A Killing Cold

Chapter 6

6

I wake with Connor’s arm around me, his face burrowed against my shoulder. He sleeps like this often, not holding me so much as half-flung over me, like he’s afraid I’ll slip away from him in the night. As if, as he once confessed, he’ll wake to an empty bed and no evidence that I was ever there.

You came out of nowhere. Like a magic trick , he told me. He meant an illusion. Something that isn’t real.

I wriggle out from under the weight of his arm. In the bathroom I press two fingers against my cheekbone as I stare at my reflection. Real enough.

By the time Connor gets up, I’m dressed and the coffee is made. I always wake up before he does—it’s an old survival instinct I’ve never shed. Sloth is one of the deadly sins, and you didn’t want Beth finding you still asleep in bed past the appointed hour.

I sit alone, sipping my coffee, letting the sense of Theo Scott seep into my limbs. She’s never there when I first open my eyes. I am an empty house without her. Restless, dull. And then she enters in: not something I’ve constructed, no meticulously planned illusion. More like a visitor—someone who arrives every day and yet remains in some ways a stranger.

Connor stumbles into the shower, then out to press a kiss into my hair, praise me for the coffee. He moves like a bear in the morning. Lumbering, slow, seemingly fifty pounds heavier as he thumps down into a chair and takes his first slurp. He’s wrapped himself in a plush robe, one of two left hanging in the bathroom for us. There’s something different about him, I think: a lassitude to his limbs I can’t put down to sleepiness.

“Something on my face?” he asks.

I hum a nonanswer. “So what do you do in a place like this for two weeks?” I ask.

He scratches his neck, stifles a yawn. “Drink,” he says. “Stare at fires. The guys go hunting, the women always bake something. There are walks in the woods and snowshoeing and cross-country skiing, and did I mention the drinking? Or you can read. Mom always brings a stack of books,” he says. His eyes glitter. “And we can keep each other busy, of course.”

He’s looking for a laugh, but I only tilt my chin. I think of telling him—the footprints, the possibility of a presence outside our window. I would sound paranoid. Fearful. Perhaps even delusional. None of these words are acceptable descriptions for an aspiring wife. I’m not an idiot. I know Connor Dalton is out of my league. A step out of line, and he will realize this—or remember it.

So when Connor reaches out, I let him tug me from my seat into his lap. He tips his face up, and I meet his lips with mine. He abandons his mug, freeing both hands to rove up under my sweater, warm palms against the skin of my hips.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he says. He never tires of this, the marveling at me. But I can’t stand it—the way he looks at me so intently. Like he is analyzing every freckle, every pore. Like he will see beneath the skin, assess my sinews, my veins, down to the bone. To the marrow.

So when he nods toward the bedroom, I slide off his lap instead, kneel on the warm hardwood. He’s already hard when I undo the belt of his robe, take him in my mouth. His hand grips the back of my head, my nails dig into his thigh, and as he lets out a soft moan, zips of pleasure trace electric paths through every part of me.

After we’re done, he sits with his head tipped back, that half-dazed smile curling at the corners of his mouth. I brush my fingertips lightly over his eyelids, drag them down his cheeks, and then I’m slipping away before he can open his eyes again.

I love Connor Dalton. I need Connor Dalton.

And so, I can never let him look too closely.

We spend the morning lazing in the cabin, but around noon, Alexis comes to collect us. “Mom’s here,” she says without preamble. Her eyes flick to me, half-apologetic. “And it’s pie day.”

“Pie day?” I echo.

“Remember what I said about the baking?” Connor asks.

Right. An afternoon with “the women,” performing the rituals of domesticity—despite the fact that the Daltons clearly outsource these anytime they threaten to acquire the whiff of actual work. The Scotts worshipped work, glorified labor and making oneself useful. Idleness, ignorance, softness, indulgence , I think anytime I am sitting on the couch in the evening with a glass of wine and a book.

