Cover of Snow (26 page)

I made it out of the woods, trudging along several paces behind Dugger. He checked to make sure I was there, then sprinted ahead. When I reached the road, the sedan drove up like a ghost car, Dugger surrounded by a billowing cloud of exhaust.

I got in and closed my eyes. The camera sat heavily in my coat. I couldn't return it to Dugger until I found someplace to download the shots, but I suspected he might have trouble functioning without it.

Could I ask him to take me to Cold Kettle? Dugger seemed to be driving with intent, turning around on this road that led nowhere, and heading the other way down it. As the miles streaked by, it became clear that what lay ahead was town.

“Dugger,” I said, emotionlessly. “I can't go back there.” I paused. “And maybe you shouldn't either.”

He gave me a humorless grin. “Nothing will happen to me, Missus.”

“No,” I responded, thinking that however the body had gotten to its makeshift grave, Dugger had obviously learned about it without reaping any punishment or constraint. He learned about a lot of things, for that matter, didn't he? “I guess not. Why is that, Dugger?”

“Can't do anything,” he responded. “I'm useless, dumb. Dumb, crumb, piece of scum. So why would they do anything to me?” One hand traveled to his arm and for a moment his face seemed to change; then Dugger replaced the hand on the wheel.

“Your arm?” I asked. “What happened to it?”

But he only flashed that loveless smile again and kept driving.

“You're not dumb,” I said slowly. “You put pieces together as if they were a puzzle. You're one of the smartest people I've met, Dugger.”

He still didn't look at me, but a shine adorned his eyes.

“But I'm afraid it might've been dumb to show me what you did today,” I said, and then I began to cry. “Because I'm not smart enough to do—to do anything about it.”

Dugger steered the car so abruptly over to the side of the road that the tires rode up on one bank. “Don't do, rue, construe,” he said.

I tore my gaze to his, trying to get him to look at me. I answered the rhymes as if they were a conversation. “Why then, Dugger? Why did you show me?”

The lids of his eyes settled shut. He answered without opening them. “Because now we both know.”

Dugger didn't go into the thorny knot that was the center of town, instead driving down one of the streets that abutted it. Closely packed houses spread themselves out as they got farther away from the buildings and the stores. The house Dugger stopped at was the last on the street, its neighbor a quarter mile away.

“What are we doing?” I took a look at this working-poor section of Wedeskyull, which my business had never given me cause to enter.

“It's time, Missus,” he said. “I've known it for a while.”

“Time?” I echoed. Dugger sounded so lucid. “For what?” But I got no answer. “Do you live here?”

Still no response, but when Dugger got out of the car, he came around and opened my side. Heat from the blowers had thawed my pants, and with the fabric damp against my skin, I started shivering convulsively. It didn't matter whose house this was; I needed to get inside.

Dugger mounted a set of concrete steps that had heaved and cracked with each winter's coming and going. He took out a loop of keys and opened the front door. I supposed that keeping doors unlocked was a privilege relegated to the more expensive areas, a rural fantasy of what country life should be.

A woman met us in the narrow rectangle of hall. She was slight like Dugger, but older, her hair chalked with gray, blue eyes beginning to dim. They assessed me without blinking.

“There'll be a change of clothes in my room,” she commanded Dugger, who trotted off obediently. “Coffee or tea?” she asked, no less abruptly.

“Tea,” I said, my teeth chattering so hard they clacked. “Thank you.”

She added a hefty dollop from a liquor bottle to the mug she filled. I drank the whole thing down, welcome warmth suffusing my body. Dugger had returned with an armful of clothes. The woman eyed me again. “You have a few pounds on me, but they should fit,” she said, and pointed. “Powder room by the back door.”

I nearly laughed as I headed to do her bidding. Only minutes ago, laughter would've seemed a less likely prospect than my flying to the moon. Or than dredging up winter hard soil in Wedeskyull. My smile faded.

I crossed a stained but recently mopped patch of linoleum, then wedged myself past a rusted washing machine. No dryer. There must be a line outside, which meant a Laundromat in winter. I pulled open the door to a tiny bathroom. I had to bend into all sorts of awkward angles to strip off my sodden garments and pull on the clean, dry ones, but the effort was worth it. I felt the events of the morning drop off with my clothes. Both my calves were a pale, chalky white, one step away from frostbite. I slapped and rubbed them with curious disinterest, which faded as soon as the porcupine quills of circulation started returning to my skin. Sucking in breath to button the pants, I realized that the woman had been right in her assessment of my size, and almost laughed again. She was skinny, though, knotted and hard as a tree branch.

When I came out, she had gone. Only Dugger stood in the kitchen.

“Momma said to tell you to have some more tea.”

“Thank you,” I said again. My mind was whittling away at possibilities, wondering what would come next. “I'm okay though. Now.”

