William Giraldi - Hold the Dark

“Slone’s father has been dead awhile,” Marium said. “I’m not sure how. I don’t know anything about his mother, never met her. I believe I’ve met Medora’s mother in town, years ago. Very blond hair and white-white skin. Strange-looking woman, her mother. Her father disappeared on a fishing trip. Someone told me that. Went to sea and never came back. But I don’t know that for sure.”

“You’ve got to find out more about them.”

“It’s damn near impossible to know anything about these people, Mr. Core. That’s the way they want it. Why they live here. Why they stay. Everything you hear, you hear second- or third-hand and you never know how much of it is true. These people don’t come into town all that often. And when they do, they keep to themselves.”

“Still, someone should talk to the parents.”

“We tried. The Feds tried. I just tried again half an hour ago. I have a man out there trying again. No one here will tell you a damn thing. These homes you see”—he pointed with his cigarette—“they aren’t listed in any phone book. These people don’t have a paper trail like you and me.”

“There have to be records somewhere,” Core said.

“You still haven’t figured out where you are, have you?”

It occurred to Core then that his inability to comprehend this place and its people—their refusal to be known—was part of the reason he’d remained. He flicked his filter from the window, lit another, then aimed two dashboard vents at his body. He shook against a chill and reclined with his cup.

“So I’m on my own here, Mr. Core. I just went through their cabin again, looking for whatever I missed the first two times.”

“You’ve got to check the hills,” Core said.

“We’ve had planes looking from here to the border and they haven’t seen a goddamn thing. I took up my own plane yesterday before dark and there’s nothing to see except white. East, west, north, south—nothing but white.”

“You fly?”

“You better fly or know someone who does if you live out here or you won’t be able to get anywhere when you need to. We don’t have roads like you have roads.”

“They didn’t go west,” Core said.

“And you know that how?”

“West is the city and then the sea, right?”

“Eventually. So?”

“So watch wolves long enough and you’ll see what their territory means to them. The Slones have been in these hills since they were old enough to walk. They won’t flee somewhere they don’t know.”

“Keep going.”

“I’ve seen some of what’s out there past those hills,” Core said. “I know you have too. I could see that tundra. She could hide forever in her own backyard and none of you would ever find her.”

“Slone would find her. Unless he’s thinking that she’d never run to the most obvious place there is. But that’s what I need to know, Mr. Core, if I’m wasting my damn time here, if these people are long gone by now, deep into Canada or getting a suntan on a beach somewhere.”

“No, they’re still here,” Core said.

A topo map of the region lay on the seat between them. Core unfolded it and tried to study its multiple lines and shades, but the vastness it showed would not be breached.

“If the people of this village came across Medora, hiding out there, like you say, they wouldn’t turn her in,” Marium said. “Even as what she’s become, she’s still one of their own. All the blood here is bonded.”

“What has she become?” Core said.

“I should be asking you that.”

Core looked away again and reached for the chocolate in his coat.

“What has that woman become, Mr. Core?”

We are the most unnatural of all , he thought.

“A child is the mother’s,” he said. “Not the father’s and not anybody else’s. Always the mother’s in a way we’ll never understand. It’s the same wherever you look out there, in nature. She was trying to fix something. Something was broken and she thought she was fixing it. Or saving him from something. Trying to, anyway. I don’t know.”

“Who destroys something to fix it? Tell me who does that please.”

“It happens in medicine,” Core said. “Chemotherapy does just that.”

“Are we talking about medicine or people here?”

“What Medora did is the same as chemotherapy. Kill the boy in order to save him.”

“Save him from what?”

“I don’t know that,” Core told him. “Don’t you think I’d say it if I knew? I’m trying to know.” He lit another cigarette, studied Marium’s lighter, a Zippo made of mock snakeskin. “Saving him from Slone, maybe. From becoming what his father is. I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll agree with you on one thing, Mr. Core. What happened here is a cancer of some kind. And believe me, when this is all done, I’m going on vacation, taking my wife to the Caribbean or someplace, nothing but green water and hot sand.”

“The Caribbean?”

“Hell yes the Caribbean. But right now we’re in this snow, Mr. Core. So I need you to replay your conversation with Medora Slone. Start from the start and tell me everything she said to you.”

A young girl trudged before them in snow past her knees with a .22 rifle strapped slant across her caribou coat, face and hair lost in a hood and ruff, an unleashed husky before her exploding a path in great clouds of powder. Core knew she was a girl by her gait. How could it feel to be from this place, to have your every molecule formed by its rhythms? Medora Slone had told him that Keelut wasn’t of the earth, and he’d puzzled over those words since then.

But no place is of the earth—every place is of itself, knows only itself. The Caribbean? A child there is as peculiar, as particular as this child before him trudging through snow. Medora Slone, he recalled, had told him that she looked at magazine pictures of green water and island sand and wondered about those places, about their reality—their reality that seemed to her like mystery. She told him this right there on the road in front of him, between those rows of cabins, when she showed him where the wolves had invaded this village. She told him that the only warmth and water she had now was the hot spring hidden in the crags past the valley. Her special place, she said. And again he thought of her in the tub that night as she scoured her skin with a brush, as she tried to get clean and could not. He felt his own clean-shaven body against his clothing.

“She said something to me,” Core told Marium. “The night I got here. She mentioned a hot spring to me. And I think I saw what she was talking about, that morning when I looked for the wolves. I saw a spring out there.”

“Why a hot spring? I’m not following.”

“If she’s out there,” Core said, “she’d need water. She’d need to get warm. Maybe she couldn’t build a fire, couldn’t risk being seen from the air, I don’t know.”

“Okay. Lots of hidden springs out there, Mr. Core. Where is this one you saw?”

“About a three-hour walk northeast from here.”

“What else?”

“She called it her special place,” Core said. “That’s all. I don’t know what else.”

“Her special place. A hot spring.” He flattened the topo map on the seat between them. “Show me,” he said. “We’re here,” and he uncapped a red pen with his teeth, marked a crooked X on Keelut.

“It would be here then,” Core said, pointing. “Although I can’t make sense of this map. How old is this thing?”

“That’s okay,” Marium said, refolding the map. “You don’t have to make sense of it. You can show me yourself at sunup.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re gonna show me where this spring is, Mr. Core. We’ll fly over at sunup. We can’t take off now. It’ll be dark in two hours, and we’re still an hour drive from town.”