The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  “He’s always being threatened. Doesn’t do much good, though.”

  “You sound almost as though you approve.”

  “He’s one stubborn man standing in the way of the expansion of a town and the money that would bring into the local economy.”

  “As you yourself said, there’s nothing more likely to make a certain kind of man resolute than finding himself threatened for his beliefs.”

  “I don’t think the First Amendment guarantees your right to be an asshole.”

  “I think that’s precisely what it does.”

  Morland threw his hands into the air in despair. “Jesus, if I closed my eyes I could almost be talking to Danes himself, and you don’t know how unhappy that makes me. So you talked to Danes? Go, you. I’ll bet he told you all about how rich old Prosperous is bad, and its people are jerks just because they look after their own. I could give a fuck what Danes says. We’re weathering the recession, and we’re doing okay. You know why? Because we support one another, because we’re close-knit, and that’s helped us get through the bad times.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Parker, this town has taken a kicking recently. Instead of busting into old cemeteries, you should go to the new one and pay your respects to the two boys we just buried there. Their crosses won’t be hard to find. They have flags beside them. Close by you’ll find fresh earth over Valerie Gillson’s grave, and the messages her kids left on it for her. Look to your right and a pile of flowers marks where Ben Pearson is resting. Four dead in twenty-four hours, a town in mourning, and I have to deal with your bullshit.”

  He had a point. I just chose to ignore it.

  “I’m looking for an older couple,” I said, as though he had never spoken. “Sixties at least, at a guess, although you know how young people are; when you’re in your twenties, everyone over forty looks old. This couple own a blue car. I saw a few blue cars during my ride through your very clean town, but I resisted the impulse to start knocking on doors until we’d spoken. You could save me time by giving me the names and addresses of anyone who might fit the criteria.”

  I took a small hardback notebook from my pocket, slipped the minipen from the spine, and waited. I felt like a secretary poised to take dictation.

  “What are you talking about?” said Morland.

  “I have a witness who says that the people who took Annie Broyer to this town were an older couple in a blue car. I thought I might try talking to older couples with blue cars. Sometimes the simplest options are the best. You’re welcome to come along, unless you’re preparing some more stump speeches.”

  There was a knock at the door behind me.

  “Not now,” said Morland.

  The door opened a fraction. I turned to see one of the secretaries poke her head in.

  “Chief, I—”

  “I said, ‘Not now!’”

  The door quickly closed again. Morland hadn’t taken his eyes from me throughout the brief exchange.

  “I told you when you came through last time that there’s no evidence the woman you’re looking for ended up in Prosperous.”

  “I think she did.”

  “Has she been reported missing?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “So you’re looking for a street person, a former junkie, who has probably fallen back into her old ways, and you want me to help you accuse seniors of kidnapping her?”

  “Seniors, and younger,” I corrected. “And only ones with access to a blue car.”

  “Get out!”

  I closed my notebook and restored the minipen to the spine.

  “I guess I’ll just have to go through the DMV.”

  “You do that. Nobody here fits your bill. That girl is not in Prosperous. If I see you within the town limits again, you’ll be charged with trespass and harassment.”

  I stood. I’d filled my aggravation quota for the day.

  “Thank you for your time, Chief,” I said, as I left the office. “You’ve been a big help.”

  He took it as sarcasm—I could see it on his face—but I was speaking the truth.

  I had never told Morland that Annie Broyer was an ex-junkie.

  THE WOLF CONTINUED TO circle the town. He had returned to the place in which he found the meat and bone belowground, but only the scent of it remained now. For a time, the streets had been filled with even more light and noise and men than before, and the activity had caused the wolf to flee into the woods, but his hunger had driven him back. He tore apart a garbage bag and fed on the chicken carcasses he smelled inside before slipping back into the woods. He remained thin, and even through the double layer of his fur, his ribs shone sharply carved. The temperature had started to drop again; that night it would plummet to minus seven. The wolf’s thick subcutaneous fat had become depleted over the winter months as his body fed upon itself. The food from the town was sustaining him, but the damage had already been done. Instinct warned him to seek shelter from the cold, to find a dark, hidden place with warmth. In his youth, members of the pack had sometimes colonized abandoned fox dens, and the wolf now sought a hole in the ground in which to hide. The pain was spreading through his body, and he could put no weight on his damaged limb.

