Winter at the Door (12 page)

“I think I found something. About Nicki,” Dylan said.

“What? Where?” She grabbed the elusive folded sheet of paper from the drawer and slammed it.

“Allagash. I’m on my way there. A guy, a hunter out in the woods, he got lost and while he was out there he saw—”

“Come on.” She rushed back out again, this time with her map of Bearkill and the surrounding area in hand, to her car.

Well, not
car
, exactly;
behemoth
might’ve been a better word for it. The department vehicle she’d been issued was a white Chevy Blazer just like Chevrier’s, big and ugly as hell but with the full Interceptor package.

“If you’re a bad guy and it’s chasing you, you’d better have a rocket ship,” said Chevrier when he’d driven her to Houlton to pick up the vehicle.

And this had turned out to be true. Bad guys, however, were not the problem this morning; bad farm animals were. She shot out of her parking spot; past the Food King, she put on her flashers and beacon.

No siren, though. No sense scaring people for a pig. At the corner she swung onto Route 223.

“What else?” she demanded, meanwhile scanning both sides of the road for a renegade porker. It was too soon to see it, though, she realized after a moment; from the directions she’d been given and her sense of the map, the farm was still a dozen miles away.

And it’s a pig, not a racehorse …
 Half a mile outside Bearkill, they were in a logged area. A buffer of trees had been left standing on either side of the road, but now in late fall with the leaves gone, you could see through to the clear-cut beyond: chainsawed stumps, stacks of forty-foot tree trunks, chewed-up earth, and a litter of branches churned together by the massive tires of big machines.

“Allagash,” said Dylan again, but he might as well have been speaking Urdu.

“I don’t—” More clear-cut sped by. Then the logged-off tract ended and a series of pastures began: fenced, with surfaces lumpy from years of hooves treading them. A watering trough made from an old bathtub flanked a salt lick whose dusty surface had been whitened by cows’ tongues on one side.

They must be getting close now, but still no pig. Seven days ago,
she wouldn’t have understood what was so urgent about finding what amounted to a few hundred pounds of bacon. But now—

“Allagash,” said Dylan, pushing Rascal’s imposing snoot out of his collar, “is a town. A very,” he added cautioningly, “
small
town. Smaller than Bearkill.”

To be smaller than Bearkill, you’d need a negative number of people, she thought, then realized that wasn’t fair. Everything here looked small by comparison with Boston. “And?”

More fields. No pig. “And it’s also an area. The Allagash wilderness area. No people at all, or hardly any.”

“Really. That’s starting to be my theme song, isn’t it?” But again it wasn’t really; the town of Bearkill, she was beginning to understand, only seemed thinly populated by contrast with the big city she’d left behind. It was, she reminded herself again as the terrain grew hilly once more, all relative.

“Hey, what’s this?” Dylan asked, plucking a small electronic device about the size of a pedometer from the Blazer’s console.

“Personal locator beacon.” Winding around and down, the road bottomed out along a stump-studded swamp, darkly murky with wisps of mist on it where the sun’s low rays slanted through the mossy boughs.

“Chevrier gave it to me. You push the button, it signals a satellite so rescuers can find you. All the deputies have one. Anyway, Dylan, what about—”

“Get stuck in the snow out there,” he said, eyeing the device, “that thing might come in pretty handy.”

“Uh-huh.” Not that she expected deep snow any time soon. “Dylan, do you not
have
any more information for me, or are you just …”

After a chilly start, the last few days had been warmer, like a false spring, and now the warmth brought a sick-sweet reek of rotting vegetation drifting up from the swamp. And—

“Damn,” she said abruptly. A gravel turnout flanked the swamp at the road’s lowest point. A boat-launch spot? Or maybe it was a picnic area?

Lizzie didn’t know, but she did know with sudden urgency that she’d drunk way too much coffee this morning, and hadn’t hit the ladies’
room in her rush to get out of the office. She swerved into the turnout; the pig—and whatever Dylan had to say, which she was convinced now couldn’t be much or he’d have already said it—could wait.

Dylan, she groused mentally as she made her way down to the swamp toward some bushes, knew that even the hint of news about Nicki was a reliable attention-grabber. But if he thought that he could yank her chain just by saying the child’s name …

There
. A low, flat spot, not too weedy and out of sight of the road … Quickly, she completed her task and stood. A highway department trash barrel had been thoughtfully placed not far off.

