Peter Geye - Wintering

“You think he swiped these letters?” he said.

“Of course.”

“What about Rebekah?”

“Oh, I can’t see that.”

“You said yourself that she was selfish and vain. Maybe stealing the letters was her way of keeping part of something she cared about. Maybe it gave her a feeling of control.”

“Let me see if I understand you. On the one hand, you’ve got Hosea Grimm, the only man as rotten as Charlie Aas who ever lived in this town, a man whose entire life was a fraud, whose every move was calculated for his own gain. On the other hand, Rebekah Grimm, who tried to make a living selling hats in a town of a thousand people. Half of whom were women who knit their husbands and children new hats each Christmas.”

“A woman who employed you for twenty-five years, largely for the company. She had no one. You said so yourself. Maybe she wanted to keep something all to herself.”

I studied the letters on the counter. This theory of Gus’s, it wasn’t out of the question. “I suppose it’s possible,” I admitted.

“And I suppose it doesn’t matter whether it was her or him.” His face drained of color and he picked yet another letter from the stack and held it at arm’s length. “Sometimes there just aren’t any words to explain things, are there?”

“Words in any language,” I said.

—

After Gus left I spent a long hour pondering the possibility of Rebekah Grimm’s guilt. It had been quite some time since I’d held her up for scrutiny.

Gus hadn’t said anything when I explained how she’d dealt out her considerable wealth, but it occurred to me — as it must have to him — that holding on to all of it would have required considerable shrewdness. Lord knows she was at times miserly. I can still see her counting out my weekly wage, her fine fingers dropping those nickels and dimes into my own callused hand. She’d put off a job for a whole summer in order to catch the handyman in his season of need, all so she might save ten bucks on a hundred-dollar job. But she was also prone to great extravagances and cunning business sense. It was one of the few things that surprised me about her. Some people said she was crazy. Others — those who’d known her longest — said crazy like a fox.

I remember, during the winter Gus and Harry spent on the borderlands, when everyone in town was whispering about the fix Charlie Aas was in, Rebekah told me something that she meant to incriminate him beyond doubt. It was a story that went back before my time in Gunflint, to the autumn of 1936, when Hosea Grimm died. His passing hadn’t been unexpected. He’d been sick for years, having suffered two brain attacks in quick succession. The first left one side of his face like a melted candle. The second killed him in his sleep.

For years Marcus Aas and his boys had been circling Hosea’s holdings, especially the Shivering Timber, a seedy brothel on a lake three miles up County Road Two. It had been around almost as long as Hosea himself had been. Once upon a time a dozen or more molls worked the front porch there, but during the last months of Hosea’s life that number had shrunk considerably. Friday nights found only three or four negligeed girls out on the rail. Marcus had it in mind to revive the place. He’d come to Hosea with a middling offer in July of ’36, one that a prudent man would have accepted for any number of reasons, not least of which would have been to avoid getting tangled up with the Aas clan. Even as early as then, Marcus and his boys were marking every light post in town. But Hosea said no.

When he passed, Rebekah didn’t even have to wait until morning before Marcus rang the bell on her counter. He came in just at closing time, his youngest son, Charlie, at his side like a yearling bear cub. Charlie’s eyes darted around, as if he was checking for an assassin. Marcus offered neither pretense nor condolences. He simply told her that he would now be buying the Shivering Timber for one thousand dollars, half of his original offer and less than a quarter of its real value. Charlie, he told her, was going to handle the transaction. On that day Charlie was just a month past seventeen years old, though even then he had a full, manly beard that he stroked as his father spoke.

Marcus wanted there to be absolutely no confusion about the new order of things. He lectured Rebekah on the diminished nature of Hosea’s estate. He told her how it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for Curtis Mayfair to poke his head into her affairs and try to arrange for Hosea’s chattel to go to Odd Eide. He assured her that would be foolhardy, and beyond the scriptures of law both as the state and the good Lord above saw it. Marcus reckoned Odd was nothing but a prodigal waste. It was Rebekah who had served Hosea dutifully, and in his kindness he would help her manage what Hosea had left behind. Starting with the Shivering Timber. Marcus clapped his son on the back and told him to work out the details.

The details, as the young Charlie Aas made it known, were simple. “Sign over the whorehouse or you’ll be back in bed with Hosea before he’s underground. We already talked to Lenny Washburn, and it’s no trouble at all for him to make a double coffin.”

Maybe it was because she was in shock from Hosea’s death. Maybe she simply felt she had nothing to lose. Maybe she was looking for a reason to carry on and a fight with those thugs seemed like a noble idea. Whatever the case, she told Charlie Aas to leave. She told him the resort (as she would reincarnate it) up at the end of County Road Two was not for sale, nor would it be going on the market soon, not until some changes were made. She told him that if he had any concerns she might take them up with her attorney, the aforementioned Curtis Mayfair, who represented everyone in town save the Aas clan.

Charlie, of course irate, left in a tantrum. “You ain’t seen the last of me, you lamebrained dyke! I were you, I’d sleep with one eye open! I’ll be back and up your ass until we get what we came for! Don’t you worry about that!”

She knew very well these were not idle threats. Still, she couldn’t help being almost amused by his raving. Even so, that first night she slept with Hosea’s Browning pistol on her bedside table. For three or four days she waited him out. She buried Hosea. She had a locksmith add a deadbolt to the front and back doors and a lock to her bedroom door on the third floor. Four or five days after Marcus and Charlie made their offer, as she readied for bed, she heard what sounded like glass breaking downstairs in the apothecary. She went into her room, locked the door, and spent a sleepless night wondering if Charlie was coming to make good on his barking promises.

In the morning she inspected the entire apothecary and found everything as it should have been. That night she heard voices in the back alleyway. She tried to spy out the window but saw nothing, so adjourned again to her locked room. The next morning she studied the Ax & Beacon classifieds. The only dogs for sale were a litter of miniature schnauzers offered by a family that she hardly knew who lived down in Misquah. When Claire Veilleux came in for her day’s mail, Rebekah asked for a ride down the road.

Rebekah knew that getting a puppy was foolish. Even when full-grown it wouldn’t be much bigger than a house cat. But she liked the idea of having another pair of ears in the apothecary, so she brought one home and named her Timmy.

The next morning, while Timmy slept in her basket under the mail counter, Charlie stepped casually into the apothecary. He had shaved part of his face so all that remained were muttonchops. With his hair slicked back, wearing a suit, he came right up to the counter and asked for the Aas family mail. She handed it to him.