Cover of Snow (21 page)

Jean was as nervous as a sixteen-year-old getting dressed for a date. She wanted to look not only nice, but important. Like someone you had to believe.

Although she never forgot to be grateful that she hadn't suffered like Eileen, her sister-in-law's life was in truth the fuller, containing all the normal features of womanhood. Eileen once had a husband, children. That made her worthy of consideration in a way Jean never would be.

The most she'd had to lose was a house. Lifeless boards and bricks that, once cooled, would be cleared away as if they had never stood or sheltered a soul.

Maybe that wasn't true. Jean had known love, it just hadn't led to marriage or a family. It couldn't have. How could two people live together with a secret as sharp as a blade between them and never speak of it? They would spend their lives avoiding being sliced to shards. It was better that Vern had married someone who didn't have any idea, even if that someone was plain, thin Dottie Miller, who had dried out to a husk over the years.

Jean felt tears prick her eyes. She'd been crying a lot lately.

She checked the mirror to straighten her skirts and make sure her powder hadn't gotten disturbed. Then she tugged on a hat and made the trip across the road to visit her only real companion in the world.

Eileen fixed tea, while Jean tried to hide the fact that she was looking around for something to go with it. Eileen's counters were so bare, and her cupboards and fridge were always empty as well. She had nothing to offer, and Jean felt stung by sorrow again. In some ways Jean had passed through life untouched. She might leave no footprints, but she was also largely unscathed. While Eileen had been dragged through every bit of her life, and the violence of it had simply worn her away.

Jean gathered breath. “Dear heart?”

Eileen lowered her sharp chin to her cup.

Jean's tea tasted bitter; Eileen hadn't added any sugar. She only bought the fake stuff anyway.

Jean fought to make her next words distinct. “There's something I need to tell you.”

The sip of tea Eileen had taken started to dribble from her mouth. Her face went slack; it looked like she was having a stroke.

“Dear heart, what's wrong?” Jean struggled to rise.

“Don't,” Eileen commanded.

Don't what?
Jean wondered.
Get up? Or tell you?

Jean sat back down, watching her sister-in-law warily. “I might not have. I might never have said anything. But now with Brendan—”

The cup rattled as Eileen set it on the table. Jean reached out to assist her, and when she did, Eileen caught her wrist in the strong winch of her hand.

“I've told you never to speak about him.”

A sound escaped Jean's mouth, something like a mew. But she forced the words out. “I wish you'd known—been able to see how much fun Brendan was. Even afterward. Oh, could he make me laugh—”

“Stop it.” Eileen's voice had hardly risen, but her grip was like a vise.

Jean abruptly closed her mouth.

“Don't ever bring him up again.” Eileen bore down on Jean's arm, squeezing the flesh around the bone.

“You're hurting me!” cried Jean.

“Understand?” Eileen hissed. “And nothing to do with him either.”

Jean was stricken by an altogether alien sense of pain. She hadn't let anything come close enough to hurt her in a long, long time. Her wrist blanched beneath Eileen's strong fingers. The relief when her sister-in-law finally freed her was so great that Jean couldn't imagine how she had ever dared consider unburdening herself, far less speaking her mind.

One thought stabbed my brain like a shard of glass.
Get out of here
.

For a moment, though, my body wouldn't obey. I spun in a clumsy circle, noting that the door to the building was still cracked, just as I had left it, and that not a single boot print or slide mark interrupted the swaths of snow we ourselves hadn't disturbed. It was as if Ned had been pulled up into outer space.

He'd been right there, just behind me, a moment ago. I was about to shout his name when I stopped as abruptly as if someone had clapped a hand across my face.

High on the hill, on the opposite side of this valley, stood the police department. It sat in shadow now. All looked motionless there, but Ned's description of a hive of activity came back to me on a cold current of air.

Anything that had come so swiftly, as silent and skillful as a sword, was capable of making me disappear as well. I couldn't help Ned right now. If he had chosen to go, well, that was further indication of the way he'd do anything for a story, even leave me behind on a frozen, deserted lot. And if the more likely scenario proved true—that something terrible had taken place—then the farther I got from the scene, the more I could help him.

How? By calling the police?

I dove into my car, igniting the engine. Swerving wildly, I reversed out of the parking lot without once looking over my shoulder or into the rearview mirror.

My chest was still rising and falling in uneven gasps as I headed down the empty, snow-banked road. The State Police, I realized. They were the ones to call. But I didn't have a cell phone anymore, nor a house with a phone to use. I had to get out of Wedeskyull. It wasn't safe.

