Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  “You take any of these pills yet?”

  He stared stoically ahead. “No. Couldn’t drive with the dope on board and they dosed me at the hospital with the other stuff, so it wasn’t time yet.”

  She shook tablets into her hand. “Yeah, well, it’s time now.”

  Give it overnight, she thought, for the antibiotics to show some effect. She grabbed a washcloth out of the bathroom and soaked it in cold water at the sink.

  “Here,” she told Dylan, holding out the pills and a glass of milk. That he didn’t argue told her how awful he felt.

  Antibiotics, do your stuff. The wound itself didn’t look bad enough to go back to the hospital immediately, but if it wasn’t better tomorrow …

  She laid fresh gauze four-by-fours on the suture line, held them lightly with her thumb while she wrapped the gauze bandage once around his upper arm. “That too tight?”

  He shook his head. She wrapped the gauze around a few more times, cut it, and secured the end with a swatch of tape.

  “There.” In the kitchen, the coffee finished brewing; she brought a cup for each of them to the living room, where she’d set him up on the sofa with blankets and a pillow.

  Because nobody, she’d already decided, was going anywhere tonight if they didn’t have to. “Dylan, when we were up there in Allagash today …”

  He drank deeply. Dylan without caffeine was like a car with no gasoline. “Yeah?”

  An unexpected shiver went through her as she remembered her first thought at the sight of his sleeve flying bloodily apart. I’ll have to swim to him, get him in a lifeguard’s carry, and—

  But he was fine. He was going to be—

  “Dylan, the shooting didn’t start until we were out on the water, more than halfway there in the kayaks.”

  He frowned, wincing as he reached to set the emptied cup on the end table. “So? Hell, I’m just glad we didn’t pull up on shore right when—”

  “Yes, I am, too,” she interrupted. “But you’re missing something. Don’t you think it was a little too coincidental?”

  “Huh.” He leaned back against his pillow. “Maybe you’ve got a point. Like someone staged the whole thing for our benefit. But how did they know we’d be—”

  Staged, she thought, but with real people as actors. Real people who bled … and died. “Somebody went there to kill those two men.”

  Maybe somebody who didn’t want the story of a child spotted deep in the woods getting any further than it already had.

  “Which means,” she went on to Dylan, “someone followed the hunter, overheard him telling the guide his story, and …”

  A new thought struck her. “This guide fellow, Nussbaum, he called you from there? On what, a cell phone?”

  Dylan shook his head. “No cell signal on the island. He’s got—had—a ham radio setup. That’s part of the experience he’s selling the city guys, a real remote getaway.”

  Color was coming back into his face. He’d discharged himself from the hospital, then suffered the consequences. But she’d fed him scrambled eggs and gotten the pills into him; now he yawned.

  “Dylan, stay awake a minute. How’d you get Harold Nussbaum’s message? Who’d he radio to and who called you?”

  Because someone had known they’d be there, and roughly when; the more she thought about it, the more she was sure the point had been not only to kill those men, but for her and Dylan to see it.

  “Chevrier,” Dylan replied. “Harold radioed the sheriff’s department, Chevrier called me. Couple more back-and-forths, we had it set up I’d be there by midday or a little after.”

  “So it was maybe twenty-four hours between the time the lost hunter got found and … Dylan?”

  But it was no use. He snored softly, his face smoothed in sleep. Injury, pain, and exhaustion plus the pills … never mind one cup, a whole pot of coffee wouldn’t have helped.

  Still, he’d told her enough. Chevrier had heard the radio messages from the guide whose client had seen a child deep in the woods. But so, perhaps, had a number of other people.

  Anyone could. You could listen in to ham radio on a scanner, the way they did at Area 51. Plenty of people had them and tuned them to police and fire department transmissions as well as to ham radio messages; for some, like the guide Harold Nussbaum, they were a necessity, while for others they were entertainment.

  But that wasn’t the point. Dylan slept on while she let Rascal out into the yard and waited for him to return. After that she undressed, removed what was left of her makeup, and brushed her teeth before climbing into her chilly bed.