  South of the town, he picked up the smell of a deer. The spoor was old, but the wolf identified the pain and panic that had marked the deer’s final moments. He paused, wary now. The deer had died in terror, and beneath the sweet stink of prey the wolf could detect another smell, one that was unfamiliar and yet set his senses jangling. The wolf had no predators, aside from man. He would even take on a grizzly in a fight for food, and his pack had once come upon, and consumed, a hibernating black bear. The fear that the wolf now felt reminded him of his fear of man. Yet this was no man.

  The scent of the deer drew the wolf on. He flattened his ears against his head and arched his back as a car passed. The light vanished, the sound faded, and he continued to pick his way through the trees until at last he came to a clearing.

  In the clearing was a hole. Beside it, almost hidden by roots and branches, lay the deer. The wolf narrowed his eyes and pulled back his ears. His tail pointed straight out, parallel to the ground. The threat came from the hole. Now the wolf snarled, and his fur bristled. He crouched in anticipation of an attack. His senses were flooded by the smell of the deer. He would fight to eat.

  And then the wolf’s tail moved, withdrawing fully between his legs. He thrust out his tongue and lowered his hindquarters, his eyes still fixed on the hole but his muzzle pointing up. His back arched again, just as it had when the car passed, but this time it was a gesture not of fear but of active submission, the repect that one animal pays to the dominant other. Finally, the wolf approached the deer while maintaining a careful distance from the hole. Briars entangled around the deer’s hind legs came away easily as the wolf pulled at the remains. Despite his weariness and his hunger, he did not start to feed until he had managed to drag the deer as far from the hole in the ground as he could. The smell of danger grew fainter. The threat from the dominant animal was receding, moving farther away.

  Moving deeper into the earth.

  THE DOORBELL RANG IN Chief Morland’s house. Morland’s wife went to answer, but he told her that he would take care of it. He had barely spoken to her since coming home, and hadn’t eaten dinner with the family. His wife said nothing, and did not object. Her husband rarely behaved in this way, but when he did he usually had good cause, and she knew better than to press him. He would tell her of his troubles in his own time.

  Thomas Souleby stood on the doorstep. Beside him was a man whom Morland did not know. He wore heavy tan boots, and his body was hidden beneath layers of clothing. His red beard was thick, flecked here and there with gray. In his right hand he held a wolf trap on a length of chain.

  The two visitors entered the house, and the door closed softly behind them.


  We humans fear the beast within the wolf because we do not understand the beast within ourselves.

  Gerald Hausman, Meditations with the Navajo

  CHAPTER

  XXXI

  THEY CONVENED AT THE home of Hayley Conyer, as they always did when issues of great import had to be discussed in private. The board of selectmen conducted public meetings on a regular basis, but the agenda for such gatherings was decided well in advance, and sensitive subjects were resolutely avoided. They were also open only to residents of Prosperous, following an abortive attempt by Euclid Danes to hijack one session. The late Ben Pearson had advocated killing Danes following that particular incident, and he had not been joking. If it had gone to a vote of the board, the motion would almost certainly have been passed unanimously.

  Luke Joblin arrived first at Hayley’s house, accompanied by Kinley Nowell. Kinley had checked himself out of the hospital following Ben Pearson’s death. He was still weak, and his breathing was shallow and labored, but he walked into the house under his own steam, aided only by the walker that he had been using for the past decade or more. Joblin carried his ventilator for him. After them came Thomas Souleby, and then Calder Ayton. Hayley was most solicitous of Calder, whose grief at the loss of Ben was etched on his face. She whispered to him as he sat silently at the table, the chair to his right—the chair that had always been occupied by Ben—now empty.

