Cold (21 page)

“Are you asking if I was raped, Noel?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
 
“No.
 
I mean it doesn’t matter—to
me.”

He had looked back at the road.
 
“What are those?”

“These?
 
They’re for headaches.”

“Aspirin?”

“No, they’re a prescription.
 
I get a lot of headaches and aspirin doesn’t help.”

“What, migraines?”

“Yeah, I feel one coming on.”
 
She unscrewed the plastic cap on the vial and tapped out a white pill.

“I knew a guy inside who got migraines all the time,” Norman said.
 
“He got these auras too.
 
Something happened to his vision, so there was sort of a hole in the middle.
 
He could see all around it, but not right in the center.
 
They’d come and go.
 
He had white pills for them—sort of like that one—but it wasn’t any prescription from the doctor.”

Noel looked at the pill in her palm a moment, working up saliva in her mouth.
 
“I get auras too sometimes.
 
Between my headaches, my auras and being deaf in one ear, sometimes I get the impression that my head just doesn’t work too good.
 
Like it malfunctions, and I feel very—very disoriented.”
 
She took the pill and swallowed hard.

Turning her head, she saw that Norman was watching her carefully.
 
“I want you to understand something,” he said, looking back at the road.
 
The snow pack was slippery and he wasn’t going more than thirty miles an hour.
 
“Things inside, they’re different than outside.
 
I’m still the same me.
 
Understand?
 
I’m still the same me.”

For a moment she thought she was going to cry.
 
She made herself busy by closing up her bag and putting it back on the floor.
 
“Did they hurt you?” she said quietly.

“No.
 
No, I didn’t get raped.
 
And no, because after what they did to Bing I finally walked away.”

“Bing?
 
He was a friend?
 
What did they do?”

“Doesn’t matter now.
 
It’s done.
 
And I walked away.”

“Okay.”
 
Noel stared out at the snow and sky.
 
The Trooper kept moving forward.
 
The furrow seemed deeper now, the blue sky even bigger.
 
But it wasn’t as threatening.
 
It was easier to be lost in all this glaring light, easier than at night when she’d sit alone in the front office of the motel staring at her reflection in the plate glass window.
 
Sometimes she’d put her coat on and go outside.
 
She’d walk away from the building, until she was out of sight of the motel’s amber lights.
 
On clear nights there were so many stars.
 
She’d stare across the field toward the hills that rose above that side of town.
 
On moonless nights the hills were perfectly black and sometimes she was able to stare right into that blackness until she couldn’t stand the cold any longer.
 
It frightened her, this total darkness with the stars above, and because it frightened her she felt she needed to look at it as long as possible.
 
She thought of it as preparation.

“Your father,” Norman said, “he’ll assume we’ve gone to Canada.”

Noel wasn’t sure how much time had passed.
 
“I doubt he’d think that we’d come way out here, to Big Pine Lodge.”
 
She felt her lower lip with her fingers.
 
“The thing with Daddy is he never wonders how someone
else
thinks.
 
He never understood why my mother came back after three days.”

“Why did she?”

“For me,” Noel said.
 
“I understood that right away.
 
In fact, though I was frightened, I knew she was going to come back.
 
I don’t know how, but I just knew it.
 
And when she came back she had this look on her face, like she’d seen this in
cre
dible horror.
 
In a way, she never lost that look until she died.”

“Didn’t she leave with another man?”

“He was a friend of my parents’.
 
Afterwards, he moved out of the state.”
 
She smiled briefly.
 
“I think Daddy persuaded him to
think
that it would be a good idea to just disappear.”

Norman glanced up in the mirror as Lorraine stirred from her nap.
 
Noel turned around and saw that Lorraine was staring back at Norman earnestly; she didn’t seem frightened, only confused.
 
Noel knew she wanted to know why this man looked like Warren.

“Honey,” Noel said, and waited until Lorraine looked at her.
 
“Honey, this is your father.
 
He’s been away a long time, but now he’s come back to us.”
 
Suddenly Noel’s eyes misted over and Lorraine’s three-year-old eyes watched her with absolute fascination.
 
“It’s all right, Mommy’s not
sad.
  
Daddy’s come
back
to us.
 
Somehow I
always
knew he would—isn’t that
strange?”

Norman slowly reached into the back seat until his fingertips touched Lorraine’s cheek.
 
She stared at him and didn’t move away.

ten

Del found the house a couple of miles outside of North Eicher.
 
The sign at the end of the driveway read:

REJEAN PRONOVOST

Real Estate

Home Appraisal & Inspection

Land Survey

Taxidermy

Pronovost met Del in the neatly plowed driveway outside his workshop.
 
As they shook hands, he stared right at Del.
 
A lot of people didn’t look at a police officer in the face, not right off anyway.
 
He was six or seven years older than Del, very fit, compactly built—the thick shoulders and short legs of a hockey player.
 
Since childhood Del had seen a lot of guys like this skating on ponds and rinks.
 
His curly black hair went gray at the sideburns and he had a trimmed white moustache beneath a crooked nose that might have been broken more than once.
 