“Okay?” Dugger echoed, and I nodded. “Then come.”

I frowned, but didn't argue. In this small, shabby house, obedience seemed to be the order of the day.

Dugger led me up a skinny crook of stairs to a room tucked beneath the eaves. This house had charm. He had to duck to pass through the door, then crouched even lower and pulled out a bin from under his bed. The bed was a single, made up neat and flat with a wool plaid blanket. Otherwise the room was almost bare.

I stooped a little going in.

Dugger pried up a lid to reveal a whole electronics store—no, more like an electronics museum—of tape recorders, microphones, and other audio devices. The biggest amongst them was scratched and dented, a flurry of holes like BB pellets across its prow, and a fat orange button lying at one end of a row of plastic levers. It looked like what I'd used in sixth grade Social Studies when we had to interview old people about their lives.

Dugger had begun sorting through a carton of tapes, focusing intently, his matted head bent. I realized that he must've gotten wet in the woods too, but hadn't bothered to change.

He was mumbling while he searched. I leaned closer to hear.

“No, Missus!” Dugger stuck one arm out in the direction of some shelves. “Go stand over there.”

Once again, I obeyed.

But I had caught Dugger's rumblings as he hunted the tape. He'd been singsonging with a more fully elaborated rhythm than usual, almost like verse.

As I huddled by the stand of shelves he started up again, a dreadful poem, clotted with meaning. The meter filled my ears, growing louder, roaring like a wave rolling onto the beach, until Dugger stuck both arms into the air. “Found it!”

He held a cassette, circa thirty years ago, its shiny innards spilling down around his wrists so that it didn't seem the thing would ever play.

I was still hearing his rhyme in my head. Or maybe he was still chanting it.

“Ice, slice, pay a price. Ice, slice, run like mice.”

He pushed the
eject
button on the big recorder and the flap on top swung open. Dugger snapped in the cassette that he had patiently wound.

A rising whistle sounded, with the steady mew of tape spinning beneath it. It took a couple of arduous turns of the cassette player for me to perceive that I was hearing screaming wind. Wind that must have been blowing decades ago.

“Dugger? How old is this—”

“Shhh!” Dugger lifted one finger.

The rush of wind competed with other noises as the tape continued to roll. Voices hollering to be heard,
“Hurry, hurry, there, stop,”
a few sudden, loud barks. Then banging. Thuds.

A rush of wind drowned out everything. Dugger continued to squat on the floor, his finger depressing the button, pale head tilted in concentration.

I couldn't make out what I was hearing besides the roar of the outdoors.

A crack, loud as gunfire in this enclosed space, boomed off the walls, and I jumped. Dugger eased the cassette out of the player. The clatter had been the
eject
button popping up.

Without looking up, Dugger held one hand out to stay me. “Just have to turn it over.”

Why? This was nothing but an ancient, wheezing collection of gibberish. His other recordings had been far clearer.

The tape had spooled out again. With meticulous care, Dugger wound the glistening intestines back into their plastic casing, then inserted the neatly coiled cassette.

A burst of voices, clearer with no wind roaring over them, crackled to life. One gruff, commanding, the other arrogant in its youth.

I took one step forward, then another.

Dugger watched as I walked, his irises specks in snowy fields, lips moving along with the words, or to his own inaudible rhymes. He hobbled closer, thrusting the tape player out, the better for me to hear.

“Dugger,” I whispered. “Who is that? Is it …?”

But there was no reason for me to finish the question. I doubted he would be able to answer in this state anyway. And I didn't need him to.

The gruff voice sounded awfully familiar. Dugger had finally recorded something important, or at least something whose relevance I could imagine. He had caught Vern Weathers on tape.

As soon as I placed the identity of the speaker, I realized I had to be wrong. How could Vern speak in the exact same voice twenty or thirty years ago? He would've been a young man then. In case I doubted my ability to date the cassette, the next words crackled to life.

“—heard what I said, Vernon.”

It was the gruff voice again. He was speaking
to
someone named Vernon. And it was Vern who answered him, younger and reedier, but unmistakable.

“Far as anyone knows, we were at the Dugout all day, Pop. I got twelve witnesses can attest to us watching the game. All too drunk to know exactly when we got there.”

The tape rolled for a quiet second or two.

“We're supposed to go out on Packey Lake with Mike on Tuesday. How'm I gonna explain bowing out on him?”
the same voice continued.
“It'll be worse if Davey and I
don't
do what we always do.”

Davey. Dave.

“You boys,”
said the gruff voice in a tone that made disagreement sound threatening, unsafe.
“Ain't never going fishing again.”

Silence on the tape, more telling than words.

“This isn't like the others.”
That was another voice, young too, but containing less bravado.
“This time they'll keep looking. They won't stop. You already promised not to stop, Pop—”

“And we won't,” said the older voice calmly. “We'll keep trying to solve this. We'll keep looking into it forever. Right, boys? Forever.”

