Family.
He wondered what his mother might say if she found out he had relapsed again—worse, he imagined what she might do to him.
There will be no second chances, she had said.
Second chances.
It broke his heart to think about how many chances he had actually had, and how many times he had lied to her.
“Yeah,” he croaked, “visiting the family.”
The ticket lady leaned down and glanced at the overnight bag Oxford clutched in one sweaty palm.
“Well I hope you packed some warm things in there.”
She sat back in her chair and turned her gaze to the train station entrance. It was clear that she wanted to turn her whole body to face the doors, but her girth made swiveling in her chair a significant task.
“It’s not gonna stop,” she informed him, clearly referring to the thick snowflakes that were coming down steadily now.
The woman was holding the ticket just out of his reach, and all he wanted to do was snatch it from between her chubby, manicured fingers and get the hell on to the train. And sleep. Oh God, sleep would be great. He brought two fingers to his temple and rubbed. The Tylenol was wearing off.
“And it’s gonna get cold, too. Colder than it’s been in some twenty years, they say.”
She was nodding, the thick fat wobbling beneath her chin like rooster wattles, and Oxford felt himself nodding back. Anything to get this woman to shut up and let him get on that train.
When the ticket lady leaned forward again to add something else, Oxford seized the opportunity; he reached under the plastic partition with surprising dexterity and grabbed the ticket from her hand.
“Thank you,” he said under his breath, ignoring the way her smile—obnoxiously white teeth peeking out from red lipstick that was two shades too cheery—faded.
It wasn’t until much later that he realized he had forgotten to ask for his change.
Merry fucking Christmas, he thought glumly, his sweaty palm massaging the last ten dollars he had to his name.
* * *
About an hour later, Oxford awoke to an announcement over the train’s intercom.
“Final stop: North Askergan County.”
His headache was gone, and after a few deep breaths and a long stretch, Oxford realized that he actually—surprisingly—felt pretty good. So good, in fact, that his mind was free to think of other things. It wasn’t his family, or his recently widowed mother that he was thinking about, however, but something else—something more inert, but oddly more powerful: the black cosmetic case he had stolen from the pasty, sleeping woman flashed in his mind. It was powerful, that case, and like a magnet it pulled at him.
No, Oxford scolded himself, squinting his eyes so tightly that he saw bright flashes. No fucking way.
Another deep breath and the tug subsided to a level that left him feeling comfortable enough to open his eyes. Still, he was helpless to prevent his gaze from flicking to the bathroom door—a door that he knew could be locked from the inside, a place where he could be alone.
The train slowed and then stopped, and less than a minute later he found himself standing, grabbing his overnight bag, and disembarking before he succumbed to any of his urges.
Inside the station, Oxford made a brief stop in a small, brightly lit souvenir store. He bought a cream soda, a stuffed owl, and a QueenPop magazine, reluctantly handing over his last ten dollars. This time, he made sure to take his change.
As annoying as the woman at the ticket desk had been, at least she hadn’t lied to him; the snow was coming down so heavily that it was difficult to see more than a few feet across the train station parking lot. A brief glance back at the tracks the train had made in the heavy snow and he was grateful that he had taken the early train; if the snow kept up at this rate—and if the completely impenetrable grey sky was any indication, it most definitely would—he doubted any other trains would be making the trek north tonight.
Oxford had only been waiting outside for a few minutes before he realized that the ticket woman’s other prediction also held some truth to it. Despite the falling snow, it was damn cold—a dry, brittle chill that pricked at his exposed flesh. He tossed his bag down on the snow and, unzipping it just enough for his hand to fit in and to avoid it filling with snow, he reached inside. Annoyingly, nothing he touched felt anything like his hat. With a frustrated grunt, he unzipped the bag all the way and peered inside. Of course, his hat was right there, near the top, right beside the—
Oxford’s hand hung in midair.
His black-and-white-striped cap was right there beside the inconspicuous black faux-leather cosmetic case.
You could go inside, a voice in his head implored. You could go inside and keep warm. Head to the bathroom, wash your face, maybe go into a stall and—
A vision of his mother’s eyes, sadness and disappointment clinging from her green irises, flashed in his mind.
Oxford closed the bag forcefully and zipped it with such vehemence that the zipper overextended and pinched the fabric like tiny teeth biting down on canvas.
6.
Although It Wasn’t The world’s loudest scream, the noise was so unexpected that Cody instinctively turned his head around to look at his girls. This simple and arguably dangerous act likely saved their lives. When Cody turned his head, his arms, which had been firmly and obstinately locked at ten and two to avoid the impulse to look at and thus fuel his wife’s anger, turned slightly in the same direction and their car avoided the skidding silver sedan by mere inches. The fishtail drew Cody’s attention back to the road, and after a brief lateral slide, he managed to right their SUV. He realized then that he had been holding his breath, and he quickly released the stale air and sucked in a fresh lungful.
“Everyone all right?” he asked hesitantly, still not sure who had spotted the swerving car in front of them and screamed.
When no one answered, he offered a quick glance at Marley and was surprised that she was still staring at him. Her eyes, wide and bright, expressed not so much fear or relief as something else—anger, maybe, or disgust.
