14 Degrees Below Zero (24 page)

“I’m sorry I killed you,” Lewis said.

Anna shook her head and smiled, radiating peace. “Silly Lewis,” she said. “I could hear you talking to me while I was slipping away. It was a wonderful way to die.”

“You mean—”

“Lewis, you took care of me until the very end. And since then you’ve been wandering around worrying about all the bad feelings you kept inside. Don’t you understand? You made mistakes, but they were mistakes of love. If your greatest sin was loving us too much, then you should be at peace.”

“I was unfaithful,” Lewis blurted out.

“I know,” Anna replied, very serious. “I didn’t like it at the time. It doesn’t matter much now.”

“But Stephen—”

“Stephen is fine.”

“But I pushed him. He fell.”

Anna tapped on her forehead. “Remember,” she said.

“I
do.
That’s what hurts so much.”

And now the wind stopped. The land extended around them to all sides, but there wasn’t much to see. It was as though the snow had risen up and engulfed the totality of the landscape; Lewis could see around them, but in the near distance a fog of blank whiteness obscured the world beyond.

“What just happened?” he asked.

“Think,” Anna ordered him.

He remembered arranging Anna’s body, thinking about calling Jay and realizing that he might be arrested for killing Anna, no matter how good his intentions might have been.

Then he remembered all the dinnertimes, Jay in a high chair, then a sulky teenager, the way Lewis could always make her laugh even in the depths of her adolescent alienation. He thought of the decades of familiarity they’d shared, he and Anna, the deep way they trusted each other even when they didn’t like each other very much. That was why he had killed her—because she would have done the same for him.

“I remember now,” Lewis said.

“You finally found me,” Anna said, and now she looked as she had on her last day, emaciated and ravaged, though with an expression of radiant happiness. She reached out and took his hand.

“Come with me,” she said.

Lewis remembered lying down next to his wife in their bed, feeling the softness of her cheek, pressing close to her as her consciousness dissolved and her breath began to turn ragged.

He blinked and saw that room now, felt its stillness, and touched Anna’s cheek.

“Not there,” she said. “Here. Come on.”

“I can leave there?” Lewis asked.

“You have to,” his wife told him. “It’s time.”

“I can let go?” he said, with relief and amazement.

Lewis got up and took her hand, and together they walked into the calm. He no longer felt cold, and his steps were no longer dogged by exhaustion. They walked together across the field until all was white. There was no longer any need to be Lewis Ingraham.

EPILOGUE. HIS LOVE FOR HER TRANSPARENT AND SHINING.

T
he midday sun by the riverfront coursed through a low cloud cover; the light was less stark than in weeks past, during the final flush of summer when Jay spent entire afternoons by the water with Ramona. It was October, and the world had returned to business after enjoying a sweet dalliance with indolence.

Jay sat on a concrete wall where she could smell the fresh breezes and maintain a good view of the other office workers set loose for lunch. She had bought a ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper from a street vendor, and she opened it up and took a bite. It tasted good, and she washed it down with a slug of bottled water.

Ramona was in her third week of kindergarten at the public school a few blocks from their apartment. Jay had worried about her daughter all through the spring and summer, in the months after Lewis’s death, but Ramona never talked about what happened in rural Minnesota that winter, and didn’t seem particularly bothered by it.

Jay had heard on the radio about Ramona being found in a little town not far from Albert Lea. Jay was only ten miles away at the time. She had arrived at the gas station shortly after the police, who had made a perfunctory search of nearby fields for Lewis but were quickly discouraged by the high winds and blowing snow. It was as though a curtain had descended around the little minimart, and everyone on the scene ended up indoors for hours, drinking coffee and piecing together what had happened.

“He went looking for Grandma,” Ramona told Jay and the police.

It had taken a while, but Jay had forgiven her father. The strain of losing Anna had obviously been too much for him. His actions with Stephen were bizarre and reprehensible, but it was over now and there was no point in harboring resentments or waiting for apologies that would never come.

They found Lewis the next day, frozen stiff on his back in a furrow in a soybean field. He was almost entirely covered in snow, with just his face and extended arm visible.

He was smiling.

Jay polished off her sandwich, surprised as she often was lately by how hungry she was. She had a job answering phones and sorting mail at a downtown non-profit. Sometimes she made field visits, bringing canned food to elderly people and little bundles of clothes to newly arrived immigrant families. It was nice to feel like she was helping people who needed it.

When she had time to herself, she walked the streets of this new city. Every time she turned a corner she saw something new. She thought a lot about Minneapolis, but it was two long days away by car and she didn’t want to blow money on airfare—anyway, who would she visit? People there had receded for her into fond, comforting, but ultimately irrelevant memories.

