The Winter Girl (14 page)

“It's awful,” he said. “Who is she?”

“Tell Elise about the winter girl,” I said, turning off the television.

“I have no idea what he's talking about,” he said calmly to Elise. “Do you?”

“He says you've been giving her cash, Dad. He says she's been squatting next door. What else did you tell him?”

“That was all,” he said. “Just an unfortunate I felt sorry for. What else is there?”

“One of you is lying,” she said, snorting out a quick laugh. It was as simple as that. She handed me the camera and marched out of the room, grabbing her coat on the way.

“Or all three of us,” Victor said to his daughter as she left the room, smiling as widely as he could, despite his depleted energy.

Ignoring him, I turned to follow my wife, running after her until I caught up to her in the driveway, her shoulders hunched forward as she walked onto the road.

“You can't go that way,” I said breathlessly. “We've got to walk down to the beach. Walk up those steps to Swain's house.”

“You have a system now?” she said, turning toward me again. “You wait till I leave, then scurry off?”

She didn't wait for the answer, and she didn't follow my suggested route either. She cut right through the property that sat on the hill, then downward toward Swain's house. The dry grass we were walking on belonged to an old motel that they hadn't been able to sell for years. But the owner kept it perfectly maintained, even in winter, the sloping lawn cleared of all dead leaves.

Following Elise through some gray branches, one of which snapped wildly and stung my cheek, we emerged on the circular driveway in front of Swain's house, strewn with clusters of dead pine needles.

The door wasn't locked, but at least Elise had the courtesy to knock.

I caught up to her in the living room, where we stood side by side, staring at the decrepit furniture around us.

“Carmelita,” I shouted. “I'm here with my wife. She wants to meet you. She wants to hear your story.”

Elise glared at me incredulously as I called out the name.

“What's wrong?” I said.

“It just gives me the creeps that you're on a first-name basis already.”

“I don't even know her last name. She used to be Swain's housekeeper,” I began to explain. “When she came back to see if there was any work, he wasn't here.”

But Elise wasn't paying any attention to me, because Carmelita was walking down the curved staircase, wearing the same faded sweatshirt and jeans. I thought for a moment that she might scream at us, or stab at us with some small knife hidden in her pocket, or wolf-whistle for an army of friends who would finally take revenge for what Victor had done. But all she did was sit down on the bottom step, crossing her arms so that her slender fingers anxiously touched each shoulder. We could both see that she was shaking.

“I shiver sometimes,” she said, embarrassed. “Not because of the cold. Only when I'm nervous.”

Elise took a step toward Carmelita and reached downward, waiting for the woman to shake her hand. It might have taken only a few seconds for Carmelita to acknowledge the gesture, but it felt like much longer. Eventually, she reached up, limply touching Elise's fingers and tugging her hand downward. A strange, mocking handshake.

“Have we met somewhere?” Carmelita said. “Your face looks so familiar.”

“No,” Elise said. “It doesn't.”

Then Carmelita looked at me and had the nerve to raise her thin eyebrows and bite her lip, as if my wife were lying through her teeth.

“My husband showed me some disturbing photographs of some scars on your body,” Elise said. “I want to help you.”

“Will you call the police?” Carmelita asked, looking at my wife without emotion, waiting for her reaction.

I reached for Elise's hand and squeezed her fingers, surprised at how clammy her skin felt.

“We can do whatever you want. This is serious,” Elise said.

“It's very serious,” Carmelita said. “But now this wonderful man has sworn to protect me. Do you know how envious I am? Does he make the same promises to you?”

She reached for my free hand and swung it back and forth playfully. I could feel Elise's fingers slipping away from my other hand. She turned around and took a few steps toward the center of the living room, waiting for us to join her. I couldn't remember the last time that Elise's face had such a pained look. I couldn't remember the last time a woman had disrespected her with such subtle accuracy.

“I think we should all sit down,” Elise said. “I want to hear your story.”

“Whatever you want.” Carmelita sighed, swinging my hand one more time through the air and letting it drop away. “But I'm tired of telling stories.”

I sat in the ivory-colored chair, wishing I could take another slug of Tanqueray while the two women talked softly on the couch. Elise was holding both of Carmelita's hands and giving her a tremendously earnest look that Carmelita still didn't seem to take seriously. That only made Elise grip the younger woman's fingers tighter as Carmelita calmly explained how her father would sink his teeth into her chest.

I could see that the back of Elise's neck was flushing, and soon the redness had crept into her whole face and her skin glistened.

“But I shouldn't be the only one getting undressed,” Carmelita said, reaching for the hem of Elise's T-shirt and starting to pull it up. “Do you have any marks on your body?”

“You're in a state of shock,” Elise said, pulling away from her. “You're traumatized and you're going to need help.”

I watched my wife turn toward me, give me a funny look, and then she ran toward the sliding glass door and pulled it open. Out on the ruined patio stones, she doubled over and dry-heaved. I went outside and touched her back and told her I loved her, aware that Carmelita was watching us from the living room.

“I don't want to hear the rest,” she said hoarsely, gagging again. “She's telling the truth.”

