go?”

  She blinked uncertainly again, and I was sure I saw flour puff from her eyelashes. And then she smiled. It was brief but genuine.

  “Yes, yes, we can do that. I just have to get this loaf in the oven, and I won’t start any others,” she said.

  She had baked five loaves, and I managed to eat almost a whole one by myself as we cleaned. Butter, cinnamon, peanut butter, jam. Apparently, I had to prove to myself that all the toppings tasted good in combination with the homemade bread. They did, and the bread was also delicious by itself.

  “You’re going to be rich,” I said after I chewed my last bite—my last bite for now, at least.

  “Only if you don’t eat the product first,” she said.

  I laughed, but didn’t think she was joking.

  I think both Ellen and I saw how this temporary acquaintanceship could be beneficial. Ellen needed someone she could mostly trust to talk to who wasn’t Viola, the woman in charge of her ultimate freedom, and I always needed someone to bake me homemade bread—and keep my secret, of course.

  Viola still wasn’t back by the time we left. Another inch or so of snow had accumulated while we’d been cleaning and eating. We were getting close to a foot of new accumulation.