Beside it, she watched a huge bird, long-beaked and stick-legged, step deliberately along the swamp’s edge. Dimly aware of a low hum coming from somewhere nearby, she caught her breath as the bird’s beak flashed, then came up gripping a shiny minnow.

The hum was getting louder. Puzzled, she glanced around. The mist seemed to be rising, not just up off the water but from the weedy patches and reed thickets around it.

Rising, and surging toward her. The hum rose to a whine as the first sting caught the side of her face, the next inside her collar.
Mosquitoes …

Slapping and flailing wildly, she raced for the Blazer, lunged in and slammed the door, gasping. Some made it in with her and she swatted at them, killing some but missing others, while Rascal’s droopy bloodhound eyes followed her jerky movements worriedly.

Dylan, by contrast, was laughing so hard he could hardly breathe. “If you could’ve seen yourself …”

“Get them
off
me.” Even though she’d gotten most of them, their whining drone still sang in her ears.

“Okay, okay. Here, hold still, there’s one on your—”

“Where?” Panic pierced her, which was ridiculous, they were only mosquitoes, for heaven’s sake. But that huge cloud of them, rising up from the reeds like some alien monster …

A shudder seized her. “Hold still.” Dylan leaned close, his hand cupping the back of her head to steady it. With the other hand, he delicately plucked something from her left eyebrow and drew it away between thumb and forefinger.

Then he squished it. “There,” he said, not releasing her. “I think that’s the last one.”

“Thank you.” The warmth of his hand on her hair sent a pulse through her, sweetness and pain mingled so thoroughly she could hardly tell one from the other.

Their eyes met, and for a moment he seemed about to speak. Or possibly to kiss her, and if that happened—
oh, if that did happen
—what would she do?

But then his face filled with understanding, a kind she’d never had from him back in Boston; back when they really were lovers, when …

He drew his hand back. She wanted to take it in both of her own and never relinquish it. But—

“It’s okay,” he said. “I get it, Lizzie, I really do. If I were you, I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

She sat motionless behind the wheel of the Blazer, still feeling his touch. “Yeah, well.” Her pounding heart slowed.

She started the engine. “Rascal’s got dibs on the back seat, anyway,” she added, trying to make light of what had happened.

Dylan didn’t reply, busying himself wiping the remains of the insect off his hands with a tissue from the box she kept on the console.

Soon they were on the road again, and the moment passed, or nearly so. “What else about Nicki, anyway?” she asked, trying to think of something to say and only coming up with that.

Climbing out of the ravine, the road wound around several sharp switchbacks, then leveled out on a high ridge. Off to the west spread the White Mountains, impressively high and massively solid-appearing even at this distance.

White snow patches surrounded the highest peaks. “Okay, the thing is, a while ago I put a word in a guy’s ear,” Dylan replied.

He’d put his sunglasses on, aviator spectacles that made him resemble a bush pilot. Now he took them off again to polish them with another tissue as if wanting something to do with his hands.

I can tell you what to do with them. Exactly what to
—The thought surfaced, unbidden; she shoved it back down yet again.

Knowing he was thinking it, too. “Guy up in the Allagash, he’s a Maine Guide,” Dylan went on. “Has a business there; he takes people
hunting and fishing in the area—you know, they come up from the city for a wilderness adventure.”

While he spoke, he fiddled with the personal locator device.

Too bad the pig hadn’t been wearing one. “And?” Driving, she kept watching for the animal; they must be getting close now.

“And he called me last night,” said Dylan, “told me a client of his had gotten away from him. City fella, up here to bag a moose, guide took him out before dawn and left him sitting in a blind.”

Here, piggy-piggy
. Sloping away from the road on both sides, the land on this long, high hill was thicket-dense and studded in the bare spots with immense dark gray granite boulders.

“So?” No pig. It occurred to her again that maybe Dylan really didn’t know anything new at all, that this was just a ploy so he could be alone with her.

The idea was thrilling and deeply infuriating at the same time. And confusing … 
Oh, just sleep with him, for Pete’s sake. Who would it hurt?

