Cold (34 page)

 
Del nodded.

Norman waited, but there was nothing more; the man continued to stare into the fire, seemingly content that his view was no longer obstructed.
 
Finally, Norman took a breath and said, “Well, so you found her?”

“We found her, yes.”

“Where?”

 
“Where do you think, Norman?”

“Hey
look,
don’t play games with
me.”
 
He took his elbow off the cabinet and, without something to lean on he felt unstable, his arms limp and unrestrained.
 
“I asked
you
a question.”

Del turned on the couch, just his head and shoulders.
 
“Where you left her.”

“In the snow.”

“Right—in the snow.”

Norman took a step closer to the end of the couch.
 
“How long was she there?”

Del turned back to the fire.
 
He’d clearly made some decision.

“How long, I said.”

The constable stared at the flames.

Norman drew the pistol out of his belt and took another step toward the couch.
 
“How long was she there?
 
Was she
alive?”

“Why?” the constable said.
 
He almost seemed to be speaking to himself.
 
“Why would you want to know?
 
What difference is it to you whether she died or not.
 
Unless you’re concerned about facing a murder rap.
 
Is that it?”

Norman’s right arm reached back and he swung through fast and hard, catching the constable on the side of the head with the handle of the pistol.

•

At first Noel thought it was Lorraine falling out of bed, and she seized up—her muscles, her heart, everything went tight.
 
It was a hard sound but there was something fleshy about it too.
 
She knew this sound from falls Lorraine had taken, and she imagined the child half awake, trying to get out of bed, whacking her head against the floor or the edge of the nightstand.
 
Noel left the stove, the wooden spoon still in her hand, dripping chicken broth and draped with limp noodles.

But when she reached the kitchen door she stopped.
 
It wasn’t Lorraine and Noel felt a momentary sense of relief before something new and confusing and frightening seemed to pour into her.
 
Norman was standing beside the couch, staring down.
 
He seemed both angry and afraid.
 
The gun was in his hand.

The constable wasn’t on the couch.
 
He was nowhere in sight.

Suddenly Noel was shoved aside from behind as Warren came out of the kitchen and strode over to the couch, holding the bottle of vodka by the neck.
 
“What the fuck?” he nearly shouted.
 
“What the
fuck,
Norman?”
 
He stopped at the back of the couch and looked down toward the fireplace, or perhaps the coffee table.
 
And he whispered,
“Holy shit.”

Noel crossed the living room and saw the constable, lying on the floor between the couch and the coffee table.
 
He seemed stuck there and he didn’t move.
 
Blood seeped from his scalp; it pooled in a missing knothole, and filled the gaps between the floorboards.

“Norman!” she said.
 
“Norman, what—”

“I didn’t mean it,” he said.

“Fuckin’ great,” Warren said.

“I just hit him
once.”

“You’re pathetic,” Warren said.

He went around the couch on Norman’s side, and Norman did an odd thing:
 
he turned to his brother and stood in his way.

“Leave him alone,” Norman said.
 
“You don’t know—he might be faking it.”

Warren tried to go around Norman, but his brother grabbed his forearms.
 
The gun and the vodka bottle both glinted in the firelight.

Noel went around the other side of the couch and knelt down by the constable.
 
He wasn’t moving—he wasn’t faking anything.
 
Looking up, she watched the two brothers, locked in each other’s arms now, as though they were trying to dance and neither wanted the other to lead.
 
“Will you
stop
it?”
she said weakly.

They kept up their peculiar dance, their feet shuffling, their arms quivering as they tried to overpower each other.
 
Warren, who was slightly taller, seemed to be gaining the advantage, and he began to work Norman’s right arm and the gun down to his side.

“God!
 
Just stop it!”
Noel shouted.

And just as the bedroom door where Lorraine was sleeping swung open, Noel stood up and screamed as the gun went off.

sixteen

Once Liesl had the wood-burning stove stoked up she got into bed.
 
The house was well protected by the woods, though when the wind was out of the north-northeast it came up the drive with a vengeance.
 
Tonight the house swayed, creaking like an old boat.
 
The first winter after they had built the house, she and Harold laid in bed many windy nights, wondering if they had done something fundamentally wrong, if the entire structure was going to collapse about them.
 
They feared that they had made some essential mistake in designing the house.
 
Because they had framed the house themselves, with the help of friends who were willing to exchange labor for beer and a meal, they knew every stud, every header, every joist.
 
Liesl’s shoulders had become firm, her forearms taut and beveled from days of driving sixteen-penny nails with a framing hammer.
 
By the end of the first winter, which didn’t declare itself until late May, they believed that the house would stand through anything.
 
Like a wooden hull, she was built to give, and to come back, again and again.

In the ensuing years she and Harold called it The Sweet Ride.
 
A strong wind tended to encourage and enhance their lovemaking.
 
Gretchen was conceived on a day in February when the wind gusted to over eighty miles-per-hour and there was more than three feet of new snow.
 
Since the accident, Liesl found it difficult to lie in bed alone on windy nights.
 
Tonight was no exception, and after about fifteen minutes she got up.

She remembered the other thing about Constable Del Maki, and she padded through the living room with a blanket over her shoulders, into the studio, to her desk.
 
