Winter at the Door (2 page)

In addition, the sheriff’s department served court orders and warrants, moved prisoners and psych patients, worked with the Maine DEA, the warden service, Border Patrol, and Homeland Security, and staffed a seventy-two-bed county jail; the transport detail alone logged 160,000 miles per year.

And none of it could afford to get screwed up just because she was a new deputy. She’d need an experienced partner for a while before working a patrol assignment on her own; that much she’d understood.

Eventually, though, she’d be out there solo: keeping her eyes and ears open, asking polite questions and maybe a few not-so-polite ones. Searching—

And sooner or later finding. If, that is, it turned out that there was really anything—any
one
—up here to find …

Out of the blue, Chevrier asked the question she’d seen on his face when he’d first met her in person the day before.

“So, you will pass the physical, right?”

The Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department’s mandatory pre-employment fitness test, he meant. Sit-ups, push-ups, a mile-and-a-half run … all required in order to finalize her hiring.

“Yeah,” she replied, controlling her impatience. Back in Boston, where she’d been a homicide detective until a few weeks ago
—dear God, was it only that long?
—she’d done those things religiously at
the police academy gym on Williams Avenue. Six days a week, sometimes seven …

Usually seven. It was among the joys of being a woman cop: to the dirtbags—and to some of your coworkers, too, though they’d deny it—you were a pushover until proven otherwise. So there was no sense allowing for even the slightest chance of it being true; on a good day, she bench-pressed 220. She just didn’t look like she could, or at any rate not at first glance.

Short, spiky black hair expertly cut, blood-red nails matching her lipstick, and smoky-dark eye makeup meticulously applied took care of that, as did her scent, which was Guerlain’s Rose Barbare, and her high-heeled black boots rising to the tops of her tightly muscled calves, snug as a second skin.

She had no uniforms here yet, so today she wore black jeans, a white silk T-shirt and navy hoodie, and a butter-soft leather jacket. The look wasn’t fancy, but perhaps partly as a result of all those gym hours it was effective; exiting Chevrier’s vehicle, she’d attracted second glances from several of Bearkill’s passing citizens, some even approving.

Some not so much. Hey, screw them. “I’ll do just fine,” she repeated evenly, “on the fitness tests.”

“Okay,” Chevrier replied.
If you say so
, his face added, but not as doubtfully this time; whether it was the confidence in her voice, a closer appraisal of her gym-toned form, or a combination of the two that convinced him, she didn’t know.

Or care. “In that case, you’re the new community liaison officer here in Bearkill,” he said. “First one we’ve ever had.”

Gesturing at the dingy room, he added, “I’ll set you up with account numbers for furniture and supplies, and we’ve got people on contract to get the place cleaned and painted for you.”

On the way here, he’d explained that her assignment had changed because a federal grant he’d been expecting to lose had come through after all. So he had funding for this new position.

But he hadn’t described her duties, an omission she thought odd. Could it be he believed that being from a big city meant she already
knew the usual activities and objectives of such a job? Or … was she supposed to invent them herself?

Her hiring had been fast-tracked, too: a mere two weeks between the time he’d learned that she was in the coastal Maine town of Eastport—her first stop after leaving Boston—and this morning’s paperwork.

It was another thing she felt curious about: why he’d been so interested in her, and in her homicide experience especially. She made a mental note to ask him about all of it if he didn’t volunteer the information soon, just as a husky teenager on an old balloon-tired Schwinn bike pedaled by the big front window.

Sporting a nose stud and a silvery lip ring and with his pale hair twisted into utterly improbable-looking dreadlocks, the kid wore faded jeans and a drab T-shirt and was tattooed on all visible parts of his body except his face.

Really?
she thought in surprise. So apparently not every young male in Aroostook County was a good old boy; she wondered if Tattoo Kid here was a skilled fighter, or if he survived looking the way he did by trading something other than punches.

“… department credit card for gas, but we do repairs back at the house,” Chevrier was saying, meaning that vehicles were taken care of in Houlton, she thought, likely through a local car dealer’s service department.

