Winter at the Door

by Sarah Graves

  Chevrier waved back, then flipped on the wipers to brush a half inch of fresh snow off the windshield. “Nope,” he said in answer to Lizzie’s question. “And I guess the DEA crew didn’t trust me with that little item of info, either.”

  His voice conveyed how he felt about that: one part ticked off, two parts what-else-is-new. “We’ve got a few tweakers, you see ’em around town, and once in a long while some goofball gets a bright idea, tries making the stuff.”

  He took the turn toward town, onto the rural highway that an hour of snowfall had whitened again after an earlier plowing. An orange town truck went by the other way, scattering sand.

  “But mostly they stay a lot farther out in the sticks, where they can keep out of sight better,” he added.

  They drove in silence for a few miles, the passing landscape transformed by the snow squall. Plowed fields, earth-colored the day before, now sported brown and white stripes; tree trunks were glazed on one side, charcoal on the other, and the dark green spruce trees were white-frosted as if decorated for holiday cards.

  Nicki, thought Lizzie. Any time now, the Christmas wreaths and other holiday decorations would start going up. She’d sent a crocheted dress to her sister’s baby that first year; after that, there’d been no one to send anything to.

  “Pretty, huh?” said Chevrier.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  A pastured horse wearing a red plaid blanket looked up from behind a fence, his dark muzzle sporting a wisp of straw. As they passed, a boy in a denim jacket ran down to the horse from the nearby farmhouse, carrying a leather harness.

  “I bet Boston’s good-looking sometimes, too, though.”

  She turned, surprised, as they came into town past the Food King. Area 51 sign’s glowing alien shone over the entrance to the bar, its black, slit-eyed stare unblinking through the snow.

  “You’ve never been?” she asked as he pulled to the curb. In her little storefront office, the lights were on and the shelves were all up and painted, but Spud was not in sight.

  Chevrier chuckled. “Oh, yeah. I’m not a complete rube.”

  Embarrassed, she protested, “That’s not what I meant.”

  But he just grinned. “I’ve been to conferences there. Just never saw any of the good parts, that’s all.”

  Then he frowned. “Look, not to be nosy. But I was talking to Washburn earlier and … did you two have a falling-out? Because he’s a nice guy but kind of sensitive. Easy to get crossways with him, I mean, if you don’t know him.”

  Or if you say you’re going home alone and then he sees you coming out of your house the next morning with another man, she thought acutely.

  But of course she didn’t say that. “No. No, we’re fine, I just …” She stopped, flustered.

  “Say no more.” He put up his hands in acceptance. “None of my business, anyway.”

  She glanced up and down the street: still no Spud. “Trey told me a little about that big place of his the other night. I guess his father left him, um, financially embarrassed?”

  Chevrier made a face. “Financially and every other way. Guy gambled his life away, lost his land, got in debt, the stress put his wife in the grave. Trey even wound up in foster care for a while. Gotta give him credit, I’ve never seen a man haul himself out of a hole by his bootstraps like he has.”

  “Wow,” she said, thinking about all those acres, the house, and the modern vet clinic. “Those are some bootstraps.” Then:

  “Listen, I’ve still got nothing on that other thing.”

  Chevrier’s dead-cop case, she meant, wondering if she should confess her growing doubts about it. It would be only fair. But:

  “Yeah, well, I never thought you’d just grab it up for me like a rabbit out of a hat,” said Chevrier.

  “When things quiet down, we’ll take a ride over to Van Buren, over on the Canadian border,” he went on. “Where Fontine lived.”

  The dead ex-cop she hadn’t had a chance to find out about yet, he meant. He glanced in the rearview mirror as she readied herself to get out.

  “Meanwhile, just … you know. Pay attention,” he said. “You come up with anything I should hear, give a holler, that’s all.”

  He glanced in the rearview again with a small frown; she turned to see why and caught sight of Spud climbing out of a gray van in the parking lot of the Food King.

  The van pinged her memory somehow; she put the thought away for later examination. “So you want me to work on the Brantwell baby for now?”

