The Winter People (9 page)

Ruthie put her arm around her little sister, pulled her into a hug. “I know. We’ll figure it out. After breakfast, we’ll look for clues. People don’t disappear without a trace. It’ll be like playing Nancy Drew.”

“Who?”

“Forget it. Just trust me, okay? We’ll be fine. We’ll find her. I promise.”

Sometimes, when Katherine woke in the night, she could almost feel them both there beside her. She imagined the other side of the bed was warm, and if she squinted her eyes just right, the pillow seemed to bear a soft indent where their two heads had lain. She’d roll over in the morning and press the pillow to her face, trying to catch a scent of them.

It wasn’t just shampoo, shaving lotion, and motorcycle grease. It was all of that blended together with something intoxicatingly spicy underneath—the essence of Gary. And Austin, he’d smelled like warm milk and honey, a sweet ambrosia that she could drink up and live on forever. In the soft hours of early morning, before the sun came up, she believed it just might be possible to distill everything a person was down to a scent.

Once she was awake, like now, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of French roast in her hand and still wearing one of Gary’s old T-shirts, she realized how silly the thought was, knew that their being in bed with her was only a dream, a body memory perhaps. Like a person feeling pain in a phantom limb.

How many mornings had they spent like that, Austin tucked between them in fleecy pajamas telling them grand stories about his dreams:
“…  and then there was a man who had a magic hat and he could pull anything you asked for out of it—marshmallows, swimming pools, even Sparky, Mama!”
She’d ruffled his hair, thought it sweet that he could bring their dead dog back in his dreams.

The acidic coffee hit her empty belly with a snarl and a toothy
bite. She tapped her ring against the mug. Gary had given it to her two weeks before he died. She turned it around her finger, noticing the indentation it was leaving, as if it were slowly working its way into her skin, becoming a part of her.

She should eat something. She’d skipped a proper dinner last night, settling in at her worktable with a jar of olives and a glass of Shiraz. Since Gary’s death, she’d pretty much been living on canned soup and crackers. The idea of actually going to the trouble of cooking a proper meal for just herself seemed silly, not worth the effort. If she craved something more elaborate, she could go out. Besides, she’d discovered some pretty fancy canned soups: lobster bisque, butternut squash, roasted red pepper and tomato.

But she hadn’t been shopping yet, and the soup-and-cracker cupboard was empty; she’d have to go to the market today. She’d unpacked a few dry goods yesterday—oatmeal, baking soda, flour—but the pots and pans were in boxes. She’d been in the apartment for two days now, and other than setting up her artwork area in the living room and making the bed, she had done little to settle in.

The truth was, she liked the sparse look of bare countertops and shelves; the empty white walls felt like a clean slate. She was even hesitant to hang her clothes in the closet, preferring the vagabond feel of living out of suitcases. What did one really need to live? The thought excited her a little—an experiment in pared-down living.

Katherine looked around at the piles of cardboard boxes, neatly marked
KITCHEN
with contents written below: mixing bowls, steak knives, ice-cream maker, bread machine. But who on earth really needed an ice-cream maker or a bread machine? These, she decided, along with a great many other things in the boxes, would need to go.

Out in the living room were more boxes: CDs, movies, books, photo albums. The things that made up a life. But now, in their boxes, they seemed strangely unreal. A remnant from another woman’s life. The Katherine who had been married to Gary and once had a son; who had wedding china and photo albums and an electric knife sharpener. Now all these objects felt like toys, like she was a child in a playhouse trying to imagine what it was that grown-ups did.

A
ustin had died two years and four months ago—leukemia. He was six years old. And it had only been a little over two months since Gary’s death. Sometimes it felt like two days, sometimes twenty years. Her decision to move from Boston to West Hall, Vermont (population 3,163), had seemed absurd—concerning, even—to her family and friends. She claimed she needed a fresh start. After all, she’d just been awarded a Peckham grant: thirty thousand dollars to cover living expenses and art supplies, enabling her to work on her art full-time, to finish the assemblage-box series she’d been working on for the past year. For the first time in her life, she’d be an artist and only an artist—not a wife or a mother or the manager of a gallery. She gave notice on their Boston loft, resigned from her job at the gallery, and moved to a small apartment on the third floor of an old Victorian house on West Hall’s Main Street.

