The Cold Nowhere

61

Cat stood by the dunes, breathing in the lake air that floated over the hill. April had given way to May, and winter had finally given way to spring. The breeze was mild. The long grass swished and bent. She climbed the trail to the top of the sand and saw the great expanse of Lake Superior stretched out in front of her. It was midnight blue under the stars, but there were whitecaps agitating the waves.

She hadn’t told Stride why she needed to go outside, but she wondered if he knew. She had to say goodbye. Goodbye to her parents. Goodbye to Dory. Goodbye to who she was.

Her past was finally behind her.

‘Catalina Mateo,’ said a voice from the shadows.

Cat jumped. When she looked down the stretch of dunes, she saw two rusty old deck chairs stuck in the sand. Maggie Bei sat in one of them.

‘Oh!’ Cat exclaimed. ‘You startled me. What are you doing here?’

Maggie shrugged. She had a bottle of wine in her hand. Even at night, she wore sunglasses. Cat could see that the woman was a little drunk. ‘I like to come out here sometimes and watch the lake. I’ve done it for years.’

‘So you can be close to Stride?’ Cat asked.

The Chinese cop laughed. She was cute and as tiny as Cat, but she had a hardness about her. ‘Don’t try to psychoanalyze me. It doesn’t work. Besides, the last shrink I visited shot himself in the head.’

Cat swallowed hard. It was an odd thing to say.

Maggie patted the empty chair with the base of the wine bottle. ‘Sit by me,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘Okay.’

Cat didn’t want to stay, but she stayed anyway. She sat in the deck chair beside Maggie, and the two of them stared at the lake water under the night sky. Maggie didn’t say anything. Cat kicked at the weeds with the toe of her boot.

‘Stride asked me to stay with him,’ Cat said.

‘I heard.’

‘Serena, too.’

‘Peachy.’

‘I know you don’t like me,’ Cat said.

‘I like you fine, Cat, but I don’t trust you.’

Cat squirmed in the chair. ‘Why not?’

Maggie’s head swiveled. She didn’t take off her sunglasses, and Cat couldn’t see her eyes. The cop had a tiny diamond in her nose. She didn’t explain anything to her. Not yet.

But it didn’t matter. Cat knew exactly what she meant.

‘Those are two people I care about in that house,’ Maggie went on. ‘Stride’s my best friend in the whole world. He always will be. For a while, I thought maybe, maybe, it might be something more than that, but who was I kidding? As for Serena, well, I still like her. One of these days maybe we’ll figure out how to be in the same room without killing each other.’

Cat waited. ‘I’m not sure—’

‘You being there with them is either going to bring them together or drive them apart,’ Maggie continued. ‘I’ll probably regret saying this, but I’d rather you bring them together, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘If you give them shit, you will answer to me.’

‘I understand.’

Cat began to get up, but Maggie shook her head. ‘I’m not done,’ she said.

Cat sank back into the chair. She waited for Maggie to talk, but the cop sat there in frustrating silence, and the silence felt like a balloon, getting bigger and bigger until all it could do was pop. Finally, when she couldn’t stand the tension anymore, she blurted out, ‘What do you want from me?’

‘The truth.’

‘About what?’

‘You know what.’

Cat did, but she couldn’t say. Now the silence was hers. She said nothing at all. Her whole body felt cold.

Maggie finally took off her sunglasses. ‘I was down in Minneapolis just before everything went to hell,’ she said. ‘Can you believe Ken McCarty had the balls to come see me? What a bastard he was.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t need you to be sorry. I didn’t feel a thing for him when he was alive. I don’t feel a thing for him now that he’s dead.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Cat said.

‘See, you sound like a shrink again, Cat. Don’t do that.’

‘Sorry,’ she repeated.

‘Speaking of shrinks, did you kill Vincent Roslak?’ Maggie asked, so suddenly it felt like a scab being ripped off her skin.

Cat began shaking. ‘No.’

‘No? That’s your story? That’s all you have to say about it? You see why I don’t trust you.’