And then a thought occurred that made my breathing even out.

Something had happened to Ned. But I had been standing not twenty feet away from him and nothing had been done to me.

I began to assemble the pieces of a plan. I would report Ned's disappearance using a pay phone. Wedeskyull still featured a few; many of the residents still used them.

It had snowed while I was gone; a foot or more sat atop the rock-hard drifts. I wasn't aware which way I was driving. Or maybe I was, maybe I'd needed to come here. Because I'd chosen to head into town via the street my house sat on.

The street my house used to sit on. I hardly slowed as I went past—imagining someone sent to watch and wait for me to do exactly this—but that didn't stop the sight from registering.

Club hadn't begun to hint at the devastation I would find, the accumulation of snow rapidly laying waste to a smoldering ruin. Here and there on the ash-heaped plot of land, smoking black stalks stuck up through the drifts, like shards of decaying teeth. Studs. The farmhouse had burned down to its 150-year-old studs.

All the hours I had spent there, prying at paper till my fingernails peeled, stroking on paint with a horsehair brush, ignoring my stinging eyes, were gone, as burned up as the house. All of the time Brendan and I had spent living here. The loss of that past hit me harder than the destruction. It was as if it had all never been.

I entered the intersection that made up the center of town. A fresh onslaught of tears blocked out the sight of familiar things—Al's garage, Coffee Rockets, the pharmacy—as I drove down the recently plowed streets.

I pulled up in front of the movie theater. I had to dial information for the State Police, using a credit card number I'd memorized over the years. I told my story to the person who answered.

“Ma'am, we don't take missing person reports for an adult until forty-eight hours has passed,” said the man on the other end. “And unless this occurred on the interstate, it wouldn't be a matter for us. Where are you located? Where did the incident take place?”

A pause. “Ma'am?”

Hadn't Melanie Cooper just been through this? What had I thought would happen?

“Ma'am?”

I pressed the silver lever as silently as I could to disconnect the call.

The patrol car stopped me on Patchy Hollow Road.

I was headed toward the only person I could imagine seeking shelter with now, the one person who felt like family in Wedeskyull with Brendan gone.

I opened my door and got out, a brute breaking of protocol. Any civilian knew to stay in the car while the police officer walked around. But if I had sat there, the cop would've seen me trembling, legs vibrating on the seat. Getting out was a show of strength.

It was Tim Lurcquer.

“Nora,” he said, flicking his light to my face, then damping it, along with a note of surprise in his voice. “You came back.”

Tim hadn't been at Ned's office, then. Not unless he was a damn good actor.

“Going to your mother-in-law's?”

I didn't answer. There was a mad thrum in my head. There was no feeling of danger about this encounter, and yet a man had disappeared virtually in front of me, and I wasn't telling the police.

Tim's face was mostly hidden behind his mask, only small, close eyes, and a thin, ungenerous mouth exposed to the elements. I pulled my hat down, too.

A flock of bats took off, skittering, disturbed from hibernation by something. I watched until they became scarcely visible miniature black rockets against the sky. Then a second gray car appeared, just a shadow in the night, and Club let down his window. He shone a flashlight in my face for longer than Tim had; I had to blink and shield my eyes. “Lurcquer, we're needed.”

“Yeah?” Tim said, touching the radio on his belt. “Nothing came in.”

Club looked at me again. “Say hello to Mrs. Hamilton.”

He meant Eileen; Jean was simply Jean, and sometimes Aunt Jean, to everyone. I decided it was just as well if no one knew where I was really going.

Club drove away, and Tim got into his car and took off after him.

Jean's drive had been recently cleared by whichever service she used, but she didn't seem to have bothered shoveling the day's accumulation off her porch. I mounted the humped steps unsteadily, holding on to the railing, then tapped on Jean's door with a gloved fist. She could be heard approaching slowly before she opened up. A dry gust of heat hit me.

“Oh, Nora,” she said. “I'm so glad you came back.”

“I'm sorry, Aunt Jean,” I said after a pause. “I'm so sorry about the house.” I leaned forward awkwardly, and Jean enveloped me in a hug.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” she whispered fiercely. “Nothing.”

She led me inside. Jean's foursquare had always been a pleasant, homey place, but today nothing fragrant came from the kitchen, and the holiday lights she still had entwined around her staircase hadn't been turned on.

