The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  The board had wanted to test Harry and Erin Dixon. Concerns had been raised about them—justifiable concerns, it now appeared. But it was a big step from doubting the commitment of citizens of Prosperous to taking direct action against them. In all the town’s history, only a handful of occasions had arisen when it became necessary to kill one of their own. Such acts were dangerous, and risked sowing discontent and fear among those who had doubts, or were vulnerable to outside influence.

  Morland now regretted telling Harry Dixon that he might have killed his wife and him. He didn’t like Dixon, and didn’t trust him. He’d wanted to goad him, but it was a foolish move. He’d have to reassure him. He might even have to apologize and put his words down to his justifiable anger and frustration.

  But the test wasn’t over. The test had only just begun. Harry Dixon would have to make amends for his failings, and Morland was pretty sure that Harry Dixon wouldn’t like what that would entail, not one little bit.

  “So what was it that you thought you saw?” said Morland.

  “I believe I saw a wolf.”

  CHAPTER

  VIII

  The ground was hard. Not that Harry should have been surprised; he’d lived in Penobscot County long enough to have no illusions about winter. On the other hand, he’d never had to dig a grave in any season, and this was like breaking rocks.

  Morland left him to his own devices at the start. The chief sat in his car, the driver’s door open but the heat on full blast, and smoked a series of cigarettes, carefully stubbing each one out in the ashtray. After a while, though, it became clear that Harry would be hacking at the ground until summer if he was forced to dig the grave alone, and so Morland opened the trunk of his car and removed a pickax from it. From where he stood, Harry caught a glimpse of something wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, but he didn’t look for long. He figured he’d have seen more than enough of it by the time the night was over.

  Morland broke the ground with the pickax, and Harry cleared the earth away with the shovel. They worked without speaking. They didn’t have any energy to spare. Despite the cold, Harry felt sweat soaking into his shirt. He removed his coat and was about to hang it on the low branch of a tree when Morland told him to put it in the car instead. Harry assumed it was because the car would keep his coat warm, until Morland made it clear that Harry’s health and well-being were the last things on his mind.

  “With luck, she’ll stay down here and never be found,” said Morland. “But you never know. Prepare for the worst and you won’t be disappointed. I’ve seen crime scene investigators put a man behind bars for the rest of his life on the basis of a thread left on a branch. We take no chances.”

  Morland wasn’t concerned about leaving tracks on the ground. It was too hard for that. Neither was he worried about being seen. Nobody lived nearby, and anyone who might be passing would, in all likelihood, be a citizen of Prosperous, and would know better than to go sticking a nose into Chief Morland’s affairs even if he or she was foolish enough to come and investigate in the first place. Anyway, by now news of what had happened to the girl would have been communicated to those who needed to know. The roads around Prosperous would be quiet tonight.

  They continued to dig. When they got to three feet, they were both too exhausted to go farther. The chief was a big, strong man, but Harry Dixon was no wilting flower either; if anything, he’d grown fitter over the previous year, now that he was required to be more active on his construction sites than he had been in decades. That was one of the few good things to come out of the financial mess in which he found himself. He had spent so long supervising, and ordering, and taking care of paperwork, that he had almost forgotten the pleasure of actual building, and the satisfaction that came with it—that, and the blisters.

  Morland went to the car and took a thermos of coffee from the back seat. He poured a cup for Harry, and drank his own directly from the neck. Together they watched the moon.

  “Back there, you were kidding about the wolf, right?” said Morland.

  Harry was wondering if he might have been mistaken. At one time, there had been wolves all over Maine—grays and easterns and reds—and the state had enacted wolf bounties until 1903. As far as he could recall, the last known wolf killing in the state was back in 1996. He remembered reading about it in the newspapers. The guy had killed it thinking it was a large coyote, but the animal weighed more than eighty pounds, twice the size of the average coyote, and had the markings of a wolf, or a wolf hybrid. There had been nothing since then, to his knowledge: sightings and rumors, maybe, but no proof.

  “It was a big animal, and it had a doglike head. That’s all I can say for sure.”

  Morland went to light another cigarette, but found that the pack was empty. He crushed it and put it carefully into his pocket.

  “I’ll ask around,” he said. “Wouldn’t be a wolf, but if there’s a coyote in the woods we’d best let folk know, tell them to keep a watch on their dogs. You done?”

  Harry finished the last of the coffee and handed the cup back to the chief. Morland screwed it back on and tossed the thermos to the floor of the car.

  “Come on, then,” said Morland. “Time to put her in the ground.”

  THE TRUNK LIGHT SHONE on the plastic, and the girl inside it. She was lying on her back, and her eyes were closed. That was a mercy, at least. The exit wound in her chest was massive, but there was less blood than Harry might have expected. The chief seemed to follow the direction of his thoughts.

  “She bled out on the snow of Ben’s yard,” he said. “We had to shovel it up and spread some more around to hide what we’d done. Take her legs. I’ll lift from the head.”