She heard Vincent’s voice, like an echo she couldn’t get out of her head. She still loved him. Is sex a violent act for you? Are there any sexual acts you won’t do?

‘I didn’t kill him.’

Maggie nodded. ‘You never saw him after he moved to Minneapolis, right? That’s what you told Stride.’

Cat said nothing.

‘Except you did see him down there, didn’t you?’ Maggie said. ‘I knew something was wrong when I visited his office, and it took me a while to figure out what was driving me crazy. You know what it was? The bells. Just like Quasimodo. The bells, the bells. It was the light rail line that goes by Roslak’s apartment. I’d heard it before, and you know where? It was on a tape that Roslak made of one of his sessions with you. I could hear the light rail chimes in the background. It was in Minneapolis, Cat. Why would you lie about that if you didn’t have something to hide?’

Do you think you could kill someone, Cat?

‘I – I didn’t want anyone to think—’

‘You didn’t want anyone to think you killed him. Sure. By the way, I showed your photo to a Jefferson Lines driver who does the bus route between Duluth and Minneapolis. He remembered you really well. That’s the problem when you’re such a stunner. Men don’t forget you. He said you made that trip every week. How many times, Cat? How many times did you see Roslak down in the Cities?’

Cat couldn’t lie anymore. ‘A lot. I loved him.’

‘So what happened? Did you realize he was just abusing you and all of his other patients? Did you realize he was just interested in sex? He didn’t give a shit about you, Cat.’

‘I didn’t kill him,’ Cat repeated.

‘So who did? Ken? That’s what I thought at first. Roslak must have figured out about the burglary. He saw the ring, or you said something under hypnosis, and he somehow made the connection to Ken. It would be easier if we left it like that, but I don’t think that’s what happened.’

‘I didn’t kill him!’ Cat shouted again. ‘How can you say that to me? I couldn’t even put the knife in your boyfriend’s back! I stood there as he was about to shoot Serena, and I couldn’t do it! Is that the problem? Do you wish you’d killed him yourself? I could never do that to another soul. I know what knives do. I’ve seen it.’

‘You’ve seen it?’

Cat bit her lip. ‘My mother.’

‘You didn’t see your mother.’

‘Leave me alone!’

‘Who killed Roslak?’

Cat sat down again and inhaled loudly.

‘If you cry, so help me, I’ll slap you,’ Maggie said.

Cat swung around angrily. ‘I won’t cry. Not in front of you.’

‘Who killed him, Cat?’

Please. It’s hot in here.

I’ll open a window.

She twitched. She could still feel him behind her. It hurt so bad, but it was what he wanted, and she would let him do anything, just so that he kept loving her. ‘She heard what he was doing to me,’ Cat said. ‘I was crying. She thought he was raping me. She misunderstood.’

‘Who?’

‘Dory.’ Her voice was devoid of emotion, as if she had pulled a plug and let it drain away like dirty water in a bathtub. ‘She drove me down to the city that day, and she waited for me outside so she could smoke a cigarette. The window was open. It was loud.’

Maggie was silent.

‘She burst in on us. I was – I was bleeding back there. He was still inside me, and she pulled him off. My knife, the one I always kept, it was on the floor near my boots. Dory didn’t give me time to explain. I wanted to tell her it was okay. I was letting him do it. It was what he needed. He loved me. She took the knife and she stabbed him, and she kept stabbing him. I wanted her to stop, but she just kept stabbing and screaming at him.’

Cat slowly pulled her legs underneath herself and folded her hands in her lap. ‘When it was over, we took one of his coats so Dory could wear it, and no one would see the blood. We drove home. We stopped along the way to throw the knife in one of the lakes. When we got back, I helped her take a shower and clean herself, and then we bundled up all the clothes in a garbage bag and put it in a trash can. We never talked about it again.’

Maggie got out of the chair. She put her sunglasses on again in the darkness. ‘Is that the truth?’

