Teddy saw the tension rattle on her face, turning it red. He heard the tremor in her voice. Little bitch is scared. Encouraged, he surged forward and pushed her chest hard with both hands. She went down on her butt in the snow. Then he yanked her gloves from his pocket and tossed them up on the roof of the shed, where they stayed put in a foot of snow.
“Yuk,” Teddy wiped his own gloves on the front of his jacket. “Now I got girl cooties all over me.”
She was starting to get up, working to hold back tears.
“Now you’re gonna cry. More girl cooties,” Teddy said with a grin.
“No, I ain’t,” she said in a trembling voice as she drew hard, pulling the tears back inside her eyes. She pushed up off the snow.
“Crybaby girl cooties,” Teddy taunted, and he rammed her with his shoulder and hip. Ha. Hockey check. She went down again.
“Leave me alone,” she said in the shaky voice. “I mean it, that’s two.” This time she was up faster, bouncing kinda…
Two? Teddy laughed and shoved her again. “Loser,” he taunted. It was one of his dad’s favorite words. Then he blinked, surprised because this time she surged against him, kinda strong for a girl, and kept her footing. Doing this dance thing on the balls of her feet.
“That’s three,” she said, still moving away from him but her small fists swinging up; tight, compact miniature hammers. Red with cold.
“Oh, yeah?” Teddy sneered, opening his arms, palms out, elbows cocked to shove her again. As he charged forward, he realized she wasn’t moving away anymore.
Thirty yards away, Mrs. Etherby started when she read trouble in the blur of red and green jackets that lurched around the side of the shed. Uh-huh. Definitely trouble. She’d need some help. The big kid in the green was Teddy Klumpe. She whipped off her glove better to thumb the transmit button on her playground walkie-talkie.
Then she hesitated and lost her breath…
Jesus. The smaller kid-the new girl, hat knocked off, red ponytail streaming-planted her feet and whipped her whole upper body around behind a rigid right-hand punch that landed smack on Teddy’s onrushing nose.
Fat droplets of bright poppy red blood splashed the snow. More red dribbled down Teddy’s chin as he dropped back on his rear end. Aghast, he began to sob.
Running forward, breathless, Etherby got her call off to the office receptionist:
“Madge, you’re not gonna believe this.”
Chapter Two
When Broker leaned down, the material of his tan work jacket tightened across his shoulders, stretching the pyramid logo and the type, “Griffin’s Stoneworks,” on his back. The jacket Griffin had loaned him was a touch small. He wrestled a heavy oak round up on the chopping block next to the woodshed in back of the garage and grinned; never thought he’d be chopping firewood at the end of March again. He’d been splitting oak since they’d moved into Harry Griffin’s lake rental. The hardwood didn’t grow up here, pretty much it petered out in the middle of the state. Griffin imported the oak by the truckload to heat sand and water so he could mix mortar for winter work on his stone crew.
If anybody asked, Griffin would say the new guy in town was working on his crew. Mostly Broker stayed home and split wood for exercise. Stayed close to Nina. Going on three months.
But the geographic cure was working. She was slowly climbing out of the black pit. So he picked up the twenty-pound monster maul, hefted it, getting his stance, swung it up using his legs, hips, and shoulders to transfer the weight in a powerful arc over his head. Then he brought it down. The wood parted with a clean snap that echoed into the surrounding trees, out across Glacier Lake.
He put down the maul and yanked another hunk of oak from the pile next to the chopping block. Seventy degrees yesterday down in the cities. Fifty-five degrees up here. Then in midmorning the temperature nosedived, and he noticed the nuthatches and chickadees mob the bird feeder in a feeding frenzy…
Sensing the onrushing storm.
Now, a day later, Broker picked up the maul and raised his eyes to the clouds still coming in rolling gray ranks from the northwest. The clipper had roused out of the Yukon, roared across Canada, and dumped fourteen inches of snow on Glacier County just after lunch yesterday. Almost as if the Canadians were sending a cold wish of censure across the border.
