2

It was apparent to Cass that Tilly and Vick knew she’d seen Jack. Either Tilly herself had spotted her with her brother or someone had betrayed him. Cass had two options: hide in her room or linger in the kitchen, meet their inquisition with nonchalance and try to learn what she could about the source of the money.

She looked at the table, on which sat a cribbage board and deck of cards, Tilly’s puck of chew and coffee-can spittoon, and three mugs of coffee, one before Tilly, one before Vick, one before the empty seat by the front door. Above each freshly poured mug, steam rose and dissipated. Vick rested his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, eyeing Cass. Steeling herself, she spoke first.

“The fuck do you want?” she asked him.

He filled his mouth with coffee, goofily inflated his cheeks, and gulped it down. “Cassie, Cassie, Cassie, Cassie,” he said, his voice husky from alcohol and cigarettes. “Don’t be like that. I know you wanna make me out to be a jackass just so you can say that’s what I’ve always been, but I ain’t here for that. I’ve got some exciting news. Big plans ahead.”

Cass rolled her eyes. When she lit a cigarette, Tilly scolded her. “Take that outside. Always with your bad habits,” she sniped, tucking chew into her lip.

Cass opened the front door and went out onto the stoop.

“Don’t shut the door. We need to talk,” Tilly said.

Cass left the door cracked but stepped out of sight of the kitchen. Wind bawled against the garage siding. She didn’t see Vick’s truck anywhere and was beginning to wonder if he’d walked the six miles to Tilly’s. Then, peering around the side of the house, she spotted the back tire of his motorcycle, which, she reasoned, he must have coasted down the length of the long driveway, since she didn’t hear it approach. She hadn’t seen his bootprints in the basement, so she assumed he hadn’t sniffed around down there. She sucked deeply on her cigarette and closed her eyes.

“That’s not the only reason he’s here, Cassandra,” Tilly mumbled from the kitchen, her cheek fat with tobacco. “We know you been up to something. Just since I’m old don’t mean I don’t know how things are.”

“You know everything, Grandma.”

“Got more ears than the two on my head. From what I hear, it’s the devil himself has come for us. These days, Cassandra, I wouldn’t put no type of sin past nobody, with all the worst going around. Ain’t like the way it used to be. Way back when, Charlie Smith was a boy used to go around snapping chicken necks. He wouldn’t eat them or try to trap wolves with them. Just leave them right where he killed them. That was about the worst thing I’d ever heard of. Till he got his ass whooped, then he quit. But he stood out that way. Now, it seems we get at least two robberies a week. Doors kicked in, tires slashed over some fight about a loose woman. All those kids out behind the Rogers’ shed, smoking up chemicals and all that. I know of them at least three times beating kids within an inch of living. Girls, too, taking and giving.”

Tilly spat in her can, then continued raving, “Rick Swenson’s daughter stabbed him with a rusty pocketknife last week. She’s the same one just got outta rehab in Duluth. Tell me how they paid for that. And remember last summer, them two boys got higher than sparrows and drowned their sister in the bathtub?”

Annoyed, Cass said nothing. She’d heard these anecdotes of Tilly’s before.

Tilly screeched, “And don’t forget all those murders down in Brainerd. Them fellows shot in their car in the Wendy’s parking lot.” It seemed that in raising her voice Tilly wished to emphasize the significance of this particular tragedy, but Cass was too concerned with Vick’s presence to pay it much mind. “I gotta wonder about whose fault is it all, the evil coming over us?”

As the wind flounced her exhalation from her lips, Cass spotted another small doe trot across the driveway and disappear into the grove. “Ain’t mine,” she replied.

“What ain’t?” Vick asked.

“A doe out here. Second I seen.”

“What ain’t, Cassandra?” he persisted.

“I said it ain’t my fault all this shit’s happening!” she crowed back at him.

“And what shit is that?” Tilly replied.

“Whatever shit you’re talking about.”

“Less your fault than Jack’s, I’d say. By the by, I couldn’t hear you down in the basement today. Found it curious.”

“You’re half deaf, woman. Been that way a long while. Anyway, I took a nap for a bit.”

“You seem worried, sweetie. Would you hurry up with that smoke? Getting cold in here.”

