The snow, which had been suspended in the air as if too light to settle completely to the ground, now began to stir in a sideways roll against his windshield for the last miles along Route 3 before he reached the bridge. The van headlights were absorbed by the gray wool of night, gaining him only a short view of road before the distances became featureless.
The last time he had come to the Cape in the winter was after the great storm of ‘78. It was the year his father had sold their small shack on the bluff in Eastham. The old man never liked going there after Henry's mother died. He couldn't bear it, and keeping the little house up had become a miserable annual chore. He had wanted to keep it for Henry and his sister, but those were the Carter years: money was tight, and jobs for electricians had dried up. The old man sold it after Shelagh had left home, the same year Henry took his first full-time summer job.
The house Henry was looking for now was no shack, but it would be no more visible in this weather than the dark gaps of shadow which appeared regularly at both sides of the road. Occasional lights distinguished one shadow from another, revealing the presence of other human beings. Cape Cod was a lonely place in winter.
He was thinking he should turn back. It was only five o'clock as he passed the rotary in Orleans, but he might not be able to find the place now in the dark. He should have started earlier. The book auction he had attended that morning had extended into the afternoon. He should have changed his plans. The weather report had not mentioned snow, but then New England weather reports were useless—worse than useless, they were misleading. He was happy he had worn his boots.
Albert would have known what the weather would be if Henry had bothered to ask. Albert could read the look of the clouds like any good fisherman. But by then Henry had already made the phone call. Whoever had picked up the phone without answering would have heard his voice. Henry had even given his own name in the hope of getting them to speak. Henry was very sure it was Arthur who was staying at Morgan's beach house.
A street sign caught an edge of his headlight. Henry stopped and backed up until he could see it fully, and then checked his map. Only two more intersections.
The sign for the road he wanted was encrusted with snow, but a car had left the highway there and made its tracks. He followed these for over a mile before getting the idea that perhaps they were Arthur's tracks. How many people would be staying in a beach house in early December? Arthur might have gone out to buy some milk or get the paper. Henry only hoped that the tracks were going toward the house and not leaving.
The house was gray shingle and white trim, invisible to the eye but for a yard light by a low rail fence. The tracks Henry had followed led to the dark hulk of a car parked in the driveway in front of a separate garage. The snow burst upon him as he opened his van door. The wind here had a hard edge of salt and the smell of metal.
A steady hiss and moan spoke from the eaves of the house and in the pine boughs that blocked what view of the ocean he might get from the driveway on a good day. There was no light on at the door. A bedroom lamp glowed through a closed curtain in a dormer above. There were no footprints at this front door, and Henry assumed the preferred entrance was at the rear, but he rang the bell anyway. He could hear the electric trill even through the wind. There was no sound of response. He rang it again.
After the third try, he walked around the side where the garage offered a brief shelter from the blow, probing through the drift of snow for the steps to the deck with his boot before noticing the imprint of someone else. A metallic crack behind made him jerk his head around. It was the cooling of the engine in the car parked there—recently arrived and only just beginning to collect a coat of snow.
In front of him, on the sculpted surface of snow across the deck, there were other footprints. A lamp blazed through the glass of a sliding door. The door was partly open, and snow was beginning to drift through the opening over a small rug onto the wood of a polished floor, where it melted into golden beads of water.
The light caught the footprints on the deck in a moonscape of scrapes and depressions. These were two sets of footprints, mixed. The snow had blown up deeply against the house beside the door, and in that there was the impression of something which had lain there recently—no, had fallen. It was the impression of a body. Across the snow dark pieces of something had been tossed. Henry bent down to pick one up, and realized it was not whole. Bloody snow fell apart in his glove.
Henry went through the opening of the door and closed it behind himself.
"Arthur?"
A momentary silence was slowly replaced by the muffled wind outside. There was no other sound within. He turned away from the glare of the light. A kitchen, close by on the garage side, suddenly hummed with the sound of a refrigerator. He jerked, then took a deep breath to force a measure of self-control. Away in the other direction stretched a darkened living room. On the wall by the kitchen was a phone. Henry picked it up and dialed for the police. He had to say the address twice. He hung up then, impatiently.
His eyes sought the splatter of more blood. There was none. The house was in neat order, with dish towels stacked in an open pantry and place mats laid on a glass-topped table near the sliding door. The curtains of the living room were open to a flat gray movement of snow—to a view in better weather he could only imagine. A wall of books faced the windows from across the arching back of a couch positioned before the metal hood of an open hearth. Half-burned logs smoldered there.
Behind the wall of books a stairwell rose to the upper floor. Henry called Arthur's name again as he climbed the steps. His voice died in the still air. Two bedroom doors were open, with a bathroom between them. One of the beds was only half-made. There was no sign of anything else.
Downstairs again, Henry opened the sliding doors to the howl and press of the wind—growing now, it seemed. Snow attached to his eyelashes immediately. He wiped his face and looked off the deck in the direction of the ocean. Faintly there, only a few feet away, the tracks of two people broke the flat white surface of the slope between stunted pine.
Henry followed, stopping briefly when he saw again the dark pieces of splattered blood to one side. The footprints fell further apart.
They were running. They were running, one from the other. He followed more quickly. He knew who these men were. He was not sure which one to be fearful for.
Ranulf had called Henry that morning to ask if he had any idea where Arthur might be. He said he wanted only to talk to him. Arthur had been avoiding Ranulf since the memorial service. Ranulf thought Arthur had left town until someone else mentioned seeing him the previous week. Then Henry had made the mistake.
The Realtor had called to complain about Henry sticking his nose in where it didn't belong. Henry's pretence of friendship with Arthur was a fraud. And part of this had come out when Henry had asked Ranulf if he knew how much debt Heber's sickness and death had left on Morgan's shoulders. Henry understood that it was at least partially his own stupidity that had caused this bloody mess now.
The push and shove of the wind took Henry's sense of balance away. He fell when his boot slipped off what must have been a board-covered path below the moving surface of the snow. The sound of the ocean was clear now.
A triangle of darker wooden railing protruded from the snow and Henry stopped just short of it with the realization that these were steps and the gauze before him was empty space. He felt his way blindly downward until the squall passed and the beach suddenly presented itself in variations of gray.
A steady grind of surf separated into the fall and crash of individual waves. Blackened ocean parted from the mottled dark of the sky; the snow emitting its own fluorescence. Wind carried pellets of ice against the skin of his face, stinging.
He heard a cry. It was a cry. Not a scream.
He stopped and scanned the slope of broken drifts across the beach for some sign of their movement.
There was another cry.
They were there. Only yards from him. On the covered sand. One figure twisted away and gained his feet, turning to run. The other arose in a wave of snow and enveloped him.
Arthur's voice tore from his throat. “Insane ... you're insane. I loved her.... I swear I couldn't kill her!"
Henry ran at them headlong, hitting both from the back at once and knocking them to the ground. The black tatters of blood marked the snow around them as they turned on their backs to look up at him. Blood oozed from Arthur's nose with each heave of his chest.
The truth seemed obvious.
"Ranulf. Arthur didn't do it."
The words were simple enough to say.
The two men lay still, their breath blown from their mouths in belches of smoke, until the distant blue of a police light entered the plane between the snow-thickened air and the icy rubble of the beach.