  With a soft whine, Rascal sank to the rug beside her. Poking her hand from beneath the covers, she reached down to smooth his silky ear. “Yeah. I’m lonely, too, bud.”

  Which wasn’t the point, either. Lying there wide awake, she saw the crime scene again unreeling in her mind’s eye, but this time she didn’t dismiss it. Instead she tried to bring an elusive detail into focus, the thing that made the scene …

  Wrong. Something flat-out nonsensical about—

  And then, just as she was dozing off, it came to her and she sat up abruptly. The clothes, brand-new looking, that the dead hunter had been wearing … and the shiny new boots.

  But he’d been lost in the woods. Staggering through swampy areas, clambering over logs, shoving his way in and out of the brushy thickets. So how’d he stay so pristine? He might have put on a clean shirt since then; pants, too. Probably the camp even had hot showers.

  But the boots had looked expensive, possibly handmade. He wouldn’t have had a spare pair of those along. Also, now that she thought about it, if she’d been lost in the woods that long, she doubted she’d stay another night in the wilderness if she could help it.

  The nearest hotel with a hot tub and a bar that could mix a martini or three would’ve been her next stop. All of which added up to …

  Rascal lifted his head. Then he hauled his big body up and padded to the window, his nose making a weird snorkling sound as he sniffed a strange new scent into it.

  “Hey, boy. It’s okay. Lie down, fella.” She snapped on the lamp on the bedside table, saw by the blood-red numerals on the clock that it was nearly 3 a.m.

  All of which meant that the dead hunter was …

  Rascal planted his paws, opened his drooly mouth, and let out a howl that the hounds of hell would’ve envied.

  All of which meant: wrong hunter.

  The dog bayed again, trotting anxiously from the room. In the living room, Dylan muttered sleepily, then called out.

  “Lizzie? There’s someone—”

  She shot up, cursing when she remembered Dylan had her robe on, then grabbed her long raincoat from the closet, pulled it on, wrapped its belt around her waist, and tied it. Striding fast down the dark hall, she recalled that her weapon was in her bag, and her bag was—

  She hit the living room at a run, Rascal ahead of her baying like a crazed banshee. Half off the sofa, Dylan grabbed for his own gun, on a chair with his clothes. But he’d forgotten his bad arm and as he yelled out in pain the front window exploded.

  The rock flew in with a crash of glass, tearing its way past the red curtains to land with a thud on the floor. She rushed to the front door, yanked it open, and hurried outside, Dylan’s weapon gripped in her two hands.

  But there was no one there. Halfway down the front walk, she stopped, swiveling left and right with the weapon but seeing no fleeing shape, not even departing taillights.

  A dog barked distantly; not Rascal, who stood stock-still by her side, growling into the gloom. A light went on in one of the houses nearby. Moments later a siren shrieked; someone had called the cops.

  Good, she thought grimly, staring into the night, because this time it wasn’t a false alarm. An edging stone was missing from the ones lining the front walk, and the whole front window’s pane of glass had collapsed inward, leaving a jagged, shard-edged frame like a mouth full of shining teeth.

  Inside, she found that the
hurled missile was indeed the absent walkway stone, half whitewashed long ago from the look of it and the other half dark with earth and crumbly leaf mold.

  Also, there was a note rubber-banded to it. Seated on the sofa, Dylan unfolded the note, a sheet of ordinary lined paper torn from a notebook.

  Outside, the Bearkill squad car pulled up for the second time that night. Glancing at her, Dylan read the note: “ ‘Go home. Don’t mess with him. Please.’ ”

  He stared at it a moment. Then he began to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded as, outside, the squad car’s doors slammed. A sputter of radio traffic came from the car, the sound so familiar that a pang of homesickness shot through her.

  Go home. Yeah, that sounded good. Only—

  Dylan was still laughing, holding his bad arm and shaking his head as the cops came up the front walk and pounded on the door.

  Lucky I’m not a bad guy with a shotgun waiting in here, she thought acutely. “I said,” she demanded of Dylan, “what’s so—”

  More pounding on the door; she grabbed Rascal’s collar. No sense getting the dog shot.

