Winter at the Door (3 page)

“Never mind,” she repeated, as much for herself this time as for the baby. “We’ll figure it all out when we get inside.”

It was the biggest slab of meatloaf Lizzie had ever seen, flanked by a mound of gravy-drenched mashed potatoes the size of a softball and a fluted paper cup of celery-seed-flecked coleslaw, the shredded orange carrot and purple cabbage drenched in enough dressing to float a barge.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded at Chevrier’s smile when the waitress delivered their food. He’d ordered a chef’s salad, which was also enormous but not quite as artery-clogging as her own meal.

“You ever heard the old saying ‘Never eat anything bigger than your head’?” he replied with a chuckle.

Lizzie dug in. She hadn’t eaten since the night before, and the meatloaf was as delicious as it looked. “You ever heard the old saying ‘Don’t criticize what other people are eating’?”

He nodded, chewing. “Good one.”

The Coca-Cola was so cold that it made her head hurt, and the gravy on the potatoes hadn’t come out of a jar or a can. They ate in silence for a few minutes.

“So,” he said around a mouthful of dinner roll.

Driving out of Bearkill, he’d sped them down a rural highway between fenced fields green with what he said was winter wheat. Huge outbuildings dug into the sides of hills were, he informed her, for potato storage; yards full of machinery, from familiar-looking tractors to massive contraptions resembling some science-fiction variety of praying
mantis, flanked pretty, old-fashioned farmhouses whose long, low ells linked them to massive, gambrel-roofed barns.

“That way, Farmer John doesn’t have to go outside so much in winter when he needs to do chores,” Chevrier had explained about the house-barn connections.

“In the blizzards we get here, you could get lost ten feet off the porch,” he’d added, while she’d stared out the car window at a little girl in denim overalls riding a bike in a farmyard driveway, pigtails flying.

It wasn’t Nicki, of course. For one thing, the pigtails were red. And the child looked a bit too old, maybe ten or eleven.
But what if it was her?
she’d thought.
Would you take her away from …

But it wasn’t, she told herself again now. “Which reminds me,” said Chevrier, “you got any survival gear? Winter stuff or wilderness stuff? Or to have in your vehicle?”

In Boston she’d thought of the wilderness as anything past Route 128; at her headshake he went on:

“Okay, got some items kicking around at home, I’ll bring ’em in for you. Flares, emergency blanket …”

He shrugged. “Can’t be too careful.” Then: “Anyway, I guess you think I’ve got some explaining to do.”

That, of course, had been the other condition: that he level with her.

“Yeah,” she agreed, eating another forkful of coleslaw. The cabbage was peppery-fresh, the sweet dressing full of celery seed so delicious she was tempted to sip the remaining puddles with a spoon. “You could put it that way.”

Coming into the restaurant, he’d been greeted by everyone they passed, and when he stopped at booths and tables to chat, he knew their names and their kids’ and grandkids’ names. In Maine, she recalled, county sheriffs were elected officials.

“The thing is,” he went on, washing the last bit of roll down with a sip of coffee. “The thing is, I’ve got ex-cops dying on me. When they shouldn’t be. And I’ve got questions about it.”

He’d chosen a booth farthest from the rest of the room, a noisy spot near the cash register. She stopped chewing.

“Really.” In her experience, when somebody started talking like this, you just tried not to get in the way.

You just let them know you were listening. Chevrier took a slow, casual look around the room to make sure no one else was, then went on.

“Yeah. Last year or so, four of ’em. All on the up-and-up, says the medical examiner.”

“But you don’t think so.” Obviously, or he wouldn’t be talking to her about it. “So they were all unwitnessed deaths?”

Because otherwise the medical examiner probably wouldn’t have been called at all. Chevrier nodded, speared half a hard-boiled egg, and ate it.

“First one, Dillard Sprague, last December,” he recited. “He was a boozer, lost his job with the Buckthorn PD over it a few months before.”

He washed the egg down with some coffee. “Supposedly he slipped on an icy step coming out of his back door, late. Got knocked out, lay there, and froze to death. His wife, Althea, found him when she got home the next morning from her night shift at the hospital.”

Lizzie winced. “Not a fun discovery, huh? But if that’s all there was, couldn’t it have been accidental, just the way it seemed?”

