Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Crouching, Decker held the can of beans over the flame with a camping handle and stirred with thoughtful, slow strokes. Val watched him and felt useless, only neither of them seemed to mind. He needed a shave, she thought, his day-old growth of beard just a pleasant sort of dirtiness on his face. She felt bad about yesterday, knew she must have looked like a spoiled American baby, and it bothered her. “Sleep well?” She jerked the bag over her shoulder.

  His eyebrows shot up and he nodded. “You?”

  “Pretty well.” She remembered waking up warm and blissful at about five a.m., when light was just seeping into the tent, only to find she was lying up against Decker, who was sleeping on his back, with her head in the crook of his left shoulder, her arm flung over his chest. His arm was curled over her, his fingertips in her hair. She jerked away, jabbed the top sleeping bag down around her, and fell back asleep.

  “This is just about ready. Hungry?”

  Nodding, she staggered to her feet and set aside the sleeping bag. While she was still asleep, Decker had spread out her clothes to dry on the hull of the canoe. She felt them all—still damp—and thought he probably wouldn’t mind if she paddled for a while in his underwear. The lake was so still it looked like a hard, polished surface.

  “Sun’ll burn off that mist,” Decker said. “And when it does,” he tapped a spoon against a metal bowl, “we’re going to have a hot day.” She went over to Decker and sat down cross-legged with the camp stove between them. He stirred her share of the baked beans avec jambon and handed her the bowl. “We’ll be at Charlie Cable’s by dinnertime,” he said, dipping his own spoon into what was left in the can, “and from there we can call Portage Airlines to pick us up.”

  Val felt stunned. “Does it have to be tonight?” What was the matter with her?

  He was silent. “No,” he said, chewing reflectively. “It doesn’t.” He looked at her as he settled back on the ground, hooking an arm around his bent knee. “I just thought you’d want to get back to town pretty quickly.”

  “I do,” she said as she straightened up, “but we’ve come all this way—”

  “And Charlie’s good company.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but I can’t think a few hours will make any difference.” Besides, she could poke around for some incriminating evidence.

  “Neither can I.”

  She tried to be serious. “And we could always contribute the other can of SpaghettiOs.”

  “You can’t wait to get rid of them, can you?”

  They both laughed. Then she took a heaping spoonful of beans, her fingers pushing in a couple that were about to get away. They ate quietly, watching two ravens who swooped overhead and settled in separate treetops. They made their hoarse call, inching on spindly legs along the fragile branches. One of them lifted a shiny wing and picked at himself. The other turned to face the lake. Still they seemed aware of each other. Val wondered if they were mates. “Thanks for setting out my things,” she said.

  He raised a hand dismissively, his eyes still on the ravens.

  “Tell me about Leslie.” She didn’t know she was going to say it and knew it was a mistake as soon as it was out. His face changed as fast as the weather. She watched his features draw together, completely losing the good-natured openness she had only ever seen. He looked older. He looked eternal. Then he shook his head. It was a small movement, tight and slow, one that left no room for another opinion. His eyes never left her face.

  She edged closer to him. “What if,” her voice dropped, “what if Charles Cable…” If she voiced it, she was giving it a kind of credibility that scared her.

  Decker waited. Then: “What?”

  “What if Cable killed Leslie?”

  He practically fell over. “Charlie Cable? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  He seemed so incredulous Val felt insulted. “He was on the lake that day, and Kay said—”

  “I told you I’m not talking about it.”

  “You damn well have to talk about it—”

  “Oh, really?”

  “—because I can’t sign a killer!”

  He looked at the sky. “Ah, that explains it.”

  “Can you imagine the publicity if it got out?”

  “Maybe you’ll sell more books,” he said softly.

  Val heaved a sigh, watching him scrape his leftover beans into the fire. “You know that’s not what I mean. If Cable’s anywhere on the edges of a murder case, I have to figure out just how close to the heart of it he really comes. If there’s any suspicion about him and we signed him anyway,” she opened her hands helplessly, “we’ve had it.” Then she added, “And I’ve had it.”

