Snowblind Page 2

  He had said, “Laughter is better.”

  Troubled, she had mumbled something and departed and for a week had avoided even looking at Miri in the halls at Trumbull Middle School. And then she had dug through the school phonebook and called him out of the blue on a Friday night and asked him if he remembered what he had said to her in the restaurant. It had surprised her that he did.

  “I wanted to thank you,” she said. “And to tell you that I agree.”

  They had been dating for more than a year. Darkly handsome, kindhearted, and staggeringly good in bed, he was everything she could have hoped for. Her mother ought to have been ecstatic that Allie had found a man who loved her. The woman had always wanted her to date a doctor. But, as she had made very clear, she had meant a Jewish doctor, not an Albanian one. Fortunately, Allie had stopped giving a crap what other people thought of her choices on the day she became a widow.

  Things weren’t quite so simple for the boys, or for Miri. It was for their sake that she and Niko had kept their relationship fairly quiet, wanting to spare their children the gossip at school and to save Miri from being interrogated by her mother, Niko’s ex-wife, Angela. Tensions still lingered between Niko and Angela, who was a nurse at the hospital where he worked.

  “Hey,” Niko said, giving her a nudge. He searched her eyes. “I thought this was your favorite movie.”

  Allie took a handful of popcorn from the bucket on his lap. “One of them.”

  “You seem far away.”

  “No,” she said, smiling. “I’m here.”

  She kissed his cheek out of reflex, just a bit of reassurance that all was well, and saw that Miri had been watching the exchange closely. Allie arched a querulous eyebrow and Miri gave her a shy smile and returned her attention to the movie.

  A gleeful flutter touched her heart; Miri was onboard! Several of her friends had told her that she needed to focus on her relationship with Niko, that the kids would just have to deal with it because eventually they’d all be grown up and off to college and she couldn’t let their needs dictate her life. But she wanted Miri to like her, to feel comfortable with her, and she wanted—no, needed—Jake and Isaac to feel the same about Niko. If she and her handsome man had any chance at a future, it had to include their children.

  Tonight had been the beginning of an effort in that direction, carefully planned. Dinner and a movie, in and of themselves, were not a big deal. But the night would end with Miri and Niko sleeping over, with Miri in the spare room and Niko in Allie’s bed. She had to fight back her own awkwardness at the thought of it so that the kids would not read it in her face and think she and Niko had anything to feel awkward about.

  Forcing her anxieties away, she tried to focus on the movie and realized that Jake had been watching her. Like Miri, he had caught her little snuggle and kiss with Niko, but Jake’s face was unreadable. She smiled at him and he gave her the too-cool nod that had become his universal response of late and turned back to the TV.

  Come on, woman, she thought. Breathe.

  The boys hadn’t balked at the idea of Niko and Miri staying over, and Miri seemed at ease. It was all going to be fine. The storm raged outside and they were all cozy and warm here in the house. In a little while, when the movie was over, she’d make hot chocolate and take out the cookies she’d baked earlier. Things were going perfectly.

  That’s what worries me, she thought.

  But she nestled herself against Niko and he slipped his arm around her on one side and Miri on the other, and she let herself get lost in the movie again.

  When Jake glanced back at them, Allie had a moment of unease, wondering if her cuddling with Niko was bothering him. After a moment, she realized that Jake wasn’t even looking at her and Niko. He was sneaking glances at Miri. Lovely Miri, just a year behind him in school. The girl caught him looking and Jake smiled at her. Miri gave him a half shrug, raising her eyebrows as if to say, What are you looking at? Jake rolled his eyes and looked back at the television, and Allie saw a sly, shy little smile appear on Miri’s lips for just an instant before vanishing as if it had never been there at all.

  Oh, my, she thought. No wonder they don’t mind hanging out together.

  Jake and Miri were crushing on each other, and neither of them had any idea that the other felt the same. Allie smiled. It was adorable and complicated, all at the same time, but for now she would choose to focus on the adorable part.

