Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  Unbelievable and also wrong, the first not necessarily being the same as the second, in her experience. But: “Why?”

  The dog dragged its muzzle from her lap and sank to the floor. Outside, afternoon crept over the clearing, the silent shadows lengthening across the grass freckled with fallen leaves.

  A breeze rattled the bare branches nearby. The dog’s warmth felt good on her feet. “How can you be so sure he didn’t …”

  “Insurance.” Chevrier sounded certain. “He had all the usual benefits, including the life insurance he’d had since he came on the job. But about a year ago he called me, asked me to drive him to a doctor in Montreal.”

  She turned in surprise. “His doctor was in Canada? Why? And why couldn’t he drive himself, was he that sick?”

  Chevrier shook his head. “We’re pretty close to Canada, you know. People go back and forth all the time. And no, he wasn’t sick that anyone knew. But on the way up there he swore me to secrecy and then he dropped a bomb on me. He thought he had lung cancer. He’d been suspecting it for a few months.”

  The sheriff sighed. “So first he’d bought himself a big new policy, got it all set up and squared away, then he waited a few months before getting his suspicions confirmed so the insurance company couldn’t get out of paying benefits on account of a preexisting condition.”

  “Which he had? He was right about the cancer?”

  Chevrier nodded again, grimly. “Yup. He’d done his homework about it, too—doctor in Montreal turned out to be one of the top guys for that kind of a tumor. But there wasn’t a whole lot that even he was going to be able to do for old Carl.”

  “Because he’d had to wait,” she guessed. “So as not to have that preexisting condition problem …”

  “Yeah.” Chevrier stuck his hands in his pockets, recalling it. “And while he was waiting, this big tumor of his was growing, getting even bigger until it was blocking off half his windpipe.”

  She got up, zipped her jacket, and shivered inside it. “That kind of thing can get ugly. It must’ve been hard for him.”

  “Yeah. He was uncomfortable. Struggling, not to put too fine a point on it. But I’m telling you, the guy was determined.”

  Not to kill himself, Chevrier meant. He saw her getting it. “Yeah, because if he committed suicide, the insurance wouldn’t pay off.” He went on:

  “Bogie had a grandchild with birth defects, see? Her care’s very expensive. The death payout on the policy would’ve given his son and daughter-in-law a break. On the money angle, anyway.”

  “But not anymore.” She sniffed at her hands; not only did the dog stink, but now so did she: hands, clothes … everywhere that Rascal had touched radiated the stench of Eau de Mutt.

  Chevrier got up. “No,” he said glumly, shoulders slumped. “I talked to the son. They’re probably going to lose their house and move here, the kid’ll have to quit her special school and therapy.”

  He looked around at the roughly furnished porch and the unkempt yard outside, frowning as if trying to imagine how a disabled kid would cope in it. “He would never have let that happen.”

  Probably this place could be cozy at night with the lamps on, but now in the bluish light of a cold autumn afternoon the porch felt lonely and discouraging.

  “How long did he have?”

  Rascal got up, stretched, and padded to the screen door, where he stood watching a squirrel race back and forth on the driveway. The dog’s tail kept time with the squirrel’s activity.

  “To live?” Chevrier laughed without humor. “To look at him, you’d still have thought it might be forever. But he told me the doctors said a month, maybe a couple of weeks. Said it would be fast, once it really all started to go south. But the insurance company investigators said the pain made him put a bullet in his head instead.”

  He made a face. “Course they did. It’s in the company’s own interest to think that’s what happened, isn’t it?”

  Getting up, he pulled open the screen door. Rascal scrambled out, ran to the tree where the squirrel had taken refuge just in time, and stood there gazing up yearningly at it.

  “So they don’t have to pay out. And it’s true, he did try to commit fraud on them, I’m not denying that part. But I’ll tell you what,” said Chevrier with sudden fierceness, his eyes on the dog.

  “I knew Carl Bogart a long time. I know what kind of cop he was and what kind of man he was, and I know for a fact that he could have done a whole damned year with a red-hot poker stuck in him if it meant his family would be better off afterwards.”

