Practical Sins for Cold Climates Read online

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket, and she took some comfort in his tapping because it meant information, a plan, a schedule for getting the hell out of there. “Tomorrow’s the day he comes to town for his mail and generally makes the rounds.”

  “So you won’t have to get me to his cabin.” Altogether good news.

  He pointed the empty bottle at her. “I guess you lucked out, Valjean,” he said, slipping the empty into a Sleeman’s beer box next to the kitchen stove. “Looks like you’ll catch your man at lunchtime tomorrow, at Caroline’s.”

  “And she would be?”

  “Caroline Selkirk. My sister-in-law.” And then he added, “Camp Sajo.”

  “Oh. Right.” She held her breath and wheezed it out. “Anything sooner?”

  Decker’s eyes were wide. “Sooner than lunch?”

  “The night is young.” Did she actually just bat her eyes at him?

  He looked at her quizzically, like he wanted to say too bad about that eye tic thing, and headed toward the front door. Val followed, noting the vertical line of sweat tracing his backbone under his shirt. In someone she actually liked, she’d find it oddly appealing.

  Outside the cottage, shadows were already hitting the far shore. “Listen,” Decker turned, “I can send someone over here to stay with you, if—”

  “Thank you, no.” She’d lock and bar all the windows and doors, pull the covers over her head, and cower until morning. Even that was better than having to make conversation with some sleepover buddy she’d never see again. The only thing that would make the nine hours of blackness endurable would be the silky pleasure of knowing she could deposit the signed contract, like a mouse, at Peter Hathaway’s Jesus-sandaled feet. “Any chance at Charles Cable tonight?”

  “Well, there’s a meeting he might have come in early for, a community development group. I’m going.”

  Her heart sprang. “Can you take me?”

  “Be ready at seven,” he called back to her as he jogged toward the plane. And she thought she heard him add, “What a shame,” softly, more to himself, even.

  After he left, Val rummaged through Peter’s shelves and came up with a can of Campbell’s clam chowder. She was drawn to the word Manhattan on the label, and two minutes later she was downing the soup like it was a potion that could transport her there. While she ate, she thumbed through an old family album of madly smiling Hathaway forebears holding up stringers of fish, brandishing walking sticks, or hugging any of a number of big old black dogs with tongues the size of tennis shoes.

  In one photo, a much younger Peter, from the days when he still had hair that required a brush, leaned against a red Jeep with one arm around a beautiful blond in a halter top and shorts, the other arm around a less obvious beauty, this one a redhead in a sarong. He wasn’t madly grinning like his dog-loving parents, but it was a kind of in-the-moment expression that took whatever was on offer because he never had to go looking for it. Beautiful breasts just naturally nuzzled against him, and slender, rounded hips invited his hands.

  Now she knew.

  It was just how the world worked.

  She teased the picture out of its photo corners. Peter with Les and Caro, someone had written. Not Peter. Someone, maybe his mother, was the chronicler of the life he was too busy living to have a moment’s anxiety that maybe it wouldn’t always be that way, young and strong in front of a jazzy car with two beauties, that maybe hanging onto a photo could at some point be inexpressibly sweet. It might be a key to understanding the baffling connection she and Peter Hathaway had been working on since that first night on the futon, but she had the train and plane rides home to ponder it.

  What had happened between them was so shockingly uncomplicated that neither of them trusted it, of that she was lay-down-your-money sure. He had quickly taken up with a schizophrenic poet named Daria Flottner, who shaved her head, and Val found herself a widowed Irish undertaker who lived in Brooklyn and had three kids. While the love had been uncomplicated, the failure to love became a matter of exquisite torment. When Peter wanted Val’s sympathy, he would stand looking moodily out of his office window on the twelfth floor and tell her that it wasn’t easy being hooked up with a poet. She didn’t mention that the Irish undertaker lasted only two months, since she didn’t like his children and he didn’t like the commute. When she could tell Peter was feeling rejected, he told her that she feared rejection and then he refused to sign up any author she recommended. So she pursued Peter’s writers of space junk, never certain whether it was more to please him or to get away from him.