  The wind gusted hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames and snow pelted the glass. The lights flickered and the television screen dimmed for a moment.

  “Oh, no,” Miri said.

  “We’d better not lose power,” Isaac said.

  Jake kept his chin in his hands, now. “I kind of like it, actually. Candles and blankets.”

  Miri shivered. “But it’ll be so cold.”

  “We’ll be all right, love,” Niko assured her.

  “Well,” Isaac muttered, “I guess as long as it doesn’t go out before the movie’s over.”

  As if he’d given the storm a dare, another gust slammed the house and again the lights flickered. This time, they went out.

  Joe Keenan took it slow across the bridge that spanned the Merrimack. The wind off the river whipped snow against his windshield and he gripped the wheel tightly. The snow fell so hard that his wipers could barely keep up with it. Where they didn’t reach, a fresh inch had built up on the glass in just the past half hour of his shift. He wanted to turn on the light bar on top of his patrol car, but they weren’t supposed to hit the blues without reason, and he didn’t want to give anyone reason to bust his balls. Not with six days remaining until he completed his rookie year. The phrase made it sound like baseball, but in your first year on the Coventry PD you were fair game for everything from gentle hazing to practical jokes, and you took the fall for fuckups that weren’t rightly yours.

  A gust of wind buffeted the car so hard that the steering wheel jerked in his hands.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath, wishing he were home with his wife, Donna, watching a movie or even one of her bizarre reality shows.

  Not a chance, though. On nights like this, a handful of more-established cops would call in sick—they’d even have a debate about whose turn it was—and every rookie would be out in the damn storm, responding to calls about power lines being down or elderly folks who’d slipped in their driveways, trying to keep up with the shoveling so the sixteen inches of ice and snow that had been predicted wouldn’t freeze like concrete.

  Bent over the wheel to peer out through his windshield, speedometer dropping under twenty miles per hour, he mentally corrected himself. He’d lived in Coventry his whole life, and in his experience there were no nights like this. His parents and aunt and uncles talked about the Blizzard of ’78 with this weird combination of fear and reverence and even fondness, but this storm was starting to rage seriously. Apparently, back in 1978 the blizzard had stalled, the conditions just right to keep it spinning on top of the greater Boston area for days. Tonight’s blizzard wasn’t likely to hang around that long, but if the sexy, doe-eyed weather girl from channel 5 had been right this morning, it would be remembered with some fear and reverence of its own.

  Keenan turned on the heater. He hated to run it because something had broken off or been jammed inside and the blowing air caused an annoying clicking sound, not to mention that some drunk kid had puked in the back the week before and the smell lingered no matter what efforts were made to clean the seat and floor. The heat only made it worse.

  “This is bullshit,” he whispered, as if someone might overhear, and he glanced at his own blue eyes in the rearview mirror for reassurance. His mirror image agreed with him.

  He flicked on his right-turn signal, though nobody was on the road to notice. Coming off the bridge, he saw the gleam of the Heavenly Donuts sign and felt a little spark of happiness in his chest. He desperately needed a coffee. He’d park and sip it for a few minutes and drain away the tension t
hat had built up from all the time he’d spent with a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. He hated driving in storms.

  So maybe you don’t. Tuck away in a parking lot for an hour. Who’ll notice, out in this? And it was true. If he got a call and had to respond, he could do that. But an hour of rest with a big hot cup of Heavenly’s coffee would make him more alert and better able to do his job—at least that was what he told himself. Trying to peer through the clear parts of the windshield and the hypnotic swipe of the wipers had him halfway to falling asleep as it was.

  The lure of coffee drew him into the parking lot and almost immediately he started having second thoughts. There hadn’t been a plow by in a while; there had to be three inches of snow in the lot and more was falling by the minute. What if he fell asleep and got snowed in to the lot? Better to keep moving.

  Still … a café mocha would be bliss.

