Winter at the Door (6 page)

Aiming it at the knob with the keyhole in it, she thought,
I don’t care how safe it’s supposed to be out here, I need to get a deadbolt put in, and
—

The key stuck. She pushed harder, whereupon the door swung wide open, soundlessly and without resistance.

But I locked it
, she had time to think,
I know I
—

The shape rose up suddenly, silently in the doorway, looming there in the instant before it burst out at her. As she went down she crouched instinctively, rolling off the step, then leapt up.

“Stop! Police!” Grabbing into her bag for the Glock, she came up first with the .25 she’d confiscated along with—
thank you!
—the single round it had held. Not hers, but it would do; popping the slug into the chamber and slapping it shut—the Boston PD’s weapons-training in-services had been exhaustive, not to mention effective—she charged after the intruder.

Across the yard and alongside the house, she kept the fleeing figure in view. But then he—if it
was
a he—vanished into the gloom, over the low backyard fence, and into the trees beyond.

She held herself still, barely breathing, listening for any sound. But all she heard as she glared out into the night was the angry thud of her own rapidly beating heart.

“Lizzie? You okay?”

She turned fast, stepping into a wide stance and leveling the weapon two-handed before recognizing the familiar voice.

Twenty feet away, Dylan Hudson raised his own hands, palms out, backpedaling hastily.

“Hey, hey. It’s me, all right? What’s going on?”

That’s what I’d like to know
. “Someone was inside.”

She lowered the gun. “I chased him back here, but he was gone before I could see him very well.”

Dylan approached. “Damn,” she said with a little laugh, “but whoever that was startled the crap out of me.” His arm slung casually
around her shoulders felt good, like she wasn’t alone all of a sudden, like in the old days.

Yeah, like that
. She pushed the thought away. “Come on in with me a minute while I make sure there’s not some other dimwit still in there.”

No other dimwit was, though, and as they went through the rooms, they found that none of Lizzie’s few things had been taken.

In the bedroom, the bed had new sheets, a new fleece comforter, and a new pillow, all courtesy of the house’s owner, whom Lizzie had decided she liked despite his dreadful taste in home decor.

Dylan came up behind her. She was nearly as tall as he was; with his breath warm against her neck she turned to slip past him, biting her lip hard as she did so. The simple comfort of his touch would be lovely right now. As it had been in the past until she found out that he was lying, that he had a wife waiting, that …

Never mind
. She was new here in Maine but he had an already-established network of connections who could help her find Nicki.

So she still needed him. Had always needed him …

Shut up
. She went on into the kitchen, where the furniture couldn’t be reclined upon; reluctantly, he followed. “You sure you want to sleep here tonight?” he asked.

She stood at the kitchen window looking into the darkness beyond the fence where the intruder had gone.

“I’m staying down at the Caribou Inn,” he said. “There’s two beds,” he added.

Yeah, right
. “First of all, I’m not going anywhere with you. And second, I thought you’d already gone back to Augusta.”

Instead of hanging around here spying on me
, she thought but did not add; she hadn’t minded having him show up when he did.

“I had some things to do.” He opened the refrigerator. “Hung out with Chevrier for a while, and he tried talking me into going moose hunting with him.”

“What’d you say?” Nothing in the fridge interested him. Of course it didn’t; he’d only opened it as a stalling maneuver.

“Told him I’d as soon stand in a pasture and shoot a cow.”

Then he looked at her, knowing what she was thinking as he always
had; he was thinking it, too. Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t just lie down with him again, get it over with.

The rest of the time, though, she remembered walking around in a daze of misery: wanting him, hating him. Another long moment passed while he waited to see what she might do. Then:

He closed the fridge. “You going to call the cops?”

She shook her head, having had a few minutes to think about it. “I’ll tell the Bearkill guys in the morning, but I think I know what this was. The house was vacant for quite a while.”

Thus the tall grass, untrimmed shrubberies, and the unaired smell inside. “Probably some kid didn’t get the memo about a new tenant, you know? Wanted a party spot.”

Pursed lips, raised eyebrow: that notion wasn’t flying with Dylan. After what Missy had said about the effectiveness of the Bearkill gossip wire, it didn’t with Lizzie, either; not really.

But summoning Mutt and Jeff over here seemed pointless at this juncture, and anyway she was very tired; Dylan tipped his head skeptically at her, but in reply she folded her arms.

“Look, I’ll keep the Glock out on my bedside table, okay? Besides, who ever heard of a housebreaker who comes back?”

Because even if it wasn’t local teenagers just wanting a place where they could drink a few beers and maybe smoke a few joints, it was something along those lines. Had to be; after all, what else was there in Bearkill?

“Okay.” He gave in finally as she walked him to the door. Outside, the night was silent, no cars moving and not even a plane overhead.

People lived like this, in this stillness so huge that it felt like an actual presence. “See you tomorrow, maybe,” he said.

“You’ll be around?” Keeping her voice even.

“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “For a little while, anyway.”

Then he turned and strode off, crossing the lawn to his car.

Closing the front door, she leaned her forehead against it in relief. Only after she turned to confront the empty house and her aloneness in it did she realize:
Dylan, you slick bastard
.

He’d never answered her question about what he was doing in Bearkill in the first place.

He waited until everyone else in the house was asleep. His mom, tired from her job as a cashier at the Food King, had gone upstairs to escape the TV, still blaring in the living room, with his dad conked out on the sofa in front of it.

What the old man might be tired from, nobody knew. The only other person at home, a fourteen-year-old cousin who was staying here this year due to various family troubles, snored in a chair.