There came a sharp bray of laughter.

Then a sound that could only be the slapping of feet.

“Go get your brother,” intoned the gruff man. “Make sure he does what he's supposed to. And you do it, too.”

Agreement ominous in its wordlessness.

Another gunshot boom, and the tape popped up.

I looked at Dugger, but his eyes wouldn't meet mine. He thrust the cassette at me and I took it.

The articles Ned had brought over told me that the police never found out who left the fishing hole uncovered. The one that Red fell through.

Bill had written in his journal about a man named Franklin. He'd pleaded for a chance to ask him some questions about his own boys. Franklin Weathers, chief of police when Red Hamilton died. Twenty-five years ago, Franklin had told reporters that he would do everything in his power to find the people who left the hole unbarricaded, although he lacked hope because he was sure the “culprits” weren't from Wedeskyull.

An unprecedented manhunt had been launched.

When the criminals were his own sons, under his roof all along.

Red hurts, Lynn lurks
, Dugger had once rhymed. I'd heard the word as
Lynn
anyway. But what if Dugger meant
Lin
, the nickname given to the chief of police in a headline Ned had snipped?

Franklin “Lin” Weathers.

His sons had left the hole untended, and he had lied to protect them.

Had Bill, a cop on the force, suspected the truth?

Once I had wondered why Dugger would record scenes of suffering, snap pictures of the things no one else wanted to see. All the moments better off
not
set down in memory. But now I thought I understood. For an autistic person, cut off from emotion as if he were living through glass, were all these peaks and valleys a way in?

A tree limb began to snap back and forth outside. Dugger's eyes had gone snowy. He was still crouched on the floor, staring at the wall without appearing to see a thing.

I knelt down to try and help him, to thank him. Even if I still wasn't sure what to do with the knowledge he'd given me. But Ned was alive somewhere. Together we would figure out a way. I just had a few pieces left to fit together, picking up where Dugger had left off.

Mrs. Mackenzie appeared in the doorway. Her hunched form didn't have to bow to enter, and her gaze flew straight to her son. “Oh no,” she said.

“Where's his medication?” I asked.

“That medicine don't do a thing.” She transferred her direct stare to me. “What happened? Who
are
you?”

I fought to rise. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Mackenzie. My name is Nora Hamilton. Dugger was—he's been trying to—”

She cut me off. “Nora Hamilton?”

I nodded.

“They're looking for you,” she said. and I frowned, heart beginning to hammer. “All day today, it's been on channel six.”

The local channel.

“Come here.” Mrs. Mackenzie extended a hand and led me.

We went back down the stairs, into a living room with one sofa, and a TV on a stand. Mrs. Mackenzie clicked on the news.

A few stories came on that contained no meaning or relevance—fluff pieces, winter sports, school events—and I had time to wonder if Mrs. Mackenzie might be as confused as her son. Except Dugger wasn't confused at all, was he? He knew more than anyone.

And then the coverage changed. An anchor announced breaking news.

The reporter was blond and trim, standing in front of a white winter scene that looked fake. “Police Chief Vernon Weathers had this to say,” she chirped.

Vern appeared on the screen, mask removed, gray hat pushed back, his face reddened by real wind and weather. “New developments have raised questions about the recent death of a member of our force.”

My heart began clip-clopping in my chest. Not to be alone in this anymore—not to be the only one who believed Brendan's death demanded answers! Or even more—the possibility that it hadn't been suicide at all, just made to look that way! That was a wish I had never even dared give voice to. I could hardly breathe.

Mrs. Mackenzie was watching me closely.

“Officer Hamilton was a hero and we will get to the bottom of this,” Vern continued. “I only hope that Officer Hamilton's wife—who is now missing—is not in any danger herself.”

The scene cut and the reporter came back into focus.

“So today Wedeskyull residents may be asking this question: When it comes to local police officer Brendan Hamilton …” She paused for a dramatic beat. “Suicide or slain?”

My palms had dampened with sweat. I wiped them on Mrs. Mackenzie's pants without thinking, then glanced at her self-consciously.

“They want to talk to you,” she said, turning and walking a little ways out of the room.

A second reporter flashed onto the screen. “Police are asking Mrs. Hamilton, or anybody with knowledge about Mrs. Hamilton's whereabouts, to come forward immediately, in the hope that she is able to shed light in the matter of her husband's death.”

Mrs. Mackenzie had fetched a cordless phone.

I don't know what exactly tipped me off. This was the biggest lure Vern could've dangled in front of me. And it was as false as the wintry scene the reporter had delivered her lines before.

Brendan hadn't been a hero, never did one thing in all his time on the force to earn that appellation. But it wasn't only that. It was Vern's implication that my safety was in question, when in reality his words had been a call to arms. They were setting up a manhunt.