  3

  Mosquitoes bounced softly against the screening, and because she and Martin were eating dinner in silence on the porch, Diane Kelleher could hear the little tick, tick, tick the insects made. She had made what their friends on the lake always called “Diane’s chicken”—the tamari and plum wine marinade—although, as she cut slowly into a boneless breast, she always thought she’d be known for something more lasting than chicken. There is something that happens to a woman, she thought, when she makes this kind of a good marriage, and she wondered if there would be more finished work in her pottery studio if there were fewer jars of caviar in her pantry.

  Hunger, she thought, pushing a forkful of chicken through the sauce on her plate in a little figure eight, keeps ambition keen. But she was fifty-four and just yesterday she had figured out a surprising statistic. After thirty-three years of marriage to Martin Francis Kelleher, who ate silently across from her, one finger lovingly keeping his place as he read through his daily stack of faxes, the number of dinners she’s cooked up herself came to 9,642, taking into account things like vacations, takeout, business dinners, holiday family meals, and so on. Maybe she’d shoot for an even ten thousand, present herself with a gold oven mitt, and just—disappear.

  She impaled a few garlic green beans. “Are you going to the meeting tonight?”

  “Of course.” He didn’t look up.

  “Where is it?” She already knew the answer.

  “Sajo.”

  He had a broad, well-shaped head, and the kind of crinkled eyes and quizzical brows that always made him look skeptical. At fifty-six, he still looked good in t-shirts and shorts, which he always wore belted, and the sun had bleached the hair on his arms white. His skin was rough from years of shaving a tough beard, and his hair was thinning, but on him it hadn’t mattered. He was a man whose face you noticed, not his hair. To Diane, he had the presence of a union leader, square and scrappy, not the CEO of Cintorix Corporation—and these days, who knew what else?—that he really was.

  One night while he slept, she took a mini-flashlight out of her nightstand and shined it absurdly on his left ear, counting the hairs that had been sprouting there in recent years. There were seven. His breath came like rustles, and his arms were crossed, maybe while he monitored the bullshit of his subconscious adversaries. Seven golden ear hairs, so far. She twirled the mini-flash, picturing a hair forest thickening up over the next couple of years, cutting off whatever lay behind it, like the charmed briars around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

  Things were different in the twenty months since Leslie Decker’s death, and Diane turned it over in her mind. There was a discomfort Martin felt, she could tell. For, just a mile away, poor Leslie had been killed. Beaten and hurled out a second story window. It had been early in October, and first the nights went cold, and then the days went cold, and finally the case went cold. Someday soon maybe her own suspicions would go cold as well.

  Lake and town people said they missed Leslie Decker because of her smile—which always seemed to Diane a ridiculous reason to care for somebody, smiles are so easily made—or because Leslie had worked hard to keep Camp Sajo solvent after the death of Trey Selkirk out in the Rockies, that senseless way. Or even because—and this was Martin’s line—she had done so much to save the lake environment. And anyone listening at that moment took it
to heart because everyone knew that Martin Kelleher cared very, very deeply about the environment.

  The sun was heading toward the treetops, and Diane stood up from the table, the mosquitoes backlit, the sun shining just about pink on the seven golden hairs in Martin’s left ear. She swallowed a smile, blinking. “Is the meeting in the great room?” She picked up her own dinner plate.

  “I guess so. The meetings always are.” He scowled at his papers, made a violent note.

  She wanted to make him look up. “Even when Leslie ran the show?”

  He met her look. “That Leslie,” he said, and here it came, Diane could tell. “What an environmentalist.”

  “Martin, please,” she came back, faster than she would have liked.

  She beamed at him, at his surprised look, and held out a hand, rippling her fingertips at him, glancing at his dinner plate, as though she had just asked him for it—instead of scoffing at his comment about the dear dead Leslie. He handed her his plate with a quick, sheepish look like now he understood what she had meant—when he hadn’t, at all.

