The Snow Falcon (3 page)

He went up the stairs and entered an outer office. A young woman smiled at him as she looked up from her word processing.

“Hi. Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Carl Jeffrey.”

“Sure, I’ll get him for you. Can I give him your name?”

“Michael Somers.”

Her smile faltered the way it might have if she’d reached to pet a dog that had then unexpectedly growled at her.

“I’ll tell Mr. Jeffrey that you’re here.”

Though there was a phone on her desk she could have used, she got up and went through to an inner office, glancing quickly back at him as she closed the door behind her. When the door opened again after a minute or two, she returned to her desk, avoiding his eye as she went. Carl was just behind her, his expression split into a wide smile.

“Hey, Michael! It’s been a long time. How are you?” They shook hands, then stood back a second to look each other over, Carl shaking his head. “Hell, you look just the way you did when I last saw you.”

“You look good yourself, Carl.”

In fact, Carl was as Michael had imagined he might have turned out. The face was the same, only fleshier than he remembered, neck and jowls merging into rolls that flowed over the collar of his shirt. The suit he wore was wrinkled at the arms and stretched tight around his middle, and there was a faint stain on his tie. Carl waved an arm and ushered him into his office.

“How about some coffee or something?”

“Coffee would be great.”

Carl called back to his secretary. “Jenny, did you hear that? Fetch us some coffee, would you? How about a doughnut? There’s a bakery a couple of doors down that does pretty good food. You hungry?”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

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Carl’s expression creased into a slight frown of indecision, his eyes growing smaller in his face. He made up his mind while Jenny waited by her desk. “Just get me one of those cream-cheese bagels. Poppy-seed,” he called out. He turned back to Michael and patted his expansive stomach. “I have to watch what I eat.”

Michael didn’t comment, thinking that it seemed he was fighting a losing battle.

Carl smiled broadly again, shaking his head in disbelief as he went behind his big wooden desk. “How long has it been? Twenty years? How’d you manage to stay looking so good? Sit down, make yourself at home. Smoke?” He picked up a pack of Camel Lights from the desk and offered them across.

“No thanks. I quit.”

“Yeah? I should do the same. These things’ll kill you, that’s for Carl lit a cigarette and speculatively blew smoke across the

sure.

room as he settled his bulk back into his chair.

They were the same age, thirty-seven, but Carl looked older. He had the smooth features that overweight people often have, and his size made him look prosperous in a smalltown kind of way. It was the suit, partly, and the office, with its big desk and chair and its windows overlooking the street. In the city he would have looked like a rumpled, slightly seedy second-rate lawyer and his features might have adopted a harassed attitude, but here he appeared well settled—rooted and confident. In contrast, Michael knew he himself looked edgy. He saw it in his own expression when he caught himself unawares, passing his reflection in a window or a mirror. He thought he appeared guarded, his brow vaguely furrowed, as if he was worrying at some internal problem. His hair, though, was thick and fair, and sometimes he caught in the way he looked a trace of the younger man he’d once been, even the boy back beyond that, and he guessed that was why Carl seemed surprised by his appearance. Maybe he didn’t fit Carl’s idea of what an ex-con ought to look like.

“So tell me, when did you get here?” Carl asked.

“I just arrived.”

“I’ve been expecting you ever since I got your last letter. I was starting to think maybe you’d changed your mind when you didn’t show up. I thought maybe I had the dates wrong, but when I called

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that hospital—St. Helen’s?—they said you got out a couple of weeks ago.”

“I decided to drive here,” Michael said.

“All the way from Toronto? Jesus, that’s a long way. They have planes now, you know, Michael.”

Michael shrugged. “I felt like driving.”