“I'll fix us a snack,” Jean offered. “Where are your things?”

All I had left in the world wasn't even really mine, but I realized that it shouldn't be left in the car. I gave her arm a quick squeeze, then turned for the door.

“Go over and say hello, why don't you?” Jean called. She meant to Eileen, and I didn't have the heart to respond.

As if she'd been summoned, Eileen was emerging from her house when I came out of Jean's. My whip-thin mother-in-law was coatless; the energy with which she was moving must have helped to combat the cold.

“Nora!” she shouted as she strode forward.

I began to shiver. My hand shook as I tried to locate my keys in my coat.

“I know you've been in my house!” Eileen's arms pinwheeled as she advanced across the snow-heaped field, refusing to slow or find her footing. “Rascal's hair was on the floor!”

I felt that lacquered clump again between my fingers. It seemed a long time ago that I had invaded my mother-in-law's lair.

“Calm down, Eileen,” I said, when she drew close. Couldn't a draught have accomplished the thing she referred to so plainly, as if it weren't the slightest bit odd to keep a dead dog's fur lying around?

“Don't tell me what to do, you thieving witch.” She made a brutal stab at my face. I flinched instinctively, but my mother-in-law didn't so much as falter. “And stop going after things that don't belong to you.” Did she mean Bill's journal? “You never know, Nora. Someone might do the same to you.”

It was a strange comment, especially when you considered that I had recently lost just about everything I had. “What do you mean?”

Eileen didn't seem aware of how cold she was, her thin frame snapping back and forth like a line in the wind. There was silence over the twin lawns and roadway that bisected them. Nothing flew or cracked or rustled. The sky was still almost lightless, just an ivory hint of the coming moon.

She turned on me. “All your poking and prying will get you nowhere,” Eileen said. “Leaving well enough alone is a skill.”

Words came to me unbidden. “Like you left Brendan alone after Red died?”

There was a cold, pure silence then. The air seemed to settle around us, heavy, laden with unfallen snow. “You've got that backward,” Eileen said at last. “It was your precious husband who left someone alone.”

“Because he was trying to
help,
” I replied, almost panting. My own vision was fiery now. “In the only way a child could think of. Has it occurred to you that neither of them should've been on their own?”

My mother-in-law looked at me, and in that moment I was more frightened of her than of any of the cops. Eileen's fists were folded and in her eyes was a cold, pure look of loathing. If she'd had a gun, she would've shot me. No, something hotter, more intimate than a gun. She would've dragged a knife along the skin of my throat.

“I'm sorry,” I began. “That was out of line—”

My mother-in-law turned around on the uneven ground. She walked off, stumbling once and going down on both knees. Before I could get to her, she had risen and started forward once more, back bowed so that she wouldn't fall again.

Don't feel bad for that bitch,
stated the version of Teggie who lived in my head as I walked across Jean's lawn toward my car.
If it weren't for her, none of this would be happening.

But that wasn't precisely true.

I had just reached the driveway when a hand dropped onto my shoulder from behind, all five fingers splayed. At first I assumed it to be Eileen's—proof that she had felt every ounce of the rage I had seen in her eyes—but even as I was held in place, my brain threw up a string of facts almost too fast for me to parse.

This person was tall. The hand had landed from above. Whereas my mother-in-law and I were almost exactly the same height. And he was strong in a way no woman could've been, at least no past-middle-aged woman who had spent her life collecting relics, not black belts.

I fought to twist around, but the powerful hand kept me facing forward.

One finger found an area in my shoulder that I hadn't known existed, a spot that produced such pain that I went still and silent. I was in a place beyond protest or screams. The next thing I saw was the snowy driveway underneath me.

The hand was in my pants pocket. Not pulling my pants down or groping me. It was searching for something.

I tried to get one word out—
coat
—but my ability to speak had been lost.

He must've found them. I didn't feel anything when he did. Some unknowable time later, maybe no time at all, I heard the sound of the locks and my car door opening.

My body twitched on the frozen ground. What was making it move? Aftershocks from my shoulder, which felt as if it had been passed through a meat grinder.

My head happened to be facing Jean's house and I squinted at it. Jean had said she was going to make us something to eat. She should've missed me by now. An image took shape before my blurred gaze. A wavering glow of color. Jean had the television on.

Feeling began to return. As if it were detached, I spotted my arm, lying across the snow. I watched my palm appear and disappear as my hand began to open and close.

