Cold Heart Page 5

  She put the finishing touches to her soldering and studied the shards of glass remaining on the table. Several were cut to fit but never used. Others lay farther from her hand, different shades and variations of the swirling interior colors, uncut, in case she chose to replace one of the pieces. One lay by itself, exiled. Its hue and the distinct coloration had been exactly what she wanted.

  It irritated her that she had not been paying attention when she cut it.

  Usually a piece of glass broke along the fault lines created with the scribe or allowed itself to be nibbled with her special cutting pliers. But sometimes, for myriad reasons—pressure of the tool, inconsistent force from her hands, or just the unpredictable obstinacy of an inanimate object—the glass would not break cleanly. Instead, it fractured through the layer of glass itself, creating microthin, jagged edges that were sharper than razors.

  She called pieces like that scalpel glass.

  She'd recut it and use it somewhere else.

  The spring light through her windows was perfect for stained-glass work. In early May the sun hung over the Kuskokwim Mountains like a light peeking over the top of a miner's helmet, shining golden onto her table. Although at this time of year the sun came up officially sometime after five in the morning and didn't set until ten at night, the high, snowcapped mountains on three sides bathed McRay in almost perpetual twilight.

  In the bush, the light and the weather were king.

  Although spring was capable of flooding the narrow valley with verdant life, it was just as likely to bury it under a sudden snow squall or flood the plains below with weeks of torrential rain that turned the wide, placid, Kuskokwim River into a snarling deluge of ferocious power. Snow could bury the mountains in a night and then the next day the sun and warm Chinook winds could melt it all. Or send it roaring downhill in deadly destructive avalanches that ripped gaping wounds in the forest.

  Outside, jays screeched at the ravens, fighting over the leavings of last night's dinner. Micky knew she shouldn't be throwing food so close to the cabin. But the birds were so thick this time of year that they'd clean up every scrap before a grizzly could get wind of it. Besides, the big bruisers were just starting to come out.

  There was a scratching cry as one of the birds chased another away from its food, and then silence.

  It was as though the entire world had taken a deep breath.

  She rested both hands on the table and waited for the birds to begin squabbling again.

  It had taken her a long time to become accustomed to the silence in McRay. There was a world of difference between hearing the traffic outside your bedroom window and listening to the low soughing of a night wind under your eave. Of being accustomed to the wail of sirens and hearing nothing more for hours on end than a willow ptarmigan flapping through the brush.

  Was it even quieter than usual?

  It was four years since Houston. The temperature range was an average of sixty degrees lower and the population was a few million less.

  But it was the quiet that had taken the most getting used to.

  Micky finished fitting the stone and set the iron back down in the coals of the woodstove. The window was finished. Of course there were always areas to improve. She would keep retouching and polishing forever if she didn't force herself to say enough. Over the past weeks she had removed and replaced dozens of pieces of glass, searching for just the right balance of color and light. Chasing the perfection she saw only in her head.

  But Cary at the Mendenhall Gallery was getting antsy. Clive Cabel had stopped by yesterday with a phone message from her. The gallery owner wanted the piece on the next mail plane and that would be coming in around five o'clock. But occasionally Rich was early.

  She walked around the table, studying the stained-glass window.

  It wasn't perfect.

  But they never were.

  She could almost see something good in the piece.

  Something magical.

  If she removed this piece of glass and replaced that one. If she reshaped that corner. If she made the work less a depiction of fish and more a study of light and shade…

  She pulled her hand away.

  She glanced at the crate in the corner and made up her mind. Time to pack it up.

  You can't hold on to your babies forever.

  By the time she had the window safely stored in the wooden crate it was almost lunchtime and her stomach was starting to grumble. She pulled a can of milk down from the shelf over the woodstove and poured a bowl of granola. She opened a can of butter—one of those odd, long-shelf-life foodstuffs that bush villagers accepted as standard fare— smeared a generous helping on the biscuits left over from last night's dinner, and carried the meal over to the table, pulling up a three-legged stool.

  Her cabin was comfortable, with one large living area downstairs and an open sleeping loft above, without being too big for her to take care of. When she moved in, it had three large fixed windows and she had spent much of her first summer creating and installing three more stained-glass ones. The window in the loft opened to allow cross ventilation between it and the front and rear doors. The doors themselves were massive affairs with black, hand-wrought iron hinges and locks and hand-carved spruce planks with X-braced interiors.

  She glanced around the cabin and thought of Houston.

  Has it really been four years already?

  McRay was home to her now. It seemed as though she had stepped out of Zeke's plane that day and found not a strange, unfamiliar land, but a refuge.

  Outside, the jays were screaming their heads off again.

  12:00

  DAWN GLORIANUS STARED AT their wet clothing, laid out on grass still brown from winter. The clearing on this side of their cabin was covered with a patchwork lawn. Her mother insisted that the washing smelled better if it dried that way rather than on a line.

  Snow circled the spruce trees around the cabin where the bases of the big conifers were shaded from the sun. The temperature was barely in the fifties. But it was warm enough for Dawn's mother, Terry, to decide that it was time for spring cleaning. Every item of winter gear, every blanket, every pair of long johns, every sock was washed clean by hand in the big galvanized tub that doubled as their bath.

