“My pipes?”
“Something about your pipes freezing.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve been losing a lot of sleep over that. It’s been my biggest problem this week.”
“I’m just telling you what she said.”
“Okay,” I said. “You delivered the message.”
“Alex, I don’t know what else to say. I swear, I really didn’t know anything until…”
“Save it,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more. You didn’t know about this because you didn’t want to know. If you knew, you would have had to tell me. And you didn’t want to do that. And we both know why.”
I looked in his eyes. For the first time since I had known him, I felt the distance between us as he looked back at me. I knew that, even if we ever found a way to get over this, the distance would always be there.
“Tell me this,” I said. “Whatever happened to that bag? I hear there’s quite a load of, what did they call it, wild cat in there?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “As far as I know, she didn’t have it when they took her.”
“Of course she did,” I said. “Your cousins are sitting on enough drugs to stay high for the rest of their lives. Or whoever those people are in Canada. And they’re not even sharing it with you?”
He just looked at me, his shoulders back like he was ready to jump on me. “I was feeling pretty bad about what happened to you,” he said. “You’re making it a lot easier on me.”
“Why don’t you go ask them?” I said. “Ask them where that bag is. If they say they don’t even know what you’re talking about, then you know you’ve got a problem. That stuff is poison, Vinnie. For anybody. Indians, white, black, anybody. If the drug doesn’t hook you, what about the fact that you could sell that stuff for, God I don’t even know, a couple hundred thousand dollars, at least? You think that every single one of your cousins can resist that temptation? Talk about the white people destroying you. It looks like you guys are gonna do a pretty good job of it without anybody’s help.”
“It’s time for you to walk away,” he said. “Walk away before I do something I’ll regret.”
“We wouldn’t want that,” I said. “God knows you’ve done enough already.”
When I left, he was still standing there in the parking lot, staring off into the distance.
I spent the heart of the day in my cabin, sitting by the woodstove. I didn’t feel like going to the Glasgow, even when the sun was starting to go down and I’d normally feel the urge for a little company. I sat by the woodstove, putting in log after log, trying to get even heat going to dispel the chill in my body. I felt cold all the way through.
I tried not to think about Molinov, or about what he said as he left me. The cold takes away a part of you. It didn’t make any sense at the time. Now I was beginning to feel the truth of his words.
I was tired, but I dreaded the thought of going to sleep. I knew as soon as I closed my eyes, I would be back in that shack. It took me fourteen years to get over that day in Detroit, I thought. Fourteen years until I didn’t see that apartment every night, my partner lying on the floor next to me. Now I’ve got some new dead bodies to dream about. Maybe this time it’ll only take me thirteen years.
I got up and walked around the place, looked out the window as the day gave way to darkness. I could see my own reflection in the glass.
“Do something,” I said. “Anything. Don’t just sit here going crazy.”
I put my coat on and went out to the truck. I fired it up and drove the quarter-mile to the second cabin. It felt strange to open the door and walk in, now that I knew what had really happened there. I picked up the leg that had broken off the table. It was solid oak. My father had made this table down in his basement in Dearborn, turned the legs by hand on his lathe and put the whole thing together without using one nail. Somewhere I still have a couple of his old pipe-clamps, I thought. If I can find them, I’ll try to glue this thing back together.
I felt the weight of the table leg in my hands, holding it like a bat without even thinking of it. I tried to swing it. It hurt like hell. You’re a real specimen, Alex. You used to be able to drive the ball when you got hold of it. Now it hurts just to swing a fucking table leg.
Wait a minute.
I stared at the table leg in my hands. In my mind I was back in this very same cabin the morning this had all started, the morning I came to find Dorothy and found nothing.
Nothing but chairs scattered around the room. A table overturned. A leg broken off. And the faint marks of snow melting on the floor.
They came to her that night. They knocked on the door. She was afraid. She thought it was Bruckman. Or Molinov’s men. Or Molinov himself.
She panicked. She looked for something to defend herself. She opened the drawers. There was nothing but plastic silverware. She knocked a chair over.
And then she turned the table over and tore the leg off. She was strong enough to do it if she used a little leverage. There was nothing holding the table together but glue that had become brittle after years of cold air.
She held the leg and waited for the door to be kicked in. I could see her standing right here, breathing hard, ready to make her stand.
And then they called to her. Voices from her past, calling her by her Ojibwa name.
She dropped the table leg and opened the door. Come with us, they said. We’ll take you away from here.
She must have wanted to tell me she was going. I had to believe that.
No, they said. There’s no time. We must go.
Maybe they told her they would call me later. Maybe they tried to convince her that they couldn’t tell me, that I couldn’t be trusted.
Or maybe they just grabbed her at that point, and took her away.
No matter how it happened, she didn’t have the bag with her when she left.
The melted snow on the floor. That was her. After I left her, she went outside, then came back in.
Which explains her message. The frozen pipes.
I put the table leg down, went back outside to the truck, grabbed the flashlight from the cab and the shovel from the back.
I went to the back of the cabin and started digging through the snow. I had done the same thing the night I brought Dorothy here. I had gone under the cabin to turn the water on, and told her to keep the tap dripping so the pipes wouldn’t freeze.
When the deputies searched this place, I thought, they didn’t really have their hearts in it. They didn’t think about what was under the cabin.
I dug all the way down to the little access door. By the time the deputies got here, there had been enough new snow to cover it
I crawled under the cabin and turned the flashlight on. There it was in the corner. I backed my way out, pulling the bag with me. When I was out, I stayed on my knees and unzipped the bag.
White powder, in small clear bags, the powder glittering as I passed the light over it.
“So this is wild cat,” I said. “Brought here all the way from Russia.”
I zipped up the bag and took it back to my truck. I needed to get back inside, next to that woodstove. A good stiff drink wouldn’t hurt, either.
Then I needed to figure out what the hell to do next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Two weeks passed. It snowed. I plowed the road. New renters came to stay in the cabins. They drove their snowmobiles on the trails, filling the cold air with noise.
I didn’t spend much time at the Glasgow Inn those two weeks. I chopped some wood. I cleaned up after the snowmobilers. I even got the passenger side window in my truck fixed. Mostly I stayed in my cabin by the woodstove, trying to get warm.
I saw Vinnie’s car by his cabin. But I didn’t see the man himself. Not once.
Until he came knocking on my door. When I opened the door, he was standing there on the walkway I had just shoveled.