  “Coming!” she called, just as Dylan finally got control of himself and spoke again, still looking down at the note.

  “ ‘Don’t mess with him.’ ‘Go home.’ Oh, Lizzie …”

  With her hand on the doorknob, she glanced back at him once more as he explained what he thought of the implied threat that had been stuck to the rock hurled through her window.

  “Lizzie, they don’t know you very well here, do they?”

  The guy drove silently, and he drove for a long time. Spud hadn’t noticed the police scanner on the dashboard before. But now he did, its faint sputtering and bursts of garbled words in the cab’s dim interior like messages from outer space.

  From some other universe, one where I’m not going to be dead pretty soon. Because that, he felt sure, was the guy’s plan, never mind what he’d said about showing Spud why. That promise was just to keep Spud cooperative.

  But the truth was, Spud hadn’t done his job. The guy had known, maybe because of the scanner—that Bearkill cop, he thought now—and this was the result: headlights stabbing ahead onto a narrow, rutted track between the trees. No lights or houses, not even any of the hand-painted signs put up by the snowmobile clubs or ATV riders on well-used routes.

  Just nothing. But sooner or later they would stop. Then Spud was certain he’d be marched even deeper into the woods, until—

  Bam! A rock scraped the van’s underside, startling Spud so badly that he nearly passed out. A couple of miles later, the guy slammed on the brakes.

  His smooth, expressionless face turned to Spud. “Get out.”

  Spud’s throat closed with fright. Afraid not to obey, he fumbled the van’s doorhandle with fingers that felt as thick as clubs. Half-falling once he’d managed the van’s door, he hit the ground on legs like pillars of Jell-O, stumbled, and fell.

  Crawl. Crawl like a crab, doitdoit getawaygetaway …

  But the guy stood over him already. “Get up.”

  Somehow Spud managed it. “Listen, I can try again. I can—”

  The guy snapped a flashlight on, waved Spud ahead of him. “Walk.”

  Spud hadn’t seen a gun out, only the ones rolled up in the van’s cargo area. But there was that knife the guy had on his belt; that would be plenty. The flashlight beam drilled through the darkness to a path ahead, like a tunnel into the woods.

  “I gotta pee,” Spud managed. The guy waved the flashlight again, jerking his head toward the side of the faint trail.

  Run, Spud thought as he zipped up, but once more the guy was right behind him. “Look,” said Spud, trying hard to sound as if he were being reasonable.

  Instead of pleading for his life. Begging … any minute, he knew, he was going to start sobbing like a little kid.

  The guy sighed. “Just walk,” he said patiently. Because of course he could afford to be patient, couldn’t he?

  He knew where he was, and he had the van keys. Also, he had that knife. “Go on,” the guy said, gesturing out ahead again with the flashlight. “You wanted to know. Now you’ll see.”

  So Spud did, having no choice; one foot in front of the other, down a path that grew narrower and less discernible with each step. Soon he was pushing through thick brush, long thorns needling his hands and clawing at his face.

  After that came head-high saplings slapping him whiplike, then a bog that threatened to pull him down with each sucking step. Gasping, Spud struggled forward, wondering if the guy meant to march him to death.

  Although when he glanced back, the guy seemed to be moving along quite easily. Because he knows the way, where to step.

  Because he’s been here before. Burying his victims, maybe. Another harsh hiccup of fear made Spud’s gut clench, just as a low branch hit him hard, square in the forehead.

  He felt the ground hurtling upward at him, then the guy’s hand catching the neck of his T-shirt and twisting it, hauling him up by his throat with Spud too scared and exhausted even to flail effectively. God, it was cold out here. On his feet once more, he just stood dumbly gasping into the darkness.

  Because at night, more than anything else that it was, the forest was dark. Like a cave.

  Or a grave. “Can’t,” he whispered, distantly amazed at how quickly he’d been brought to this condition of helplessness, of utter not-caring about anything. It was the fear, he knew, that had done this to him. “Kill me or whatever. Just … whatever.”