  He turned toward her, his eyes gleaming moistly in the light filtering in through the porch screen. Behind him, Rascal tipped his head as if inviting the squirrel down.

  “And I’m telling you that Carl didn’t kill himself, no matter how well someone set it up to make it look like he did.”

  He sighed heavily. “Anyway, I just wanted you to see Carl’s place, get a feeling for what kind of guy he was.”

  So that was it. Neat, sweet, and complete, as her old Boston patrol partner Liam O’Donnell used to say. Chevrier thought that somebody had killed his friend.

  Just not completely complete. “There are,” she said slowly, wanting to be sure she understood, “three others like this? Cops dead, you don’t like the explanations?”

  Three of them now that he’d told her about, and one more. He nodded slowly and with appreciation for the unlikeliness of it. “Yeah. You’ve been thinking about it, huh?”

  She had. It had been running along in the back of her mind ever since he told her the real reason he’d hired her here. An experienced murder cop was about as useful as a fish on a bicycle in Bearkill—

  Except when she wasn’t. “I figured it might take a while for it to sink in,” he added.

  “Well, it is unusual. I mean it’s a big number.” She tipped her head at him consideringly. “Four of them,” she repeated.

  “But all part of one crime,” he agreed. “Only I can’t seem to figure out what they had in common, why they … Hell, that’s really the problem isn’t it?”

  Yeah, that was the problem, all right: why? Because if you understood that, the rest opened up: the who, how, everything.

  Without the why, though, you could have all the other stuff and more: arrests. Convictions, even. With enough of the who and how, you didn’t necessarily even need a motive in the courtroom.

  But without one, if it had been your case, it would still all be like ashes in your mouth.

  Lizzie got up, crossed the porch, and opened the door into the mobile home, averting her eyes from the dark brown smears and spatters of what she knew must be Carl Bogart’s blood.

  “You left it like this?” she asked. Chevrier stood in the doorway behind her.

  “Yeah. Sorry, I know it’s ugly. But when it happened, that’s when I finally decided to try getting somebody up here, somebody who could—”

  “—have a look,” she finished for him, moving past the sink with its dish drainer holding one cereal bowl, one juice glass, one cup with a spoon in it. Bogart had been a tidy widower.

  “Yeah, I get it,” she added to Chevrier. And then I turned up, a homicide cop looking for a job in Aroostook County. “Hudson told you about me?”

  A three-piece living-room set plus end tables, a coffee table made from the highly polished cross section of an enormous tree trunk, and a large flat-screen TV furnished the next room.

  “Yeah,” said Chevrier, following her. “I went through here after it happened, by the way. Nothing missing. Nothing even out of place.”

  “And no note.” A tall, glass-fronted gun case held a quartet of lovely old rifles. A mahogany breakfront displayed some framed photographs, including one of a smiling silver-haired woman.

  “No note. That’s Audrey, his wife.” He went ahead of Lizzie down the hall to three bedrooms, one a catchall and the next set up like an office with framed cop commendations and commemorative placards on the wall.

  The thir
d room was Bogart’s: lamp, chair, bed. A cell could hardly have been plainer. A braided rug with some blankets heaped on it showed where Rascal had slept.

  “I took the dog’s dishes back to my place,” said Chevrier. “But I knew better than to try bringing those blankets into the house past my wife.”

  The place did smell pretty doggy. More to the point, though, there was nothing even slightly odd or unusual about it. Back in the kitchen, she paused over the spatter evidence.

  “You checked his hands?” For evidence that Bogart had fired a gun recently, she meant. But Chevrier shook his head.

  “I did, but he fired weapons all the time, and handled the powder for reloading shotgun shells, too.”

  “I see.” She could still get a scene specialist up here, she supposed; there were favors she could still call in, in Boston.

  But this long after the fact, she doubted it would do any good. The insurance company could simply say that any aberrations from normal splatter patterns were from degrading of the evidence over time.

  And Chevrier seemed to understand this. “Anything occur to you, though?” he asked as she walked back out onto the porch.