The doe emerged at the grove’s edge nearest the house and craned its neck to lick the salt-block Cass had placed there two nights ago.

“Come look, I’ll show you,” Cass said. “A little small, maybe. Too young.”

Tilly slowly stood, curved like a candy cane, her feet and ankles swollen, and hobbled her way to the front door, sliding her spittoon across the kitchen table for balance. Cass helped her onto the stoop, then quietly closed the door behind them. The wind muffled their conversation some. They watched the doe.

“She ain’t quite ready, is she?” Tilly said.

“What’s he doing here?”

“Can’t a man wanna see his daughter? He told you he has some news. Anyway, I suppose he wouldn’t mind just talking to you about how things are going, Cassandra.”

“I ain’t been in trouble. You already knew that. I don’t know what Vick’s up to, but I promise this has nothing to do with looking out for me or anyone else, and you’ll get nothing for helping your son out. Remember when he said he needed to borrow twenty-two hundred to repair his roof, then he took off for the Mille Lacs Casino? Remember when you and him were gonna make fistfuls of cash running that hardware store so you handed over Grandpa’s life insurance money? I guarantee he’s screwing you again somehow.”

Tilly looked up at Cass. “Stop that. God knows he ain’t been perfect to me, but he ain’t been half-terrible either. Anyway, he’s my son. Frankly, I don’t know the whole truth of what he’s looking for, but he says he’s worried about your safety. When you’re a parent, you’ll understand all this better. He does love you, Cassandra. Jack, too.”

“Bullshit. And you know exactly why he’s here. Doctor never even snipped the cord between you two.”

Tilly scoffed and they faced the doe again. When the wind died down and Cass sniffled, the doe sprinted off. She flicked her butt into an ice-cream pail on the step, dropped her hood, and escorted Tilly back inside.

Cass draped her coat over the back of her chair, then the women sat at the table, warming their hands against their coffee mugs.

Staring into the grove again, Vick said to her, “Any chance you’ve seen your brother?”

“Nope.”

“You expecting to?”

“Wouldn’t waste time doing that.”

Vick placed the cribbage board between them and shuffled the deck of cards with his slender, skillful fingers, flicking his gaze back and forth between the women. They three cut the deck to see who would deal first, then began to play.

After a few hands, Vick scowled and said, “It kills me that Jack’s turned you against me so bad, Cassie. A goddamn shame. Especially now that he’s in such trouble. Bad trouble. I doubt even he knows the half of it. There’s some nasty people looking for him. They won’t stop till they get what they want, either. Your brother and I have had our differences, but he’s still my son, and I ain’t gonna let these goons come and hurt him. Right now there’s still time to save him. But we gotta talk to him and let him know what’s going on.”

“What goons?”

“That’s not your concern. Just tell me where he is, honey,” Vick implored her.

“I would if I knew.”

“If you only knew how important this is. On my soul, dear.”

“Soul,” she scoffed.

“Cassandra,” Tilly reprimanded her, “let’s not let old grievances get in the way of helping your brother.”

Vick and Cass watched Tilly spit the rest of her chew into her can and begin to cough. She groaned, cleared her throat, and hacked for a minute, her wrinkles wriggling. Then she swigged her coffee and sucked the last droplets from her mustache and cried, “When you were a girl, you were so curious, Cassie. Always asking questions and climbing trees and looking through cupboards. Always busy, busy, busy. I wonder a bit about why you sit out here with us, though you clearly don’t enjoy our company and we didn’t ask you to be out here. You could’ve gone to your room or back to the basement. But no. And why is that? Because you’re curious. Still so curious. Although, there is one thing that interests me. I have the feeling that you may have been too curious, learned something you maybe shouldn’t have, and now you feel bad about it. I can tell, Cassie. Grandmotherly intuition. Please don’t feel guilty. Your dad and me know you’re just too damn good of a girl to do something awful on purpose. Hardly even leave the house but for work. A good girl.”

As Tilly spoke, Cass looked into the adjacent living room at the couch upholstered in rough olive and brown cotton twill. Tilly, lowering her eyes, finished, “Then again, maybe he didn’t tell you everything. Maybe we can fill in some blanks for you. You wanna know where that money your brother’s got came from, Cassandra?”