  He ran one big hand over his bristly blond buzz cut, hesitating only a second before he slid the cruiser into the drive-through lane, frowning as he spotted a single truck parked in the lot, more than half a foot of snow already accumulated on top of it. Rolling down his window, he waited at the big menu board. A terrible feeling washed over him. Something was wrong, here.

  “Hello?” he called.

  No answer. Not even static. Troubled, he took his foot off the brake and let the patrol car roll around the corner of the building, tapping the accelerator. But it was only as he rolled up to the window and saw the gloomy shadows inside that he understood the crisis at hand: Heavenly Donuts had closed up early because of the storm. There would be no coffee.

  Bummed, Keenan started mentally mapping out his distance to other coffee shops. Coventry had a Starbucks and three Dunkin’ Donuts, but the nearest of the four was miles away and there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t all have shut down as well. Not that he could blame them: there weren’t many customers braving the streets tonight.

  With a sigh, he pulled out of the lot, figuring he might as well drive over to the nearest Dunkin’, especially considering how quiet his radio had become. During the evening commute he’d responded to five different accidents. It was a part of living in New England he had never understood. These people saw snow every winter, but somehow every summer they seemed to forget how to drive in it.

  Now, though, going on ten P.M., pretty much everyone was home safe and sound except for an unfortunate handful, like plow drivers and rookie cops.

  Driving along South Main Street, Keenan realized he’d screwed up, so distracted by the unfulfilled desire for coffee that he’d forgotten to clean off the windshield. The wipers were starting to stick, so he hit the lights and started to pull over to the curb, the swirling blue making strange ghosts in the storm and tinting the flakes on the glass.

  With a loud crump, the car struck something that rocked it violently to the left. He slammed on the brakes, arms rigid on the wheel, so tense that he was unable to muster a single profanity. His heart thundered in his chest and he felt it in his eardrums and temples—worried for a moment that he might be having a heart attack and thinking about cutting back his Oreo intake—and then the car skidded to a shuddering halt and he exhaled.

  He slammed the patrol car into Park.

  “Motherfucker,” he said, just to assure himself that his capacity for profanity had not suffered any injury.

  Popping the door, he climbed out and took in the strange, silent landscape of Coventry under siege by winter. Power lines hung low and heavy. Shop windows were caked with blowing snow. Drifts had begun to form. The blue glow from his light bar spun all around, painting it all in ghostly shapes that waxed and waned without a whisper.

  Boots crunching in the snow, Keenan stepped back and scanned the driver’s side for damage. Finding nothing amiss, he made his way around the front and was happy to see both headlights in working order. Since the moment of impact he’d been running through a catalog of things he might have hit—parked car, dog, deer, person—but he didn’t think it had been any of those. The wet snow had crusted thickly on his windshield, but the wipers were still clearing enough of a span that he would have seen anything as large as that. His headlights and the streetlamps might not cut very deeply into the storm, but they were still working.

  Still, he’d hit something, and as he came around to the passenger’s side, he saw that he had the dent to prove it. He searched the street and glanced over at the sidewalk but saw no sign of whatever it had been. Following his tire tracks thirty feet back the way he’d come, he saw no other tracks. No prints. No blood in the snow or evidence that there had been anything at all. It was easy to make out where the impact had occurred by studying the way the tire tracks jagged so abruptly to the left.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  Keenan walked back to the car, confounded by the dent. How could he have hit something when there had been nothing to hit? He crouched by the car and wiped off the snowflakes that had started to adhere to the dent. He’d catch hell for this and would never be able to explain it, but he was going to solve the puzzle by freezing his ass off while the storm whited out any evidence.

  As he started back around the front of the car, still bathed in those blue lights, a thought occurred to him. What if he hadn’t hit anything after all? What if something had hit him?

  Keenan gritted his teeth against the cold and shook his head. It was a stupid idea and the semantics didn’t make a damn bit of difference. Even if a bear had come hurtling out of the storm and crashed into his car as he drove by, there would be some evidence of its presence. Blood. Fur. Tracks.

  Unless the bear had wings, it hadn’t been a bear.