  “Not yet.” Her boots made a hollow sound on the pressure-treated pine steps leading down to the yard. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  They got into his vehicle. Time to go; you wouldn’t think fresh air could feel so smothering, but it did. Right now, it definitely did.

  On the way back to town, the road crested a hill, then ran flat along the top of a ridgeline. “So what’s this Brantwell guy like? Missy’s dad, I mean?”

  Chevrier glanced at her. “Last night in the bar,” Lizzie explained, “Missy’s cousin said something about how she was lucky he wasn’t home. Because she was getting in late.”

  Across the valley the sun was already thinking about setting, the distant treetops sharply cut out against a glowing red sky.

  Chevrier’s lower lip pursed judiciously. “Like I said, he’s got a lot of workers on his farm. Pays good, treats ’em fair as far as I’ve ever heard. Well spoken, decent looking. He’s on the county board of commissioners, belongs to the Chamber of Commerce, and so on.”

  In the shadowy valleys between the ridges, lights in houses and yards began going on. “That’s where he is now, in New York at a meeting on milk prices,” said Chevrier. “He’s kind of like the County’s unofficial ambassador for stuff like that.”

  “Travels a lot, then, does he?” The relief in Missy’s eyes last night when she was reminded that her dad wasn’t at home had been impossible to miss.

  Chevrier shrugged. “Pretty often. Once a month, sometimes more, he’ll be away a few days. He’s got a good foreman working for him, Tom Brody, manages the farm.”

  He shot another glance sideways at her. “Why, you think he might make problems for Henry about last night?”

  “No, no.” It wasn’t as if Henry was related to Missy, or—heaven forbid—married to her. Henry was just a local screw-up of the small-town variety as far as Lizzie could tell. She leaned back in the seat. “I doubt he’ll even hear about it. I just wondered.”

  They drove on in silence until Rascal thrust his flop-eared, foul-breathed muzzle between the truck’s two front bucket seats.

  “The dog needs his teeth cleaned,” she said. “And a bath.”

  “That reminds me,” said Chevrier. “Got a favor to ask you.”

  “No,” said Lizzie at once, knowing what was coming. The dog liked her, and she’d heard Chevrier say his wife didn’t like it.

  Nevertheless, when she got out of Chevrier’s vehicle on Main Street, Rascal got out, too, and could not be persuaded back in.

  “Thank you,” Chevrier said sincerely. He’d be airing his vehicle for a week. “It’ll only be until I find someone else.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lizzie said sourly, still thinking about Carl Bogart and the others. But Chevrier couldn’t stay to talk about that now, either; he had a meeting with drug enforcement guys from Bangor to get to.

  It occurred to her, though, that even if she didn’t want the dog for company, she could use him for an alarm system. Also, when Dylan Hudson started hinting around about staying overnight again, as he inevitably would, she’d be able to point out to him that she already had one mutt. Ba-da-bump …

  Meanwhile she had one more chore on her to-do list, so once she saw that the lights were still on in her office—

  She’d given her new helper Spud his instructions and left him to it; if there was disappointment coming in that department, she’d deal with it later, she decided as she crossed the street with the big hound keeping a surprisingly calm pace beside her.

  He hopped into her Blazer as if he’d been doing it all his life, too, and moments later they were heading back out of town. “Good dog,” she told him, and he eyed her gravely in reply; then she turned her attention back to her errand again.

  When she’d mentioned her plan to Chevrier, he’d told her she wouldn’t be able to miss the Brantwell place, and as it turned out he was right. The long, well-maintained driveway was fenced on both sides with posts and barbed wire, and at the top a sizable complex of farm buildings spread away on both sides of the large, well-maintained, white clapboard house.

  Big farm is right, she thought as she pulled up alongside two cars, Missy’s yellow Jeep and a newish Cadillac Escalade. As she got out, a man came out of the nearest barn, wiping his hands on a rag.

  “Help you?” Smiling but businesslike; introducing herself, she saw his eyes register the official car and the fact that she was a cop, but not with any concern.

  “Roger Brantwell?” she asked, not thinking he could be; his face, while friendly, was thin and ferret-like.

