C Box - Winterkill

Joe looked up at Marybeth and put down the papers.

“Doesn’t Nate Romanowski drive a Jeep?” Marybeth asked.

Joe nodded. “Yes, he does.”

“Interesting, huh?”

“Two guys sent from our nation’s capital sent to clear up an internal problem crash on a desolate road in Montana,” Joe said. “So what did he do, force the SUV off the road?”

“If the motor of the SUV wasn’t working, he wouldn’t have to, would he?” Marybeth asked. She had obviously been thinking about this.

“So how could he make a motor die in another car?” Joe asked, but halfway through his question, he guessed the answer.

They listened to the shower run upstairs while they ate breakfast. The girls ate pancake after pancake, soaking up every drop of the syrup. Because real maple syrup was expensive, it was saved for holidays and special occasions.

“Grandmother Missy takes long showers,” Lucy observed.

“She uses up all our hot water,” Sheridan grumbled.

“I like the sweet taste of the syrup and the salty taste of the bacon,” Sheridan said, savoring it.

“I just like the syrup,” Lucy declared. “I wish I could suck that syrup up through a straw.” Lucy smiled, pantomiming exactly how she would do it.

“Remember when Mom caught you licking your plate clean of all of the leftover syrup like a dog?” Sheridan asked Lucy, baiting her. Lucy made a face, and Sheridan laughed. “Like Maxine, licking out her dog-food bowl!”

“Stop it!” Lucy howled.

Marybeth shut things down with a look of disapproval.

“What do you like, April?” she asked.

April had been silent through the Rose Bowl parade and breakfast. Joe looked at her from his place at the stove. Sometimes, April withdrew from the rest of them, seeming almost to shrink out of view even though she was in the middle of things-the invisible girl. Other times, like now, she looked lonely and haunted. Joe sometimes thought of her as a living, sweet ghost.

April mumbled something, and stared into her lap.

“What was that, honey?” Marybeth asked.

April looked up. Her face was hard, and pinched. “I said I had a dream my other mom was looking at me last night.”

April’s words froze everyone at the table.

Marybeth leaned closer to April. Sheridan and Lucy looked from their mother, to April, and back.

“Are you doing okay now?” Marybeth asked softly.

“She was outside my window, looking in at me through the curtains,” April said, her eyes still downcast. “She sort of rubbed the window with her hand and smeared the glass. She kept saying ‘I love you, April, I miss you, April.’ ”

April said it in a Southern accent that sounded just like Jeannie Keeley, and it disturbed Joe because he had never heard April talk like that before.

For the first time that morning, Joe was focused. The dull red ball of anxiety, dormant in the pit of his stomach for a few hours, awoke.

Then he realized that Marybeth was trying to catch his eye. When he looked back, Marybeth was using her chin to point toward the back door without April realizing what she was doing. Joe got it: She wanted him to go outside and check the yard. Marybeth obviously believed April, or at least wanted to dispel any lingering possibilities.

As Marybeth cleared the dishes away-leaving a clean one for Missy when she made her morning entrance-and the girls returned to their parade, Joe pulled on his insulated coveralls in the mud room. As he laced his boots, he looked up. Sheridan was the only one who looked back. She had caught the exchange between Marybeth and Joe, and knew where he was headed. Her eyes slid off of him and back to the television. She was complicit in the plan.

He went out the front door, shoving it hard to break through a small drift that had piled against it. It was bitterly cold outside, with enough of a wind to bite into his exposed skin. Pinpricks of snow stung his eyes. Pulling a stocking cap over his ears, he trudged around the house and into the backyard. His boots broke through the crust of snow, making it hard to walk without moving like Frankenstein’s monster.

The girls’ room was at ground level. April’s and Lucy’s bunk bed was near the wall and window, and Sheridan’s single bed was near the door. The snow in the yard looked undisturbed except for a recent set of dog tracks and a yellow stain left by Maxine. He approached the back porch and squinted into the wind at the snow beneath the window.

The world was white-on-white-white ground, white sky, snow in his eyes-making it hard to see.

But they were there-two slight indentations beneath the window. They were only a little larger than a child’s boot-prints. At least he thought he could see something. With the fresh snow filling them and the wind topping them off with powder it was hard to know for sure. Ground blizzards, like water flowing over a dam, rolled over the fence and snaked across the yard, obscuring the depressions under the window.

Joe stopped and closed his eyes. He hoped when he opened them he could see more clearly.

When he opened his eyes they were still there. Kind of. For Jeannie Keeley to have stood beneath April’s window, she would have had to park on the road the night before, open the front gate, and walk around the dark house to the back. It had been extremely cold, as he knew. And if she had done it, it had to have been after Marybeth had arrived home from the funeral and Missy had taken the van back into town, or before she returned home that morning. Joe wondered when April thought she’d seen her mother, but knew it was unlikely that she’d noticed the time. He didn’t want to upset April more by asking her.

His camera was in his evidence kit in his pickup, and he retraced his steps to the front to dig it out. If he had hard evidence of his daughter being stalked, it could be used in a custody hearing. Returning, he wondered if the camera’s shutter release would be too cold to work properly. Photographing in snow was always difficult.

But it didn’t matter. By the time he returned, the boot tracks under the window-if they had ever really been there at all-were gone beneath the shifting rivulets of windborne snow.

As he stamped the snow off his boots, Marybeth came into the mud room.

“Well?” she asked.

Joe sniffed and shrugged. “Maybe. It was too hard to tell.”

Marybeth shivered, but Joe doubted it was from the cold.

That afternoon, Joe smashed his pickup through snowdrifts on the dirt road to Nate Romanowski’s house by the river. In the bed of the pickup were flattened, road-killed jackrabbits that Joe had collected on the highway, and two pheasants from his freezer. Blowing snow flowed like floodwater over the brush, obscuring Romanowski’s house and the mews.

On the bank of the river, Joe stopped and opened his door, which snapped away from his grasp as the wind took it and threw it wide open. He leaned against the wind and snow, clamping his hat on his head, and carried the burlap sack of rabbits and pheasants to the river’s edge. He tucked the carcasses between large round river stones so they wouldn’t blow away. While he did this, he searched vainly in the howling sky for a glimpse of Nate Romanowski’s hawks. If they were there, or watching him from the gorge, he couldn’t see them.

As he drove home, his fingers thawing, he hoped the birds were still around and would find the food he had left them.

He was fulfilling one of Romanowski’s requests. It was time to get working on the other one, he thought, now that he knew more. Now that he knew that Nate Romanowski had been telling the truth.

The next morning, Joe got a call from a local rancher who complained that elk had knocked down his fence and were in the process of eating the hay he had stacked to feed his cattle during the winter. When Joe arrived at the ranch, the elk had eaten so much hay out of the rancher’s haystack that it leaned precariously to one side, ready to topple. The small herd of elk, lazy and satiated, had moved from the stack to the protection of a dark windbreak of trees. Because the animals of Wyoming were the responsibility of the state, ranchers called game wardens when elk, moose, deer, or antelope ate their hay or damaged their property. The warden’s job was to chase the animals away and assess the harm done. If the damage was significant, the rancher was due compensation, and Joe would have to submit the paperwork.