Cover of Snow

by Jenny Milchman

  “Two days before what?” I asked.

  A bird took flight, releasing a branch. Snow plummeted, but Melanie didn’t bother to duck. The spilled flakes melted upon her face, making slow, teary rivulets. “John disappeared just two days before your husband’s death.”

  And then her head jerked up, gaze rising as if she were tracking the sight of something.

  It was behind me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Melanie turned and fled. For a second, the tails of her coat could be seen flying out behind her while the drumbeat of her footsteps sounded dully against the terrain. Then all trace of her was gone.

  I revolved slowly, instinctively beginning to back up.

  Ned Kramer stood before me, hands held out appeasingly.

  Pent-up breath escaped in a whoosh. “You scared me to death.” The draining of adrenaline added a bite to my tone. “You always have that effect on women?”

  Ned’s gaze followed Melanie’s retreating form. “They’ve been known to turn and run.” Then he explained. “I was worried about you. You hadn’t said anything about meeting someone, and then you ran off into the woods. So I figured I’d try and tag along. Took me a little while to find you.”

  Ned was a reporter; I’d known him first in conjunction with a story. Had I become the potential story?

  He was peering at me closely. “You need to get someplace warm.”

  It was suddenly all too much to think about. Everything was too much to think about.

  Ned seemed to sense my state of mind. “Let’s drive back together and talk,” he suggested. “I booked a room at the inn in town last night. But I have to be in Albany tomorrow, and I can take the bus down, pick up my car then.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense just to stay here?”

  “Come on,” he said, beginning to lead me away. “You can tell me all about your friend.”

  Melanie had said she would’ve liked to talk to a reporter, so I assumed it was okay to reveal what she’d told me. But still I hesitated as we began to drive, my car pegged toward Wedeskyull as if it knew where it was going.

  I didn’t have a good handle on Melanie. Was she a bereft woman, projecting her abandonment outward—running from reporters in the woods and elevating normal police procedures to the level of a cover-up? Or was there something dreadful and unexplained going on here, a missing man, and police who failed to take notice?

  “She’s not my friend,” I began. “I just met her. Her name is Melanie Cooper.”

  Ned twisted sharply in the passenger seat.

  “What?” I asked. “Do you know her?”

  Ned was staring out the window, his mouth set in that clean line again. “No.”

  I forced myself to focus on the road. “You sure?” I tried to get him to look my way. “Are you being straight?”

  Ned didn’t crack a smile. “How did someone you didn’t know come to be talking to you a hundred miles from home?”

  It was a good question. “Her husband … I guess he’s disappeared. Or left. And Melanie found that the police didn’t help her very much. When she heard that Brendan died … she thought there might be a connection.”

  “Because Brendan happened to be a cop?”

  I spoke sharply. “She’s reaching. You do that when you’re bereft. Right?”

  Ned didn’t reply.

  The road was a dark river before us. The contrast between it and the wild whiteness flanking the highway made the eyes blink, do funny things. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you all that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well …” I felt suddenly silly. “Why’re you so interested?”

  “I’m a reporter,” Ned said. “I’m interested in everything. You could describe your last trip to the grocery store and I’d be taking notes.”

  “What about the fires?” I asked bluntly. “You were there at both houses. How do I know you’re not behind them?”

  Ned was still staring out at the glistening scenery, the night sky. The stars were blanked out by remnants of the earlier storm. “How do I know you’re not?”

  “What?” I took my eyes off the road for a moment, and with the glare of the headlights lost, the lightless sky overwhelmed me.

  “Look, all I’m saying is that you were going to work on my house and it caught fire. Then you let me stay at your house and it burned down. Maybe you’re trying to kill me.”

  My lips quivered. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Ned twisted around in his seat. “The fires are a false road, Nora. Or at least any connection I have to them is.”

  “What?” I couldn’t follow what he was saying. “What does that mean?”

