Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Val stopped in front of Caroline Selkirk, who looked up at her with a ruined face. “She hated this place, and I never knew it. She worked behind my back.”

  And Val thought of the woman who, beaten, held aloft by the man she had been blackmailing to get the money to save the camp she herself had practically destroyed when she let a camper drown, wouldn’t give up the one small thing that might have saved her life. “Caroline,” was all Val could say in that moment, “it’s not the whole story.”

  Angry, Caroline dug her hands into the ashes. “But she plotted with Martin—”

  And all Val felt suddenly was wearier than she had ever been in her life. “It’s not the whole story. You’ll see.” As she turned away to make her way up the blackened path to the double sleep cabin, where she thought she could sleep for two days straight, she saw Charlie Cable arguing with Kay on the porch of the lodge. Then the big man set off down toward the docks, ungainly with what looked like fright, his arms pushing off things she couldn’t see. Without a word to Val, he untied a small open steel boat with peeling red paint that looked like it had been a workhorse in its day, and fell into it. His yells made no sense and he slammed the little motor into gear and headed off up the lake.

  Kay Stanley drew alongside Val, who looked at her. Then: “Marcus,” was all Kay said. Together they watched Charlie Cable, bestselling author of The Nebula Covenant, get far enough out in the lake that he could slam the tiller to the left and ride in wide pointless circles. And finally he cut the motor and struggled to his feet, where he stood alone in the white misty morning, wailing. The sound of his cries spread to each shore.

  Placidly, Kay Stanley, in her black capri pants and loose top, lifted her head and walked purposefully down to a camp boat. Val followed, untying the ropes as Kay started the motor. Then, with a steady hand, she headed across the water toward the other boat. She pulled alongside, tied the boats together, and stepped easily into the red steel boat, where she put her competent arms around the man standing there wailing, all alone.

  Later Val learned Decker had arrived, bandaged.

  No concussion.

  Broken clavicle.

  Footsteps on the narrow deck. His, she thought hazily.

  Nearby a door closed.

  Somebody set meals in a basket outside her door.

  Val dreamed of nothing.

  At night, with no flashlight, she staggered to the john.

  Somebody had mended her Colorado hippie dress.

  Somebody had washed and pressed it as well.

  From outside came the smell of a cigar.

  Val dreamed of nothing.

  And then by the second night she sat straight up in the camp bed, her eyes blinking in the dark. Val looked at the clock. 1:54. She felt wide awake and disturbed. Outside her window the crickets rasped and the air felt cool and heavy. She got out of bed, slipped into a light robe someone had set on the wall hook and looped the sash, then opened her cabin door. Tapping softly at the frame of Decker’s screen door, which was ajar, Val looked inside. The bed was made. Where was he? Alarmed, she dashed around the porch.

  “Wade!”

  Sitting on an Adirondack chair in the dark, he said, “I’m right here, Val.”

  “I was afraid you had gone.”

  “Where would I go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, “go back to sleep.”

  With a little shiver, she said, “You haven’t been to bed.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He was silent. “I thought I’d have a cigar,” he said finally. “And listen to the crickets.”

  “It’s nearly two.”

  “I’ve had more than one.”

  Her heart pounded. “Do you want some company?”

  The tip glowed. “I think you should go back to bed, Val.”

  “Why?”

  He answered carefully. “Because I think you’re heartbroken.”

  There was a catch in her voice. “And sleep helps.”

  “It passes the time.”

  “So does curiosity.” She stepped closer to him.

  “Only it doesn’t satisfy.”

  “Which is why you’re out here smoking.”

  “I’m thinking,” he said as he blew a spiral of smoke, “of four tequilas and a nameless Ag student.”

  “I see.” She searched for his face in the dark. “You’re not nameless.”

  He stood up. “Not yet. But names get forgotten by the heartbroken. I know,” he said quietly. “I’ve forgotten plenty.”

  She understood. “Good night, Wade.”

  “Good night.” As he passed her in the dark, he squeezed her shoulder and moved lightly down the steps. It was extraordinary. She watched him move across the yard, trailing cigar smoke, his shadow darker than the trees. She listened to the sound of his step on the gravel path leading down to the lake, and before she couldn’t hear it anymore, went back inside to her own room, where she slipped off the robe and slid under the sheets. It was the first time she had been turned down before she even knew what she was offering.

  She felt herself smile. She could sleep now.

  So could he.

  29

  At Sands Point Seaplane Base on Long Island, Wade Decker was slowly carrying Val’s bags out of the Cessna and setting them on the dock, and Val found herself remembering the evening, just a week ago, when they had to leave the Cessna behind and set out for Charlie Cable’s by canoe. He had lowered supplies out of the plane then too. Where you begin is where you end. For some reason, it all just felt inadequate, so she studied the orange wind sock and the fuel pump at the end of one of the docks, glinting in the sun high overhead.

