Cold Heart (11 page)

How long can I wait here like this?

She shivered so hard her jaw ached.

El's call sounded over the chatter of the creek like the dull droning of a giant bee.

“Come on out, Dawn. You can't stay down there forever. You're hurt. You must be cold. Come on out.”

His voice made her want to throw up.

But, at the same time, it reassured her.

He wasn't just over the lip of the bank. His voice was coming from up near their cabin.

She began to slide backwards on her stomach, down toward the water, pushing off with her hands, trying to keep the gravel from making noise as it created tiny avalanches beside and beneath her. When she felt the icy stream pushing her feet and slippery rocks crunching beneath the toes of her boots, she stopped.

My feet'll be soaked in seconds.

Like that matters.

She clawed at the frozen dirt like a frightened animal.

I'll be dead in a few minutes.

Decide.

H
OWARD REACHED THE EDGE
of the Glorianus property, where the alders ended and the trail cut across the open grass that led up to Terry and Dawn's stoop. The cabin seemed dark and, although smoke was rising from the stovepipe, he didn't see any movement through the windows.

It was more than possible, knowing Terry, that she had grabbed young Dawn at the first sound of gunfire and was holed up inside. Howard didn't want to frighten the woman by showing up at her door with a loaded shotgun and, there was no reason to. If El was shooting at a bear, it sure wasn't going to be inside Terry's house.

The climb from the bridge had winded him again. He set the shotgun on its stock and gripped the short barrel for support. If this expedition turned out to have been for nothing, he was going to hit Terry up for a cup of coffee and a piece of one of the cakes she was always baking.

The wind gusted and he tugged at the collar of his shirt, thankful that he was wearing his goose-down vest. When his wind had come back a little, he hefted the gun over his elbow, but tucked his left hand in the vest pocket to warm it. He was making his way toward the cabin when he heard El, calling to Dawn.

Now, why had Dawn run off?

She was always arguing with her mother, of course. The girl was at that age and Howard knew that she hated living in the bush.

But why was El here looking for Dawn and what had the shots been about?

Did he fire them to get the girl's attention?

Where's Terry?

It occurred to Howard that Terry, being the way she was, might have panicked and gone to El for help if Dawn had run off. Or, maybe something far worse had happened. Maybe the girl had run afoul of a bear and now El and Terry were trying to find her.

Howard picked up his pace.

He rounded the cabin and the sun hit him directly in the eyes. He could barely make out El's silhouette. He did see the gun hanging in El's right hand and a slight quiver of doubt rose in his heart. But, at that instant, Howard was far more worried about Dawn.

“What's the matter, Eldred?” he said, in as conversational a tone as he could muster, still winded. “Where's Dawn?”

El turned to face him.

Howard pulled his left hand out of his vest and tried to shield his eyes from the blinding sunlight.

El raised the pistol and Howard's mouth dropped open as he realized the terrible mistake he had made.

The boom of the pistol wasn't nearly as much of a shock as the powerful ripping sensation of the heavy-gauge bullet tearing through his breastbone. The ground came up fast, driving the wind from his lungs, knocking the glasses from his face.

Howard's mind functioned at lightning speed.

Have to get the shotgun up.

Got to shoot the bastard.

He's like a wounded grizzly. But cold and calculating. Not mad with rage.

El had cracked.

It happened to people in the bush.

Howard had seen it before.

Folks got cabin fever during the impossibly long dark winters. Went completely batty.

Howard struggled to lift the heavy shotgun with just his right arm but all he could do was scrape it along the ground. He heard another blast and dirt blinded him where the bullet cratered the gravel inches from his right eye. He jerked and the shotgun fired into the ground beside his feet.

That was his only shot.

He didn't have the strength to pump another round into the cylinder now and it didn't matter anyway.

El straddled him and Howard stared up into sunglasses that masked the face of a demon. He watched the pistol rising to point directly into his eyes and knew that he would do no more fishing along Sgagamash Creek.

