Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  Cover of Snow is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Jenny Milchman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Milchman, Jenny.

  Cover of snow : a novel / Jenny Milchman.—First edition.

  p. cm

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53423-1

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Small cities—Fiction. 3. Conspiracies—Fiction. 4. Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.I47555C68 2013

  813′.6—dc23

  2012037976

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: Marietta Anastassatos

  Cover images: © Alexandre Cappellari/Arcangel Images (winter scene), ©Marcus Garrett/Arcangel Images (woman)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  My husband wasn’t in bed with me when I woke up that January morning. The mid-winter sky was bruised purple and yellow outside the window. I shut bleary eyes against light that glared and pounded.

  A second later I realized my toes weren’t burrowing into the hollows behind Brendan’s knees, that when I flung out my arm it didn’t meet his wiry chest, the stony muscles gone slack with sleep. I slid my hand toward the night table, fingers scrabbling around for our alarm clock.

  Seven-thirty.

  It was late. As if drugged, my brain was making sense of things only after a dull delay. But it was a full hour past the time I always woke up. We always woke up. Brendan slept a cop’s sleep, perpetually ready to take action, and I had been an early riser all my thirty-five years.

  Bits of things began to take shape in my mind.

  The morning light, which entered so stridently through the window.

  Brendan not in bed with me. He must’ve gotten up already. I hadn’t even felt him move.

  But Brendan had been working late all week; I hadn’t yet found out why. My husband had good reason to sleep in. And if he had risen on time, why didn’t he wake me?

  I felt a squeezing in my belly. Brendan knew I had an eight o’clock meeting with a new client this morning, the owner of a lovely but ramshackle old saltbox in need of repair. My husband took my burgeoning business as seriously as I did. He would never let me miss a meeting.

  On the other hand, Brendan would know that if I slept late, then I must be worn out. Maybe getting Phoenix off the ground had taken more out of me than I realized. Brendan probably figured he’d give me a few extra minutes, and the morning just got away from him.

  He must be somewhere in his normal routine now, toweling off, or fixing coffee.

  Except I didn’t hear the shower dripping. Or smell the telltale, welcome scent of my morning fix.

  I pushed myself out of bed with hands that felt stiff and clumsy, as if I were wearing mittens. What was wrong with me? I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror and noticed puddles of lavender under my eyes. It was like I hadn’t slept a wink, instead of an extra hour.

  “Brendan? Honey? You up?”

  My words shattered the air, and I realized how very still our old farmhouse was this morning.

  Padding toward the bathroom, one explanation for the weight in my muscles, not to mention my stuporous sleep, occurred to me.

  Brendan and I had made love last night.

  It had been one of the good times; me lying back afterward, hollow, cored out, the way I got when Brendan was able to focus completely on me, on us, instead of moving so fiercely that he seemed to be riding off to some distant place in the past. We’d even lain awake for a while in the waning moments before sleep, fingers intertwined, Brendan studying me in a way that I felt more than saw in the dark.

  “Honey? Last night tired me out, I guess. Not that it wasn’t worth it.”

  I felt a smile tease the corners of my mouth, and pushed open the bathroom door, expecting a billow of steam. When only brittle air emerged, I felt that grabbing in my gut again. Cold tile bit my bare feet.

  “Brendan?”

  My husband never started the day without a shower; he claimed that a night’s sleep made him ache. But there was no residue of moisture filming the mirror, nor fragrance of soap in the air. I grabbed a towel, wrapped it around my shoulders for warmth, and trotted toward the stairs, calling out his name.

  No answer.

  Could he have gone to the station early? Left me sleeping while my new client waited at his dilapidated house?

  “Honey! Are you home?” My voice sounded uncertain.

  No answer. And then I heard the chug of our coffeepot.

  Relief flowed through me, thick and creamy as soup. Until that moment, I hadn’t let myself acknowledge that I was scared. I wasn’t an overreactor by nature usually.

  I headed downstairs, feet more sure now, but with that wobbly, airless feeling in the knees that comes as fear departs.

  The kitchen was empty when I entered, the coffee a dark, widening stain in the pot. It continued to sputter and spit while I stood there.

  There was no mug out, waiting for its cold jolt of milk. No light was turned on against the weak morning sunshine. Nobody had been in the icy kitchen yet today. This machine had been programmed last night, one of the chores accomplished as Brendan
and I passed back and forth in the tight space, stepping around each other to clean up after dinner.

  That thing in my belly took hold, and this time it didn’t let go. I didn’t call out again.

