Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

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

  Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Graves

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Graves, Sarah

  Winter at the door : a novel / Sarah Graves.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-345-53501-6

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53905-2

  1. Women police chiefs—Fiction. 2. Drug traffic—Fiction. 3. Eastport (Me.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R2897W56 2014

  813′.54—dc23 2013034239

  www.bantamdell.com

  Title page art: @ iStockphoto.com

  Jacket design: Susan Zucker

  Jacket image: © Arcangel © Mark Owen

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  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

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Carl Bogart’s old Fleetwood double-wide mobile home stood on a cleared half acre surrounded by a forest of mixed hardwoods, spruce, and hackmatack trees shedding their dark-gold needles onto the unpaved driveway.

  It was late October. From the black rubberized roof at the mobile home’s kitchen end protruded a sheet metal stovepipe topped by a screened metal spark guard and a cone-shaped sheet metal rain cap.

  No smoke came from the stovepipe. Cody Chevrier pulled the white Blazer with the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department decal stenciled on its door up alongside the double-wide and parked. Bogart’s truck, an old green Ford F-150 pickup, was backed halfway into the lean-to shed that stood at right angles to the trailer.

  A day’s worth of fallen hackmatack needles veiled the truck’s windshield. Cody got out, his door-slam loud in the clearing’s silence.

  “Hey, Carl?” Half a cord of white maple logs chainsawed to stove length lay in a mess of wood chips with Carl’s splitting axe stuck in the chopping block at the center of them, as if he’d just gone inside for a drink of water or something.

  “Carl?” At midmorning, frost still glazed the fallen leaves lying in coppery drifts in the trailer’s shade, the day clear and cold now after a night that had gotten down into the twenties. There were no marks in the rime under the trailer’s windows that Cody could see.

  Besides the pickup truck, Carl’s shed held a shotgun-shell reloading press bolted to a massively overbuilt wooden workbench, the bench’s legs fastened through big galvanized angle irons to a pair of old railroad ties set parallel into the shed’s poured concrete floor. Seeing this reminded Cody that it was about time for him and Carl to start thinking about lugging the shell press indoors for winter. Turning slowly, he regarded the double-wide again.

  Around it, long grass lay flattened by the deer who used the clearing as a sleeping yard; Carl didn’t hunt anymore himself, just reloaded the shotgun shells for others. No tire tracks were on the grass, and the hackmatack needles on the driveway had already been disturbed by Cody’s own vehicle, as well as by the breeze that had sprung up at dawn.

  So: no sign that anyone else had been here recently, Cody thought, unable to keep his mind from running that way even with no real evidence yet of anything amiss.

  A red squirrel scampered up the steps to the double-wide’s screened porch—from May through September, the mosquitoes here could stand flat-footed and look right over the house at you, and the blackflies were worse—then reversed itself in mid-leap and ran back down them again, hot-footing it across the yard into the woods.

  “Carl, you old son of a bitch, get your ragged ass out here,” Cody yelled, because Carl was scaring him now. This was not like the old retired ex-cop.

  It was not like him at all. A low howl rose from the back seat of Cody’s vehicle, where Carl’s black and tan hound, Rascal, had been confined for nearly an hour already. The dog had been found way over on the old White Oak Station Road, nobody with him, and calls to Carl to come down and get the animal hadn’t been answered.

  Which was also not like him. Cody mounted the steps, shading his eyes with his hands to peer into the screened enclosure. As he did so, memories from years past assailed him, from back when a much younger Cody Chevrier was the newest, greenest Aroostook County sheriff’s deputy imaginable, and Carl was his boss.

  Back then, by this time of the morning Carl’s wife, Audrey, would’ve had her day’s laundry out drying already, Carl’s flannel shirts and tomato-red long johns flapping from a line strung on pulleys between the porch and the shed. She’d have had strong coffee burbling in a percolator and fresh-baked coffee cake laid out on a white paper doily, sweet smelling in the warm, bright kitchen.

  Broiled brown-sugar topping on the coffee cake, she’d have had; Cody could almost taste it. But Audrey had been gone all of ten years now, and from the porch’s far corner the old clothesline hung slack on bent wheels, a few blackened wooden clothespins still clipped to it.

  Cody called through the screen, heard Carl’s radio playing tinnily inside. No other sound, though. And Carl wouldn’t ever have left his axe out that way.

  Or his dog roaming. Rascal howled dismally again from the rear of the Blazer, the sound raising the hairs on Cody’s neck. The breeze kicked up another notch, chilling his armpits inside his jacket and giving him gooseflesh.

  Oh, he didn’t like this. He didn’t like it a bit.

  With a feeling of deep reluctance, he pulled open the screen door and crossed the porch he and Carl had built together one fine autumn weekend all those years ago. Rascal’s predecessor, Rowdy, was just a pup at the time, Cody recalled, the young dog nosing around and getting in their way, while inside, Audrey fried ham-and-egg sandwiches for lunch.

