The Snow Falcon (4 page)

Michael heard the underlying tone. “You look like you don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Carl started to shake his head and protest, but changed his mind. “The truth is, Michael, I should counsel you to think about this. I’m speaking as your friend here, not just your lawyer. This is a damn good offer,” he added.

“It’s not the money.”

Carl fiddled with a pen. He got up, looking uncomfortable about the whole situation, the expression on his face changing to one of irritation. If he’d had to guess, Michael would have said that Carl was wishing Michael’s dad had taken his business someplace else before he died—only there wasn’t anywhere else in town. He wondered if maybe Carl had put some kind of deal together that was going to make the lawyer some money, and now that he understood Michael wasn’t selling, he was pissed about it. Another possibility occurred to him, however, one he hadn’t anticipated and hoped wasn’t true.

“The truth is,” Carl went on, choosing his words carefully, trying to sound reasonable, “I just assumed you wouldn’t want to stay around

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here. I mean, it’s lucky you didn’t sell everything when your dad died. There’s enough to start somewhere new.”

Luck, Michael thought, had nothing to do with it. Back then the last thing he’d wanted was anything that had belonged to his dad. He wouldn’t have cared if the house and store had just fallen apart.

Carl was warming to his new approach. “I wish sometimes I’d got out of here when I was younger the way you did. I don’t know why you’d want to think about living in a place like this. What would you do, for a start? You were in advertising, weren’t you? I mean, there’s not much call for that kind of thing around here.”

“I doubt I’d be much in demand these days,” Michael said.

“Well, maybe not in Toronto. There’re other places. New York. California, maybe.”

The mention of the States made Michael think of Louise and Holly again. The last he’d heard, his wife had remarried and was living in Boston.

“I wasn’t planning on going back to the advertising business,” he said.

“What will you do, then?”

“I don’t know. I’ll get a job of some kind, I suppose. It doesn’t matter what.” The fact was, he hadn’t considered the practicalities of his situation too much. What was uppermost in his mind was that he needed to be here, he needed to reconcile his life, and after that, he didn’t know. He didn’t know if there would even be a time after that.

Carl changed tack, adopting a cautionary tone. “You’re turning down a good offer, Michael. I mean, it might not be so easy to get a job around here.” There was the ring of prophecy in the way he spoke.

“Because I’ve been in prison?”

“It’s not that. Jesus, there’s other people around here had their brush with the law. But, well, you know how people are.”

Michael thought about Carl’s secretary and the way she’d acted around him earlier, the way Carl was acting now. He thought he was beginning to see how people were. “I grew up here, Carl,” he said, not entirely sure what point he was trying to make. Maybe it was an appeal of sorts, for some kind of understanding. He started to try and explain a little of how he felt, why he’d needed to come

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back here, but Carl was already talking again, Michael’s words barely registering.

“Little River is a small town, Michael. People aren’t like they are in the city, you have to remember that. Think about how long it is since you lived in a place like this. I mean, I guess you left here in the first place because you hated it, and let’s face it, you haven’t exactly been back here on a regular basis now, have you? Before you got locked up, I mean.”

That was true enough, but Michael’s reasons for not coming back went a lot deeper than that, something he knew now he wasn’t about to explain. “Do people here know about me, Carl?”

Carl seemed surprised by the question. “Do they know about you? Hell, of course they do. It was in the papers.”

It had been a faint hope, Michael saw now, to think the news hadn’t traveled this far. “Maybe they don’t remember, or they don’t care. It was a long time ago.”

“In a place like this, people have long memories.” Carl paused. “Listen, think about this. If you sold up, you could just go somewhere where nobody knows you. The papers here didn’t get their facts exactly straight when they reported your case, Michael. Plus, you know how things get twisted when stories go around. Murder is a touchy subject.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Michael pointed out.

“Doesn’t mean you weren’t intending to,” Carl said flatly.

Michael didn’t say anything for a moment, and suddenly he thought he’d been foolish not to have foreseen this. “This isn’t about the town, is it, Carl? I mean, you’re not just talking about how the people out there feel about me?” He gestured toward the window. His tone had become bitter with disappointment, and maybe Carl misinterpreted that as something else. Just for a second, something flashed across his face, a flicker of apprehension.

“You have to understand this thing from other people’s point of view,” Carl said.

Michael stood up to leave. He guessed he could see what their point of view was. “Thanks for your time, Carl.”

Carl followed him to the door. “I think you’re making a mistake here, Michael,” he called after him.

Michael didn’t reply. As he left, Carl’s secretary looked up from

her screen, then quickly looked away again without meeting his eye. He paused momentarily, saw her shoulders stiffen against him, her back resolutely turned his way, and for a second it seemed like a portent of things to come, the way his life would play out, and he was suddenly deeply saddened by that.

THE HOUSE WAS situated off a country road a couple of miles out of town. An unpaved track wound down between the trees, full of potholes and, at the moment, inches thick with snow. At the bottom there was a clearing surrounded by woods, and a quarter of a mile beyond that flowed the river from which the town took its name.

Michael turned off the engine and let the silence settle over him, punctuated by the pinging of hot metal. Just then the sun burst through cloud and lit the mountains, chasing a shadow down across the snow-covered slopes and the forest all the way to the clearing. The house was awash with light, and for a few moments it was as if somebody had thrown back dusty curtains in an old room. It was a two-story weatherboard place with a porch running along the front and side, and despite the paint flaking like burst blisters, it looked solid enough. He absorbed the feeling of being there again and felt a shadow of the past behind him. The sun vanished as the cloud closed over again, plunging the landscape into gray. The sky seemed low, pressing down, and the house all at once was desolate.

