Core felt grateful for the smoke hanging there between them like a curtain. He recalled Medora’s body next to his on the sofa, the vision of her in the tub.
“Nothing happens here in a way that makes any sense,” Core said. “You told me that yourself.”
“That’s not exactly what I said. What I’m saying now, Mr. Core, is that Medora Slone must have mentioned something to you, something that might tell me where she could be right now. Because if we want to get this thing figured out, we better find her before her husband does.”
“Is that why Slone killed those cops at the morgue?”
Marium stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, then looked at the Slones’ cabin. “He couldn’t take the chance of us finding his wife before he did. That’s my view of it. So they wouldn’t take her to where he couldn’t get at her.”
“And the coroner too, why?”
“To get the boy’s body,” he said, pouring more coffee for himself and Core. “Or else he’s just evil. It’s not as uncommon as you might think.”
Evil is a distortion of love—Core couldn’t remember who said it or when, and didn’t know how it helped explain what was upon them now.
“Slone let you drive away from the morgue that night,” Marium said, lighting a new cigarette. “He let you go. Why would he do that? The wife calls you here, the husband lets you live. Why?”
Two village boys, eleven years old, padded in fur and face masks, blared by on a snow machine that sounded like a chain saw. Villagers shoveled pathways around their cabins. With their faces pressed deep into hoods, toddlers stood nearly immobile in moose-hide suits. Every few minutes someone stopped to stare at the men in the truck but did not raise a hand of welcome. The sun was nowhere. Core cracked the window another inch, felt the air move in his stomach.
“Are you gonna answer my question, please? Why did Slone let you drive away that night?”
“He wants a witness,” Core said.
“A witness to what?”
“To this story he’s telling.”
“This story he’s telling, okay. And Medora, she wants a witness too? That makes you the chosen storyteller, Mr. Core. Please explain that.”
“How can I explain this?”
“Vernon Slone is a man and every man is explainable.”
“What kind of man does this?” and he nodded out the window at the village, as if all of Keelut were the direful work of one person.
“The human kind,” Marium said. “You should get a grip on that and you won’t be so surprised all the time.”
The human kind, Core thought, distressed in his new wavering between words, between animal and human, in this place where one world grated against the other. They sipped their coffees through silence, the wind-roused snow like mist against the glass. Core felt hungry for the first time today. Marium pressed on the radio, turned through the stations, searching, Core thought, for a weather report, for some fact he could understand. He didn’t find anything he wanted and pressed it off.
“You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Core.”
“Which?”
“Why are you still here?”
“Because I’m trying to understand this thing, just like you,” Core said. “I’m telling you everything I know. I’m trying to help. You should be talking to the people of this village, not me.”
“These people will tell us nothing,” Marium said. “They have their own laws. Or they think they do. They think the whole world is their enemy.”
“They’re your people, aren’t they?”
“They sure as hell don’t think so. And they’re probably right. Just because you’re from this region, that doesn’t make you part of the blood of this village. Besides, as long as I have this job I’m their enemy.”
“Slone killed that old woman here?” Core asked.
“I think so. It wasn’t Cheeon, not his style. These people took her body. That’s what I mean. They have their own laws.”
“Did you find the boy’s body?”
“Nope, not his either. You can’t look anywhere now. Every eight hours new fall covers whatever there is to find.”
“What about Slone’s parents? Or Medora’s? Has anyone talked to them? I imagine they can help you more than I can.”
“Slone’s father has been dead awhile,” Marium said. “I’m not sure how. I don’t know anything about his mother, never met her. I believe I’ve met Medora’s mother in town, years ago. Very blond hair and white-white skin. Strange-looking woman, her mother. Her father disappeared on a fishing trip. Someone told me that. Went to sea and never came back. But I don’t know that for sure.”
“You’ve got to find out more about them.”
“It’s damn near impossible to know anything about these people, Mr. Core. That’s the way they want it. Why they live here. Why they stay. Everything you hear, you hear second- or third-hand and you never know how much of it is true. These people don’t come into town all that often. And when they do, they keep to themselves.”
“Still, someone should talk to the parents.”
“We tried. The Feds tried. I just tried again half an hour ago. I have a man out there trying again. No one here will tell you a damn thing. These homes you see”—he pointed with his cigarette—“they aren’t listed in any phone book. These people don’t have a paper trail like you and me.”
“There have to be records somewhere,” Core said.
“You still haven’t figured out where you are, have you?”
It occurred to Core then that his inability to comprehend this place and its people—their refusal to be known—was part of the reason he’d remained. He flicked his filter from the window, lit another, then aimed two dashboard vents at his body. He shook against a chill and reclined with his cup.
“So I’m on my own here, Mr. Core. I just went through their cabin again, looking for whatever I missed the first two times.”
“You’ve got to check the hills,” Core said.
“We’ve had planes looking from here to the border and they haven’t seen a goddamn thing. I took up my own plane yesterday before dark and there’s nothing to see except white. East, west, north, south—nothing but white.”
“You fly?”
“You better fly or know someone who does if you live out here or you won’t be able to get anywhere when you need to. We don’t have roads like you have roads.”
