The Angland house was roomy and old enough to have a stairway off the kitchen for the servants. It had bird’s-eye maple on the ground floor. And a mansard tin roof and a square turret topped by a delicate scrim of blackened metalwork.
The house sat on a big lot back from the road overlooking the water. Last summer, the peeling paint had been seaweed green. Now that paint was gone. The wood siding had been sanded, but only half the surface had been sealed with primer. It gave the structure a mangy, deranged aspect that was amplified by missing sections of gingerbread trim. A scaffold, fouled with frozen leaves, leaned, stranded, against a wall.
Work interrupted; that could signal a marriage on the rocks? And other homes on this road had put out wreaths, boughs, and strings of lights. The Angland house displayed no holiday garnish.
No one seemed to be home. No lights on. The windows winked, cold black rectangles, a hundred yards off the road, behind a screen of red oaks. As he drove past, he rolled down the window and inspected the cobbled drive next to a back door. Empty. Garage doors closed. Keith would drive an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria from the police motor pool.
He saw Caren in a sports utility or maybe a small truck.
In back, a patio hugged the bluff. A stairway descended to the water, the rails silhouetted against the iron and brown hedgehog of the Wisconsin river bluffs. The nearest neighbors were a quarter mile in either direction, separated by brittle regiments of standing corn.
A long gust of cold wind swirled up from the river and rattled the cornstalks. Closer in, curled oak leaves skittered down the cobblestone driveway like hollow scorpions.
There was no place for him to hide his rusty blue Rabbit near the house, so he drove on, turned and waited at a bend in the road.
Staking out the house was a long-shot gamble. People were naturally defensive at the threshold of their castle. Angland could be home, his car out of sight in the garage.
He needed Caren to go out, on an errand, to the grocery, to the bank. Then he would slide up and start a conversation to test her mood. If he saw the right signals, he would put his questions.
But right now it was just cold. Should have made a move ten years ago, when he still had the legs. Someplace warm.
His breath made a chalky cloud. Not a very big one. Was that really the size of a lungful of air?
A measure of his life.
Tom hugged himself and looked around suspiciously.
Other measures, the numbers, were never far away. He kept them at bay by staying busy, by keeping on the move. Now he was stationary, and he imagined them creeping out from the cornfield. A picket line of strident dollar signs circled him and banged on his car.
The rent.
Two augured-in VISA cards.
Sears, Dayton’s, and Target. His ex-wife had run them into the ground just before she filed for divorce. Tom had taken them on as part of the divorce agreement. Another price of freedom.
The big-hit child support.
The car loan for this piece of junk. Insurance.
All the numbers merged into one monthly figure that exceeded, by many hundreds of dollars, his salary.
His blackjack strategy having failed, he’d have to skip out on his rent.
Possibly he could move in with Ida Rain.
If he moved in with Ida he could pay down the credit cards. But Ida didn’t need a roommate. She didn’t appear to need anything. She was thirty-nine, never married, a confirmed femme solo and a very thorough lady. Other women at the paper bought whistles when one of their coworkers was attacked in the ramp where they parked. Ida bought a hefty, five-shot, 38 caliber Smith amp; Wesson Bodyguard model revolver with the recessed hammer and a two-inch barrel. She took a police course of instruction and learned how and where to shoot it: “Three shots, center mass.” In her thorough way, Ida had “taken him on” in every sense of the phrase, as a reclamation project. It was a problem. When her concern left her body, it was compassion and affection.
When it touched him, it became control.
Tom shivered.
Jesus, it was cold.
Thirty-four icy minutes later a set of low beams swung down the gloomy gravel road and a bronze-colored Blazer turned into the driveway. Hatless, coat unzipped in the hard wind, Caren Angland got out and walked stiffly to the back door. Tom watched lights switch on, marking her progress through the first floor.
Ten minutes later, the back door opened again and she stepped back out. Now she wore faded jeans and had exchanged the long coat for a green and black mountain parka.
She still wasn’t wearing a hat. She paused to test the lock on the door, then got in the Blazer.
He trailed her back through Afton, north up the highway that skirted the river and connected with I-94. Short of the interstate, she turned left up a gravel road that wound through a tract under construction where fields and rolling woodland were losing to tiny plots with huge new wood frame homes.
For the second time he saw a sign that advertised HANSEN’S CHRISTMAS TREES-CUT YOUR OWN TREES. Caren turned at the sign. Tom smiled. She was going to get the tree.
5
The access road curled into a miniature evergreen forest and ended in a rutted dirt lot. Caren parked the Blazer and got out. Tom remembered her face as bright, casting light. Now it was drawn, pale, a little puffy. She walked past Tom’s car to the shack where a sign explained that Hansen loaned you a small saw to cut your twenty-five-dollar tree. On a very cold afternoon, she was the only person in the field not wearing a hat or gloves.
Tom bypassed the shack and trailed her into the fir, spruce, and pine.
Two dozen people wandered through the trees. A third of the shoppers towed preschool children who looked like characters from the Sunday comics, bundled in floppy fleece Jester caps, scarves and mittens. Frosty captions of breath stuck to their faces. Families. Mom, pop and kids doing the ritual. In some cases it was just pop and the kids. There were several solitary men, so Tom didn’t stand out. Caren Angland was the only single woman.
The other people circled, fluffed gloved hands at the boughs, and debated. Not Caren. She walked directly to a tall, long-needled white pine.
Tom slid through a thicket of shorter spiky firs and paused to watch her stoop and begin to trim away the lowest branches, better to get at the trunk.
He browsed toward her, turned, inspected a tree. When their eyes met briefly through a tunnel of pine needles, he looked away. Awkward embarrassment. Caren’s eyes paused for a beat, assessing him for threat.
She saw a man of medium height, in his late thirties, early forties, who had once been good-looking behind his plastic horn-rims, but had stopped taking care of himself. His baggy tan parka came from the United Store. Wrinkles overwhelmed his corduroy suit. Galoshes, a purple wool knit cap with a Vikings logo and cheap leather gloves completed his ward-robe. The clothes wore him, and with his tousled straw hair, fleecy mustache and soft blue eyes he had the rumpled persona of a perpetual graduate student who’d have stains on his tie and who toiled slowly after obscurities in a too-fast world. English lit. perhaps.
Harmless. A Minnesota Normal.
Through the screen of pine, his eyes swung back and caught the corner of her glance. He smiled self-consciously.
“Can’t make up my mind. Every year I do this. And then somebody else gets the best trees.”
Polite, crisp, she replied, “It’s early. There’s still a good selection.”
He nodded. “Last few years I went with balsams. But now they strike me as cramped and uptight.”
“Scotch pine is a nice tree,” said Caren. “Problem is they drop their needles in three weeks.” Her saw made a pile of damp white dust as she efficiently cut through the base of the tree. Resin dripped in the minty air. A smell like turpen-tine.