  Behind him the guy paused as if acknowledging this, Spud waiting for the knife with his head bowed and his arms at his sides. The guy stood close behind him, pushing him up against a curtain of dark spruce branches. Come on, come on …

  Get it over with, he thought. But when the blow came, it was not the sharp knife thrust Spud expected. Instead—

  “Get in there,” the guy said, then reared back and kicked Spud hard, hurtling him through the spruce-bough curtain into a clearing lit by a small campfire.

  A clearing with a little girl in it.

  As Spud burst through into the clearing, the child sat up. A woven hammock suspended between two posts held her, wrapped in a zipped-up sleeping bag. Her head rested in a rough fur-lined hat.

  She was, Spud guessed confusedly, about nine years old: taller than a little kid, shorter than a teenager. In the orange flickering firelight, her gaze searched the clearing and found him still windmilling his arms to stay upright.

  She did not make a sound, only looked past him to where the guy now came through easily, slipping between the spruce boughs as if they weren’t there at all.

  Or as if he weren’t, as if he were some kind of ghost or bad spirit, haunting these woods and …

  Stop that. Cold and scared, Spud felt his mind beginning to play tricks on him, making up a story that explained it all.

  No matter how impossible the story was. Because this … this was more impossible, wasn’t it? The guy crossed to a second hammock.

  Behind it stood a small tipi-style structure covered in bark and evergreen branches. To one side, an open lean-to held tarp-draped shelves filled with canned goods, jars of what looked like rice and other things Spud couldn’t identify.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the tops on some containers were bulging, the contents leaking. But before he could think about what that meant, the second hammock moved.

  A woman sat up from it, swinging her thickly stockinged legs over the side in a practiced motion. Spud stared as the woman crossed the clearing and ducked into the lean-to.

  A moment later she emerged with some items on a rough wooden tray: mugs, a loaf of dark bread, a jar of instant coffee. She kept her head turned as if she didn’t want him to see her face.

  Still, he began to feel hopeful. Probably the guy wouldn’t kill him in front of these two. But, man, this is so …

  With a jerk of his head, the guy summoned Spud closer. “Sit.”

  Spud obeyed swiftly
. For one thing, relief was making him feel faint; once he got moving, if he didn’t sit down by the fire he thought he might topple into it.

  The child’s pale blond hair shone from around her hat’s brim as she turned over in her hammock. The woman set the tray down, keeping her face averted, then recrossed the clearing and got back into her own hammock, all without a word.

  The guy broke the bread, thrust a chunk of it out at Spud. He poured steaming water from the kettle hung over the fire into the mugs and spooned in instant coffee. “Drink it.”

  The hot liquid felt scalding going down. But it warmed Spud from the inside, and when he’d dunked the dark, coarse bread into it and eaten some, he began to feel almost human again.

  The guy ate steadily as well, consuming his food in small, even bites. When it was gone, he drained his cup, rinsed it with more hot water from the kettle, and crossed the clearing to toss the rinse water out.

  The water made a shining arc, sparkling in the firelight, then hit the darkness out there and was gone.

  Swallowed up …

  The guy went to the lean-to, came out with a blanket, and threw it at Spud, then returned to the fire and dropped to his haunches. The way he bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, freshly energetic even after their long hike, told Spud that any ideas he might be having about escape strategies were not only foolish, they would probably be fatal.

  That is, if this whole escapade didn’t end up being fatal, anyway. “So,” he ventured.

  He’d finished his coffee. Maybe, he thought, he should rinse his cup, too, and toss the rinse water out. That seemed to be the drill around here.

  The guy eyed him steadily, like a cat waiting for a mouse to try making its move. Nah, probably not.

  He cleared his throat and spoke again. “So, am I, like, your prisoner here or what?”

  The guy shook his head. He had what was almost certainly a knife scar under his left eye. It did not, Spud noted acutely, make the guy any friendlier looking.

  “Listen, I’m really sorry,” he went on when the silence had lengthened uncomfortably. “I screwed up. I was trying to change the lock, I didn’t know that the other cop was going to show up just when—”