His wife, after all, was dead. But that way lay disaster, a sure route back to the kind of heartache it had taken her way too long to break out of, last time.

So no more. Here, piggy
—

Dylan went on: “So like I said, the guy got lost. Instead of staying in the blind, which in this case was a tree platform—see, you’re supposed to sit up there out of sight and wait for the animal to come along—”

Which to Lizzie sounded about as entertaining as toenail clipping, only with less useful result. “Make your point, Dylan, will you? Because seriously, I’m getting old, here, waiting for you to—”

A pig crossed the road. Lizzie hit the brakes, swung the Blazer over onto the shoulder, and stopped. The pig, black and white with a round, pink snout, had tiny black hoof-tipped trotters too small for such a large beast.

Dylan stared bemusedly as the pig made its way down into the ditch running along the high side of the road. According to the call she’d gotten about the lost creature, the animal—an exotic breed, though how a pig could be exotic, Lizzie didn’t know—was pretty tame.

Also, though, it was pretty
big
. “Now what?” Dylan asked.

All she was sure of was that she couldn’t let the thing out of her sight. “You call,” she instructed Dylan, “the owner.” She gave him the number. “And I’ll—”

Climbing out of the Blazer, she still wasn’t sure. If the escapee had been a robbery suspect, say, or even a … But then it hit her: a
tame
pig. From a farmyard, where they probably had—

She opened the Blazer’s rear door and waved encouragingly at another animal often found in rural farmyards. Rascal looked up doubtfully, then brightened as he got the idea. By now the pig’s corkscrew tail was disappearing into a thicket.

“Okay, Rascal.” She waved the big, massively snouted hound down out of the Blazer. “That’s right, boy, go get ’im!”

The next ten minutes were an interesting exercise in hound following, rough-terrain walking, shallow-stream fording, and a tricky bit of fallen-tree clambering over, followed by a sudden, briefly terrifying exercise in not-quite-as-tame-as-advertised pig confronting. Then the pig turned back toward the road.

She’d known pigs were smart, but this one was smart looking, too. Catching sight of her, its small, calculating eyes narrowed into the not particularly friendly expression one might expect in an animal prized mostly for the tastiness of its flesh.

Like, not friendly at all. Also instead of sloping gently as it had where she first pulled over, the ground here ended in a sharp drop. Fifty feet, maybe, she estimated when she eased over to the edge of it, and it ended on a thin, razorish-looking jut of granite.

Not
quite
sharp enough to impale you, but—

The pig looked at her, then back over the edge of the cliff. Out in the high distance, a hawk sailed, outspread wings unmoving, rising and falling on the unseen thermals. The land spread below in patchwork, green and brown, thinly dotted with farm buildings.

This
, she thought, standing there covered in mosquito bites she didn’t dare scratch for fear of scaring the pig,
is crazy
.

Snork!
the pig pronounced irritably. By then, Rascal had caught up to the animal and stood implacably before it, big head lowered and massive, black-toenailed paws planted stubbornly.

“Come on, pig,” she said softly. “Come on, I just want to take you home. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Not yet, anyway
, she added silently, because of course that bacon, those chops.

The pig, apparently, thought the same, all four hundred or so pounds of it. God, did pigs really grow so big and—

The pig glanced over the cliff, then turned its unsettlingly intelligent small eyes—
yep, those are piggy little eyes, all right
—on her and the dog once more.

After that—

Snork!
it said very clearly again. Defiantly, looking right at her.

And then it jumped.

For a while it seemed as if pig levitating might have to become part of her skill set. But almost immediately after the animal’s leap, a pickup truck skidded to the side of the nearby road and a lot of teenagers jumped out.

Looking as agile as if they belonged to that circus Trey Washburn had mentioned, they wasted no time in scrambling over the cliff’s edge, down to where the pig quivered on a narrow ledge.

There they snugged a rope harness around the animal’s midsection, tying him in so he looked as if he wore a homemade skydiving harness.

But they couldn’t take the pig down; the descent was too steep. And they couldn’t bring it up; the animal was too heavy and uncooperative. So they were stuck until another truck pulled in, a new red Ram 1500 with a heavy chain winch on the back and Trey Washburn behind the wheel.