The Winter Girl (16 page)

T
he old Montauk Highway was a slippery mess, so I didn't exactly drive at breakneck speed on the way back to Victor's. I knew he was dead, because I'd seen how much crushed-up narcotic Elise had dumped into his glass of Ensure. Of course, I'd completely bought her story it was Tylenol and that it was only a dry run.

“This is going to really suck,” Elise said tersely. I could smell the tequila on her breath. We'd had another round of shots before leaving Buckley's. Even when we'd stepped out of the pub and walked soundlessly through the snow, nothing felt different. We were still the same old couple, stuck in time.

“You think so?” I said angrily. “Yeah, dealing with a dead body is a pretty big deal.”

“Just watch the road.”

I did watch the road the rest of the way, and we drove in silence. I turned the wipers to high, but their tiny squeaks couldn't drown out the sound of the tires splashing on the driveway.

We were home. The lights were on in the kitchen, the upstairs bedroom, and Victor's bedroom, just as we had left them.

Victor was nowhere to be found.

The television was still on. The sheets had been pulled aside. His black socks were still there beside the bed, crumpled and left next to each other like two dark eyes.

“Dad,” I heard Elise call out. It was eerie hearing the lilting tone she used as she called his name into every room, as if she were really concerned about his whereabouts and he might be alive.

“Shoes,” I said, picking up one of Victor's special orthopedic sneakers. The other one was lying on its side on the deck. But it wasn't as if he was wearing it. It was as if he had momentarily struggled to put it on, then given up.

If he was in pain, if he were panicking, if he didn't know his daughter had just poisoned him, I knew just where I might find him.

I grabbed a flashlight and ran down to the fence that separated the two houses. It was snowing harder now and I suddenly fell as I pointed the flashlight at the old man leaning against the fence. He had climbed over it and then all his strength had left him.

“Victor,” I said, aiming the beam at his narrow white shoulders. His torso was bare, the pajama top balled up in his hand. Moving the beam toward his mouth, I waited anxiously for a frozen breath, but there was nothing.

I climbed the fence, knelt next to him, pointing the flashlight at his face again. One eye had drooped shut. Almost. There was still a watery line of blue and white. The other eye was open, the pupil dime-sized. I waved the light in front of it, still keeping a little distance between the two of us in case he should suddenly reach for my throat. I still believed he was capable of one last, terrible movement, or at least a few words that would change our lives forever again.

“Is he dead?” Elise said.

She was standing about twenty feet away, near the two brown streaks where I had fallen into the snow. When I waved the flashlight at her face, she looked petrified, as if she had expected him to die with his hands neatly crossed in bed and a note thanking her for his last drink.

“Yeah,” I said, turning off the flashlight, because I didn't want to see anything for a few seconds. I wanted to gather my thoughts before I thumbed it on again. Across from us the timer in Swain's house was flipping switches again. The upstairs bedroom light went dark, but not before I had time to see Carmelita standing there, leaning against a wall as if she had been waiting for us for a long time. Downstairs, the kitchen lamp came on, throwing its slanted square of light all the way to the edge of Swain's patio.

I
was the one who grasped Victor's cold fingers and dragged him back to the bottom of the deck. Once, I paused because I thought I heard him exhale. I waited there, the flashlight aimed at his head by his daughter. The snow, still falling, had begun to cover the deep-set wrinkles in his face.

I knew I was going to have to carry him over my back in order to get him up the stairs. Elise waved the flashlight at the bottom step as I wrapped my arms around him and pushed him up, until I could feel his chin fall heavily on my shoulder. Even in the cold, I could feel a semi-warm thread of saliva, or blood, ooze from his mouth and spread over my shoulder.

“Did you see her?” Elise said.

“Who?” I said, breathless, moving toward the bottom step as Victor and his silken pajama bottoms began to slide out of my arms.

“Carmelita,” she said. “She was watching us.”

“Can you help me?” I shouted back. “This is a fairly new concept for me.”

