Rye Curtis - Kingdomtide

You never told her?

Adelaide felt so much shame she made me promise never to tell her. Of course I’ve kept my promise. Who’d want their daughter to know that their mom did something like that?

Bloor pinched her again. She clenched her teeth and kept her eyes on the light in the doorway. Then Bloor leaned back and gripped again her nipples and gave them two hard turns, kissing the air above him. She yelped once and bit her tongue. He dropped his body down and rocked back and forth against her thigh. She watched yet the doorway over his shoulder.

The floor creaked. Jill crossed the landing and stopped outside the open door. She and Lewis locked eyes and after a moment the girl went down the stairs to the kitchen and Lewis heard the refrigerator door open and a plate scrape the countertop.

Bloor finished himself in a chalked hand and streaked the mess on a window above the headboard and fell back beside Lewis on the bed and laughed. That was wonderful, he said.

Lewis held her damp palms over her breasts. She listened to Jill climb the stairs and saw her cross again the landing.

Bloor called his daughter’s name.

She stopped in the doorway. She did not look in.

Good night, Bloor said.

Good night, said the girl, and she went on into her bedroom and shut the door.

Some transient presence tripped a motion sensor outside and a weak light came on and lit up the terrace. Lewis figured it was likely a squirrel but she thought she had seen something else there through the sliding glass door. A thin woman in shadow. It was only late September, yet snow fell without on the terrace in the cold light. Lewis figured it looked like shredded plastic in an old movie, and the spotlit heights of the motionless trees beyond the railing like set dressing to a windless stage.

Well, that settles that, Bloor said, looking out to the snow. If Cloris Waldrip did survive the crash, she won’t survive the night.

Snow hung low the boughs and cauled the granite forms roadside and stilled the tall grass. Lewis drove Jill in the Wagoneer, yawing edgewise an alpine forest, static humming low on the radio, tire chains biting into the last of a paved road that had earlier been plowed. Lewis put to purpled lips the thermos of merlot. She sipped and turned the Wagoneer up a dirt road mottled with ice and mud.

Jill watched her from the passenger’s seat. Are we going to get stuck out here?

No, I won’t get us goddamn stuck. Lewis drank again from the thermos and replaced the lid. She gave the Wagoneer some gas.

Are you drinking wine out of a thermos?

No.

They drove on for some miles over the dirt road, guttering heavy places of snow and spitting past boarded-up hunting lodges. Leeward a hut with no windows hung a poorly butchered carcass, bottom up, frozen to a muddy icicle. Lewis did not stop to write a ticket. She drove on without speaking until she told Jill how she had received word that morning that the NTSB had faulted human error for bringing down the Waldrips’ airplane.

Terry Squime must’ve lost control, Lewis said. Like he just decided he didn’t know how to fly anymore. The goddamn body was too far gone for them to figure if he’d had a seizure or an aneurism or anythin like that, but they didn’t rule any of that out.

Jill said nothing and worked the handle and brought the pane down and got a cigarette. She struck a match in a book and lit it.

They said there could’ve been some turbulence and he panicked, Lewis said. Stress-related. Didn’t rule out it could’ve been depression and he took the Waldrips with him. He’d just gotten married and it hadn’t been going well. Apparently he’d been meetin men in motels. His mailman too.

Jill pulled on the cigarette and put her lips close to the window. Depression and mailmen, she said.

Lewis followed a road of black mud rutted in parabolas. A lake flashed beyond a belt of dying trees. She turned at a totem pole nailed over with snakeskins and filthy socks and a clothesline hung with the parts to a bear costume frozen at crazy angles. She slowed to a stop before a hut of plank wood leaning off the side of the road. A rusted pipe in the roof smoked green. An ironing board used for a door slid away from the entrance and a head poked out. A dark-skinned man appeared there in swimming trunks and a diving mask pushed back over curls of long icy hair. He saw what they were and came caped in a beach towel sprinting for the passenger’s window, eyes wide, high-stomping through the snow in tieless combat boots.

Lewis told Jill to roll down the window all the way. Jill sighed and cranked down the pane and leaned back so that Lewis could talk to the man now resting an arm on the side mirror.

Hiya, Eric, what in the hell you doin in your swim attire?

Dogpaddlin, the man said. Dogpaddlin in cold water is all you need to stay regular. His teeth chattered. Who’s this pretty baby?

She’s a volunteer.

All right, all right, he said. He was nodding and shivering like faulty clockwork. What’re you doin out here on a day like today, Ranger Lewis? Your outfit’s liable to get stuck.

Somebody called in a complaint about you scarin some goddamn campers.

I weren’t scarin no campers. Some kids was gettin drunk and drugged and pregnant on my property, so I dressed up like a bear and ran them off with a croquet mallet.

Yeah, that’s what they said you did.

They was on my property.

With your property line so close to the campgrounds you ought to think about puttin up a goddamn sign or two so this kind of thing won’t keep happenin. If someone gets on your land, just radio the station and me or Ranger Paulson will take care of it. Keep you from ever gettin involved. You still got your radio?

Yes, ma’am.

All right then.

You goin to write me a ticket?

Hell. I don’t guess I will this time.

Appreciate it.

Let me ask you a question, Eric.

Yes, ma’am.

Seen anythin noteworthy out here in the past few weeks?

The man lowered his brow. Suddenly he was still and no longer shivered. How’d you mean?

Did you see anythin out of the goddamn ordinary? Anythin at all.

This about them bucks, ain’t it?

What?

The man darted his eyes. I saw two bucks mountin each other behind my hobby shed. I’d heard somewhere they do that sometimes but I ain’t never seen it in all my life. Thought it unnatural at first, but I don’t know.

Anything else? said Lewis.

Well I tell you what, I did see some smoke last night while I was out in the lake.

Smoke?

Maybe t’were the night before. Like a campfire out yonder, twirlin up like this volunteer’s hair here. He nodded at Jill.

Goddamn.

Was the faintest little thing too. Looked like it was comin deep from the Old Pass. It caused me to remark to myself cause I was under the guidance we weren’t allowed up there anymore. I assumed it was originatin from one of those shelters.

Appreciate you, Eric, that’s goddamn helpful.

Is it? Eric darted again his eyes to the girl. Jill stared ahead out the windshield. This about that sicko goofball from Phoenix?

No, Lewis said. A plane went down some weeks back and we’re lookin for one of the survivors. A seventy-two-year-old woman, name of Cloris Waldrip.

The man whistled and started back shivering and shook slowly his unhinged and chattering head. Seventy-two? Tell her kin to bury an empty box and get on with they lives.

Lewis brought Jill back to the station that afternoon and poured in secret a mugful of merlot from a bottle behind her desk and set to writing a report on the smoke over the Old Pass. Pete was in the kitchenette, Claude at his desk. Jill smoked cigarettes at the window overlooking the snow and the wilderness. She pressed a thumb to the pane.