Chapter Five

At home, we had no power. The generator had run out of fuel, and the house was an icebox. I hoped the hot water tank had enough heat left to let me take a shower.

Ricky and I owned a little two-story house in what locals jokingly called downtown Random, namely the five or six blocks around Main Street where a few hundred people lived. From our front door, I could walk to the sheriff’s department. The house wasn’t much—two small bedrooms upstairs; a kitchen, living room, and dining room downstairs; and an unfinished basement where mice took shelter from the winter cold. The yellow paint on the wooden siding was peeling away, the front porch needed repair, and the roof leaked over our bed when the rain got heavy. Even so, it was ours, and I didn’t want to lose it.

We’d stretched to buy the house three years earlier, with help from my dad. I didn’t know then that Ricky would be fired a year later and our income would be cut in half. But we were a young couple in Black Wolf County, and buying a house was what you did. There were no apartments, so either you lived with your parents or you saved up enough to strike out on your own. Or you left the area entirely and headed for the city. We’d stayed in my dad’s house for two years after we got married, and with him gone all the time, he was fine to have us live there as long as we wanted. But in his house, I was still a kid, and I wanted to be all grown-up. That was how life was supposed to go. You got married, you bought a house, you had kids.

I wanted that whole fairy-tale life more than anything. Believe me when I tell you that, sweetheart. But a fairy tale was not what I got.

When I got home, I kicked off my boots and sat on the living room sofa with my coat on. The Christmas tree in the corner was the only indication of the holiday. The tree was so tall that the top branch bent over at the ceiling, but we’d put it up right after Thanksgiving, so it was already turning brown and dropping needles. The ornaments on the branches were all the same, red and silver glass balls, and one had fallen to the floor and cracked. We couldn’t afford gifts, but my dad and brother had sent a few things, which we’d put under the tree. I’d made big plans to cook a roast and potatoes and bake pies in the days before Christmas, so all we’d have to do is heat everything up, but those plans had gotten away from me.

“You’re late.”

Ricky came into the living room from the kitchen. He gnawed on a pan-fried chicken leg from the refrigerator and sat down in the armchair next to the tree. He wore pajama bottoms, and his chest was bare.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“I figured you’d be in bed when I woke up. You know, I sort of expect my wife to be in my bed in the morning.”

“Well, that was the plan.”

“What happened?”

“Gordon Brink got murdered.”

Ricky arched an eyebrow. “No shit? Who did it?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Somebody kills a lawyer, do they get a prize or something?”

“It’s not a joke, Ricky.”

He wiped the chicken juice from his mouth with his arm. “So are you home for the day now?”

“No. I need to go back.”

“It’s Christmas.”

“Yeah, and this is a murder.”

He sighed with a little hiss through his front teeth. I think that was what frustrated me more than anything else, more than the drinking, more than the money he wasted, more than the times he came home smelling of drugstore perfume. It was the blame he directed my way when he didn’t get what he wanted. Like everything was my fault. Like we were drifting apart because of me. I was the one going to work, taking the night shifts, coming home and cooking meals and doing laundry. I felt like my life was a matchstick house, and I was holding it together with nothing but little dabs of glue. But to Ricky, it was never enough.

I’d met him at a high school football game six years earlier. This was not long after I’d gone to work at the sheriff’s office. At halftime, I was sitting by myself in the bleachers when a man with a cheesy grin under his mustache introduced himself as Ricky Todd. He wasn’t tall, but he had a tough, strong, mine-worker’s body, with big feathered blond hair and a mustache so thick you could mop the floor with it. Men came up to me all the time, so that wasn’t unusual. I was pretty and unattached, which is a rare combination in this town, but I had the reputation of shooting men down like Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel. Ricky didn’t let that stop him. He sat down and started talking to me.

What was it about him?

Why did I agree to go out with him when I’d turned down the others?

It wasn’t his looks, that’s for sure. In high school, he’d been popular and handsome, but then he went fishing with Ajax one summer, and while Ajax was horsing around with the reel, a hook caught Ricky in the face and yanked off a big chunk of his nose. The surgeons did their best to repair it, but it never healed right. Girls lost interest in him after that, in the shallow way that teenagers do. Ricky made jokes like it didn’t bother him, but way down deep, he was bitter as hell.

I didn’t care how he looked. No, what made him different was that he seemed fascinated by who I was. He asked a lot of questions, about my childhood, about growing up on my own, about my mother. It flattered me that he found my story intriguing. I didn’t understand then, or maybe I was too young to realize, that men can be like that about things they want to own. That one way to control someone is to learn everything about them, so you always have ammunition to use when you need it.

