Dead of Winter

by Gerri Brightwell

  Only now does Fisher feel a twinge of fear. He calls out, “It’s me, Mike. Anyone home? Brian? Jan?” His ears sing in the silence. “Got a call from Bree asking me to come over, so—here I am. You there, Bree?”

  Grisby rolls his eyes. It’s strange to see him standing on the pale carpet in his huge, white bunny boots and green parka and ridiculous fur hat, like someone from an uglier world who doesn’t belong here. Like him, for that matter. Except Grisby’s clueless that he doesn’t belong here. He’s stuffed his gloves in his pockets and now his hand goes to a small camera at the end of the kitchen counter, weighing it, smoothing its surface as though he means to pocket it. “Hey,” says Fisher, “put that down. Don’t mess with their stuff.”

  Grisby shrugs. He slides the camera back onto the counter then pats it once with his fingers, like a promise that he won’t forget it.

  Already the warmth is making Fisher sweat. He plucks off his hat and calls out, “Bree? Bree, it’s Dad. Where are you, sweet pea?” Silence. “I came, like you asked me to.”

  He pulls off his gloves. His hands are damp and he wipes them down his parka, then sniffs and looks about him. The heat’s making his nose run, but he won’t blow it, not yet, not into this odd silence.

  Over by the stairs the wood stove ticks quietly, and he can’t help himself, he opens its door and glances inside. The embers flush with the rush of air, but the fire’s almost out. No one’s fed it for hours. And really, he thinks, the music could have been going for hours, too. No easier thing than to set an album to replay, or to shuffle songs, to make the house pulse with life when no one’s home. Bree, he thinks. Did Janice and Brian take off for the evening and she got pissed enough to crank up the music? Is she lying on her bed with her earphones on? Or has she gone out too? A friend could have come and picked her up, and any moment now Brian and Janice might walk in the door, and here he’ll be in their house, wearing his boots on their precious carpet. He glances over his shoulder, even goes over to the kitchen window and glances outside. Nothing but darkness and the glow of someone’s porch light way off through the trees.

  He comes back to the woodstove and peers up the stairs to the next floor. He tries to feel his way into the silence. Is it thin and innocent, nothing but the sound of a house left empty? Or is it thick with expectation? Is someone lying in bed upstairs, too buzzed to care about the doorbell ringing, or the music stopping, or the voices calling out from downstairs? Who could that someone be except Breehan? Still, dread pinches at Fisher’s stomach.

  He glances back. Grisby’s opening drawers in the kitchen and he wants to tell him to cut it out, but all of a sudden he doesn’t want to raise his voice. Taking a breath he starts up the stairs. His knees strain and his forehead’s cool with sweat. Under his boots the thick carpet gives unpleasantly, and the only sound is the slight thud of his feet and the hiss of his bare hand along the banister. How easy to imagine Brian coming upon him and asking what the hell he’s doing sneaking around his house, or Janice opening a door and seeing him there, and smacking him across the face as she’s done a few times before, years ago now. No wonder Fisher’s head swings this way and that, snatching at the creak of a floorboard, the drip of a faucet, the huff of his own breath.

  On Breehan’s door there’s a blotchy black and white poster of two men, one in glasses, one bearded, both sullen. Beneath them, Dead Beats in uneven capitals. An ugly thing and meant to be, he’s sure. He nudges the door open. This is a room that sneers back at you: the walls covered with posters, the lightbulb giving off an eerie pinkish glow that turns the purple bedsheets lurid. Everywhere, clothes: piled by the bathroom door, by the open closet, spilling from drawers. Jeans, socks, thongs, a black bra, a pink bra, wrinkled T-shirts like shrugged-off skin. Over it all floats a smell that’s earthy and metallic. Where does Fisher recognize it from? He can’t say. It doesn’t fit here; for all that, it seems part of the mess.

  He treads over some magazines spread-eagled over the carpet and lays a hand on the bed. The sheets are cold. What did he expect? He even gets down on his knees and peers underneath. A few years ago she’d have been hiding there, or in the closet. But she’s fifteen now. He has to remind himself of that.

