Mercy Snow (14 page)

T
he dead, no matter how long passed, love nothing more than attention and remembrance, to hear their names flitting from living tongue to living tongue. When it comes to that, there is nothing like a good funeral, even if it is not their own. Certainly this was the case with Gert Snow. Reunited with the air, dancing once again on the lips of the townspeople, Gert’s newly freed spirit began kicking up mischief. She started with the burial of Suzie Flyte.

The day dawned eerily warm over Titan Falls, slushing up the neat sheets of ice that had formed on the river, making a mess of the path in front of the church. Stella Farnsworth felt the first insinuation of a flutter in her belly. When she went to change into black for the service an hour later, she found a foot-shaped bruise smeared on her skin that would remain there for the rest of her pregnancy. All through town, people’s measures of cream curdled in coffee, shower water ran to freezing before scalding, and mice frolicked in pantries.

Cal woke earlier than usual that morning with a pounding headache and the feeling that something heavy and insistent was sitting on his chest. For a moment, groggy with sleep, he thought it was their old cat, Moss, before he remembered that it had been
years since the beast had been alive. Groaning a little, he threw the covers aside. June shifted in her sleep, her arm snaking across the bed toward him, but he evaded her and stood.

She cracked an eyelid. “Do you want coffee?”

“No.” Cal slid on the pants he’d left draped over the armchair in the corner. “You sleep. I’m going to check on a few things at the mill. I’ll see you later at St. Bart’s.”

June had half hitched herself up on one elbow. “But your suit…”

Cal found the garment bag hanging on the closet door and hooked it over his arm. “I’ll change in my office. Go back to sleep.”

With a mumble, June complied, burrowing herself back in the covers and rolling onto her side. Cal observed her for a moment, her body so well known to his, even after all its changes. When they’d met, she’d been as narrow and pliable as a ribbon, and then, pregnant with Nate, she’d been plump as a summer pheasant. Lately the angles of her youth seemed to have vanished forever. Her body lacked the pleasing tenderness it had once possessed. Was it the slight weight gain she’d suffered over the past few years? Simply the beginning of the descent into life’s second half? Cal didn’t know. He missed the girlish June, however, and the way her plaid skirts used to dance just above her knees, though if he were being honest, he knew that this yearning said more about him than it did her. Now when June wore skirts, she wore them longer, if she bothered to wear them at all.

The woman he’d been seeing in Berlin had no such qualms about showing off her legs or anything else. Bryga, her name was. She was a Polish-American girl, a waitress he’d met at the soda fountain, a single mother to a small son. The boy’s father had been killed in a logging accident, but she didn’t like to talk
about him. She didn’t like to talk much at all, in fact, and at first that was what Cal thought he wanted. It was enough—to help himself to someone young and maybe a little dumb, to someone so close to home who was nothing like it.

At least he’d thought so before this mess with the bus crash. Now his throat closed up every time he recalled his quick conversation with Suzie outside the movie theater in Berlin. In exchange for the girl’s discretion about Bryga, he’d promised to restore her father’s mill job. It had seemed such a simple bargain at the time: her silence for his word of honor. Suzie hadn’t even needed to point out that Nate was sitting a mere fifty yards away, hunched in the dark of the movie theater. That was obvious. Where Suzie led, Nate followed. It had been like that since they were six damn years old. Cal had just forgotten all about the youth-group trip. He’d glanced uneasily at the theater doors, eager to wrap up the transaction.

When he remembered what happened next, his blood ran cold.

“If I hear one whisper about any of this, your father won’t just lose his place at the Titan Mill, he’ll lose his chance at any of them. Do you understand? You have to keep your mouth shut.”

And Suzie, with the same astonishing sass she’d had as a child, sneered. Displaying the sarcasm that only a teenage girl could produce, she’d looked him straight in the eye and made an X over her heart. “I promise,” she said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

T
he floor of the mill was blessedly empty when Cal arrived on the morning of the funeral, the machines gone quiet for Sunday, sculptural in their stillness, industrial hunks of oiled metal
and gears that lost all meaning unless they were spinning, whirling, spraying. In the storeroom great rolls of paper sat like blank gravestones or monuments, their significance indeterminable, yet to be written.

Cal made his way to the metal staircase leading up to his office and reached to turn on the light, but when he did, sparks jumped out and burned him, leaving an unpleasant ozone flare lingering about his nostrils. He cursed and examined his hand. There was a dusky brown spot burned into the pad of his thumb, staining the whorls of it. He stuck it in his mouth and pulled it out again, but the mark remained. Cursing even more, Cal clattered up the steps and let himself into his office, opening the blinds for light and throwing the garment bag over the back of a chair, rumpling his funeral suit surely, but he had much larger worries.

Below him the river spread its waters in wintry glory. Cal’s father, Henry, had deliberately relocated his office to this strategic spot, where he could keep an eye on the comings and goings of traffic to and from the mill. At this time of year, the river was well on its way to being iced to calm, but in spring and summer and all through the autumn the currents bubbled and churned. Once, even forty years ago, floats of logs had still been pushed down in this manner, the wood hauled out, dried, and sawed. Cal had seen old tintypes of jams that had gone on for miles and stood as tall as a three-story building. Now the lumber was trucked in, and, honestly, Cal was glad. It made for a quicker and more efficient delivery all the way around, fewer men hurt and less of the end product damaged.

