I stare at the unfamiliar shapes and shadows amassed around me and wait for the wave of regret. I am in his house, lying on his couch. His bandages bind my wounds. His food nourishes my broken body. And he is dead at my hands. I looked him in the eye, and I executed him. I should be torn apart by this fact, rending my clothing and sweating with guilt, but there is nothing there. I do not feel sad. I search for it as a child may search for that one talisman of comfort, the teddy bear, the favorite blanket, that touchstone that calms them in their darkest moments. I search for my remorse, the proof of my own virtue, but find nothing.
It is the absence of the thing that makes me sad. I know what I should be feeling, but it is not there. There is no grain of regret to be conjured, despite my best efforts. I didn’t expect this. I had braced myself for a maelstrom of emotional repercussions, but no such violence has come. I feel fine.
I look for Ana, and I find her lying at my side. She had lined up three cushions from another couch to make a small makeshift bed beside the sofa where I had fallen asleep.
I roll onto my side so I can see her better. In that soft blue luminescence, her face seems to radiate its own fine glow. Strands of her hair crisscross her eyes, and the subtle rise and fall of her chest as she breathes is almost feline. I can see her sister’s features in her face, and it reminds me that the man I dropped through the hole in the ice had drowned Zoya by shoving her face into a toilet. He pulled the strings when Reece Whitton pushed my wife into the path of an oncoming car.
I roll back over and stare at the patterns on the wall until I fall back asleep.
CHAPTER 44
The next time I wake up, sunlight fills the cabin. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and sit up. Where Ana had been sleeping the night before lay my clothes, washed and folded. I can hear the muffled clacking of movement in the kitchen. Then Ana stands up on the other side of the island, a frying pan in her hand. She looks my way and smiles.
“I am sorry,” she says. “I was trying to be quiet.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost noon. You must have been very tired.”
“Noon?”
I stand in my underwear, a little wobbly on my tender feet, and begin putting on my pants. Ana watches from the kitchen.
“There is very little food here,” she says. “Nothing fresh. Only canned goods and some fish in the freezer. Do you like fish?”
“Huh? Fish? Sure, I like fish.” I pull my flannel shirt over arms so sore that I can barely move them.
“Good, because I have thawed some to have for breakfast.”
“You really don’t . . .” I start to beg my way out of breakfast but stop when I see the hint of disappointment in her eyes. I feel like I’m in a hurry, like I need to make an escape from the scene of the crime. I rethink my answer. I have nowhere to go. Not anymore. “You know, fish sounds perfect.”
I sit back down and unwrap the bandages from my feet. My toes are red and tender. I can’t feel anything in my left pinky toe or in the tips of any of the others. My socks are warm and dry, and I feel like I’m dipping my foot into warm butter when I pull them on.
In the kitchen, Ana is wearing an oversized Vikings jersey and I think shorts, but I can only see her thighs. She’s also wearing men’s socks rolled down to her ankles to work as slippers. Walking to the kitchen, I’m about to make small talk about the fish when I see my gun on the island countertop.
“My . . . gun?” I pick it up and inspect it. There is still some moisture inside the barrel, but the rest of it looks as good as new. “Where . . .”
“I went out to where you were rutting around last night. It is much easier to find things in the daylight.”
“I thought I told you to stay at that lodge.”
“I had no choice but to come here. There were things that I needed to find. To get them, I would have walked far more than ten miles. The cold and snow were a small price to pay.”
“What kind of things?”
“You would not understand.”
“I can be a very understanding man. Try me.”
She gives a glance over her shoulder, as if to size up my sincerity. The fish lay on a plate, and she pats them dry with a paper towel. Then she leaves the kitchen, heading to a room that I can see is a bedroom. I think she is ignoring me. When she comes back out, she’s carrying a small paper sack. She hands the bag to me and returns to her cooking, lowering the fish into the hot oil.
In the bag, I find a stack of passports held together with a rubber band. I pull the top few from the stack and begin thumbing through them. Women—young girls, really—all with Russian-sounding names and Greek-looking letters skittering across the papers.
“What are these?”
“They are Mikhail’s girls. They are the ones who wear his ruble tattoo behind their ears.”
I shuffle through a few more and find Zoya’s passport and then Ana’s. I count fifteen in all.
Ana turns to face me, letting the fish fry unattended. “If we have no passports, we cannot run away. We cannot go home. We are here illegally and must do as we are told.”
“What will you do with these?” I put the passports back into the bag and slide it to Ana.
“I will find the women. I will send them home—if they will go. I want to help them, if they will let me.”
“That’s very good of you,” I say.
“They will be like me and refuse to listen at first. They are here because of Mikhail. They will be loyal to him. They will not want me to interfere with their lives. But soon, they will come to realize that Mikhail is . . . gone. They will be fearful and they will feel alone. That is when I will be able to help them.”
“Do you need help? I know some people—”
“I will be okay. I am strong. I have been through much, and it has made me strong. You have freed me, Max Rupert.”
“I wouldn’t say that. I—”
She turns back around to her fish, flipping them over and sprinkling basil and rosemary and garlic salt on them. The aroma fills the cabin, and my mouth waters its approval.
“And what will you do?” she asks. “You will go back and be a detective?”
“No,” I say. “I will not be going back.”
She looks surprised and a bit saddened by my answer. “Then where will you go?”
“I have a cabin north of Grand Rapids. It’s been in my family since before Minnesota was a state. I’ll take you back to the city, and then I plan to go there and sit. I don’t know what’s going to happen beyond that, and I don’t care. I may just live out the rest of my life in that old cabin. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.”
Ana dishes up the fish. “You do not have to take me to Minneapolis. I will drive Mikhail’s car back and park it at his house. I will be careful to not be seen.”
“You’ve thought this through.”
“I have. And before I leave, I will clean this cabin. I have experience in doing a proper job of cleaning. When I am finished, there will be no proof of our being here.” She looks at me with eyes chock full of complicity. “We never left Minneapolis, remember?”
After our lunch, she gathers the dishes and stacks them in the dishwasher, then shoves the bedding we’d used into the washing machine and starts it. For my part, I pace around the cabin, trying to think of what I might be overlooking. When I am satisfied that I have accounted for every trace of my being there, I pull on my coat and fold my snow pants over my arm.
“I’m going now,” I say.
Ana walks with me to the front door, tucking her hair behind her ear like a schoolgirl as we stop to say our good-bye.