The Wolf in Winter

'It's the second door on the left,' he said. 'You take your time. You're safe now.'

  She headed into the back of the store, her hand over her mouth, seconds before the chief entered. He was a big man, six foot three and topping out at about 200 pounds. He was clean-shaven, and his eyes were gray, like the cold ashes of old fres. He had been Prosperous's chief of police for nearly a decade, and had taken over the job from his father. Before that, he served his apprenticeship in the Maine State Police. That was how he always described it: 'my apprenticeship'. Everyone knew that Prosperous was the only place that mattered. He walked with just the slightest of limps, a consequence of a car accident near Augusta back in the day. No one had ever suggested that his injured limb might impact upon his ability to carry out his job, and the chief had never given anyone cause to do so.

  'Where is she?' he asked.

  'In the bathroom,' said Ben. 'She wasn't feeling good.'

  Morland had been in Pearson's store often enough to know it nearly as well as he did his own house. He went straight through to the bathroom and knocked on the door.

  'Miss?' he called. 'My name is Lucas Morland, and I'm the chief of police here in Prosperous. Are you okay in there?'

  There was no reply. A cold breeze fipped the ends of Morland's trousers against his shoes and legs. It was coming from under the bathroom door.

  'Shit,' he said.

  He stepped back, raised his right foot and kicked hard against the lock. The lock held, but the jamb broke on the second attempt. The door opened to reveal an empty bathroom. The small window above the toilet gaped open. Morland didn't even waste time trying to look out. The girl would already be seeking the cover of darkness.

  Thomas Souleby was following behind the chief, and was almost bowled over by him as he moved back into the store.

  'What is it?' he asked, but Morland didn't answer. He was trying to hide the pain in his left leg. This damn weather always played hell with it, and he'd be glad when summer came. He stomped into the parking lot and turned left at the corner of the store. Pearson's was close to the intersection of two roads: the front faced north on the main road into Prosperous while to the west was the highway. Morland's eyesight was good, even in the dark, and he could see a fgure moving fast between two copses of trees, making for the highway. The road crested a hill at Prosperous's western boundary. As he watched the girl, the lights of a truck appeared on the hill.

  If she reached it, he was lost.

  Annie ran.

  She'd been so close to safety, or so she'd thought, and then the cop had appeared. She'd recognized him at once: the shape and size of him, but most of all the way that he limped. She'd seen him twice before. The frst time was just after the handover, when she'd been brought to the basement. She'd fought against them as they carried her from the truck, and the cloth across her eyes had slipped a little. The cop had been there, supervising the operation, following on behind as they brought her to her cell. The second was on one of the occasions when they permitted her to shower, although they always kept her hands and feet manacled. She had glanced to her right as she left her basement cell, and caught a brief glimpse of the man with the gray eyes at the top of the stairs before the door closed. On neither occasion had he been in uniform, otherwise she would have known better than to let the old geezers call the cops.

  The couple had kept her well fed. That, at least, was something. She had strength, perhaps more than she'd had in many years. There was no alcohol in her system, and she was clean of drugs. Her own speed surprised her.

  Annie saw the truck at the same time that Morland did. If she could get to the highway in time, she could stop it and beg for a ride to another town. There was a chance that the cop might come after them, but any truck driver in his right mind would be able to see her bare, bloodied feet and her tattered nightgown, and know that something terrible had befallen her. If that wasn't enough to convince him, she was sure that her story would do the rest. He – or she, if she was lucky enough to be picked up by a woman – could take her to the cops in Bangor, or to the nearest state police troop house. The truck driver could haul her to the FBI in Washington DC for all Annie cared. She just wanted to get away from this godforsaken town.

  The ground began to slope upward as she neared the road. She stumbled slightly as her feet hit a rock, and there was a terrible, sharp pain. She'd broken the big toe on her right foot. She was sure of it. It slowed her down, but it didn't stop her. The truck was still some distance away, but she was going to reach the highway long before it passed her spot. She was prepared to stand in the middle of the road and risk being hit if that was what it took to stop it. She'd rather die quickly under its wheels than be taken back to that basement.

  Something pushed her from behind and she fell to the ground. An instant later she heard the shot, and there was a pressure in her chest, followed by a burning that set her lungs on fre. She lay on her side and tried to speak, but only blood fowed from between her lips. The truck passed barely an arm's length from where she lay, the driver oblivious to her dying. She stretched her fngers towards it, and felt the breeze of its passing. The burning inside her was no longer fery but cold. Her hands and feet were growing numb, the ice spreading inward to the core of her being, freezing her limbs and turning her blood to crystals.

  Footsteps approached, and then two men were looking down on her. One was the limping cop, the other the old man who had given her his coat. He was holding a hunting rife in his arms. She could see the rest of his friends following behind. She smiled.

  I got away. I escaped. This wasn't the ending that you wanted.

  I beat you, you fuckers.

  I—

  Ben Pearson watched the life depart the girl, her body defating as its fnal breath left it. He shook his head in sorrow.