Cass sneered down at her cards, but her fingertips were juddering, so she turned her eyes to the ice calligraphy on the windows. She felt Vick and Tilly scrutinizing her face for signs of forfeit, the slightest ambivalence. A silent minute passed so expectant, so tender and grave, that Vick and Tilly played their cards and moved their pegs and sipped their coffee and even breathed with special precision, as if any deviation from their interrogation’s course would imperil it.

Cass’s gaze descended to Tilly’s hands. Molted slabs of scarlet atop each. Veins plump with blueberry-jam blood. A cruddy, gnarled tooth at the end of each yellow finger. As if magically, those two grotesquely weathered creatures lured Cass’s gaze, turning her eyes into drowsy slits, as Tilly’s own opened wider. Cass dropped her cards, scratched her arms over her hoodie, then slipped both hands into her pouch.

“Cassie, baby,” Vick whispered, “you’re shaking.”

“I’m cold.”

He set his cards down on the table, went to her, and crouched by her side. His eyes were wet, though she didn’t smell liquor on him. He placed his hand on her thigh.

He said, “God knows, I’ve been horseshit for a father. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it, that it don’t pop into my head and I gotta shake my head to get rid of the pain. That’s the truth right there, whether or not you choose to believe it. That’s me telling you the hardest thing I could. But I’d do anything for you and Jack.”

Tilly had inched so close that when she whispered, “No more secrets,” wafts of stale coffee-and-tobacco breath washed over Cass.

“Let’s keep Jack safe from these nasty, nasty people, Cassie,” Vick said. “He told you everything, didn’t he? Told you what he did with the money?”

Cass peered into Tilly’s eyes. Tilly smiled sympathetically, her bottom lip enveloping her upper, the wrinkles on her face crimping and flexing.

When he squeezed Cass’s thigh, she pinched her eyes shut and nibbled on her upper lip. She knew that her sudden silence was betraying her, that she needed to justify it somehow.

She said, “There is something I need to tell you …”

She paused and looked her father over. The facial expression she’d grown to expect from him, the pained and hateful and arrogant simper that he could never entirely hide from her, a pain no excitement could relieve, a hate no blessing could replace with love, an arrogance no violence could humble, wasn’t there. Instead, he seemed empathetic to her dilemma, and for a moment she had the urge to reciprocate his compassion and tell him the truth. However, she then recalled the handprint bruises on Jack’s arms as he sat whimpering in the corner of their shared childhood bedroom, the memory like cold air on a bare tooth root.

She bit her bottom lip and eyed Vick and, without a blink, explained, “How many times did you say you’d come by and show me how to use the rifle you gave me, the one that used to be yours? I used to wait and wait for you to come show me, Vick.”

Before he could rock back on his heels and pull away, Cass hugged him melodramatically, draping her arm around his neck and wiping snot on the shoulder of his leather jacket. When she released him, she said to Tilly, “You always are so sweet to me, listening and all, Grandma.”

Tilly grunted. Vick returned to his seat, nodding to himself in frustration.

They continued their cribbage game.

“How about, if I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him?” Cass told him, pepped up by her evasion.

“Please do. You suppose you could start calling me Dad again?”

“What for?”

“For me.”

“Christ,” she barked. “You know, it’s just like you to come in and lie about something stupid for no damn reason. On top of all the rest of your bullshit, too.”

“What did I lie about?”

“You said you had good news. What happened to all that? Up and vanished in the wind.”

“But I do have news. I already told your grandma. Just hints, though, not everything. I’m trying not to get too far ahead of myself. Here it is: I’m in love. Someday I think I’ll ask her to marry me.”

Vick smirked at his cards, Tilly at him. Cass stared at him but said nothing.

“Don’t ask me who it is,” he continued. “I ain’t told no one. Don’t wanna jinx it.”

“Do I know her?” Tilly asked.

“You may. You may not.”

Gritting her teeth, Cass asked, “Does she know what happened to your first wife?”

“Everyone knows what happened to Suzanne.”

“That ain’t true. Sergeant Bloom played dumb for years now. Otherwise, you’d be in prison.”

