Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  She sat there in the darkness as the engine cooled, the dog waiting patiently in the back seat.

  Like how, after he got them, he lost half of them.

  Which I will bet any money is quite some story, indeed.

  Watch her … Spud hunkered yet again across the street from her house in a dark side yard, waiting for her to get home. The people who lived in the house he crouched beside were out at the high school honors dinner and would be for another hour.

  Their son, Brett, was the star of the senior class and was going to U. Maine next year. Yeah, good old Brett, Spud thought with savage envy. But then his attention snapped back to the present as in the darkness across the street she got out of her car, finally. There …

  Her slender shape, glimpsed for a moment in the light from the open car door, nearly made his heart stop. Everything about her just knocked him the hell out; he might have watched her even if he hadn’t been hired to by the guy in the van.

  He stared, pierced by an awful longing … But no, don’t think about that. Or about what ends up happening to the girls you watch, either.

  The thought came unbidden; he shoved it roughly from his mind again. She wasn’t one of them, and besides, he didn’t like thinking about that stuff. Silencing his mind, he went on gazing hungrily until the car door slammed and the light went out.

  Might as well go home … But then the car’s back door opened and a dog jumped down. A big dog … Rascal, of course.

  He’d forgotten about the dog. But she’d brought him with her. And now—Uh-oh.

  As if hearing this, the dog’s enormous head turned. But of course it wasn’t hearing him. It was smelling him, snuffling up his scent.

  Panic seized him. Now what do I do? If he stayed where he was, the dog would uncover him and she wouldn’t even have to call the police, would she? She was the police.

  But if he ran, she’d hear him, probably see him, too; and the dog might chase him.

  Closer … As the dog reached the end of the driveway, Spud tensed; if he jumped up and ran, she might not see him clearly. He readied to leap. But in the instant before he made his move—

  “Wait,” she said. “Sit.” The dog lowered its head mulishly, its eyes like two coals staring through the darkness. Only when she seized the nape of its neck did the creature obey, turning to follow her reluctantly.

  Christ. He let out a breath. Across the street a flashlight flared briefly; a key snicked in a lock. A tall, narrow oblong of light with her shape in it showed; she urged the dog through.

  The door closed, and very soon the lights inside went out.

  Margaret Brantwell. Margaret Brantwell. Margaret …

  Lying in the warm, sweet-smelling straw of the cow barn, Margaret recited the name over and over the way she’d written it in her notebook at school. Seeing how it looked, how prettily it flowed from her pen, and it was just as pretty when she said it.

  And soon it would be her name. She wouldn’t be Margaret Allen anymore; as soon as she graduated from high school, she and Roger would be married and then they would have a farm of their own, even bigger and better than this one, the one she’d grown up on.

  In their stanchions, her father’s cows breathed peacefully, giving off the smells of silage and milk. Margaret snuggled down deeper into the clean straw, content. She was young and in love, just seventeen years old and with her whole life just waiting for her out there, and—

  “Mom?” A voice came from somewhere. A light went on, making her blink painfully. “Mom, are you …?”

  The voice sounded worried. She sat up reluctantly. “Who is it?” She peered around in confusion at the tractor, its massive tires bulking in the gloom, and at the long, flat wagon loaded with potato boxes, ready to be hauled out into the field.

  No cows. No straw. No …“Mom, what’re you doing out here?”

  A blond girl in pajamas and robe crouched before her, a look of concern on her pretty face. “Mom, I looked all over for—”

  Who is this girl? She was lying, Margaret realized, not on straw but on burlap sacks. And this barn—

  Not seventeen. I’m fifty-nine. I’m in my husband Roger’s barn, not my father’s. And this is—

  “Mom, it’s me.” Missy. My daughter.

  “Oh, honey.” She managed a laugh, took the hand her daughter offered, and let herself be helped up. “Oh, this is so silly.”

  She didn’t remember coming out here, lying down. But Missy wouldn’t understand that, wouldn’t—

  A pang of fear pierced her. She didn’t remember. “Mom, you aren’t even wearing a coat. What are you—”

  Or slippers, either. What had she been thinking? “Oh, honey, it was so pretty outside, I just came out for a minute and then I guess I … I must’ve fallen asleep.”

