Winter at the Door (26 page)

Moments later she was headed out of town on Route 227, her map on the seat beside her. Fenced fields and farmhouses lay silent under a fresh snowy blanket; once they had thinned out, her only companions were the trees thick on either side of the road, their branches already bending under a load of fast-accumulating flakes.

Everything in her wanted to charge back to Allagash and Nussbaum’s lakeside camp, to start asking questions, examining evidence, making suggestions for how the investigation should go.

But in this snow, going there would be worse than useless; better to let the system collect and plow through what evidence there was, see if any of it might offer a lead. And
then
she could go off half-cocked.

At Presque Isle she came briefly out of the woods into an area of divided highway flanked by fast-food places, then turned onto Route 1 North toward Van Buren. This part of the state, along the Canadian border and the Saint John River, would’ve been turf most familiar to the last dead cop on Chevrier’s list.

Her cell phone rang. Dylan’s number … she let the call go to voice mail. Let him wonder where she was
—and with whom
, a small voice in her head added vindictively—for a change.

After that, she just drove. Fifty miles to the small town of Van Buren, on the border between Maine and New Brunswick, was an easy ride from Bearkill when the weather was good, probably. But now it felt endless; first more deep forest, then swamps with the skeletal remains of drowned trees jutting up from them, and then more forests went by. With ten miles still left to go, she found herself regretting her impulse.

Probably this would all be a goose chase, anyway. The house that Chevrier’s dead ex-cop friend Michael Fontine had died in was still vacant, the Van Buren cop she’d talked to had said.

Although that didn’t mean there’d still be anything in it to confirm Chevrier’s suspicions. The phone chirped once more; there had been no coverage for most of the drive, but now it was back.

Dylan again, though, and she ignored it again as the reassuring shapes of a Rite-Aid store and a Qwik-Stop materialized through the blowing snowflakes. A block later, past street signs posted in English and French, a red-brick church with a bell tower and an elaborate rose window marked the edge of the business district.

There was a border crossing somewhere in the vicinity, but she didn’t see it or a police station, either. She pulled into a gas station/convenience store; in a small town like this, surely people would remember the retired cop who’d died.

Inside, the smell of sweet drinks mingled with the aroma of the hot-dog-grilling machine, the red sausages sweating as they turned
under hot lights. She chose a Coke from the cooler, then went up to the counter and asked the clerk if he could help her find her late uncle Michael Fontine’s old place.

No sense broadcasting why she was really here if she didn’t have to. If Chevrier’s suspicions were right, she didn’t want to start any alarm bells ringing about a possible investigation.

The old man with twinkling dark eyes and neat mustache smiled pleasantly and replied, but his English turned out to be so heavily interspersed with French, she could barely understand it.

“Oui,”
he said when she’d finally gotten her message across.
“Je suis désolé pour ton oncle.”

“Right. I mean
merci
. But …”

Trey Washburn had said this part of Maine, and the area of New Brunswick, Canada, that lay beyond it, too, were deeply French. She searched her memory for her high school French lessons.

“Ooh at-son mayson?” she managed—
where is his house?
Or at least she hoped that was what it meant.

The clerk smiled kindly despite her butchery of his language.
“Près de la traversée. Maison jaune, petit.”

He moved his slim, well-kept hands to show how small the yellow house near the bridge was; near the border crossing she’d missed seeing, she realized.

“Merci,”
she told him again, turning to go.

“Bonjour, êtes-vous un policier?”

She understood that, all right.
Are you a cop?
Just then a younger man with a broom and dustpan came from the rear of the store, as the clerk behind the counter spoke again. This time, though, he wasn’t smiling.

“Votre oncle était un bon homme, il ne s’est pas suicidé.”

Not a suicide
. She stood speechless. Finally, “How do you know?”
That I’m a cop. A
flic.
And
—

The younger man spoke, angling his head affectionately at the older one. “He was a cop himself in Montreal. Retired now. And he knew your uncle, they went to Saint Rose’s up the street, they were ushers together at Sunday mass.”