  He doesn’t bother with the bathroom: the light’s off, the air still. He wants to escape that smell and he pulls the bedroom door closed behind him. A noise. From a doorway at the end of the corridor. Fear swells up inside him, and his voice cracks as he calls out, “Anyone home? Jan? That you in there?”

  A humming sound. A whispering. He’s not breathing. His whole self’s straining forward to listen. “Jan?” His voice is quieter this time.

  He comes down the corridor with arms held out and feet high and slow like a deep-sea diver crossing the ocean floor. In the room off to the left a light’s on. The office. He’s shivering now and his hand’s a long way away as it reaches up and nudges the door open. An empty chair. A computer screen. The ceiling light glaring off the windows. No one here. No one staring back at him. On the desk a fax machine hums as it prints a message, and a sheet of paper whispers over another. Who the hell still uses a fax machine? “Fuck,” he says, so lightly he barely hears it.

  The window glints like dark water. He stands and looks out. Someone’s left the light on down on the deck, he can see the railing and the flower boxes on it, thick with snow now. Beyond lies the terraced yard Jan’s so proud of, and a view of the valley and the jagged teeth of the far-off mountains, not that you can see any of that tonight. You pay for a view in this town, that’s the way it goes. And Jan and Brian can look out at those mountains while they work their butts off to pay for the privilege, sitting up here making appointments for property viewings, arranging open houses, closing deals. To think that when he was married to her, Janice was overweight and worked the cash register at the supermarket. What had Brian seen in her that he could reshape? Because she’s not the woman she was—the same wide-eyed look, the same stolid way of standing, but she’s lost fifty pounds and the indolence he’d loved about her. Now she’s all tailored pant suits and nervous energy, her fingers tapping countertops, or dancing fast across the screen of her phone, or snatching up her car keys because there are properties to show and clients to meet, and, for Chrissakes, she can’t eat without her phone ringing.

  Under the brightness of the overhead light, small eyes of green and red flicker from the silvery surfaces of routers and CPUs, of gadgets Fisher doesn’t even know the use of. He lets his hands rest on the back of a desk chair and it swivels, knocks against the pull-out tray for the keyboard, snaps the computer to life. Fisher leans close and covers the mouse with his hand. An excitement leaps in his chest. One click of that mouse and a dialog box pops up, demanding a password. He tries JANICE. He tries PATRIOT and NRA and MILITIA and 2ND AMNDMT. Brian’s a jerk but he’s careful. He wouldn’t be that obvious.

  What did Fisher want to find, anyway? Dirty pictures? Incriminating emails? Something he could hold against that jerk, that’s for sure, even if he never let on that he’d dug up his secrets.

  He turns away. On the wall, a rack with keys hanging from it. On the desk, a pot of pencils—how he hates those things. Armstrong Realty in blocky white letters on apple red. He’s found them in his car, in his trailer, even one in his cab. He takes pleasure snapping them in half and throwing them in the trash. By the desk stands a printer on a small table. Next to it, two filing cabinets spotted with fridge magnets: most are shaped like houses with the A of Armstrong Realty making the point of the roof: there’s also a blue circle with Jansson’s Title Services; a metallic key-shaped magnet saying Realti-Key; a bland square thing that says Northern Sewage and Septic; and a cartoon grizzly holding a rifle, of all the dumb things, and Arctic Gun and Supply haloing its head. As dumb as a bear painted on a cab, for fuck’s sake.

  He stands in the doorway and looks down the corridor. What’s he doing here? Breehan’s long gone, and Janice and Brian are out. Is this r
evenge? Poking around the house when they’re not here? It’s not like that, he tells himself, but that’s a half-truth. In the years since Jan remarried, he’s never been free to roam around in her new life. On the other side of the corridor stands the door to the master bedroom and he hesitates, rubs his lips with one rough finger, then walks softly toward it in his boots, though there’s no need for that when the carpet’s thick and pale as fresh snow.