Calmly, he replied, “You and your brother are entitled to your theories, but that don’t make them true, Cassie.”

“By the way, it’s funny how you can’t get Bloom to help you with this missing-money case. Tough when you’re a crook and he’s a crooked cop.”

“Cassie—”

She’d had enough. She threw her cards down, put her hood up, and slipped out onto the stoop, slamming the door behind her. Rancorous winds cooled her warm face, stilled the descent of the sweat on her brow. She pushed her sleeves up and smoked a cigarette, then escaped to the garage.

While waiting for him to leave, she sharpened Tilly’s chainsaw. She sat on a stool before the plywood countertop in the corner of the garage, hunched over the jaws.

Fifteen minutes later Vick knocked on the garage door and pulled it up enough to crouch his way beneath it and step inside. He was holding her coat.

“You’re gonna catch a cold out here,” he said.

She ignored him.

“I’m leaving now. I’ll see you around. Please, Cassie, these are bad folks we’re dealing with. Things could get violent. Don’t trust Bloom. Don’t trust your brother. Don’t trust me if you don’t wanna. I only want you all safe.”

“I try to be quiet, just work and trap and mind my own business. I try not to be like you, but there’s always something with you and Jack. Always. Now you’re trying to get this money. Even got your own mother shaking me down for it.”

“Money? Me? What do I care? I mean, have you ever really looked at it? It’s ugly. Just green paper covered in germs. Got some creeps’ faces slapped on it.”

He shook his head and walked toward her and leaned against the counter. “Your coat’s dirty.”

She looked at him.

“Stinks too. You have a campfire?”

“Was craving s’mores. Fuck does it matter to you?”

He smirked. “Okay, then.” He hung her coat by its hood from the corner of the countertop and said, “I have no memories of you ever being nice to me, Cassie. I’m sure there was a time, but …” He shrugged.

She looked him over and replied, “You frighten me, Vick. It seems you like to frighten people.”

“Don’t be afraid. It’ll all be over soon,” he said, downcast. “Take care of Grandma, and call me if you need to.”

She watched him walk away, unsure as to what end he was wielding his tenderness.

He went to his motorcycle, let it warm up for a few minutes, and drove off.

She replayed the evening’s events in her head, attempting to recall if she’d said anything that might’ve somehow given Jack away. When she’d assured herself that she had not, she quickly put the saw away and closed the garage door and padlocked the woodchute door. After coming in from the cold, she locked the door behind her.

Tilly yet sat at the table. Cass took the rubber band from her hair and wrapped it around the cards. “No more cribbage tonight. It’s getting late. Don’t you think you should go to bed, Grandma?”

“Ain’t tired.”

Neither was Cass. She made salted popcorn on the stove, and they moved to the living room couch and watched game shows on the TV. A veneer of ice palled the living room and kitchen windows and the half circle of glass on the top of the door, shuttering the house. As Tilly played games on her cell and drank coffee and chewed and muttered to herself, Cass lounged with her feet warming beneath Tilly’s sinewy thigh, thinking over the many unanswered questions with which the day had presented her. Where did the money come from? Had Jack killed somebody? Was anything Tilly and Vick said true? Who were these “goons,” if they existed at all? Would they come after her?

At one point, she asked Tilly, “Why does he do that, pretend he’s not an asshole anymore?”

Tilly pounced as if waiting for the question. “You’re so young, Cassandra. You don’t know what the human spirit is capable of. I ain’t naïve about him and what he’s put me through. But I’ve seen how people can be better than they’ve been. A mother must always give her son that chance.”

Cass nearly scoffed, then was glad she didn’t. She could never tell if Tilly was senile, wise, or both.

“Jack really in danger?” she asked.

“You know he is, Cassandra.”

The night wore on and the snowfall thickened and the wind keened with increasing vehemence against the house. Cass closed her eyes and tried to drift toward sleep, but her apprehensions would not permit it.