  Inside, she took the robe Missy held out for her, accepted the cup of hot, sweet tea. “You must think I’m very silly.”

  Yes, that’s what it is. Silly. Not—

  Her daughter shook her blond head indulgently. But there was a look in her eyes that Margaret didn’t like.

  Not anything worse. “I love this place so much I just wanted to go out and look at it a little while, that’s all.”

  She smiled reassuringly at her daughter. “You’ll understand when you’re my age. Now you hop on up to bed. You may be …”

  Sipping her tea, she went on. “You may be Jeffrey’s mom, but I’m still yours, remember?”

  Finally Missy smiled, relenting. “Okay. Probably when I’m your age I’ll want people to cut me a little slack, too, huh?”

  “Probably you will.” Then: “Honey, I know we’ve talked about this before. But about Jeffrey’s father, I—”

  It had been on Margaret’s mind lately, maybe because she’d been spending so much time with the baby now that Missy worked part-time at her cousin’s bar. Missy had never revealed who the baby’s father was, probably because she thought opening the subject would make her own father so terribly angry again.

  The months that Missy had spent somewhere away from home—she had never revealed where, either—had been hell, the fact of her pregnancy little more than a postscript by contrast. Now they were a family again, baby Jeffrey a beloved addition.

  Still, it was hard to see Missy alone. Families should be together. “Honey, don’t you think the baby’s dad should know …?”

  That his child exists, that he has a son, Margaret meant to finish. But Missy’s face closed stubbornly as it always did at the mention of this subject. “Mom,” she protested.

  So Margaret gave up again, just as she always did. “Okay,” she relented gently. “You probably know best about that. Sleep tight, honey,” she added, then waited until she heard Missy going up the hall stairs to let the smile on her own face fade.

  Jeffrey. The baby’s name is Jeffrey. And mine is …

  Biting her lip, she set her cup in the sink and waited for it to come to her. Then, keeping a sharp ear open in case Missy came downstairs again, she got a pen from the utility drawer in the pantry and inked it in tiny letters on the inside of her arm.

  Margaret, she wrote. Margaret Brantwell.

  So she wouldn’t forget.

  FOUR

  “Hey, Lizzie!” It was Dylan, calling from down the street.

  “No time!” she called back, jiggling the damned key in the office door lock and hurrying in, meanwhile hoisting her bag and urging Rascal along.

  It was just one week today since she’d breezed into town, thinking the place couldn’t possibly offer her any challenges and that a dog would be no help. But in the days since, she’d brought Old Dan back to the nursing home twice, both times hearing about his son the woodsman but never meeting this legendary personage; she’d also hauled Henry off another Area 51 patron, delivered Missy Brantwell’s mother home after she’d forgotten where she’d parked her car, and right now she was being urgently summoned to find a pig, a task for which Rascal at least was well suited.

  “What?” she demanded,
rummaging through her desk drawer as Dylan came in.

  What she hadn’t done was find out any more about Nicki or solved Chevrier’s ex-cop murders … if they were murders, an idea she found less and less convincing. In her spare time, she’d dug into each of the supposed victim’s histories but found no common thread among them. Except of course that they were dead …

  “I think I found something. About Nicki,” Dylan said.

  “What? Where?” She grabbed the elusive folded sheet of paper from the drawer and slammed it.

  “Allagash. I’m on my way there. A guy, a hunter out in the woods, he got lost and while he was out there he saw—”

  “Come on.” She rushed back out again, this time with her map of Bearkill and the surrounding area in hand, to her car.

  Well, not car, exactly; behemoth might’ve been a better word for it. The department vehicle she’d been issued was a white Chevy Blazer just like Chevrier’s, big and ugly as hell but with the full Interceptor package.

  “If you’re a bad guy and it’s chasing you, you’d better have a rocket ship,” said Chevrier when he’d driven her to Houlton to pick up the vehicle.

