“Jeanie’s mother is a hopeless alcoholic, drowning in self-pity, with a violent boyfriend. If I’d warned you about her father, it would have destroyed the little time Jeanie had left. She was already dealing with so much, I simply couldn’t do that to her.”
“But you knew Reiser was a murderer!” Doyle raged.
“Actually, I didn’t, but it wouldn’t have mattered. You saw them together. She worshiped him. And he treated her like...”
“A princess,” Zina finished.
“What?” Doyle said, whirling on her. “You can’t be buying this crock?”
Zina didn’t answer. Didn’t have to.
“Are you going to arrest me?” Lauren asked.
Doyle eyed his partner, then Lauren, then back again.
“It’s your call,” Zina said.
“No,” he said slowly. “Not tonight, anyway. But you’re not clear of this, lady. You’ll be answering a lot more questions before it’s done.”
“I’m terribly sorry about what happened, Sergeant. I hope you can believe that.”
“I don’t know what I believe,” Doyle said, releasing a ragged breath. “Let’s go, Zee.”
In the car, he sat behind the wheel without starting it, staring into the snowy darkness.
“I know what’s bugging you,” Zina said quietly.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a helluva coincidence. That warning Reiser, for the sake of his daughter, just happened to make the doc a very rich woman.”
“You think she’s capable of that?”
“I know she’s awfully bright, Doyle. She has the degrees to prove it. So it’s at least possible. But given her choices? I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Nor do I,” he admitted. “I just wish...”
“What?”
“I wish that kid had gotten her early Christmas, that’s all.”
“Hell, maybe she did,” Zee said. “Maybe her father was right. Where she is now, it’s Christmas every day. Start the damn car, Doyle, before we freeze to death.”
Doyle nodded, firing up the Ford, dropping it into gear. But as he pulled out, he realized Zina was still eyeing him. Smiling. “What?”
“My grandfather Gesh once told me he’d killed many a deer with one perfect shot,” she said. “Right through the heart. But sometimes a buck will keep on running, a hundred yards or more. He doesn’t realize he’s been hit, you see. Right through the heart.”
“I don’t follow you,” Doyle said.
“I know,” Zina grinned, shaking her head. “I’m just sayin’.”
Mary Stewart Atwell
Maynard
from Alaska Quarterly Review
Leaving Maynard had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. The keys were in the ignition, my suitcase was in the trunk, and he had gone in to make sure that the stove was off. What was I supposed to do, wait for him to come back so I could say for the thousandth time, “Please, Maynard, I don’t want to go to Memphis”? This was my opportunity, and I took it. The hula dancer on the dashboard looked hipshot, and before I pulled out I pushed hard on her high hip to set her going.
I was counting on the fact that it would take him a while to realize I was really gone. He would worry that he might have misunderstood the situation. What would be more embarrassing than the cops pulling up at the same moment I got back from the grocery store, having run out to pick up some cheese doodles for the trip? Theresa would have to talk him into reporting the car stolen, and even then he would want to negotiate — to make the cops promise they wouldn’t be mean to me. All told, it couldn’t take less than a day and a half for them to get on the road.
The problem was that I only had one tank of gas. I had wanted to go to Florida, but when I looked at the map and looked at the needle dipping toward the three-quarters mark, I decided to go visit my cousin Stanley in North Carolina instead. I’d gotten a postcard from him the year before and I’d kept it because it was the only postcard anyone had ever sent me. On the front it had a picture of a beaver holding up a fish, and underneath it said “Catching the Big One in North Carolina.” From what Stanley said on the card I thought it was the kind of town where you could just walk into the post office and ask for somebody and they’d draw you a little map on the back of a wanted poster, but when I did that the postman said, “You can’t get there from here.”
“That’s the stupidest expression I’ve ever heard,” I said. “You can get anywhere from anywhere.”
“Not in a Cadillac you can’t,” the postman said. He had a little red mustache that glittered when he looked up to see who had rung the bell over the door. “He’ll tell you,” he said and disappeared into the back, leaving me with Milo. He smiled, and I was glad I had the little pistol that Maynard had given me for my eighteenth birthday tucked inside the lining of my purse.
I didn’t know it yet, but Milo wasn’t really scary. “How long are you planning to stay?” he asked as the Cadillac chugged up a slope that didn’t seem to have any top to it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll leave before winter, though. I hate winter. I always wanted to go to Florida, but my husband said it was too expensive.”
“Your husband?”
“Well,” I said, “he’s not really my husband,” and Milo laughed. I was surprised that he didn’t seem to want to talk about the baby. All anybody wanted to talk about was the baby. For the last month Maynard and Theresa hadn’t let me go anywhere, not even for a walk, as if I didn’t know better than anyone when I was going to have it. Milo had stopped the car, and before I knew it he was helping me out, as gently as if I’d been an old lady. He was a lot bigger than Maynard. I had to tilt my head all the way back to look up at him. “Can you give me a hand with something?” I asked. “I need to store the car someplace for a while.”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t,” Stanley said. He looked a lot worse than the last time I’d seen him. Almost all his teeth were gone, and he kept wiping his hands on the tablecloth. “I can’t take care of a baby. I can give you a little money, though — not much, but a little. Enough to get to Florida, probably. Isn’t that where you want to go?”
“Stanley,” I said, “it’s good to see you,” and for a moment he stopped wiping his hands and looked at me. “This is a nice house,” I said, and I meant it. It was cozy. Until you heard Stanley talking about Peter and Luke and John and realized they weren’t just friends of his, you’d think he was a mostly normal person. “So tell me about Milo,” I said.
“Oh no,” Stanley said, shaking his head. “I don’t know if I’d feel worse about setting you up with him or setting him up with you.” But when Milo came over later that night, I could tell that Stanley was trying to leave us alone together. We stood out on the porch, where down in the valley we could see smoke rising like a kitchen fire.
I looked down into the tangled branches of what Milo called a laurel hell. The smoke rose from the middle, making a trail like a snuffed candle. He’d emptied the Cadillac’s gas tank first so it wouldn’t explode. “When will it stop burning?” I asked.
“By tomorrow, most likely.” Milo put a sure, firm hand on the small of my back. I thought he looked worried, but with the beard it was hard to tell for sure. “No one sees the valley from this angle except me and Stanley,” he said. “And the DEA.”
I turned to face him, folding my hands under my belly and widening my eyes. I’d been practicing this pose for a long time, since before I met Maynard even. “Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”
“You tell me about yourself first,” Milo said.
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. But he didn’t believe me, and when he came back the next day I knew I had to tell him at least part of the truth. Some men wouldn’t have cared where you came from, but Milo wasn’t one of them. “I lived with Maynard and his sister,” I said. “They were nice to me, I guess, but you get tired of people being nice to you all the time. Anyway, it wasn’t really about me at all; it was like they were being nice to the baby through me. And then Maynard decided that I went out too much and that I was going to have to stay at this special hospital in Memphis until the baby came, and I don’t like hospitals, so Heft.”