Chapter 15

“Liz!” Ken startled as he bobbled and then dropped the wood he carried under his arm. “What are you doing here?” He stopped to pick it up.

“Don’t you know half the town is looking for you?”

He blew out an exasperated breath. “I thought it might come to that eventually.” He stacked most of the wood onto the pile next to the cast iron stove and then added some on top of the glowing embers inside. The wood caught and flames kicked up hotter.

“Your sisters filed a missing persons report, and Dad was about to issue a BOLO. I need to tell him.” I reached again for my cell.

“Wait,” he said. “Before you do, we need to talk.” He pulled open a small, battery-powered lantern on the table, and it lit up the room—well, that portion of the room in a three-foot circle from the lantern. “Have you had lunch?”

“Lunch?”

“It’s a meal people eat, usually sometime around the noon hour.”

“I guess I haven’t.”

“Then you’re in luck,” he said. “I make a great woodstove grilled cheese. Or pancakes. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the gamut of my cooking skills. Pick your poison.” He snapped his fingers. “Or is poison a poor choice of words coming from a murder suspect? I, uh, am a suspect now, right?”

I inhaled through my teeth. “I’m afraid they’re not coming up with many more leads.”

He nodded. “Pancakes then? I have just enough real maple syrup for one more meal, and I’d hate for it to go to waste if I’m going to prison. Please.” He pointed to the camp chair. “Make yourself comfortable.”

I pulled off my outerwear and draped it on the back of the camp chair. Finally I pulled off the hat and did my best to smooth my hair with my fingers.

I sank into the chair. “Why are you holed up here?”

“Just a second. This is the crucial part.” I watched as he eyeballed the ratio of water and pancake mix into a bowl and stirred it with a wooden spoon. He grimaced a bit then added substantially more pancake mix. “Hope you’re hungry.”

Only after the first three pancakes were bubbling up on the cast iron skillet did he answer. “First of all, I’m not ‘holed up here.’ I’m innocent until proven guilty, and I have a perfect right to come and go as I please.”

“Without telling anyone? Your sisters were worried.”

“And if my sisters knew about this cabin?” He stabbed the air with the spatula. “I’d have no place to get away and think. Look, my gut instinct is to help the police. That shyster they hired told me to clam up, and then he claimed he was tied up and couldn’t talk for a few days. But I’m sure I’ll have a bill long before then. Meanwhile, someone killed Marya.” His voice cracked. “If anyone has a shot at figuring out who that might be, it’s me. I needed to think.”

“Fair enough.”

He turned back to the stove and flipped the pancakes, sending off a hearty sizzle. His shoulders slumped. “I didn’t mean to lose my temper with you.”

“You must be under a lot of stress.”

“That may be so.” He slid a heaping plate in front of me, along with a bent metal fork and a jug of maple syrup bearing the label of a local farm. “But of all people, you don’t deserve it.”

I paused to consider what he meant.

“Go ahead while they’re hot. I’ll have the next ones.”

I slathered syrup over the whole plate. “Have you thought of anything helpful?”

“It must have something to do with the money.”

“I’d heard that you were going over Marya’s business records.”

The next batch went into the pan before he answered. “Does that seem creepy? That sounds creepy, even to me.”

“I assumed that you wouldn’t have done it without good reason.”

“Thanks for believing that,” he said. “At first I thought I was losing my mind. I bounced a check trying to pay a bill when I knew there was enough in the account. I checked the balance online, and almost the whole account was cleaned out. Then it magically reappeared. Marya tried to shrug it off as a bank error, but I backtracked and found she’d made a whole series of withdrawals and deposits. No explanation. But after I confronted her, she left the account alone.

“Then one day I knocked over her purse by accident. She had almost a thousand dollars in cash stuffed into her wallet. I volunteered to make a bank deposit for her, told her it wasn’t safe to carry so much around. I was trying to be helpful. But she just got defensive and nervous. She was up to something. Something she didn’t want me to know about.”

“You thought it might be something illegal?”

His shoulders sagged. “I must have gone over every piece of paper in the house a dozen times. Every account. Every record. And I still don’t get it. Money came in from nowhere and vanished just as fast.”

I avoided his eyes and dug into my lunch. “Mark Baker has those records now.”

He wrestled with some bags in the corner and returned with another camp chair, which he propped up on the opposite side of the table. “Probably for the best. Sharp man. Maybe he can turn up something. It can only help me.”

Even in the dim light, I noticed him eating his pancakes with a spoon.

“Do you get more syrup that way?” I asked.

He looked down at the spoon. “Only one set of utensils. Don’t get much company here. Not invited company, anyway.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Everything was all topsy-turvy when I got here. Not like I remembered it, and I swore I had more food. Maybe it’s just my imagination, though. Or maybe some kids found the place. I’ll have to get a lock. Assuming …”

I let that comment slide. Assuming he didn’t go to prison.

“Back to Marya,” I said. “You’d been following her, too?”

