“You sound strange. Don’t tell me I woke you up.” The voice on the other end of the line chuckled.
“No, no. Well, yeah, you did. But that’s okay. I’m off today.” Louis’s eyes swept over the crumpled bed. He spotted his chambray shirt crumpled in the blanket at the end. He squinted and saw two glasses on the bureau, half-filled with tawny liquid.
“I know. I called the station. They gave me your number.”
Louis suppressed a sigh. He had forgotten to call his foster parents and tell them he had finally gotten a phone.
“Look, Louis,” Phillip went on, “I won’t waste time busting your chops about why we haven’t heard from you in weeks.”
“Thanks,” Louis said softly. Leave it to Phillip Lawrence to cut through the bullshit. He hated talking on the phone more than Louis did.
“But it does make it easier to guilt you into coming down to dinner,” Phillip added.
“Dinner?” Louis said, surprised. “Where are you?”
“We’re at Higgins Lake. We brought the motor home up for the week.”
Louis laughed. “That old piece of shit? I’m surprised it made it this far.”
“Oh, I got rid of the Winnebago. Got a brand-new Gulf Stream Super Coach. The galley’s bigger than our kitchen. Frances is happier than a clam.”
Louis smiled, remembering a trip they had taken to Saugatuck in the Winnebago the summer of his thirteenth year. Frances tried to cook a chicken on the tiny stove.
“So, when can you come?”
Louis rubbed a hand over his face, trying to clear his head. What day was it? He had spent yesterday with Jesse in the station, going through case files. It has been Jesse’s day off, but he had come in anyway, desperate to find something after the watch scene with Gibralter. But after hours of going through the files they had found no one who could be considered a threat.
“Louis? You there?”
“Yeah, Phil.”
“How about tonight? Fran’s making a Christmas ham.”
Christmas…it was two days away. He had forgotten that, too. “Sure, I’m off today, I’ll be there,” he said.
He grabbed a pen off the nightstand and wrote directions to the campsite on his palm. He said good-bye and hung up, rolling onto his back and pulling the blanket up over his naked body.
He shivered, giving in to his mild feeling of guilt. He hadn’t called the Lawrences since he left Detroit and he had seen them only three times since his return from Mississippi last February. They hadn’t pressed and he was grateful. He knew that they loved him. They had been his parents, without being his mother and father. They had always instinctively honored the emotional buffer he had installed around himself. And he had loved them all the more for that. But right now, he was feeling more than a little guilty. They deserved better.
A snow blower started up somewhere off in the distance. He didn’t want to get up. He felt lazy, satiated with the languid energy of a good night’s sleep. He pulled the sheet over his cold nose. A smell drifted up to him, the sweet-musky smell of sex.
Zoe…
He closed his eyes. Zoe…snow…glow. He smiled.
Glow…go…slow.
Slow…don’t…go…Zoe.
He flipped over on his stomach, burying his face in the pillow, inhaling her smell, reliving in his head the chaotic choreography of their lovemaking.
Finally, with a sigh, he heaved himself out of the warm bed. He shivered and started to the bathroom. It was an hour’s drive down to Higgins Lake and he had to stop in town and find something that would pass as Christmas presents.
“So, how’s the job going?”
Louis poured himself another glass of brandy and sat back in the kitchen booth. “Good. Not what I expected exactly, but it’s a good, honest department.”
Phillip smiled. “I guess so. When I called, somebody named Dale McGuire answered. When I told him who I was he acted like I was his long-lost cousin or something.”
Louis laughed. “Dale’s very…social.”
“So they’re treating you good there?”
Louis considered the question for a moment. Phillip was asking, without asking, if things were different than they had been in Mississippi. It had always been that like between them, this odd dance they did about race. They were white; he was half white, half black. They had always dealt with it obliquely, a thing seen always from the corner of the eye, never straight on. Sometimes it bothered Louis. Sometimes he was grateful for it.
Like now. He hadn’t told Phillip everything that had happened to him down in Mississippi, just that his color had been “a problem.” He hadn’t told him that for the first time in his life, his color had nearly cost him his life.
Phillip Lawrence, he knew, would not ask either. It was part of the emotional buffer. It was part of their dance.
“It’s different here,” Louis said finally.
Phillip accepted the answer and took another sip of his brandy. “Thanks for the Courvoisier,” he said. “Don’t usually get this kind of good stuff.”
“I bought it for myself,” Louis said with a smile as he poured himself another three-finger shot. Phillip watched him carefully.
“And thank you for the White Shoulders, dear,” Frances chimed in from the stove.
Louis smiled up at her. Booze and perfume weren’t the most original presents, but then Loon Lake wasn’t exactly a Turkish bazaar. “Thanks for the sweater. I needed it,” he said.
She smiled and bent to poke her head into the oven. The smell of baked ham filled the motor home. The radio was playing softly, Christmas carols. Frances began to hum along.
“I’ve been reading about your case in the Free Press,” Phillip said. “Tragic.”
“Yeah,” Louis said, taking a quick drink.
“Are you close to catching anyone?”
“No, not yet,” Louis said. He glanced up at Frances. She had stopped humming.
“You’re being careful, aren’t you?” Phillip asked.
“Of course. We all are,” He took another swift drink. He glanced to his left, out the window, unable to meet Phillip’s eyes. The window was fogged and he wiped it with his shirtsleeve. He could see out across Higgins Lake. It was much bigger than Loon Lake. To the north, he could see gray clouds moving down toward them. Snow clouds.
Frances set a plate in front of him. He looked down at the careful arrangement of crackers around a crock of bright-yellow cheese. He looked up at her.
“Win Schuler’s?” he asked with a smile.
“What else?” she said, smiling back.
He dug a cracker into the soft cheese and took a bite. The tang of the cheese brought back a flood of memories. He had eaten only Velveeta before the Lawrences had taken him to Win Schuler’s for his tenth birthday. He had never seen a salad bar before that, never been to a restaurant. He had been paralyzed with the choices. Frances had coaxed him to try the cheese. He loved it. He still did.
“Have you made any new friends, dear?” Frances asked, going back to her post at the sink.
Louis shook his head slowly, smiling. “You mean women.”
“Well, okay…women,” she said, nodding.
“Fran, leave the man alone,” Phillip said, scooping a cracker into the cheese.
“It’s okay, Phil,” Louis said, still smiling. “Fact is, there is someone.”
Frances smiled. “Oh, Louis! I’m so glad. What’s her name? When can we meet her?”
“Zoe,” Louis said. “And not for a while.”
“Zoe,” Frances repeated. “Is she foreign?”
Louis grinned. “I guess you could say that.”
Phillip reached across the table for a pack of cigarettes and matches. Frances saw him and frowned just at the moment he looked up at her.
He let out a sigh. “Come on, Fran. It’s twenty degrees out there.”
“I don’t care. You’re stinking up my new home with those things.”
Phillip looked at Louis. “You want to keep me company?”
“Sure,” Louis said, picking up his glass.
They put on their coats and went outside. Louis watched as Phillip lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. He blew out the smoke in a slow stream, ending almost in a sigh.