“You could find out now,” Hope suggested.
“Oh, it’s too late now,” said Eden. “Now it would just be weird.” She apologized, and went off to bed, Marty following, and calling down, “Well, shavua tov, everybody.”
Hope, Blake, and Johnny were playing cutthroat Scrabble when Frank turned in.
But he slept uneasily.
Frank imagined he would dream of Natalie, and he did, but not the sweet angel dream of a husband greeting his first true love across the star-strewn gulf of eternity. Natalie came into the room, blue-lipped and naked, her hair wet and slicked back, the morgue sheet slipping from around her hips, trampled under her feet, where puddles formed. In her arms was her unborn baby. So soon, Frank? Do you think of me, Frank? Be careful, Frank. A foot from the bedside, Natalie thrust the half-formed baby at Frank. He jerked awake, drenched in sweat, and stumbled from the bed to the protective yellow glow of the bathroom light, shivering as he pulled off his shirt and sweats and slipped into the clean ones he always set out the night before.
What else did he expect from a mind wrung with guilt by the joy he had so indecorously embraced?
Sleep was over. He made coffee in the dark, grabbing a cup, then collecting the things he kept on a low shelf—his water bottle, his flashlight, and his phone. For a moment, emotion flickering between affection and poignancy, he noticed Ian and Colin’s small flashlights lined up beside his, at the exact angle.
When he stepped out the back door, it wasn’t quite four. More than a foot of snow had quietly fallen: Colin and Ian would be wild with joy, for until now there had been only a dusting. The fall was wet and heavy, and Frank came awake as his muscles engaged, shoveling hard, a path to the stable. The goddamn motion light was out again, but Frank could feel his way. Then he quickly set to a cursory mucking out of the five big boxes, and made sure the troughs were clean and flowing. He stroked the horses’ necks as he gave them their measures and filled their mangers with the clean hay he and Patrick had put up last summer.
Still, he couldn’t shake the dream. He had worked his way to the end, where the little roan quarter horse they boarded waited impatiently, and prepared to go back up the other side, where the rest of the boarding horses stood. That was when he saw the dark hump of the small car nearly hidden by the wall of the indoor riding ring.
Did Patrick have a girl there? On Christmas? Without the quick blink of moonlight on the bumper, he would not have seen it at all. For a moment, as the moon closed her eye again, he thought he might have imagined it. The blunt shove of something hard above the waistband of his Carhartts . . . he didn’t imagine that.
“Where is he?” said a small voice.
“Let me turn around.” Without asking to, he did. It didn’t matter if he saw Linnet’s face, for she would shoot him in any case, as whoever was with her would methodically help her kill everyone in the house. They would slit the rubber top on the truck, and take the laptop that he and Claudia had wrapped for Hope, the golden cuff links of an upraised closed fist, facing back—the ASL sign for “Hold On,” their gift to Patrick. They would rummage over the toys, pull out drawers, and mess things up. A robbery on Christmas Eve, people would say. No one around. That poor family . . . all of them . . . so much heartache . . . and the son, the one with the limp, didn’t he lose his wife in some big tropical storm? That’s the one, he did.
“Go and bring him down. Put something on him. I’ll leave the rest of you alone.”
“How do you know he’s upstairs?”
“A retard could walk right into that house. As if I haven’t before. Some supercop you must have been. Go get him and I’ll leave the rest of them alone. I can’t tell which one is him.”
“You won’t leave the rest of us alone,” Frank said. “My mother will wake up. And my fiancée. You’ll shoot them, too. You have somebody in there now, telling them they’ll all be fine if they’re quiet and nobody makes any fast moves, let’s just put this rope around your chair.”
“Your precious mother!” she sneered, pushing back the black watch cap to reveal a sweaty frill of red hair and a scar livid on her otherwise perfect face. “Their mother, their real mother, took a big handful of baby blues with a glass of gin. She was dead before she dropped the glass.”
“Why are you involved in this? You’re just a kid. Who’s with you?”
“Nobody’s with me, you fuck. Why would I bring somebody with me? Nobody who knows about those kids stays alive. Me. And Louis. That’s all.”
