C Box - Winterkill

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Is Mom going to be okay?”

Joe paused. “She’s going to be all right. It takes a while.”

“I miss April, too.”

“So do I, honey.”

“I know we’re not going to get April back,” Sheridan said. “But I do want my mom back.”

Joe reached over and put his hand on Sheridan’s shoulder. Her hair was still damp from practice.

“Dad, can I ask you something?”

Joe nodded.

“Are you and Mom mad at me for not watching April closer that day in school? For letting Jeannie Keeley take her away?”

Joe was hurt by the question, and pulled quickly to the side of the road so he could turn in his seat and face her.

“No, honey, of course we’re not angry with you,” he assured her. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“But I was responsible for her,” Sheridan said, fighting tears that seemed to come, Joe thought, much more easily than they used to.

“That’s never even crossed our minds, Sheridan,” Joe said. “Never.”

As they pulled out into the road, Joe restrained a heavy sigh. He felt badly that he hadn’t seen this coming, hadn’t thought to talk to Sheridan about this earlier. Of course she would feel this way, he thought. Despite her maturity, despite what she’s been through, she’s still a child, he thought. And she naturally wondered if the difficulties her parents were having were somehow her doing.

It had been rough on Sheridan and Lucy, Joe knew. They missed April, and they missed the way their mother used to be. Marybeth had seesawed between snapping at them and smothering them with physical affection. Lucy had complained to him that she didn’t know what to say to her mother because she never knew what reaction she would get.

Joe knew he was far from faultless as well. He felt distant, and uninterested in so many of the things that used to give him joy. His thoughts were still up there on the mountain, in the compound, in the snow. He sometimes forgot that the living members of his family were in front of him and needed his attention.

“Your mom will be all right,” Joe said. “She’s tough.”

Sheridan nodded.

“We’ve never really talked about what happened up there on the mountain, Dad,” she said. “It seems like the good guys turned out to be the bad guys, and the bad guys weren’t all that bad.”

Joe smiled. “That’s a pretty good way to put it.”

“I can’t really sort it out,” Sheridan confessed.

“Sheridan, it’s all about accountability,” he said after a pause. It was something he had thought a lot about recently.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means that people should be accountable for their actions. They have to be accountable. There need to be consequences for thoughtless or cruel behavior,” Joe said, wondering if he’d said too much. He didn’t want her to think he was plotting revenge.

Sheridan sat silently for a few moments.

“Who is accountable for me losing a sister for no good reason?”

Joe frowned. “I am, to a certain degree…”

“No, you’re not!”

“Yes, honey, I am,” Joe said, looking straight ahead out the window. “I didn’t protect her as well as I should have. I didn’t get her back.”

“Dad!” Tears rolled down Sheridan’s face.

“Others are even more accountable,” he said.

That evening, after dinner, the telephone rang. It was Robey Hersig.

“Joe,” Hersig said.

Joe could tell that something was wrong. There was no greeting, no small talk, no mention of the coming storm.

“Yup.”

“We got an early look at the findings of the joint FBI and Forest Service investigation. Munker and Melinda Strickland were not only exonerated, they were commended for their actions. There will be a formal announcement tomorrow.”

Joe squeezed the receiver as if to crush it.

“How could this happen, Robey?”

“Joe, you’ve got to stay calm.”

“I’m calm.”

He looked up to see Marybeth staring at him from where she had turned near the sink. It was obvious she could tell what was happening by reading his face. Joe watched as her expression went cold and her fists clenched.

“Don’t do anything foolish,” Hersig said. “We knew this was a possibility. You and I discussed it. With an internal investigation and all… well, they weren’t too likely to find that their own people screwed up. Remember, these are the Feds-the FBI. We knew that going in.”

Joe said nothing.

“Joe, promise me you’ll stay calm.”

Marybeth had run upstairs to the bedroom and closed the door after Joe told her what Hersig had reported. He needed to give her some time, he thought, before he went up there. He needed some time to figure out what to say that wasn’t angry and bitter. Grabbing his coat from the rack in the mud room, he went outside into the dark to try to clear his head.

It was cold, and there was humidity in the air. The stars were blocked out by clouds. After two months, there would be snow coming again. For some reason, he welcomed it. He zipped his coat as he strode up the walk toward the picket fence.

Joe heard a muffled rustling of bird’s wings in the dark and stopped with one hand on the gate. He turned. Next to Joe’s pickup in the driveway, Nate Romanowski sat on the hood of an ancient Buick Riviera with Idaho license plates. His peregrine was perched on his fist.

“Have you ever considered just knocking on the door?” Joe asked.

“Thanks for keeping me out of it,” Nate said, ignoring Joe’s question.

“You were helping me,” Joe said, closing the gate behind him and approaching Nate and the Buick. “It was the least I could do.”

“I heard about the results of the investigation,” Nate said, shaking his head. “Their first rule of survival is that they protect their own.”

“How in the hell did you know about it? I just heard.”

“My contacts in Idaho,” Nate said. “The decision was a foregone conclusion six weeks ago. All the Feds knew about it. Office gossip. It just took them a while to write it up with the proper spin.”

Joe sat next to Nate on the hood of the Riviera. He sighed deeply, and fought an urge to hurl himself into something hard. He realized how much he had hoped for a miracle after the investigation, and how naïve that hope had been.

“It would be a good thing,” Nate said, “if Melinda Strickland went away.”

Joe turned and looked hard at Nate. This time, he didn’t argue. Joe thought about his family inside the house, and how rough the past two months had been for them all. This wouldn’t set things right, or take them back to where they were. But he thought about what he’d told Sheridan about accountability.

“I can take care of it,” Nate said.

“No,” Joe said hesitantly.

“You don’t know what you want, do you?”

“I want her out of this state,” Joe said. “I want her out of the Forest Service. I want her to pay something. And I don’t mean money. I mean her job at the very least.”

“She’s evil.” Nate frowned. “Leaving her on the street will result in somebody else getting hurt wherever she lands.”

Joe thought about it. “That’s as far as I’m willing to go, Nate.”

“You’re sure?” Nate asked.

Joe nodded. He was well aware of the fact that he was crossing a line. But, he thought, it was a line that needed to be crossed in these circumstances. If he was wrong, there would be a world of trouble for him. If he was right, there could still be trouble. The easy and safe thing would be to simply let things run their course. But that was something he couldn’t do.

“Maybe a little more,” Joe said, feeling both elated and guilty at the same time.