The church with the rose window … The youth’s speech was
heavily French inflected, too, but understandable. The clerk at the counter spoke again, his eyes no longer twinkling.

Professionally serious.
“J’ai dit à la police, quand ils sont venus, ‘Il ne l’a pa fait. C’est un péché mortel, et il voulait aller au ciel. Après la mort de sa femme, il vivait pratiquement dans l’église, il voulait être avec elle. Pourquoi s’enverrait-il plutôt en enfer?’ ”

Seeing her helplessness, the younger man translated. “He says he told the cops your uncle practically lived at the church after his wife died. All he wanted was to be with her once more, why would he send himself to hell instead?”

She turned back to the older man, who was watching her with a look she recognized: cop to cop. And he’d left a job behind, too …

“Do you miss it?” she asked. “Montreal,
la grande ville? Les grandes …
”

“Les enquêtes des grands,”
he corrected with a smile. “The big investigations?
Non
.”

He went on in French again, too swiftly for her to catch,
“Et de toute façon, c’est la même chose ici. La nature humaine, l’obscurité et la lumière. Le même partout.”

Human nature … the dark and the light
. Another smile, still kindly, but this time tinctured with unmistakable warning.

“Bon chance, mademoiselle. Prenez soin.”

Good luck, and be careful
. She pondered the words as she drove out of the parking lot, wondering if they were mere French politeness or if there was more to the retired cop’s warning. And why
would
a religious man give up eternal life in favor of ending his earthly one, anyway?

For herself, she believed that information about a possible afterlife would be provided, if at all, on a need-to-know basis. But for the people who worshipped in the church with the big rose window, suicide was a mortal sin.

You went to hell for it, lost all hope of seeing your loved ones in heaven. And from what she’d just heard, that hope was all a certain dead ex-cop had been living for after his wife died.

A block back the way she’d come, she spied the sign for the border
crossing and turned left, braking lightly on the downhill grade. At the foot of the hill stood a red-brick customs station and a guard’s box with stop signs in French and English; beyond that stretched the low concrete bridge over the Saint John River.

A car with Canadian plates pulled up to the booth and the driver spoke briefly to the officer inside, then proceeded onto the bridge. Brake lights flashed again as he slowed for Canadian customs on the other side.

A border crossing, she thought. With guards and passports. And … a customs station; she hadn’t considered what that might mean before.

But now she did. So maybe, she thought as she found her own turnoff just before the entrance to the bridge and took it—

Maybe this trip wasn’t really such a goose chase—an
oie chasse
, as her
flic
colleague might have put it—after all.

The narrow road along the Saint John River was little more than a path, two snowy ruts leading to a handful of small houses half hidden by overgrown bramble thickets. It ended at a pile of dirt with a sign stuck into it:
NO SNOWMOBILES!

To the left a weedy verge overlooked the river, which she had imagined as rushing and wild; instead, the wide, flat expanse of moving water was dotted with low, sandy islands, and looked almost shallow enough to walk across.

Not that she meant to try. Beside her, Rascal whined his wish to be allowed out of the Blazer.

She eyed him doubtfully, holding up his leash as she opened his door. “I don’t know, buddy. I don’t have time for a long—”

Walk
, she was about to finish as he leapt past her, his big, muscular body nearly bowling her over in his hurry to exit. Then, before she could even call him, he took off, up and over the dirt pile and down the snow-choked trail on the other side of it.

By the time she had clambered up the pile herself, he was nowhere in sight. Damn, damn …“Rascal!”

She followed his trail, aware that it was still snowing, so his tracks wouldn’t remain visible, and that although it was only just before noon, the cloud-darkened sky was growing darker.

Much darker … then she heard the sounds.
Crunching
sounds …

Pushing through clumps of reed in a half-frozen boggy area, she found the source. A girl in a green jacket looked up from a canvas ground cloth where Rascal sat chewing what appeared to be the world’s largest dog biscuit.

The girl got up and approached. “Hi, I’m Marie. Is this your dog? Nice boy.”

She had dark curly hair, dark eyes, bright cheeks, and a confident handshake. She waved at the river. “I’m making pictures of the birds down there, you see? I do it very often.”