Chevrier looked sour. “Right. Could’ve. If he was the only one. Next guy, Cliff Arbogast, a few months later. He lives right up next to the Canadian border, got let go off the Caribou force when it turned out he’d been running the family car with his department gas card.”

He ate more salad. “Which,” he went on around it, “wouldn’t have been so bad, but his wife was an Avon lady, drove all over taking orders and making deliveries.”

Lizzie loaded mashed potatoes and gravy onto her fork. From outside, Grammy’s Restaurant had looked like any other roadside joint: red and white sign, aluminum siding, twenty feet of gravel parking lot separating it from the highway it sat beside.

Inside, though, it was clean as a whistle and smelled like a place where somebody really knew how to cook.

Which somebody did. She ate some more meatloaf. Then: “What happened?” she asked. “To the Avon lady’s ex-cop husband?”

Chevrier dragged a chunk of iceberg lettuce through a dollop of Russian dressing and chomped it. “Electrocuted.”

“Excuse me?” She’d heard him, all right. But modern building codes and wiring regulations made such accidents rare. The only fatal power mishap she’d ever seen, in fact, wasn’t a household event at all.

It was after a big storm, back when she was a rookie patrol cop on the Boston PD: downed trees, live wires, standing water. Add a bunch of pain-in-the-butt looky-loos out gawking at the damage and, presto, one dead civilian.

But cops knew better. Some she’d worked with wouldn’t go near a live-wire situation until the power company was on scene.

Chevrier seemed skeptical, too. “Yeah. Spring evening, Cliff’s taking a bath, listening to the Red Sox on the radio,” he said.

“Radio’s on the sink, it’s plugged into the outlet by the mirror, you know? So he reached for his razor and shaving cream and somehow he knocked the radio into the tub with him.”

He grimaced. “Or that’s how the story goes, anyway.”

“Huh.” She ate the last bite of her mashed potatoes, drank some Coke, meanwhile trying to picture all this. Just pulling a radio into the tub with you was a pretty good trick, and …

“Breaker didn’t trip?”

Because even though it was not a good idea, in a properly wired house you ought to be able to float a radio in the bathtub like a rubber duckie, the power cutting off microseconds after the overload hit the circuit breaker.

You wouldn’t like it much, but you wouldn’t necessarily die, either. Chevrier looked across the room to where a big man in a denim barn coat and rubber boots was just getting up from his table.

“Place didn’t have circuit breakers,” Chevrier said while watching the man approach.

“Old house, still had fuses. One of ’em had burned out some time earlier—he’d stuck a bent nail in there.”

He sighed, remembering. “So the wires melted, started a fire, and that’s how it got called in, originally. Dwelling fire.”

“I see. So that makes two of them so far? Sprague, Clifford Arbogast …”

“Yeah, and two more. Michael Fontine, ex–state cop, he lived way over by the border crossing in Van Buren. And …”

But just then the big man in the barn coat arrived at their booth. “Hey, Cody.”

The new arrival had ruddy cheeks, thinning blond hair, and a linebacker’s meaty build. Twenty or thirty pounds more than he needed packed his tall, powerful frame, but on him it didn’t look too bad, maybe because it was distributed evenly instead of all hanging around his waist.

Or maybe it was because he had the brightest, bluest, and possibly the smartest-looking eyes she’d ever seen, pleasantly crinkled at the corners.

“And whom do we have here?” The little ironic stress he put on
whom
was just audible enough to be charming.

She stuck out her hand. “Lizzie Snow.” With a nod across the table, she added, “I’m Sheriff Chevrier’s newest deputy.”

His grip was warm and firm, and he didn’t milk the moment by holding on for too long. “Trey Washburn. Hey, good to meet you, Lizzie.”

“It’s
Dr
. Washburn,” Chevrier put in. “Trey here is our local veterinarian. Puppies and kittens, that sort of thing,” he added jocularly.

Washburn’s smile was infectious and his teeth were white and well-cared-for-looking. “Right,” he said. “Also horses, pigs, cows …”

His hands were very clean, and a faint whiff of Old Spice came off him. “No elephants so far, but if the circus comes to Houlton this year like they’re threatening to do, that’ll be next.”

He looked back at Chevrier. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Sorry to hear about Bogart. You find a home for his hound yet?”

