Winter at the Door (9 page)

“Help you?” he asked crisply as he crossed the porch.

Well, he was a businessman, and this was after all his place of business, Lizzie thought. She smiled and put out a hand. In a businesslike manner. “Hi. I’m Deputy Snow.”

Close up, Roger Brantwell was a tall, well-built man in his late fifties who looked like he’d probably been a quarterback in high school. Now his curly blond hair was receding and his strong, square jaw had a pouch of softness under it, to match the one over his belt.

He took the hand Lizzie offered perfunctorily, then dropped it. “Is there some trouble?” His quick glance at his daughter suggested that if there was, she’d better not be the cause of it.

“Not at all,” Lizzie replied quickly. “I just stopped by to say hello. And to say thanks,” she added. “Your daughter helped me out.”

“I gave her a ride home last night, Dad,” said Missy, and he nodded, accepting this.

“I see. Well. Nice to meet you,” he said, and Lizzie could read his thoughts about Missy on his face: too-short hair, too much makeup …

She got the strong sense that to Brantwell, any makeup at all might be too much. “I know what you’re thinking,” said Missy suddenly when he’d gone inside. “That I should go somewhere, do something. Away from here.”

Lizzie turned back to the girl. “I never said …”

“You don’t have to.” Missy gazed flatly at her. “I know he seems … a little unfriendly. But he’s got a lot on his plate. All this—”

She waved a hand, indicating the house, yard, and buildings, and
the men working among them. “It can be a lot of pressure. He didn’t get anything handed to him, and it’s hard, making a go of this place.”

She took a breath. “And a woman like you who went to college and even graduate school, probably, I know what your type tends to think about someone like me, too.”

My type?
Lizzie thought a little defensively.

Missy went on: “But I live here, Lizzie, okay? This is my home, right here in Bearkill, and I don’t want to go anywhere,” she declared.

From the sound of it, she’d made this speech before.
Fine, but is that because you do love it?
Lizzie wondered.

She looked once more through the geranium-filled window at the kitchen with its arched doorway into the pretty sunroom.

Or is it because it’s so safe, familiar, and comfortable, and you don’t know what you’d do otherwise?

“Of course,” said Lizzie, putting her hands up placatingly. “I never meant to imply any other thing.”

Thinking,
She’s quick on the uptake. She’d have been good to have in the office
. “Anyway, see you in town,” she finished. “And by the way, that kid of yours is really cute.”

“Yeah,” Missy relented with a faint smile. “He is, isn’t he? And … look, thanks again for your help last night.”

“Don’t mention it.” The flannel-shirted foreman, Tom Brody, crossed the yard and got into the Escalade that Brantwell had just driven up in, pulling it across the wide graveled area toward where Missy’s new Jeep sat gleaming in the yard lights.

Hey, at least the benefits here are good
. As Lizzie started the Blazer, Brantwell came back outside again; then he and his daughter went in together and the door closed behind them.

It was only just past four in the afternoon, but the cold sky was edging toward dark when she reached Bearkill, the sun’s last thin gleams fading behind the treed ridges to the west. Parking the Blazer across from her office, she noted in dismay that her new helper had hung blue plastic tarps at the windows, concealing whatever was going on inside.

Dope smoking, probably, she imagined. Or beer drinking, or both. God, what had she been
thinking
when she—

She shoved open the door. The kid looked up. “Hi.”

“Hi, yourself.” All ready to blast him with verbal fury, she found herself at a loss for words. “What’re you doing?”

The answer, though, was clear. It was just that it was all she could think of to say, confronted by the prospect of a space so utterly changed that it might as well have been transported from some other solar system.

The planet Whitewash, maybe. The walls and the ceiling were now devoid of the many tack holes, bumps, scrapes, and gouges that the previous surfaces had possessed. The ceiling tiles had been painted and new fluorescent fixtures, shedding bright light that somehow managed to be pleasant yet forcefully illuminating at the same time, had replaced the old, dim, flickering ones.

“Well, I—” He got to his feet, a big, plump, dreadlocked teenager with piercings and tattoos everywhere, wearing a pair of black jeans, black high-tops, and a ratty black sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out of it.