  It was difficult to get her out of the trunk. She hadn’t been a big girl, which was why they’d decided to fatten her up first, but for the first time Harry understood what was meant by “dead weight.” The heavy-duty plastic was slippery, and Morland struggled to get a grip. Once she was out of the car, he had to drop her on the ground, put his foot under her to raise her upper body, and then wrap his arms around her chest to carry her, holding her to him like a sleeping lover. They stood to the right of the grave, and on the count of three tossed her in. She landed awkwardly, in a semi-seated position.

  “You’d best get down there and straighten her,” Morland told Harry. “If the hole was deeper I’d be inclined to let it go, but it’s shallow as it is. We don’t want the ground to sink and have her head peeping up like a gopher’s.”

  Harry didn’t want to get into the grave, but it didn’t seem as though he had much choice. He eased himself down, then squatted to grip the ends of the plastic. As he did so, he looked at the girl. Her head was slightly lower than his, so that she seemed to be staring up at him. Her eyes were open. He must have been mistaken when he first saw her lying in the trunk. Perhaps it had been the reflection of the internal light, or his own tiredness, but he could have sworn . . .

  “What’s the problem?” said Morland.

  “Her eyes,” said Harry. “Do you recall if her eyes were open or closed?”

  “What does it matter? She’s dead. Whether we cover her up with her eyes wide open or squeezed shut is going to make no difference to her or to us.”

  He was right, thought Harry. He shouldn’t even have been able to see her eyes so clearly through the plastic, but it was as though there was a light shining inside her head, illuminating the blue of her irises. She looked more alive now than she had in the basement.

  He shook the thought from his head and pulled sharply on the plastic, dragging the girl’s body flat. He didn’t want to see her face again, so he turned away from it. He’d tried. She’d been given a better chance than any of the others, of that he was certain. It wasn’t his fault that Ben Pearson had put an end to her hopes.

  Suddenly, all the strength was gone from his body. He couldn’t haul himself from the grave. He could barely ra
ise his arms. He looked up at Morland. The chief had the pickax in his hands.

  “Help me up,” said Harry. But the chief didn’t move.

  “Please,” said Harry. His voice cracked a little, and he despised himself for his weakness. His mother was right: he was half a man. If he’d been gifted with real courage, he’d have put the girl in his car, driven her to the state police in Bangor, and confessed everything to them, or at least dropped her off in the center of the city, where she’d be safe. Standing in the grave, he imagined a scenario in which the girl agreed to keep quiet about what had occurred, but it fell apart as soon as he saw himself returning to Prosperous to explain her absence. No, he’d done the best that he could for her. Anything more would have damned the town. Then again, it was already as close to damnation as made no difference.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the impact of the pickax on his head, but it never came. Instead, Morland grabbed Harry’s right hand, leaned back, and their combined strength got him out of the grave.

  Harry sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.

  “For a second, I thought you were going to leave me down there,” he said.

  “That would be too easy,” said Morland. “Besides, we’re not done yet.”

  And Harry knew that he wasn’t referring to the filling in of the grave alone.

  THE GIRL WAS GONE, covered by the earth. The ground had clearly been dug up, but Morland knew that whatever remained of the winter snows to come would take care of that. When the thaw came in earnest, the ground would turn to mire. As it dried, all traces of their activity would be erased. He just hoped that they’d buried the girl deep enough.

  “Shit!” he said.

  “What is it?” said Harry.

  “We probably should have taken her out of the plastic. Might have helped her to rot quicker.”

  “You want to dig her up again?”

  “No, I do not. Come on, time to go.”

  He wrapped the blade of the shovel and the head of the pickax in plastic bags, to keep the dirt off the trunk of his car. Tomorrow he’d clean it inside and out, just to be sure.

  Harry had not moved from his place beside the grave.

  “I have a question,” he said.

  Morland waited for him to continue.

  “Isn’t there a chance that she might be enough?” said Harry.

  Morland might have called the look on Harry’s face hopeful, if the use of the word “hope” weren’t an obscenity under such circumstances.

  “No,” said Morland.

  “She’s dead. We killed her. We’ve given her to the earth. Why not? Why can’t she be enough?”

  Chief Morland closed the trunk before he replied.

  “Because,” he said, “she was dead when she went into the ground.”

  CHAPTER

  IX

  It was just after five on the evening after my return to Portland when I arrived at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue. The bar was buzzing, as it always was on Thursdays. Thursday was showcase night, when the Bear invited a craft brewery to let folks taste its wares, always at a discount and always with a raffle at the end. It really didn’t take much to keep customers loyal, but it always amazed me that so many businesses couldn’t work up the energy to make the minimal extra effort required.

  I found Dave Evans, the Bear’s owner, marshaling the troops for the assault to come. I hadn’t worked there in a while. Like I said, business had been good for me in recent months, maybe because, like the Bear, I tended to go the extra mile for my clients. In addition, some ongoing litigation relating to the purchase of my grandfather’s old house on Gorham Road had been settled in my favor, and a lump sum had found its way into my accounts. I was solvent, and likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. Still, I liked to keep my hand in at the Bear, even if it was only once or twice a month. You hear a lot from people in bars. Admittedly, most of it is useless, but the occasional nugget of information creeps through. Anyway, my presence would allow Dave to take the rest of the night off, although he was strangely reluctant to leave.