She waved the flashlight at the third, then fourth step. It occurred to me, as I hugged Victor tighter, that he had an unmistakable hard-on. I'd read about this happening to hanged men, but now his prick was pressed against my stomach. One last, perverse joke. Even though he'd never get to enjoy it.

At the top of the deck, I laid him down, the back of his head thunking rudely against the all-weather planks. Elise turned off the flashlight and stood over her father, watching the snowflakes catch on his chin and the hairs of his chest. His pajama top was balled up in her hand.

“Can you prop him up?” she said.

I dug my hands under his armpits and made him sit up, and she raised one of his arms, tugging the sleeve up to his elbow, and the shoulder. I tilted him forward and she pulled back his other elbow, found his fingers, and dressed him for the last time.

Three buttons were missing, surely covered by a fresh inch of snow. The pajama top fell open all the way to his waist.

“It'll have to do,” she said, standing up again. She turned and faced Swain's house again, looking at it uneasily.

“What's wrong?”

“She's watching everything. I know she's standing there right now.”

“She's probably happier than you are,” I said, pulling open the screen door. I used my foot to keep it open, then dragged Victor into his own living room. I let his hands fall to the floor, and then I raised mine to my face, wiping some snot off my nose. My hands smelled like the lavender lotion Sandra had massaged into his knuckles every day. Turning away, I stared at the brass statuette of a rodeo rider on the mantelpiece until the lurching feeling in the pit of my stomach passed.

When I looked back at Elise, she had covered her mouth and looked away too, her shoulders rhythmically moving up and down, the same way they had before she left for Mastic.

“I can't believe you let me talk you into this,” she said, glaring at me, her fingers still pressed against her runny nose.

I wouldn't say it was a revelation, just a small moment of dread that might have passed for one. Why should it surprise me that she'd turn it around and blame anyone but herself? It was in her blood. The complete set of genes responsible, lying on its back on the floor.

“You can get it from here?” I said tersely. “I'm going upstairs to take a shower. I've got to wash your father off me.”

I smelled like coughed-up Ensure, lavender blossoms, and the vaguely corked smell of dried blood. It was blood, after all, that had spilled from his mouth.

“Just change your clothes,” Elise said. “We don't want to look too nice when the ambulance people get here.”

214 Windmill Lane.

A quaint little Cape Codder near the railway tracks and the water tower in Southampton. And the day outside, brilliantly blue and frigid.

Elise and I sat across a long conference table from David Read, Victor's lawyer. I had expected some gruff, potbellied local who wore a suit and tie even in the depths of January. But what we got instead was someone fresh out of law school, wearing a comfy North Face vest and tearaway track pants. He looked like one of those pleasant, oval-faced jocks you see walking with their sharkish-looking girlfriends on the Upper East Side on a Sunday morning. He had been working out at Omni Fitness, he said, when we had called him.

Just like Victor, I thought, to pick the most junior guy at the firm to save a few bucks. God knows what pennies were in store for us. In the car on the way over, Elise and I had placed bets on what he would leave us. I wagered he would leave us some contemptuous appliance, like the backup microwave he had refused to throw out when he purchased its replacement. Elise was certain he wouldn't even leave us that. It didn't matter to her, she said. She was going to fight it in court. She'd read about other children who'd at least managed to rescue a small portion of a deceased parent's property.

“Here it is,” David Read said, plucking a long blue folder from a pile of other folders. “Just give me a minute.”

Elise laid her hand on the conference table, and I reached over to squeeze it. Even after taking four compulsive showers and soaping myself relentlessly, I still felt like I could detect that lavender scent. I knew it was my mind playing a trick on me, but in the end, what's the difference?

“Nearly there, nearly there,” David Read said, wetting his thumb on a blue circular sponge and flicking another page upward. “Here we go. No, that's not it.”

I looked out the window again, focusing intensely on a rusted patch on the railway bridge. I thought I might be sick again, especially if I let my mind wander back to the sound of the stretcher being un-collapsed inside the house. The sleepy voice of a dispatcher on a bulky walkie-talkie, in a town that had no other emergencies. We told them exactly what had happened. We went to dinner. We came back. He wasn't breathing.