  But Chevrier shook his head. “I’ve got people on that. And the whole rest of the world’s on it, too, now it seems like, though I’m pretty sure it’s a local thing …”

  Which made sense, she realized, since otherwise how would anyone have known there was a child in the house at all?

  “… and you don’t know much of anyone around here yet,” he added. “So …”

  Right, so where would she even start? And anyway, the cops whose case it was wouldn’t like her butting in, any more than she would if it were hers. Chevrier’s radio spat static and then a dispatch voice reported that a snowplow had clipped the fender off a vehicle outside Bearkill and needed assistance.

  Leaving Lizzie on the sidewalk, Chevrier took off, the Blazer’s light-bar whirling yellow in the snow, which was once again falling thickly. The van she’d seen in the Food King’s lot was gone.

  And so was Spud. Though she stood outside peering around a minute longer in the swirl of fat, white snowflakes, in the few seconds she’d been turned away from him he’d simply vanished.

  An hour later she was still in the office, going stir-crazy. She’d driven back to the house to get Rascal, walked him and fed him, then brought him here, but the big dog couldn’t settle down any more than she’d been able to.

  And Spud hadn’t returned. Probably he’d decided to go home before the snow got any worse. And maybe I should, too …

  The weather outside continued and the silence in the office went on, as well, while Rascal paced unhappily. So much for your great plan, she thought. Come up here and get a cop job, be an insider so you can hunt for a kid who might not even be here.

  And now here she was with nothing to do, just twiddling her thumbs. Liaison officer, my great-aunt Fanny.

  She should’ve waited for a real job to open up, she thought, turned her back on Cody Chevrier’s half-assed switcheroo from full-fledged deputy to boondocks benchwarmer. Then at least she’d be out there doing … what?

  She didn’t even know. There didn’t even seem to be any leads on the Brantwell baby, or none that anyone had confided to her. The meth distribution operation was a state case, or would be soon; the shootings at the lake were state cop material, too—

  And Dylan was gone, almost certainly back at his motel by now with the woman who’d been waiting for him there.

  Not that I care. And anyway … oh, the hell with it. Maybe she should wander over to Area 51, see if she could save another patron from another drunk with a gun.

  It was just her speed, lately. “Come on, Rascal.” Leashing him up, she went out into the swirling snow.

  But when she got to the bar’s entrance the smell of stale beer drifting from it was so dispiriting, she couldn’t face going in. Missy Brantwell’s truck wasn’t around, either.

  Of course it’s not. She’s probably home waiting for a ransom call, or being cross-examined by social service workers. But if you sit on your hands for much longer, Lizzie, they’re going to attach themselves to your butt.

  Thinking this, she turned abruptly away from the saloon’s front door and strode back across the street, with Rascal prancing beside her, grinning.

  Are we going somewhere? his face asked eagerly. Huh? Huh?

  “Yeah, buddy.” She opened the Blazer’s passenger door; he leapt up as if this was what he had been wanting all along.

  And she had, too, she realized. So … You want to investigate something? a defiant little voice spoke up in her head. Blow the dust off tho
se red-hot detecting skills of yours?

  Because there was still one thing she could work on, wasn’t there? Climbing in, she fired up the Blazer’s engine, the heater, and the super-storm-fighting windshield wipers she’d had put on when she bought the new tires. After a quick call to the cops in the town of Van Buren, which Chevrier had said was east of here near the Canadian border, she pulled out onto the street, feeling the DuraTracs bite into the snow with a decisive crunch.

  Moments later she was headed out of town on Route 227, her map on the seat beside her. Fenced fields and farmhouses lay silent under a fresh snowy blanket; once they had thinned out, her only companions were the trees thick on either side of the road, their branches already bending under a load of fast-accumulating flakes.

  Everything in her wanted to charge back to Allagash and Nussbaum’s lakeside camp, to start asking questions, examining evidence, making suggestions for how the investigation should go.

  But in this snow, going there would be worse than useless; better to let the system collect and plow through what evidence there was, see if any of it might offer a lead. And then she could go off half-cocked.