I was about to try to lift my head when a boot stomped onto my back, pressing me to the drive. The voice that spoke came at the far boundaries of my consciousness—I would've been able to place it if it not for the state I was in.

“I can shut you up,” the voice said, the truth of his statement made clear by my mouth, which gaped open and closed like a fish. He got closer, replacing the boot on my back with his knee, so he could speak right into my ear. “And tell the old bitch to shut up, too.”

I had no idea how long it took me to get up. First the pain began to recede from my shoulder, then feeling started to return to the rest of my limbs. Only then did the throbbing bruise on my back awaken, along with my raw, frozen cheek, which had rested on the ground.

I went immediately for my car, crawling across the snow.

All it held that could've been of interest was Brendan's box. And if that had been taken—because it had value beyond the sentimental unbeknownst to me—I wouldn't care about the shoulder-grabbing ninja move, which had temporarily crippled me. The cops could steal my things, destroy my house, and ruin my burgeoning career.

But if they messed with my dead husband's box, I was going to figure out whoever had taken it, and I was going to hunt that person down and kill him.

Every item in Brendan's box had been taken out and dropped or tossed about dispassionately. I found the Stonelickers bumper sticker on the floor of my car, patting my hand around and locating by feel. The letters had been torn from their envelopes, while the toy soldier and red skate laces wound up on the snow. But nothing was missing. I reassembled everything inside the box, then replaced the lid, jiggling it over the side that stuck.

I hobbled across the lawn like an old woman.

Jean was in front of the TV when I let myself in. She peered at me in the low light. “Nora?”

I gave a single nod.

“Oh no!” Jean got to her feet with surprising alacrity. “What happened? Why is your cheek so red?” Her cushy fingers probed the tender side of my face.

“I—I was pushed, Aunt Jean.”

“Pushed?”

I nodded. “Someone was searching for something inside Brendan's box. The one that used to be Bill's.”

Jean took the yellow box from me, frowning. “You mean something's missing?” She cradled the box in her hands, absently stroking one side.

“No, nothing,” I replied. “I don't know what they could've been looking for. Brendan just has keepsakes in there. They wouldn't mean anything to anyone besides him. Or me.”

“Yes,” Jean murmured. “I understand.”

Given who her sister-in-law was, I supposed she did. Surely Jean had stumbled upon Eileen's dungeon at least once in all these years.

“Come into the kitchen,” Jean said. “Let me take a look at that cheek.”

She cleaned it gently, then doctored it with ointment. The fire began to subside.

I looked up gratefully.

“I must've been making sandwiches,” Jean said apologetically, “when you were …” She trailed off. “Would you like one?”

My appetite was returning, and I accepted Jean's offering. She stood by while I ate, though she didn't pick up anything from the platter herself.

“I'm worried about you, Aunt Jean,” I said, swallowing my mouthful.

“About me? Whyever for?”

I gave a little shudder, recalling the sound of that voice in my ear. Then I set down the rest of my sandwich and looked at the soft creases around Jean's eyes. “Do you know something?” I asked. “That somebody could be afraid you would tell?”

I recalled Ned's fleeting conviction that I had learned something about the first January twenty-third, the one that took place twenty-five years ago. The police investigation had seemed so thorough, according to the articles Ned had brought me. And yet—look what Ned suspected about the police. It must've been one of the cops who assaulted me. Not Club. And affable Dave couldn't have aped that tone if he'd tried. It had to have been Tim, or possibly Gilbert.

I couldn't stand to hear that awful snarl again in my mind, and spoke to blot it out. “The man who attacked me outside said something.”

Jean was staring at me steadily.

It occurred to me that although she knew at least one crime had been committed tonight, Jean hadn't suggested calling the police. I took a breath and uttered the poisonous words. “He said, ‘Tell the old bitch to shut up.'”

Her reaction surprised me. Jean let out a laugh, feeble and not all that far from a croak, but still a laugh. She sounded like somebody coming off a long illness maybe, or else someone just waking up. Something sparked in her eyes and caught mine.

“Is that right? Because I'd say this old bitch has been silent long enough.”

I frowned. “About what, Aunt Jean?”

She reached over, squeezing my hand between the folds of her own. “Tomorrow, dear heart, all right? After I figure out the … best way to do this. In the morning,” she said. “We'll talk.”

I was about to protest, ask something further, but Jean switched her gaze then, staring out the kitchen window. The moon had finally risen in the sky, and for a moment the view was blinding.