by Lia Matera
“Are you accusing us of…?” He looked more thrilled than shocked.
“Of dousing the men so you didn’t have to keep picking them up? So you could respond to more important calls? Yes, I am.”
“But who are you going to—? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t have a shred of proof to offer the police,” I said. “And I’m sure you guys will close ranks, won’t give each other away. I’m sure the others will make you stop ‘helping,’ make you keep your mouth shut.”
I thought about the dead men—“pretty good guys,” according to the MiniMart proprietor. I thought about my-Johnny-self, the war veteran I’d spoken to this morning.
I wanted to slap this kid. Just to do something. “You know what? You need to be confronted with your arrogance, just like Kyle Kelly was. You need to see what other people think of you. You need to see some of your older, wiser coworkers look at you with disgust on their faces. You need your boss to rake you over the coals. You need to read what the papers have to say about you.”
I could imagine headlines that sounded like movie billboards: Murder Medics. Central Hearse.
He winced. He’d done the profession no favor.
“So you can bet I’ll tell the police what I think,” I promised. “You can bet I’ll try to get you fired, you and Ben and whoever else was involved. Even if there isn’t enough evidence to arrest you.”
He took a cautious step toward his car. “I didn’t admit anything.” He pointed to the other man. “Did you hear me admit anything?”
“And I’m sure your lawyer will tell you not to.” If he could find a halfway decent one on his salary. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do.”
I turned to the man behind me. “Would you mind walking me in to my office?” I had some cash inside. He needed it more than I did.
“Lead the way, little lady.” His eyes were jaundiced yellow, but they were bright. I was glad he didn’t look sick.
I prayed he wouldn’t need an ambulance anytime soon.
Snow Job
“Snow Job” was first published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Jan/Feb 2019.
It was nominated for the 2020 Thriller Award for Best Short Story.
She’d literally gone as far as she could. The undercarriage of her car was wedged on a tall ridge of ice between tire tracks. She was blocking the single plowed lane of the uncreatively named Main Street.
She cut the engine. In the moment before the windshield went opaque with frost, she watched snow flurries blow sideways and upward in a manic swirl. The interior temperature plunged, the motor smell of her heater replaced by the fake floral of car wash carpet cleaner. Then the cold snuffed all scents, the air carrying nothing but chill.
She grabbed her overnight bag and pushed the door open, feeling it slam into curbside snowpack. When she stepped out, her ankle boots crunched through its glassy surface, filling with powder. Before she could draw her first breath, her cheeks felt grated and her shoulders tensed into painful knots. This wasn’t just a different microclimate from the city’s—or even from the foothills below—it was a different planet. It was a distant frozen moon.
It wasn’t long past dinnertime, but nothing on the short street looked open. Not that there was much here: a weathered hardware store, a tiny market, a junk shop. The café that was her destination still had its lights on, though. Ava, wary of the uncleared sidewalk, turned back to her car and pulled a flashlight from the glove box.
She was already late. She’d never driven in snow before. If she’d known how grueling it would be, she’d have phoned Aaron from one of the charming little towns below the snowline. She’d have pleaded with him to turn around and meet her someplace closer to home. But by then, she’d lost cell service.
Both Aaron and Jess had grown up in these mountains—half the city had, it seemed (which didn’t, in Ava’s opinion, didn’t speak well of rural living). But she was an L.A. transplant who didn’t ski and preferred to vacation in foreign capitals or on exotic beaches. She’d never had to drive in weather like this, and vowed she never would again. The only thing that had kept her going was Jess’s assurance that her new little Audi would do well on his ever-threatened “snow holiday.”
Her flashlight beam showed someone else’s footprints—Aaron’s?—leading to the café. She followed them, steeling herself to see him again.
In his last text messages, he’d apologized for adding extra miles to the rendezvous. Tried two B&Bs, but clerks recognized me. Will try another—don’t want reporters. Then it had been, I heard of a perfect place, with directions to this café.