“We always do pie day first,” Alexis says as we set out from the cabin. She has this way of talking like everything she says is about to be followed up with a punch line that never comes, like we’re all about to break into laughter. She keeps swinging around backward to look at us as she walks. I have no idea how she hasn’t fallen. “Grandma Louise’s famous recipe. We all have a recipe that’s ‘ours,’ you know? You get to be in charge, order everyone around. I remember being so fucking excited to be the head baker for the first time when I was thirteen. Lemon bars—that’s my recipe. You’ll have to pick one. But Grandma Louise decides if it’ll actually go in the rotation. You might have to try a few times. I made seven variations before she decided it was ‘minimally acceptable.’”

“Cool it, Lex. You’re going to scare her off,” Connor says.

She makes a face—more teenager than thirty-something executive. That’s the difference I saw in Connor this morning. He’s different here . There’s a blur at his edges, like twenty-seven years’ worth of past selves, twice-a-year snapshots, are layered over him.

Places are like that, I’ve heard. Childhood homes. Old haunts. The you that was left behind settling into your body like a ghost. It’s not an experience I’ve ever had; my life has been a straight line onward, never doubling back.

We skirt the pond—the ice has cinched inward, tightening the circle of open water. A new car sits next to Connor’s, and fresh footprints trammel the snow around it. Alexis bounds up the steps of the lodge. Unlike last night, we enter without knocking, stomping snow from our boots before ditching them at the threshold.

The doors at the other end of the foyer open. A woman steps through, instantly recognizable as Alexis’s mother in the same way Connor is such a carbon copy of his father—the same straight dark hair, sharp nose, piercing eyes. This has to be Rose Dalton.

“Connor,” she says warmly. There are exclamations—embraces—her hand on his head like she’s checking if he’s grown—a flurry of questions about the drive, the weather, when she got in. I hang back, not part of it.

Until Connor half turns, his hand extended to beckon me in. “And this is—”

“Theo,” his mother says. I step forward, into the protective half circle of Connor’s arm, which he sets around my shoulders. She takes my hand in both of hers. She smiles, but it isn’t the smile she gave to her son. It compresses her lips, draws tight lines at the corners of her eyes.

“It’s so good to meet you,” I say. “Connor’s told me so much about you.” So so so , I think, cringing, and put the word on time-out.

“I’ve heard a lot about you as well,” she says, a veneer of warmth over a decidedly neutral tone. “I am very much looking forward to getting to know you myself.”

“Me too,” I say, and with that she drops my hands and her attention is back to Connor.

Five minutes later we’re being herded into the kitchen, where Louise Dalton is already standing next to a line of artfully arranged ingredients—tubs of flour and sugar and shortening, green and red apples, cinnamon and whole nutmeg. The last time I did any serious baking, I scooped flour and sugar from yellow and orange plastic tubs older than I was. Every ingredient here is in a glass jar with a neat hand-printed cursive label and a polished wooden lid. The eggs nestle in a wicker basket.

Paloma is absent—watching Sebastian again, Alexis explains breezily, though I have to wonder if that’s just an excuse. Louise sets Alexis and me the task of peeling apples. I sit on a barstool two down from Alexis and get to work, quickly skinning long strips of peel.

You get a prize if you get it all off in one piece , I remember Beth telling me once, in a rare moment of good humor that didn’t last—my fault. It always was.

Wicked girl.

Of course, then I’d used a paring knife, twisting the apple, the blade skating close to my thumb as I slid it just under the glossy skin. I’d tried and tried, getting more and more frustrated. Every time, the strip broke, until finally I had it, moving with steady intensity, the last half inch coming free in one continuous piece, and I’d looked up at Beth and asked, What do I get? And she scowled, called me greedy, and the bowl was in my hands before I knew it, the apples tumbling across the floor, bouncing, rolling in every direction, and a scream tearing out of my throat, an animal sound.

Now I twist the apple and peeler in my hands, skinning the fruit efficiently, and try not to remember the way Beth’s face contorted in disgust.

Connor’s mother is watching me with one eyebrow slightly raised, a quirk to the corner of her mouth. Alexis gets her smile from there, I think—that corner in particular, only on her it never stays tucked away.

“No need to race. We’ve got all day,” Rose says. My cheeks heat. I’m three apples ahead and the only one in a rush. Alexis, apples already abandoned, hands her mother a glass of white wine. Rose curls her hand around it, holding it to her chest.