  The eggs were from her own hens, the crisp homemade pickles preserved from cukes grown in her garden. She’d raised prize dahlias, too, back then, or was it roses? Cody couldn’t remember.

  No matter, though; once she died, Carl had quit mowing so much and let the raised beds and the cold frame go to ruin. Now in the screened porch a rickety wooden card table heaped with old copies of Field & Stream and Sports Illustrated stood beside a bent-ash rocker with a striped blanket for a cushion, a reading lamp with a blue plaid shade on a tripod stand, and a trash-bag-lined barrel half full of empty Budweiser cans.

  No ashtray. Carl never smoked. He always said a cop couldn’t afford to mess up his sense of smell. From inside the trailer, Cody sniffed scorched baked beans and a rank whiff of something else.

  “Oh, man,” he said softly.

  Carl Bogart’s body lay sprawled on the linoleum just inside the double-wide’s entry. Cody stepped over it into the familiar kitchen, then turned and crouched to feel for a pulse in his old friend’s whiskery neck.

  He’d known there wouldn’t be one, though. Blood stained the cabinet fronts in the kitchen and a dark poo
l had begun drying under Carl’s head near the weapon, a .45 revolver that Cody recognized, fallen by Carl’s hand.

  “Oh, buddy,” Cody said sadly. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then he went back outside to call dispatch.

  ONE

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  “This is not what I signed up for,” Lizzie Snow said. “And you know it.”

  She gazed around in dismay at the small, dusty office whose plate-glass front window looked out at the remote northern town of Bearkill, Maine. The office walls were covered with fake wood paneling, the ceiling was stained 1960s-era acoustical tiles, and the ratty beige carpet was worn through to the backing in the traffic areas.

  “You said I’d be …” The furnishings consisted of a beat-up metal desk, an office chair with one of its cheap plastic wheels missing, and a metal shelf rack of the kind used to store car parts in an auto supply store, plus one old phone book.

  Not that sticking her in a better office would’ve helped. “… on patrol,” she finished, trying to control her temper.

  Squinting out across Main Street, she told herself that the town, at least, wasn’t so bad. Two rows of small businesses and shops, a luncheonette, and a corner bar called Area 51 whose sign featured a big-eyed alien with a cocktail in its hand made up the downtown district. There was a laundromat, a flower shop, a supermarket, and an office supply place called The Paper Chase.

  All were apparently doing business, though not exactly thriving; years ago in the post-WWII housing boom and for decades after, timber harvesting had supported this community and many others like it. But with the lumber industry sadly diminished, the area’s agriculture—potatoes, oats, broccoli—couldn’t take up the slack, and there wasn’t much else here to work at.

  Or so she’d read. Bearkill was one of many Maine towns she’d Googled before coming here, but this was her first visit.

  Too bad it’s not my last …

  She supposed she should’ve liked the little town’s air of brave defiance, stuck way out here in the woods with not even a movie theater or a Whole Foods, much less a museum or jazz club.

  But, dear God, there wasn’t even a Starbucks, the only hair salon was called The Cut-n-Run, and if you could buy any makeup but Maybelline in this town, she’d eat her hat.

  “Yeah, I know the job’s not like I described,” Aroostook County sheriff Cody Chevrier admitted.

  Six-two and one-eighty or so with close-clipped silver hair and the perma-tanned skin of a guy who spent a lot of his time outdoors, summer and winter, Chevrier was in his late fifties but still trimly athletic-looking in his tan uniform.

  “Since you and I talked last, though, there’ve been a few developments.”

  “Yeah? Like what, a crime wave?” she asked skeptically. On the sixty-mile drive north up Route 1 from the Aroostook County seat of Houlton this morning, she’d seen little evidence of that.

  Farms, forest land, widely spaced homes and small roadside businesses were the norm here, she’d seen after filling out the stacks of pre-employment paperwork Chevrier had put before her. Around the courthouse and the sheriff’s office, men and women in business garb carried briefcases and drove late-model sedans, but once she’d left Houlton it was good old boys in gimme caps and women in pastel sweatshirts all the way. Nobody looked as if they had a whole lot to steal, or the inclination to steal anything, either.

  “You might be surprised at what goes on in this area,” said Chevrier.

  “Uh-huh.” She eyed him sideways. “Maybe.”

  And moonbeams might fly out of her ass the next time she passed gas, too. But she’d been a cop for a dozen years now, and she wasn’t betting on it; crime-wise—and otherwise, she thought bleakly—this place was deader than Elvis.

  “You said I’d be on the road,” she reminded Chevrier again. “First with a partner and then …”

  According to the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department’s website, there were 2,500 miles of public roadway in “the County” (locals always used the capital C), which spread across half of northern Maine. Eight thousand miles more of privately maintained roads belonged to major landowners, primarily lumber companies. In area the County was larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined; its 71,000-plus residents generated approximately 600 criminal complaints and 400 traffic incidents each quarter.