She would have money soon. Her childhood home had sold, for a relatively huge sum, and once her attorney sorted out the thickets of outstanding debt, Jay was coming into decent cash. She figured she’d buy a condo where she and Ramona could spread out and have enough space to grow together—someplace where she wouldn’t have to worry about a landlord tolerating Carew, who was in heaven now that he had Ramona’s daily companionship.

Ramona seemed to be doing fine in kindergarten. Her teacher said she was quiet, but that she did all her work and seemed very intelligent. The teacher and principal seemed unaware of what had happened last winter. Jay planned to keep it that way.

A young guy in office wear sat down close to Jay and made a show of checking text messages on his cell phone. Jay smiled at him as she wadded up her wax paper and sipped her water.

“Got the time?” the guy asked. He was about Jay’s age, and was affecting a great deal of confidence.

“Don’t you have it on your phone there?” Jay asked.

The guy blinked. He looked down at the device as though it had betrayed him.

“A quarter after twelve,” Jay said, still smiling.

“Hey, I guess that was a pretty transparent excuse for talking to you,” he said.

He was good-looking, with an appealing sheepishness now that his bluster had been blown to shreds.

“Pretty transparent,” Jay repeated.

“Here’s the thing,” he said, still clutching the phone. “I’ve seen you out here a lot. You seem really interesting. Would you like to have dinner sometime?”

Jay folded her arms and looked into the guy’s eyes. “Maybe,” she said. “Ask me another time. Right now I just want to sit and think.”

“That’s totally cool,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name’s Andy.”

“I’m Jay,” she said, shaking his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“See you around?” he asked.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told him.

“Good,” he said, grinning with apparent relief. “Don’t.”

When Andy was gone, Jay realized she wished she had accepted his invitation for a date. Next time she would. Her next-door neighbors at her apartment building were a newly married couple who were always offering to babysit Ramona. They told Jay she needed to get out and meet people. They were probably right.

Stephen was settling into the fall term with a new batch of students to obsess over and fixate upon. He really loved them, a fact he assiduously tried to hide from them lest they realize their power. He was a figure of legend on campus now, having survived a near-fatal attack by the father of his younger lover. He was missing a finger, walked with a cane, and suffered bouts of headaches and memory loss that would probably never entirely clear up. Still, he was about to publish his book and had moved in with a female faculty member whom he rarely talked about during his and Jay’s monthly phone talks. Their conversations were already becoming more repetitive and distant, and soon he would be able to live without the sound of her voice. It was perfectly natural. Jay didn’t mind.

She got up and started walking in the general direction of her work. She knew it was just the power of novelty, but everything around her seemed so fresh and vital—the air, the countless lives all around her, the sparrows flitting in the square dining on crumbs. She felt an absence of worry and emotional oppression that had to be very close to happiness. In a few hours she would see Ramona, and they would have dinner at the little pizza place downstairs from their apartment. Already everyone who worked there knew them, and the staff would make little swans out of paper napkins for Ramona and bring her free cups of lemonade. Ramona would tell Jay about her day at school, and Jay would hang on her every word.

About a block from the building where she worked, Jay stopped short. She saw a man holding a rail by the waterfront with his back turned to her. He was tall, standing very erect, dressed in a herringbone sport jacket and wool slacks. He was smoking a cigarette, his full head of hair blowing gently in the breeze off the river.

Of course it wasn’t Lewis. He was much thinner, his hair was much darker. The lines in his face marked him as at least a decade older.

The man stubbed out his cigarette and took the railing in both hands. He seemed lost in thought as he squared his shoulders and tapped one foot against the pavement.

Jay supposed that’s how it was going to be—seeing shadows of her father, and her mother, everywhere she went for the rest of her life. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

She knew that it would only be in her memories that she would see Lewis again, and see the way his face would brighten in the instant that he recognized her, his own memories ignited and his love for her transparent and shining. It was the same look that Ramona would one day remember about her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Q
UINTON
S
KINNER
is also the author of
Amnesia Nights,
as well as other nonfiction books. He lives with his family in Minneapolis.

Also by Quinton Skinner

Amnesia Nights

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Villard Books Trade Paperback Original

Copyright © 2005 by Quinton Skinner

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

V
ILLARD
and “V” C
IRCLED
Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Skinner, Quinton.

14 degrees below zero: a novel of psychological suspense / Quinton Skinner.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-58836-462-3

1. Victims of violent crimes—Fiction.         2. Parent and adult child—Fiction.         3. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.         4. Coma—Patients—Fiction.         5. College teachers—Fiction.         6. Single mothers—Fiction.         7. Minnesota—Fiction.         8. Widowers—Fiction.         I. Title: Fourteen degrees below zero.         II. Title.

PS3619.K565A613 2005

813¢.6—dc22                  2004061220

www.villard.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-462-3

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