  “Oh, hell, no,” he said, laughing in reply; a pleasant ferret. “I’m Tom Brody, I’m just the hired man around here. Or one of ’em,” he added. “Place is crawling with ’em, as you can see.”

  He waved a flannel-shirted arm around the neat, organized-looking barnyard: wood crates stacked here, farm machinery parked there, nothing random-appearing. And Brody was right, the place bustled with men—no women, Lizzie noticed—busy hammering or painting or hauling or fixing big pieces of equipment she didn’t recognize, in the bluish late-afternoon light.

  As she watched, Missy came out onto the broad porch that ran along the side of the house. A wooden porch swing on heavy chains hung by a window full of red geraniums; she stopped by it.

  “What’s up?” she asked, gently jouncing the baby she held in her arms and not sounding any more friendly than she had the night before.

  “Got something I’d like to run by you,” Lizzie said. It had occurred to her earlier, but she’d wanted to ponder it.

  “See, I’ve got this kid Spud working for me,” she began when Missy had invited her inside and sat her down in the kitchen.

  Not enthusiastically, but she’d done it. And not just any kitchen: new ceramic tile, stainless steel, polished granite, and a door leading out to a sunroom with wicker and ferns, a fountain trickling prettily in the corner, made this one look fresh out of a decorating magazine.

  “Spud?” Missy responded skeptically. “That freak?”

  “Yeah, well.” Lizzie spread her hands. “He doesn’t seem so bad. Why, should I know something?”

  Missy had put the baby, a handsome and placid little boy about a year old, into a crib in the lamplit sunroom, where he’d promptly fallen asleep.

  “No,” she said, “I guess not. I don’t know how anyone stands looking at all that body piercing of his, though. That nose stud, ugh.”

  Which was what Lizzie had thought, too, but judging people on their style choices didn’t seem right, and after what she’d seen on the streets of Boston, it wasn’t even especially exotic.

  Also, the kid had seemed very eager; pathetically, almost.

  “Yeah, well, maybe you can keep me from having to look at it so much,” she told Missy. “I was hoping I could get you to come work in the office for me.�
��

  She needed someone so she could have regular office hours without being stuck there herself, and for that Spud wouldn’t do at all. But Missy had begun shaking her curly head even before Lizzie finished.

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t. I’ve got the baby, and—”

  “But I thought your mom took care of him?” As Lizzie spoke a young woman wearing an apron over blue jeans and a sweater came through the kitchen, carrying a can of Pledge and a dust rag.

  “And it’s not like you’re stuck here doing the cleaning,” Lizzie added when the girl had gone. The Brantwells’ program of hiring help went for inside as well as outside, apparently.

  “It won’t make you rich, just twenty hours a week—”

  Not that Missy needed the money, obviously. Every surface in the place glowed with what Lizzie recognized as the effect of plenty of cash: new, clean, shiny, not a speck of dust or smudge of a fingerprint anywhere, and the cars outside were new, too.

  “—but at least there won’t be drunks trying to strangle you,” she added, and at this Missy did crack a smile.

  But her mind was made up. “Thanks. But it wouldn’t work, I’m afraid. My dad’s got some really rigid ideas. It’s only because it’s family that I even talked him into the bar thing.”

  Lizzie sipped coffee. It was intensely pleasant, sitting in the bright, clean kitchen like this with the fountain trickling in the background; she got the feeling that if a person lived here, everything would be taken care of for them.

  That there’d be a safety net, and that it might begin to feel a little tight after a while, as Missy had—well, she hadn’t said it, exactly, had she?

  She hadn’t needed to. “I see. You mean he doesn’t want you working? Because you’re his daughter, or—”

  Or because he’s a control freak? The whole place wasn’t just neat; it was aggressively so. There was that handsome baby in the sunroom now, too, the circumstances of whose birth might not have been what Mr. Brantwell had wanted for his daughter.

  Missy wasn’t wearing a wedding ring and there didn’t seem to be any baby daddy around. Don’t assume, Lizzie told herself, but still, she was getting the strong sense that Roger Brantwell might be a little … Oppressive was the word she wanted, actually.