“I’m fine, Daddy,” Corina finally replied softly from the backseat.
He glanced back at her and noticed that her white headphones lay in her lap. Unlike Marley, she looked scared and relieved.
“The storm’s not coming my ass,” Marley grumbled angrily, and Cody turned his attention back to the snow-covered road in front of them.
In the backseat, Henrietta started to cry.
* * *
It was almost an hour after their near collision before tensions eased enough to allow conversation to return to the vehicle.
Tentatively, Cody posed what he knew was a clichéd question, but his words held no other purpose but to break the unease.
“Are you guys excited?”
He ignored Marley’s sour expression and turned his attention to his girls. To his dismay, Marley’s look was mirrored on Corina’s young face. Even without the matching expressions, they were near replicas of each other: small, almost upturned noses, full lips, roundish faces. Only their eyes differed significantly, Corina’s being a bright green, while his wife’s were a deep hazel.
“Who’s going to be there?” Corina asked, not bothering to look up from her cell phone.
Definitely not whoever you have been texting for the last half hour.
“Well, Mama, of course, and your two uncles.”
“Uncle Jared?”
“Yes,” Cody said hesitantly, “he is one of your two uncles.”
“Is he coming alone?”
Cody shook his head slowly.
“I think he’s bringing Seth.”
Corina finally stopped texting and looked up. When their eyes met briefly in the rearview mirror, she quickly turned back to her phone, but not before muttering, “Gaylords.”
Cody was so taken aback by the comment that it took a moment before he came to terms with what she had said.
“Corina!”
“Gaylords!” Henrietta repeated with a giggle.
“Corina!” Cody scolded again, turning to Marley for support. Either she hadn’t heard, or worse, she had chosen to ignore the comment.
“That’s terrible! Why would you say that?”
When his eldest daughter failed to respond and instead continued to click away on her phone, he once again turned to Marley.
“Are you just going to sit there?”
Marley flicked her long, dark hair over her shoulder and finally faced the backseat.
“Give me the phone,” she demanded sternly.
When Corina ignored her, she repeated herself.
“Give. Me. The. Phone.”
This time, she didn’t wait for a response, and instead reached back and, with surprising speed, snatched the phone from her daughter’s hand before she had a chance to react.
“Hey!” Corina cried.
Marley switched off the phone and put it in the cup holder between the front seats.
“You are not to use those words,” she said with a sigh.
Finally you back me up, Cody thought. Maybe your icy demeanor is cracking. Selfish or not, the idea of a peaceful holiday with my family to mourn Dad’s passing maybe, just maybe, won’t be a complete debacle after all.
Corina crossed her arms and sulked.
“Gaylords,” Henrietta chanted in a sing-song voice, and Cody scowled.
Or maybe not.
7.
The Two Askergan County deputies had stopped bickering, and a calm had settled over the station, broken only by the incessant telephone ringing. Sheriff Dana Drew glanced at the phone on his desk for a moment before deciding to just let it ring. They would call back, he knew; or, more specifically, she would call back. For some reason, on this final day before his holidays, he was feeling somewhat nostalgic, and the last thing he wanted to do right now was talk to Mrs. Wharfburn. His gaze drifted from the black telephone to his two deputies—Deputy White, head firmly entrenched in paperwork, and Deputy Coggins, staring blankly into space—and he counted his blessings. These were good men.
Sheriff Drew had met his deputies a long time ago, back when they were in their early teens, awkward and uncomfortable, but even then he had known that they were good boys. And this wasn’t just a quality that went away when you hit puberty, he knew; no, it was something that was just ingrained in some people, and for whatever reason, Sheriff Drew had an uncanny ability to recognize these types. Over the years, as first a deputy himself and then eventually as the sheriff, he had honed this skill, or ability as Deputy Coggins jokingly referred to it. And now he could spot one of the good boys in a crowd. While useful this talent no doubt was, it was much more difficult for him to pick out the bad ones—the bad boys. This type didn’t stick out to him, maybe because his evil meter was usually stuck on yellow. Or maybe it had something to do with the moral ambiguity of the masses, or the Internet, YouTube, or Justin Bieber; he just didn’t know. But what he did know was that the good boys, like these two, almost always grew into good men.
Sheriff Drew felt himself nod. They were nimrods some of the time, maybe even most of the time, but they were the good kind of nimrods that Askergan County needed.
His thoughts shifted from the deputies to the empty dispatch desk. It was nine-thirty now, and Alice was sill nowhere to be found. Thankfully, before his anger had a chance to ruin his mood, the phone rang again, distracting him, and this time he reluctantly picked up the glossy black receiver and held it to his ear.
The sheriff didn’t even get a chance to say hello or introduce himself before Claudette Wharfburn began shouting.
“Alice Dehaust, I know your mother, young woman, and if you don’t tell that Sheriff Drew that I called, that I have been calling, I will go to her and tell her what you done: left an old, lonely widow—”
“Mrs. Wharfburn,” Dana interjected, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.
