Cold Quiet Country (19 page)

I’d hiked back and forth so many times in the past twenty-four hours, each time in the snow, that my boots were soaked. At one point I built the fire to a roar and removed my boots and set them close. I wrung my socks and the water fell like cow whiz on a flat rock. Then I suspended them on sprigs propped between rocks. The smell of baking wet leather and drying wool was potent, but every few minutes an easy breeze came through the hollow and replaced the stink with pine and snow.

I watched the moon from when it first appeared between tree limbs, sometimes no more than a flash of silver behind drooping branches dressed in icing, until it rose high into the sky. Sometimes I nodded off, but the dying fire always brought me back because my bare feet got cold until I threw on more wood. Eventually I slipped on my dry socks and toasty, but damp boots, and stretched the aches from my back and behind.

Somewhere nearby, I sensed eyes watching me. Had Burt stood on his porch and seen firelight through a dozen acres of trees? Couldn’t be.

I shoveled snow onto the fire and stopped after a couple scoops, thinking it might be fortuitous to have cherry-red coals waiting for me if I met failure at the house. I put the remaining wood on the fire, trusting the three or four inches of snow covering the forest floor, and headed for the farm.

A shadow flitted across the corner of my eye; I stopped. My hands were empty. I cast about the ground for a rock or limb, but all was covered in snow. Finally, a coyote darted from trunk to trunk. He slunk with his head deviously low, pacing me, offering friendship on a lonely night. If I fell and broke my leg, he’d eat me.

The terrain was up and down, slippery. I stumbled on an iced-over log and fell. Landed with my elbow jammed in my ribs. I was two-thirds to the field, and rested a moment before standing. My lonely friend sat concerned on his haunches thirty feet away, tongue lolling, watching.

My pant legs rustled, ice crinkled underfoot, and my breath burst out in clouds of frost. The coyote pressed closer, as if unable to determine if I was old and infirm or young and stupid. The smell of my flesh in the dry frozen air must have been maddening. He grinned and revealed that of his twenty pounds, five were teeth.

I was alone, but my companion reminded me I was never so alone that there weren’t others in the same plight, and though we were not cooperative, neither did we have to fear each other so long as we were strong. I talked to myself, entertaining him. He leaped along, content waiting for me to trip again and hoping when I did I would break something.

The forest gave way to heaping mounds of snow-covered brush where Burt had cut trees and let them dry. Piles of dead limbs, where rabbits huddled in warmth and safety. I flopped over logs, skirted stumps. Tripped on an unseen hazard. Regaining my feet, I saw my comrade had stalked within spitting distance. His head drooped, but his agile front paws lifted out of the snow one at a time, and his shoulders swayed each time.

I stepped into the field and he gave me a sorrowful glance, and bounded off.

From the edge of the field I saw the house was dark. I linked up with the trail Burt had forged by dragging me, and found his boot prints on top of the path my body had made. A man like Burt Haudesert would have found joy in so simple an act as that. It would have reinforced his sense of dominion.

I followed his footsteps, scrunching my toes every so often to confirm they were still dry.

I stood on the outskirts of the house a minute, like the knight Gawain, looking on the Green Knight’s castle, knowing death waited within.

Between the barn and house, there were so many footprints in the snow I didn’t worry about creating a new pair as they wouldn’t have given me away. I wondered, though, if Burt or Cal—Cal had always been the loonier one—might be waiting for me in the dark with a rifle. The hair on my neck rose. Cal could have been in the barn; each loft had a side that faced the house with plenty of knotholes larger than a rifle barrel.

God gave me the imagination to gin up all kinds of abstract terrors, but he also provided the wits to hold them at bay. Realizing that I most feared Gwen would say, “Let’s run tonight,” I checked my other fears.

What if she said, “I’m ready, let’s go.”

What would I do but take her, and suffer a never-ending fear that she was hungry or cold and that I wasn’t doing my duty by her, that I wasn’t man enough to support her, that for all my hubris I was yet a mere orphan who’d read a lot of books and worked a lot of farms, but had yet to prove himself a worthwhile man?

At the same time I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her to suffer. This is what the mythologies called the Scylla and Charybdis.

