Brian Freeman - The Cold Nowhere

Djemilah leaned across the table. The beads in her hair clicked together. ‘He didn’t do it at all.’

‘We found jewelry and cash from the burglary at his place. Plus the gun.’

‘You guys planted it.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Come on? Seriously? That’s your story?’

‘Well, somebody did. Fong was framed. He didn’t do it.’

‘Fong did a year for half a dozen identical burglaries in the Cities before he moved to Duluth.’

‘Not with a gun,’ the woman retorted. ‘He never used a gun. He never even owned a gun. I would have known.’

‘Six months before the Keck shooting, there were two unsolved burglaries in Duluth. We found merchandise from those crimes in Fong’s apartment with his fingerprints on them.’

Djemilah sucked her lower lip between her teeth. ‘Okay, look, that summer, I found out I was pregnant. Understand? We were barely making ends meet with the two of us. So Fong, yeah, he did those couple jobs, just like you said. I didn’t know. He was looking for money to make it easier for us, and when I found out, I blew my top. I said if he ever did anything like that again, I’d kick him to the street with one of my heels up his ass. I’m telling you, you don’t want to see me mad, and I was mad. He swore he would never do it again, and he didn’t .’

‘So he committed the first two burglaries, but not the third?’

‘That’s the way it was.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘Sounds to me like he kept you out of it when he planned the Keck job. He didn’t want you getting mad at him again.’

‘Hey, I did get mad after he was arrested! I figured he was guilty, but he swore up and down he didn’t do it, and I believed him. Somebody set him up.’

‘Even assuming that’s true, who could have done that to him? Did he give you any names?’

Djemilah shrugged. ‘It could have been anybody. Fong had a job at the hospital, you know? People at the hospital, they all knew about his past. Doctors, nurses, staff, whoever. It was easy to blame him. Somebody gets robbed, everybody looks at the ex-con.’

‘There’s a reason for that,’ Maggie said. ‘Most of them reoffend sooner or later.’

‘Not Fong. He was done with that. And definitely not with a gun. Let me tell you something: if I thought he did what you people said, I’d spit on his grave. I wouldn’t lie for him. My life went to hell after he got locked up, and I’m only digging out now. But you people were wrong.’

Maggie held up the photograph of Marty Gamble. ‘Look again, Djemilah. This man was involved in the burglary that killed Rebekah Keck. If Fong is guilty, then he had ties to this man. If Fong is innocent, then this man knew enough to pin the crime on him. Somehow their lives intersected. Do you have any idea how they could be connected?’

The front door to the restaurant banged. Two Asian college students came inside and waved. Djemilah stood up from the table.

‘I gotta go,’ she said, ‘and the answer is no. I don’t know that man, and neither did Fong.’

The sun was nearly down.

Stride, Serena and Cat stood outside Michaela’s old house on the remote hilltop of the Antenna Farm. In the intervening years, the evergreens had soared, making the house look even smaller than it was. The paint was the same, yellow and peeling. The porch beams were warped and faded, in need of stain. The weeds in the lot were overgrown, with patches of snow clinging to the fields like white islands.

‘It looks abandoned,’ Cat said.

‘The owners lost it to foreclosure last year,’ Stride told her. ‘The bank has it now. The house will probably be torn down if the lot sells.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded sad at the prospect.

Stride’s Expedition was parked in the rutted driveway. They stood near his truck, twenty yards from the house. Cat hung back, looking afraid. Serena reached out and took her hand.

‘Have you been back here since it happened?’ she asked her.

‘No. Not once.’

‘We don’t have to do this if you’re not up to it,’ she said.

‘No, it’s okay. I want to. You said it might help.’

Cat started toward the house. Her boots cracked a puddle of thin ice like a broken window. Stride and Serena followed, letting the girl walk by herself. It had been Serena’s idea to bring Cat here, to see if the visit triggered any memories, but now he wondered if they were making a mistake.

The girl stopped and looked at Stride. ‘Was it cold?’

‘That night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bitter cold. You were freezing when I found you.’

She nodded. ‘I remember being cold.’

Cat climbed onto the porch. The loose wood sagged under her feet. Stride found himself overwhelmed by the vividness of his own memories. When he took hold of the railing, he recalled how it had felt under his hands ten years earlier when he’d stood there with Michaela. He remembered the steam making a cloud in front of her face with each breath. He felt the touch of her hand.

Serena watched him carefully, as if she knew what he was thinking.

‘Do you remember how you got under the porch?’ Serena asked Cat.

‘Mother came to my room and woke me up. She opened the window on the back of the house and lowered me into the snow. She said to hide there and not to come out until she came and got me. She made me say it over and over, that I shouldn’t come out, no matter what I heard. Over and over.’

‘Why did you have to hide?’

Cat stared at the driveway, where the truck was parked. ‘There were lights. A car. Someone was shouting.’

‘Who?’

The girl bit her fingernail. ‘My father.’

‘Are you sure it was him?’

‘Yes. He’d been drinking. I wanted to go to him and tell him not to be mad, but I–I went under the porch, like my mother said.’

‘Was he alone?’

Cat’s mouth opened and closed. Her eyes glazed over. ‘I–I don’t know.’

They let her stand in the cold. Cat put her face up against the frosty glass of the front window and peered inside. Stride stood next to her. It was hard to see through the maze of ice crystals. Serena lingered behind them on the porch.

‘Do you want to go inside?’ he asked.

‘Can I?’

‘Sure.’

He had a key from the bank, and he undid the lock. Inside, the house was a wreck, much worse than he expected. The furniture, except for a toppled three-legged chair, had been removed or stolen, and the carpet had been ripped out. Sometime over the winter, the furnace had failed, and pipes had frozen and burst, leaching over the floor and flooding the walls. Vandals had come inside. So had animals.

‘Sorry, it’s not safe to be here,’ Stride said. ‘I didn’t realize it was so bad.’

‘Please, just a minute,’ Cat said.

She picked her way into the empty center of the floor. Stride saw ice, trash and rat droppings. Water stains made ribbons on the ceiling.

‘We should go,’ he said.

‘Please.’

He didn’t want to be here. It was too painful. He could see where the Christmas tree had been, on that night when Michaela had tried clumsily to seduce him. He could smell sugar and hear music. It was all unreal; it was all long gone.

‘Her window was open,’ Cat said.

‘What?’

‘In my mother’s bedroom. She always left the window open, even when it was cold.’

Stride remembered the crime scene and the open window. He recalled thinking that Michaela liked the night air, the way he did himself. ‘Yes, it was.’

‘The window is over the porch.’ Her lower lip quivered. ‘I heard them.’

‘I know.’

‘I heard everything, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, I think you did.’

‘I–I just don’t remember.’