It was something he didn’t feel like explaining. The fact was, he’d used some of the money his father had left him to buy a Nissan Patrol and had set out across the continent, following Route 1 all the way to the Rockies and across them before eventually turning north on Route 97 toward Williams Lake. He’d stayed in cheap motels, spending only as much time in them as he needed to sleep. The rest of the time he was either driving or sitting in diners at night sipping a beer and watching people come and go. A lot of the time he ate junk food, stopping at a Dairy Queen or a McDonald’s. The food in prison, and after that at St. Helen’s, had featured hamburgers and the like on a regular basis, but he’d learned that it was small things that people on the inside missed the most. For him, one of those things had been the particular taste of a Big Mac, even though it was something he’d hardly ever eaten before his life had disintegrated in such spectacular fashion. He supposed it had something to do with missing what he couldn’t have, and maybe it was just a way of stopping him thinking about the other, more important things he’d lost in his life. Maybe he should have mentioned it to Heller. The psychiatrist would have rubbed the side of his forehead with one finger and given that small disarming shrug. “What do you think, Michael?” He said that a lot, and sometimes Michael had wondered why he needed Heller at all if he had to figure everything out for himself.

Driving to Little River Bend had been a way of getting used to the idea of having his freedom again. It had felt good to be surrounded by empty spaces, and every now and then he’d felt the need to stop just so he could walk around. Flying to Vancouver and then catching a local plane to Williams Lake would have made the transition all too sudden, the change too abrupt for him to absorb. He’d needed time to adjust, to prepare himself and think about things, though in all honesty he’d done precious little of that. All the way, a trepidation about returning had grown in him, to the point where

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he’d considered just turning back. He didn’t, however, say any of this to Carl.

Carl’s secretary tapped lightly on the door and came in carrying takeout coffee cups and a paper-wrapped bagel that she put on the desk. Michael saw the way she leaned over from the side, making sure she didn’t get too close, and when he thanked her, she still wouldn’t look directly at him. Carl didn’t seem to notice anything amiss and started unwrapping his sandwich.

“You want cream or sugar?” he said with his mouth full.

“No thanks.” The secretary left them, and when she’d gone Michael said, “I think she’s wary of me.”

Carl looked to the door, his eyebrows rising. “Jenny? What makes you say that?”

“Just a feeling, I guess.”

Carl waved his hand. “She’s young. Don’t worry about her.”

Carl started sorting through stuff on his desk while he drank his coffee and chewed his bagel vigorously. “By the way, Karen said to say hi when I saw you.”

“Karen?”

“My wife, you remember Karen White? We’ve got a couple of kids …” He passed over a photograph, then his expression fell. “Hell, me and my big mouth. I guess you probably don’t want to hear my happy-family talk. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s okay,” Michael assured him.

A moment passed and Carl said, “You mind if I ask about your wife? I mean, have you seen her?”

“We’re divorced now.”

“You had a little girl, right? What was her name?”

“Holly.” A picture of her sprung to Michael’s mind, the way she’d been when he’d last seen her, just a baby. He didn’t even know if the picture was accurate, or if it was simply a generic image of a baby. She would be almost eight years old now, he realized, and he had no idea what she looked like. He was aware that Carl was watching him, no doubt trying to decipher the thoughts in his mind. For a second, a silence enveloped them. Then, when Michael didn’t volunteer any other information, Carl moved on.

“Anyway, I’d call Karen up so she could come in and see you herself, but I know she’s tied up with some meeting she had to go to. Something to do with school.” He waved his hand airily.

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Michael looked at the photo and did recall Karen White. She’d been kind of a chubby blonde with an unnerving lazy eye that sometimes drifted inward. The picture showed Carl and Karen beaming smiles at the camera, two well-fed children in front of them.

“She’ll be sorry she missed you,” Carl said, his smile slipping back into place.

“I’ll see her around, I expect.”

“Oh, sure.” Carl appeared vaguely puzzled, then the feeling was gone. “Anyway, I guess you want to get down to business,” he said, becoming brisk.

He appeared happier dealing with straightforward issues that held no minefield of misunderstandings. He picked up a folder and started to read from it. “Everything’s pretty much as I told you when I wrote. There’s the house, of course, which is kind of in a poor way, which you’d expect after being empty for so long, but it’s not too bad. I had someone go out and take a look for you. The roof needs fixing in a couple of places and it could use a coat of paint, but nothing serious. Then there’s your dad’s old store. As you know, his insurance covered the mortgage when he died, so that’s freehold as well.”