She sat down, switched on the lamp and opened the lower right-hand drawer:
 
file folders alphabetically arranged.
 
She ran her thumb along the tabs—
Auto, Building Receipts, Clients/Pottery, Clients/Sculpture, IRS Returns
—until she came to a file that was simply labeled
Spring 1993.
 
She couldn’t think of any more appropriate title for this folder.
 
She opened the folder on the desk and sorted through it:
 
insurance forms regarding the truck, which had been totaled; forms and bills from the hospital; the invoice from the funeral home; the accident report.

She stared at this, a two-page form with the heading
Constable’s Office Yellow Dog Township.
 
She had not read the description of the accident again since she first received the report, nearly six years ago.
 
It had come in the mail several weeks later, along with so many other documents.
 
So many documents and forms and letters generated by one accident.
 
She looked down the first page, which stated facts such as the time, location and cause—“extreme blizzard conditions”—of the accident.
 
All typed, with occasional letters sitting in a dried pool of Whiteout.
 
On the second page there was a brief narrative of the accident, and at the bottom of the page the signature:
 
Del Maki, Deputy
Constable
.
 
Since then Eno Turnquist, who had been sheriff since the fifties, had retired.
 
She had never made the connection until now:
 
Del Maki was the last one to see her daughter alive.

Liesl pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders.
 
Her lips were quivering uncontrollably, and it was impossible to read the report through her tears.
 
The facts of the accident—the time, the location, the weather, the road conditions—were all clearly stated in the report.
 
But facts by themselves are nothing, mere points of observation.
 
Without underlying cause a fact has no significance.
 
She knew why they had been on that road in the storm.
 
It was Saturday afternoon and they were returning from Marquette, where they had taken Gretchen to Darcy’s birthday party.
 
Earlier they had discussed not going because of the weather, but Liesl knew that to keep Gretchen home would lead to heartbreak because Darcy was her best friend.
 
Darcy had lived a half mile down the hill until the previous fall, when her parents separated and she moved with her mother into Marquette.
 
So the girls no longer saw each other in school.
 
Still, they talked on the phone several times a week, they wrote letters to each other.
 
Gretchen had made her birthday present for Darcy, a dog she had fashioned out of some of her mother’s clay, painted yellow with brown ears and tail.
 
Darcy loved dogs.
 
She was seven.
 
All the girls at the party were seven or eight.
 
All the girls at that party, except Gretchen, were now in their early teens.

The snow was coming down so hard that Harold insisted they get an early start home before dark.
 
Ordinarily the drive out from Marquette took about thirty minutes; in a storm it could take twice as long.
 
The truck had four-wheel drive, but the new snow was powdery and a good foot deep in the roads.
 
The plows weren’t able to keep up.
 
As they climbed the hill toward Negaunee and Ishpeming, they discussed staying in one of the motels on Route 41.
 
But a house heated by wood needed constant tending, and if they stayed away over night there was a good chance that the water pipes might freeze.

They turned on to County Road 870 and continued to climb.
 
Harold kept his speed under twenty-five and remained in second gear.
 
There were no other vehicles on the road that wound through the woods, though they did pass one car that had skidded up the snowbank; it was abandoned, an orange flag attached to the antenna.

About ten miles out on 870 they began to descend into the valley to the south of Eagle Lake.
 
They were singing, the three of them, as they often did when they drove together.
 
Gretchen and her friends had discovered The Beatles recently, and in the truck Harold and Liesl and Gretchen worked on the harmony to “If I Fell.”
 
For such a big man, Harold had a sweet tenor, reedy and pitch perfect.
 
Liesl and Gretchen took the bottom part—it was something Liesl had been doing since she had been a teenager, singing John Lennon’s part of The Beatles’ harmony.
 
The joke was that most girls got to be Paul; she got to be John.

They rounded the bend just before Maud’s Creek.
 
The small bridge halfway down the hill was narrowed to one lane because of the snowbanks.
 
When they were within a hundred yards of the bridge, a green truck emerged from the bend at the bottom of the hill, a big squarish vehicle with a row of amber lights across the top—a delivery truck of some sort.
 
It was going too slow for such an incline and Liesl could see that it was losing speed.

“He’ll never make it up at that rate,” Harold said.

They were too close to the bridge to stop before the other truck passed, and at their present speed the two vehicles would meet head-on in the single lane in the center of the bridge.
 
Harold eased the gas pedal down slightly and they descended a little faster.

Liesl would never be sure, but she believed that at the same time the green truck accelerated too—she could see the rooster tails of snow flying out behind the rear tires.
 
She glanced at the speedometer; they were only doing thirty, but she could feel the truck fishtail slightly just before it reached the bridge.
 
They would have crossed the bridge before the green truck if it had maintained the same speed, but it was definitely climbing the hill faster.
 
Gretchen tensed and leaned against her.
 
She made sure the girl’s seatbelt was fastened, and she noticed that her boots were pressed to the floor.
 
Liesl remembered thinking that six months earlier, before
her
seventh birthday, Gretchen’s legs wouldn’t have reached the floor of the truck.
 
She was growing that fast.