I married Ricky not long after that. Darrell, my father, my brother, they all told me I was moving too fast, but I was in a rush to feel normal at that point in my life. I wanted to do what other Black Wolf County girls did. I married a mine worker, I worked to make us extra money, I went to the 126 and drank and joked with friends, I cooked and cleaned and had sex with my husband on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That was how my life went for three years. Maybe that’s how the rest of my life would have gone, if Ricky hadn’t heard his supervisor making a joke about his damaged nose and thrown the man through a window. The assault got him fired from the mine. Everything changed after that; everything began to spiral downward, for me and for him. I began to see the other side of my husband, as if I were orbiting around the dark side of the moon. His failures as a man somehow became my shortcomings as a wife.

Darrell was right about the danger of living with tigers. Believe me, as a cop, I knew what happened behind closed doors to too many of the women in Black Wolf County. Ricky hadn’t touched me, not yet. Even so, I’d grown wary of what he might do. I’d noticed the heat of his temper, like a gas flame on high. When we argued, I saw him clenching his fists. His demands in bed had begun to make me uncomfortable. I felt like he was testing my boundaries, pushing me to see how far he could go before I pushed back. It was almost as if he wanted me to give him an excuse. All along, he had this odd, taunting look in his eyes that said: I dare you.

“I’m going to take a shower before the water gets cold,” I said. I got off the sofa and slipped out of my winter coat, but Ricky blocked my way.

“Was Ajax there?”

“What?”

“Were you with him this morning?” Ricky asked.

“I wasn’t with him. He’s a cop. He was at the crime scene, too.”

“Yeah. Sure he was.”

“What’s the problem? What are you talking about?”

Ricky’s blue eyes looked like ice on a glacier. “I know you’re screwing him.”

“No, you don’t know that, because I’m not.”

“He says you are. He threw it in my face at the movie on Sunday.”

“Well, Ajax is a liar. He pushes your buttons, and you let him do it.”

“He comes on to you,” Ricky said. “I’ve seen him do it.”

“Yeah, he comes on to me and every other woman in town, but there’s nothing between us.”

I was tired of this argument. We’d had it over and over. I was done defending myself, but I still felt the need to be a peacemaker. On that day of all days, I needed a little bit of peace.

“Look, I’m sorry about the argument on Sunday,” I went on. “I’m stressed about money. I’ll talk to my dad. He’ll help us out.”

“It’s not my fault there are no jobs, Bec.”

“I know. And I know it sucks that I have to work on Christmas. I’ll make it up to you. But right now, I need to shower and get back.”

With that, I dragged my tired body up the stairs to the second floor.

In the bathroom, with a little morning light coming in through the window, I stood in front of the mirror and took off my clothes. I hung up my uniform carefully, as if it were a disguise. I unhooked my flimsy bra and peeled down my underwear, and I stared at my reflection in the gloom. Two dark eyes stared back at me, dark as coal, with thick eyebrows like two black slashes. Underneath them were the bags that makeup couldn’t hide. I hadn’t slept more than a few minutes in days. My nose was Rudolph-red from the freezing cold temperature and from sniffling and sneezing. My cheeks were flushed, and my entire head felt thick.

I had a V-shaped face and a tiny mouth, but my lower lip bulged in a way that made men think I was puckering at them. I wasn’t. My black hair hung to my shoulders. It was messy, with split ends and a few strands going their own way no matter how many times I brushed them down. I was skinny. I’ve always been skinny. You could see my shoulder bones, my narrow hips, my knobby knees. My arms were as scrawny as the chicken leg Ricky had been eating. My breasts made shallow pyramids that ended in tiny pink points. My skin was pale, my whole body china white. It wasn’t just the winter; even in the summer, I never tanned.

I may have seemed fragile on the outside, but this was tough country, and no matter if you were skinny and small, you did what you had to do. I shoveled snow. I cut down dead trees. I cuffed drunks twice my size.

That was me, sweetheart. That was your mom.

I mean, not yet, but soon.

I climbed into the tub and turned on the shower. The brown water wasn’t hot anymore. It dribbled from the showerhead, mostly cool. I didn’t wash my hair, because I had no way to dry it with the power out, and I couldn’t leave it wet. Instead, I tucked as much of it as I could under a plastic shower cap. I soaped up quickly, watching dirt run down the drain, and I rinsed off, freezing.

When I yanked back the shower curtain, I screamed.

Ricky was right in front of me. He looked me up and down, his wife’s naked body, me shivering like a soaking-wet cat and wearing my stupid yellow polka-dot shower cap. His chest was still bare. His pajama bottoms and underwear were pooled around his ankles. The pudge of his stomach swelled from his waist, but everything else was muscle. He dangled, already beginning to grow. His hands took hold of my shoulders, and he squeezed with his thick fingers, not enough to hurt me, but definitely enough to remind me of his strength.

I felt the weight of his arms shoving me to my knees and making it very clear what he wanted.

“Ricky, not now,” I told him. “Not like this.”

I held my breath, wondering if words would be enough to put him off this time. He waited a long, long moment before he let go. Then he laughed, as if this was only a game. As if we hadn’t been on the verge of something ugly. He yanked up his pajamas with a shrug, but he gave me a look as he did, and I saw that same strange challenge in his eyes.

I dare you.