“Who’s Louis?”
“You met him. Here.”
“How can you be sure of Louis?”
“I know Louis. He raised me from little. Best schools. Nannies. Travel. He trained me.”
“Like Oliver Twist.”
“Shut up.”
“How do you know Patrick?”
“You can find anybody, asshole. People don’t bother to hide their tracks. The professor says watching people move around on the Internet, it’s like watching ants on an ant farm. You know where they fly, and where they live.”
“Who’s the professor?”
“What?”
“You said the professor. Who’s that? You can’t have access to flight manifests unless you’re government.”
“You fucking fool. You can have anything you want.”
“How’d you find Patrick?”
“Sent a letter to the college, telling them to ask him, as part of a student committee. The student club would pay. Sent a letter to him, asking him to come. Put up a flyer and found a place outside he could talk to kids. That took real genius. I gave him the check. You listen to me now. You just tell all your pals here in Mayberry that you found his parents, or just his dad, and he could only take the one boy. Tell them whatever you want. I can take the older one, too, but I’ll just kill him. Or maybe not. Maybe Louis will want to keep him to make Ian happy. If you tell people that somebody came here and got them, then somebody will come back and kill your new bitch and your sister. How’s that?” She poked Frank, hard, with the gun, a Glock 9mm with a sound suppressor.
“Leave now and I won’t say anything,” Frank told her, carefully keeping his voice even, uneasy with pleading. The wind groaned in the aspens with the sound of rain. “It’s to both our advantages.”
“Go get him.”
“Leave now and I won’t say anything. Look, I don’t even know what to say. I don’t know who you are and I’m betting that car isn’t one your daddy bought you.”
“I’m getting tired of this. They’re going to find you in the snow out there behind your fancy barn.”
Suddenly a small flashlight beam hit them, a dim beam. A toy.
“Be nice,” Ian said. “Be happy.”
The girl didn’t move. She raised her gun and shoved it hard against Frank’s chest.
Ian said louder, “Be nice. Please.”
Frank could feel the gun shaking.
“Put the gun away. Be nice. That’s my dad,” Ian said.
He shined the flashlight in her face. Frank could see him, in his mountains-and-trains pajamas, his hat and boots. Slowly, visibly quaking, Linnet began to lower the gun. Striding past Frank, Ian came close enough to touch her—the slim ugly gun in her hand pointed at his little downturned mouth. Inch by inch, the girl reached inside her jacket and began to stick the gun into the waistband of her pants. Then Frank caught her under the chin with his fist, stunning her and knocking her to her knees.
The gun went off with a sickening thump.
Ian screamed.
Blood bloomed from the girl’s leg, soaking the cream-colored jeans she wore. She fell sideways and Frank had to skip back to avoid the spurt. Her femoral artery. If he had a tourniquet and a fast car, he might have been able to get her to town in time.
“Someone will always come,” Frank said harshly. The girl nodded, unable to speak. “Where’s Louis?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Nobody k
nows.”
“Do you want me to call someone? Anyone for you?”
The girl didn’t answer. Her eyes were already stiffening, fixed on a point over Frank’s head. A rectangle of orange light pillared on the snow, and Patrick stepped out, the rifle over his shoulder.
Ian screamed, and then screamed again.
Patrick said, “Jesus, have mercy on her.” Patrick carried Ian back toward the house while Ian wept into his shoulder.
“Dad,” he moaned. “Patrick. Dad, please.”
Frank didn’t touch the girl. He got a horse blanket off the top of a clean stack of them and threw it over her. Leaning against Glory Bee’s stall, he called Claudia.
“There’s an intruder,” he said. “Claudia, I’ll explain later. Will you do me a favor and get Colin and Ian dressed and ask my mom to come with you to the Glass Lamp Inn on Hamilton Street?”
“A hotel? On Christmas morning?”
“They can’t be here. I’ll follow with the presents and then I have to come back out here for a short while. Don’t worry too much.”
Frank heard the door open and now Ian was screaming for Claudia.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Well, sure, why would I worry?”