Despite this information, the younger paramedic got out his portable defibrillator and tried to shock Victor back to life three times. And I really thought we were done for. That it would work and his dried-out, open eyes would blink, and it would all start over again. I told the paramedic that Victor got a little loopy when he took his nightly meds and had wandered outside while we were having dinner. As he waved a pen light in front of Victor's fixed pupils, I told him we had found him half naked in the snow. The grit and dead pine needles stuck to Victor's skin must have made my story seem believable, because he only murmured something about late-stage hypothermia and “paradoxical undressing.” Elise and I solemnly followed the stretcher as it noisily rolled over the carpet. They slammed the doors of the ambulance, the red and blue of its emergency lights exploding harmlessly in the pine trees around us.

“So,” David Read said, “if you'll give me a minute here while I read this over.”

We gave him a minute, watching his lips move as he read the words. He looked up with a pleasant smile and told us it was a fairly straightforward last will. Victor had left Elise everything.

O
ur day chugged ahead as if it had been planned by someone else. At 10:00 a.m., we'd found out that Elise had inherited Victor's house, Swain's house and property, and 297,300 shares of the Hensu Knife Company, which in turn was bought by the Scott Fetzer Company, and in turn Berkshire Hathaway. After picking up Victor's neatly boxed ashes at the O'Connell Funeral Home on Little Plains Road, a quick call to an investment adviser at Hathaway confirmed that the shares were worth approximately $2.8 million.

“I'm feeling guilty about not spending a little extra for a coffin,” Elise said, as I drove down Hill Street toward Victor's house. Yesterday's snowstorm had almost melted away, leaving only a few traces of itself on the wigwam outside Navajo Joe's Trading Post.

“I think once you murder somebody, you really shouldn't worry too much about the small things.”

She laughed at that, and I tried to. Victor, even tucked away in heavy plastic in that featureless cardboard box, offered us no particular advice.

“Who knows how many times he changed his will,” she said, staring out at the thicket of branches as we veered onto Westway. There was a
FOR SALE
sign on the first property in the cul-de-sac, a timber-framed ranch home that blended in drearily with the forest behind it. We could afford that one now, and two or three more. Another spasm of nervous excitement took hold of me. I couldn't stop imagining certain financial possibilities. A black Lexus passed us as we drove toward the bay and I glanced at it, imagining the smell of leather and a warmed, pre-reclined seat.

I could build a darkroom somewhere. I could afford a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle on eBay.

“He didn't change his will though,” I said, parking the car at the boat ramp at the end of the road, just a few yards from the water. It was still and light blue. The color of her late father's eyes.

“He had an appointment with his lawyer. He would have found a way to fuck us over before he died.”

To tell you the truth, Elise looked a little abject. Even though the heat was blasting in the car, she was hidden deep inside her gray parka, the hood pulled up. She reached back for her father's container, generously adorned with a plastic handle, and walked down to the edge of the water. I left the keys in the ignition and joined her there.

“I don't know how to do this,” she said, looking down at the box. “Maybe there's a better place.”

I didn't say a word. I just took it from her, and she gratefully stood back as I ripped off the handle, then tore open the flaps and pulled out the heap of ashes in the thick plastic bag. They looked more like what's left in a fireplace than something fine and powdery, with visible pieces of bone and something that looked a lot like the brass button of the cardigan he'd been dressed in for the final viewing. No one had attended.

To our left, an aging golden retriever appeared, wagging its whole hind end happily as it greeted us.

“Sammy,” its cheerful owner shouted. “Leave those people alone.”

He called the dog's name again, his beaming expression fading as he noticed the plastic bag in my hands. Pulling the dog away by the collar, he continued walking, not letting go of Sammy until he was another hundred yards away.

“Let's get this over with,” I said, kicking off my sneakers and then pulling off my socks.

“I'll come with you,” Elise said, doing the same. “I'm not just going to stand and watch you from the shore.”

Pants rolled up to our knees, we waded into the freezing water, wincing as our feet touched down on broken clamshells and sharp pebbles. In the distance, visible only as a dot of brown, barely distinguishable from the sand, Sammy was still obsessed with us, his hoarse barking carrying along the surface of the water. I peeled off the thick clasp tie and opened the bag.