Which as news was not earthshaking, nor was the rest of the procedural stuff he was reciting. Lizzie slipped a hand into her jacket pocket and withdrew a creased photograph of a little girl who was about nine years old.

The child had straight, shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyes, and wore a red, white, and blue striped cape of some shiny material; she held a small banner that read
HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

I’m coming, honey
, Lizzie thought at the photograph, worn from frequent handling.
I’ll find you. And when I do …

She tucked the picture away again. It was why she had left Boston, why she was here in Maine at all: an anonymous tip, her first hint in years that she had living family after all. But she still didn’t know the end of that last sentence.

When I do … then what?

“… get yourself a PO box right away so we can send you your paychecks,” Chevrier was saying.

She wasn’t even sure that the child in the photograph was the one she sought. Her younger sister Cecily’s infant daughter, Nicolette, had gone missing from Eastport eight years earlier, right after Cecily’s own mysterious death.

If she wasn’t a sad little pile of bones in an unmarked grave somewhere, Nicki was Lizzie’s only living kin, and after a long time of believing the child was dead there’d been other hints recently, too, that instead she was somewhere in northern Maine.

But Lizzie wasn’t sure of that, either, and anyway, northern Maine was a big place. There was, she realized for the thousandth time, so much she didn’t know.

I should have done more, started sooner
.

I shouldn’t have just let it go
.

But she had; for one thing, she’d needed to earn a living, and there was no undoing any of it now. Tattoo Kid pedaled by the front windows a second time, his eyes meeting hers briefly and then looking quickly away again as Chevrier went on:

“I’ll get a requisition going for your computer stuff, have a carpet crew come up from Bangor …”

She turned to him. “No.”

His brow furrowed. “So … what, you mean you’ve decided that you don’t want the spot?”

For a moment she was tempted; she’d have loved telling him to take his job and stick it. After all, who offered somebody one position, then waited until they showed up before informing them that it had turned into something entirely different? But …

“Oh, I’m taking it.” She crossed to the desk, grabbed the phone book, and threw it into a corner. Who used a phone book anymore, either? “But only on two conditions. First …”

She aimed a finger at the front window. “You want me to build friendly relationships with the people here in Bearkill? I mean, that’s what a liaison officer does, right?”

She had the funniest feeling that Chevrier might not know quite what one of those did himself. But never mind:

“There’s only one way I can quick-start relationships with these folks—”

At the far end of the downtown block, the office supply store was somehow still alive, while at the other end a run-down gas station survived, as did the tiny convenience store attached.

“—and that’s for me to buy stuff from them.”

Which was also true in Boston, and anywhere else there were cops: coffee and a lottery ticket at the bodega, an apple at the fruit stand, sandwiches at the luncheonette—you bought a little of this or that anywhere you thought you might get the chance to talk to people, hear things.

“Supplies, cleaning, painting, new tires for the squad car whether it needs ’em or not,” she went on. “All of it has to get done locally. And as for computer equipment?”

She turned to face him. “Look, Sheriff, I’ve got my own reasons for wanting the job you’re trying to foist on me, okay? So I’m not walking away even though you know damned well you absolutely deserve it.”

He shrugged again, acknowledging this. “But,” she went on, “as far as computers and printer paper and everything else this place needs?”

She waved a hand around the bleak little storefront. “Either that office supply joint down the street is about to hit a big payday,
and
my car gets serviced here in town, or you can forget you met me.”

She expected pushback about the car, at least; regulations, routine. But instead he kept nodding at her demands, which among other things gave her an even stronger sense of how very much he wanted her here.

Curiouser and curiouser. “Okay,” he said. “That makes sense. Do it however you want. You’ll need purchase orders, but …”

“Not so fast. You haven’t heard the other condition.”

Chevrier looked wary—“What’s that?”—as the tattooed kid on the bike rolled by yet a third time.

Briskly she zipped her jacket, settled her black leather satchel on her shoulder, and pulled the creaky front door open, waving him out ahead of her.

“Come on,” she told him.