“They didn’t go west,” Core said.
“And you know that how?”
“West is the city and then the sea, right?”
“Eventually. So?”
“So watch wolves long enough and you’ll see what their territory means to them. The Slones have been in these hills since they were old enough to walk. They won’t flee somewhere they don’t know.”
“Keep going.”
“I’ve seen some of what’s out there past those hills,” Core said. “I know you have too. I could see that tundra. She could hide forever in her own backyard and none of you would ever find her.”
“Slone would find her. Unless he’s thinking that she’d never run to the most obvious place there is. But that’s what I need to know, Mr. Core, if I’m wasting my damn time here, if these people are long gone by now, deep into Canada or getting a suntan on a beach somewhere.”
“No, they’re still here,” Core said.
A topo map of the region lay on the seat between them. Core unfolded it and tried to study its multiple lines and shades, but the vastness it showed would not be breached.
“If the people of this village came across Medora, hiding out there, like you say, they wouldn’t turn her in,” Marium said. “Even as what she’s become, she’s still one of their own. All the blood here is bonded.”
“What has she become?” Core said.
“I should be asking you that.”
Core looked away again and reached for the chocolate in his coat.
“What has that woman become, Mr. Core?”
We are the most
unnatural of all, he thought.
“A child is the mother’s,” he said. “Not the father’s and not anybody else’s. Always the mother’s in a way we’ll never understand. It’s the same wherever you look out there, in nature. She was trying to fix something. Something was broken and she thought she was fixing it. Or saving him from something. Trying to, anyway. I don’t know.”
“Who destroys something to fix it? Tell me who does that please.”
“It happens in medicine,” Core said. “Chemotherapy does just that.”
“Are we talking about medicine or people here?”
“What Medora did is the same as chemotherapy. Kill the boy in order to save him.”
“Save him from what?”
“I don’t know that,” Core told him. “Don’t you think I’d say it if I knew? I’m trying to know.” He lit another cigarette, studied Marium’s lighter, a Zippo made of mock snakeskin. “Saving him from Slone, maybe. From becoming what his father is. I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll agree with you on one thing, Mr. Core. What happened here is a cancer of some kind. And believe me, when this is all done, I’m going on vacation, taking my wife to the Caribbean or someplace, nothing but green water and hot sand.”
“The Caribbean?”
“Hell yes the Caribbean. But right now we’re in this snow, Mr. Core. So I need you to replay your conversation with Medora Slone. Start from the start and tell me everything she said to you.”
A young girl trudged before them in snow past her knees with a .22 rifle strapped slant across her caribou coat, face and hair lost in a hood and ruff, an unleashed husky before her exploding a path in great clouds of powder. Core knew she was a girl by her gait. How could it feel to be from this place, to have your every molecule formed by its rhythms? Medora Slone had told him that Keelut wasn’t of the earth, and he’d puzzled over those words since then.
But no place is of the earth—every place is of itself, knows only itself. The Caribbean? A child there is as peculiar, as particular as this child before him trudging through snow. Medora Slone, he recalled, had told him that she looked at magazine pictures of green water and island sand and wondered about those places, about their reality—their reality that seemed to her like mystery. She told him this right there on the road in front of him, between those rows of cabins, when she showed him where the wolves had invaded this village. She told him that the only warmth and water she had now was the hot spring hidden in the crags past the valley. Her special place, she said. And again he thought of her in the tub that night as she scoured her skin with a brush, as she tried to get clean and could not. He felt his own clean-shaven body against his clothing.
“She said something to me,” Core told Marium. “The night I got here. She mentioned a hot spring to me. And I think I saw what she was talking about, that morning when I looked for the wolves. I saw a spring out there.”
“Why a hot spring? I’m not following.”
“If she’s out there,” Core said, “she’d need water. She’d need to get warm. Maybe she couldn’t build a fire, couldn’t risk being seen from the air, I don’t know.”
“Okay. Lots of hidden springs out there, Mr. Core. Where is this one you saw?”
“About a three-hour walk northeast from here.”
“What else?”
“She called it her special place,” Core said. “That’s all. I don’t know what else.”
“Her special place. A hot spring.” He flattened the topo map on the seat between them. “Show me,” he said. “We’re here,” and he uncapped a red pen with his teeth, marked a crooked X on Keelut.
“It would be here then,” Core said, pointing. “Although I can’t make sense of this map. How old is this thing?”
“That’s okay,” Marium said, refolding the map. “You don’t have to make sense of it. You can show me yourself at sunup.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re gonna show me where this spring is, Mr. Core. We’ll fly over at sunup. We can’t take off now. It’ll be dark in two hours, and we’re still an hour drive from town.”
“It was just something she mentioned to me. I’m not saying she’s there. How would I know?”
“If I had better leads than that, I’d follow them, believe me. But I don’t. So you’re gonna show me.”
“Shouldn’t you take men with you?” Core asked. “Other cops, I mean? I can’t help you out there.”
“How many men you think fit in a Cessna? You and me will go, you’ll show me this spring, and if we find anything, we’ll come back for more men. You can stay at our place tonight.”
“I have a motel,” Core said.