Frank called the Glass Lamp, noticing, too late, that it was five in the morning. Sleepily, the innkeeper mumbled, “Merry Christmas.”
“It’s Frank Mercy, the police officer, from Chicago, who—”
“Of course, Frank,” the woman said. “What’s up?”
“We’ve had an accident out here. I don’t suppose you’re open on Christmas.”
“We are, in fact. Not fully. We have two guests from Dublin visiting family.”
“We need four rooms, Mrs. Gentry. It’s an emergency and I’m sorry to impose. I’ve adopted two little boys whose parents were victims of the tsunami in Brisbane. This is their first Christmas in America, and the anniversary of the deaths, and there was a hunting accident at our farm. A trespasser. Not someone in our family . . .”
“Well, Frank, of course. That’s fine. Give me . . . twenty minutes. You can have the honeymoon floor for the cost of a regular room and two others side by side the next floor down. Will you want a breakfast?”
“Of course, if you can manage. I can’t thank you enough,” he said.
Frank walked back toward the car, an old black Toyota with a scabrous roof and no plates. There was a blanket on the backseat. Folding it over his hands, for even his gloves would have traces of sweat from his horses, he started the car and drove it several times around the barn, trying to decide what to do with it. Finally, he simply parked it in the woods. Every farm in south-central Wisconsin had several random disabled cars, why not his? He then folded the blanket and placed it in the middle of a stack of twenty filthy horse blankets set out for the industrial laundry service. Then he crossed back to the house up the driveway.
Ian was waiting with Patrick at the kitchen table. He ran to Frank. “Dad! Is that lady gone?”
“She’s gone. She’s badly hurt and had to go for a doctor. What I want you to do is go with Cloudy and Grandma and Colin to this special Christmas place where we’re going to stay until we find out if the lady was another one of those horse stealers . . .”
“Well, she’s not.”
“Why?”
“She’s the same one that came to the ice skating and said she was Patrick, Dad! Collie cut her face with his skate.”
Patrick sighed mightily and pillowed his head on his arms. What would he feel, Frank thought, to be a man who had kissed the thighs and breasts of a pretty, fragile woman so feral she would come roaring back to get what she wanted a month after having her face slashed with a skate blade? How would he feel if he had been the tunnel through which the same girl walked into all their lives—or thought he was?
“Pat, when you gave those lectures, how did you set them up?”
“Guv, I never did. They called me, didn’t they?”
“You didn’t think that was unusual? Why you? You’re here, what? A few months? You gave up racing two, three years ago . . .”
“I didn’t care, is the truth. They had money and they gave it.”
“But you didn’t see her in the classes. Only after, she came to you. Maybe that was to get you away from here.”
“Frank, I never knew,” Patrick said.
“No one could.”
Claudia came down, leading Colin and carrying Frank’s old leather suitcase. Hope followed her and said to Frank, “I’m turned out of my own home on Christmas Day.”
“Mom, you know I’m sorry.”
“How long will this—”
“Mom, this once, without being disrespectful, can you go with Claudia and ask me later? I will explain, and I will talk about what’s possible and impossible.”
Frank followed the van with the truck.
Mrs. Gentry had laid out a feast of cream-cheese-stuffed French toast with cranberry syrup, bacon, and cinnamon rolls. The adults insisted on food and coffee before they revealed what Santa (the canny rascal) had left under Mr. and Mrs. Gentry’s astonishing tree—a monster pine with ornaments so new they were techno and so old that they came from the 1939 World’s Fair, but all of them silver.
After breakfast, and after hearing Colin sigh and say, “No way . . .” when he saw the presents, Frank admitted his headache was so commanding that even the skin of his face hurt to the touch. Claudia said, “Lie down for a while, sweetheart. We’re going to put together the Gamma Earth Defending Fighting Wing here.”
“The Red Five X Wing Starfighter,” Ian said.
“Why does it seem that all the Lego parts are white?” Claudia asked Colin.
“You have to follow the book,” Colin said, with a sigh.
“I may take a nap,” Frank said, “but then I have to help Patrick.”