On the day Dubya rolled the tanks into Iraq.
As he bent to lift the heavy round, he heard a low, shivering moan. He paused and listened carefully. Okay. Got it. Wolves. An acoustic bounce, rippling in their baying on the wind from the big woods up north. He was sizing up the knot in the wood on the block when Nina came out on the back deck and held out the cordless phone. “Can you take this?” she said.
He looked at his wife, leaned the splitting maul next to the chopping block, removed his gloves, and walked to the porch steps, raising his thick eyebrows and heaving his shoulders in a questioning gesture. Then she grimaced and darted her eyes north, sensing more than hearing the wild sigh on the wind. She narrowed her eyes. “Is that…?”
“Yeah. The pack up in the big woods, sounds like they’re active in daylight. It’s the new snow freezing last night. Crust on top makes it hard for the deer to run,” Broker said, matter-of-factly.
“Cool. Now we have wolves day and night,” she said, staring into the distance, listening to the faint rise and fall of the eerie baying. Then she recovered and thrust the phone at him. “Something happened at school.” Still no help, doing a quick handoff.
He took the phone. “Hello?”
“Mr. Broker?” said a calm but controlled voice, “this is Trudi Helseth, principal at Glacier Falls Elementary. We met when you registered your daughter, Karson.”
“Kit. She goes by Kit,” Broker said as he stared at Nina, who stood on the deck, huddled in her robe and slippers, puffing on an American Spirit. Oblivious to the cold, her green eyes flitted up to the gray clouds with apprehension, as if they were a messy ceiling about to collapse. She yanked her eyes from the sky and fixed them on the edge of the tree line where the woods started, eighty yards away. The wolves howled again on the errant shaft of wind, and she hugged herself.
Broker was watching Nina closely as he listened to the phone. Past the worst of it; now, the way she had started to key on the weather had him thinking-could be a swerve in her condition toward seasonal affective disorder. The overcast sky meant she’d have a bad day…Then Principal Helseth commanded his full attention when she said, “There was a playground incident involving Kit this morning…”
His heart sped up. “Is she…?”
“She’s fine. Just skinned her hand a little. I have her here in the office. Is it possible for you to come into the school to talk?”
“What happened?”
“I really need to see you in person. This is not something we can handle on the phone.” When Broker didn’t respond immediately, Helseth continued. “We’ll be sending Kit home with you for the rest of the day, Mr. Broker.”
“I’ll be right there.” He switched off the phone and went over to Nina, who was stuck, her tired eyes anchored to the snow-draped pines behind the house. He put his arm around her shoulder and gently guided her back toward the patio door. “C’mon. It’s cold out here.”
Jeez, Kit?
Galvanized by the understated urgency in the principal’s tone, he stayed in his work clothes, went straight to his truck, and drove toward town. The plows had been through, but there was still a hard undercoat of icy snow on the roadbed. After he skidded through a curve a little too fast, he eased off the accelerator, leaned back, and took a deep settling breath through his nose.
Center down. Wait and see. Don’t jump to conclusions.
So he let his eyes track the snowy landscape to either side of the road. Glacier County was aptly named; a white place on the map, just this long skinny ditch the last ice age had gouged into the map and filled with moraine and melt. Wedged between Thief River Falls and the Red Lake Rez. It had always been remote, and now it had pulled ahead of Broker’s native Cook County as the least populated county in the state. In the winter. The population quadrupled in summer. Broker smiled ruefully when he came around a bend and saw the construction site of another lake house going up. The flimsy yellow sticks thrusting at the pines and snow. A bundled work crew swarmed over it. Hola. Mexicans, by the swarthy faces peeking from their headgear and the amused grins. Yesterday they had been wearing shirtsleeves. But they were swinging their nail guns, working like hell. Even up here they were starting to build the fast Pac Man houses that ate the woods.