  In addition, the sheriff’s department served court orders and warrants, moved prisoners and psych patients, worked with the Maine DEA, the warden service, Border Patrol, and Homeland Security, and staffed a seventy-two-bed county jail; the transport detail alone logged 160,000 miles per year.

  And none of it could afford to get screwed up just because she was a new deputy. She’d need an experienced partner for a while before working a patrol assignment on her own; that much she’d understood.

  Eventually, though, she’d be out there solo: keeping her eyes and ears open, asking polite questions and maybe a few not-so-polite ones. Searching—

  And sooner or later finding. If, that is, it turned out that there was really anything—anyone—up here to find …

  Out of the blue, Chevrier asked the question she’d seen on his face when he’d first met her in person the day before.

  “So, you will pass the physical, right?”

  The Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department’s mandatory pre-employment fitness test, he meant. Sit-ups, push-ups, a mile-and-a-half run … all required in order to finalize her hiring.

  “Yeah,” she replied, controlling her impatience. Back in Boston, where she’d been a homicide detective until a few weeks ago—dear God, was it only that long?—she’d done those things religiously at the police academy gym on Williams Avenue. Six days a week, sometimes seven …

  Usually seven. It was among the joys of being a woman cop: to the dirtbags—and to some of your coworkers, too, though they’d deny it—you were a pushover until proven otherwise. So there was no sense allowing for even the slightest chance of it being true; on a good day, she bench-pressed 220. She just didn’t look like she could, or at any rate not at first glance.

  Short, spiky black hair expertly cut, blood-red nails matching her lipstick, and smoky-dark eye makeup meticulously applied took care of that, as did her scent, which was Guerlain’s Rose Barbare, and her high-heeled black boots rising to the tops of her tightly muscled calves, snug as a second skin.

  She had no uniforms here yet, so today she wore black jeans, a white silk T-shirt and navy hoodie, and a butter-soft leather jacket. The look wasn’t fancy, but perhaps partly as a result of all those gym hours it was effective; exiting Chevrier’s vehicle, she’d attracted second glances from several of Bearkill’s passing citizens, some even approving.

  Some not so much. Hey, screw them. “I’ll do just fine,” she repeated evenly, “on the fitness tests.”

  “Okay,” Chevrier replied. If you say so, his face added, but not as doubtfully this time; whether it was the confidence in her voice, a closer appraisal of her gym-toned form, or a combination of the two that convinced him, she didn’t know.

  Or care. “In that case, you’re the new community liaison officer here in Bearkill,” he said. “First one we’ve ever had.”

  Gesturing at the dingy room, he added, “I’ll set you up with account numbers for furniture and supplies, and we’ve got people on contract to get the place cleaned and painted for you.”

  On the way here, he’d explained that her assignment had changed because a federal grant he’d been expecting to lose had come through after all. So he had funding for this new position.

  But he hadn’t described her duties, an omission she thought odd. Could it be he believed that being from a big city meant she already knew the usual activities and objectives of such a job? Or … was she supposed to invent them herself?

  Her hiring had been fast-tracked, too: a mere two weeks between the time he’d learned that she was in the coastal Maine town of Eastport—her first stop after leaving Boston—and this morning’s paperwork
.

  It was another thing she felt curious about: why he’d been so interested in her, and in her homicide experience especially. She made a mental note to ask him about all of it if he didn’t volunteer the information soon, just as a husky teenager on an old balloon-tired Schwinn bike pedaled by the big front window.

  Sporting a nose stud and a silvery lip ring and with his pale hair twisted into utterly improbable-looking dreadlocks, the kid wore faded jeans and a drab T-shirt and was tattooed on all visible parts of his body except his face.

  Really? she thought in surprise. So apparently not every young male in Aroostook County was a good old boy; she wondered if Tattoo Kid here was a skilled fighter, or if he survived looking the way he did by trading something other than punches.

  “… department credit card for gas, but we do repairs back at the house,” Chevrier was saying, meaning that vehicles were taken care of in Houlton, she thought, likely through a local car dealer’s service department.

  Which as news was not earthshaking, nor was the rest of the procedural stuff he was reciting. Lizzie slipped a hand into her jacket pocket and withdrew a creased photograph of a little girl who was about nine years old.

  The child had straight, shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyes, and wore a red, white, and blue striped cape of some shiny material; she held a small banner that read HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

  I’m coming, honey, Lizzie thought at the photograph, worn from frequent handling. I’ll find you. And when I do …

  She tucked the picture away again. It was why she had left Boston, why she was here in Maine at all: an anonymous tip, her first hint in years that she had living family after all. But she still didn’t know the end of that last sentence.

  When I do … then what?

  “… get yourself a PO box right away so we can send you your paychecks,” Chevrier was saying.

  She wasn’t even sure that the child in the photograph was the one she sought. Her younger sister Cecily’s infant daughter, Nicolette, had gone missing from Eastport eight years earlier, right after Cecily’s own mysterious death.