With a quick glance at Lizzie, Chevrier replied, “No. Might just keep him myself if I can talk the wife into it. Dog’s a pain in the rear, but he’s all I’ve got left of old Carl, you know?”

A moment of silence that Lizzie didn’t understand passed between the two men. Then:

“Lizzie,” said Washburn pleasantly, “I’m going out to take a look at a newborn calf later today. If the sheriff here doesn’t already have you too busy setting up a speed trap or something, you’re welcome to ride along.”

At the invitation, her inner eyebrows went up. Could he be hitting
on her? The twinkle in his blue eyes said yes, but he was a friendly guy. So maybe he always twinkled.

Before she could reply, the restaurant’s front door opened and another man came in: tall, dark-haired, sharp-featured. His deep-set eyes scanned the dining room swiftly before finding her.

Then his harsh face softened. Every woman in the place, old or young, watched him cross the room; he was just that way, loose-limbed and easy in his well-cut jacket and dark slacks.

Comfortable in his skin. Quickly, she banished the memories this thought evoked:
Oh, his skin …

Hoping Chevrier and Washburn hadn’t noticed her reaction, she drank some of the watery Coke at the bottom of her glass to wet her mouth. But the new arrival had noticed, of course.

He always did. As he approached the booth, his lips moved subtly in a small, utterly outrageous imitation of a kiss.

Damn, damn,
damn
, she thought.

It was Dylan Hudson.

Her new place was a rented house on a dead-end street on the easternmost edge of Bearkill, a tiny ranch-style structure with a mildewed porch awning, a small plate-glass picture window, and a concrete birdbath lying on its side in the unkempt front yard.

Half an hour after showing up in the diner, Dylan eyed her appreciatively as she strode up the front walk and let herself in with her new key.

“Looking good, Lizzie,” he said.

The landlord, with whom she’d only spoken once on the phone, had left the key for her in the mailbox mounted on a post at the end of the front walk; yet another astonishing difference from the way things were done back in Boston, she thought.

“Oh, shut up,” she snapped crossly at Dylan, pushing the front door open. The air inside smelled stale but otherwise okay.

“What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

She looked around, meanwhile thinking that in a moment she’d be alone in here with him, and that she’d rented the place fully furnished.
And that last time she’d checked, the word
furnished
implied a bed …

Behind her, Dylan waltzed in without being invited. But then she didn’t have to invite him, did she? He knew perfectly well that he’d been invited wherever she was, pretty much from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.

“Answer my question, please,” she told him as he bent to plump one of the cushions on the upholstered sofa: brown plaid tweed with big shiny wooden armrest knobs, truly ghastly looking.

Cheap pottery lamps, wood-laminate end tables … the place had been decorated out of Walmart, it looked like. But it was better than nothing, and anyway, furniture shopping wasn’t on her agenda.

Finding Nicki was. Dylan stood innocently a few feet away. “I mean what, did you think I need babysitting or something?” she went on.

He turned, the look in his dark eyes mischievous. The faint scent of his cologne, some very subtle champagne-y thing that was emphatically not Old Spice, floated in the still air; he’d been wearing it when they first …

No. No, don’t go there
, she instructed herself firmly.

Dylan grinned wickedly. “Babysitting, huh? That could be fun.” But then his expression changed. “Come on, Lizzie. I just wanted to help you get settled in, you know me.”

After she’d said goodbye to the veterinarian Trey Washburn and turned down his invitation, she and Chevrier had driven back to Bearkill, with Dylan following in his own car.

Chevrier and Hudson knew each other pretty well, somewhat to her surprise; Maine State Police detectives like Dylan worked often with the rural sheriffs here, it seemed, unlike back in the big city, where in her experience the relationship was more often competitive, to put it mildly.

“Yeah, I know you,” she answered Dylan now, a pain she’d thought healed suddenly sharp in her chest. “You’re the guy who swore to me that your wife was already getting a divorce.”

She crossed the small knotty-pine-paneled living room and drew the flimsy-feeling dark red curtains back from the picture window.
Weak autumn light filtered in, the sun at a long, low angle already even this early in the afternoon.

Dylan came up behind her, gazing out at a tiny lawn thickly carpeted with fallen leaves. The other houses on the street were just like this one, small ranches set well back in postage-stamp yards.