“This is a nice place? In Soo Michigan?”
A little jab there, I thought. Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, is so much smaller than its sister city across the river. Soo Canada has more of everything.
“It’s a classy hotel,” I said. “I’d really like to see you, okay? It’s been a few days, and I wouldn’t mind spending some time with you.”
She didn’t say anything for a long moment. There was the faint hum on the line and nothing else.
“Yeah, why not?” she said. “It sounds nice.”
That’s how it happened. That hesitation, that long silence while she thought about it, I figured that was just natural. Just part of the dance, the getting to know someone new.
Of course it wasn’t that at all. It was something else entirely. But I didn’t know her well enough yet. I didn’t know the way she was, the way she has been for most of her life. The way she
had
to be. Above all, I didn’t know the one most important thing about her— that she never, ever hesitated that long about
anything.
Not unless it was something big.
Really big.
Damn it all to hell. If I had only known.
Natalie Reynaud. That was her name. Apparently, some of her friends called her Natty, but I never did. Not once. Natty didn’t work for me. Natty didn’t sound miraculous enough. To me she was always Natalie.
She was a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police, stationed in a little town called Hearst, way the hell up there on the last road in the world, the Trans-Canada Highway. The first time I saw her, she was jumping out of a floatplane, having flown back from a remote outpost to look for five missing men. She had dark brown hair pinned up under her OPP hat. She had green eyes.
She didn’t find those missing men that day. Or the next. Vinnie and I found them, in a way I was still having nightmares about. Then a senior constable named Claude DeMers came looking for us. He was Natalie’s partner, but he came without her. DeMers ended up dead and Natalie ended up looking like a bad partner. It was something I knew a little bit about myself.
There was something else I knew, too. Natalie’s partner didn’t leave her behind just to protect her from a little danger. He left her behind because he had a secret of his own out there, buried in the ground with the dead men. So he came out alone to try to keep that secret in the dirt, and he ended up with a bullet in the back.
Natalie took an administrative leave of absence from the OPP. I went back home to Paradise, but I kept thinking about her. I found out she was living in Blind River, just a couple of hours away from the International Bridge. So I went to see her. It was New Year’s Eve, with only a trace of snow on the ground. I drove across the bridge and followed the Queen’s Highway due east, along the shore of the North Channel. I arrived at her doorstep with a bottle of champagne and something else—what I thought would be a final answer to all the questions I knew she was living with. I had lived with the same questions, after all, with my own partner gunned down right in front of my eyes, on a hot summer night back in Detroit, in that one-room apartment just off Woodward Avenue with the tinfoil all over the walls.
I remembered the hell I had lived in for all those years afterward. I knew Natalie was in that same hell now. I thought I could give her a way out, the way out I never had.
Claude DeMers was buried a hero. He was the man who flew out to that lake to try to save the two Americans. When I told her the real story, I knew it would have to stay between us. When your partner’s dead, you can’t be the one to stand up and defame him. You can’t point to his grave and say there lies a dirty cop. I knew that, but I figured what the hell. As long as
she
knew. Maybe she’d be able to sleep at night.
I had another reason to find her. I admit that. I sat in the dining room of that old farmhouse, watching what the antique light did to her green eyes, and how it picked up a faint hint of red in her hair. We talked and then we drank the champagne and made an awkward toast to the new year at midnight. She finally told me she wouldn’t mind if I stayed the night, just so she wouldn’t have to be alone.
“I don’t trust many people,” she said to me that night.
“But you trust me.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can tell,” I said. Although, of course, I couldn’t. I had no idea what she was thinking. In another five minutes, I could have been back in my truck, heading home.
“That would be a miracle,” she said. “I mean a real miracle.”
“I think it already is,” I said. “Look how we met. And now here we are.”
“I guess I should thank you for coming out here, Alex. It was a completely insane thing to do. But I’m glad you did.”
I didn’t say anything then. I drank some more champagne and so did she. She had a way of looking up from her glass, eyeing me carefully, not like she was shy but maybe just the opposite. Like she was sizing me up. She asked me what sports I played, because it was obvious I was an old athlete. I shook off the “old” business and told her about my baseball career, such as it was. She told me she was a hockey player, back when a woman who played in college had nowhere to go with it. No women’s hockey in the Olympics, just back to the frozen pond in the backyard. It surprised me a little. I would soon find out that the game of hockey fit her perfectly.