A wineglass makes a chiming sound as it’s set on the granite countertop in front of me. I jump. Olena, the slim girl with Bambi eyes, stands at my shoulder. She murmurs something unintelligible as she hurries away.

I’ve misunderstood the point of this exercise, I realize with a touch of irritation at myself as Alexis leans a hip against the counter. It’s not the baking after all.

Rose takes a sip of her wine and pins me with her gaze. “So, Theo. You and Connor met at a party, is that right?” she says.

I bob my head. Alexis props her elbows on the countertop, leaning her whole body over. I can see down her blouse—see the sharp ridges of her sternum and ribs where the skin pulls tight. She’s so thin her chest almost looks sunken. “She already sat through an interrogation last night, Mom. Cut her some slack,” she says, and winks at me. I wonder if you have to practice winking in order for it to look natural.

“I don’t mind,” I say. “I’m an open book.” I don’t know why these things come out of my mouth.

“Really? Connor says you’re quite mysterious,” Rose replies. My teeth feel glued together. She chuckles. “Don’t look so stricken. I think he likes being intrigued. And I’ll admit, I’m intrigued, too. Connor’s never introduced me to any of his girlfriends—even Darcy, and they were together, what, two years?”

“Eighteen months,” Alexis demurs.

Rose makes a light noise, a sort of verbal shrug. “In any case, here you are on the mountain. It’s remarkable.”

“Is it?” I ask.

“We do not generally allow casual romantic partners to join us at Idlewood,” Louise says. She, too, has a glass of wine, though she hasn’t touched it that I’ve seen. “Rose, you and Liam were together for three years before he brought you, isn’t that right?”

“It’s a bit like a proposal in its own right,” Rose says. “You get engaged and get your invitation to the mountain.”

“Well, we are engaged,” I point out. Her lips thin, so briefly that I could almost pretend it didn’t happen. My pulse is beating quickly at my throat, like I’m looking into the teeth of a wolf, not just having a friendly conversation surrounded by pie ingredients.

One of these people might have sent me those texts. Louise? Surely not—or could she have had someone send them for her, told some employee to handle things? Rose? She’s only just met me, and she’s obvi ously skeptical, but openly hostile? Could it be Alexis after all, covering for it with her friendliness?

I’m being paranoid. But I can’t help it. What if one of them knows?

My hands have been still too long. I reach for my wine. It’s oversweet; it turns my stomach.

“I brought Paloma up here when we’d only been together a few weeks,” Alexis says. I know she’s trying to help, but being argumentative is just extending this horrific line of conversation.

Louise scoffs. “Because all you teenagers had license to invite a friend for the summer retreat. We simply didn’t expect that any of you would be sleeping with them.”

Annoyance—or maybe anger—flashes briefly over Alexis’s face, but she doesn’t push the point. “We should chill the dough, right?” she asks.

“Toss those peels out first,” Louise directs her. Alexis takes the metal bowl we’ve designated for the purpose over to the pullout cabinet that houses the garbage cans. “The trash is full,” she notes as she chucks the peels in with the organic waste.

“I’ll have Olena take it out. Where is that girl?” Louise asks.

“I’ll take it,” I say immediately, eager for the excuse to escape for at least a minute or two.

“That’s not necessary,” Louise says.

I shrug. “I don’t mind.”

“The bins are straight out back, behind the cinder block wall,” Alexis says, pointing in the right general direction. Before Mrs. Dalton can object again, I scoot in to grab the bag. My sleeves are still pushed up from when I washed my hands, and as I tie the top of the bag, Rose leans forward, a little frown sketched over her lips as she examines my tattoo. My first instinct is to yank down my sleeve, but I turn my wrist instead, giving her a better view. She touches my forearm lightly, as if to fix my arm in place for her examination.

“A dragonfly,” she says with the faint note of a question.

“Kind of a personal symbol of mine,” I say, though a symbol of what, I could not explain. I’m never sure if the dragonfly in my dreams is a protector or a warning—or an ill omen.

“I see,” she says, with an expression bordering on distaste. Her hand drops. Abruptly she turns away. “Louise, let me help you with that,” she says, stepping quickly away and leaving me to furrow my brow. Maybe she’s not a fan of tattoos. Or dragonflies.