  “Clear him or nail him, is that it?”

  “It’s due diligence.”

  “Peter on the same page?”

  A beat. “Yes.” Of course he would be. She’d clear it with him later. Sometime between signing and countersigning.

  Wade gave her a hard look. “Charlie Cable was the only one around here who actually liked Leslie,” and then he seemed to hear what he’d said and pulled back, “so you’d have to be—”

  “How could that possibly be true? There’s Caroline, there’s you—”

  “You heard me,” said Decker softly, reaching for her bowl.

  He was diverting her from the strong possibility that Charles Cable had killed Leslie Decker. Why?

  He went on, “You’re leaving out the cops’ favorite suspect.”

  “Martin Kelleher?”

  His eyes slid to her. “Me.” Without another word, Wade Decker grabbed the pot, the bowls, and the spoons and headed down to the water to wash them.

  She followed him, crouching alongside as he dipped water into the pot and started to scour it with a sprig of pine needles. “Tell me what you think happened that day, tell me what she—”

  “Sorry, Val.” He scrubbed harder.

  That was it. They looked at each other silently for what seemed like a long time, then Val looked away. She thought she understood. “We share a tent, some underwear, and a few bad moments,” she said, “but it doesn’t make us close.”

  “It doesn’t even make us friends.”

  She looked down, folding her arms across her chest. “Right,” she said quietly, feeling unbearably sad.

  “Look,” he said, grabbing their spoons from the ground, “you had one hell of a day yesterday and a good night’s sleep, and you woke up in the arms of a man you don’t know—and don’t even particularly like—and it felt just great.” He widened his eyes at her. “But, no, I won’t tell you about Leslie.” His voice dropped. “Leave it alone.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then you’re on your own.” Wade Decker opened his hand and let the spoons clatter against the inside of the can, like dropping a gun after a shooting.

  The trail continued uphill into the forest, where it was suddenly cooler, but then she could feel her own sweat and the mosquitoes started to check her out. She thanked God for DEET and figured she’d find Decker sooner or later. The climb was just starting to make her cranky when she finally heard the waterfall. The trail split, one half angling off to the right to some vacant tent sites scattered over the rock, the other continuing upward over a footbridge.

  Val heard a thunderous splash and a whoop that echoed all around her. Heading toward the sound, she passed the canoe, where Decker had lodged it upright in the crotch of a fir tree. Then she saw the waterfall, the white, plumed water churning down over the high rock wall and ripping away downstream over shallow rocks.

  Just as she noticed Decker’s clothes in a heap on the dry rocks, she heard him call her name, and she caught sight of him standing behind the waterfall in a shallow crevasse, a wedge-shaped grotto formed by the overhanging rock. The water crashed fierce and thick in front of him, the white spume like a curtain pushed upward
by air and might.

  It was beautiful.

  “Val,” he yelled, his arm jutting through the falls, beckoning. “Come on in. Just swim out hard,” he was yelling over the noise of the falls, “swim out hard and I’ll catch you and pull you in.” The day was hot, and her shirt clung in patches. All she had to do was strip, drop herself into the pool and swim out to Decker.

  “Val!”

  She looked away downstream, then back at Decker. If she stripped, she’d have to swim, if she swam, she’d have to swim to Decker, if she swam to Decker—she’d never get a foothold in such a small, close place, not even for a second. “I can’t,” she yelled back, her voice lurching with a feeling she didn’t understand.

  “Come on, I’ll catch you,” he called from behind the waterfall, naked and laughing, taking the force of the water, expanding into all the corners of life that she left unlit. Through the years she had placed so many pieces of herself in reserve that she no longer knew where to find them.

  “It’s all right,” she yelled, when it wasn’t at all. “I’ll wait for you.”

  “We may never get another chance.”

  That she knew.

  She was counting on it.