“Is there anything you want to say?”

“I don't feel like it's real yet,” Elise said, keeping her eyes on the shimmering inlet, where a beacon blinked on and off, even at midday. She shaded her eyes so that I could see only the smile breaking across her face. “How about you?”

“I'm working on it,” I said, that nervous excitement caught like a ball of rubber bands in my throat. I let the ashes pour out of the bag. The residue simply floated around us. The only thing that sank was that fucking brass button, and even that I could still see, nine inches underneath the water, already nipped at by a pinkie-sized fish.

In silence, we walked back to our sneakers and socks and shoes, gently stooping down to unroll our pants over our wet skin.

“W
hat do we do about the girl?” Elise said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, scrawling circles inside of circles and then decorating them with crosshatches. We were waiting for her bank officer to call her back, letting us know whether Victor's Hensu shares had been transferred in kind to Elise's Chase account.

“She probably took off,” I said. “And who cares anyway? She doesn't have any idea what happened.”

“She sees Victor lying dead against the fence. She sees us dragging him back into the house.”

“So he goes nuts at the end. You think he's the first old guy who dies wandering around in the snow?”

Continuing her frenzied doodling, Elise pushed the pen deep into the notepad, giving the crosshatches each a rectangle, and then the rectangles each shot off a pointy arrow. The phone rang and she instantly stopped.

“Yes, this is she,” my wife said.

She didn't even notice that I had stood up and put on my jacket. I grabbed the Nikon on the counter and started to tell her where I was headed. I watched her cover the phone with her hand, biting her lip hard as another girlish smile broke across her face.

“I love you,” she said, quickly unclasping her hand and turning her attention back to the conversation. “So it's in the account, but it's not technically there yet? I think you're going to have to explain that to me.”

C
armelita saw right through me. I even felt embarrassed that I'd tried to invent a stupid story.

I was sitting on the couch in Swain's house, listening to the echoes of my increasingly high-pitched voice bounce off the walls. She was sitting in the fake ivory chair, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms clasped around her legs.

“You don't believe me,” I said, not even bothering to tell her the rest.

“Not a word.”

“Well, it's true.”

I watched her, I must admit, a little tensely, as she stood up and walked over to me.

“I was sleeping,” she said, “and I thought I heard Victor calling my name. But very faint.”

Carmelita sat down next to me, her leg touching mine. I frowned prudishly and moved away from her.

“I can hear you fine from there,” I said.

This amused her so much that she pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head sadly, as if she was trying very hard not to laugh in my face.

“I put my jacket on,” she said. “I walk down there until I see him. He tells me that the two of you have tried to kill him. Very raspy voice. Can hardly hear him at all.”

“He was a very paranoid guy, Carmelita. He thought his own doctor was trying to finish him off.”

“I get very close to him,” she said, ignoring me, “so I can hear what he is trying to say. He wants my help. That is all he wants.
Help me, help me, help me.
I knelt there until I couldn't hear those words anymore.”

“So we're all involved,” I blurted out, turning toward her angrily. “You did the right thing. You didn't lift a finger. You didn't call the police.”

“Give me your hand,” she said, holding her palm upward.

“Why?”

“I'll tell you in a second.”

I gave her my limp fingers, expecting her to turn them over and trace some strange fortune. Instead she stood up, tugging at me gently.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“You're going to follow me.”

I walked a step behind her, my hand still in hers as she guided me into the kitchen and turned on a flimsy overhead fluorescent light. We walked down the narrow plywood stairs. It was just at the bottom that I pulled away, watching her turn on another light in the dank room.

It was like any basement anywhere: concrete walls, casement windows that were caked with sea salt and dust. There was some garden equipment rudely jumbled in a corner. Rakes and bags of rock salt and sacks of mulch and a lawnmower still scabbed with a summer's worth of dry grass. The rest of the floor was bare except for the floodlight that showed the fine layer of dust on an old washer and dryer in the other corner. Flaps of gray lint filled a small galvanized bucket next to it.