  Pastor Warraner arrived at the same time as Chief Morland. Had Hayley not known of the animosity that existed between them she might almost have suspected them of collusion, but the two men stood awkwardly apart on the porch when she opened the door to them, their body language speaking volumes about their distaste for each other. She knew that Morland had been out in the woods that day, setting traps for the wolf with Abbot, the hunter brought by Souleby to the town. Morland looked exhausted. Good, thought Hayley: it would make him more pliable. She took him by the arm as he passed, indicating to Warraner that he should go on ahead into the dining room. Warraner did as he was told. He had no concerns about what Hayley Conyer might have to say to Morland in his absence. Even after their last meeting, when Hayley had sided with Morland against him, Warraner remained secure in his position as Hayley’s spiritual adviser.

  “Did you find the animal?” asked Hayley.

  “No, not yet, but it’s still around. We discovered a deer carcass. It was all chewed up. Abbot reckoned it had been dead for a while, but the damage to it was recent—not more than twenty-four hours. We’ve laid bait and set traps. We’ll get it soon. Abbot says that it’s wounded. He could tell by the tracks.”

  But Hayley was now more interested in the deer. Like the others, she had seen the photograph on Valerie Gillson’s phone.

  “The deer, was it—?”

  “Maybe. There wasn’t much of it left to identify. And there was a hole not far from where we found it.”

  She nodded. “Go inside. The others are waiting.”

  Morland joined them. The four surviving members of the board sat on either side of the dining table, with a chair left empty at the head for Hayley. Warraner sat at the other end of the table, leaving two chairs between himself and Kinley Nowell. Morland seated himself across from Warraner, leaving three chairs between himself and Calder Ayton. If he squinted, he could almost see the ghost of Ben Pearson occupying one of them, tearing open a pack of exotic cookies or passing around some British candy, because it was Ben who had always taken it upon himself to provide a small treat for the board and the observers. But the chair remained empty, and the table bare. There were no reports to be considered, and no notebooks lay open. No true record of this meeting would ever be kept.

  Hayley turned off the lights in the hall and took her seat at the head of the table.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s begin.”

  HARRY DIXON KNELT INSIDE his bedroom closet and removed a section of baseboard. The house was quiet. Erin was at her quilting circle, where work had commenced on a quilt in memory of the town’s recent dead. According to Erin, so many women wanted to participate that they had to bring in more chairs. Bryan Joblin had gone with her, although he would be drinking in a bar while Erin sewed. Harry wondered how long the board planned to keep up this farce of imposing Joblin on them: until he and Erin found another girl; until they proved themselves.

  To that end, Harry had earlier gone out with Joblin, and together they had cruised the streets of Lewiston and Augusta, looking at women. It wasn’t exactly difficult work. Harry figured that Joblin would have been doing something similar in his spare time anyway, even if it weren’t a matter of some urgency. Hell, Harry had been known to cast a wistful eye at young beauties when his wife wasn’t around, but he was nothing like Bryan Joblin. The Joblin boy had a reputation for being a pussy hound of the first order, to the extent that Hayley Conyer herself had taken Bryan and his father to one side following a chance encounter on Main Street and warned them that if Bryan didn’t keep his pecker to himself, or at least limit its use to the vast swath of the United States beyond Prosperous, she would personally slice it off and hang it from the town’s welcome sign as a warning to others who might be similarly tempted to screw around with the feelings and, indeed, bodies of Properous’s generative future. Since then, Bryan Joblin had indulged himself largely in the relative fleshpots of Bangor, and still tended to cross the street in order to avoid any further confrontations with Hayley Conyer, as though fearing that the old woman might whip out a blade at any moment and make good on her threat.