  Terry knelt over the frothy water, sliding a sheet up and down the washboard, her shoulders heaving. Dawn glanced at the handkerchief in her own right hand. Terry had finished washing it but Dawn didn't know where to put it yet. And she was more concerned with her mother's anger. When Terry got in one her moods, there was no sense talking to her. Dawn knew that she had incited Terry's wrath even if Dawn didn't think it was her fault.

  Dawn hated McRay.

  In McRay, people lived like animals. They did dumb things like washing their clothes in a tub. Stupid things, like putting them on the lawn to dry. Even though the temperature would drop to freezing the second the sun dipped over the mountains. Even though the clothes would all be frozen solid in the morning, anyway. In McRay you got your schooling through the mail. And if you ever had any notion of meeting a boy, you could just forget it.

  Dawn didn't know much about how her counterparts lived, Outside. But she was pretty sure from her voluminous reading that they met people of the opposite sex, had things called dates, and did other wonderful things that she was still two long years away from getting to experience.

  As soon as she turned eighteen, on that very day, McRay, Alaska, would be history.

  But all Dawn had said, this time, was that she was old enough to fly into Anchorage by herself. She didn't need to be chaperoned on a yearly shopping trip. She could stay with her pen pal, Judith.

  That was all Terry needed to hear. She blew up. Just as Dawn was afraid that she would.

  But for Terry a blowup wasn't like a temper tantrum for the normal parent. Terry didn't scream or throw things. She didn't stomp around their cabin and slap her hands against her sides or sit and slowly heat up like a tea kettle.

  Terry cleaned.


  She swept the floor until bristles snapped off the broom.

  Then she mopped.

  She slopped scalding water onto the bare floorboards and swung the mop like it was a hockey stick until soap suds clung to the walls.

  She pulled every plate and pot out of the cupboards and dusted them and the cabinets.

  She polished the inside of their two windows until Dawn was sure she'd wipe the glass right out of the frames. Then she went outside and scrubbed the other side of the windows.

  And then she started washing clothes.

  She hauled bucket after bucket up from the North Fork, heating them over the glowing woodstove that made it too uncomfortable to stay inside the cabin. She kept two buckets heating on the stove as she beat piece after piece of clothing and linens to death against the washboard.

  But Dawn knew that Terry was cooling off now. Pretty soon the spring inside her that was all wound up would wind down, and then she'd be able to talk almost like a normal human being again.

  Terry wiped her forehead with the damp sleeve of her calico shirt. Her shoulders sagged. When she dropped back onto her haunches and rested her hands on the tub, Dawn approached her quietly.

  “I'm sorry, Mom,” she said.

  Terry turned slowly and looked up into her daughter's dark eyes. Dawn stood motionless under her mother's inspection. There was love on Terry's face.

  Love.

  Anguish.

  Fear.

  And something else.

  Something too terrifying for Dawn to want to try to understand.

  Terry stood and wiped her hands on her jeans. They were chapped, worn hands. But the fingers were long and delicate. She was still a beautiful woman and Dawn had inherited her good looks from both sides of the family. A winning smile and lanky build from her father. High cheekbones and dark hair from her mother.

  “You don't know what it's like out there, honey,” said Terry. “They killed your father.”

  Dawn didn't want to fight the same old battle. There was no argument that would convince her mother that there was no they. That her father had been killed by a crazy act of violence. He'd been an innocent bystander, shot in a holdup. It could have happened to anyone.

  “When I'm eighteen I'm going to leave,” said Dawn.

  “I can't stop you.”

  “But you won't come,” said Dawn. She didn't want to leave her mother. She just wanted to get the hell out of McRay.

  “No,” said Terry, looking around the small clearing, at the high peaks, at the azure sky that had no match anywhere else in the world. “No. This is where I live.”

  “You can't hide from the world, Mom,” said Dawn.

  “Yes, you can.” Terry bent to heave the soapy water out onto the ground. Dawn watched it form a rivulet then seep into the soggy soil, like blood into a bandage.

  “People die out here, too,” said Dawn. But she had no proof of that. No one had died in McRay in her lifetime.

  A jay leaped from its perch in a dead spruce and screamed away, angry. Terry and Dawn watched it go. Boots crunched on the trail that led along the creek and Dawn knew immediately who it was. El Hoskins.

  She turned away, acting as though she hadn't heard, and slipped behind the cabin. She didn't like El and didn't want to have to be polite to him. Terry had told her on numerous occasions that she needed to act friendlier. El was their neighbor and he had always treated both of them with respect. But there was just something about El that always gave Dawn the creeps. The way he insisted on being called Eldred for one thing even though everyone in town called him El behind his back. Everyone except for Dawn's mother.

  She heard her mother say hi and, to Dawn's dismay, El replied. He wasn't continuing down the trail. He was stopping to talk.

  Great.

  Dawn slumped against the logs of the cabin, twisting the wet handkerchief in her hands. The rough bark jabbed her back and she scrunched around, getting comfortable.

  “Going to the store?” asked Terry.

  “Mmm,” said El. Dawn could hear his boots, closer now, crunching in the gravel outside the cabin door.

