Eventually Henrickson pulled over and killed the engine. Just ahead on the left-hand side of the road was a gate. The name Anders was visible on a flat piece of wood nailed to it.
They got out, unlatched the gate, and walked down a track which wandered through the trees. After two hundred yards they saw a building up ahead. By the time they reached it, Tom was wondering if they were in the right place after all. The place looked small and cold and empty despite the light on over the door.
'Not much of a house,' he said. It looked like more of a cabin with a porch, just a square log building with a car port on one side. The entrance to the house was under there, looking back up the track: a door with the number '2' burned in at waist height. There were four small glass panels in the upper half, the view of the interior obscured by a thick curtain.
Henrickson knocked. 'Compact, that's for damned sure.'
When, after a few moments, there was no answer, he knocked again. Tom meanwhile drifted up a little rise in front of the house. There was another small cabin twenty yards away in the trees, but it was dark and a little overgrown. When he walked a little further he could make out the faint glint of a small icy pond, also presumably on the property. The far side was a line of trees, apart from…
He walked a little further and thought he could see another cabin around the other side. He thought about calling out to Henrickson, but then, for some reason, didn't. Instead he walked back.
Henrickson was knocking for the fourth time. 'No one's home,' he said. 'She's probably back in Sheffer enjoying the bright lights and big-city ambiance. Which is kind of a pain. However…' He looked at his watch. 'Time is moving on. You say she said the place where you were was a good walk out from her property. Maybe we're not going to make it there and back today anyhow.'
He stood back from the door and walked over to one of two small windows on the next side. This too was curtained, but with thinner material. Tom looked through it with him, but you couldn't make out much of the inside.
'We're done for the day,' Henrickson decided. 'We'll head ourselves to town and kick back. See if we can get hold of this woman's phone number, so we can do things properly tomorrow. For now, I'm as hungry as a bear. No offence.'
They peered back through the window a final time, and then set off back up the track towards the gate.
It wasn't until they were back in the car, and the noise of its departure had drifted down through the trees, that the curtain at the front door moved.
21
When she was sure the men had gone, Patrice unlocked the door and stepped outside. She stood a while, listening carefully, but heard only what she always heard on her property: nothing at all. She didn't count the fall wind, or birds in spring, or busy summer insects. They weren't noises.
Tracks in the snow showed the men had walked down the drive and then right around the cabin. She realized that it also suggested that one of them had…
She followed the shuffling marks which led up over the small ridge and down towards the lake. They stopped after a few yards. Patrice saw that, unless the man had been very unobservant, he should have been able to spot the other small building on the far side. Yet she had not heard him call out, or mention it to the other man. That didn't necessarily mean anything. He could simply have been cold or bored or hungry. Wouldn't have mattered anyway. There was nothing in that cabin except tools and damp and the memory of an unexpected bout of love-making that had swept her and Bill along with it one winter night when they were supposed to be patching up the roof.
She walked down to the quarter-acre pond that marked the start of the wilderness section of her property. She sat on the bench that hugged the big tree a few yards back from its edge, and looked out across the icy water.
'They're coming,' she said, quietly. 'What do I do?'
He didn't answer. He never did. He didn't even know what she was talking about. But she always asked, just in case. Men like to feel involved.
— «» — «» — «»—
In the months after Bill's death, Patrice had found herself in a strange new world in which everything seemed to have been broken and put back together not quite right. She learned that a fridge looks cold if stocked only with what you need, unleavened by the unexpected that caught your partner's eye. She remembered that pieces of paper didn't actually come with doodles, that envelopes, bills and till receipts didn't spontaneously develop sketches of trees or cats or boats. They looked odd without them. One of the hardest things she learned was that there no longer existed homes for some kinds of information. She could pass the time of day with the mail man, and she could chat in line at the market: but she couldn't tell Ned his nose was weird, or turn to someone and sing the tune of some silly advertisement that made her smile. That's the kind of thing makes people think the poor old bitch is going batty, such a sad story, something should be done. An event happened and then was gone, like a drop of rain falling onto hot asphalt. Nobody watching but her, a VCR that didn't work.
You got through a day and wondered what your reward was. It soon became evident the prize was you got to withstand tomorrow too. You got through it, hour by long hour, but at the end you looked up without much expectation. You had begun to understand the score. Sure enough: today's prize was the same. Outwardly calm, but with a scream building like the sound of a long-forgotten steam engine in the back corner of a basement, you got through that tomorrow too, and a flat hardpan of further tomorrows after that. You got through enough of them to realize you'd been had, that they aren't tomorrows after all but the wretched stretch of an endless today. What can you do? Rebellion gets you nowhere. If you're giving up smoking, and it all suddenly gets too much and you decide that the chance to not smoke tomorrow is not sufficient reward for having successfully not smoked today, then you can stomp furiously to the store and buy a pack and tear them open and make yourself feel happy and disappointed and defiant and guilty. No such triumphant failure exists with death. You can't say, 'Screw this. Bring my husband back'. People realize this, dimly. They don't put the world to the test because they understand that to finally articulate this demand, and have it denied, would drive them completely insane. They obliquely acquire the harsh intelligence that there's no way out, that they can't give up giving up, and go find the emergency packet of their loved one; can't retrieve him or her from where they've been hidden all along, on top of a cupboard in the kitchen or behind the bath upstairs; can't dust them off and run their fingers through their hair and kiss them gently on the lips to wake them and the world back to normality, as if the whole episode had been some bad dream or stupid idea.
After a lifetime of unconsciously doing and thinking the right thing, of being born on the liberal side of every debate, Patrice found herself prey to thoughts of the utmost political incorrectness. She looked at people clogging the lanes of the market, people who were old and cranky and a pain to be around. Six months before she would have asked herself what had made them so unhappy, and if there was anything she could do to help. Now she just thought how unfair it was they were still alive. When she saw an appeal on television for a children's hospital she asked herself why people went so misty-eyed over kids when they'd done so little for the world, when someone like Bill had so much longer to become a part of other people's lives. Hers, for example.
And when someone tried to put an AIDS pin on her in the street over in Snohomish one afternoon, she snapped at them and pushed the boy aside. The boy — who was doe-eyed and good-looking — turned to his co-worker, a strikingly pretty teenage girl fairly dripping with compassion, and made a remark.