He tiptoed down the hall toward the back door, then froze at his father’s voice: “Spud.”

“Yeah?” He hated the nickname, acquired when he was a baby because his head, supposedly, had looked like a potato, all lumpy and misshapen. It still did, a little, and the name had stuck.

“Where you goin’ so late?” Spud didn’t reply. Maybe the old man would just fall back asleep. But no such luck:

“Don’t you be gettin’ another damned tattoo, hear?”

Yeah, right. Bearkill, Maine, middle of the night, there’d be a place to get inked. Sure there would.

Although Spud would have done it, if there had been. Body art and piercings had become his way of escaping everything drab and ugly about his life, which in daylight was just about all of it. At night, though …

“Spud!” his father yelled once more, sounding as if his mood was getting uglier. “Dammit, you get in here!”

But instead of obeying, Spud snatched his jacket and slipped out, grabbed his bike from where it leaned on the trash cans by the falling-down garage, and coasted down the dirt driveway.

Moments later he was flying along the asphalt between farm fields, bare earth on one side with the oats and the broccoli all harvested for the year, the other side thick with withered potato vines, the crop ready to be dug. The night was clear and cold with an icy sliver of moon hanging in it like a curved claw; Spud paused on a hilltop to survey the barns, pastures, and clumps of dark forest that went on all the way to the western horizon.

Beyond that lay the Great North Woods, partly tamed in a few places but mostly wild, empty of people, and full of ways to die: you
could get lost and starve, sprain your ankle and freeze, or fall off a cliff and get stuck in a ravine, howling yourself hoarse.

Or if you went out there to kill yourself on purpose, you could do that, too. With, say, your dad’s old deer rifle which he hadn’t used for years, but which still stood in a glass-fronted gun case in the dining room, along with a box of bullets.

Not tonight, though. Tonight, age eighteen, Spud still had what his high school guidance counselor had called options. Like, he could join the army and go fight whatever war was supposed to be so important this week. Get his ass shot off while firing his weapon at other young guys he had nothing against.

Yeah, there’s a plan
, he thought sourly as he pushed off on the bike again. Like in a movie he’d seen in which poor kids were set to fighting each other in an arena; the winner got food, warm clothes, a chance at a life.

It was the losers, though, that he’d found fascinating. The looks on their faces as they realized:
Not me. I’m not one of the lucky ones. I’m not going to make it
.

He knew that expression. It was the same one he saw in the smeared bathroom mirror each morning when he brushed his teeth.
You gotta pull yourself up by your own bootstraps
, people said.

But he wasn’t that stupid. He’d actually been on the college prep track, taking physics and chemistry and doing quite well, thank you, until the old man got nailed with that last DUI and had his license to drive the big rigs yanked.

The swishing noise heard throughout the household then had been the sound of everyone’s hopes going down the drain, not just Spud’s own. So: no college. Pretty soon he was going to have to find some kind of work just to help support the household.

But pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps was still against the laws of physics. A guy like Spud, without money or connections, needed a way to get one or preferably both of those things if he was going to escape the living-dead existence that was Bearkill. And now he might’ve found that way: the lady cop.

His first attempt to profit from her arrival, confronting her in the
Food King and practically demanding that she pay him for as-yet-unspecified information, had of course not worked; too ballsy, he told himself as he pedaled. Too fast, she didn’t even know him, and the way he looked—the body art, the nose stud and lip ring, plus his dreads and angry facial blemishes … No wonder she’d figured him for a creep. So he’d rethought his strategy.

Watch her
, the guy in the van had said, coming upon Spud on the street just outside her new office this afternoon.
Watch her. And tell me what she gets up to. I’ll pay
.

Spud had seen the guy around town a few times but not often; they weren’t friends. So his first notion had been to tell the new woman cop what he’d been asked to do, maybe try for a reward out of it. But after the way she’d gotten right up in his face, he’d decided it might be simpler—and safer; the guy had a mean vibe about him—just to do what he’d been asked.
Watch her
—

Hey, what could it hurt? Spud pedaled hard past the grassy front yard of a farmhouse with its wide freshly graveled driveway that led to the barn and silos. A startled spaniel flew furiously down to the dark road and ran behind him barking, then fell back.

He passed Town Hall, a low yellow-brick complex that looked like a reform school; all it needed was loops of razor wire. Next came the town maintenance yard where the snowplows, road graders, and school buses were parked.

That was another option his counselor had suggested. A town job didn’t pay much, but it came with benefits like health insurance, sick days, pension, and so on. She’d been gazing at him with a look of such concern when she said it that he hadn’t told her what those things—along with the whole idea of plowing snow and mowing grass for a living—made him think of:

An early grave. Not for the guys who liked it, maybe, but for him it would be better just to get his dad’s rifle.

Plus one bullet. He coasted into town, past the red-brick library (
OPEN M-W-F 10–4 & SA 12–3
), the shuttered Tastee-Freez (
SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER!
) and the ballfield where he’d played Little League until at age eleven, he was already just too big (
PLEASE NO DOGS ALLOWED!
).

He didn’t care, though. By then his interests had already shifted from base hits to bass guitars, veering briefly into freebase cocaine when it was plentiful for a while even way out here. But after coke came meth, so poisonous that you had to have something seriously wrong with you to partake of it.

Which many of his friends, as it turned out, did, and so of course a couple of times he’d tried it, too. He’d gone back to weed pretty quick, though; his acne was bad enough without using some chemical junk to make it worse, and there were a few meth chicks around town by then, too, whose ravaged faces were like living warning signs.