“Go to hell,” Howard said.

The big gun bucked again.

R
ITA TOTALED THE BILL
and Micky paid cash for it.

“Carburetor's almost in,” said Clive. He leaned out of the door to his workshop, wiping his hands on a rag. “I'll be right behind you. I need to catch Damon about his last order. Some of the stuff he needs isn't coming in for a couple of weeks.”

“I think he's up the valley with Stan or Marty today. But you never know with Damon; he could be off prospecting.”

“I'll catch him later then.”

“If I see him I'll tell him you're looking for him. I picked up a couple of things for Aaron. I'm going to hike up and see him.”

Rita grimaced and Micky laughed.

“He really isn't so bad,” she protested.

“Have it your way,” said Rita.

Micky opened the heavy door and stepped out onto the porch. The breeze blowing down the valley buffeted her and she was surprised by the chill in it. The clouds were still high cirrus and the sun shone beneath them. But by the time she reached the edge of the clearing and headed back up the trail toward home, she realized that she had better stop and grab a heavier jacket and gloves and maybe a hat. One of the things that Aaron had taught her was that only
Cheechakos
went out unprepared for bad weather. If the weather changed abruptly and took you unawares, it was no one's fault but your own.

Aaron had taught her a lot things.

How to bank a fire so it would burn all night.

How to bake bread in a pressure cooker on top of a woodstove.

How to walk in snowshoes.

How to live today and not yesterday.

That was the most important thing that she had learned from Aaron. The hardest for him to teach. The most difficult for her to learn.

Four months after the incident at her woodpile, she and Aaron were sitting on his porch, watching the mountains turn a thousand shades of blue in the distance. A pair of ravens played aerial tag over the needle tops of the spruces and Micky was feeling almost at ease.

“Quit living with dead people,” said Aaron.

She glared at him as though he had two heads. How dare he say something like that to her? How dare he intrude on her grief in that manner?

And how did he know I was thinking of Wade?

“Now you're going to stomp off and say what an old shithead I am. But you know I'm right.”

“I'm getting better,” she said.

“No, you're not.” His grizzled gray beard jarred with blue eyes that seemed far too young for his wrinkled brow and gnarly old hands.

“Are you just trying to start something today?” she asked, prepared to do just what he said, stomp right off.

“Look around.” He waved his hand around the valley. The sun was high overhead, fireweed burned blue in the grass, and the Kuskokwim was wide and gray with spring runoff. “This whole damned planet is filled with life. Think about it. Think how much more life there is than death.”

She turned away from him.

“And yet you waste your time on the dead side,” he said. “You know what happens then?”

She waited.

“Wonderful people like me, that you could have been thinking about, by the time you get around to doing it, are dead.”

She laughed, knowing that that was exactly what he had aimed for. He laughed too.

But it had been a serious lesson and she knew it.

Whether it had been well taught, or whether she had been about ready to step over the threshold of recovery anyway, she never knew. But McRay started to feel more like home after that, and, though she still thought of Wade often, they were fond memories. The image of him in the cruiser, the memory of her parents, facedown in pools of their own blood, were mercifully blurred and seldom recalled.

That was Aaron's gift to her.

She was almost to her cabin when she thought of the hare again. She slipped silently off the trail and with a stealthy tread, crept around to the far side of the huge spruce. But the snowshoe rabbit was gone. She glanced through the deep woods; the sunlight filtered amber and gold down into the thick carpet of pine needles. Aaron might have been able to figure out where the animal had wandered off to, but tracking a rabbit across soft forest bottom was still beyond Micky's abilities.

She thought she heard something splash in the creek and immediately turned downslope. But the forest between the trail and the Fork was dense. She couldn't see the creek and no further sounds came from that direction.

But something about the noise set her nerves back on edge.

The shots.

The nervous rabbit.

Her intuition about Aaron.

Now the splash.

