“Kids selling Easter Seals,” John Wildstrand called back.
“What? Tell them we don’t want any,” Neve yelled.
“Say you’re going for a little walk,” said Billy.
“I’m going for a little walk!”
“In this snow? You’re crazy!” his wife cried.
“Put your coat on,” said Billy. “So she doesn’t see it’s still hanging on the rack. Then come with me. Shut the door.”
John Wildstrand went out into the snow and Billy pulled the door closed behind him. As Billy followed him down the walkway, presumably with the gun still out or slightly hidden, Wildstrand’s confusion turned to a prayerful wish that he might find Maggie hidden in the car. That this was some odd prank. Some way of her seeing him. The windows of his house sprayed a soft, golden light all the way down the landscaped twist of pavers. There was a band of utter darkness where a stone wall and close-grown arborvitae cast a shadow onto the boulevard. The car sat beyond in the wintry shimmer of a street lamp.
“Get in,” said Billy.
Wildstrand stumbled a bit in the icy snow and let himself into the passenger’s side. The backseat was empty, he saw. Billy held the gun just inside the sleeve of a large topcoat, and kept it pointed at the windshield as he rounded the front of the car and ducked quickly into the driver’s seat.
“I’m going to ease out of this light,” he said.
Billy kept his gun out and his mild eyes trained on Wildstrand as he put the car in Drive and rolled forward into the darkness beyond the street lamp’s glow.
“Time to talk.” He put the car in Park.
Billy was a nervous-looking boy with deep brown eyes and a thin face. Toast-brown hair flopped over one eye and bent into his collar. There were little wisps of down on his chin. He was artistic. This sort of action, Wildstrand knew, did not come naturally to Billy Peace, though he was descended of the famous guide Lafayette Peace, who’d also fought with Riel. He might have gotten slightly drunk to force himself to drive to the Wildstrand residence with a gun and ring the bell. And what if Neve had answered? Would Billy have pretended to be selling candy bars for some high school trip? Would he have tried something else? Did he have an alternate plan? John Wildstrand stared at the gaunt little face of Billy. The boy really didn’t seem likely to put a bullet in him. Wildstrand knew, also, that Billy’s success in getting him into the car had depended on some implicit collaboration on his own part.
“So,” Wildstrand repeated, using the patient voice he used with jumpy investors, “how can I help you?”
“I think ten thousand dollars should be just about right,” said Billy.
“Ten thousand dollars.”
Billy was silently expectant. Wildstrand shivered a little, then pulled his coat tight around him and felt like crying. He had cried a lot with Maggie. She had brought all of his tears up just beneath his skin. Sometimes they rushed out and sometimes they trickled in slow tracks down his cheeks, along his throat. She said there was no shame in it and cried along with him until their weeping slowed erotically and sent them careening through each other’s bodies. Crying with her was a comfortable, dark act, like being painlessly absolved in church. There was an element of forgiveness in her weeping with him, he felt, and sometimes he became sentimental and sad about what his grandfather had done to a member of her family, long ago.
John Wildstrand heard himself make a sound, an ah of doubt. There was something about the actual monetary figure that struck him as wretched and sorrowful.
“It’s just not enough,” he said.
Billy looked perplexed.
“Look, if she keeps the baby, and you know I want her to keep the baby, she’s going to need a house, a car. Maybe in Fargo, you know? And then there are clothes, and, what, swing sets, that sort of thing. I’ve never had a child, but they need certain equipment. Also, she needs a good doctor, hospital. That’s not enough for everything. It’s not a future.”
“Okay,” Billy said, after a while. “What do you suggest?”
“Besides,” Wildstrand went on, still thinking out loud, “the thing is, in for a penny in for a pound. This amount will be missed just as much as a larger amount will be missed. My wife sees our accounts. There needs to be an amount like, say, let me think. If it’s just under a hundred thousand, the papers will say nearly a hundred thousand anyway. If it’s a hundred thousand, they’ll say that. So it might as well be over fifty thousand. But not seventy because they’ll call that nearly a hundred.”
Billy Peace was quiet. “That’s just over fifty thousand,” he said finally.
Wildstrand nodded. “See? But that’s a doable thing. Only there must be a reason. A very good reason.”
“Well maybe,” said Billy, “you were going to start some kind of business?”
John Wildstrand looked at Billy in surprise. “Well, yes, that’s good, a business. Only then we’ll need to actually have the business, keep it going, make a paper trail and that will lead to more deception and the taxes…it all leads back to me. It gets too complicated. We need one catastrophic reason.”
“A tornado,” said Billy. “I mean in winter maybe not. A blizzard.”
“And where does the money come in?”
“The money gets lost in the blizzard?”
Wildstrand looked disappointed and Billy shrugged weakly.
“A cash payment?”
They both cast about for a time, mulling this over. Then Billy said, “Question.”
“Yes?”
“How come you don’t get divorced from your wife and marry Maggie? A while ago, she said you loved her and now it sounds to me like you still love her. So maybe I didn’t have to come here and threaten you with this.” He wagged the gun. “I’m not getting why you don’t leave your wife and go with Maggie, like run off together or something. You love her.”
“I do love her.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Look at me, Billy.” John Wildstrand put his hands out. “Do you think she’d stay with me just for me? Now be honest. Without the money. Without the job. Just me.”
Billy Peace shrugged. “You’re not so bad, man.”
“Yes, I am,” said Wildstrand. “I’m…a lot of years older than Maggie and I’m half-bald. If I had my hair, then maybe, or if I was either good-looking or athletic. But I’m a realist. I see what I am. The money helps. I’m not saying that’s the only reason Maggie cares for me, not at all. Maggie is a pure soul, but the money helps. I’m not losing one of my biggest assets — if I divorced Neve now I wouldn’t have a job. All gone. I took over from her father, who is, yes, old and in a nursing home. But perfectly lucid. Neve is a fifty-one percent shareholder. Besides, here’s the thing. Neve has done nothing wrong. She has never, to my knowledge, betrayed me with another man, nor has she neglected me within her own powers. It is not her fault. Until I really saw Maggie, you understand, one year ago, I was reasonably happy. Neve and I had sex for twenty minutes once a week and went to Florida on winter vacations; we gave dinner parties and stayed two weeks out of every summer at the lake. In the summer we had sex twice a week and I cooked our meals.”
Billy looked uncomfortable.
“Besides, we’re a small bank and we could get bought out. That would change my situation. I’d like to be with Maggie. I plan to be with Maggie. If she’ll have me.”
Now Wildstrand leaned questioningly toward Billy.
“What does your presence here mean, actually? Did she send you?”
“No.”
“What happened? She won’t talk to me, you know.”