He gestured around. “I did what you said. Today I got the place ready. The furniture’s coming tomorrow. Oh, and I’m having the communications stuff done by the sheriff’s people, okay?”

The floor covering, which had been cruddy beige rug, was now gray indoor-outdoor carpeting, not quite professionally installed but still pulled acceptably tight under wooden furring strips; he’d nailed them like floor trim at the carpet’s edges.

“Because I know you said try to use locals,” he added.

She had said that. But she’d had no idea he would get this far, this fast. She went on looking around wonderingly as Rascal paced the room’s perimeters and lay down yawning on the new rug.

“But I think you want stuff nobody can hack, right? I mean, for your phones, computers, all your—”

“Yeah.” She looked at him. “You sprayed it?” That was what the drop cloths were all about, everything covered if it was not supposed to get painted. Then … 
pssssst!
the spray painter came out, and presto, pretty soon it was done.

Again, maybe not quite the way a professional would have approached it. But it was nice, and the smell was already fading.

Seeing her reaction, he looked smug, as if he’d known that she hadn’t expected much from him. “Anyway, about the computers? I arranged for the big items, but you can get the peripherals and accessories here in town, okay?”

At the little office supply store on the corner, he meant, just as she’d planned. Meanwhile he’d picked up the annoying verbal tic of ending all his sentences on an up note, as if they were, like, you know, questions?

“But for, you know, security’s sake?” he went on. “The comms office in Houlton is bringing in your hardware tomorrow. They’ll hook it all up for you, too.”

She kept looking at him. Telling him he could clean up the office, make it habitable, had been more in the way of throwing the kid a bone. She’d still meant to find adult help.

He, however, had taken it extremely seriously and he hadn’t done badly at all, even thinking about the security angle and doing something about it.

“So now I’m going to be your office manager and maintenance guy?” he went on.

She peeked into the washroom: spotless. Paper towels in the dispenser, check; toilet paper, ditto.

A small bottle of mouthwash, a new wrapped toothbrush, and a comb were on the sink; also, the linoleum floor tiles shone.

“I mean, you’ll need someone for that, right?” he added hopefully. “Part-time, at least? In the beginning, anyway?”

He was practically rubbing his hands together in appeal. She looked around once more: the front windows sparkled, dust bunnies had been chased from between the radiator vanes, and was that—

It was. A single carnation stood in a small florist’s vase on her desk. She didn’t like carnations, but …

He waited expectantly. “Yeah,” she said, turning slowly. She’d planned to spend a week or more on this place, hiring out some of the work, doing the rest herself.

She had not, to put it mildly, been looking forward to it. “Yeah, part-time to start is fine.”

There were things at the house that needed doing, too, once the office got squared away. Then something else occurred to her.

“Don’t you go to school?” There’d been kids in the grocery store as well, she realized, during the hours when they should’ve been in classrooms. “Doesn’t anyone around here go to—”

He was already nodding. “Oh. Yeah, you wouldn’t know, would you? I’m eighteen, I graduated already. But it’s potato time?”

Not waiting for a reply, he hoisted a black plastic trash bag crammed full of spray cans, used paintbrushes, crumpled newspapers, and wadded-up plastic drop cloths, and dragged it to the doorway.

“Here in the County, they let kids out of school to work the potato fields,” he went on. “See, a machine comes along and digs potatoes, the kids grab ’em up, throw ’em in baskets? Takes about two weeks to get ’em all, the kids make money and the taters get picked. They’ve been doing it here for, like, a couple centuries?”

He stopped. “But you probably don’t want to hear about that boring stuff.” Then, looking down at Rascal, “Want me to walk him for you?”

“Oh, no thanks,” she began. But it was a thought; also, the animal would need food, and maybe a bed, and … what else did dogs need, anyway?

Spud grinned. It didn’t make him attractive, precisely, but it went a long way toward diluting the effect of the dreadlocks and piercings; not much could be done about the tattoos, she supposed, other than long sleeves. But hey, it wasn’t like she’d be sending him to conferences of law-enforcement professionals.

“That’s Carl Bogart’s dog, isn’t it?” Spud went on. “You’ve got him now? That’s great, it’s a good place for a dog where you live, way out there on the edge of town.”

