Josie stirred, sighed, and mumbled something incoherent as I lifted her from the passenger seat. Her head lolled against my chest, and I carried her to her home. She was not heavy. Still, her body was slack, and that made it difficult, especially when I had to unlock the front door and haul her across the threshold. I carried her upstairs and laid her gently on the bed. As I looked down on her body, a lot of things came to mind that I could do, all in the guise of making her more comfortable. I did none of them except remove her shoes and drape a quilt over her. I went downstairs to her living room and settled on the sofa—I knew how to get to her home from Buckman’s but not to the lake cabin, so I was there for the duration.
Life shifts, doesn’t it, I told myself, as the days pass and circumstances change. If I had remained in St. Paul with Nina, my life would have continued unaltered. I would never have given Josie so much as a passing glance, much less a thought. Yet I came up here at the behest of the ATF and now I found myself thinking of her affectionately, thinking of her in ways that invited disaster.
You’ve got to get the hell outta here, my inner voice warned me. Get out before you do something that you’ll have to keep secret for the rest of your life.
EIGHT
I woke early, went upstairs, and cleaned up as best I could in the bathroom without disturbing Josie, then snuck back downstairs again. I found the ingredients and made coffee. While it was brewing, I rummaged through Josie’s refrigerator, where I found eggs and shredded Swiss cheese in a plastic pouch. There were hash browns and breakfast sausage in the freezer and onions in the cupboard. I chopped the onions and sausage and fried them up. When the sausage was no longer pink, I added the browns, seasoned them with salt and pepper, and cooked them until they were heated through. I took the mixture off the heat, added the shredded cheese, and stirred the ingredients together until the cheese melted. I poured the mixture into a brownie pan and made four indentations with a spoon. I cracked open the eggs and poured them into the indentations without breaking the yolks. Afterward, I put the pan into the refrigerator.
While I waited, I explored Josie’s home. It was neat and tidy, or at least neater and tidier than my place. For someone who claimed she didn’t read, Josie had a surprising number of books, including a volume of poetry by Carol Connolly, the poet laureate of St. Paul. She had a lot of framed photographs and posters on her wall, too, most of them of Paris.
I heard Josie stirring upstairs, so I preheated the oven. When it reached 350 degrees, I popped the egg dish inside. Twenty minutes later I called to her. Josie came into the kitchen wearing a pale blue terrycloth robe and nothing else that I could see. Her face had been washed, but not her hair, which stuck out at odd angles.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. She didn’t seem surprised by my presence, just annoyed.
“I didn’t know how to get back to the cabin, so I slept on your sofa.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I filled a coffee mug and set it on the table. She sat down across from it and took a sip. “This is good,” she said.
“Of course it is.”
She drank it with both hands. “Last night—did we?” she asked.
I fought the impulse to tease her. “No,” I said.
“I didn’t think so.”
I carved out a square of the egg dish with a spatula, slipped it onto a plate, and slid in front of her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Try it.”
“I said I’m not hungry.”
“I need you to eat.”
“Oh, you need me to eat, do you? Like suddenly that’s the most important thing in your world.”
“I need you to feel better than you do now.”
“Why?”
“If we’re going to spend the day together I don’t want you to be all cranky because you have a hangover. Now eat.”
She did, reluctantly taking a forkful and then another. “Dammit, Dyson,” she said. “This is delicious. You cook better than I do; you make better coffee…”
“I’m practically perfect in every way,” I said. I was quoting Mary Poppins, but Josie didn’t catch the reference.
Nina would have, my inner voice said. She wouldn’t have a hangover, either—she knows how to drink. And if she did have a hangover, she’d still look terrific. She doesn’t even own terrycloth.
Don’t you forget it, I told myself.
We ate together in silence. To break it, I mentioned the photos and posters of Paris on the walls.
“The one of the Eiffel Tower is my favorite,” she said.
“It looks even better at night,” I said.
“You’ve been to Paris?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Couple years ago.”
“Did you like it?”
“Very much. I didn’t really see that much of it, though. Just the tourist stuff.”
“Can you speak French?”
“A little. I’m better with Spanish.”
“I want to go to Paris so bad. After this is over … Have you ever thought about going back?”
“Many times.”
Josie drank her coffee and ate her breakfast. The air vibrated with all the words she left unsaid.
You have got to get out of here, my inner voice told me yet again.
*
It took Josie an hour to get dressed. It was an hour well spent, I decided but didn’t say aloud. Twenty minutes later we returned to the cabin on Lake Carl. We found the old man sitting at the picnic table on the deck. An impressive display of empty beer cans was already arrayed in front of him despite the early hour, and the way he kept adding to it, you’d have thought his stomach was on fire.