The kid with the piercings, body art, and blond dreadlocks was now halfway down the street, looking back at them. She yanked the balky door shut, then jiggled the key in the lock until the tumblers fell sluggishly.

“I’m hungry. We’ll talk over lunch. You’re buying.”

There he is!
Sighing in relief, Margaret Brantwell hurried down the canned goods aisle of the Food King in Bearkill. She’d looked away for only a moment, she was certain, and when she looked back her year-old grandson’s stroller wasn’t where she’d left it, parked by the frozen foods case.

Oh, if Missy knew that I’d lost track of him even for an instant, she’d
—

Well, she wouldn’t let Margaret take care of him anymore if that happened. But Margaret adored her daughter’s baby boy, she’d be desolate if she couldn’t—

“Mrs. Brantwell?” The store manager stood by the stroller. A clerk was there, too, looking worried. Both frowned accusingly at Margaret.

“Mrs. Brantwell, we were just about to call the police. The baby’s been here all alone for ten minutes, we didn’t know—”

“Ten minutes?” Margaret glanced around. Everyone was looking at her. And the baby was crying; she crouched hurriedly by him.

“Oh, no, I’ve been right here, I was—”

But then she stopped as it hit her with a horrible internal lurch that she didn’t remember where she’d been, didn’t recall the moment when she’d walked away from the baby in his stroller.

That she didn’t know how long she’d been gone. Defensively she grabbed up the baby, cradling him against her chest.

“I was just down the aisle, I can’t imagine how you missed seeing me. You must not have been trying very hard.”

There, turn it around on them, see how
they
liked it. Poor little Jeffrey wailed fiercely, his face squinched and reddened.

“There, there,” she soothed him. “Did all these strangers scare you, baby? There, it’s okay, Grandma’s got you now.”

A red-aproned clerk hurried up pushing a grocery cart. “Oh, Mrs. Brantwell, there you are, you left your—”

Margaret drew back. “
That’s
not mine!” She hugged Jeffrey closer. His cries grew louder. She felt like crying now, too, surrounded by these unpleasant strangers all trying to tell her things that weren’t true.

The items in the cart—milk, lettuce, coffee beans
—might
be hers. But where did that huge chocolate bar come from, and the cheap wine? And the jug of motor oil wasn’t even from this store.

They were trying to trick her, that’s what it was. But it wouldn’t work, because she was too smart for them.
Can’t pull one over on Margaret
, her father used to say, and it was still …

Grabbing the stroller’s handles, she whirled and stalked away from them, all the foolish people with the unfriendly looks on their faces. Outside the store, she carried Jeffrey to the car and put him in his car seat, buckling him in carefully the way she had promised Missy she would always do.

Then she settled behind the wheel and sat there for a moment to gather her thoughts, get over the awful fright she’d had.

There, that’s better
, she thought as her heart slowed. Even Jeffrey calmed down, sucking energetically on his pacifier, his sweet little face relaxing, so cute in his blue knitted hat.

She’d made him that hat. If she could find where she’d put the yarn, she might make mittens. Meanwhile …

She looked around at the busy parking lot outside the Food King, people bustling back and forth with their carts in the cold November sunshine. It was a lovely day.

Just lovely, and the drive down here to the store had been so easy and uneventful, she didn’t even remember it.

She turned to the baby. “Jeffrey, we’re here! We’re at the store, and now we’re going to go in. Are you ready?”

He grinned, waving his pacifier in his chubby fist. She got out and found his stroller waiting by the passenger-side door as if someone had put it there for her. She looked around mystified, then decided that it was too nice a day to worry about it.

Blue sky, crisp air … now, what exactly had she come to the store
for, again? She’d made a list but she must have left it at home. She was always doing that.
Silly. Getting so forgetful
.

“Never mind,” she told Jeffrey as she pushed him across the parking lot in the stroller. Such a beautiful baby, she simply adored him, and felt so grateful that Missy allowed her to take care of him the way she did.
My grandson …

At the entrance she slowed uncertainly; the store looked so unfamiliar all of a sudden. But how could it? She’d been here
—surely she had
—a thousand times before. Only—