I rubbed her back with one hand as she tried to stand up straight again. She turned and stared at Carmelita, still watching us anxiously from the living room. Not knowing what we were saying, or whether she had something new to fear, she had pulled off her sweatshirt so that we could see her scars.

When I looked back at my wife, her eyes were red and shimmering.

“We kill him,” she said softly. “It's the only way we can be happy, Scott. He's going to keep on feeding off our misery as long as he's alive.”

“Let's talk about that later,” I said, secretly pleased that her rising hatred of her father had forced her to even consider this. But something more immediate was bothering me. “She thinks she knows you. Can you please tell me what's going on?”

Elise turned away from me for a moment and faced the bay. She shielded her eyes for an instant as if she were looking for something threatening on the horizon, or down on the dock below. But there wasn't a single boat in the water, as far as I could see. And no one was watching us from the dock.

“Last summer,” she said. “I saw the two of them standing on the beach.”

“Where was I?”

“You were back in Brooklyn. You had to shoot some brides in the park.”

That was possible. There had been a weekend that Elise had visited her father, but I couldn't even remember which month. It hadn't seemed important to me at the time, and the truth was that we had both been relieved to have the short break from each other. But I did remember that when she returned, she had looked even more stressed out than usual after being around her father.

“I arrived early,” she said. “And he wasn't in the house. And then I did what we always do. Go for a long walk. And they were standing on the beach by Swain's house. But we never even shook hands. I just watched her turn and walk the other way.”

“And what did he say? Didn't you ask him what he was doing with her?”

“No,” she said. “I didn't say a word. I thought he was just flirting with some stranger. I didn't even see her face.”

She shielded her eyes again, narrowing them as she scanned the horizon and then lowered her head and stared down at the pier in a peculiar way.

“What are you looking at, Elise?”

“I feel like someone is going to try and hurt us,” she said softly, “but I don't know who.”

I followed my wife into the gully as she walked away, but she was distracted enough that she tripped over some vines and plunged to the ground.

“Shit,” she said, angrily grabbing at my arm and hauling herself up again. She took one look at my face, saw that it was clouded with questions, and kept on walking.

“I believe you, all right?” I said, stepping over a dead pine limb.

“No, you don't, but that's your problem now,” she shouted back, her voice echoing in the cluster of curled and twisted pines. It was the most stunted and knock-kneed forest I'd ever seen. A minor hurricane would have ripped all of those fragrant pines out of the shallow graves their roots sat in.

I
didn't know how to tell my wife that murdering her father wasn't a good idea, but I couldn't help but feel this twisted sense of relief that she at least saw a future for us. All I knew was that she'd hugged Carmelita and whispered confidential heartfelt things in her ear, and now we were tearing back through the scrub pine and brambles between the two houses.

“Stop,” I said, gripping her arm. “Just stop and talk to me.”

She pulled her arm away from me, but at least she turned around. She looked so distraught, it was as if she were the one who'd had her breasts bitten by Victor, not Carmelita. Her face was still red and her black bangs clung to her forehead in patches. Through the spindly canopy of pine branches above us, I could see that the sky had turned a dull white again. It looked like it was going to snow.

“She thinks she deserves it,” Elise said. “I thought I deserved it. He's got a way of making you feel you're the one that's fucked up inside.”

One of her legs gave way, and she grunted softly as I tucked my arm under hers, supporting her. I watched her brown eyes narrow to slits, the ashy breath puffing from her mouth.

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “Just got a little light-headed.”

Not far away, I could hear the sound of something that sounded like a Weedwacker. It grew louder until I could see that it was a Cessna, flying toward the inlet, its yellow wings buffeted by the wind. For a moment, I saw us from above, as the pilot would, and wondered what he'd make of us. Why the hell were we stumbling between two houses in the middle of winter? My wife was looking at me imploringly, but my head was still tilted back, watching the small plane until the thin, buzzing sound ceased.

“Why don't we just leave?” I said.

“What if he gets better? Are you comfortable with the idea he'll be over there torturing her while we try to pick up the pieces in Park Slope?”

“The police,” I said softly.

“Our fingerprints are all over the house. And who knows what the girl would say. Do you want to be writing each other sad letters from prison in a year?”

“Elise, you can't even kill a cockroach. You wouldn't even let me buy a glue trap for those mice.”

“This is different,” she said. “It's his time anyway. Remember? They were saying he would go any day. It was his time, and he weaseled out of it.”

That was true, but I still felt the facts were being twisted. The Cessna, which had vanished just a moment before, was circling back. It didn't mean anything, I told myself. Maybe just some pilot on a check flight. But for half a second or so, I wondered how much money Victor had hidden away, and if he had already hired a small team of private detectives to watch every move we made, even from the air. And then there was her brother, our supposed savior, giving criminals the wrong address, but why the house next door?

“How would we accomplish this?” I said. “Ever heard of an autopsy?”

“You think that some coroner is going to get involved? On a weekend in mid-January? For some geezer who's already been given a death sentence by his doctor?”

“I guess not,” I said, trailing my thumb up a brown vine studded with thorns. “I have no idea.”

“You've got to trust me on this one,” Elise said, squeezing my hands. She opened her mouth, her lips perfectly ajar, waiting for a kiss. When I was too slow to offer her one, she leaned in and mashed her lips against mine instead.