  And this had turned out to be true. Bad guys, however, were not the problem this morning; bad farm animals were. She shot out of her parking spot; past the Food King, she put on her flashers and beacon.

  No siren, though. No sense scaring people for a pig. At the corner she swung onto Route 223.

  “What else?” she demanded, meanwhile scanning both sides of the road for a renegade porker. It was too soon to see it, though, she realized after a moment; from the directions she’d been given and her sense of the map, the farm was still a dozen miles away.

  And it’s a pig, not a racehorse … Half a mile outside Bearkill, they were in a logged area. A buffer of trees had been left standing on either side of the road, but now in late fall with the leaves gone, you could see through to the clear-cut beyond: chainsawed stumps, stacks of forty-foot tree trunks, chewed-up earth, and a litter of branches churned together by the massive tires of big machines.

  “Allagash,” said Dylan again, but he might as well have been speaking Urdu.

  “I don’t—” More clear-cut sped by. Then the logged-off tract ended and a series of pastures began: fenced, with surfaces lumpy from years of hooves treading them. A watering trough made from an old bathtub flanked a salt lick whose dusty surface had been whitened by cows’ tongues on one side.

  They must be getting close now, but still no pig. Seven days ago, she wouldn’t have understood what was so urgent about finding what amounted to a few hundred pounds of bacon. But now—

  “Allagash,” said Dylan, pushing Rascal’s imposing snoot out of his collar, “is a town. A very,” he added cautioningly, “small town. Smaller than Bearkill.”

  To be smaller than Bearkill, you’d need a negative number of people, she thought, then realized that wasn’t fair. Everything here looked small by comparison with Boston. “And?”

  More fields. No pig. “And it’s also an area. The Allagash wilderness area. No people at all, or hardly any.”

  “Really. That’s starting to be my theme song, isn’t it?” But again it wasn’t really; the town of Bearkill, she was beginning to understand, only seemed thinly populated by contrast with the big city she’d left behind. It was, she reminded herself again as the terrain grew hilly once more, all relative.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Dylan asked, plucking a small electronic device about the size of a pedometer from the Blazer’s console.

  “Personal locator beacon.” Winding around and down, the road bottomed out along a stump-studded swamp, darkly murky with wisps of mist on it where the sun’s low rays slanted through the mossy boughs.

  “Chevrier gave it to me. You push the button, it signals a satellite so rescuers can find you. All the deputies have one. Anyway, Dylan, what about—”

  “Get stuck in the snow out there,” he said, eyeing the device, “that thing might come in pretty handy.”

  “Uh-huh.” Not that she expected deep snow any time soon. “Dylan, do you not have any more information for me, or are you just …”

  After a chilly start, the last few days had been warmer, like a false spring, and now the warmth brought a sick-sweet reek of rotting vegetation drifting up from the swamp. And—

  “Damn,” she said abruptly. A gravel turnout flanked the swamp at the road’s lowest point. A boat-launch spot? Or maybe it was a picnic area?

  Lizzie didn’t know, but she did know with sudden urgency that she’d drunk way too much coffee this morning, and hadn’t hit the ladies’ room in her rush to get out of the office. She swerved into the turnout; the pig—and whatever Dylan had to say, which she was convinced now couldn’t be much or he’d have already said it—could wait.

  Dylan, she groused mentally as she made her way down to the swamp toward some bushes, knew that even the hint of news about Nicki was a reliable attention-grabber. But if he thought that he could yank her chain just by saying the child’s name …

  There. A low, flat spot, not too weedy and out of sight of the road … Quickly, she completed her task and stood. A highway department trash barrel had been thoughtfully placed not far off.

  Beside it, she watched a huge bird, long-beaked and stick-legged, step deliberately along the swamp’s edge. Dimly aware of a low hum coming from somewhere nearby, she caught her breath as the bird’s beak flashed, then came up gripping a shiny minnow.

  The hum was getting louder. Puzzled, she glanced around. The mist seemed to be rising, not just up off the water but from the weedy patches and reed thickets around it.