“Stay with us, I insist,” he said, smiling. “We have a spare room. And you’ll like my wife. We’ll have a home-cooked meal.”
“Because you’d rather keep an eye on me, you mean.”
“You’re free to leave, Mr. Core, you probably know that. But you haven’t left yet, you’re still right here talking to me. You can be a witness, whatever you want to call it, but you’re gonna show me this spring.”
Through the windshield, through blurs of blown snow, they watched the young girl and husky get swallowed by hulking cones of covered spruce. Marium swigged from whiskey again and passed the bottle to Core.
* * *
In his double-bay garage, at six a.m., the sun still loath to bring its light, Shan Martin dialed Marium’s office—he had the number memorized—and tried to get him on the phone. “You tell Marium to call me, tell him I have information about Vernon Slone. I saw which way he’s going and I believe that reward money is mine. You tell Marium to call me.”
He returned the phone above the workbench to a cradle blackened by years of oil and grease. On the radio a weather report complaining of more storms, snow from the north. He flattened a cigarette filter into a can and moved a truck’s carburetor aside. On a square of aluminum he crushed a pain pill with a hammer, then with a putty knife scraped the residue from the head and chopped, plowed the powder into a line. With a rolled one-dollar bill he snorted half into one nostril and half into the other.
When Shan turned, he saw him there by the door in a wolf mask, the pistol-grip shotgun at his side like a cane. The sight of Slone in his garage made it suddenly hard to breathe.
“Jesus, Vernon? What are you doing? The hell you wearing, man? I thought you left.” His peculiar new voice was a choked wobble.
Slone stepped toward him slowly. Shan inched back against the workbench.
“Is this Halloween, man? The fuck you wearing?”
Slone’s boots made not a sound on the concrete floor.
“I thought you left. You come back for some pills? That wound must be killing you. I can get you more.”
Just the breathing inside the mask.
“You all right, man? I was just talking to Darcy on the phone, she wants more money from me, you know women, it’s always that way with them.”
Slone stepped nearer still and Shan looked to the gun. “The hell you doing, Vernon?” Slone raised it to pump the first slug into the chamber—a sound metallic and final in the cuboid cold of the garage.
Cornered where the workbench met the cinder-block wall, his face a welter of anguish, Shan pitched wrenches and screwdrivers that bounced from the padding of Slone’s coat and clanged to the floor. He shrank more into the corner, his face now coiled in a noiseless sob. When Slone reached him, he pressed the barrel up hard beneath Shan’s sternum. In the muzzle of the mask a hollow wet breathing, those familiar eyes embedded above a lupine snarl.
Sniveled pleas, an appeal to their past. Excuses—what the divorce had done to him, his abysmal debt. An apology for this betrayal, a prayer with tears. The radio sound behind them, the weather report foretelling of this winter’s reign.
The blast ripped up through Shan Martin’s chest and out his throat and face in a vermillion flare, thrust him back into the cinder block before he slumped dead to Slone’s feet, his face leaking teeth
and pieces from where his mouth had been. Slone lifted a garage door, backed up his truck to the new snow machine strapped to a trailer, then attached the trailer to the truck’s hitch . . . on the radio behind him the weatherman trying to explain arctic air, still in calm drone about what was coming.
XI
A snowplow scraped against asphalt at eight in the morning, shook the house when it hit the curb. Core woke to its headlamps and racket—woke in the spare bedroom in Marium’s home, the room that in eight months would belong to Marium’s child. Nothing in this room now but a single bed and an ironing board, the iron unplugged on a green carpet. No dresser, not a chair. Walls bare, a washed-out cream. Before sleep he’d felt that familiar sense of being afield in an unfamiliar bed, a welcome trespass among the scent of strange laundry soap. Lying wrapped in the dark and straining to hear the sounds of the house and not to make a sound himself.
The night before, Marium’s wife, Susan, had cooked a meal of burbot and rice in a kitchen with appliances much older than her. All evening at the table she observed Core with barely veiled suspicion. He tried to diffuse such discomfort with talk of children.
“What’s it like to have a daughter?” Susan said.
“It’s good, though I’m not the best man to ask about kids. I haven’t been the father I planned on being.”
“I hear no one is,” she said.
“I was away a lot, more than I wanted to be.” And I’m still away now, he thought.
“You were away to work, I’m guessing,” Marium said. “To make money. That was for her.”
“There are ways to make money that don’t involve being apart from your family. I was younger than you by a bit. What are you, forty-three? You’re wanting a boy, I’d bet.”
“Sure I do.” He looked to Susan. “But a girl is good too. And I’m forty-eight. A fogey like me having my first kid.”
“Fogey?” Core said. “I’ll trade with you.”
Now in the dark of the morning Marium knocked twice on the door to the spare bedroom. Core was already dressed, trying to unearth his toothbrush from the bottom of a duffel bag.
“Sunup is ten-fourteen,” Marium said. “We gotta get to the plane. You’re right that Slone is still here. We got a call in last night from a mining camp north of here. Slone was there yesterday and there’s a dead man to prove it. Plus a call in early this morning from one of Slone’s old buddies. We gotta get to the plane.”
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