  But Diane turned away with the empty plates from the 9,642nd dinner she had made and—covering her laugh with a couple of coughs—decided she would deduct this evening’s, lowering that total by one, because something about it had been delicious, and if anyone ever asked, she would have to tell them it must have been the plum wine marinade. What else could it possibly be?

  They got to the meeting thirty minutes late, but for Val it was an extra half hour of dithering time while she kept an ear open for the drone of his float plane. The aqua top with the print skirt? Or the brown top with the khaki-colored drawstring pants? And why in God’s name did she pack a good skirt for this Northwoods gig, anyway? Did any of it really matter?

  “Why don’t you go?” Val had asked Peter a week ago, shuffling through a stack of office mail, only half-listening as she ripped open the latest whizz from Human Resources, telling them all one more time how their health insurance was being slashed to serve you better.

  Peter wagged his shorn head. “Charlie Cable knows my stuff too well. In person I’m still the screw-up who drove the boat over the fishing lines and we had to watch the mother of all pickerel swim off, and if that wasn’t bad enough,” here he opened his arms wide, never missing an opportunity to display himself, “I’m just another sellout to the great urban whore.”

  “How is Daria?”

  “I meant my personal style.”

  “Of course,” she murmured. “My mistake.”

  “And Cormac?” he countered.

  The undertaker.

  She fanned herself with her mail. “Oh, you know, New York in a heat wave. Lots of handguns, no air conditioners—”

  “So,” Peter filled in the blanks, “he’s busy?”

  How would she know? She shrugged noncommittally, disgusted with herself. She was going to have to leave for Toronto on the next flight just to get away from the baffling thing she always became when she was with Peter Hathaway. “So you and Charles Cable—”

  “—are phone friends. Out of sight, he loves me. I have mystique.”

  They looked at each other a second too long.

  Any other man would pull her in.

  Any other woman would go.

  He walked around to his desk drawers—his serf pants flowed nicely around his Jesus sandals—as he explained he didn’t want any time to elapse for other editors to start sniffing around Charlie, and he sure as hell didn’t want The Asteroid Mandate to go to auction. Neat, sweet, and complete. That’s what he wanted, and that’s what Valjean Cameron could deliver. He himself had already made a six-figure offer to Charlie Cable, which had been accepted. All Val Cameron had to do was get a signature and make nice.

  “Look, Val,” he said, squeezing Purell on his hands. She knew what was coming: the usual threat. “Do you not want to go?” He sanitized his hands vigorously, then fluttered his fingers dry. “Is that what you want? I’m sure I can find some nice memoirs for you to work on. There’s that five-hundred pager from the former undersecretary of defense—”

  The one thing Valjean Cameron wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pencil was memoirs. Mem-WAHRS. The self-indulgent ramblings of the formerly busy. Before she went to have all of her wisdom teeth extracted a few years ago, she made herself read the mem-WAHR of the ex-head of a soap manufacturing company, figuring some swirl of rage and boredom would take the edge right off her pre-op anxiety. She was right. There was simply no excuse for autobiography. But this, she knew, was a minority opinion.

  “Threats,” she told a sanitized Peter, using the voice of the sixth grade teacher she had loathed, “are beneath both of us.” Here she was lying: they were beneath her, certainly, but these days she was no longer sure what exactly was subatomic enough to slip in between Peter Hathaway and the pursuit of pleasure.

  “Very well, then,” he said, enunciating carefully. “I take it you mean you will go.”

  “I will indeed go.” You obtuse and maddening flake.

  “Indeed. I believe that is wise.”

  “What it is,” she looked at him pointedly, although she wasn’t sure she had a point, “is necessary.”

  His eyes flickered at her. “Just be sure to do your due diligence,” he said, and never missing an opportunity for a parting shot, added, “this time.” He always saved references to the Downy debacle for those times when he was feeling particularly bested by Val.