  The sedated feeling was disappearing now, cobwebs tearing apart, and my thinking suddenly cleared. I brushed past the deep farm sink, a tall, painted cabinet.

  With icy hands, I opened the door to the back stairs, whose walls I was presently laboring over to make perfect for Brendan. Maybe, just maybe, he’d skipped his shower and called in late to work in order to spend time in his hideaway upstairs.

  The servants’ stairs were steep and narrow, with a sudden turn and wells worn deep in each step. I climbed the first two slowly, bypassing a few tools and a can of stripper, then twisted my body around the corner. I took in the faded wallpaper I’d only just reached after months of careful scraping.

  Perhaps I didn’t have enough momentum, but I slipped, solidly whacking both knees as I went down. Crouching there, gritting my teeth against the smarting pain, I looked up toward the top of the flight.

  Brendan was above me, suspended from a thick hank of rope.

  The rope was knotted around a stained glass globe, which hung in the cracked ceiling plaster.

  Brendan’s neck tilted slightly, the angle odd. His handsome face looked like it was bathed entirely in red wine.

  Suddenly a small cyclone of powder spilled down, and I heard a splitting sound. There was a rip, a tear, the noise of two worlds cracking apart, and then a deafening series of thuds.

  The light fixture completed its plummet, and broke with a tinkling sprinkle of glass. A tangle of ice-cold limbs and body parts slugged me, heavy as lead blankets.

  And I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, until the warble my voice had been before became no more than a gasping strain for air.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Club Mitchell arrived, gun at the ready; I don’t know when, or how he knew to come. He was Brendan’s partner, and his best friend before that. Maybe Club and Brendan had developed some karmic connection. Maybe I called him. He might’ve heard me keening—there was no other word for it—on that back stair.

  Club scooped me up in his well-muscled arms and carried me to our couch. Then he must’ve gone back to where he found me, because the next thing I heard was cursing.

  “No. Oh no. What the fuck did you do?”

  I screwed my fingers into my ears, but I couldn’t block out the sound of Club Mitchell starting to cry.

  My parents and sister arrived next.

  Again, I had no idea how they’d been summoned. I let them in, trembling in clothes I didn’t remember putting on, awash with outdoor chill. The wreath I’d made was still hanging on the front door, its gay ribbons motionless in the still air.

  “Oh, Nora, darling.” My mother stuck out both her arms, like tongs.

  I stared over her shoulder as she enfolded me. My unblinking eyes settled on my sister, Teggie. She was shivering, her grass-blade arms wrapped around her narrow torso.

  “Time,” said my dad, his voice throaty, but brisk. “Time is what you need.”

  Unbelievably, fatigue was smothering me, and I yawned mightily.

  “Heals all wounds,” Teggie murmured, her tone so affable that only I would’ve heard the bite.

  “That’s right,” my dad said, giving her a surprised, grateful look.

  Teggie walked over to me. “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll make you some coffee.”

  “I can do it,” my mother offered.

  My father crossed the room and embraced me, his arm a weight around my shoulders. I fought not to shrug it off, and my sister rescued me, leading me over to a chair.

  “Nora,” my mother called from the kitchen, an apologetic note in her tone. “I’m just having a little trouble finding the—”

  “It’s all right,” I barked. Then I dropped my voice. “Right now all I want is to sleep.”

  My father and sister glanced at each other, a rare private exchange between them.

  My mom came back in. “All right,” she said softly. “That sounds like a good idea. Need any help getting upstairs?”

  I squinted at her, my mother’s face suddenly unknown to me, a stranger’s. “No,” I replied in a tone odd to my own ears. “I don’t need any help.”

  I mounted the front stairs and sank into the yawning sea of our bed. After a minute or two, I got back out. My throat was filling up, my nose too; I couldn’t breathe. I curled up on the wood floor, where it didn’t seem to matter if I suffocated, down low, a place nobody would ever think to look. After a while, I reached one hand up and pulled a blanket down over me.

  The sole, lone thing I cared about, in the entire shimmering universe, was why.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the day of the funeral my family members appeared before me in a dark blur. I couldn’t remember what I had put on, whether it was black, green, or nothing at all.

  “Mom?” I asked. “Am I—okay?”

  She didn’t seem to understand what I meant. Her gaze didn’t drop to my outfit; it offered no reassurance. In that moment my mother’s face told me only one thing.