  Rising, and surging toward her. The hum rose to a whine as the first sting caught the side of her face, the next inside her collar. Mosquitoes …

  Slapping and flailing wildly, she raced for the Blazer, lunged in and slammed the door, gasping. Some made it in with her and she swatted at them, killing some but missing others, while Rascal’s droopy bloodhound eyes followed her jerky movements worriedly.

  Dylan, by contrast, was laughing so hard he could hardly breathe. “If you could’ve seen yourself …”

  “Get them off me.” Even though she’d gotten most of them, their whining drone still sang in her ears.

  “Okay, okay. Here, hold still, there’s one on your—”

  “Where?” Panic pierced her, which was ridiculous, they were only mosquitoes, for heaven’s sake. But that huge cloud of them, rising up from the reeds like some alien monster …

  A shudder seized her. “Hold still.” Dylan leaned close, his hand cupping the back of her head to steady it. With the other hand, he delicately plucked something from her left eyebrow and drew it away between thumb and forefinger.

  Then he squished it. “There,” he said, not releasing her. “I think that’s the last one.”

  “Thank you.” The warmth of his hand on her hair sent a pulse through her, sweetness and pain mingled so thoroughly she could hardly tell one from the other.

  Their eyes met, and for a moment he seemed about to speak. Or possibly to kiss her, and if that happened—oh, if that did happen—what would she do?

  But then his face filled with understanding, a kind she’d never had from him back in Boston; back when they really were lovers, when …

  He drew his hand back. She wanted to take it in both of her own and never relinquish it. But—

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I get it, Lizzie, I really do. If I were you, I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

  She sat motionless behind the wheel of the Blazer, still feeling his touch. “Yeah, well.” Her pounding heart slowed.

  She started the engine. “Rascal’s got dibs on the back seat, anyway,” she added, trying to make light of what had happened.

  Dylan didn’t reply, busying himself wiping the remains of the insect off his hands with a tissue from the box she kept on the console.

  Soon they were on the road again, and the moment passed, or nearly so. “What else about Nic
ki, anyway?” she asked, trying to think of something to say and only coming up with that.

  Climbing out of the ravine, the road wound around several sharp switchbacks, then leveled out on a high ridge. Off to the west spread the White Mountains, impressively high and massively solid-appearing even at this distance.

  White snow patches surrounded the highest peaks. “Okay, the thing is, a while ago I put a word in a guy’s ear,” Dylan replied.

  He’d put his sunglasses on, aviator spectacles that made him resemble a bush pilot. Now he took them off again to polish them with another tissue as if wanting something to do with his hands.

  I can tell you what to do with them. Exactly what to—The thought surfaced, unbidden; she shoved it back down yet again.

  Knowing he was thinking it, too. “Guy up in the Allagash, he’s a Maine Guide,” Dylan went on. “Has a business there; he takes people hunting and fishing in the area—you know, they come up from the city for a wilderness adventure.”

  While he spoke, he fiddled with the personal locator device.

  Too bad the pig hadn’t been wearing one. “And?” Driving, she kept watching for the animal; they must be getting close now.

  “And he called me last night,” said Dylan, “told me a client of his had gotten away from him. City fella, up here to bag a moose, guide took him out before dawn and left him sitting in a blind.”

  Here, piggy-piggy. Sloping away from the road on both sides, the land on this long, high hill was thicket-dense and studded in the bare spots with immense dark gray granite boulders.

  “So?” No pig. It occurred to her again that maybe Dylan really didn’t know anything new at all, that this was just a ploy so he could be alone with her.

  The idea was thrilling and deeply infuriating at the same time. And confusing … Oh, just sleep with him, for Pete’s sake. Who would it hurt?

  His wife, after all, was dead. But that way lay disaster, a sure route back to the kind of heartache it had taken her way too long to break out of, last time.

  So no more. Here, piggy—

  Dylan went on: “So like I said, the guy got lost. Instead of staying in the blind, which in this case was a tree platform—see, you’re supposed to sit up there out of sight and wait for the animal to come along—”