  “Nice day for it,” said Terry.

  “Mmm,” said El. That was another one of the things that drove Dawn crazy, the way he talked. You had to drag words out of him. That and those stupid sunglasses he wore all the time. He looked like a janitor trying to look like a movie star. He was skinny and tall and his shirts were always pulling out of the back of his pants.

  Dawn knew without sneaking a peek that he had that big.44 magnum pistol on his hip. The gun looked like it would weigh him down enough to flip him over. He always walked with his hand on it as though he was ready to do a quick draw.

  Dawn had overheard Stan Herbst and Marty Kiley making fun of El one day down at Cabels’ Store. But her mother had shaken her head and pulled her away from the conversation.

  “He's a nice man,” Terry had said. “But I wish he wouldn't carry that gun. It makes me nervous.”

  “All guns make you nervous,” Dawn replied.

  “You're right,” said Terry. “But I guess people need them here. Not like in the city.”

  But Dawn didn't think El carried the gun for protection. She figured he carried it for show. She'd seen him down at the store, watching himself in the window when he didn't know anyone else was looking.

  “Could I have a cup of coffee?”

  El's question shook Dawn out of her reverie.

  Coffee?

  El had never been in their house before. Never been invited.

  Now he's inviting himself in?

  Terry took a minute answering.

  “Sure, Eldred,” she said. “You all right?”

  “Mmm,” said El.

  Dawn peeked around the corner. Her mother peered at El curiously but he just stared through her with those stupid mirror glasses. Terry headed into the house. El glanced around and almost spotted Dawn, but she jerked back.

  “Where's your daughter?” he said.

  Terry's answer was muffled by the thick, bark-sided logs. A pot clanged on the stove. There was another stretch of silence and then the bang of another pot hitting the floor.

  What the hell?

  Terry's scream sliced the air like scissors slashing thick cloth. At the sound, Dawn raced around the corner of the house toward the door. It was darker inside and the figures seemed more silhouettes than real people.

  Her mother screamed again.

  Another pot hit the floor. Then another.

  But they weren't falling from the cabinets.

  They were being ripped out of them.

  A terrible clamor erupted as Terry clawed the last of the pots and dishware out of the cupboards. She wasn't screaming now. The noise that made its way out of her mouth was a throaty gurgle that terrified Dawn.

  Terry must have turned to get the coffee from the canister and El had pulled the big hunting knife that he wore in the sheath on his boot.

  As Dawn watched, paralyzed, El brought the knife up again, and then again, plunging it down so deep between Terry's shoulder blades the hilt hit her bloody shirt. Each time he had to lean his elbow against her back to lever it out of her flesh.

  Terry's head sagged forward and she slumped over the counter as he continued to stab her limp body, following it down until he was on his knees above her. The blood pooled so wide and thick on the floor that Dawn thought it would never stop. That it would run in a river past her feet and turn the Fork itself crimson.

  Terry's face was twisted toward the door. Dawn was riveted by her mother's eyes and her strangely calm expression. Dawn had anticipated surprise. Something like this was surely the last thing her mother expected to happen in McRay.

  No one ever died here.

  El fumbled, trying to wrench the knife out again. Another horrible guttural noise bubbled from Terry's lips, and Dawn gasped. El spun. He was an alien, with a humanoid face and giant glassine eyes.

  Dawn couldn't comprehend what was happening
. Couldn't figure out how to get her body to listen to her mind. Her mind kept screaming for her to run. But she couldn't move.

  El struggled to his feet, leaving the giant knife pinning her mother to the floor.

  He whipped the huge black Ruger out of its holster and pointed it at her.

  She backed away two steps but she was still looking down the barrel of the gun that seemed large enough for her to crawl into.

  She wondered if she would see the huge gray bullet coming at her eyes.

  12:10

  MICKY STOOD ON HER front stoop, staring at the trail that forked in her front yard. One path led directly through the woods to Cabels’ Store. The other followed the creek, from the store all the way up the valley to Aaron McRay's cabin.

  Creek or woods?

  She was in a hurry. Clive might be busy and she wanted to be certain he could make time to pick up the crate.

  She chose the woods.

  But she had hardly started down the trail when a highpitched screech stopped her. It sounded for all the world like a woman screaming. Micky listened for a moment but heard nothing more. She wrote the sound off to the crying of a jay.

  Then the pop pop of two muted gunshots stopped her again. The shots had come from across the creek. She turned in that direction.

  Either Stan or Marty had hit a find. They always fired their rifles when they did.

  Their claims and Damon's ran along three hundred yards of the South Fork and they had four different sluices set up there, long washboard affairs where they had diverted part of the stream.

  Damon's claim was just this side of Marty and Stan's. But it wasn't Damon shooting. He hadn't worked on his claim since the year before. And Damon hated guns. His experience with violence was mostly secondhand. But it had scared him, nonetheless.

  In the four years since she'd moved to McRay, Damon had spoken less and less of the experiences that had driven him to leave his profession. But she understood the internal pressures that had forced him into the life change. And she understood why he didn't want to have anything to do with guns. Vegler had killed his victims with a.22 rifle.