February 2, 2023
10:33 a.m.
Despite every layer—gloves and sweaters, warm wool socks—I was getting colder with every step, the bone-chilling kind that not even the day’s bright sun could alleviate. It was the damn wind, calmer than earlier this morning but still the kind that seems to whip through you, to seep in through every seam, every gap. Not to mention the snow, coming down even harder now, refusing to let up, blanketing everything in yet another sheet of white.
Errant hairs blew against my face, and I brushed them aside, pulled the hood of my coat tighter over my head and clenched and unclenched my hands in an attempt to get the blood flowing. Then I did the same with my toes, which felt icy, despite my waterproof boots.
I paused and surveyed my surroundings. I was still on the road that led to the motel, and I hadn’t seen so much as a single car or—hell—a snowplow. Just me out here, entirely alone. It was a bad one, this storm. And I was foolish to be out in it.
The long line of my footprints were already nearly filled up with new snow, the path behind me empty and stark. The road had curved a couple of times now, so I couldn’t see the motel, only tall trees on either side, weighed down with flakes, some of whose branches had fallen, scattered across the road.
I turned to keep walking, but as I did, my foot caught something, and suddenly, my hands, my face, my body, were prone in the snow, cold touching my every inch. I scrambled up, my pulse pounding, snowflakes on my lips. An ache shot through my wrist as I brushed off the snow. The speed with which I’d fallen was staggering, the sheer isolation of being out here terrifying. If I had really gotten hurt, what would I have done? Who would even pass by and find me?
It was beyond clear: I should never have come out here. Because surely I should have gotten to the old house by now. Soon I would be stranded in the snow, trapped in my own nightmare—someone finding my cold dead hand reaching out of the drift tomorrow…
Slow down, Kerry, I could practically hear Frank saying. You’ve got this, if you can keep your cool.
It was always so easy for him to stay calm, I thought. So impossible for me.
Still, I retrieved my phone, checked, once again, for a signal—none—then opened the Health app, which automatically tracked my steps. Nearly two thousand, which was a mile, if I remembered correctly. Frank had gotten super into fitness tracking one year. Sure, at least a few hundred of those steps were from walking around the motel this morning, but I had to be making progress, I had to. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and faced once again the direction I’d been going, the unblemished falling snow. There was another curve in the road, maybe a hundred feet ahead.
The house is probably right around the bend; that’s what Frank would say if he were here. There isn’t any reason to panic. You’re almost there.
Just one step in front of the other, I told myself as I pushed forward, ignoring the cold, the fact that my toes were tingling already with numbness, which I knew couldn’t be a good thing.
Then, finally, I was rounding the curve, and when the trees opened up, I nearly cried with relief.
The Victorian house.
I was here. I had made it. Imaginary Frank had been right.
The front steps creaked beneath my weight as I trudged across them. The porch held a series of planters, domed with snow but getting ready for spring, plus a porch swing that was full of powder. I lifted my hand to the door, taking in the lightly peeling lavender paint, fresher on one side than the other, as if whoever lived here was improving the place, little by little, slat by slat. A pickup truck sat in front. On the drive in, not even twenty-four hours before, I’d marveled at how even the waypoints to the motel were charming, almost felt curated, and now, the idea felt absurd. People out here—they had to deal with this—batten down against winter storms. Against women lying dead out in the snow. It wasn’t for show, for likes. It was real.
Heart thumping, I delivered a quick knock. It was difficult not to imagine the worst: Big, angry men, guns in hand, ready to tell me to get the hell off their property. Locals furious at people like me coming up and changing everything with my sheer presence.
No sound, no shuffle of footsteps. I forced back the fear and knocked again, louder this time. Rap rap rap.
Again, I turned back, stared at the road, empty apart from my footsteps in the snow. I couldn’t go back to a dead body and just wait. I felt tears in my eyes as my pulse pounded even faster—I was supposed to be getting everything together. It was never supposed to be—
“Can I help you?”
I jumped, practically leaping out of my skin. In my panic, I hadn’t even heard someone approaching, or maybe they’d just been quiet. I brushed away my tears, the material of the gloves scratchy against my face, and turned to see a woman.
Thank god, I thought. A woman.
