Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“I’m sorry,” I told her that night before I went to bed.

“For what?”

“For what you told me. Aunt Lulu.”

“Yeah,” she replied, in a voice that was somehow not her voice—the voice of a younger woman, a woman who was not yet sitting before me and smoking her life away, the woman who had stood in this same place some fifty years earlier and watched her children play on the rug. “Me, too.”

I turned the key and pushed on the wooden door, which had begun to stick in its frame. The lights came on. The ice cream case and the grill showed their blank, shining surfaces.

I didn’t think I needed to tell the stranger what I’d done. I’d hardly given the ranger who’d taken my call anything to go on, and anyway, I doubted she’d written any of it down. Even if she had, as far as she knew, I was just a crazy person who could barely manage to string a sentence together.

Still, I felt uneasy. When I opened my book, I found I couldn’t read it and pushed it aside.

I had just unwrapped my sandwich and was gazing down at it, struggling to work up a desire to eat, when the door opened and the state troopers walked in.

There were two of them, a man and a woman. The man was lanky and awkward-looking, the woman petite and focused, her frizzy red hair pulled back in a knot.

I stood as they entered, my mouth dry.

As much as I’d been agonizing, I hadn’t truly expected them. Not here. Not in front of me.

Not at all.

“Ms. Guttshall?” the woman said, taking a step toward me. She was remarkably compact, like one of the women wrestlers they sometimes showed on TV.

I took a deep breath that I hoped they wouldn’t notice. “McElwain,” I said.

She checked some papers on a clipboard. “Ms. McElwain. We were wondering if we could talk with you.”

I rested my palms on the counter, as if to show I had nothing to hide, even though something within me had gone cold. “Sure.”

“You know Mr. Landis? Up the hill?”

She meant Martin.

“Sure,” I said again, attempting to shrug.

“You seen anything unusual going on up there lately?”

I sucked in my lower lip, trying to put on a puzzled look while my mind raced. “Unusual,” I repeated.

“Yeah. Like, anybody going in or out at odd hours, for example. People maybe you don’t know.”

“Well,” I said slowly. “I mean, it’s a hostel.”

“I’m talking about people who don’t look like hostel guests.”

I looked down at the counter, gripping my hands together and studying them for a moment. Then I looked up, my pulse thrumming in my ears.

I had to choose.

And I chose.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“No?” The woman raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure? One of my colleagues was up there the other day, but unfortunately Mr. Landis wasn’t very cooperative. We thought you might be able to help.”

I forced myself to meet her eyes. “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s a criminal offense to lie to the police, ma’am.” She said it without anger, but with firmness. “Did you know Mr. Landis spent three years in the federal penitentiary up at Lewisburg?”

I stiffened, trying not to show the surprise I could tell she wanted me to show. Her partner was watching me keenly, my discomfort apparently rousing him from his boredom.

“No,” I replied.

“He did. Aggravated assault. Heroin deal gone bad.” She paused, as if for effect. “Victim suffered severe spinal injuries. He won’t be able to walk again.”

I crossed my arms. “I didn’t know that,” I told her, keeping my voice even. “And I don’t care to know it now.”

She sighed. “Please, ma’am. Don’t make this hard. Where’s your friend?”

“My friend?”

The man spoke up for the first time, with an authority I hadn’t expected.

“Yes, your friend,” he said, his tone so dispassionate it almost gave me chills. “The Russian guy. Rangers’ve had their eye on him for weeks.”

I glanced from one face to the other. A deep, churning pit seemed to open in my chest.

“I don’t know anyone from Russia,” I said finally.

The woman looked as if she planned to stare me down. “Do you know what ‘aiding and abetting’ means?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I set my face in a mask. “And I’ve never met anyone from Russia.”

“You haven’t?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. In a bizarre way, I was almost tempted to laugh. “I haven’t.”

“You don’t have any idea who I might be talking about?”

I had just opened my mouth to reply when the stranger himself appeared on the other side of the screen door, his expression hopeful but anxious. His lips stretching into a nervous, apologetic smile, he was glancing to the side, checking for unwanted visitors in the wrong places. Horrified, I watched him reach for the doorknob.

“I don’t know any Russian guy,” I repeated loudly, the sound of my voice so harsh and strange that the policewoman took a step back.

Behind the screen door, the stranger’s face changed as he registered my words, emptying in shock. Then he opened the door.

“I believe you are looking for me,” he said.

The two figures in uniform turned around.

“You stay here,” the tall officer barked at me as the woman reached for the stranger’s elbow.

They moved out of sight and I rushed to the door, leaning over the porch railing as they moved up the hill. The stranger’s foot slipped, and he dropped to his knee in the mud. The tall officer grabbed his sleeve and yanked him up, pushing him forward. The hostel door closed behind them.

“That was so foolish,” I told him.

We stood next to each other on the cold, pale sand at the edge of Fuller Lake. The moon was so full and close-looking that it seemed like it could sit in the palm of the hand. The tapering fingers of the pines jutted into the sky, reflected in the water below along with the few stars that were visible alongside the moon’s light.

The stranger carefully unscrewed the cap on the bottle he was holding, the one I had brought from the cache I’d long ago found at the back of the storage room, and took a sip. “I had to do it. You couldn’t see yourself. You looked—” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and shook his head, handing the bottle back to me. “Besides, it was better for them to hear it from me. If I show I’m not afraid of them, maybe I can gain just a bit more time.”

“You don’t have time,” I said.

He copied my pose, gazing at the lake, and didn’t answer.

We weren’t supposed to be here after dark; no one was. I listened for footsteps in the sand behind us, the breaking of a twig. But we were alone.

“What did they ask?” I said finally, twisting the bottle open and swallowing a mouthful of the honey-colored liquid. It burned my throat and traced a warm, slow trail to my stomach.

“Oh, this and that. What’s my name, where did I come from, how long have I been here. They asked to see my passport, and I showed it to them. They made some phone calls, and then they went away.”

“They saw your passport?”

“Yes.”

“And nothing happened?”

“No.”

There were small bits of quartz in the sand, rough, rectangular pebbles that glinted in the moonlight. It had been years since I’d seen the lake at night. I tugged the hood of my sweatshirt over my head until the water, sand, and trees were all I could see. It was cold, and my skin tingled, but the alcohol warmed me.

“Does that mean maybe nobody’s looking for you anymore? I mean, no one important?” I asked.

“It means nobody’s looking for the person in the passport,” he said after a moment, tracing a line in the sand with the tip of his shoe.