“Yeah, well, in Bearkill that’s only a ten-minute walk,” she began jokingly, then recalled suddenly the dark shape that had barreled past her the night before, out of her place.

It struck her also that the tattoos covering Spud’s arms and neck
weren’t hearts with the word
Mom
inked in them, drawings of nude women, or other such traditional decorations.

Lightning bolts, blood-dripping daggers, screaming skulls … Spud went for the violent end of the body-art spectrum. Even the jewelry in his piercings looked like weaponry: bent silver nails, spikes twisted into gleaming spirals.

“Really, you’re sure you don’t want me to take him out?” the boy persisted, crouching by the dog.

What she wanted, suddenly, was for Spud to go away and leave her alone to think. “Thanks, but I haven’t gotten any supplies for him yet, and you’d need a leash to—”

But Spud was undeterred. “He won’t run away. Only reason he took off when Bogart died was that Carl couldn’t call him back.”

He hefted the trash bag. “Why’n’t you go on and pick up the stuff you need for him at the Food King. I’ll meet you back here so you can take him home.”

Not waiting for an answer, he went to the door with the dog right alongside him, then turned back a final time. “It’s nice of you to take Rascal,” he said seriously. “Old Carl loved that dog. And I’ll bet he’s really going to like your backyard.”

Right
, she thought as he vanished with the trash bag and the dog.
My backyard, yet another thing you know about … how?

But then the smells of woodsmoke and clothes needing a wash wafted from him again and she realized: if it had been him running past her at her house last night, she’d have known it.

And he knew where she lived because everyone did, of course, and about the yard, too. Probably the whole town knew her blood type and her bank balance, in fact; all grist for the rumor mill that Missy Brantwell had warned her about.

Besides, Spud had grown up here. He knew everything about the place.
So don’t get paranoid, Lizzie
, she instructed herself, and let her new helper take Rascal for his evening walk while she went to the Food King, where it turned out a king’s ransom was about what it cost to get ready for pet ownership.

Counting out the bills at the cash register, she hoped that hiring
Spud wouldn’t turn out to be similarly expensive, or if it was, that money wasn’t the only thing her own snap decision to go along with his wishes on the matter ended up costing her.

She was still thinking this, meanwhile loading bags of dog kibble, biscuits, a leash, and a synthetic chew-bone the size of a brontosaurus femur (its packaging said Bacon! Flavored!) into the car’s back seat when from the shadows at the rear of the store’s parking lot came a yell of distress.

And then a whole lot more of them.

“Help! Help! Help!” Just the one word, wailed over and over again in a voice that was high and ragged, left no doubt in her mind that this was not a joke.

Vaulting a concrete Jersey barrier, she jogged sideways to avoid a stray shopping cart and raced across the asphalt. Under the lights by the store entrance, she swerved around to where the compressors, the trash bins, and the loading dock stood, casting deep shadows that hid …

“Help!” At the far end of the lot where old shopping carts and trash lay scattered …“Help! They’re killing me!”

Finally she spotted him, sprawled on the ground beside what looked like another cart. But instead it was one of those motorized power chairs, the kind they advertised on TV to give frail and elderly people their mobility back.

She thought that in this case the chair might’ve made a little too much mobility possible. As she crouched by the victim, someone drove a car up and shone its headlights on him. “Call 911,” she yelled, then assessed the old man rapidly.

By the book: airway, breathing, circulation, all present and operating, no blood obvious anywhere. Next, check state of consciousness: “Hey, buddy, it’s okay, I’m a cop. What’s your name?”

The old man looked up pleadingly. In the headlights’ glare his face was bone white. He was wearing a cotton T-shirt, loose drawstring trousers, and tube socks.

No shoes; he’d come out here in his nightclothes, by the look of it, maybe from home but more likely from some kind of care facility; those loose trousers looked institutional. And—yep, there was a plastic ID bracelet around his bony wrist.

“Help,” he said again, but confusedly this time, whispering it while glancing around in puzzlement. “How … how’d I get here? Which son of a bitch got me in all this … Help!”

He struggled to sit up. “Oh, I’ll be in trouble now. They’ll fire me for this, I’ve got to—”