‘It’s the truth,’ Cat said. ‘Dory was all I had. She protected me. So I protected her.’

Maggie turned around and hiked down through the trail in the dunes.

‘Are you going to tell Stride?’ Cat called.

There was no answer. Maggie kept hiking through the long, swaying grass until the darkness swallowed her up and Cat was alone again with the roar of the lake. She didn’t take a walk in the wet sand the way she’d planned. She didn’t say goodbye to everyone who had died. She realized that she’d been wrong. The past was the past, but it was never really behind her.

*

The house was quiet after midnight. Serena’s hair was wet, and he toweled it dry, using soft touches to avoid stress on her wound. They stood on the slanted floor of the house’s third bedroom. A floral blanket covered the bed. A flickering lavender candle lit and scented the space. Serena was fragrant from the soap in the shower, and her skin was damp under the silk robe.

‘Sharing a bathroom with two women,’ she murmured. ‘You’re a brave man, Jonny.’

‘I’ll adjust.’ He squeezed the strands of her hair in the thick towel.

She turned around, and the candle cast his shadow across her face. ‘Do you mind if I sleep here? Not in your bed?’

‘It’s fine.’

‘I’ll get there, Jonny. I just need time.’

‘I know.’

‘Will you undress me?’

His fingers tugged at the bow of her robe. The strip of silk came undone, and the robe parted an inch down her body, exposing a shadow of skin below her neck. He nudged the fabric from her shoulders and it spilled to her feet. She was naked and perfect in his eyes, but she wasn’t healed. The gauze on her chest reminded him of what she’d suffered. He ached to touch her, but there was something just as arousing to see her standing there under his gaze.

‘There’s a nightgown in the closet,’ she said.

‘You?’

She smiled. ‘We have a child in the house now.’

He found the black nightgown on the hanger and bunched the fabric and gingerly slid it over her body, covering her in lace. Clothed, she was even more beautiful, drawing his eyes to the swell of her breasts and her bare legs stretching from her mid-thighs to her feet. Behind her, the bed was turned down.

‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

‘It hurts.’

‘I know.’

He tucked her in and blew out the candle, causing a finger of smoke to curl into the air. Almost as soon as she closed her eyes, he heard her breathing change, growing steady and regular as she slept. He closed the door softly, leaving her alone. He was tired, too, but he couldn’t go to bed yet, feeling as he did. Life had changed. He was a guardian of the future. He was a watchman protecting things of infinite value. So be it. There were other times to sleep. He sat down in the red leather chair near the fireplace and kept vigil on the night.





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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It was a great pleasure coming back to Duluth for the return of Jonathan Stride. The people of Duluth and Superior always give me and Marcia a warm welcome, for which we are very grateful. A special thanks to Sergeant David Greeman and the members of the Duluth Police for the detailed tour of their facilities and visits to many interesting corners of the city. Thanks, too, to the staff of the DECC, the lift bridge and the county emergency response center for taking me inside their operations. Chuck Frederick, Ken Browall and the team at the Duluth News-Tribune have been great supporters of me and my books, as have Sally Anderson at the Bookstore at Fitgers and Laura Selden at Mix 108.

Isanti County attorney Jeff Edblad was his usual helpful self in trying to explain intricacies of Minnesota criminal law and sentencing procedures to me.

In the publishing industry, I have been extremely fortunate to work with agents Ali Gunn, Deborah Schneider, Diana Mackay, the entire team at The Marsh Agency, and co-agents around the world. I’m also very grateful to everyone at Quercus in the UK and Sterling in the US, with particular thanks to David North and Charlotte Van Wijk.

Matt Davis, Paula Tjornhom Davis, Mike O’Neill, Alton Koren, and Terri Duecker provided thoughtful suggestions on many different aspects of this book. Somewhere in the middle of a bottle of wine (or was it two?), Matt, Paula, Marcia and I also came up with the book’s title. I honestly don’t even remember who first said it.

Marcia always gets the first two words in every book, but she gets the last words, too. Thank you for everything, sweetheart!