  16

  At the end of the trail above the falls, Decker and Val studied the channel. They had stayed long enough at the falls to set Val’s clothes out to dry on hot, clean rock face while she watched the clouds, and Decker bathed and shampooed his hair with an old plastic bottle of CampSudz he found in the rucksack.

  The sky burned blue, the clouds hardened into alabaster, and Val felt herself tempered by the force of sunlight. They had a lunch of Slim Jims that tasted better than she’d imagined. She changed back into her own shirt and torn pants and handed him his underwear. Decker decided to go shirtless, then stashed everything except the jeans he was wearing into the dry bag.

  It was what lay just below the waterline that made the channel almost unnavigable. Enormous, submerged boulders of varying shapes and sizes, some mossy, some not, all slippery. As clear as the water was, when the sun and clouds shifted it was impossible to tell where to put the next foot—except by feel.

  Val pulled off her shoes and tossed them into the canoe. They tried what turned out to be false passages, where the spaces between boulders weren’t wide or deep enough for the canoe to pass, and backed up to try others. Her bare feet slid into deep underwater crevices she could only let happen, keeping her ankles soft as they twisted. Val’s shirt, unbuttoned below her heart, floated up around her chest.

  Once they were past the rocks they traded places in the shallows and climbed back into the canoe. “That was good,” Decker said, smiling, and she nodded. They stretched themselves toward the middle of the canoe and studied the map he spread out over the dry bag, then paddled to where the channel forked. To the right was the way to Charlie Cable’s.

  After they had paddled slowly down that right fork for about an hour, well ahead of them on the near shore was a dock that appeared as a bold outline in the sunlight. They paddled through a field of water lilies, which parted as they came, and pulled up to the dock. It was in good repair.

  Decker unlashed the packs, landed them on the dock, then hoisted himself up and steadied the canoe for Val. “Getting out?” he asked as he tied the canoe to a cleat. Lifting herself onto the dock, she sat beside him. He unrolled the top of the dry bag and pulled out his shirt.

  Val said, “I’d like to wash up first.”

  They looked at each other. “I put the CampSudz in the side pocket of the rucksack,” he said with a smile. “I’ll meet you up at Charlie’s.” He left the dock pulling his arms into the shirt and she lost sight of him on the path into the woods. She found the CampSudz and set it on the dock. Then she stood, slipped out of her clothes, and dropped them beside her.

  Crossing her arms over her chest, Val looked down at her tired feet. In that moment she believed that all around her was silence and goodness, and nothing else. She let her suspicions of Charlie Cable just float on away from her like a random leaf in a tiny breeze. Curling her toes over the front edge of the dock, she pulled her hands quickly overhead and did a shallow dive.

  It was cold. But somehow not as cold without her clothes. She surfaced, driving hundreds of white bubbles before her, and swam to the lily pads. Treading water, she touched the thin, round pads that floated in green perfection, the pure white flowers open to the sunlight that swelled everything. Back at the dock she climbed out long enough to lather up, running suds over the goosebumps, squeezing suds on her hair, working them through with the kind of zeal only a wet body on a warm day can feel.

  Val dived again, rubbing her head clean, and felt the soap leaving her body. Swimming to the surface, she turned smiling and crying to squint into the sun. Then she headed back to the water lilies, swimming underwater with her eyes open, threading her way among the slender, waving stalks.

  She looked at her rippling white body, her legs hanging like stems, without clothing, without transportation, without shelter—with literally nothing between her and whatever could befall her—and felt exquisitely human. Downright epic, even. She had survived moose muck, teenage boys, headwinds, SpaghettiOs, Wade Decker, and the platoon of bogeymen inside her head, and she had prevailed. She, Valjean Cameron. She came up for air.

  Standing at the edge of the dock, not three feet away from her, his arms crossed and his shoulders jerking around like he must be carrying ferrets inside his shirt, was Charles Cable. “You can’t have the book,” was what he said.