  TWO

  Pulling into the parking lot at Harpwell’s Garage, Doug Manning heard his stomach growl. The smell of Chinese food filled his car and he felt immensely grateful that the family that ran the Jade Panda lived above their restaurant, and so had stayed open as the snowfall totals mounted and the wind drove it into drifts. He hadn’t been as lucky finding an open liquor store, but he figured the guys had enough beer to last the night, and if not there were assorted, quarter-full bottles of booze in Timmy’s office.

  Most people played it safe, stocked up on essentials at the supermarket and hunkered down for the storm with a movie or board games. Doug’s wife had wanted him to do exactly that, but the guys who worked at the garage had been planning to get together for the Bruins game tonight and if he had tried to back out because of a little snow—or a lot—he’d never have heard the end of it. So there’d be beer and Chinese and a lot of bitching about their wives. The Bruins were playing in Florida, the lucky bastards, so the storm wouldn’t have any impact on the game.

  Doug parked and climbed out of his restored Mustang. Three steps from the car, blinking snowflakes out of his eyes, he slipped and bobbled the huge brown paper bag filled with steaming Chinese food. He clutched the bag, closing his eyes, and when he opened them a second later he was amazed to find himself still standing, bag still safe in his arms.

  Heart pounding, he gave a little laugh. Timmy Harpwell paid a decent wage and Doug liked his job, but other than that, Doug and luck didn’t get along very well. There were people, his older brother included, who considered him a fuckup and there were a lot of days he would have agreed. If he’d dumped a hundred and fifty bucks worth of Chinese food in the parking lot, he’d have been better off climbing back into the Mustang and heading home to Cherie. The guys would have given him no end of shit. At least with Cherie he knew he could smile and apologize and make her a drink and she’d forgive him eventually. If he listened to her bitch enough, he might even find some makeup sex at the end of the rainbow.

  But he hadn’t fucked up this time. No apologies would be necessary.

  Careful as hell, he made his way across the snowy lot to the door. No matter how many inches fell, they’d have no problem getting out in the morning. Timmy Harpwell had a plow on his truck; tomorrow he’d be clearing senior citizens’ driveways and making a ton o
f cash, and that meant his own parking lot would be the first pavement he cleared. Doug might even be home before Cherie woke up in the morning. He could picture her bright orange hair spread across the pillow and imagine sliding in beside her, waking her with a kiss, and had to fight the temptation to just drop off the Chinese food and head home. Timmy Harpwell liked to hold court, and he didn’t employ guys who weren’t interested in kissing the ring now and again.

  Half Korean, on his mother’s side, with her black hair and eyes so brown they might as well have been black, he had dealt with plenty of racist shit growing up in Coventry, both casual and malicious. Most of the malicious stuff had gone away when he’d topped six feet and two hundred pounds, but the casual, aren’t-we-buddies-just-busting-each-other’s-balls racism would never go away. He’d learned early on that if he wanted to keep working at Harpwell’s, he had to take whatever shit was dished out and try to find some way to give it back. The minute he showed how much it bothered him, or let on that he’d rather spend time with his wife than the boys at the garage, Timmy would stop giving him even part-time work, and he and Cherie couldn’t afford that.

  Doug banged in through the door and snow blew in behind him as it whisked shut. The front office was empty so he made a beeline for the back room. There were nine guys sprawled on stained sofas and chairs arranged around the giant TV. Doug had missed half of the second period, but he’d lost a game of rock-paper-scissors with Franco over who would pick up the food. They had both been hired last year and were the two lowest guys on the totem pole, which meant they always got the scut work, but Doug didn’t mind.

  “All hail the conquering hero!” he announced as he entered, carrying the huge bag. “And nobody touch my fried dumplings.”

  Most of the guys cheered and raised their beers, a couple of them rising to help him sort out the food. Not Timmy Harpwell, though. Sitting there with his carefully sculpted beard scruff and his perfect hair, the boss just snickered, shot a glance at Zack Koines, and shook his head.