“Okay,” he said, putting his helmet back on. “Let’s rip it up.”
I brushed the snow off my helmet and lifted it over my head. Then I stopped dead.
“Alex,” Vinnie said from behind me. “Are you all right?”
Inside the restaurant, sitting against the back wall…
It was Natalie.
I didn’t believe it at first. I thought maybe after everything that had happened that day, I was having some kind of hallucination. But then she moved. She looked up and took a quick scan of the room before going back to her drink. It was her.
“Alex, what is it?”
“She’s here.”
“What?”
“She’s here,” I said. “Come on.”
He looked confused as all hell, but he put his helmet on his sled and followed me into the bar. From one second to the next, the air felt seventy degrees warmer. It smelled of cigarette smoke.
“Gentlemen!” the bartender called to us. “Wipe off the snow please!”
I ignored the man. I walked through the room in my ridiculously large snowmobile suit, leaving a trail of snow with every step. The faces were all turning to look at me, but she hadn’t seen me yet. She didn’t know I was twenty feet away from her and closing in.
She didn’t notice me until I was standing right next to her. When she finally looked up at me, it all hit me at once. This was the woman I had spent every waking hour worrying about, the woman I had almost killed myself trying to find. Now here she was, sitting at this table. The light picked up the red in her hair. She stared at me with those green eyes until finally she cleared her throat and spoke.
“You’re here.”
There were seven or eight things I wanted to say. I picked one. “So are you.”
“Hello, Vinnie,” she said, looking past me. “Did Alex drag you all the way out here?”
“He didn’t drag me,” Vinnie said.
“Natalie,” I said, “everyone’s been looking for you.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“All the police in Michigan and Ontario. Your old commander. Me.”
“I haven’t been gone that long.”
“Natalie, he’s alive.”
“That suit’s a little big on you,” she said.
“You already know that, don’t you…”
“Yes.”
“And your mother…”
“Don’t, Alex. Please don’t talk about that, okay? I’m trying to hold everything together here.”
“I was there,” I said.
She looked at me. “You saw her?”
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t have left her alone,” she said. She looked at the bottom of her glass. “By the time I got back, it was too late.”
“For God’s sake, what’s going on?”
She didn’t look up.
“Natalie, please,” I said. “Tell me why you’re here.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” she said, standing up and grabbing her coat. “I’ll let our old friend Simon Grant tell you.”
Chapter Twenty
She led us both through the bar, out onto the cold street. The snow was falling even harder now. There was nothing but the faint light coming from the front window, a light at the small hotel in the middle of the block, another far down at the end of the street. Everything else was dark. Empty buildings. Mountains of snow.
We stopped to breathe in the cold air, all three of us. Outside the bar it was quiet. A faint wind made the snow swirl around our heads.
“Natalie, what are we doing?”
“You’ll see,” she said. “You have to trust me.”
“What do you mean, Simon Grant’s going to tell us? He’s dead. I mean, not like your stepfather. I went to Simon Grant’s funeral.”
“Please, Alex. Just come with me before you say anything else.”
I turned to Vinnie. “Just go,” he said to me. “She asked you to trust her.”
“Vinnie, you come with us,” she said. “I’d like you to hear this, too.”
She set off down the street, back toward the center of town, moving quickly down the path we had just cut with our sleds. I zipped up my ridiculous suit and tried to keep up with her. I was tired, more tired than I wanted to admit to myself.
“Where are we going?” I said. “The Grants’ place is up the other way.”
“We’re not going to the Grants’ place,” she said.
She stopped in front of the hotel in the middle of the block, the Chippewa. She pulled the door open and held it for us. A woman came to the counter in the tiny lobby, rubbing her eyes and looking past us, out the front door.
“Still snowing out there?” she said. She was a big woman, in her sixties. I would have bet anything she was an Ojibwa.
“You could say that, Mrs. Larusso,” Natalie said. “We’re going up to my room for a while.”
“Are you sure, hon? We have other rooms, you know.”
“No, we’ll be fine.”
“We always have empty rooms in February.”
“We’ll let you know if we need one, Mrs. Larusso. Thank you.”
“Natalie,” I said, “why are we going up to your room?”
“Just shut up for once,” she said. “Please. Just stop talking.”
“Natalie…”
“I swear,” she said, taking my hand in hers, “if you say one more word, I’m gonna hit you right in the mouth.”
She hit the elevator button, waited exactly one second, and then opened the door to the stairwell.
“I always hated elevators,” she said, and pulled me into the stairwell. Vinnie followed. As we went up the stairs behind her, I couldn’t help but think of the last time we had been in a hotel together, and everything that had happened since then. Her room was on the third floor. It was small, dominated by a queen-sized bed with an elaborate iron frame. She took her coat off.
“Natalie,” I said. “Will you please tell us what’s going on?”
“Take that stupid snowmobile suit off,” she said. “You, too, Vinnie.”
“All right,” I said. “If that means you’re finally gonna talk to us.” I unzipped the suit.
“Sit down,” she said, “and watch this.”
There was a television on top of the dresser. She turned it on. A commercial was just ending, then Monday Night Football came back on. Before I could say anything, she picked up an overnight bag from the floor and pulled out a video cassette.
“Will you both sit down, please?”
When we were both sitting on the edge of the bed, she put the videocassette into the VCR port that was built into the bottom of the television. The football game was replaced by a hospital room. A man was sitting up in a bed, his hands folded in his lap. He was looking at the camera.
“What is this?” I said. Then I recognized the man. He was a slightly younger Simon Grant.
Another man appeared. It was Marty Grant. His face loomed huge in the frame as he adjusted the camera angle.
She hit the fast-forward button. The two men stayed in place, Simon Grant in the bed, Marty in the chair next to him. Their heads and hands moved in a blur as Natalie scanned through the tape.
“Martin, I know why you’re doing this,” Simon Grant said as soon as the tape speed went back to normal. “You think I’ll be dead by the end of the week.”
She hit the fast-forward again. “Simon Grant had a heart attack about ten years ago. Marty wanted to get a tape of him talking about his life, in case he wasn’t around much longer.”
“How did you get this?” I said.
She looked at me. “Marty gave it to me.”
Before I could ask her anything else, she put the tape back to normal speed again. “Okay, this is about where we want it,” she said. “Listen.”
Marty was laughing hard at something his father had just told him. “You gotta be kidding me, Pops. She actually fell for that?”
“Only for fifty-five years. God bless her.”
“Okay, if that’s the best thing you ever did in your life,” Marty said, “then tell me the worst thing you ever did.”
Natalie moved away from the television. She went to the window and looked out at the darkness as the tape kept playing.