I have to head to the front to collect my boots. When I’m halfway there, a flutter of laughter floats down the hall. I turn my head, and I can just see Olena. Her whole body is canted back, someone’s arm around her waist to hold her up. She’s bending away from him but laughing, the movement elongating her neck, baring her throat, and Trevor leans in to kiss it. I stand there, frozen. He looks up. Sees me. He grins.

I hurry away.

In my haste, I step out with only my thick sweater to ward off the chill. Instead of cutting back through the house again, I tramp around the side of the lodge. A squat wall of cinder blocks hides the dumpster from view of the house. I deposit the bag and lower the lid slowly, not willing to break the quiet of the forest with a clang.

I have to go back inside. I can’t. Mist plumes from my lips. Out here, I can breathe, but the cold air holds a razor’s edge that nicks my throat. Inside is warmth and the scent of cinnamon, smiles and laughter, so why do I feel safer with the cold seeping into my bones?

“Something interesting about the dumpster?” says a voice, and I jump. Magnus Dalton stands behind me, maybe twenty feet away. He’s wearing a gray jacket, the cuffs stained a dull brown from age and use. I try to picture the man in a business suit—I know he owns several companies, that he spends his days in boardrooms, but the crags of his face belong so clearly to this place.

“Just lost in thought, I guess,” I say. I gesture toward the house. “We’re baking.”

“Ah. Pie day.” His eyes glint in understanding, and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I could use a hand. Think the ladies can spare you a minute?”

I nod mutely, relieved and nervous. Magnus takes off without another word. I scramble to follow. Multiple sets of footprints trample down a path that he follows, leading to a small wooden shack. Halfway there, the footprints join up with wide wheel tracks and, following behind them, drag marks. Here and there, blood dots the snow. My stomach knots as the pieces click together.

The door of the shed stands open. Outside, a green ATV—or rather, UTV, with two seats side by side—sits parked, a sledge hooked up behind it. Just inside the door, the deer that must have recently been carried on that sledge is laid out on a tarp, eye glassy, head tilted grotesquely where its antlers prop it up. A bloody hole punctures its side, at the ribs.

“Good shot,” I say, trying to keep my expression from twisting with distaste. I know where my food comes from. It doesn’t make staring at death any more appetizing. “Rifle?”

He shakes his head. “Wrong season for it. Get a good shot with a broadhead and it’ll go straight through just as well as a bullet. Clean kill.” He pauses. “Mr. Vance tells me you had quite the encounter.” He moves as he speaks, getting a thin rope from a nearby table. He loops it around the antlers and ties a practiced knot.

“I guess Mr. Vance isn’t as good a shot as you are.” I fix my eyes on Magnus, not the dead stare of the deer.

He grunts a laugh. “No, he is not. You could have been killed, you know. Never go near a deer until you’re certain it’s dead. No sense getting gored.”

I remember, then, Joseph telling me the same thing. How I leaned in close to listen as he crouched down in front of me, showing me the parts of his rifle, his knife. Making me hold every piece until they felt natural. The Scotts were always putting knives in my hand. They shouldn’t have been so surprised I’d pick one up myself.

“You said you’d been hunting,” he says. “Who took you? Your father?”

That was what I was supposed to call him, at least. I hadn’t minded it, not at first. I’d adored him. He didn’t have his wife’s temper— or his father’s. Joseph’s father, he’d told me, was a congenial man with a loud laugh and a deep affection for the sound of a snapping belt. Seemed to like that clean, sharp sound even more than he liked the fear it instilled. Joseph tried out his father’s favorite method of discipline only once. Often he let me get away with things. Palmed me pieces of candy, just pressed a finger to his lips when he saw me sneaking a piece of bread after Beth ordered me upstairs without my dinner. For a little while I’d thought I could really be someone he loved.

“Yes,” I say, realizing I’ve been silent too long. “My adoptive father.”

There’s a pulley screwed to the beam that runs down the center of the shed, and threaded through it is a cord terminating in a hook, which Magnus draws down to snag the rope he’s used to secure the deer. “Help me haul this up,” he instructs, and I step forward. An instinct to please that I haven’t felt in years tugs at me like marionette strings. I haul on the cord with him, struggling with the weight of the deer. Watch as its neck distends, as its body heaves from the ground, swaying. Settling.