  He eases the door open. The lights are off, but a bluish glow jerks over the walls and the pale sheets of the bed. He calls, “Jan? Is that you?” but even before the words have vanished onto the air he knows the flat-screen TV on the wall is playing to no one. It’s on mute and a music video’s quick cuts make it twitch from long-legged women slow-stepping down a staircase to a man tumbling from a window, and tumbling again, his wide-open mouth filling the frame. How odd that this room exudes a quiet all its own, as though everything from the bedcovers thrown wide to the painting of birch trees on the far wall to the stand for necklaces on the bureau is holding its breath.

  He’s been in this room once before, when Janice showed him around, a realtor showing off her new home, her new life, her step up from the life she’d shared with him. But then the room was stark and barely lived in. Tonight there are pink panties draped over the edge of the laundry basket, and on the bedside table a glass and a bottle of Laphroaig, mostly empty. Brian’s nothing if not a man of expensive tastes, even when he’s just getting buzzed like any other poor fucker. Fisher steps closer. In the shadow of the bottle sits a tiny enamel box that he flips open. In it, a couple of circular white pills scored across the center like shirt buttons. He touches them with the end of his finger. Percocet? he wonders. Or something out of that league entirely? Grisby would know. But then, Grisby would find a way to slip them into his pocket.

  He could turn this room inside out. He could root through the drawers, he could get down on his hands and knees and search under the bed. Is he so desperate to dig up their secrets? This isn’t just about Brian. This is about why the hell Jan married a mean-mouthed tight-ass like Brian, and why she’s stayed married to him when underneath the guy’s boiling with rage—it’s there in his eyes, and in the clamped-down way he talks these days, and if Jan can’t see it, she’s fooling herself. She hasn’t left him, though, has she? Not the way she left Fisher, taking off to an apartment she’d already rented without a word to him, taking their baby daughter, their car, so that when Fisher got home from work, the place reeked of an emptiness he’s never gotten over.

  He pushes his hands into the small pockets at the waist of his parka, the pockets that lead through to the warmth of his body, and sighs. He’s already weighed down by tiredness and the ache in his head—what good would it do to poke around in this room? Other people’s secrets lodge inside you like shrapnel. Be better than that, he tells himself, you can do it, then his mouth pulls into an uneven smile. That’s what Jan used to tell him: Be better than that. Only, he couldn’t.

  Suddenly it’s easy. He’s sick of the whole thing, anyway: of creeping around Janice and Brian’s house, of searching for Bree when it’s clear she’s gone. He turns on his heel and starts back down the corridor.

  What stops him just before the stairs? That smell, that slight stain on the air as he comes close to Bree’s doorway. He rests one hand on the cool wood of the newel post as though he means to go downstairs. But he doesn’t. That smell nags at him. Where does he know it from? He wheels around with his lips tucked tight against his teeth in irritation at himself, and pushes Bree’s door open again.

  At first he simply stands in the doorway. What more is there to see than the mess of clothes, the posters on the wall, the photo of Bree from when her hair was long and pretty and Jan had taken her to Vegas, the small TV on the bookcase, the books leaning every which way, the desk littered with gum wrappers and pencils, the pencil sharpeners, the erasers, the used tissues crumpled into untidy blossoms and dropped around the garbage can? He steps toward the window and peers into the darkness. Nothing beyond the glass except the night. He rubs his face with both hands.

  He’s closer to the bathroom now and the smell unfolds itself. It makes him think of the woods, of the one time his dad took him moose hunting and the whole filthy business of butchering an animal too big to drag back to the truck intact. With one finger he touches the bathroom door. It groans and swings open a few inches, allowing in just enough light to suggest something uneven about the shadows, something that makes Fisher’s heart squeeze in his chest.

  The air reeks and he wants to retch. One hand goes up over his mouth with his finger and thumb pinching his nose. His throat’s so tight his breath drags noisily in, out. Then, forcing his shoulders forward and with one arm raised, though who knows against what, he flips on the bathroom light.

  Red, sprayed across the tiles, the shower curtain, the toilet, the towel hanging from the rack. Slumped against the wall beneath it, Brian. Naked. In the side of his head there’s a glistening crater, and his open eyes have a dry look to them, as though they’ve been staring at the washbasin for hours.