A camera stood on a tripod, aimed at the river. “But the light is going now, so I was, how you say, wrapping it up?”

Her smile belonged in a toothpaste ad, and her French-accented voice was musical. Rascal got up and nudged the girl for another biscuit; Lizzie snapped his leash on.

Gathering her stuff up with practiced swiftness, the girl trudged with Lizzie back toward the Blazer. Past the dirt pile that marked the end of the drivable part of the trail, Lizzie spotted the yellow house.

The
maison jaune …
 The girl followed her gaze. “Oh, you were looking for that house? It’s why you’re here?”

She sounded troubled, suddenly. Smart as well as pretty, Lizzie thought.

“Poor Michel,” the girl went on. She pronounced the name the French way. “He was a nice man. I used to see him in the yard. All alone. I tried to be friendly to him, but then last September he died very suddenly.”

She turned to Lizzie. “You want to go in, yes?”

No
, Lizzie thought suddenly. She’d thought she did, but now that she was here … 
Not even a little bit
.

The cramped-looking bungalow, its yellow paint not quite negating the impression of darkness from within, glowered at her. The blank, empty windows piercing the facade reminded her of the multiple eyes of some malevolent insect. No one would want to go in there.

No one. “How did you know I wanted to see inside?” she stalled.

The girl smiled. “I watch people’s eyes. When I take their picture, when they look at my pictures.”

She smoothed Rascal’s ear. “Yours, they look at the house like they want to … like they want to
invade
it.”

I’ve come all this way
, Lizzie told herself, still eyeing the place reluctantly. Really, it looked …

“And I have,” the girl offered brightly, “the key!”

“Okay,” said Lizzie reluctantly. She was a cop, after all. An experienced
flic
who could take care of herself. “Lead on.”

Inside, the house smelled of dampness, of rooms unheated and sink traps with water standing too long in them. A front hall held a coat tree with a blue cotton jacket hung on it, a table bearing a jug of long-dead flowers, and a wicker basket full of sympathy cards.

On the loss of your wife …
 The cards’ front illustrations were of somber skyscapes, lone doves, and funeral-tinted blooms, purple iris and marine-blue roses. The house had been empty for months, yet no one had touched them or anything else, it seemed.

“This way!” the girl called from the front parlor; Lizzie followed to where a worn brown recliner, a large, not-very-new TV, and a red velvet settee made up the furnishings. On the walls, framed cross-stitched portraits depicted various saints; a white china statue of the Virgin Mary’s veiled head rested in a nest of spun glass on the mantelpiece. On the hearth sat a grate-fronted propane heater.

Rascal sniffed uneasily, then sat, plopping himself down on the tan rug with a resigned groan.
You and me both, buddy
, Lizzie thought. In the kitchen, more evidence of a solitary life: one plate, one cup, one set of cutlery on the drainboard.

A saucepan on the stove held the gray powder residue of water heated a cup at a time, morning after morning, likely for the instant coffee a jar of which now held a solid, blackish lump that stuck to the glass like hardened molasses.

The bathroom: no shade on the lightbulb over the sink, a worndown toothbrush, and a single towel. It struck Lizzie that if she had to
live like this day after day, she might start thinking of a way out, too. Only not if she thought the act would condemn her to a fiery eternity …

Or if it meant I’d never see Dylan again
. The thought caught her unprepared, showing her the painful truth of what she’d been trying so hard to ignore: that he’d been lying to her again, that he’d been looking her in the eye and lying.

By omission, at least. And that it was killing her. Grimly she turned from the thought, back to the business of today.

“How did he do it?” she murmured. “How did he—”

The girl looked up from the counter’s sad kit of dishware. She’d been eyeing it with calculation; for a photograph, perhaps.

“He hung himself. In there.” She angled her dark head at the only room they hadn’t entered. “From the bedroom door.”

The girl hadn’t asked why Lizzie wanted to come in here. Too young to be suspicious of others’ motives, she was so curious and eager about everything herself that it probably didn’t occur to her that not everyone else was.