Cold (20 page)

“What?” Noel said.

“I’ve been thinking about where we
should
go.
 
Up into the woods.”
 
She turned her head and stared out at the road.
 
“You want to go back, you really want to go back to
before
what happened happened,” he said, “first you got to go where it
happened.”

“Norman.”

“Like you said in your letter.”

After a moment, she said, “You know what this means?”

“Maybe—I’m not sure.
 
It probably means I’ll get caught.
 
But at least it won’t be caught running.
 
And maybe—maybe I can find out exactly what they’ve been doing out there in the woods.
 
Look what they’ve done to me—to us.
 
If I do, maybe that’ll count for something, I don’t know.”
 
She didn’t say anything.
 
“Look,” he said.
 
“I’ve been thinking about this ever since I got your letter.
 
I wanted to come back and see you, see Lorraine.
 
But I didn’t plan on this, on you coming with me—not out there.
 
I thought I’d do that alone.”

She turned to him finally.
 
“All right, Norman.
 
This is nuts, but all
right.”
 
She didn’t seem frightened now, but angry and perhaps determined.
 
“You
go out there, we
all
go.”

•

As he drove to North Eicher Del saw nothing but snowplows. The wind was building out of the northeast, blowing new snowdrifts across the road.
 
He made a call on his cellular phone to Monty.
 

“Anything?”

“Nada,” Monty said.
 
“I called this guy I know with the state police over in the Soo.
 
Nobody’s seen anything, and you can bet nobody’s looking very hard in this stuff.”

“Anything else?”

“Only thing is I had to run over to Hasslebrink’s Small Engine Repair.”

“He finally had a heart attack.”

“If he did, you’d owe me five bucks.
 
No, he had two customers who wanted to go duke city right there in his shop.
 
One wanted his snowmobile fixed pronto.
 
The other had brought in his snowblower.
 
It was a no-brainer.
 
I said the snowblower gets looked at first.
 
I tell ya, that snowmobile guy was pissed.”

“I bet.”

“You should have seen the snowblower, Del.
 
It was a Toro eight-horse.
 
Must have been at least thirty years old and in mint condition.”

“I bet.
 
Call me if anybody finds Norman or this Dodge van.”

“You bet.”

Halfway to North Eicher, Del stopped at a crossroads diner called Koski’s Korner, which was known for its pasty:
 
beef, potatoes, rutabagas, onions, carrots all cooked in a crusty pouch.
 
Miners took pasties to work because stayed warm for hours and they could hold them by the crust.
 
Del’s grandfather had worked in the copper mines up in the Keewanaw Peninsula, and his grandmother had made pasties Sunday through Thursday night.
 
When his grandfather took Del and his father bowhunting, they brought pasties.
 
He hadn’t gone hunting since he was twenty-eight, the year his father and grandfather both died, and he now only ate pasties when it was extremely cold out.
 
The radio said the wind-chill was thirty-below and falling, so he indulged himself.
 
There were two schools of thought concerning pasties:
 
to eat them with gravy or with ketchup.
 
Del favored ketchup, except when it was this cold; then he went with gravy because it would give him more to burn.

When he was back on the road, he called directory assistance.
 
There were two Pronovosts listed in North Eicher, Noel and a man he presumed was her father.
 
Del called Rejean Pronovost, who answered on the second ring.
 
It was almost noon and he sounded like he’d just gotten up.

“Sir, this is Del Maki, Constable of Yellow Dog Township.”

“Uh-huh,” Pronovost said.
 
He cleared his throat, then inhaled:
 
smoker.

“I was wondering if you’d heard about Norman Haas?”

“What about him?”

“He escaped from prison.”

“Uh-huh.”
 
Pronovost inhaled.
 
“Thought you were going to say he was dead.”

“Just wondered if anyone’s contacted you, or your daughter.”

“You mean the police?” Pronovost snorted.
 
“Nope.”

“Thought it might be possible that he’d go home to North Eicher.”

“Now that wouldn’t be too smart.
 
But I don’t know if that kid’s capable of doing the smart thing.
 
Where the hell are you?” Pronovost asked.
 
“What’s that noise?”

“I’m driving, sir.”

“What you got?”

“Old Land Cruiser.”

“Sounds like a friggin’ Zamboni.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Goes in anything, those Land Cruisers, eh?”

“Just about.
 
I was wondering about your daughter.
 
Is she there, in North Eicher?”

“Yeah, she clerks nights at the motel and leaves her daughter with me usually.
 
She’s already been by to pick her up.
 
Came and went before I got up.”
 
Pronovost hesitated a moment.
 
“I’ll give a call over to her apartment, just to check.
 
Let me have your number so I know how to reach you.”

Pronovost called back in less than two minutes.
 
“She didn’t answer,” he said.
 
He sounded more alert than before.
 
“She might be out shopping, but I called her neighbor, who often looks after the child, and says she hasn’t seen her or her car all morning.”

“Still, they might be doing errands,” Del said.

“Might be.”

 
“I’m almost to North Eicher,” Del said.
 
“Mind if I stop by?”

“I’ll be in my shop.
 
Let me give you directions.”
 
There was something halting in the man’s voice now, as though he were trying to remember something while he was speaking.
 
He inhaled deeply and often.