  'And she was a good one too,' he said. 'She was scrawny, but they were feeding her up. If we were lucky, we could have got ten years or more out of her.'

  Chief Morland walked to the road. There were no more vehicles coming their way. There was no chance that they would be seen. But what a mess, what a godawful mess. Somebody would answer for it.

  He rejoined the others. Thomas Souleby was closest in height to himself. These things mattered when you were dealing with a body.

  'Thomas,' he said, 'you take her left leg. I'll take the right. Let's get this all cleaned up.'

  And together the two men dragged the remains of Annie Broyer, lost daughter of the man named Jude, back to the store.

  5

  They saw the cars pull into their drive and knew that they were in trouble.

  Chief Morland was leading, driving his unmarked Crown Vic. The dash light wasn't fashing, though. The chief wasn't advertising his presence.

  The chief's car was followed by Thomas Souleby's Prius. A lot of folk in Prosperous drove a Prius or some other similarly eco-conscious car. Big SUVs were frowned upon. It was to do with the ethos of the town, and the importance of maintaining a sustainable environment in which to raise generations of children. Everybody knew the rules, unoffcial or otherwise, and they were rarely broken.

  As the cars pulled up outside the house, Erin gripped her husband's hand. Harry Dixon was not a tall man, nor a particularly handsome one. He was overweight, his hair was receding and he snored like a drill when he slept on his back, but he was her man, and a good one, too. Sometimes she wished that they had been blessed with children, but it was not to be. They had waited too late after marriage, she often thought, and by the time it became clear that the actions of nature alone would not enable her to conceive, they had settled into a routine in which each was enough for the other. Oh, they might always have wished for more, but there was a lot to be said for 'enough'.

  But these were troubled times, and the idyllic middle age they had imagined for themselves was under threat. Until 2011, Harry's construction company had weathered the worst of the recession by cutting back on its full-time employees and paring quotes to the bone, but 2011 had seen the com
pany's virtual collapse. It was said that the state had lost 4800 jobs in March of that year alone, which contributed to making Maine the nation's leader in lost jobs. They'd both read about the arguments between the Maine Department of Labor and the Maine Center for Economic Policy, the latter basing its fgures on higher Bureau of Labor Statistics job loss fgures that the former refuted. As far as the Dixons were concerned, that was just the state's Department of Labor trying to sweep the mess under the carpet. It was like telling a man that his feet are dry when he can feel the water lapping at his chin.

  Now Harry's company was little more than a one-man operation, with Harry quoting for small jobs that he could complete with cheap labor, and bringing in skilled contractors by the hour as he needed them. They could still pay their mortgage, just about, but they'd cut back on a lot of luxuries, and they did more and more of their buying outside Prosperous. Erin's halfsister Dianne and her surgeon husband had helped them out with a small lump sum. They were both hospital consultants, and were doing okay. They could afford to lend a hand, but it had hurt the couple's pride to approach them for a loan – a loan, what was more, that was unlikely to be discharged anytime soon.

  They had also tapped the town's discretionary fund, which was used to support townsfolk who found themselves in temporary fnancial trouble. Ben Pearson, who was regarded as one of the board's more approachable members, had taken care of the details, and the money – just over $2000 – had helped the Dixons out a little, but Ben had made it clear that it would have to be paid back, in cash or in kind. If it wasn't, then the board would start delving more deeply into their situation, and if the board stared snooping it might well fnd out about Dianne. That was why the Dixons had agreed, however reluctantly, to keep the girl. It would serve as repayment of the loan, and keep their relationship with Dianne a secret.

  Erin had only discovered her halfsister's existence some three years earlier. Erin's father had left Prosperous when she was little more than an infant, and her mother had subsequently remarried – to a cousin of Thomas Souleby, as it happened. Her father hadn't been heard from again, and then, at the end of 2009, Dianne had somehow tracked Erin down, and a tentative if genuine affection had sprung up between them. It seemed that their father had created a whole new identity for himself after he left Prosperous, and he never mentioned the town to his new wife or his child. It was only following his death, and the death of her mother, that Dianne had come across documents among her father's possessions that explained the truth about his background. By then she was on her second marriage – to a man who, coincidentally or through the actions of fate, lived in the same state that had spawned her father, and not too far from the town and life that he had fed.

  Erin had professed complete ignorance of the reasons why their father might have gone to such lengths to hide his identity, but when Dianne persisted Erin hinted at some affair with a woman from Lewiston, and her father's fear of retribution from his wife's family. None of it was true, of course – well, none of the stuff about the affair. Her father's fear of retribution was another matter. Nevertheless, she made it clear to Dianne that it would be for the best if she kept her distance from Prosperous, and didn't go delving into the past of their shared father.

  'Old towns have long memories,' Erin told Dianne. 'They don't forget slights.'