Two images continued to emerge in her mind. The first was of her mother’s emaciated frame sheltered by a black head of hair so long it entangled with the apron straps knotted at her lower back. To Cass, Suzanne’s face was as without feature as it had been every day since the funeral ten years ago. Despite her secret compulsion to envision Suzanne’s expression as she cooked or baked or cleaned the woodstove with vinegar-water, Cass hadn’t the courage to look at the many photographs buried in a shoebox in the back of the cupboard above the fridge.

Jack hated Victor Schmidt because he believed his father was responsible for his mother’s death. One summer night eleven years ago, Vick and Suzanne went camping while the kids stayed with Tilly. Only Vick returned. Vick contended that Suzanne had walked away from the tent that night, run off to Canada with another man, and months later killed herself. More importantly, Sergeant George Bloom, Suzanne’s older brother and the Best Man at Suzanne and Vick’s wedding, believed this as well.

Jack and Cass moved in with Tilly not long after Suzanne’s disappearance. He had childhood memories of Suzanne and Vick arguing over Vick’s endless fake-check and disability scams, the insurance fraud and pyramid schemes, as she resented his criminality. Jack theorized that she threatened to leave Vick, Vick in turn killed her, and Bloom helped to cover up the murder.

Though Cass found Vick’s version of events more outlandish than Jack’s, she badly wanted to believe that Jack was wrong. She’d never told him this. Nor had she ever mentioned that, as frightened as she’d been of their father, of the fury with which he disciplined her and Jack when they were children, belt on bare bottoms, the drunken rants that inevitably led to violence against Jack, who goaded him in order to protect his little sister, she nevertheless believed he could someday show her that he’d atoned for the sins of his younger days. This outcome was, of course, much more probable were he innocent of Suzanne’s murder. Secretly, she supposed it possible that she could one day warm up to him.

The second image was of Jack’s boyhood smile, which she’d seen for an instant earlier that day, his crooked tooth tough against the flesh of his wry lip. That smile had disappeared when Suzanne did. It seemed to Cass that as a boy her brother was embittered by the realization of just how conniving and unjust the world was. Whereas, she had somehow never been duped into believing it was otherwise.

She wasn’t quite sure what Jack meant when he called her “the baddest one between all of us,” but she believed him. It wasn’t that she herself was cruel, but that she was unfazed by the cruelty of others and, no less, by that of circumstance. For her the omen of doom that presided over their meager Northwoods existence wasn’t so horrible. Because she, unlike so many in Backus, neither wished it away nor abused alcohol and drugs to hide from it, she felt ready—or as ready as she could have been—to confront it. Eager, even.

Around ten, Cass devised a plan for the night. Even if she wouldn’t need her rifle and wasn’t prepared to use it anyway, it would at least help her sleep. Her father’s gun had always been like a pet: a loyal companion.

When Tilly told her she was heading in for the night, Cass escorted her to the bathroom, cradling her arm. As the old woman readied for bed, Cass snuck back through the kitchen and down into the basement. Beside the chute was a card table, which she dragged in front of the stove. She walked past the pelts to the far corner of the basement and picked up a gray canvas gun case leaning against the wall. She brought it to the table, where she slowly unzipped the case and slid the Winchester hunting rifle out and laid it down. Sliding the bolt back, she loaded a cartridge into the chamber. She looked down at the barrel for a moment before quietly loading the final two cartridges and sliding the bolt forward again.

She waited to hear the running bathroom faucet before checking the safety and carrying the rifle upstairs and into the kitchen. She immediately stopped.

Tilly stood by the kitchen table, her forearms on the back of a chair.

“Oh?! What are you up to with Vicky’s gun?”

“Ain’t his no more. Bastard gave it to me.”

“Mrs. Cassandra Walter Schmidt, you best come clean with everything right now.”

“I’m gonna kill that doe tomorrow morning before work.”

“It’s too young.”

“Young enough for eating.”

She stormed past Tilly to shut off the faucet. Exiting the bathroom, she froze in the small hallway between their bedrooms. Someone was rapping on the front door. Tilly’s eyes lit up and she winked at Cass.

“Just in time,” she said. “We knew you had more to tell us.” She turned and shouted at the door, “Victor, be right there!”

But the knocking continued, harder now, the door hinges rattling.

Tilly frowned. “That you, Vicky?!”

From the concern in Tilly’s voice, Cass knew it wasn’t.