His handshake was a polite contest of strength.
 
“Folks just call me Pronovost.”

“Del Maki.”

“Anybody ever call you Chico?”

“No.
 
Delbert was bad enough.”

“Uh-huh.
 
Wayne Chico Maki was a good steady player for the Blackhawks.
 
Never understood how a Finn got the name Chico.”

“Me neither.”

 
“I appreciate you driving out here, Officer.”
 
He was wearing a good overcoat with a fur-lined hood.
 
“You know, this whole business will probably seem pretty silly when it turns out that Noel’s been buying groceries all morning.”

“I suppose.
 
When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Last night.
 
She dropped her daughter Lorraine off before going to work at the motel.
 
Picked her up this morning.”

“You didn’t see her then?”
 

“No, I was still, you know, asleep.”
 
Pronovost tilted his head to one side and Del understood he was referring to his drinking the night before.
 
“Nothing unusual about that.”
 
He led the way into the garage.
 
“I just got a call from Woo-San, who works days over the motel.
 
I own the place and he’s bought a piece of it.
 
How ‘bout we go over there a minute?
 
Small town—it’s only a few blocks.”

 
“In Yellow Dog Township we don’t really have what you’d call blocks.”

Pronovost laughed as he got into his Ford pickup.
 
It was so quiet Del could hardly hear the engine.
 
“Fuckin’ cold,” Pronovost said once they were on the road.
 
“Supposed to really get down there today, then more snow tomorrow.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“You know smart guys our age go live some place like Florida or Arizona, come back up here for trout season, and head south again after hunting season’s over.
 
Call ‘em snow birds.”

“I’ve never missed a northern winter,” Del said.

“Me neither.”
 
Pronovost laughed.
 
“Guess we’re just not smart guys, eh?”

When they reached the motel office an Asian man sat behind the counter.
 
It was impossible to tell his age—somewhere between forty-five and sixty.
 

Pronovost said, “Woo-San, tell Officer Maki what you just told me on the phone.”

Woo-San hesitated a moment.
 
He did not look toward Del, but spoke to Pronovost, “The girl who make up the rooms says that lights are left on in number twelve, so she went in and found that the bed has been slept in and someone take shower.”
 
His thin lower lip quivered suddenly and he seemed personally insulted as he tapped his finger on a book that lay open on the counter.
 
“There
no
name for number twelve.”
 

“What’re you saying, Woo-San?” Pronovost asked.

“No mystery to me.”

The two men stared across the counter at each other.
 
Del felt almost embarrassed, as though he’d walked in on the middle of a family squabble.

“Your daughter work here last night,” Woo-San said.
 
“Room get used and there is
no
entry,
no record
that someone stay there.
 
We don’t get paid, and we have to do laundry, pay electricity and hot water.”
 
Again Woo-San tapped the book.
 
He had inordinately long fingernails, which made his wrinkled hand seem oddly feminine.
 
“Man,” he said, his voice shaking now.
 
“She let a man stay there.
 
Why she do that?
 
You tell me—
you
tell
me.
 
Your daughter.
 
She go see a man in room twelve.
 
Your
daughter.”

Pronovost had gone tight in the face and shoulders.
 
Del had seen it countless times, often during arguments in bars or after fender benders.
 
Pronovost looked like he was about to reach across the counter and take hold of Woo-San.
 
On a hockey team he would be the player known as the enforcer.

“How do you know?” Del asked quickly.
 
Woo-San regarded him as though he hadn’t noticed him before.
 
“How do you know it was a man in the room last night?”

Woo-San’s mouth opened and he was about to say something, then he just shook his head as though it wasn’t worth explaining.

“The toilet seats,” Pronovost said.
 
He laughed tensely.
 
“It’s this theory Woo-San worked up.
 
If the toilet seat’s left up, a man stayed in the room.
 
He’s done research, I swear.
 
He’s checked the names in the register against the raised toilet seats.
 
What do you call that—inductive or deductive reasoning?
 
I can never keep ‘em straight.”

Woo-San now looked at Del as though he were appealing to someone reasonable and just, someone who was his intellectual equal and who could see the significance and logic of his assertion.
 
“There no question,
no question!”

Pronovost took a step closer to the counter and took his hands out of his coat pockets.

“Woo-San,” Del said, “would you mind if I had a look at room twelve?”

Woo-San studied his nails a moment, as though he were wondering how they’d gotten so long.
 
“Doesn’t matter if you FBI.”
 
He now seemed weary of the whole thing.
 
“The room’s made up already.
 
There no
evidence.”

“Jesus.”
 
Pronovost turned and started toward the office door.
 
“Come on,” he said, “we’re wasting our time with this.”

Woo-San folded his hands on the counter, as though he were praying.
 
“If you’re sheriff?”

“Constable.”

“Why not in uniform?”

“Ah.”
 
Del inhaled, then exhaled slowly.
 
He took his wallet from one of the pockets inside his overcoat, flipped it open and held his badge up.
 
Behind him Pronovost went outside, leaving behind a cold draft of air, followed by the clap of the storm door.