“—a cold and tired widow—”
“Mrs. Wharfburn,” Dana repeated, but the woman was unfazed and prattled on, louder now, as if trying to drown out the sheriff’s voice. He felt his head sag. This was going to be a very long last day.
“The snow is coming down heavy now, and if you want a frozen widow on your—”
He had had enough.
“Mrs. Wharfburn!” Dana shouted, and both deputies looked up from their desks.
At long last, the phone went silent. After a moment of dead air, the woman spoke again, but this time her tone was calm.
“Who is this?” she asked tentatively.
“Sheriff Dana Drew.”
There was another pause, and then the screeching continued.
“Sheriff, I have been calling the police station for almost two hours.”
Dana grimaced and fought the urge to hang up the phone right then—but he stood fast. Despite her shrill voice and undeniably annoying personality, she too was one of the good people. Really, really annoying, hysterical, paranoid, frustrating, and entitled, but good.
“What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Wharfburn?” he finally asked.
Pause.
“Well,” she began, “the snow is coming down heavier now and there are some awful—just awful—noises coming from some of the old trees—you know, the massive oak trees out in front of my house?”
Although Dana only nodded—he did know those trees—Mrs. Wharfburn either sensed this or didn’t care to wait for an answer.
“They are just creaking and making these terrible noises with every tiny gust of wind. Especially the one by the road, and that one has the most snow on its branches. You know the one?”
Again he nodded, but the ensuing pause suggested that this time she was waiting for an actual response.
“I don’t think—”
“The ones I asked to have cut back because I was worried that they would fall on the power lines one day?”
Dana grimaced again, now recalling a conversation they had had what must have been more than a year ago. Come to think about it, that conversation had gone a lot like this one.
“The one that you said you would come out and look at but never did? Well ‘one day’ is likely to be today or tomorrow, judging by all of this snow,” she finished, spitting the last word.
“With all due respect, Mrs. Whar—”
“Don’t you ‘without all due respect’ me, Dana Alexander Drew!”
Don’t hang up, don’t hang up, he pleaded with himself. Good person; she is a good person.
“I know your mother, Dana Alex—”
The sheriff took a deep breath.
“Mrs. Wharfburn,” he said sternly. “I’m sure that the trees are just fine.”
“If the power goes out, I will freeze here. My husband is dead, and I don’t know the first thing about driving the snowcat. Heck, the thing has been sitting in the shed for so long now, I doubt it would even start. Just me and Miffy here, and if the power goes out—do you know how cold it is out there?”
The woman’s tone suddenly changed again—it was slow and uneven now. She was terrified, Dana realized, and despite the way she had berated him just moments ago, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.
Dana remembered the deep chill he had felt just making the short walk from his car to the station. He didn’t recall it being even half as cold twenty minutes earlier when walking roughly the same distance from his house to his car.
“I know,” he said, trying not to sound too alarmed, “and, to be honest, the snow is supposed to keep on coming and it’s only going to get colder.”
A thought occurred to him then, as he suddenly remembered seeing Mrs. Wharfburn’s late husband, Dicky Wharfburn, a few years back at the only hardware store in town purchasing a big red generator.
Again he found himself rubbing at the deep grooves that ran from the side of his nose to the outer corners of his lips.
I might be getting old, he thought, but at least my memory is still sharp.
Regardless
of what had spurred the recollection, the memory was clear as day, and not a snow-filled day like today—a nice, sunny, warm spring day.
Warm. Spring. These words seemed as foreign as Russian to the sheriff.
“Mrs. Wharfburn, do you still have the generator that your husband bought some years back?”
There was a long pause, and if it weren’t for the woman’s low and slow breathing, Dana would have thought that the line had gone dead, which his deputies had informed him was becoming a more and more frequent occurrence.
“Mrs. Wharf—” he began, but the woman cut him off.
“Big, ugly red thing? With a pull cord, like a lawnmower?”
Dana couldn’t help but smile.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“I remember Dicky buying the damn thing, and let me tell you, he never used it once. Not once. I told him, too, that it would just sit there, like the chainsaw and the other power tools, getting rusty—”
Now it was Dana’s turn to cut her off.
“Mrs. Wharfburn, do you still have the generator?”
Another pause, shorter this time.
“Yeah, I think so.”
Dana was about to say something when the woman on the other end of the line suddenly screamed. The sheriff jumped to his feet so quickly that the base of the heavy black phone lifted off his desk and hovered in the air for a moment before coming crashing back down. He didn’t even notice Deputy Coggins stand and make his way to his desk, the man’s eyebrows knotted in concern.
“Mrs. Wharfburn!” he shouted. “Mrs. Wharfburn! Are you all right?”
When there was no answer, he made a move toward his coat that hung on the rack to his left, the phone still pressed to his ear.
“Mrs. Wharfburn!”
At long last, the woman answered.
“A branch just fell through my porch!” she shouted, her voice bordering on hysterical.
Dana felt his diaphragm contract and he slowly lowered himself back into his chair. Looking up, he realized that both his deputies were now hovering over his desk, their expressions grim. He waved them away.
Insatiable Series Omnibus Edition (Books 1-3) Page 3