She noticed a Nissan with a Hertz sticker in its window. Aaron’s car, she guessed. It meant at least one of his credit cards hadn’t expired while he was locked up. It warmed her to know that. He’d lost so much.
She put away her flashlight, smoothed her hair, and pushed open a door whose carved details were mostly lost under layers of old paint. She recoiled from the stink of beer and unwashed grill. Tiffany-style lamps glared off the counter’s shellac and caught a film of dust on the mirror above the bar. She scanned the small room, disappointment draining the last of her energy. The only person there was a fiftyish man layered in thermal wool and flannel.
“You’re letting out the heat.” He swiveled toward her. He was heavy and ruddy, a bit of gray in his hair and a lot in his beard.
“Sorry.” It took a strong push to get the door shut. “I’m supposed to meet a friend here.”
“I’m Barton,” he said. He waved her over with a crust of bread, red with chili from the bowl in front of him.
“Hello.” Ava didn’t offer her name. It was too well-known.
“Hey, Em,” the man called out.
A woman came in from a back room, pausing for a moment at the other end of the bar, appraisal on her face. Thick-browed and heavy, she looked maybe a decade older than Ava. Her dyed black hair showed a salting of white at the roots, and bulges ruched the waistline of her untucked shirt.
“A friend told me to meet him here.”
“Alan, Andy, some such?” the woman asked. “Come up from the city?”
“Yes, that’s right.” If these people didn’t watch gossip television, she wasn’t going to bring up the latest “trial of the century.”
“I plowed some road for him, out to a fishing trailer. Pretty spot, just off the river. Said somebody gave him directions to it. I’m Em, by the way.”
“My last text from him said to meet him at this café.”
“Cell service gets hinky up here.” She shrugged. “Could be he meant to text you from the trailer, but one of you couldn’t get a signal.”
“Can you give me directions to it?”
“Sure, but there’s no going out there unless I run the plow again. It snowed like a sumbitch after I got back. I’d have to charge two hundred. Might sound like a lot, but—”
“Two hundred’s fine.” Ava wasn’t going to haggle over out-of-towner prices. She was paying for everything in cash in case Jess checked the credit cards later. Depending on what happened here, she might go home with nothing to regret or confess. Maybe seeing Aaron now, unbent by a year in jail and a month-long trial, wouldn’t give rise to the same feelings, the same temptations.
She still hoped (or tried to hope) she hadn’t been fool enough to fall in love with a client. It wasn’t only unprofessional, it was a cliché, an embarrassment. For months she’d told herself theirs was just the bond that formed sometimes between lawyer and client (though she’d never actually seen that happen). She’d said so to Aaron when he insisted it was more.
They’d been alone in her office, a scatter of plastic champagne flutes still on her desk from partners, paralegals, secretaries crowding in to toast his acquittal. Aaron, tipsy after a year of abstinence, had gone from agitated to livid. “You know it’s bigger than that! You kn
ow it! You know what you want. You know I want. And if this last year taught me anything, it’s that a chance at happiness can vanish like that.” He’d snapped his fingers.
She couldn’t remember what she’d replied. Something conventional and false. When he’d stalked out, it felt like an amputation.
She’d struggled to look and sound her usual self that night, when Jess FaceTimed her.
Later, she’d gotten a text from an unknown number. It was Aaron on a new phone, his first in the thirteen months since his arrest. Please meet me tomorrow. And here she was.
She might get back before Jess returned from Japan. She might find the wisdom to forego a relationship that would threaten her marriage. She might find the strength to let Aaron walk away again. If so, and if she kept the credit cards in her wallet, Jess wouldn’t find out about this later, when the bills came. Cash bought her privacy, it bought her options, so she had plenty of it.
“Ride with me, if you want,” Em said. “It’ll be a round-trip for you on the road I plow. So might as well leave your car here, come for it in his.”
