Winter at the Door Read online

  If she wasn’t a sad little pile of bones in an unmarked grave somewhere, Nicki was Lizzie’s only living kin, and after a long time of believing the child was dead there’d been other hints recently, too, that instead she was somewhere in northern Maine.

  But Lizzie wasn’t sure of that, either, and anyway, northern Maine was a big place. There was, she realized for the thousandth time, so much she didn’t know.

  I should have done more, started sooner.

  I shouldn’t have just let it go.

  But she had; for one thing, she’d needed to earn a living, and there was no undoing any of it now. Tattoo Kid pedaled by the front windows a second time, his eyes meeting hers briefly and then looking quickly away again as Chevrier went on:

  “I’ll get a requisition going for your computer stuff, have a carpet crew come up from Bangor …”

  She turned to him. “No.”

  His brow furrowed. “So … what, you mean you’ve decided that you don’t want the spot?”

  For a moment she was tempted; she’d have loved telling him to take his job and stick it. After all, who offered somebody one position, then waited until they showed up before informing them that it had turned into something entirely different? But …

  “Oh, I’m taking it.” She crossed to the desk, grabbed the phone book, and threw it into a corner. Who used a phone book anymore, either? “But only on two conditions. First …”

  She aimed a finger at the front window. “You want me to build friendly relationships with the people here in Bearkill? I mean, that’s what a liaison officer does, right?”

  She had the funniest feeling that Chevrier might not know quite what one of those did himself. But never mind:

  “There’s only one way I can quick-start relationships with these folks—”

  At the far end of the downtown block, the office supply store was somehow still alive, while at the other end a run-down gas station survived, as did the tiny convenience store attached.

  “—and that’s for me to buy stuff from them.”

  Which was also true in Boston, and anywhere else there were cops: coffee and a lottery ticket at the bodega, an apple at the fruit stand, sandwiches at the luncheonette—you bought a little of this or that anywhere you thought you might get the chance to talk to people, hear things.

  “Supplies, cleaning, painting, new tires for the squad car whether it needs ’em or not,” she went on. “All of it has to get done locally. And as for computer equipment?”

  She turned to face him. “Look, Sheriff, I’ve got my own reasons for wanting the job you’re trying to foist on me, okay? So I’m not walking away even though you know damned well you absolutely deserve it.”

  He shrugged again, acknowledging this. “But,” she went on, “as far as computers and printer paper and everything else this place needs?”

  She waved a hand around the bleak little storefront. “Either that office supply joint down the street is about to hit a big payday, and my car gets serviced here in town, or you can forget you met me.”

  She expected pushback about the car, at least; regulations, routine. But instead he kept nodding at her demands, which among other things gave her an even stronger sense of how very much he wanted her here.

  Curiouser and curiouser. “Okay,” he said. “That makes sense. Do it however you want. You’ll need purchase orders, but …”

  “Not so fast. You haven’t heard the other condition.”

  Chevrier looked wary—“What’s that?”—as the tattooed kid on the bike rolled by yet a third time.

  Briskly she zipped her jacket, settled her black leather satchel on her shoulder, and pulled the creaky front door open, waving him out ahead of her.

  “Come on,” she told him.

  The kid with the piercings, body art, and blond dreadlocks was now halfway down the street, looking back at them. She yanked the balky door shut, then jiggled the key in the lock until the tumblers fell sluggishly.

  “I’m hungry. We’ll talk over lunch. You’re buying.”

  There he is! Sighing in relief, Margaret Brantwell hurried down the canned goods aisle of the Food King in Bearkill. She’d looked away for only a moment, she was certain, and when she looked back her year-old grandson’s stroller wasn’t where she’d left it, parked by the frozen foods case.

  Oh, if Missy knew that I’d lost track of him even for an instant, she’d—

  Well, she wouldn’t let Margaret take care of him anymore if that happened. But Margaret adored her daughter’s baby boy, she’d be desolate if she couldn’t—

  “Mrs. Brantwell?” The store manager stood by the stroller. A clerk was there, too, looking worried. Both frowned accusingly at Margaret.

  “Mrs. Brantwell, we were just about to call the police. The baby’s been here all alone for ten minutes, we didn’t know—”

  “Ten minutes?” Margaret glanced around. Everyone was looking at her. And the baby was crying; she crouched hurriedly by him.

  “Oh, no, I’ve been right here, I was—”

  But then she stopped as it hit her with a horrible internal lurch that she didn’t remember where she’d been, didn’t recall the moment when she’d walked away from the baby in his stroller.

  That she didn’t know how long she’d been gone. Defensively she grabbed up the baby, cradling him against her chest.

  “I was just down the aisle, I can’t imagine how you missed seeing me. You must not have been trying very hard.”

  There, turn it around on them, see how they liked it. Poor little Jeffrey wailed fiercely, his face squinched and reddened.

  “There, there,” she soothed him. “Did all these strangers scare you, baby? There, it’s okay, Grandma’s got you now.”

  A red-aproned clerk hurried up pushing a grocery cart. “Oh, Mrs. Brantwell, there you are, you left your—”

  Margaret drew back. “That’s not mine!” She hugged Jeffrey closer. His cries grew louder. She felt like crying now, too, surrounded by these unpleasant strangers all trying to tell her things that weren’t true.

  The items in the cart—milk, lettuce, coffee beans—might be hers. But where did that huge chocolate bar come from, and the cheap wine? And the jug of motor oil wasn’t even from this store.

  They were trying to trick her, that’s what it was. But it wouldn’t work, because she was too smart for them. Can’t pull one over on Margaret, her father used to say, and it was still …

  Grabbing the stroller’s handles, she whirled and stalked away from them, all the foolish people with the unfriendly looks on their faces. Outside the store, she carried Jeffrey to the car and put him in his car seat, buckling him in carefully the way she had promised Missy she would always do.

  Then she settled behind the wheel and sat there for a moment to gather her thoughts, get over the awful fright she’d had.

  There, that’s better, she thought as her heart slowed. Even Jeffrey calmed down, sucking energetically on his pacifier, his sweet little face relaxing, so cute in his blue knitted hat.

  She’d made him that hat. If she could find where she’d put the yarn, she might make mittens. Meanwhile …

  She looked around at the busy parking lot outside the Food King, people bustling back and forth with their carts in the cold November sunshine. It was a lovely day.

  Just lovely, and the drive down here to the store had been so easy and uneventful, she didn’t even remember it.

  She turned to the baby. “Jeffrey, we’re here! We’re at the store, and now we’re going to go in. Are you ready?”

  He grinned, waving his pacifier in his chubby fist. She got out and found his stroller waiting by the passenger-side door as if someone had put it there for her. She looked around mystified, then decided that it was too nice a day to worry about it.

  Blue sky, crisp air … now, what exactly had she come to the store for, again? She’d made a list but she must have left it at home. She was always doing that. Silly. Getting so forgetful.

  “N
ever mind,” she told Jeffrey as she pushed him across the parking lot in the stroller. Such a beautiful baby, she simply adored him, and felt so grateful that Missy allowed her to take care of him the way she did. My grandson …

  At the entrance she slowed uncertainly; the store looked so unfamiliar all of a sudden. But how could it? She’d been here—surely she had—a thousand times before. Only—

  “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 melt
ed, 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.”