“It can wait. Patrick said he was going to call his sister and rest a bit. I’ll ask Mrs. Gentry if you can take him a plate.”
Frank let his mind roam out over the afternoon pasture and what Patrick was really doing. Plowing to cover car tracks. Moving a body.
“Can we go sledding?” Colin said.
Claudia said, “I brought your snow pants. But we don’t have sleds.”
Mrs. Gentry put in, “We have plenty of sleds, and the hill they call Cabin Creek is just two blocks away, and kids slide out right onto the lake.” Colin looked about to enter a state of rapture.
“I’ll take you later,” Claudia said. “Are Marty and Eden coming out here?”
Frank shrugged. He needed to talk to Eden and Marty, but now he needed oblivion. He went to lie down, borrowing Claudia’s sleep mask for an hour. It turned out to be three.
When he came back into the living room area, Claudia and the children had gone sledding, so he took the time to go back out to Tenacity.
“I tried to call you,” Patrick told him.
“I’m sorry, Pat. Did I even look at my phone for a text? I didn’t. I slept like the dead. Come inside, Pat. There are gifts for you from us, and a nice breakfast . . .”
“The body’s gone.”
“What do you mean?”
Patrick said, “I mean the girl’s body’s gone. But I didn’t go to sleep. I plowed around some. I had a coffee. Then I came out to try to think through what should be done. And there’s nothing there but a rectangle in the snow as if something hot was set there. No blood. And there was blood even on the outside of the stable walls.”
“I’m sure if somebody got luminol and a light, there would be blood. But there’s no spatter to see . . .”
“Nothing.”
Frank said, “Do you have brandy?”
“I don’t drink, Frank.”
“You don’t . . . You don’t drink.”
“I haven’t had a drink since June. The last I had was in Chicago, when Glory Bee won.”
“That’s terrific. It’s also too bad. I could use one.”
“Your mum drinks a tot of brandy in her coffee. Look under Sha
kespeare.”
“Shakespeare?”
“The Collected Works. In the bookshelf.”
Frank made himself a mug of coffee, splashed in a measure of Martell Cordon Bleu, and watched a tot of half-and-half bleed into the surface. Then he went out to survey the crime scene, wearing the new lined Muck Boots that Claudia had given him. The temperature had dropped, and a stiff wind shoved the heel of its hand through the sere remnants of the summer’s alfalfa.
Mentally triangulating the place where he had stood and where Linnet had stood relative to the wall of Glory Bee’s stall, he walked carefully around the deep rectangle sliced with near-geometric precision into the snow. Up the grade toward Penny Hill, the car still sat among the trees, but Frank could see that Patrick had cleaned it as though it were the queen’s Bentley. About ten feet beyond the car, the tire tracks began. Someone had carried Linnet to a vehicle, perhaps on a stretcher or tarp. That someone didn’t arrive at Tenacity by coming up the driveway or through the stableyard. The tire tracks went up Penny Hill, Frank following them for a while, panting in the deep, wet snow.
He then went back, put a clean blanket on Saratoga, climbed on her back from the fence, and walked her up the hill. Snow was falling by then, fast and thick, at least an additional two inches already down. If he kept going, it would lead over the hill onto Sam and Katie Batchelder’s farm. Following the track a little farther, he saw where a very small vehicle had arced off along the lane that divided Tenacity from the Batchelder’s land, and then headed out to the highway.
He draped Saratoga’s reins over a branch, although she wouldn’t run, walked out into a clearing, and sat on one of the log seats that squared into a fire pit Frank’s father had made for him—what, thirty-five years ago? Someone had been using it for a campfire—the Mercys were generally casual about the careful use of the farm—and the split straight walnut logs were brushed clean. Frank had a memory of his mother enraged at his dad when that straight black walnut behind the house keeled over in a storm like a soda straw to a breath, the roots coming right up out of the ground. It had been big, more than fifty feet tall, with a flawless trunk, probably worth thousands of dollars. But Frank’s father was too impatient to wait for a sawyer to come and have a look at it. After a few hours of staring at the fallen tree, he took a chain saw to it, and was soon chaining up the logs to drag them out here with the tractor.
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