  And Dianne, although bemused, had consented to leaving Prosperous to its own business, aided in part by her halfsister's willingness to share with her what she knew of their father's past, even if, unbeknownst to Dianne, Erin had carefully purged all that she offered of any but the most innocuous details.

  So Erin and Harry were the poor relatives, bound to Dianne and her husband by the shade of a father. They were content to play that role, though, and to keep the existence of Dianne and her husband hidden from the citizens of Prosperous. Unspoken between them was the fact that they might have need of Dianne at some point in the future, and not only for money, for the Dixons wanted nothing more than to leave Prosperous, and that would be no easy task. The board would want to know why. The board would investigate. The board would almost certainly fnd out about Dianne, and the board would wonder what secrets Erin Dixon might have shared with her halfsister, the daughter of a man who had turned his back on the town, who had stolen its money and, perhaps, whispered of the deal it had made to secure itself.

  Keeping all their fears from Dianne and her husband was not easy. To further complicate matters, Harry and Erin had asked for the money to be paid in cash. She could still remember the look on Dianne's face: puzzlement, followed by the dawning realization that something was very wrong.

  'What kind of trouble are you two in?' she asked them, as her husband poured the last of the wine and gave them the kind of disapproving look he probably reserved for patients who neglected to follow his postoperative advice and then seemed surprised when they started coughing blood. His name was Magnus Madsen, and he was of Danish extraction. He insisted on the pronunciation of his frst name as 'Maunus', without sounding the 'g', and had resigned himself to correcting Harry's literal pronunciation whenever they met. Harry just couldn't seem to manage 'Mau-nus', though. That damned 'g' kept intruding. Anyway, it wasn't as if Magnus Madsen was fresh off a Viking longship. There were rocks that hadn't been in Maine as long as the Madsens. His family had been given plenty of time to learn to speak English properly, and drop whatever airs they'd brought with them from the old country.

  'We'd just prefer it if people in Prosperous didn't know that we were having serious diffculties,' said Harry. 'It's a small town, and if word got out it might affect my chances of bidding successfully for work. If you pay us in cash, then we can make pretty regular lodgments into our account until we fnd our feet again, and nobody will be any the wiser.'

  'But surely any dealings you have with your bank are entirely confdential,' said Magnus. 'Couldn't you ask your bank manager for an extended line of credit? I mean, you're still working, and you must have paid off the bulk of your mortgage by now. That's a nice house you have, and it's worth a fair sum, even in these diffcult times. It's hardly like asking for an unsecured loan.'

  There was so much that Harry wanted to say at that point, but it could have been summarized as 'You and I do not live in similar worlds'. Those words 'unsecured loan' bit at him as well, because that was precisely what they were asking of Magnus and Dianne, but mostly he knew that Magnus had no conception of the way in which the town of Prosperous worked. If he did, it would turn his hair white.

  And shortly after that, he'd be dead.

  Magnus and Dianne gave them the money in the end, and Harry used it to pump up the deposits being made at the bank, but the borrowed cash was almost gone now, and he didn't think that his in-laws could be tapped again. In any normal situation, Harry and Erin would have sold up and moved on. Sure, they'd take a bit of a hit on the house, but with a little luck they might come out of it with a high fve-or low six-fgure sum once the mortgage was paid off. They could start again, maybe rent for a while until the economy recovered.

  But this wasn't a normal situation. They knew that they probably weren't the only ones in the town who were suffering; there were rumors, and more than rumors. Even Prosperous wasn't entirely immune from the vagaries of the economy, just as, throughout its history, it had never been completely protected from confict or fnancial turmoil or the anger of nature. Yet it had always been better protected than most. The town took steps to ensure that was the case.

  'What do you think happened?' Erin now whispered to her husband, as they watched the men approach. 'Did she get away?'

  'No,' said Harry. 'I don't believe she did.'

  If she had escaped, then these others wouldn't be here on their doorstep. There were only two possibilities. The frst was that the girl had been captured before she could leave Prosperous, in which case the chief was going to be mad as hell with them for failing to keep her locked up, and they could only hope that the girl had sense enough to keep any suspicions about the ease
of her escape to herself. The second possibility was that she was dead, and Harry found himself wishing that the latter was true. It would be easier for all of them.

  They didn't give the chief time to knock on the door. Harry opened it to fnd Morland with his fst raised, and he finched instinctively in anticipation of the blow. There was a doorbell, but it wouldn't have been like Lucas Morland to use it under the circumstances. A sharp knock was much more psychologically effective.

  Harry opened the door wide to admit them, the chief with his face set hard and Thomas Souleby looking more disappointed than angry, as though Harry and Erin were teenagers who had failed some crucial parental test.

  'We know why you're here,' said Harry.

  'If you know why we're here,' said the chief, 'then why didn't you call us to tell us about the girl?'

  'We only just found out she was gone,' said Erin. 'We were about to call, but—'

  She looked to her husband for help.

  'But we were frightened,' he fnished for her.

  'Frightened of what?'

  'That we'd let you down, that we'd let the whole town down. We knew you'd be angry.'