  “If you focus on the fires—try to track down where I was when they started, if there were accelerants used, what the reports say, who made the 911 calls, that kind of thing …”

  He was handing me a roster of ways to go about it, an investigative reporter’s approach to the matter. And then Ned finished his thought.

  “… you might be giving some pretty powerful people enough time to cover their tracks.”

  Everything seemed to go quiet around me. I was flying down the highway at seventy miles an hour, temperature plummeting and moon racing across the planet to make its appearance in the north, yet all was suddenly still. I couldn’t hear a thing, not the blast of the engine nor the rush of tires against the road. Not even the steady, quiet rhythm of Ned breathing.

  He had just confirmed—for me, for Melanie—that forces were at work here we hadn’t yet begun to comprehend. That the one thing I’d held on to, ever since finding my husband’s lifeless body dangling from the ceiling, was true.

  “Do you want to pull over?” Ned asked, and I nodded soundlessly. He pointed to a swath of shoulder up ahead, helping me steer the car, while looking behind us to make sure there wasn’t any traffic. He leaned over, chest brushing my arm, to shift into park.

  “Which powerful people?” I asked at last.

  Ned stared out the window, but the dappled globe of the moon still hadn’t appeared. I followed his gaze, hunting some spark of light. We both seemed to give up at the same time.

  “You think of Wedeskyull as a town, the place you’ve made your home.”

  I was about to tell him that wasn’t quite the whole story when Ned looked over at me, planing his hand across the seat.

  “I’ve come to think of it as a tiny empire.”

  His use of the word made me laugh, and he jumped on it. “You think we’re a country, Nora? A democracy, one nation under God?”

  “Well, you make me sound a little naïve, but …”

  Ned gave a definitive shake of his head. “Power-hungry people want to control.” He swept his hand across the seat again. “Before my wife and daughter died, I was trying to write a book. If I ever get back to it, that’s what it’ll be about.”

  “So who are you saying has control here?”

  Ned looked out the window. “Look, I’m just beginning to be able to answer that myself. And I can’t tell you everything—protection for sources and all that.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “But I can say this: I had cause to start looking into things, matters of public record. How this town is run, how it’s always been run. And that opened up some questions that didn’t have answers, not good ones anyway.”

  “Like what?”

  Ned grinned at me, but the look was devoid of mirth. “Did you ever wonder how the police force came to be so well appointed? The barracks, computers in the cruisers, all of it?”

  I shrugged. “It always just seemed a plus for us. Brendan’s job was secure, and he was well paid, especially for these parts. It’s what allowed me to start my business.”

  Ned gave a snort. “Well paid for sure.”

  He was staring at some far-off point, impossible to see. “The chief of police—and his father before him, and grandfather before him—have always made sure they have plenty of funds, and they aren’t
overly scrupulous about how they procure them.” Ned refocused his gaze on me. “And of course, there’s always something to use them for.”

  I frowned. “Do you mean—are you saying that the police manufacture crime?”

  Ned gave me a look I’d seen before, but only in my sister’s eyes. “I’m saying they’re the criminals themselves.”

  My mouth went chalky and I couldn’t speak. Denial crested up inside me, but just as quickly Ned’s likely refutations crashed down. “That’s impossible. Brendan wouldn’t have been part of anything like that.”

  Ned hesitated. “Look, why don’t we go to my office? There’s stuff there that will make what I’m saying seem a little more plausible.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Daily Record was housed in an old brick building on the far side of Lake Nancy, parallel to the police department. Where the barracks stood high on a hill—an imposing location for such a small building—the Record sat in a valley. The rear of the building lacked a plowed path, but Ned told me to park in the lot there anyway.

  I looked at him, brows raised.

  “No reason to let anyone know we’re here,” he said.

  Snowdrifts around the lot had grown tall; it was lucky they had frozen over. We scaled a mound, boots hardly breaking through, then slid down its other side to the back entrance.