I crept to her window. Stood to the side and listened. Sure she was alone, I tapped the glass with gloved fingers, issuing a tiny drumbeat until her bedsprings creaked. In a moment the curtain moved and her ghostlike face appeared in the dark. She wore no expression and the thought flashed through me that I shouldn’t have come. That she had chosen her plight and would choose to remain in it.

While I dithered she opened the window and leaned from it into the cold and pulled me to her and swept her skinny bare arms around me. She shivered and squeezed, and I said, “I’m here.”

“He said you’d never be back.”

“Shhhh…”

“He made it sound as if he’d left you for dead.”

“I got away. Everything I own is waiting in the woods. I’ll take you away tonight, if you want.”

She clung to me. “Tonight?”

“It has to be you that decides. If I steal you away, it’s a tough life you’re stealing to.”

She put her fingers to my lips and kissed my cheek and said, “Give me a couple minutes to get some clothes.”

Gwen disappeared into the room and I realized nothing could be more obvious than my footprints to anyone who came around the side of the house. I’d been in such a morass of worry the night before when I gave her the ring that I hadn’t even considered the liability. Now I was doing it again.

The next time Burt came after me it could very well be with a rifle and a deer-hunter’s aim. From the look in his eye that morning, he wouldn’t know how to prevent himself from murdering me. I taunted him pretty good about Cal nailing his missus.

Gwen was at the window in a coat and I helped her outside. She pulled the window most of the way closed and said, “Let’s go to the barn and talk.”

Gwen Haudesert is dead, murdered by Gale G’Wain. And I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.

Looking at Gwen, I see her grandmother’s face. The faintest blush in the cheeks, the way her closed eyes sit under arched brows—as if in her final moment she was happy. Red hair so rich you can almost taste it. Skin so smooth you’d like to touch it.

There’s blood on her belly and breast. Her blouse is open at the middle buttons, enough to expose a stab wound. Cooper must have checked, looking for a way to save her. But he had to have known he was too late.

Where I expected to find a bare-stockinged foot, I find she—or Gale—fashioned a moccasin from corduroy cloth. Not enough to protect a foot from the elements. I squat, and though Cooper has made tracks around her and has already done all of this, I check for a pulse at her neck. Her skin is hard, like a peach too close to the refrigerator cold air vent. She’s been like this for hours. She’s been like this since before I set out after her. Probably from before the time I got the call.

Who else is already dead?

I lay over her the coat and the sweater I carried and spend a moment staring into the trees.

Cooper stands a few feet away. Middle-aged dog breeder. Owns a five-and-dime in town.

“You find her like this, Coop?”

“I checked the wound.”

“Was there a knife in her?”

“No. I undid two buttons and that was it.”

I dig the photo Fay Haudesert gave me from my pocket and hand it to Coop. Watch his face.

“You ever hear of a boy named Gale G’Wain?”

“Gale?”

“That’s right.”

“Accourse. He works at Haynes’s.” He looks at the photo, passes it back. “That’s him.”

“What can you tell me?” I say.

“Did he do this?”

“Gwen’s mother thinks he did.”

“Nah. Boy don’t have the gumption to slaughter a cow, let alone a girl as pretty as her.”

“He’s the one we’re after. Did you stop by the barn or come right out?”

“I looked for you at the barn. Coroner and Deputy Sager was there.”

“Any women?”

“Margot was visiting with Missus Haudesert, but I didn’t talk with her. I was looking for you, and when Sager said you was out in this, I figured I’d best get a start.”

“Yeah,” I say. “So you saw Burt?”

Coop nods.

I look at the sky. Above the boulder the trees are hardwoods and look like skeletons. The clouds are mostly purple, what I can see of them. We stand in the lee of a giant rock that angles out like the prow of a ship. Where the rock meets ground, brown leaves poke up. A few feet away is a fire circle. I touch the cold ashes. Smells fresh. I check Gwen’s foot, undo the knot at her toes. The snow and ice are worked all through the cloth. She didn’t have the chance to warm her feet at the fire—so the fire was maybe from the night before.

This was all the lodge Gale had for her.

I swear I’m going to kill him.

The snow is thin where Gwen lies. Blood shows pink, since a few flakes have blown in. To the side of her body, ten feet away, is a mess of footprints and pink spatter. A circle is trampled, and the path that leads to Gwen’s body is like you’d see if a log was dragged.