  She fussed with her briefcase, checking the clasp as though there might be something wrong with it, delaying the goodbyes, the moment when he’d climb back inside the Cessna and float a turn away from her. Decker had insisted on flying her home, or as close to home as he could get her, and now he had. She’d take the train into the city. He’d fly to Toronto for the night. Plans laid, lives resumed.

  The last of the bags set down, Decker swung himself down to the dock and came toward her. Even in the heat, Val felt chilly in her aqua top and print skirt, and her shoulders hunched. When he pulled her in for a hug, she stood there stiff with her head down. All she could do was shake her head without even really knowing why. Her cheek found a place over his collarbone, where she was careful not to press.

  She could feel and smell the rough bandage underneath his shirt and she was swamped with feeling she didn’t know how to handle. It had something to do with sorrow at his injury. But it had something to do, too, with the strange awe she always felt at touching the skeletal part of another human being. Like placing fingertips on mortality and the patient and abiding dust. Maybe it was as close as she could get. To anyone.

  With his arms around her, he rocked her once. “Come on, Val,” he said with a small laugh, “just hug me back.”

  And because there was something in the way he said it that sounded a little unsure, her arms shot up around his neck and she squeezed hard, more to keep herself from saying that she just that minute realized she was going to miss him all to hell. They both got jumpy from the pressure and were caught between hanging on and springing apart.

  They let go.

  “It’s my ribs,” she said without thinking.

  “It’s my collarbone.”

  “What a couple of liars,” she said, shaking her head.

  “The worst.”

  She glanced away. “I wish I’d gone in the waterfall.” It felt like a very big admission.

  “I know,” he said. “Next time.”

  Her heart lifted. “Oh, no,” she said, “more SpaghettiOs.”

  Decker crossed his arms. “Listen,” he
said. “I don’t just manage the building on Bay Street. I own it.” The nasal whirr of a seaplane taking off made her realize they were just trying to fill the time. With two fingers he brushed the hair back from her face. “I’ve got this charity dinner dance thing in Toronto in October,” he said. “You’d hate it.”

  “In that case, I’ll be there.”

  He laughed. “Back to the frozen North?”

  Val thought about it. “Latitudes are relative,” she found herself saying. Then she looked west toward Manhattan, where her apartment was out of sight, that place with triple locks, where she’d hidden for years. A place where she cultivated meals alone and rejoiced at jackhammers in the street below and longed for old age to overtake her so she would never have to share the tender parts of her with anyone else.

  Val knew what was coming, so she raised her face to him, her hands behind her back. Slowly leaning in, Decker kissed her without touching her. It was a thing of inexpressible lightness, like a dragonfly on the clear green water of a northern lake, like a bat’s wings, like a needle of lightning in a distant thunderhead. She didn’t move, neither did he, then they grinned at each other and she bit her lip.

  “Take care of that collarbone,” she offered.

  He stepped back. “Should be perfect by October.”

  “Ah.”

  “Able to resume normal activity,” he added, and realizing how it sounded, blushed.

  “Charming,” she heard herself say, with a fond, high detachment, her eyes narrowing at him in the bright daylight.

  Scratching his cheek, Decker leaped back onto the Cessna’s float and climbed inside. “I just figured out how to annex this goddamn country, Val,” he called to her.

  “How?”

  The engine sputtered and revved, the prop whirling. “One citizen at a time.” His eyes settled on her as she watched him touch two fingers to his lips and slowly extend them to her. One citizen at a time. She gave him a small nod, and calmly wondered how many times in her life Wade Decker would sing her to sleep. It was a new idea, one that would get her through the next two months of dinner dishes and endless fall afternoons staring out of her office window. She would let her mind sweep back over the sight of Decker running toward her in the moment before the door took him down, Decker standing joyful in the waterfall, Decker swinging her in the Virginia Reel—not even the summer night as alive as the man with his hand on her waist.

  She was wrong. It wasn’t a new idea, it was an idea so old that it existed before speech, before the first creatures crept out of the primordial mud and looked around, before the great black waters were sailed or tenanted—before, even, the first light that made possible something even better than the fine old integrity of all things. Nothing was separate. Nothing ever was. Val touched two fingers to her lips and extended them to Wade Decker, who was pulling the plane around in a sunlit watery path that could never be Lake Wendaban, and let him go.

  About the Author

  An Edgar nominee for Best Short Story, Shelley Costa is the author of You Cannoli Die Once (Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel) and Basil Instinct. Practical Sins for Cold Climates is the first book in her exciting new mystery series. Shelley’s mystery stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Blood on Their Hands, The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, and Crimewave (UK). She teaches creative writing at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Visit her at www.shelleycosta.com.

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