And then, for whatever reasons had brought me to this house, on this one cold night, after the grandfather clock at the top of her stairs chimed twelve times and the new year began, we stood up at the same time and met in the middle of the room. Because of the things that had happened to her, and to me. All these things we had in common. Hell, and maybe a little champagne on an empty stomach. It all came together in that minute after midnight. We kissed first, then she took me by the hand and led me upstairs.
We stopped in front of one room. Inside there was a canopy bed with white lace and stuffed animals all over it. “No,” she said and pulled me past yet another room, with a double bed made up neatly, with more white lace. I saw two portraits, one on each end table, but I couldn’t make out the faces in the dim light. “This one,” she said as she pulled me into the third room. She was strong and the way she was pulling me, it felt like she was angry at me, and maybe she was. Maybe that was part of it.
The room she pushed me into was different from the others. The light was on, the bed was unmade, and there were two suitcases opened up on the floor with clothes spilling out of them. She turned the light off. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, she struck a match and lit three candles. Then with her back to me she unpinned her hair and let it fall down onto her shoulders. She took her white shirt off and then reached behind and unhooked her bra. She kept her jeans on for the moment, turning around to face me in the candlelight. It’s always been shoulders for me, more than any other part of a woman, and hers were perfect. She had small breasts and her nipples stood out erect in the chilled air of this bedroom in the corner of this old, silent house. I took my shirt off as she watched me, and then she came close and kissed me again. I felt her skin against mine. Her hair smelled faintly of smoke and something sweet like cinnamon.
She pulled away and left the room. I stood there, not quite sure what to do. When she came back, her white panties glowed in the candlelight. She put something in my hand, a foil wrapper, and in the half second it took to register, she knocked me backward onto the bed.
“That’s two minutes for cross-checking,” I said.
“Shut up and take your pants off.” She climbed on top of me.
“I can’t. That’s another two minutes for interference.”
“Just shut up,” she said, and then she slapped me lightly across the mouth. It may have been a love tap, on her scale anyway, but it got my attention. “Okay, no more jokes,” I said. I rolled her over and kissed her hard. She bit my lip and dug her fingernails into my back. Then it got serious.
Somehow, we ended up on the cold wooden floor with the sheets tangled all around us. She grabbed my hair with both hands when she came, holding on so tight it would make my head hurt for the rest of the night. Afterward, she sat back against the side of the bed. She didn’t collapse on me, didn’t put her head on my shoulder. She just rolled away from me and sat there with her eyes closed. In the candlelight I could see the beads of sweat on her neck.
We sat like that for a long time, until she finally opened her eyes. “So talk to me,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. But then I had no idea what to say.
“Tell me more about yourself.”
I gave her the whole rundown. Growing up in the Detroit suburbs, my mother dying when I was eight years old. My old man getting up every morning to work for Ford Motors. Going to single-A ball right out of high school, four years in the minors without a call-up. Good hands behind the plate, but struck out too much. Went after too many bad pitches.
And then being a cop in Detroit for eight years. Getting married and living in that little brick house in Redford. I stopped when I got to the part about Franklin, my old partner.
“Can we move to the bed?” she said. “My ass is getting cold on this floor.”
We got up onto the bed, under the thick down comforter. She was finally close to me again. I could feel her soft skin and the heat from her body.
I told her about that summer night in Detroit. Tracking down the man who was harassing people at the hospital. His apartment with the aluminum foil all over the walls. Then the gun he pulled out from under the table, the gun he had found in the Dumpster. It was an Uzi, the gun of choice in Detroit in the mid-1980s.
“I watched my partner die,” I said. “He was on the floor next to me. I watched the lights go out in his eyes.”
“It doesn’t sound like you had any chance to stop it.”
“I’ve replayed it in my mind a thousand times,” I said. “Ten thousand times. I could have drawn on that guy. I could have at least tried.”
She shook her head. “No way. He already had the gun pointed at you.”
“He was spaced out, Natalie. I might have been able to beat him.”
“Just keep going. What happened next?”