  Ned took out a jingling bunch of keys, and unlocked the back door. I followed him inside. He flicked on a set of switches that illuminated a long length of hallway, and pushed buttons on a thermostat. I heard the dragon’s breath of some distant furnace.

  “This way,” Ned said, still speaking shortly.

  I felt fingertips press upon my back. We were alone in a darkened, after-hours building, and as Ned had worked to ensure, no one else knew we were here. Why was I trusting this man I hardly knew over the police force, who had become almost like family? Over, in some terrible way, my own husband? Because Ned had lost family members to suicide, too? Because he had told me that he had?

  Ned unlocked another door, then stood in its opening, waiting for me. I took a step forward. Ned’s face relaxed and the customary crinkles appeared around his eyes. I noticed how blue the orbs were in the light cast by the fluorescents of the hall.

  He entered the room, and I watched him disappear, then heard a rustle of papers. I covered the last leg of hallway to catch up.

  His office was neat and spare. It had one window that looked out onto the snow-heaped field and the black, star-pricked sky. All trace of the impending blizzard was gone.

  The room contained a desk with a flat-screen monitor on it, as well as shelves of books. File cabinets flanked one long, bare wall. Ned had assembled a stack of neatly slit articles, and he slid the pile in my direction, gesturing to a wheeled desk chair.

  I took a seat.

  Ned dropped down on a corner of desk. He watched as I began to read.

  Some of the events described in the more recent articles were familiar to me—things Brendan had sketched out briefly over the years—but this stack also contained sheets that were brittle and yellowing, the dates moving backward in time, headlines becoming more quaint.

  Chief of Police Franklin (“Lin”) Weathers

  Honored at Charity Dinner

  That one caught my eye for some reason, made me pause, before I continued on.

  There was a story about the cops solving a string of local robberies—then being awarded a grant to keep kids out of trouble—and another featuring a Wedeskyull family that was honored at the statehouse with the cops providing escort. A teenage runaway had been brought home. Club’s opening season kickoff was extolled in an article about the high school football team; Tim’s sauce placed first at the annual rib-off. The mundanities of small-town living, writ just a little large. There were some posts from a blog called CopShop, which I also glanced at.

  “Let me make us some coffee,” Ned suggested. “Or tea for you, right?”

  I nodded gratefully, laying the first page of a feature facedown on Ned’s desk, and picking up its continuation. Engrossed, I added, “And do you have anything to eat?”

  Ned smothered a smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The scents of tea and something else—soup—signaled his return. Ned was carrying three steaming Styrofoam cups. I started to sip and spoon, the hot liquids traveling straight to the teething emptiness in my belly.

  “So?” Ned asked, when he saw that I’d finished. He drank deeply from his cup.

  The aroma of coffee still turned my stomach and I slid the chair away from the desk. “Um …” I was attempting to smooth out the pile. “We have a pretty active police force?”

  Ned took another long draught, then tossed his cup in the trash, walking over to the window and laying both palms against the cold, black glass. “I’ll say,” he answered dryly.

  I tilted my soup for the last.

  Ned repositioned his hands on the glass. “The Wedeskyull Police Department is like this well-oiled machine, every cog turning. All of them know where and when to go, and what to do when they get there. It’s a regular hive of activity. Or at least, so it looks from here.”

  “Well, what would you expect? Barney Fife just because we live outside the city?”

  “Not to mention how nice it is up there,” Ned continued, his back to me. “The Chief’s office is the size of my first apartment. He drives a sixty-thousand-dollar SUV. There’s a late-model patrol car for every two men—with computers in them, no less. Those cops had computers in their vehicles before I bought my first laptop. There are police departments in major cities that still run on carbon copies. And don’t forget the fleet of ATVs and snowmobiles for wilderness work.”

  Taken all together, it did amount to quite a list. Briefly, I let my mind flick to what Brendan’s life—and my own—might’ve been like if he had worked someplace else, say a drug-riddled ghetto back in New York.