Singly, they were all easily explained and nothing to worry about. Put them all together and they added up to a huge mass of feminine neurosis. Aaron would have a fit.

She was sweaty from the brisk walk and chilled by the rising wind. She hurried into the cabin to get her heavier
jacket, stopping to give the crate a once-over, jiggling it from side to side, although she knew that it was perfectly boxed.

She replaced her Thinsulate jacket with the goose-down one, making sure her gloves were in the pockets. She grabbed a wool cap from a peg beside the door and pulled it on. Her hair barely showed beneath it. She kept it closecropped now. Easier to take care of. There weren't any hairdressers in McRay. Every few months she paid Rita to cut it and she didn't spend any time admiring it in her one mirror. Rita wasn't a butcher. But she'd better not give up her day job, either.

Micky thought again of the shots and the possibility that a bear was moving around, then fetched the Glock from the table beside her bed. She checked the chamber, then set the gun down on the worktable, trying to remember where she'd put her holster. She hadn't worn it since leaving Houston. She finally found it on the shelf beneath the kitchen washbasin. She held it in both hands, staring at it. The feel, the weight, the smoothness of the jet-black leather instantly bringing back the ugly memories she had rigorously exorcised under Aaron's tutelage.

She placed the holster on the table beside the Glock and backed away. Suddenly she didn't want to handle it. She glanced at her wristwatch, hanging on a nail on the wall, and thought how the gun and watch were symbols of life past.

Time.

And violence.

Time meant little in McRay.

A day could last forever or she might glance up from her worktable and wonder where it had gone.

And violence, the violence of the gun, was a thing of her past.

She grabbed a couple of paperbacks she had ordered for Aaron and stepped back out into the sun, closing the door behind her.

Better without the gun.

Aaron always said the Glock was a girly pistol fit for nothing but target shooting anyway.

If there was a bear in the vicinity, she'd stick to whistling and snapping her fingers.

When she reached the creek, she glanced upand downstream. She could see fifty yards in either direction before the creek meandered around a bend. But there was nothing unusual to be seen. No bear. No one cavorting in the creek. It was a normal spring day and the stream was running just as it had run for a million years before she got here. No one was shouting on the far shore. No one running through the brush.

But a terrible sense of foreboding gnawed at her.

The wind died for an instant and the forest grew utterly still.

She considered hollering across to Terry. But a hand seemed wrapped around her vocal cords and she remained silent.

Her shout might frighten Terry. Micky had spoken to Terry and Dawn on numerous occasions and Micky knew their story. Terry was afraid of the air around her. The woman was like a small bird that was so frightened it could die of a heart attack before any hunter got it. Micky would have loved to help Terry but couldn't figure out just how to do it. She sensed that the brusque technique that Aaron had used on her would be a decided failure against Terry's fears. She'd broached the subject with Aaron and he'd agreed.

“You can't fix someone like Terry,” he said. “She isn't damaged. She's broken.”

“She's just afraid,” said Micky, shaking her head. “I know about being afraid.”

“Like you were in Houston?” Aaron was the only one in town, other than Damon, who knew the whole story.

“The fear comes back,” she said.

“But that afraid? So afraid that you can't move? That you piss your pants?”

“No.”

“Well, that's how afraid Terry will be for the rest of her life. Afraid that if she leaves the protection she thinks she and Dawn have here, even for an instant, it will cost them their lives. She spends her entire time trying to find a way to keep Dawn here after she reaches legal age and it's killing her because she knows she can't.”

“How in the hell do you know all this?”

“The difference between you and Terry,” said Aaron, “is that deep down you want to be better. Terry doesn't. She doesn't want to be not afraid because to not be afraid would mean that she's wrong. It would mean that the world wasn't an evil place. That it hadn't singled out her husband for a sacrifice. That his death was just a fucking meaningless tragedy. The worst thing is, if her kid don't get out of here pretty soon, she's going to start catching her mother's fear and be too scared to.”

Micky knew exactly what he meant.