  By the time Decker arrived, she was waiting on the dock, sitting in an Adirondack chair, dressed in her drawstring pants, and going for the fifth time through her briefcase to be absolutely certain she had the contract for Charles Cable. When Decker dropped her back off later, she’d call the airline and see if she could switch her ticket for a flight out of Toronto tomorrow. That was the first piece of good news. The second was that Decker, wearing a red baseball cap that had faded to a battered pink, pulled up to the Hathaway dock in a small silver boat with an outboard motor. He idled while she climbed in, wobbling, and then tossed a life jacket to her to use for a seat cushion.

  It was a ten-minute ride west, farther from the center of the lake, to Camp Sajo. Decker pointed out a loon peacefully riding the eddies flicked by the breeze that hadn’t quite settled down yet for the day. As their boat breached the water, coming just a little too close, the loon slipped under, head first.

  Ahead of them the mainland seemed to rise, where the terrain turned into low, craggy cliffs, and the forest appeared denser. But as Decker swung wide around what she thought was mainland, she could see it was deceptive—it was a sizeable land mass that jutted out into the channel, and the lake continued beyond it.

  “Selkirk Peninsula,” Decker shouted over the engine.

  Val gave him a couple of big nods. Decker slowed down as they threaded their way between two islands. The one on their left had a dock in good shape, but on the shore there was a sizeable pile of wood debris that looked like it had been left to weather for a few seasons. A construction site that fell on hard times? Standing behind it was a permanent sign that read TAX THIS!

  She looked at Decker, who flashed a wry grin. “Charlie Cable’s property. Two years ago he was so enraged at his property tax increase, based on a boathouse he tried telling them was forty years old, that he took a pickax to the thing. He tore it down board by board and left it there, calling it his permanent exhibit. Then he moved to the wilderness.”

  They threaded quickly between two islands, where docks seemed extensive and new, but no other buildings were visible. Then she saw Camp Sajo, rising like a funny old Canadian pueblo, dark cabins ascending the land that had rock fortifications around the periphery, disappearing into woods that tolerated everything.

  Val counted over twenty boats strung together haphazardly like beads, rocking in the wake she and Decker made, thunking softly against each other. He tooled around, puttering, looking for
a slip, gave up, and pulled up against a gleaming white boat with a pristine canopy and a wooden steering wheel. No clunky outboard there. Decker lashed his boat to what he told her was Martin Kelleher’s new plaything, being sure to set the bumpers between them.

  Val tried clutching her briefcase first against her chest, and then under her arm, but couldn’t clamber from one boat to the other, not with all the bobbing. Finally, with Decker watching, she threw her briefcase into the Kelleher boat and climbed in after it, catching the hem of her pants on something metal. As she tugged it free, she realized she was still two boats away from the Camp Sajo dock.

  Decker passed her, lightly springing from one deck to the next, finally setting her briefcase on the dock and, in a quick swing she wasn’t expecting, herself alongside it. “Hey, Arlo,” he said, shaking hands with the young man Val recognized as the clerk from the bait shop.

  Half bent over her knees, Val tried to catch her breath. “Go Jays,” she wheezed. Arlo pumped the air with a grin, and for some reason started carrying Val’s briefcase up to the camp like a bellhop at the Ritz.

  At the far end of the camp docks was a two-story boathouse with an extension ladder leaning against it. High over the door that looked locked up tight for the day was a sign, Camp Sajo, where everything except the ajo was dark enough to read. At the place where the docks met the land, a pole from the trunk of a tall pine, the bark stripped away, had been mounted a long time ago in a concrete foundation, and flew a Canadian flag, where only the edges fluttered. On that far side of the camp property, the rock dropped away into softer, denser forest.

  High overhead, a bird with broad, level wings floated in a thermal—“maybe a golden eagle,” Decker said, shading his eyes to see it better—and then disappeared over the treetops. Val grunted and then hustled to catch up with Go Jays, who was disappearing into the main part of the camp. Ordinarily an eagle might hold some interest, but tonight she was on a mission.