“Actually, I’m stuck on some ice right now—a mound of it between tire tracks. I’m blocking the road.”
“That’ll be a problem,” Barton said, “come spring.”
Em smiled. “Leave the key. Bart will get you unstuck and parked. We keep our car doors unlocked here, keys in the ignition. Only about a dozen of us, this time of year, none of us thieves. So whenever you come back, find your car and you’re good to go.”
Ava felt her shoulders, tense from hours of gripping the steering wheel, begin to relax. She pulled the wallet and key ring from her bag. “This trailer, it’s fairly close?”
“Nothing’s close in snow,” Barton said.
“Half hour, plowing,” Em told her. “Won’t take you as long, driving back.”
Ava handed her the two hundred. When she turned to give Barton the car key, she caught him winking at Em. She watched Em suppress a smile. Something about the exchange made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Or maybe it was just nerves. She couldn’t remember ever having been so far off the grid before, no one at home or at work knowing where she’d gone or why.
Five minutes later, she was in Em’s enormous truck. Its headlights and rooftop beacon caught the sparkle of snow spilling from trees, landing on the windshield in puffy spatters.
“Some years,” Em said, “we’re socked in from October to June. Not complaining, though. We’d be over-developed if this piece of mountain had steeper slopes for skiing. We don’t get the sportsmen, except for fishing. It’s mostly guys like Barton—hermits, preppers, Call of the Wild types. You gotta be self-reliant to live up this high. Gotta know your skills, else you can lose half your face to frostbite. It doesn’t take long, in this cold. And bears. They don’t really hibernate, you know, just sleep a lot. They wake up, they’re hungry as the devil. You don’t want to meet one way out in the middle of a snow field—worse than Barton on a diet.” She kept glancing over. Enjoying her game of scare the city girl? “You wouldn’t think to look at Bart, but he’s had four wives. That’s what a 70-inch TV with satellite reception gets you, up here.”
Ava made polite murmurs, her mind elsewhere. Jess would be in Kyoto today, taking photos of temples in snow, scenes as beautiful as hundred-year-old woodblock prints. She could have flown there to meet him. He’d tacked a few extra days onto his business trip to Osaka because they’d both assumed Aaron’s jury would still be out. When the verdict came in sooner than expected, he’d FaceTimed to say she should join him.
She’d felt a flush sear her cheeks. “It’s too long a flight for such a short stay.” She’d hoped Jess couldn’t “hear” the words blaring in her head. All I can think about is Aaron. If he calls me tomorrow, I’ll go to him.
“I can add a couple more days to the trip,” Jess had ventured. There’d been worry in the slight thickening of his voice.
“No, I … Well, you know, a lot of things piled up while I worked on …” She hadn’t even been able to speak Aaron’s name. Not to Jess.
In the live stream on her laptop, he’d leaned forward. Behind him, a huge window showed Osaka Bay glowing with sunshine, though in Ava’s time zone, it was the previous evening. She’d taken a mental snapshot of him, his thick graying hair cut to stay in place, his face so clean-shaven his cheeks looked polished. He was a handsome man, no doubt about it—lanky but stately, casual but dignified. If their age difference showed, it wasn’t to Jess’s disadvantage.
He’d offered a wan smile. “Is it the travel attire? Hotel’s bringing up my clean laundry in a few, and— Really, Ava, you can get away for just a long weekend, can’t—”
She’d cut in quickly, “You should have given them those old pants to mend. That hole in the pocket, you’re probably spilling more yen than you spend.”
He’d looked disappointed. There had been defeat in his voice when he said, “Don’t you be mocking the comfy corduroys.”
“They’re old enough to vote.”
“But not old enough to drink.” He hadn’t quite managed a light tone.
It hurt her to think of hurting him. It wasn’t just a fear, it was a memory. They’d had an awful year, the last time she’d given in to temptation. It had been foolishness on her part. A seven-year-itch. She’d walked on eggshells for months afterward, until finally Jess got over his anger and grew sure of her again.