“Good,” Magnus says. He ties off the cord. I step away, palms stinging. “Did you learn how to dress a deer, when you went hunting?”

“It’s been years,” I tell him.

He takes a folding knife from the table. The handle is carved from antler. The blade looks hand-forged. Joseph had a knife like that—not his best knife, but his favorite, because he knew exactly where it had come from. Magnus holds it out toward me, fingers folded loosely over the handle. “Would you like to learn?” he asks.

I take the knife in answer.

“When you did this before, was it hanging head up or head down?” he asks.

“Down,” I say, and he nods like this is expected.

“There are arguments for both, and I could tell you all the reasons why my way’s better, but the truth is, it’s what my father did, so it’s what I do,” he tells me. “We are what our parents make us, after all.”

He takes hold of my hand, the one holding the knife, and walks me through half-remembered steps. Shows me just how deep to set the knife to slit the skin and the membrane beneath without puncturing the organs. He tells me to step back as he pulls out a slopping mass of intestines and stomach, letting them spill into a metal tub he’s placed beneath for that purpose. Gorge rises in my throat, but I don’t look away—he doesn’t want me to, and I want him to approve of me. Not just because of Connor. There is a yearning inside me, shameful, a thing that twists like a worm in my gut.

I want to be what you want me to be , it says. I will get it right this time.

“You don’t flinch,” he notes. There’s no approval there, just fact, but I get the feeling it’s as close as he gets.

He removes the liver, heart, and lungs with more care, wielding a second knife. The deer hangs all but hollow. It’s shocking, how quickly a living thing becomes a body, how quickly a body is disassembled.

“My grandfather made the family rich. He was afraid it would make us soft, so he made sure we weren’t. My father did the same. I did what I could, but I lost track, focused on the wrong things. Liam, Connor’s father—he was soft. Not like me. Didn’t know what to do about that.”

My fingers tighten around the polished antler handle. “Soft isn’t a bad thing,” I say, thinking of Connor, his arms around me in the night. “Soft doesn’t mean weak.”

“No, that’s true,” he acknowledges, to my surprise. “Soft isn’t the problem. Soft and weak, though. It’s only if you’re weak that you need to learn to be hard. Need that kind of strength. You’re not weak, are you.”

“I’d like to think that,” I say. My mind skitters over shameful things, secrets and failings and the lights of a police cruiser flashing rhythmically, cast against the shimmering surface of a wet road. No, weakness isn’t my sin.

“You’re not soft, either,” he notes.

No, I’m not , I think. “I work in a bookstore and I quote Joyce,” I remind him.

He fixes me with sharp eyes. They’re blue, like Connor’s, but they have more gray to them. “You might seem it. But there’s something entirely different under the skin, isn’t there?” he asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Your parents,” he says. “Were they good people? God-fearing?”

“God-fearing, yes. I don’t know about good,” I say, a bit surprised to have that question asked here. Connor’s not the least bit religious that I can tell, though he has mentioned going to church as a kid. But Magnus is from another generation.

He grunts, like this answer doesn’t shock him. “You understand—a family like ours, we have to know who it is we’re welcoming in. What kind of stock you come from. You can’t escape what’s in your blood.”

“They aren’t my blood,” I remind him. “I was adopted.”

He pauses. Flicks his knife. Spatters mar wooden boards already years deep with stains. “And your birth parents?”

“No idea. It was a closed adoption,” I say.

He looks at me, his gaze intent. I shift uncomfortably under his scrutiny. “You should get back inside,” he says at last. He reaches out his hand. I set the knife into it, knowing there’s been some kind of test here, not knowing how I fared. I’m at the door of the shed before he speaks again.

“You’ll come hunting with me. Thursday. Last day for it until after Christmas,” he says.

I nod, feeling for the first time since I stepped into the shed the cold numbing my fingertips, my ears, the end of my nose. My eyes water with it, and the smell of the enclosed place. Magnus is done with me.

I head back out into the snow.