  Still not facing front, Ned asked, “But did you notice anything else?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “I noticed how good they are.”

  “Yes,” Ned said. “That’s what I wanted you to see.”

  Silence draped itself over the office, and finally he turned.

  “In every story where the police are mentioned, they’ve done a great job. They have a ninety-five percent solve rate for homicides—over sixty years’ worth of coverage.” Ned gestured to the pile of cut-outs. “Even allowing for the fact that there aren’t that many of them and almost all are DV—that’s still too high.” Ned raked his hair out of his eyes. “And amongst all these tales, nothing bad is ever written about the police. No one ever questions their actions. Everything they do is justified and it always—always—works.”

  “This is Wedeskyull,” I said, for what felt like the hundredth time. “Domestic violence, yes, we have plenty of that. But police brutality, corruption, those things are for the city. I don’t think there’s even an IA department here.”

  Ned began tapping his fingers on his desk. I watched them move in a strong, steady rhythm. “The police are untouchable, Nora. And you know, nothing bad ever happens to them either. In all that reading, I couldn’t find mention of one single mishap. No cop has ever been harmed on the job or in the line of duty—”

  I interrupted him. “No, that’s not true. Club’s father was.”

  Ned’s fingers stilled. “What?”

  I nodded, faster now. “Mrs. Mitchell told me. He was killed, actually, not just harmed. And she said that they—the police, I guess—called it accidental.”

  I recognized the look on Ned’s face. It was one I wore—Brendan had described it to me several times—when the final layer of paper or plaster or paint fell away, and a house at last began to give up the secrets it had kept.

  “Never made it into the paper,” Ned said. He snatched a pad from his desk and began scrawling bits of things—short, choppy notes, his mind obviously moving fast. I caught the name Burt Mitchell, a letter paired with numbers that I was pretty
sure meant some kind of gun, and a couple of dates with question marks.

  “There’s someone who’s begun talking to me,” Ned said, almost to himself. “I wonder what he knows about this.”

  “You mean, like, an informant?”

  He hesitated. “Maybe. I can’t say anything more yet. I just wanted you to know … how essential you’ve been. What you’ve told me could make this whole thing come together. But listen—” Ned paused again. “I don’t want you to do anything now, okay? People won’t look kindly on you asking around. I have some leads to follow, and I’ll keep you in the loop as much as I can.” His face broke into a grin as he looked down at his pad, then back at me. “I’ll be straight. I promise I’ll be straight.”

  A chill took hold of my whole body; I felt rocked by its force. “You used me.”

  “What?”

  I clenched both hands. “This is why you’ve been so friendly to me. Not because we both lost people to suicide.” I felt a sob roll up my throat. “But because you knew I could help with your story.”

  I spun around, the office seeming suddenly small to the point of claustrophobia. “You knew I would drive, and drive, and drive, until I found out what happened to Brendan. And you knew that was exactly the information you would need!”

  “No, Nora, what are you talking about?” Ned shouted over my cries. “I just told you to stop searching, remember? I just told you I would do it—because I don’t want you to be in any danger—because I couldn’t stand it if you ever got hurt!”

  The bare emotion in his tone made me start to turn away, but then our eyes locked. I began shivering convulsively, the tremors so extreme that Ned tugged me forward. I went to pull free, but as I did, I lifted my face and that was when Ned’s lips seized mine, or did I move my mouth to his?

  Either way, we were kissing, his mouth the only true source of heat in the universe, and I entered that warmth, took it in, drinking so deeply I thought I might drown. His lips moved over mine like heated silk, then to my neck, igniting the skin there, before traveling back again to my mouth. The wind started keening, moaning outdoors. It was Ned who stopped first, taking his hands from my face and holding me bodily away, and when he did, I screamed, a raw, unchecked sound, torn from the depths of me, as loud as the wind.