  Fisher tips himself over the toilet and vomits.

  7

  FISHER HAS TO bellow Grisby’s name a half dozen times before he comes upstairs, and when he does there’s something furtive about him, something about the jerk-jerks of his head and the way his hands keep retreating to his pockets. Fisher snaps, “What the fuck—didn’t you hear me?” and Grisby snaps back, “Hey man, what the fucking fuck—you don’t have to be like that.” He slides his hand over the edge of the desk then looks about him as though he’s just noticed the smell. “What the hell’s that stink?”

  Fisher can barely speak. He swallows against the taste of vomit in his mouth and lets himself down on Bree’s bed. It squeaks under his weight. “In the bathroom,” he says at last. “Christ—it’s fucking awful.”

  When Grisby comes out he’s dangling the black L of a gun from one finger. “Guess Mister Deadguy won’t miss his piece now,” he says, “and I know someone who’ll buy it. This baby’s gonna boost my Hawaii fund.”

  “Fuck it, Grisby, put it back,” and Fisher stares down at his boots on the carpet. His fingers grab hold of his hair and pull until it hurts.

  “Two birds with one stone. Guess we know why your little girl didn’t wanna hang around waiting for you to show up. Mom and step-daddy are away so she has a little fun, only things don’t go the way she wants with this guy, you know, maybe he—”

  Fisher raises his head. “Don’t be a moron—that’s Brian. That’s her step-dad.”

  Grisby lets out a strange whoop. “Holy shit. Naked in her bathroom, oh man, what sort of a twisted place is this?” He slaps his leg. “This is bad—fucking bad. Well I guess we know why she called you and not the cops. Man!”

  “Shut the fuck up. Get it? Shut the fuck up!”

  “They’ll just send her to juvie. It’s not like it’s going to completely ruin her life. Hell, maybe they’ll believe it was self-defense and let her off. Won’t be hard—something bad must’ve been going down if he was naked in there.” Grisby steps back with one hand up in surrender. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m just telling it like I see it.”

  “You’re seeing it all wrong,” Fisher bellows, then his voice catches. He lets his head sink and he closes himself into the darkness of his folded arms. His breath heaves in and out, over and over, as though this is just the way of the world, that one man should be sitting on his daughter’s bed breathing while another—a stupid, self-righteous, uptight shit, but still—lies naked and dead a few yards away in her bathroom.

  Grisby’s got it all wrong, he tells himself. All wrong. But he can’t help hearing Bree’s voice all tangled up saying, Brian’s going fucking ape-shit, and What a fucking mess. I don’t know what I’ve done. So where’s Jan? Did she head down to Anchorage on her own? Brian would have been here with Bree, buzzed and naked. Why hadn’t she
just locked the door against him? Had he shown her the gun to scare her? Christ. Fisher shakes his head to clear it, shakes it again though it hurts like hell.

  “It wasn’t like that,” he says at last. “It couldn’t have been.”

  For once Grisby doesn’t say anything, just looks at him from under the edge of his fur hat, his eyes big behind their glasses, then turns away.

  Fisher says, “How the fuck does this make any sense, really?” His voice creaks and fades, and it’s all he can do to add, “Goddamnit.”

  He wishes he hadn’t taken that Vicodin. The calm that it sent through him earlier has drained away and his thoughts can’t quite fit themselves together. He tells himself, if only his head were clear he’d understand everything and know what to do. He remembers the times his phone rang and how easy it would have been to slip it out of his pocket and say, “Yup?” Bree would have been on the other end, all frantic, true, but he could have asked what the hell was going on and she’d have told him, and none of this would have happened.

  Only, it’s too late for that.

  Grisby’s got the gun clenched under his arm and he’s skipping those quick hands of his over everything. They tap-tap their way along the edge of Bree’s desk, and lift papers, and fast-touch earbuds that turn out to be attached to nothing, sniffing out what might be hidden beneath slippery magazines and flaccid T-shirts, until Fisher hisses at him, “Just stop with that, OK? We need to think.”