She didn’t tell anyone the truth.

Almost a month after Gary’s accident, she’d received his final American Express bill. The last charge on it, dated October 30, the day he died, was a $31.39 meal at Lou Lou’s Café in West Hall, Vermont. For some reason, he’d driven the three hours to Vermont, had a meal, then turned around and headed back to Boston. He’d taken the scenic route back, heading south on Route 5, which snaked its way down beside the interstate, I-91. It was snowing, an early-season squall, and Gary came around a bend too quickly, lost control of the car, and slammed into a ledge of rock. The state troopers told her he’d been killed instantly.

When she took the trip up to the garage in White River Junction to claim any belongings inside Gary’s car, she took one look at the deployed airbags, the smashed windshield, and the whole front end crushed like an accordion, and actually fainted. In the end, there wasn’t much to claim anyway—some papers from the glove box, an extra pair of sunglasses, Gary’s favorite travel mug. The thing that she was really hoping to find—the black backpack he used as his camera bag—was not in the car. She tried to track it down, pestering mechanics at the garage, the insurance adjuster, the state police, and the staff in the emergency room—but everyone denied having seen it.

Gary had left home at ten that morning with his backpack, saying he had a wedding to shoot in Cambridge and he’d be home in time for dinner.

Why had he lied?

The question plagued her, ate away at her. She searched through his desk, files, papers, and computer and found nothing out of the ordinary. She called his friends, asked if they knew of any buddies Gary had in Vermont—any reason he might go up there.

No, they all said, they couldn’t think of anyone. They told her he’d probably heard about a great antique shop, or just wanted a drive. “You know Gary,” his best friend, Ray, had said, choking up a bit, “a spur-of-the-moment guy. Always up for an adventure.”

As soon as she opened the bill with the charge from the café in West Hall, Katherine got in the car and started driving north. She found West Hall, Vermont, about fifty miles north of where Gary had had his accident.

It was the quintessential New England small town: a downtown with three church steeples, a granite library, a town green with a gazebo in the middle. Beyond the town green, she passed by the West Hall Union School, where small children in winter coats and hats were out on the playground tossing balls and climbing on an elaborate, brightly colored play structure. She thought of Austin—how much he loved to climb and showed no fear, going up to the top of any structure and hollering, “I’m King of the Mountain!” For half a second, she almost believed she could see him there, the wiry boy with the curly hair perched on top. Then she blinked, and it was someone else’s child.

She followed the road, which took her past the Cranberry Meadow Cemetery—full of old, leaning stones and enclosed with a rusted wrought-iron fence. She looped back around toward the downtown area and found Lou Lou’s Café on Main Street, tucked between a bookstore and a bank, all of them sharing the same big brick building. She went in, ordered a coffee, and looked out the large plate-glass window at the street, thinking,
This was what Gary looked at while he ate his last meal
.

She had a clear view of the town green. It was a bright, cloudless
November day. The trees that lined the green were bare now, but back when Gary was here, they might have been glowing red and orange, leaves falling as storm clouds gathered.

“But what were you doing here?” she asked out loud.

Glancing at the prices on the menu, she decided he must have met someone. The entrées were no higher than twelve dollars—even if he’d ordered a beer, he couldn’t have eaten a thirty-one-dollar meal here by himself.

“Excuse me,” Katherine called as the waitress passed by. “I’m wondering if you can help.” She pulled out the little photo of Gary she kept in her wallet. “I wonder if you might recognize him. He was in here last month.”

The waitress, a young woman with dyed-blue bangs and a yin-yang tattoo on the back of her hand, shook her head. “You should ask Lou Lou,” she said, nodding in the direction of the woman behind the counter. “She remembers customers real well.”

Katherine thanked her, got up, and approached the owner—Lou Lou herself, who was dripping with silver-and-turquoise jewelry and had short bright-red hair.

Lou Lou recognized Gary immediately. “Yeah, he was here, can’t say when, but not all that long ago.”

“Did he meet someone?”

Lou Lou gave her a quizzical look, and Katherine thought of breaking down, explaining everything:
He was my husband, he was killed in an accident only hours after he sat in here eating a sandwich and soup or whatever, I’ve never even heard of this place, why was he here, please, I need to know
.