“I saw it on the way in,” Michael said, thinking of the black papered-over windows. “I see Greerman’s is still there.”

“Yeah, I guess nothing much changes in a town like this,” Carl said. He flicked over a page and looked down a column of figures. “The money your dad left has been sitting in an account at the bank since he died. The taxes have had to be paid from it over the years, so the amount’s reduced a fair bit even after interest, but there’s still almost twenty thousand.”

Carl paused and looked as if he were about to say something, and Michael knew Carl had to be curious about why he’d never touched the money before, and why he hadn’t sold the house and store instead of just leaving them empty all these years. “More like eight,” Michael said, explaining that he’d bought the Nissan, and whatever had been in Carl’s mind he put it aside and went back to the sheet in front of him.

“Right, okay.” He made a note. “All the same, you’re not exactly destitute when you add it all up. Of course, you won’t get big-city prices here, but it should be enough to get you started again.”

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Michael nodded, though his mind had been wandering. He went over to the window and looked down to the street.

Carl watched him, then got up and stood beside him. “You’ve had a hard time over these last years, Michael. I think I know how it must feel. That’s why I’m glad to give you some good news.”

Down in the street, a snowplow had stopped at the side of the road. A truck pulled up, and a guy got out and started talking to the man who looked to be in charge of the plow. Michael watched them, then turned his attention to a woman with two young children who pulled up in a big Ford F250 and started taking bags out of the front seat. The roof of her truck was covered in a layer of snow. Winter this year had been comparatively mild. He could remember when, as a boy, it had been forty below here in February and the snow five feet thick. He tore himself away, realizing that Carl was waiting for him to say something.

“Good news?” Michael echoed.

“Things’ll get better for you now, you’ll see,” Carl assured him. “You’ll be able to put all this behind you. Hell, I know it’s easy for me to say that when I haven’t been through everything you have, but you have to think positively about life. In a couple of years, you won’t even remember all this.”

“I appreciate the sentiment,” Michael said, uncertain where this was heading.

Carl put his arm around Michael’s shoulder. “Well, what did you expect? We’ve known each other for a long time. Times like this, old friends need to stick together. Soon as I heard you were getting released, I started putting this thing together.”

Michael allowed himself to be guided back toward the desk, puzzled as to how his relationship with Carl had been promoted to that of old friends. As far as he could recall, they’d had little to do with each other in the time he’d lived in Little River, and since then the only correspondence between them had related to his father’s estate. Carl’s overfriendliness held the smooth oil of insincerity.

“Anyway, I guess you’re keen to hear the details.” Carl sat down again at his desk and started looking through some papers.

“Details?”

“I think you’re going to like this, Michael. I didn’t say anything earlier, because I thought it would kind of be a nice surprise for you.” He handed over a sheet of paper for Michael to look at. “Now, I got

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to tell you, the first offer this guy made was way too low. I told him that, I said you wouldn’t even be interested. I got him up to what I think you’ll agree is a fair deal.”

Michael looked over the figures, still unsure what Carl was talking about.

“So where will you go, anyway? Back East?”

It took a minute for Michael to see the assumption Carl had made, and for a few moments they sat in silence, Carl’s brow beginning to furrow with unease, or puzzlement, or both. “I’m not selling,” Michael said eventually. The sheet of paper, he belatedly understood, was an offer on the house and store. This was Carl’s good news.

“You’re not selling?” Carl blinked. “I don’t get it.”

“I mean I’m staying here, Carl.”

Carl took off his glasses and stared hard at the lenses while he polished them with a handkerchief he took from his pocket. His smile remained frozen on his face, but it looked forced, as if it were threatening to be swept away without his full consent. Eventually he looked up. “You mean you’re planning to live here? In Little River?”