He let his spoon fall onto his plate. “You know that?” He stared down at his puddle of syrup. “Yeah, I guess I was. Caught her lying. Told me she was going to the library on an evening when I knew the library closed early. I thought maybe there was someone else. That maybe she was giving him money.”

“Did you find evidence of infidelity?”

He shook his head. “Look, if I’m going to have to tell everyone about this, I might as well practice on you. In case you haven’t guessed, Marya and I weren’t particularly close lately. She came up here saying she wanted to make amends, but it became clear that she was just trying to get immigration off her back. I understand that. She had a long battle.” He looked up at me. “You know about any of that?”

“Your sisters told me. They also told me repeatedly how the two of you were perfectly suited to each other, but I suspect they were trying to get under my skin.”

Ken rolled his eyes. “Sorry about that. They loved Marya. She could be a charmer when she wanted to. Didn’t hurt that she cut their hair for free. They might have been more taken in than I was.” He winced. “That sounds bitter, doesn’t it?” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “I was furious. Not that I wanted anything to happen to Marya, but I was so angry that she’d come up here, tried to cozy up to me, turned everything upside down, and then was sneaking around, involved in who knows what. Now she’s dead, and I’m trying to remember the good things, and that’s painful. But so is remembering the bad things. And I feel guilty every time I get angry.”

He released his clenched fists. “A year ago, I’d thought I’d closed that chapter of my life, and that you and I were starting something new. I was tempted to tell her I’d moved on.” He looked up and his eyes glistened in the lantern light. “But the costs were so high for her. Arrest. Deportation to a country she had no memories of. I couldn’t just walk away. But we had separate bedrooms, you know. That part of our marriage was long over. I want you to know that.”

I shrugged. “Not sure that’s any of my business.”

“I hoped you’d understand.” He stared down at his plate. “Marya was so young, so vulnerable. I guess I fancied myself as some valiant knight rescuing the damsel in distress. She was grateful. I was flattered. Somehow we both mistook that for love—or at least, I did—but after a few months that fairy tale disintegrated. On the day she got her citizenship, we celebrated with ice cream and divorce planning.”

“Yet you were still together.”

“Filing immediately could have raised eyebrows. If someone at INS decided that we’d entered into the relationship just to evade immigration laws, we both could have been charged. Seems the government considers that fraud.”

Before I could respond, the cabin started creaking.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said, “the wind must have kicked up.”

“You still should have called my father. To let him know where you were.”

“My cell’s dead. Not that it would do me any good here. No reception.”

I pulled my cell out of my coat pocket. And no, the little icon that lights up when there’s phone reception—which is like, always, except after that time I dropped it in Val’s water dish, but rice brought it back—wasn’t there, and I also had a nice little “unable to deliver” notice about that last text I’d sent Dad.

“I think the hills interfere with the signal,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t get a connection even at the road.”

“Dad’s going to worry. I need to get back.” I turned to Ken. “Will you come, too? It’ll look better than if he has to come get you.”

He smirked and gestured to his meager surroundings. “As lovely as this place is, I guess I can’t stay here forever. Let me just do the dishes and douse the fire.”

Doing dishes proved complicated with no running water, but after he’d heated a pan and I helped him wash the sticky plates and utensils, he doused the fire. In moments the deep chill seeped into the cabin. We donned our winter things and he pulled open the door.

The sky loomed dark, as dark as if it were night, and snow had drifted up against the door, maybe as high as my waist.

“Did you happen to listen to the weather forecast before you came up here?” he asked.

“It said something about lake effect, but you know they always over blow those things.”

Thunder crashed nearby and Ken pushed the door shut. “I have playing cards.”

“Sure we can’t make it?” I pulled open the door again. The knob had left a visible imprint in the compacted snow. This time it took both of us to shut the door against the wind, and not until it blew a little of that drift inside.

“This is bad,” I said.

“Yeah,” Ken said. “I’ll bet Jim Cantore is out there somewhere, dancing in the thunder snow.”

“I’d meant being stranded. Dad’s going to be …” I trailed off because I wasn’t sure what he was going to be. Angry? And if so, at whom? Me, for coming out here? Ken, for laying low?

Ken relit the fire then started to shuffle his cards.

I walked my phone around the cabin. Once I thought I saw a single bar light up, but I couldn’t get it to repeat. I began to wonder if it might have been a trick of the light.

So we whiled away the hours playing cards. Every game I could think of, ending with cribbage. I made a makeshift cribbage board on an envelope I had in my purse.

“What’s that?” Ken said, pointing to the names I had written on the other.

“That,” I said, “is a list of some of the customers who saw Marya in the days leading up to her death.”

He took it and read down the list.

“Mean anything to you?” I asked.

“I know a few of them,” he said. “I’ve seen their names in her appointment books.”

“The barber thinks she pursued the wrong clientele and gave too many discounts to turn a profit.”

“I’ve thought as much myself.” He continued to shuffle.

I swallowed hard. “You said something once, or rather started to say, you were worried she’d gone back to her old habits.”

He said nothing, just dealt the cards.

“What did you mean by ‘old habits’? You never explained it.”