  While she struggled into her poor pants, she was angry. The problem—she thought, banging her shoes against Cable’s dock—the problem with epics is that you never quite kill all the monsters. No matter what you do, there will always be something that steps out in front of the next guy, the next foolhardy schnook with enough hubris to inflate a damn blimp. When it came right down to it, she had flashed a bunch of camper boys—she had to tell herself their laughter was the nervous virginal sort—gagged on succotash so bad that botulism could only improve the flavor, and left some of her sanity back there slurped down, down, down into the moose muck.

  Now here she was and that baffling, bestselling, possibly homicidal proto-coot Charles Cable was telling her Fir Na Tine couldn’t bring out his book? This went way beyond Peter Hathaway. This went way beyond Peter Hathaway and Daria Flottner. This was Cameron and Cable, mano a mano. Finally, she would do it for herself. Maybe, she thought as she squinched her feet back into the stiff shoes, maybe this was what being a professional really meant. Forget the skills, forget the taste, the judgment, the sheer grit of getting through editorial meetings, handling textbook neurotic authors. Being a pro was finally just a matter of acting like one.

  She’d hear what the man had to say.

  And she’d damn well try to change his mind.

  Through the screen door she saw Decker, with a beer in his hand, running a finger across the spines of the books lining one of Cable’s shelves. Cable himself was tending a pot on the two-burner stove. “Well, are you coming in?” he bellowed at her.

  She stepped inside, ruffling at her wet hair. Decker gave her a cool, inscrutable look, then winked. She took it for encouragement about Cable. “I’m Valjean Cameron, Mr. Cable—”

  “I damn well know who you damn well are.”

  “—and I work for Peter Hathaway.”

  He glowered at her. “What took you so long?”

  “Weather.” Then she added, “And my inexperience.”

  “Peter a good boss?”

  She felt off-balance. “Good enough to stay out of my way. Mostly.”

  Val watched Decker pull a bottle from the small fridge, flip off the cap with a wall-mounted opener, and bring it over to her. Decker eased over to the photos and pictures and mail strung from cord tacked up on the wall. She took a long swig and tried a discreet burp.

  At len
gth, Charles Cable announced, “You’ll stay for supper.” He rapped the spoon against the side of the pot. “It’s stew.”

  “That will make a nice change.”

  “Good year for loons,” he announced like a town crier.

  “Lake must be healthy,” she commented, assuming he wasn’t referring to anything actually in the stew.

  Cable flattened the flyaway hair with his forearm, and slipped her a quick look. “Quite a shiner.”

  “That it is.”

  “Foote?”

  She blinked, wondering. Another swig. “No,” she said. “Fist.”

  “Dixon Foote,” Cable bellowed.

  She jumped. “It was accidental. He apologized.”

  Cable grunted. His shoulders started rippling again, this time in the direction of plates and bowls, set on an open shelf over the porcelain sink. She took it as a directive to set the table. Only the table, which had a hurricane lamp and a typewriter on it, didn’t include any chairs. No laptop, even, she thought, looking around.

  So the great writer stands and bangs it all out, like Hemingway. Only she’d bet Hemingway never came up with phrases like harrowing heliotropic iron ovoids hurtling toward the mother ship. There was a simple staircase up to a sleeping loft, a change of clothes on a couple of crude pegs, and a double futon mattress against the side wall, which was practically all window. Next to it stood a small table that held a marine radio, and what looked like a golf cart battery that must be storing solar power.

  “You like Nebula, Cameron? Get yourself a bowl. You too, Wade. Step up.”

  “I didn’t read it.” No way around it. One look at the harrowing heliotropic iron ovoids line was enough for her. And now here, with the acclaimed author of this space drivel, she could only be exposed as a liar if she pretended otherwise.

  Decker widened his eyes at her. “After you,” he murmured, handing her a bowl. Together they stepped up to Charles Cable, who stood poised to ladle out steaming stew, them in their ragged tripping clothes like workhouse beggars. Cable’s eyes were big and china blue, like his wall-sized shadeless window that can’t keep anything out.