  At Presque Isle she came briefly out of the woods into an area of divided highway flanked by fast-food places, then turned onto Route 1 North toward Van Buren. This part of the state, along the Canadian border and the Saint John River, would’ve been turf most familiar to the last dead cop on Chevrier’s list.

  Her cell phone rang. Dylan’s number … she let the call go to voice mail. Let him wonder where she was—and with whom, a small voice in her head added vindictively—for a change.

  After that, she just drove. Fifty miles to the small town of Van Buren, on the border between Maine and New Brunswick, was an easy ride from Bearkill when the weather was good, probably. But now it felt endless; first more deep forest, then swamps with the skeletal remains of drowned trees jutting up from them, and then more forests went by. With ten miles still left to go, she found herself regretting her impulse.

  Probably this would all be a goose chase, anyway. The house that Chevrier’s dead ex-cop friend Michael Fontine had died in was still vacant, the Van Buren cop she’d talked to had said.

  Although that didn’t mean there’d still be anything in it to confirm Chevrier’s suspicions. The phone chirped once more; there had been no coverage for most of the drive, but now it was back.

  Dylan again, though, and she ignored it again as the reassuring shapes of a Rite-Aid store and a Qwik-Stop materialized through the blowing snowflakes. A block later, past street signs posted in English and French, a red-brick church with a bell tower and an elaborate rose window marked the edge of the business district.

  There was a border crossing somewhere in the vicinity, but she didn’t see it or a police station, either. She pulled into a gas station/convenience store; in a small town like this, surely people would remember the retired cop who’d died.

  Inside, the smell of sweet drinks mingled with the aroma of the hot-dog-grilling machine, the red sausages sweating as they turned under hot lights. She chose a Coke from the cooler, then went up to the counter and asked the clerk if he could help her find her late uncle Michael Fontine’s old place.

  No sense broadcasting why she was really here if she didn’t have to. If Chevrier’s suspicions were right, she didn’t want to start any alarm bells ringing about a possible investigation.

  The old man with twinkling dark eyes and neat mustache smiled pleasantly and replied, but his English turned out to be so heavily interspersed with French, she could barely understand it.

  “Oui,” he said when she’d finally gotten her message across. “Je suis désolé pour ton oncle.”

  “Right. I mean merci. But …”

  Trey Washburn had said this part of Maine, and the area of New Brunswick, Canada, that lay beyond it, too, were deeply French. She searched her memory for her high school French lessons.

  “Ooh at-son mayson?” she managed—where is his house? Or at least she hoped that was what it meant.

  The clerk smiled kindly despite her butchery of his language. “Près de la traversée. Maison jaune, petit.”

  He moved his slim, well-kept hands to show how small the yellow house near the bridge was; near the border crossing she’d missed seeing, she realized.

  “Merci,” she told him again, turning to go.

  “Bonjour, êtes-vous un policier?”

  She understood that, all right. Are you a cop? Just then a younger man with a broom and dustpan came from the rear of the store, as the clerk behind the counter spoke again. This time, though, he wasn’t smiling.

  “Votre oncle était un bon homme, il ne s’est pas suicidé.”

  Not a suicide. She stood speechless. Finally, “How do you know?” That I’m a cop. A flic. And—

  The younger man spoke, angling his head affectionately at the older one. “He was a cop himself in Montreal. Retired now. And he knew your uncle, they went to Saint Rose’s up the street, they were ushers together at Sunday mass.”

  The church with the rose window … The youth’s speech was heavily French inflected, too, but understandable. The clerk at the counter spoke again, his eyes no longer twinkling.

  Professionally serious. “J’ai dit à la police, quand ils sont venus, ‘Il ne l’a pa fait. C’est un péché mortel, et il voulait aller au ciel. Après la mort de sa femme, il vivait pratiquement dans l’église, il voulait être avec elle. Pourquoi s’enverrait-il plutôt en enfer?’ ”

  Seeing her helplessness, the younger man translated. “He says he told the cops your uncle practically lived at the church after his wife died. All he wanted was to be with her once more, why would he send himself to hell instead?”