A single pair of wide-spaced footprints leads from the fire.

Gale ran.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Coop says, “and you’re stark raving mad if you try.”

“He’s out there.”

Coop is quiet. I tamp tobacco into my pipe.

“I saw you lying in the field,” Coop says. “I thought you was dead and started toward you, but when you got up, I got back on the girl’s trail. What was you doing in the snow, Sheriff?”

“He’s out there ready to cut someone else up. There’s caves in these woods. Rock overhangs. He could have a shelter made already. He could be sitting next to a fire right now, snappin’ off while he thinks about this poor girl. I’ll be goddamned if I let him.”

“Maybe. But this storm? We ain’t seen the start of it. There’s a front coming through from Canada liable to bury us in ten feet, for chrissakes. If it does like back’n fifty-eight you can kiss your senile ass goodbye. We won’t find you ’til March or April, and only what the wolves leave.”

“Look at her!”

A black squirrel chatters at my outburst. Coop’s eyes lock on mine.

“Look at her! You see what that snake did?”

Coop points beyond a lightning-scarred beech at the sky. “You see clouds that look like midnight, dumping snow by the truckload? You don’t got to worry about Gale G’Wain. If he’s got shelter out here, he’s smarter than us. If he don’t, we’ll find him after the thaw. The girl’s gone, Sheriff.”

I step a few yards. Kick snow. Coop’s bluetick stands a dozen feet away, tied to an oak sapling. He’s dug a nest down to the leaves, but stands on it, maybe too cold to curl up.

“I’m sure Burt has a tractor that can get across the field,” I say.

“Use one of his snowmobiles. We lash her to a toboggan and drag her out. We just got to get her to the field.”

“Let’s go,” I say, and stoop to her feet.

Coop unties his dog from the tree, unclips the leash and stuffs it into his pocket. The dog watches with mournful eyes. Coop stands beside me.

“Let’s put her on top of the coat,” he says.

In the distance, the sound of a half-dozen snowmobiles rises to a bare whisper and with a quick turn of the breeze vanishes.

* * *

After Mister Sharps told me about the circumstances surrounding my birth, and before I departed the Youth Home to fend for myself, I visited the Monroe County courthouse. Mister Sharps had named me Gale G’Wain after a medieval story about a particularly honorable knight—and had always claimed he didn’t know the name my mother had given me. I would not find my birth record at the courthouse.

I climbed the courthouse steps and found a solid block wall at the top. I thought the doors might have been recessed between mighty columns. I had seen the courthouse a dozen times, always from the same angle, but never had occasion to enter the sacred building. It stood taller than four flagpoles and wide as thirty of the businesses located on the opposite side of the street. Each of its four sides was a faćade. Up close, the pale weathered walls resembled an old textbook illustration of the House of Usher: rust-colored stains near the roof and black decay between the giant blocks.

But the courthouse only appeared macabre up close. I wondered why those steps led to a wall with no entry, almost as if a hubristic architect had invited me to judge the fitness of the structure, and the institution it housed, and at the exact moment I accepted his invitation he proved a trickster.

I climbed down the steps and with appropriate distance, the temple appeared ghostly and spiritual, a truly hallowed house of justice.

If Bittersmith had arrested my mother, the record ought to have been archived there. Not that an arrest for being a drifter legitimized rape. At that time I wasn’t looking for a confrontation with Bittersmith. I was investigating facts. The historical record was a starting place.

I entered from the north side, through giant doors constructed to make men feel insignificant. Lawyers with briefcases and chiseled frowns hurried here and there. I looked up the stairway, which started out at least twelve feet wide, and I got a foggy notion that the people who worship the law will use any available edifice, or snag any circumstance, to make their god appear competent. The granite architecture, the big square looming shape, signified the court’s conclusions were permanent and the institution was impregnable. I was happy to accept that. Should I uncover misdeeds as foul as Mister Sharps related had occurred to my mother, this courthouse would sustain justice.

I climbed the echoing stairwell to the third floor. Each step led to warmer and warmer air until I was sweating and nervous entering the records keeper’s office. The woman behind the high counter remained seated. She looked like a barrel of mud wearing reading glasses.