Not that Cal had a call for half as much wood lately. It was hard to churn out roll after roll of clean white paper without making some kind of mess, and where was he supposed to put
it? When Cal was in college in the 1970s, the government passed the Clean Water Act, and in the years since, the state had turned ever more draconian about water quality, fining mills at the drop of a hat, for the least transgression. It was bullshit, Cal thought. Here he was paying through the nose to upgrade the converters and he’d still been nailed three times in the past five years for infractions. And he wasn’t alone. The King Mill had closed, he’d heard, and over in Maine the Horne operation was going down faster than a lead fishing lure. When business dropped in a mill, layoffs happened. And when layoffs began, so did union troubles. It was a twin vise that Cal didn’t see how to squirm out of.

He surveyed the icy riverbank below the window. Once again he felt the same pressure on his chest that he’d woken with. He stuck a finger under his collar and loosened it. Ever since the accident, he’d been vacillating between feeling like he was about to choke to death and the opposite, more alarming sensation of his entire existence loosening quickly, of a piece, and without his permission. Sweating a little, he sank into his desk chair and opened a book of accounts, the print swimming before his eyes, the awful truth of the accident filling his head.

So help him, but he’d been the one to pass Fergus on Devil’s Slide Road. He’d been hoping to beat the bus out of Berlin, but he’d had to drop Bryga off all the way at the other end of town and double back on himself, and by the time he’d reached Devil’s Slide Road, there was the old yellow bus wheezing ahead of him, gasping around the icy turns, shuddering along at the pace of a mule.

Cal considered his options. If he stayed behind the bus, he would risk everyone on it seeing him enter into town. June would collect Nate, head to the cabin, and then wonder where the hell he was. Word might get back to her about his late arrival
in town, and he’d have to explain. But if he overtook the bus, he could slip into the night, speed down by the mill, and take the road out to the cabin, arriving before June and Nate and leaving himself free of their questions.

He waited for a place where he knew the road stretched straight for a heartbeat and, without any hesitation, gunned his engine and passed the bus, hoping that none of the children—Nate most especially—would recognize his car in the dark. And then he was in front of Fergus. Another curve, more pressure on the accelerator, and he was free, shot into the darkness, the bus headlights having vanished in his rearview mirror.

It was a maneuver he’d done a hundred times before, mostly in the summer, true, and mostly when he was much younger, but never with disastrous consequences. So what had gone wrong? Cal turned a page of the ledger and wondered, his stomach queasy. Had he driven Fergus off the road? Fergus was getting older. His reflexes perhaps weren’t what they used to be. What if, startled, he’d wrenched the wheel too far in the wrong direction? Or had it been as simple as Fergus hitting a stray patch of ice on his side of the road, one he might have driven over anyway, with or without Cal zooming around him?

Cal hadn’t had any idea of the fact of the accident, not until June had come to the cabin with Nate and told him. His first thought had been an overwhelming horror of what he’d caused, followed by a violent flood of relief that Nate was standing in front of him, shaken and scared but physically fine. He listened, knowing he should confess, that he should say
something
, but before he could, June recounted how Abel had found Zeke Snow’s truck smashed into a tree a little way past the crash and how the boy had gone on the run. Cal hesitated, unsure what to make of this information, for he’d seen that, too, the smoking
hulk of Zeke’s pickup pushed up against a tree, steaming in the dark like a wounded animal, and he still hadn’t stopped.

Guilt had overcome him, and he’d been on the verge of doing what he knew he should and confessing everything when June interrupted him and told him about Suzie, sealing his lips forever.

He’d immediately pictured the mitten folded like a lover’s note in his overcoat pocket. Beads of sweat pearled along his spine and began to roll down his back, and the blood pounded in his ears with a single thought:
I have to get rid of it
.
No one can know.
Instead he’d gone up to bed feeling sick, and in the morning, when he’d stuck his hand in his pocket, the mitten had been gone. It had taken just one glance at June to ascertain that she’d been the one to dispose of it.
A hole in your pocket
, she said, her eyes locked on his, the open door she was standing in front of pushing a current of cold air over to him.
I patched it up.
But both he and she knew there’d never been a hole in the first place.

Cal closed the ledger and shoved it aside. It was useless trying to make heads or tails of the mill’s failing accounts when his personal affairs were so wildly out of order. He’d brought it all on himself, though, first by messing around with Bryga after he’d sworn up and down to June that no infidelities would ever happen again and then by passing the bus and not stopping when he’d spotted Zeke’s wrecked car. He hadn’t offered Fred Flyte his job back either. He wondered again what June had done with the mitten, knowing he would never ask her, and he reassured himself that burying Suzie was the first step in putting the whole mess behind him forever.

It didn’t feel that way, though. He gazed again out the window at the ice sheets on the river, slipping and bumping against one another. For one thing, in searching the crash site Abel had
gone and found goddamn Gert Snow’s bones, thereby uncovering a business Cal’s father and Cal himself had tried very hard to keep quiet. And then there was the question of Fergus. If he died, Cal would have even more potential blood on his hands, while if he lived, it could be worse yet. He might remember.