“That’s because I don’t know,” he said. “She told me there were a few things in her past that it might be better I didn’t know. I gathered she had been involved in something sketchy, maybe downright illegal. She assured me that was all over. That she only did what it took to survive her situation.”

“What did you think she was involved in?”

“She was busted for drug possession back in high school.” He rearranged the cards in his hand. “At the time she said they weren’t for her, that they were her sister’s. She told me later she was trying to help wean her sister off the drugs. I know it’s near impossible to quit a lot of those things cold turkey, so I guess I believed her. Now I’m not sure. Maybe Marya was using. Maybe selling. Maybe buying. Who knows?”

“Anything lead you to think she herself had a drug problem?”

He shook his head. “She kept going to the twelve-step programs, even after the court order expired. I wasn’t sure what to make of that since she claimed she never used. Maybe she found support there. But I never found anything in the house.” He sighed. “Not for lack of checking. The more lies she told and secretive she seemed, the more tyrannical I became. I started searching her purse whenever she took a shower.” He winced. “I never thought I’d become that husband. Not sure why I did it.”

“Because you still cared about her.”

“Or maybe I just cared about me.”

I rubbed his hand. “Now you’re just being hard on yourself. If that were true, you never would have taken her back.”

The creaking and groaning of the old place grew more incessant. He glanced up. “This isn’t letting up anytime soon. I’m afraid you’re stuck here for a while.”

I closed my eyes. Being stranded during a snowstorm was a real, albeit infrequent threat when you grew up in what was known as the “Snow Belt” south of Buffalo. I’d been snowed in for an extra day at Jenny Hill’s slumber party. That was fun at first, but when we ran out of ice cream and new questions for truth or dare, the party became a little boring. We were all glad—and that went double for her haggard parents—when the plows finally made it down her street.

But that was better than the time we got snowed in at home when I was eight. Dad had to work, as usual, and Mom sneaked off to “pay a few bills.” Of course, she went on a bender, and Parker and I survived the whole weekend on Pop-Tarts, peanut butter sandwiches, and unheated cans of SpaghettiOs.

But this was a first, being stuck in a wilderness cabin with a man I once dated. On some level it could be considered romantic. I glanced at the bucket in the corner with the toilet seat attached and sighed. So not romantic.

When I looked back up at Ken, he was staring into my eyes. “Have you considered that this might be providential? That maybe the weather is luring you and me back together?”

I set my cards back down on the table and folded my hands in front of me. “What would you like me to say?”

“I’d like to hear you say that you know I didn’t kill Marya, that people can change and a relationship can be restored.”

“I know you didn’t kill Marya,” I said then stopped.

“And?”

“And yes, I believe that relationships can be restored. That is, if they were ever healthy in the first place. If you’re talking about you and me … You and I were just getting to know each other when I learned that everything you told me, everything our friendship was built upon, was a lie.”

“I regret how things turned out. I meant to tell you. I was about to tell you when Marya showed up.”

“But you didn’t.”

“And I am sorry.” He placed his hand over mine. “Is there no hope of redemption?”

I pulled back my hand, took off my glasses, and rubbed my eyes. Playing cards in the low light was beginning to trouble them. I kept my eyes closed when I continued, in part because it was easier not to see his face.

“Ken,” I said, my voice wavering just slightly. “There’s always hope of redemption. I wish you well and I hope you find it. But you and me? I don’t know.”

When I opened my eyes, Ken was nodding. “Give it some thought and time,” he said. “I don’t mean we start right now and try to pick up where we left off. But maybe, after a reasonable period … Meanwhile, I think we need to get some rest.”

I looked around to figure out how that might be possible.

Ken stood and put another log in the fire. “I suppose I could take the mattress and you could take the loft.”

“There’s a loft?” I looked up. I had thought that someone just hadn’t bothered to finish putting in the plywood ceiling.

“There’s another twin mattress up there, already made up. And another pot, if you need one. There’s instructions on the side, if you’re unfamiliar.”

“Thanks,” I said, as he propped a ladder that I’d mistaken for empty shelving up against the side of the loft.

When I reached to the top, he handed me up another battery-powered lamp, then stood on the steps like a rejected Romeo.

“Good night,” I said.

He climbed back down the steps, and I inspected the space. I found the pot and managed to read through the directions in the dim light. Seemed easy in theory, but still not private enough to suit me. I glanced around to see how I might improve upon the situation.

The loft, I decided, must have served as the main sleeping area for the original resident, who could have been an outlaw, a revenuer, or perhaps Laura Ingalls, who used the creaking and groaning space as an inspiration for writing the book The Long Winter, which I’d found heartily depressing when I’d read it in the fifth grade. But the loft was a little better furnished than the lower level. There was even a roughly framed-in closet which I thought might make for an excellent place to put the pot, so that I could take care of my most pressing needs more privately.

The door stuck when I tried to open it, but there was no visible lock, so I pulled harder. Every time I made headway, it pulled back shut, like it was held by elastic. Too tired to process the physics of this, I left off applying pressure, then all of a sudden gave the door a quick yank.

And stared into the surprised, frightened face of Marya Young.