I told her about my own injuries. Three bullets, one in the rotator cuff, the other nicking the top of the lung, the last one bouncing around like a pinball and ending up next to my heart. I showed her my scars. I told her that the last bullet, the one by my heart, was still there.
She touched my chest. “God,” she said.
I told her about the bad years after that. Leaving the force, my marriage breaking up. Then those cabins up north, the ones my father had built, in this little town called Paradise, on the shores of Lake Superior. How I had gone up there, thinking I’d sell them off, but then deciding to stick around for a while. Something about the place. The absolute solitude. The desolate beauty.
I went fast through the rest of the story. Getting talked into trying out the private eye thing, and the wonderful experiences that brought me. Getting my ass kicked, almost freezing to death, watching my father’s favorite cabin burn down. Right up to the recent business with Vinnie and his lost brother. She already knew that story. She was there.
“So how about you?” I finally said. “It’s your turn.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve got to sleep.” She got up, wrapping herself in the sheet and leaving me the comforter.
“Where are you going?”
“The other room. I can’t sleep with someone else in the bed.” She left the room, then poked her head back in. “Good night, Alex.”
“Good night,” I said. I thought about maybe leaving, just getting in the truck and driving back home. Instead I just stared at the strange ceiling for a while. One of the candles burned down to nothing, making it even darker. I fell asleep. That was the first night.
Having made our
date at the hotel, all I could do was watch the snow fall and wonder how badly it would bury us. I tried to sleep, but the wind was whistling outside and making the windows rattle. I could hear a million tiny snowflakes being driven against the walls. At four in the morning, I got up and turned the outside light on. The snow was already up over the wheels of the truck.
“God damn,” I said. My breath fogged the window. “We’re gonna get buried.”
I knew what I had to do. I threw on some clothes and my coat and gloves. The snow stung my face as soon as I opened the door. I made my way to the truck, stepping through drifts that came to my knees. It was the last thing I wanted to do at that hour, but I knew I had to get out on the road to stay ahead of the snow. Once it got past a certain depth, I wouldn’t be able to plow it at all. This had happened exactly twice in the years I had lived up here. Both times, I had to wait for the county to send in excavators to dig me out. And a private access road with a few cabins was never at the top of their list.
I knocked most of the snow off the windshield, then climbed into the truck and started it up. The wheels spun a few times until they finally found some traction, thanks to a twelve-hundred-pound plow on the front and eight-hundred pounds of cinder block in the bed. I pushed my way out of my driveway and started up the road, through the snow-covered trees.
My windshield wipers were fighting a losing battle. During the night the snow had turned into the heavy wet stuff that sticks to everything as soon as it lands. I cranked the defroster as high as it would go and tried to stay on the road, which was nothing but a rumor anyway. When I had finally worked my way to the last cabin, I tried to turn the truck around, got stuck a few times, used every bad word I knew and made up some, then finally got it pointed the opposite way. I pounded my way back, past the rentals, then my cabin, then Vinnie’s, all the way to the main road.
The snow was mocking me. It was dancing in my headlights and covering up my tracks as soon as I could make them.
I turned around and went back in for more. At least I’d go down fighting.
We had breakfast
that next day, the first day of the new year. We didn’t talk about what had happened the night before. She went back to her work, wrapping up dinner plates and putting them in a cardboard box. This was her mission in life, she said. She wanted to use this time to pack up the old house, and to finally sell it. She had been putting it off for so long.
Her hair was pinned up again. She had gray sweats on. Working clothes. I offered to help her. She said she needed to be alone for a while.
She came over by the door and gave me a quick kiss on the mouth. Then I left.
By the time I got home, there was a message waiting on my machine.
“Sorry I was a little weird this morning,” she said. There was a pause. “It’s been a long time for me, if you know what I mean. Give me a call in a couple of days, eh? If you feel like coming back out, I’ll make you dinner.”
That was it. I waited a couple of days. Three, to be exact. I tried not to think about her. It was one night. You were there and something happened and it was great and so what. You’ve got your own problems and she’s got hers.
When I finally called her, she apologized again, and asked me if I wanted to come back out for her beef stew.
“I think you should know,” I said. “My man Jackie does a beef stew that’ll knock you out.”