  “Your buddies are here,” he said.

  “I have buddies?”

  “You used to. I’m not sure if the word still applies where those two are concerned.”

  He indicated a corner of the bar that was now looking significantly smaller than it usually did, thanks to the addition of two massive men in polyester jogging suits: the Fulci brothers. I hadn’t seen them since Jackie Garner’s funeral. His death had hit them hard. They had been devoted to him, and he had looked out for them as best he could. It was hard for men so large to keep such a low profile, but somehow they’d managed it during the months since Jackie’s death. The city might even have breathed a bit easier for a while. The Fulcis had a way of sucking the oxygen from a room. They had a way of knocking it from people too. Their fists were like cinder blocks.

  Dave’s concern was therefore understandable. But despite their appearance, and an undeniable propensity for violence that seemed resistant to all forms of pharmaceutical intervention, the Fulcis were essentially brooders by nature. They might not brood for very long, but they did tend to take some time to consider which bones they might enjoy breaking first. The fact that they’d stayed away from me for so long meant that they’d probably been considering the fate of their friend with a certain degree of seriousness. That boded either well or very badly for me.

  “You want me to call someone?” said Dave.

  “Like who?”

  “A surgeon? A priest? A mortician?”

  “If they’ve come here to cause trouble over Jackie, you may need a builder to reconstruct your bar.”

  “Damn, and just as the place was coming together.”

  I worked my way through the crowd to reach their table. They were both sipping sodas. The Fulcis weren’t big drinkers.

  “It’s been a long time,” I said. “I was starting to worry.”

  To be honest, I was still worrying, and maybe more than before, now that they’d shown up at last.

  “You want to take a seat,” said Paulie.

  It wasn’t a question. It was an order.

  Paulie was the older, and marginally better adjusted, of the two brothers. Tony should have had a lit fuse sticking out of the top of his head.

  I took the seat. Actually, I wasn’t too worried that the Fulcis might take a swing at me. If they did, I wouldn’t know a lot about it until I woke up, assuming that I ever did, but I’d always gotten along well with them, and, like Jackie, I’d tried my best to help them whenever I could, even if it meant just putting in a word with local law enforcement when they stepped over the line. They’d done some work for me over the years, and they’d put themselves in harm’s way on my behalf. I liked to think that we had an understanding, but Timothy Treadwell, that guy in the Herzog documentary who was eaten by the grizzlies he’d tried to befriend, probably felt the same way until a bear’s jaws closed on his throat.

  Paulie looked at Tony. Tony nodded. If things were going to turn bad, they would do so now.

  “What happened to Jackie, we don’t blame you for it,” said Paulie.

  He spoke with great solemnity, like a senior judge communicating a long-considered verdict.

  “Thank you,” I said, and I meant it, not only because my continued good health appeared assured but because I knew how important Jackie was to them. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d held some residual grudge against me, but it appeared there would be none. With the Fulcis, it was all or nothing. We had a clean slate. “Jackie done something very bad,” said Tony, “but that didn’t mean he should have been shot down from behind because of it.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Jackie was a good guy,” Tony continued. “He took care of his mom. He looked out for us. He—”

  Tony choked. His eyes were tearing up. H
is brother patted him on a muscled shoulder.

  “Whatever we can do,” said Paulie, “whatever help you need to find the man who did this, you let us know. And, anytime you want us to step up for you, you just call. Because Jackie would have stepped up, and just because he ain’t around no more don’t mean we ought to let these things slide, you understand? Jackie wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  I reached out and shook their hands. I didn’t even wince, but I was relieved to get the hand back.

  “How’s his mom doing?” I asked.

  Jackie’s mother had been given a diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease the previous year. Her illness was the only reason Jackie had committed the acts that led to his death. He just needed the money.

  “Not so good,” said Paulie. “Even with Jackie she would have struggled. Without him . . .”

  He shook his head.

  Jackie’s insurance company had invoked a clause in his life-­insurance policy relating to criminal activity, arguing that his death had resulted from participation in a criminal enterprise. Aimee Price was fighting the case on a pro bono basis, but she didn’t believe the ­insurance company was going to modify its position, and it was hard to argue that it didn’t have a point. Jackie was killed because he screwed up: he was careless, somebody died, and vengeance fell. I made a mental note to send a check to Jackie’s mother. Even if it helped only a little, it would be something.

  The Fulcis finished their drinks, nodded their goodbyes, and left.

  “You’re still alive,” said Dave, who’d been keeping one eye on proceedings and another on his bar, in case he didn’t get to see it again in its present form.

  “You seem pleased.”

  “Means I get my night off,” he said, as he pulled on his overcoat. “Would have been hard to leave otherwise.”