  And all I could think about for the rest of the day—while snow splattered the cemetery and the Wedeskyull police strode over the rock-hard soil, doing their stately, mechanical dance; when they lowered my husband’s casket into a frozen rift in the ground, before gathering stiff as tin soldiers at our tiny farmhouse—was my mother’s expression. How she had once loved Brendan like a son, but now she’d come to hate him.

  Club was the last cop to arrive at our house afterward. Once he came, there didn’t seem to be enough space for everyone else. He was a solid man, filling a good chunk of the living room, and he sloshed coffee into a cup for me. I accepted the drink without question, knowing I wouldn’t take a sip. Club had brought his huge black Lab, as he always did. I was allergic to dogs, but today I craved the lighter, easier side Weekend brought out in his master.

  I felt as if I had an invisible force field around me. Our small house was packed with family, friends, the gray-uniformed bodies of Brendan’s fellow police officers, people who had known my husband all his life. But I managed to roam between them, cutting wide swaths of space, before settling, alone, in a corner.

  Weekend trotted over. He butted my hip, liquid eyes downcast. Force field cracked by one brave soul, I thought.

  Club was standing next to Police Chief Vern Weathers, who oversaw the room as if it belonged to him, and he had to bear the hurt for everyone in it. I tried to gather together a greeting for Vern while Club cradled his holster in his palm, eyeing me. These were Brendan’s people, not mine, and while I felt comfortable enough with everyone, I’d never really become a part of them.

  Weekend’s rough sheet of tongue lathered my fingers.

  When my nose began to run, I sniffed, but didn’t take my hand away from the dog.

  Not until Brendan’s mother arrived.

  I was still staring at the tight knot of gray-clad men, their expressions frozen in a way that couldn’t be explained by the temperature, and that I didn’t quite believe was caused by the circumstances, either. These weren’t emotional men. I didn’t think grief would immobilize their features, make them move as if their joints were rusty, and cement themselves as far away from me as our small farmhouse would allow.

  Icy air sheeted in, and I looked up to see my mother standing at the front door. It was dark out already. Two women came inside, their arms linked.

  “Hello, Eileen,” my mother murmured, the name tolling like a bell.

  Eileen had arrived with her sister-in-law, Jean, a retiring presence despite her bulk.

  I’d always thought that my mother-in-law and I would have a lot in common. She had a love of archeology; I had majored in art history and restored old houses for a living. But Eileen Hamilton despised me from the moment Brendan brought me home with him from college.

  Her black dress was stiff, and its style somehow wrong:
oversized flaps at the collar, the hemline long. Funeral garb might be understandably outdated, but all of Eileen’s clothes tended toward this, like a wardrobe from a different age.

  “I’m sorry,” I told my mother-in-law, feeling as if I’d just admitted to something. Then I sneezed. Weekend rubbed against me.

  My mother-in-law’s mouth was the size and shape of a frozen pea. “Thank you.”

  “I am, too, Mrs. Hamilton,” Teggie said. “Brendan was the only brother I ever had.”

  Eileen’s mouth whittled further. “What do you intend to do now, Nora?”

  I was trying to muster some compassion for my mother-in-law. She’d had one son die before Brendan. She was childless now, and a widow, too. “I’m sorry?” I said again.

  Weekend twitched beside me.

  A cough rattled in Eileen’s throat. “Well, this isn’t really your place, is it? Brendan’s perhaps, although frankly, I was always surprised that he came back here.”

  She was voicing the same thoughts I’d had earlier, but her words, their tone, made my skin grow chill all over. I patted Weekend, thinking hard, at the same time trying not to think.

  “It’s not even your house,” Eileen went on. “Jean must own nearly all of it still—”

  Jean was standing in front of a table laden with serving plates and bowls, her wide back turned, and she offered neither protest nor affirmation. I watched out of the corner of my eye as she walked off.

  “Mrs. Hamilton,” Teggie began. “I think you’d better—”

  “This isn’t the time,” I interrupted.

  “No,” Eileen said after a pause. “Perhaps not. Give yourself a few days then. I suppose final decisions can wait.”

  My sister’s mouth opened again, but for once I spoke before she did. “It won’t be the right time for me to decide anything for a while. Not until I find out what happened.”

  “What happened?” Eileen echoed.

  “To Brendan,” I replied unnecessarily.

  Eileen frowned. Then suddenly she leaned forward, taking my hand in both her bony ones. It wasn’t a touch; it was a way to keep me still. I could feel each slender digit, the points of her knuckles.

  “Why do you think a man kills himself, Nora?” she asked, each word unflinchingly delivered, a jab in my ribs. “What reason do you imagine people will come up with?”