  That afternoon, Harry and Joblin watched schoolgirls, and young housewives. One of them would be ideal, Joblin said. He was in favor of snatching a girl right there and then—a young, athletic-looking brunette out by the mall in Augusta—but Harry dissuaded him. These things needed to be planned properly, Harry told him. Taking a woman in broad daylight was too risky. They looked at some of the homeless women, but they were all too old or worn. Fresher meat was needed.

  “What about a child?” said Joblin. “It’s gotta be easy to take a child.”

  Harry didn’t reply. He just pictured Bryan Joblin dying in painful ways.

  Joblin had bitched all the way back to Prosperous, but Harry knew he would inform his father that the Dixons looked as if they were at least trying to fulfill their obligations to the town, and Luke Joblin would, in turn, tell the board. To add to the deception, Harry set Joblin to trawling prostitution Web sites: twenty-five or younger, Harry had stipulated, and they should be from out of state. No tattoos, and no ID requirements from prospective johns. Independents too, not agency girls. Bryan had dived into the work wholeheartedly. He even printed off a list of possible candidates for Harry.

  “You know they can trace all those searches back to our computer?” Erin told Harry, when she learned of what Bryan was doing. Her quilting bag was on the bed behind her, ready for use. They were whispering. They spent most of their days in near silence now because of their unwanted houseguest. It was like living in some kind of religious retreat.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Harry. “It’s all just smoke anyway.”

  “Well, I still don’t like it. It makes the computer seem dirty. I won’t feel the same about using it.”

  Give me strength, thought Harry.

  “The computer won’t be coming with us,” he said. “I’ll buy you a new one when we get—”

  “Get where?” she asked.

  “Get to wherever we’re going,” he finished.

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. ”

  “When?” she repeated. There were tears in her eyes. “I can’t do this much longer. I can’t stand having Bryan Joblin around. I hate the smell of him, the sound of him. I hate the way he looks at me.”

  “Looks at you? What do you mean?”

  “Jesus, you see nothing. Nothing! It’s like you can’t imagine that another man might find me attractive.”

&
nbsp; And with that she stormed out to start work on the great quilt. Harry had watched Erin as she walked to her car, Bryan Joblin trailing behind her. Of course, she was still a good-looking woman. He knew that better than anyone. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Bryan Joblin might appreciate her too.

  Now he placed the section of baseboard on the carpet and reached into the space revealed. His hands came out holding a red fireproof box, a smaller version of the one in which he and Erin kept their passports and valuable documents. The key was in the lock. He had no fear of anyone finding the box, and he didn’t want Erin coming across the key by accident and asking what it was. They didn’t have many secrets from each other, but this was one of them.

  Harry opened the box. Inside were five thousand dollars in tens and twenties: it was Harry’s emergency fund. He had resisted dipping into the cash until that week, even when his business was at its lowest. Harry didn’t know how long five thousand dollars would last once he and Erin started running, but their main priority would be to put distance between themselves and Prosperous. After that, he’d make some calls. He still had friends beyond Prosperous.

  The box also contained a letter written and ready to mail. The letter was addressed to Hayley Conyer, and its contents could be summarized as a promise to keep quiet about Prosperous if he and Erin were left in peace. Even after all that had occurred, Harry remained loyal to the town. He didn’t want to betray its secrets.

  The final item in the box was a handgun, a five-shot Smith & Wesson 638 with a concealed hammer, a barrel length of less than two inches, and a weight of just fourteen ounces when empty. It had been acquired for him by one of his subcontractors, a plumber with a string of convictions who owed Harry, because Harry gave him work when nobody else would. Harry had been afraid to purchase a legal firearm. He was worried that word would get back to Chief Morland, and then questions would be asked, and with questions came suspicions. The gun fit easily into the pocket of his favorite jacket, and was powerful, accurate, and easy to fire, even for a neophyte like him. Erin didn’t approve of guns and wouldn’t tolerate them in the house. If she’d discovered that he had the S&W, he’d have found a quick use for the box of self-defense round-nose loads that sat alongside the pistol.