Em was launching into another burst of chatter, and Ava pulled her attention back, answering with polite pleasantries over the next twenty or thirty minutes.
Finally Em said, “This is where we turn. Unpaved road. I can plow you to where it ends near the trailer, but you’ll have to hoof it the last couple of hundred feet. Wasn’t as much snow earlier, when your friend parked out behind the wood shed and generator. I’d get you closer but it’s hard to read the snow at night, off road. If I drive over some rusted old engine parts or whatever? I get a flat, and I’m here till Barton comes looking for breakfast. I don’t think you want to make it a threesome tonight.”
“If you can’t drive it, will he be able to?”
“Easy peasy in daylight.”
“But if we want to leave tonight?”
“There’s a blower in the shed, he can clear a path. But you should be good through Monday, in terms of new snow. You better go before the road needs plowing again, though.”
“I really think we’ll want to—”
“There: see those lights? That’s it. Your fella’s got a fire going in the woodstove.” Em pointed. “Cooking up a storm, I bet. He had a row of grocery bags in the back seat. Flowers, too. Beats me where he found tulips, this time of year.”
Tulips, Ava’s favorites. When had she mentioned that to Aaron?
“Isn’t it dim, for a fire?” She stared at the two small patches of fuzzy light.
“Frost on the windows,” Em explained. “And they’re small, so the trailer doesn’t lose heat. The walls are nice and thick, but even windows with double glass will bleed a little bit. Mostly people come in summer. There’s a crank lets you roll down an awning with sides, sort of a canvas back porch. Build a cookfire for your fish, sit and watch the river.”
“What do people do here in the winter?”
“Oh, I suppose you’ll think of something.” When Ava didn’t laugh, Em said, “You’ll see in the morning—million dollar view.”
The headlights showed a tiny lump of aluminum trailer under a bonnet of snow sandwiched between tall drifts.
“Are you sure he’s still here? I don’t see his car.”
“Around back. But he’s here all right—I never heard of a fire that built itself. I tell you what, though: I’ll wait for you to wave me an all-clear. Be on the safe side.” She reached across Ava to open the passenger side door. “Hate to rush you, but I don’t have much gas.”
The cold hit her like a
mallet. She’d insist to Aaron that they drive to a hotel down the mountain. There must be someplace less remote where they wouldn’t be recognized.
“Watch your step,” Em said in a tone that meant, Get out. She pushed Ava’s bag toward her.
Ava hitched it over her shoulder and slid from her seat. The freezing air was vicious, flaying. She sank into snow above her knees. It hiked up her pant legs, and she almost screamed from the shock of it on her skin. She was much colder than she could ever remember being, or ever wanted to be again.
She told herself warmth was just ahead, and she kept her eyes on the trailer door, waiting for it to open. She braced for the twist in her gut she felt every time she saw Aaron. But the door stayed shut. Hadn’t he heard the truck?
Tears sprang to her eyes. It had been a tough couple of days after several near-sleepless nights waiting for the verdict. And even during the grueling drive here, she hadn’t allowed herself to imagine this moment, this threshold. She still didn’t know if she’d melt into Aaron’s arms or beg him to cool his feelings.
She knocked. Waited and knocked again. She could hear tires churning snow as Em turned the truck to face the main road.
Afraid Em might get impatient and leave, Ava pulled the trailer door open. There, instead of a crackling wood stove, she found a fading glow stick. Its pale yellow light may have started out bright, but now the chemical illumination was so faint it barely reached all four trailer walls. She stared at it in disbelief. It was beside a pile of bedding on a bench taking up most of the trailer’s length. At first Ava thought Aaron was lying there. But as she stepped inside, she saw the heap wasn’t hiding anyone. It was just a few rumpled blankets. When she touched them, they released a smell of dank forest, like an overturned log.