I opened my mouth to speak, then found myself not even knowing where to start. “Something’s happened,” I blubbered. “Something—” More tears spilled, but the woman only looked at me, impatient. She had gray hair clipped short at the sides, wrinkles at the edges of her mouth, and her lips were set into what looked almost like a permanent frown. She had a gruff, no-nonsense way about her, and here I was, on her doorstep, spouting little more than nonsense. “I’m sorry,” I went on. “I walked here, from the old motel, about a mile up the road. I…I need help.”
The woman stared at me a moment, then opened the door a bit wider.
“You shouldn’t be out in this weather,” she said, a touch of reprimand in her voice as she reached out, hand on my elbow, ushering me in. Instantly, I was hit by the warmth of fire, roaring in an enormous cast-iron woodstove, a pipe reaching up through the ceiling. She led me to a sofa, indicated that I should sit.
I took off my gloves and hat, left the coat on—still way too cold—then sunk back into the well-loved cushions. The woman took the seat opposite me. She adjusted a pillow behind her back, then set her palms on the knees of a well-worn pair of jeans. In her own surroundings, obviously chosen and cared for with love, she looked less gruff—more like someone who was used to working hard day in and day out. A glance at her hands—cracked, chapped, and red—seemed to confirm it.
“It’s just you?” she asked.
For a moment, her words were like a vortex, sucking me into the past.
To a few years before, when Frank and I were watching some easily forgettable TV show, and there was an especially cute kid on it, and he turned to me and said, his round face almost bashful, his slightly thinning brown hair mussed up like it always was: “I think it’s time, don’t you?”
Or to years before that, standing on the waterfront at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Frank’s adorable Italian family in from New Jersey, my friends and family up from North Carolina, us making promises to each other while the officiant made a joke about starting a family and turning our parents into grandparents, both of us blushing with anticipation, with joy.
Or before that, even, to that day I walked into the ad agency where I was freelancing for a couple of weeks and met the nerdy marketing director with nineties-era frameless glasses, a scraggly beard, and an “Architecture is so punk rock” sticker pasted across his laptop. He caught me eyeing it, said, “But it really is, though,” and I laughed so hard, and he started laughing, too, and then there we were, two strangers cackling in the middle of an office before I’d even filled out my paperwork.
To the moment I knew my world was going to be different with him in it. Even then, it felt like we would one day be a family.
It was never supposed to be just me. But three years of trying and two failed rounds of IVF had changed all that, of course. It had stolen our love, the stability of our marriage, our money.
Or maybe I was lying to myself. Maybe it was only me: my drinking, my failures, my “inhospitable” womb, my inability to finish a damn book.
“At the motel, I mean,” the woman clarified, bringing me back to the present.
“Yes,” I said. “Just me. Well, I guess that isn’t true. There is someone else, the other caretaker. She was supposed to have already left, but her room was a mess. Stuff everywhere, like there’d been a party. And then this morning, I saw her, outside…buried in the snow. She’s…she’s dead.” The words brought more tears to my eyes, from the release of finally saying it out loud, if nothing else.
“Dead?” she asked, rearing back. “You sure?”
“Her fingers were blue,” I said, as I used my own to wipe away the tears. “I touched her. I tried to call the police, but my phone doesn’t have any service. And the land lines at the motel aren’t working. Also, I lost power before I headed out.”
The woman nodded, gesturing around. “Same thing here. Obviously.”
“Right,” I said. “Do you know how long it takes for everything to get fixed?”
The woman laughed heartily, almost a cackle. “This isn’t Manhattan,” she said. “Could be a few hours, could be a few days.”
She must have seen the worry in my eyes because her own widened kindly. “It’s okay,” she said. “I can help you. My brother, Billy, is a cop. He doesn’t live too far from here. Radio’s working. Let me get you something warm to drink, try to call him. I’ll be right back.”
Without the hum of power, of plugged-in TVs, computers, refrigerators, the sounds that were left stood out: the crackle of the logs in the woodstove, the tick-tock, tick-tock of an antique grandfather clock in the corner, the banging of cups and running water coming behind me from the kitchen. I pressed my palms into the scratchy floral print of the sofa. It reminded me of the set my mother had gotten in the nineties, covered in blooms in different shades of mauve. My mother, who budgeted through our family’s health scares and job losses on a handful of rotating credit cards, had always maintained that you had to invest in your space, that looking at something beautiful was worth loosening the purse strings. My mom had been so happy when the book and movie deals had come through. When I’d dared to share numbers that made her and my dad’s heads spin, not to mention my little brother, Nick, who was a teacher, along with his wife, in North Carolina, their dual incomes barely enough to support their twin girls, I could just hear the pride in her voice. “A real writer,” my mother had said. “I always knew it, you know. You were always telling your stories. And you never stopped trying. And now you won’t have to worry about money anymore. This is it, Kerry. Your big break. I’m so happy for you.”