Instead, she stood up straight, said only, “Please. It’s important.”

Lou Lou nodded. “He was with a woman. I don’t know her name, but she’s local. I’ve seen her around, but can’t place where.”

“What did she look like?”

Was she pretty? Prettier than me?

Lou Lou thought a minute. “Older. Long salt-and-pepper hair in a braid. Like I said, I’ve seen her around. I know her from somewhere. I don’t forget faces.”

Katherine spent nearly two hours in Lou Lou’s, having coffee, then soup and a sandwich, then a slice of red-velvet cake. All the
while, she wondered what Gary had eaten, which table he’d sat at. She felt close to him, like he was right there beside her, sharing a secret in between bites of cake.

Who was she, Gary? Who was the woman with the braid?

She watched the people coming and going along the sidewalk: people in fleece jackets and wool sweaters, a couple of men in red plaid hunting jackets, two kids with hoodies on skateboards. She didn’t see one person in a suit, or even a tie or high heels. So different from Boston. People actually smiled and said hello to each other on the street. Gary must have loved it.

They used to talk about leaving the city, moving to a small town like this, how it would be so much better for Austin. Gary had grown up in a small town in Idaho and said it was kid heaven—there was room to breathe, to explore, you knew your neighbors, and your parents didn’t mind if you were out late because bad things never happened there. You were safe.

Katherine stopped at a bulletin board in the hall on the way out of Lou Lou’s Café. She glanced at the notices on it: Trek mountain bike for sale, Bikram yoga classes, a flyer announcing that the farmers’ market would be in the high-school gymnasium during the winter months, a poster looking for fellow believers to join a UFO-hunting group. And there, right in the middle, a no-nonsense sign:
Apartment for rent. Downtown in renovated Victorian. One bedroom. No pets. $700 includes heat
. There were little tabs at the bottom with the phone number to call.

Then she felt it again: Gary standing beside her, putting his arm around her, whispering,
Go ahead and take one
. Without thinking, she tore off one of the phone numbers and tucked it in the pocket of her jeans.

Good girl
, Gary whispered, a gentle hiss in her right ear.

Isn’t it about time to get to work?
Gary asked her now, voice teasing, soothingly familiar, as she sat at the kitchen table in her new apartment. Katherine stood up, went over to the counter to refill her coffee cup, then made her way into the living room, between its stacks of boxes, and over to the art table. It was an old farmhouse kitchen
table that she’d had since graduating from college, three feet wide and five feet long, made from thick pine planks. It was scarred with saw, knife, and drill marks, splattered with years’ worth of paint drops and smudges. There was a vise set up on the right side, which was also where she kept her tools: hammer, saws, Dremel, soldering iron, tin snips, drill and bits, along with a plastic toolbox full of various nails, screws, and hinges. In the middle, at the back, was a coffee can full of paintbrushes, X-Acto knives, pens, and markers. In a carefully labeled wooden cabinet to the left of the table were all her paints and finishes.

There, in the center of the table, was the latest box, the one she’d stayed up late into the night working on. A four-by-six-inch wooden box, it was titled
The Wedding Vows
. On the front were two double doors, styled like church windows with stained-glass designs. When you opened these, there was the wooden altar with a tiny photo of Katherine and Gary on their wedding day, both looking impossibly young and happy, not noticing the shadowy crow that peeked out at them from behind the curtain.
Until Death Do Us Part
was written in neat calligraphy, a promise held in the air like a sweet cloud above their heads. But down in the shadows below their feet were miniature skid marks on a narrow winding road, and over at stage left, half of a ruined matchbox car poked its way through the side of the box, its front end smashed. At the very bottom, two simple lines in quotation marks: “I’ve got a wedding to shoot in Cambridge. I should be home in time for dinner.”

This morning, she’d put the finishing touches on this box—a bit of silver trim around the windows, gold paint for the cross on top—then coat the whole thing with matte varnish. After that, she’d start work on the next in the series:
His Final Meal
. She didn’t have the details for this one worked out at all, only that the door would open onto a scene in Lou Lou’s Café: Gary and the mystery woman. She was counting on Gary to help out, to lead her along and show her what details to add. Gary as Muse.