  She turned back to the older man, who was watching her with a look she recognized: cop to cop. And he’d left a job behind, too …

  “Do you miss it?” she asked. “Montreal, la grande ville? Les grandes …”

  “Les enquêtes des grands,” he corrected with a smile. “The big investigations? Non.”

  He went on in French again, too swiftly for her to catch, “Et de toute façon, c’est la même chose ici. La nature humaine, l’obscurité et la lumière. Le même partout.”

  Human nature … the dark and the light. Another smile, still kindly, but this time tinctured with unmistakable warning.

  “Bon chance, mademoiselle. Prenez soin.”

  Good luck, and be careful. She pondered the words as she drove out of the parking lot, wondering if they were mere French politeness or if there was more to the retired cop’s warning. And why would a religious man give up eternal life in favor of ending his earthly one, anyway?

  For herself, she believed that information about a possible afterlife would be provided, if at all, on a need-to-know basis. But for the people who worshipped in the church with the big rose window, suicide was a mortal sin.

  You went to hell for it, lost all hope of seeing your loved ones in heaven. And from what she’d just heard, that hope was all a certain dead ex-cop had been living for after his wife died.

  A block back the way she’d come, she spied the sign for the border crossing and turned left, braking lightly on the downhill grade. At the foot of the hill stood a red-brick customs station and a guard’s box with stop signs in French and English; beyond that stretched the low concrete bridge over the Saint John River.

  A car with Canadian plates pulled up to the booth and the driver spoke briefly to the officer inside, then proceeded onto the bridge. Brake lights flashed again as he slowed for Canadian customs on the other side.

  A border crossing, she thought. With guards and passports. And … a customs station; she hadn’t considered what that might mean before.

  But now she did. So maybe, she thought as she found her own turnoff just before the entrance to the bridge and took it—

  Maybe this trip wasn’t really such a goose chase—an oie chasse, as her flic colleague might have put it—after all.

  The narro
w road along the Saint John River was little more than a path, two snowy ruts leading to a handful of small houses half hidden by overgrown bramble thickets. It ended at a pile of dirt with a sign stuck into it: NO SNOWMOBILES!

  To the left a weedy verge overlooked the river, which she had imagined as rushing and wild; instead, the wide, flat expanse of moving water was dotted with low, sandy islands, and looked almost shallow enough to walk across.

  Not that she meant to try. Beside her, Rascal whined his wish to be allowed out of the Blazer.

  She eyed him doubtfully, holding up his leash as she opened his door. “I don’t know, buddy. I don’t have time for a long—”

  Walk, she was about to finish as he leapt past her, his big, muscular body nearly bowling her over in his hurry to exit. Then, before she could even call him, he took off, up and over the dirt pile and down the snow-choked trail on the other side of it.

  By the time she had clambered up the pile herself, he was nowhere in sight. Damn, damn …“Rascal!”

  She followed his trail, aware that it was still snowing, so his tracks wouldn’t remain visible, and that although it was only just before noon, the cloud-darkened sky was growing darker.

  Much darker … then she heard the sounds. Crunching sounds …

  Pushing through clumps of reed in a half-frozen boggy area, she found the source. A girl in a green jacket looked up from a canvas ground cloth where Rascal sat chewing what appeared to be the world’s largest dog biscuit.

  The girl got up and approached. “Hi, I’m Marie. Is this your dog? Nice boy.”

  She had dark curly hair, dark eyes, bright cheeks, and a confident handshake. She waved at the river. “I’m making pictures of the birds down there, you see? I do it very often.”

  A camera stood on a tripod, aimed at the river. “But the light is going now, so I was, how you say, wrapping it up?”

  Her smile belonged in a toothpaste ad, and her French-accented voice was musical. Rascal got up and nudged the girl for another biscuit; Lizzie snapped his leash on.

  Gathering her stuff up with practiced swiftness, the girl trudged with Lizzie back toward the Blazer. Past the dirt pile that marked the end of the drivable part of the trail, Lizzie spotted the yellow house.