‘Got that out of your system?’ Wiley asked. He dug in the pocket of his coat and pulled out a manila envelope. ‘Here, take a look, these are your greatest hits. I printed stills, but I’ve got video, too.’
Janine opened the envelope and slid out one page. She recognized her own bare skin. And her lover’s. The closed eyes on her face. His naked back and her legs wrapped around him.
‘You’re disgusting,’ she snapped. ‘What do you want? Money?’
‘Well, I’m feeling a little torn here, Dr. Snow. I showed Jay what I got with my camera inside your little love nest. Since the police didn’t find it, I’m guessing he destroyed what I gave him. Or maybe you did, who knows. Anyway, I figure it’s my civic duty to do something with this. Jay’s dead. I should really hand everything I found over to the police, you know? Or heck, if I was a mercenary kind of guy, I might sell it. There are tabloids that would pay big bucks for this kind of thing.’
‘How much do you want?’ Janine asked. Her voice was drained of life.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement. You might want to put me on retainer. A monthly stipend to do research for you. You’d be surprised how handy it can be to have a detective on the payroll.’
‘I’m leaving,’ Janine said.
‘Sure. No problem. Take the envelope with you. I’ve got more where those came from.’ Wiley reached into his pants and slid out a business card. ‘You think about it, Dr. Snow, and then you give me a call, okay? We’ll work something out.’
She said nothing.
Wiley strolled away, disappearing in a cloud of snow. She heard his footsteps descending the ramp. She was alone again. The lightness in her soul had turned to lead, dragging her back into a black hole. Twenty years had passed since she was a Texas blond, dreaming that she would make something of herself. Twenty years, and nothing in between seemed to matter at all.
9
Cindy slipped out of bed after midnight. Her skin was moist with sweat, and she shivered, because the house was as cold as a drafty barn. Jonny slept heavily, with a bare leg outside the blankets. He always slept like the dead after they made love. Normally, she did, too, but not tonight. She felt restless, but she wasn’t sure why.
She went to her closet and grabbed a robe, which she pulled around her naked body. Her long black hair was a mess. She padded in her little bare feet to the kitchen and switched on the light over the sink. Quietly, she unloaded the dishwasher, pushing up on tiptoes to reach some of the cabinets. There was something about an empty dishwasher that gave her a feeling of accomplishment.
She sat down at their small kitchen table. Reaching over to the counter, she turned on the radio to the Duluth MPR station and listened to classical music at a volume barely louder than a whisper. It was something dreamy and soft. She listened to it along with the persistent ticking of the clock over the refrigerator.
Jonny’s old leather jacket was draped over one of the chairs. She shook her head with a smile. She’d teased him for years about getting rid of it, but Jonny never gave up anything from the past. She saw the bullet hole in the sleeve. She still remembered the night when Jonny’s mentor, a cop named Ray Wallace, had shot himself in a North Woods cabin rather than face corruption charges. Ray had shot Jonny before putting the gun in his own mouth. She remembered the call from the hospital. Remembered her husband’s ashen face. Those were the calls you feared when you were married to a cop. You woke up every morning, and you wondered if this would be the night you went to bed alone and in tears.
It was hard to imagine her life without him. And yet she lived with that perpetual shadow.
He’d brought home papers with him from the Detective Bureau. Documents. Files. Evidence. He usually did. He’d intended to work through the evening, but she’d interrupted his good intentions by straddling his lap. From there, they went to bed, and he never left. The evidence in Jay’s murder investigation was spread all over the table, and although she didn’t usually pry — well, who was she kidding? She pried all the time.
Cindy grabbed the top-most paper and turned it over. It was a photograph, taken somewhere in the Duluth woods. The picture showed the figure of a man, blurry because of the distance. He was young, scrawny, tatted, in camouflage, holding what appeared to be an assault rifle. In the first picture, he was in profile, but when she grabbed another page, she saw his eyes. She couldn’t really see details in his face, but his eyes reminded her of a shark’s. Utterly empty. Not ferocious like a wolf on the hunt. Eyes devoid of life. Eyes that saw nothing but the gray darkness of the water.
Jonny had written on a Post-it note on one of the pictures: Who is this guy?
And on another: Find him.
Cindy turned the photos face-down again. She didn’t want to stare at them anymore. Something about the man’s face left her with a hollow pit of anxiety in her stomach.
She got up from the table. She went to the hall closet and retrieved her heavy winter coat and her furry boots. She retreated to the porch at the back of the house and let herself out through the rear door. Their backyard was really nothing but a sand dune. She pushed through snow and rye grass, climbing to the top of the slope and then down to the beach by the great lake.
The city glowed on her left. White lights marked the buildings, and red lights blinked on the antenna farm high on the hillside. At her feet were boot prints, the tracks of dogs, and the parallel rails where cross-country skis had slid up and down the snow-covered shore. The lake was loud, but it was invisible behind a wall of ice taller than she was. Each winter the waves built a mountain range. It made the lake scary, because she couldn’t see it. Somehow, with every bellow of thunder, she expected a tsunami to crest the wall and wash her away.
Cindy stood there with her hands in her pockets. The few inches of skin where her legs were bare felt raw. She had the beach, the city, and the night to herself. There was something hypnotic about the noise of the wind and the waves. She thought about everything. Her mind was a grasshopper, jumping this way and that.
She thought about Jonny. She could still feel him inside her, could still feel his hands on her body afterward. They had such a familiarity with each other. He was still a little repressed about sex after all these years, but to her, it was as natural as breathing or crying. She could remember all the way back to their first time, on a summer night by a small lake in a city park. The two of them, teenagers, naked in the water. And then making love with sand on their bodies and mosquitoes biting at their skin. Magic.
That was so long ago. Funny how you took each day and put it on top of the one before, and before you even knew it, you had a lifetime.
She thought about her family. Hardly a family. Her mother, who died young, leaving them alone. Laura, taken from her that same summer night she fell in love with Jonny. Her father, a sanctimonious old hypocrite, who used God as an excuse for his meanness to everyone who was close to him. It was hard to say she didn’t miss him, but she didn’t.
She thought about Janine. They’d known each other for five years. Her friend could not take a gun and shoot her husband. She didn’t believe it. And yet Jonny always said you could never really know another person. Every individual was unfathomable, living inside their own soul, sharing it with no one else. She would never have said it aloud, but she wondered if she was being naive.
Was she wrong about Janine?
She put those doubts out of her mind. She had strength of will, which was something that her faith had given her. You could choose to be happy or unhappy. It was up to you. Jonny didn’t share her devotion to religion, but she didn’t need him for that. Her beliefs were for her and her alone.