The memories he had of growing up here were forbidding, and he pushed them out of his mind. Inside, the air was dank and still, and the walls felt cold to the touch. He wandered through the rooms, pulling sheets from the furniture. He thought the place might have altered after his mother had died, but it remained largely the way he remembered it.

Upstairs he went into his mother’s room. The bed where she’d died was still there. She’d swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, late on a Wednesday afternoon when she knew his dad would be home, as always, around six. Their lives had revolved around long-held routines; for years, the only night he came home late was Thursday, when he stayed at the store to do the paperwork. It was just a month

after Michael had gone back to college after the first break. He’d found a holiday job, which meant he’d come home only for a weekend. He remembered telling his parents the job meant he might not get home again until the summer, and he could still see the shock of disappointment in his mother’s face. The way something behind her eyes collapsed was testament to the fact that she’d been counting the days until he came home. She’d never wanted him to go to college; he’d always known that, and despite himself, he’d felt guilty at leaving her. He couldn’t imagine how she and his dad would get along together, and he’d guessed that was her reason for not wanting him to leave her alone. The truth was, he’d been glad to go, to be free of the claustrophobic atmosphere of this house, and once he’d left, he’d never wanted to come back again, not even for the holidays. He hadn’t needed the job—his mother had said she would give him the money—but it had been an excuse to stay away.

The night she died, his dad had come home around eleven, inexplicably breaking the routine of a lifetime. When he’d found her, she was unconscious, and by the time the paramedics arrived, she was dead. There were rumors that he’d come home earlier, found her, and then gone right back out again, not returning until he was sure the pills had done their job. When Michael had asked his dad where he’d been, he’d said he’d been at the store, but he couldn’t explain why he’d stayed late. The question had stayed unanswered in Michael’s mind ever since.

He stood in the doorway of the silent room, thinking that everything that had happened here had figured in his own decline. He knew now that his mother had been mentally unstable. Maybe he’d inherited a fragment of that in his makeup. Heller had asked him if he felt guilty about her death, if he thought his leaving had been at the root of it. He’d smiled and shaken his head. That would have been too pat an answer.

After the funeral, he’d never seen his dad again. They had stood side by side at the graveside like the strangers they’d always been, and afterward he could find no words to express how he felt, only a bright anger that he’d kept wrapped tightly inside. He remembered only later that he hadn’t shed a tear for his mother, and years later he was reminded again when he’d found himself sitting at his desk, tears coursing silently down his face after the call that informed him

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of his dad’s death. This was a man from whom he’d always been remote, whom he hadn’t laid eyes on for twelve years, a man whose funeral he would refuse to attend.

The present merged with the past, and he looked around at the quiet shrouded room and saw that this homecoming was the fruit of all his efforts. He’d sworn that he would never screw up the way his parents had, that he would make a happy home for the wife and children he’d imagined would one day be his. Now he had a daughter he didn’t know, whose mother had probably told her that her dad was crazy and had once planned to harm her.

Welcome home, he said to himself with sad irony.

LITTLE RIVER BEND WOKE TO A STEADY SNOWfall that looked set to continue for at least the rest of the morning.

Susan Baker pulled back the curtains of her bedroom window. “Hell,” she muttered under her breath. Down in the clearing at the front of the house, a patch of frozen earth showed brown and bare where Bob was thrashing about like he was having a fit. She rapped hard on the windowpane and the dog stopped what he was doing and looked around, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, appearing deliriously pleased with himself and completely stupid.

“Jamie!” Susan called. “Bob’s out there rolling around in something dead. He’s not coming back in this house until somebody cleans him up, and it isn’t going to be me.”

Before she turned away from the window, she looked across the trees toward the house in the clearing about a quarter of a mile beyond. All she could see was a wisp of smoke rising and the top of the roof. She wondered about the man who’d moved in there just a few days ago, and if the things she’d heard people say about him were true, that he was supposed to have killed somebody once. The details were sketchy, but she’d already heard two versions, and it seemed that with each telling the story was becoming more lurid. One version said that he’d killed his wife, the other that he’d killed several people, including his own daughter. This last she was certain was untrue, and even though she didn’t like the apparent relish with which some people spoke about it, she couldn’t help but be concerned

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when the guy lived right next door to her. She didn’t like her own opinion to be influenced by gossip, but it wasn’t always so easy to go by her principles. The bottom line was that she had to think about Jamie. No smoke without fire: It was something her mother used to say, one of the many annoying cliches she used to comment on life, and even as it popped up in her mind, Susan grimaced.

“God, don’t let me start turning into my mother,” she said, feeling a pang of quick guilt as she turned away and resolving that to make up for it, she’d call her during the weekend.

When Susan went through to her son’s room, Jamie was still in bed and showed no signs of moving. She shook him by the shoulder, and he turned over to look up at her sleepily, his straight brown hair hanging in a fringe almost to his eyes.

“Did you hear what I said?” He shook his head. “Bob’s rolling in something outside. Did you go down and let him out?”

They could hear him barking, and Jamie’s eyes went to the window. He nodded.

“Then you better get up and clean him up before you go to school.” She pulled back the covers from his bed and went out of the room. “Breakfast in ten minutes,” she called over her shoulder.

Downstairs in the kitchen it was warm, the heat having already been on for an hour. Susan turned on the radio while she made coffee and cracked eggs into a pan for Jamie’s breakfast. The weather report said there was a front coming, and she wished she didn’t have to drive to Prince George later. Through the window she could see the track that rose through the trees toward the road into town. At the moment it was only lightly covered with snow, nothing her Ford couldn’t handle with ease even without chains. Sometimes in winter she had to call Hank Douglas from down the road to come up in his tractor and dig out her access road for her, though that was rare.