Steven James - The Queen

“I know,” he replied. “What are you thinking about the case up there? Double domestic homicide? The husband the shooter?”

“It’s too early to tell,” I said honestly.

After hanging up, I realized that I was becoming more and more concerned about the approaching snowstorm. I tried Tessa’s number again but only reached her voicemail.

Not a fan of texting, I left another vm for her to call me first thing in the morning: “It’s supposed to start snowing in the early afternoon so I need you to leave the winter session early, by 8:30 or so. Either that or I’ll reserve a room for you at a hotel there… Okay, so talk to you in the morning.” Out of habit I found myself calling her by the nickname I’d given her a year ago, a small way of acknowledging her independent spirit and her insatiable interest in Edgar Allan Poe: “I love you, Raven.”

I said nothing about hoping she would sleep well.

It was a topic best left untouched.

Ever since the day last summer when her father had been accidentally killed and I shot a man who was threatening Tessa’s life-was in fact about to shoot her-she understandably hadn’t been able to sleep well, rarely making it through the night.

I’d suggested a counselor, but that didn’t go over so well. She’d scoffed at the relaxation exercises I looked up online and tried yoga once but hated it.

Being a vegan and not wanting to use any drugs that had ever been tested on animals, she’d tried all the natural and homeopathic cures she could find. Then practical, commonsense things: no caffeine or food within four hours of bedtime, calming music, different ambient lighting combinations in her bedroom, candles and incense, getting up and doing something else rather than lying there dwelling on the fact that she couldn’t fall asleep. Nothing had really helped, at least not in the long-term.

Obviously, it’s not healthy for a high school senior to be unable to get more than four or five hours of sleep a night, and her GPA had taken a dive. In just one semester her cumulative 4.0 slipped to 3.65-pretty traumatic for a girl who’d never gotten a B on a report card in her life.

Her resultant testiness had also eroded her budding relationship with a new guy friend. He stuck with her for a while, but as she became more and more moody he finally broke things off just before Thanksgiving, which only made matters worse.

It seemed like the more I tried to find something to help her sleep, or the more I asked her how she’d slept, the more upset she became, so last month I stopped bringing it up. As long as she wouldn’t take medication or see a therapist, I wasn’t sure what else I could do for her.

Now, I set down the phone, but I left the ringer on just in case she called back.

After cranking up my room’s heater, I sent Cybercrime the emails and web history I’d downloaded from Donnie Pickron’s computer, searched through our online files for other instances of three shots through a window at a crime scene to see if that was the signature of any known criminal, but came up blank. Then I took some time to familiarize myself with the online maps of the miles and miles of snowmobile trails that intersect Tomahawk Lake and weave through the surrounding forests.

I found out that nearly all of the national forest service staff are seasonal and the ranger’s office closes down most of the roads once winter hits. It didn’t take me long to realize that, based on the location of the sawmill in relation to the Pickron residence and the long, looping county roads that wound around the marsh, it would have saved Donnie time and money if he rode his snowmobile to work through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest rather than driving his car.

I committed the trails to memory.

Finally, emotionally drained from the events of the day, especially from seeing the four-year-old girl Lizzie’s body, I put my laptop away and headed to bed, unsure, with all of this on my mind, if I would be able to sleep any better than my stepdaughter.

Friday, January 9

6:05 a.m.

I awoke later than I’d expected, a black slit of night still hanging between the curtains.

The motel didn’t have an exercise room, but I threw myself into an old-school workout of push-ups and crunches and ended with pull-ups on the door frame to the bathroom-a way to keep my grip in shape for the climbing trip in Patagonia I was planning this summer. Ever since my days as a wilderness guide, I’ve slipped out to go rock climbing whenever I got the chance, and this summer was going to be my first trip to Patagonia in more than a decade. I needed to crank up my finger strength or I’d never be able to pull down the 5.12 routes I was eyeing.

After a shower, I saw that it was 7:08 a.m., less than an hour before my trip to Tomahawk Lake with Jake.

I flipped on the TV to catch the weather, and a life insurance commercial popped on.

Life insurance: an oxymoron. After all, life is the one thing that cannot be insured, a fact that’s all too obvious to someone in my business.

“Planning for the unthinkable, made simple and secure,” the announcer said.

I barely held back a head shake. A culture that calls the inevitable “unthinkable” is simply a culture in denial. However, when he assured me that I would “never have to face the future alone,” his words brought to mind something a little less disheartening: a conversation a few months ago with Tessa, the talk that had led to my decision to take things with Lien-hua to the next level.

My wife Christie died of breast cancer almost two years ago. At the time I didn’t know who Tessa’s biological father was, and neither did she, so, as her guardian, I began caring for her as if she were my own daughter. From the start, things had been rocky, but eventually we’d grown as close as a real father and his daughter might be, and I wouldn’t trade the time with her-even the rough spots-for anything.

Tessa liked Lien-hua a lot and wanted me to get together with her, but Lien-hua had been drifting from me, and when Tessa asked me how things were going I’d been honest and told her, “She seems a little aloof lately.”

“What are you doing about it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m wondering if she’s not that interested in me after all.”

“Patrick, women want to be pursued. They want to play hard to get, but the last thing they want is to succeed in getting away.”

I stared at her. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s ’cause you’re not a girl.”

“Why don’t they just-”

“How old are you again?” An arched eyebrow. I was having a conversation with Mr. Spock. “Thirty-seven? And you still have no clue about women?”

“Do you know a guy of any age who does?”

She considered that. “Good point. But when a girl distances herself from a guy it’s a test to see how serious the guy is.”

“So, let me get this straight. Women pretend they don’t want guys to pursue them so that they will, and they act like they’re not interested in them when they are.”

“Exactly.”

“And the more ambivalent they act about making things work, the more they want to get got?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“You’re a teenage girl. How do you know all this?”

“I’m a teenage girl.”

So, I’d pursued Lien-hua as Tessa suggested and found that her counterintuitive observations about women were correct. Consequently, things with Lien-hua had progressed, and this coming week I was planning to propose.

If I could only work up enough nerve to actually pop the question.

I surfed through the channels until I came to some cable news weather. The cohosts chatted for a minute about the balmy weather in San Diego while the scrolling news at the bottom of the screen announced that Secretary of State Nielson had arrived in Tehran for “groundbreaking bilateral talks about sanctions and Iran’s controversial nuclear research program.”