The woman returned then, a chipped mug in one hand, the radio in the other. “It’s just hot water and honey. Drink it slow. You’re red as anything. You need to warm up.”
“Thank you,” I said. The water scalded my tongue, and I blew on the cup, then nodded to the radio still clasped in her hand. “Were you able to get in touch with your brother?”
“No,” she said. “But don’t worry. I’ll try him again in a few minutes. Or he’ll try me. He’s always looking out for us, my brother.” She retook her place on the sofa. “Now, do you have any idea what might have happened? So we can tell him, when he calls?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know if she wandered out there or if there was some sort of accident. But her car isn’t even in the lot. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “Well, I can explain that. I had it towed.”
“Wait,” I said, doing a double take. “What?”
“She kept parking on my property, even when I told her not to. She didn’t move the car, so I called it in.”
“I don’t understand. Wouldn’t she park at the motel?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “She parked to the side of the dumpster, for reasons that were beyond me, but the dumpster is on my property. I’ve asked Maisy to move it, but she won’t—we’re battling it out right now—but that girl, she wouldn’t listen. Even when I warned her. Never had that problem when the Rivers family owned the place. They were good folks, you know. Shouldn’t have sold, you ask me.”
The mug shook in my hand as the woman’s words—I warned her—rang in my mind. I lowered it to my lap, hoping she wouldn’t see the quivering. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize you knew her.”
“I didn’t know her.” She tapped her foot on the knit rug beneath her. “But I’m only a mile away, on the road, that is, and our properties touch. I see everyone who goes in and out of that motel. She was there a month, you know. Impossible not to see her, really. And like I said, it’s awful she’s dead, but I can’t say it exactly surprises me. The way she was carrying on.”
“Carrying on?”
“People in and out. Partying and drinking. Like she was just asking for trouble.”
My eyes widened, and I shifted in my seat. I set down my mug on the scuffed-up wooden coffee table, then eyed the radio. It hadn’t made a single beep, and I realized I hadn’t heard anything when she was in the kitchen, either, not over the sound of water running and the whistle of the kettle. My hands felt suddenly clammy, a cold sweat taking them over. Was the radio even working? It seemed a bit convenient that every phone line was down and there was no power to be found, but she happened to have a personal device that went straight to the police.
The grandfather clock began to sing its hourly refrain, the tune feeling suddenly interminable, the ding-dong-ding-dong ringing in my ears as my heart pounded twice as fast as the rhythm of the swinging brass pendulum caught behind glass.
And as the song moved into the ring-ring-ring to denote the hour, crawling, too slowly, toward its eleven chimes for eleven o’clock, I felt trapped, too. The snow, the weather, was brutal, but how did I know here was any better? What if I had walked straight out of the frying pan and into the fire?
The chiming stopped, and my ears rang as soon as it did, as if trying to fill the emptiness with something else, and my chin trembled as I stared at the door, at the dead bolt, which I only now realized the woman had turned, and wasn’t that strange? Wasn’t it odd to lock a door in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of this weather?
The chiming stopped, but the ticking remained—tick-tock, tick-tock—and it felt like my own time, my own security, my own safety, was slipping away with each new pendulum swing.
I stood, because all I wanted in that moment was to be out of here, to be far away from this woman, from her hot water and honey, from a radio I wasn’t even sure was real.
“You okay?” the woman asked.
I took a step toward the door. I didn’t care how cold it was outside; it wasn’t worth feeling like this.
“Maybe I should—”
Before I could get out the rest of the words, the radio beeped.
“Denise. Denise. This is Billy. Come in, Denise.”
She jumped at the radio, pressing a button and holding it close to her face. “Billy, thank god! Young woman walked over here, says she came upon another woman, dead, right outside one of the rooms at the old motel. We need your help.”
Another beep and then: “Dead? I hear you right?”
The fear inside me deflated, and I sighed, then retook my seat.
The woman nodded vigorously, then pushed the button again. “Yes, Billy. Dead.”
An agonizing pause stretched between us. Then another beep.
“Aw, shit,” he said. “I’m out on a call, but let me wrap this up, and then I’ll be right there. Tell her to meet me at the motel.” Another pause. “You can have Tyler drive her over.”