•

Warren still had a key to Noel’s apartment and sometimes he went there while she was out.
 
He used to play with her mind a bit, stuff like removing all the light bulbs.
 
That was the best one—it absolutely freaked her out to come home to an entirely dark apartment.
 
But now he usually just watched television and kept an eye on the road for her Trooper.
 
She’d only returned once while he was there, and he was able to slip out the back door and walk to his truck, which was parked a block away.

Today he was restless and, though he had Regis and Kathy Lee on, he paced in and out of rooms.
 
When they were first married, Warren liked it—sharing a bedroom, a bathroom, sitting in the kitchen having eggs for breakfast.
 
And the baby—he tried but Noel said he tried too hard.
 
Overbearing, she said.
 
Like he wanted Lorraine all to himself, except when it came to the work—the feedings, the diapers, the laundry, the cleaning—he just couldn’t hack it.
 
So the more responsibility Noel took on the more he ended up watching television while she’d be in the bedroom or the kitchen, always doing something for Lorraine.
 
It had
all
become about Lorraine.
 
He went into the bedroom and opened the top drawer of Noel’s bureau.
 
He took a pair of blue panties into the bathroom, squeezed some toothpaste into the crotch, and then put them back in the drawer.
 
In the baby’s room he arranged a set of plastic blocks on the floor into letters that spelled
P-U-S-S-Y.

Back in the living room he looked at the photographs on the bookshelf.
 
There were fewer than when he lived there because she’d removed the photographs he was in, but one that he’d taken of her was still in the corner by her high school yearbook.
 
On their honeymoon they’d taken the tour boat over to Mackinac Island and walked from the village up to the Grand Hotel.
 
There was a kid working for the hotel who sat at a card table in the driveway, collecting a fee from anyone who wanted to walk on the famous porch that ran the length of the hotel.
 
The fee was three dollars per person and Noel said it was ridiculous to pay money simply to walk on a porch, so they started back down to the village; but then Warren led her through some bushes and across the front lawn of the hotel, and it was quite easy for them to simply go up on to the porch as if they owned the place.
 
He took her picture, leaning against one of the wide, white columns.
 
Her blond hair, longer then and bleached by the sun, was blown across one cheek, and she was wearing a yellow tank top, no bra.
 
Warren knew the taste and the fineness of that hair, the color and shape of those nipples.
 
When he thought of Noel he saw her as she looked in this photograph.
 
Something about her mouth, about her eyes—innocent, but with a definite touch of fuck me.

Warren took the photograph off the shelf and sat on the couch.
 
He undid his belt and jeans and started to beat off slowly.
 
He stared at the photograph, and occasionally he’d look up at Kathy Lee on the television because she had nice tits.
 
But his face hurt, his ribs ached, and he wasn’t really into it.
 
He’d been a lot harder last night when Leah sucked him off.

Ted Danson was telling Regis and Kathy Lee about his new show when the phone rang.
 
Warren kept going, and after the fourth ring the answering machine went on—Noel’s father had recorded it, telling callers that
we
were not available.
 
When the message was over, there was the beep, and her father’s voice came over the line.

“Noel?
 
When you get in, give me a call at the house.”
 
Warren let go of himself.
 
He scaled the photograph across the living room.
 
The plastic frame broke when it struck the television screen, but Ted kept on talking and Regis and Kathy Lee kept interrupting.
 
“I’ve heard that Norman’s loose and I just want to know where you and Lorraine are,” Noel’s father said.
 
“You call me.”
 
He hung up.

Warren zipped up his jeans and got off the couch.
 
He buckled his belt as he walked through the apartment to the back door.
 
Noel wasn’t here and she wasn’t at her father’s, cleaning his toilets or whatever.
 
The bitch wasn’t where she was supposed to be, unless she’d gone shopping.

•

As they drove north the snowbanks were so high that Noel could seldom see over them to either side of the road, so they were traveling down a long white furrow beneath a blue sky.
 
“It’s making me queasy,” she said.
 
“The snow—it’s so, I don’t know, claustrophobic.
 
And the sky, doesn’t it seem
empty?”

“Yeah, it does,” he said.
 
“Good thing we’re not on drugs or something.”
 
She laughed.
 
It was the first time he’d made anything close to a joke.
 
Or perhaps he was on to her?
 
Perhaps he could tell that she had several vials of pills in her bag and that there was hardly a day anymore that didn’t require some combination of pharmaceuticals.

“It feels more like we’re on a treadmill,” he said.
 
“We’re moving, but it doesn’t seem like we’re getting anywhere.”

“That’s what it’s been like day after day after
day
in North Eicher,” she said.

“Really?
 
Try prison.”

“Was it awful?”

Now he laughed.

“Your cell, it was tiny with no window?”

“I wasn’t in a cell.
 
Trustees sleep in a barracks kind of thing, a big room with beds.”

“No cellmate?”
 
She hesitated.
 
“It was you and all these other men?”
 

“Was I raped?
 
Is that what you’re asking?”

She knew he had turned his head to look at her but she kept her eyes on the road, on the whiteness of the snow, the blue overhead.
 
She was suddenly tired; she had hardly slept last night.
 
She picked her bag up off the floor and opened it.
 
“I have a headache,” she said, taking out one of the vials.