Afon
I stand in the dark with my thumb over the call button.
Lukas is one touch away. It'd be easy. If I call, he'll send men, no questions asked. Reznik's camp will get cleaned out in a night and the problem will come to a swift and bloody end.
Best of all, Caroline would go home safe. That's the upside, and it's a big one.
Then there's the downside: Lukas doesn't do favors.
Men like him don't know the meaning of the word "altruism.
" He'd help, but it would come at a price, and the interest on a loan from Lukas Lazarev is the rest of your life.
I already paid fifteen years to that man.
I got out, against all odds, but there will be no second exit.
So… no. Not yet. Not unless there's no other choice, and there's still a choice.
I put the phone back in my pocket and stand in the cold a while longer, until my fingers stop wanting to dial it.
Then I go inside.
In the morning, I rig the mountain.
"What are you doing with our dinner forks?" Caroline asks from the doorway. She's wearing my flannel and my spare jacket over it, which means she's wearing more of my wardrobe than I am.
"These are tent stakes."
"Okay, sure, same difference. What are you doing with the tent stakes?"
"Making noise."
I run paracord at ankle height across the two trails that lead up to the hut, the old mining road from the south and the deer path that comes around the ravine.
I tie each line to a stack of tin cans with pebbles inside.
Anybody who hits the cord in the dark will bring the cans clanging down on rock.
It's not pretty, but it's loud, and loud buys me ten seconds.
Sometimes, that's the difference between a fight and a slaughter.
Caroline limps along behind me, supervising. "Question," she says.
"Nope."
"Isn't this overkill?" she asks anyway.
I don't deign to respond.
She frowns. "Fine. New question. What happens if Wolf hits the cord?"
"Wolf knows where the cords are."
"How? Did you brief him? Was there a PowerPoint?"
"I walked him through. Twice. He's careful.
" I tie off the last line and test the tension with two fingers.
"You, on the other hand, fall over tree roots in broad daylight, so listen closely and remember what I'm telling you.
There's a line here, a line by the woodpile, and a line forty feet down the south trail.
Don't go past the woodpile without me. Repeat that back. "
"I don't go past the woodpile without you."
I nod, temporarily satisfied. "Good."
"I'd like it noted that I'm being extremely cooperative."
"Noted."
She grins like she won something. Maybe she did. I don't know how scoring works with her. I've stopped trying to keep track.
I spend another hour on the rest. I drag a dead spruce across the mining road at the narrow spot, low enough to step over if you know it's there, high enough to put a running man on his face if he doesn't. I pile loose shale on the slope above the deer path where a boot will send it clattering.
I clear the snow off a flat rock thirty yards out so I have one clean shooting position with cover and a full view of the clearing.
It's not a fortress. Not by any stretch of the imagination. At best, I'd call it a poorly built alarm clock.
But for now, it's as good as we're gonna get.
Midafternoon, I take the binoculars up to the overlook above the ravine. It's a forty-minute climb. I leave Wolf with Caroline and tell her I'm checking snares, which is half-true, because I do check the snares on the way.
From the overlook, I can see a long gray ribbon of the valley, and at the end of it, small as a thumbnail, the logging camp.
I brace the binoculars on a rock and look.
Activity.
Three trucks now, plus the van. Two more snowmobiles are parked by the equipment shed, covers off, ready to run.
Men rove between the bunkhouse and the trucks.
I count seven, then eight. One of them is hauling something long and wrapped from a truck bed into the shed.
Another stands by the generator with his arms crossed, not working, just watching the tree line.
A lookout. They didn't have a lookout before.
Then a man comes out of the bunkhouse in a long, dark coat, and everything around him changes shape. The men near the trucks stop what they're doing. One jogs over to him. The lookout straightens up.
It's too far to see a face, or to see anything but the coat and the way eight armed men arrange themselves around one man who isn't carrying anything.
The boss is here.
I watch for another half-hour. I'd hoped that they would nurse their wounded and fuck off to wherever they come from, but it's clear that that's not happening.
No, they're staging. Burrowing in, readying for war.
Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, they're going to start walking this mountain in a grid. The hut isn't on any map, but all they need to find us is time and patience, and they have both of those in greater supply than I do.
I lower the binoculars and look at the snow between me and the valley. My mind is forty minutes below me, lying in bed with a woman fast asleep in my flannel shirt.
I climb back up before dark.
"How were the snares?" Caroline asks when I come in. "Any hope for a non-venison meal in my near future?"
I shake my head. "Empty."
"You were gone two hours."
"There were a lot of snares."
She looks at me for a while. I'm sure she knows. She's known since the cabin that I lie to her about the things that would scare her, but she's decided, for now, to let me.
"So it's venison again?" she sighs, resigned to her fate.
"Cheer up," I tell her. "We have beans, too."
She throws a pillow at my face.
The dream is the same as always, except when it isn't.
It starts on the road outside Saratoga Springs.
It's December. I see the county road, the frozen mud shoulder, the field beyond it.
Yelena's Subaru is on its roof in the field and the wheels are still turning, all four of them, turning and turning, and I'm running through the snow and not getting any closer.
That part is always the same. In real life, I never saw the car like that. By the time, the car was in an impound lot and she was in a drawer.
But the dream doesn't care what I saw. The dream shows me the slowly spinning wheels.
Then it changes, the way it's been changing lately, and the field becomes the clearing behind my cabin, and the car is burning, and the person inside it isn't Yelena anymore.
"Afon."
A hand lands on my chest. I come up out of it fast and hard.
"Hey," Caroline croons. "It's me. You're in the hut. We're okay."
I don't remember sitting up. The fire is down to a red glow in the stove grate and Wolf is standing beside the bed with his ears up, watching me the way he watches a tree line.
"Did I yell?"
"A little." Her hand is still flat on my chest. She doesn't move it. "You said a name."
I don't ask which one.
"Lie back down," she suggests.
"I'm fine."
"Take direction for once in your stubborn life. Lie back down."
I do so, begrudgingly. The pillow is damp.
My heart is going too fast and won't be told otherwise, so I just breathe and let it run itself out.
Caroline settles beside me, on her side, no blanket wall.
There hasn't been one for two nights now.
Her knee finds my leg under the quilt and stays there.
Wolf circles twice and drops back onto our feet with a grunt.
For a while, nobody talks.
Then I do.
"Twenty-one years ago, I got married."
I feel her go still. Careful-still. Like a person who's found a deer in a meadow and doesn't want to spook it.
"Her name was Yelena," I say. "You know that already. You read the back of the photograph."
"I'm sorry I—"
"Don't be sorry. This is the next installment.
I said I'd tell it in my order, and this is how the next part goes.
" I look at the ceiling. The roof metal ticks in the wind.
"She waited tables at a restaurant in Brighton Beach, the one in the photograph.
Gervasii did business out of the corner booth a few nights a week.
I'd sit with him, and she'd come bring us tea and tell me how ugly I was. "
Caroline blushes and laughs at the same time. "Is that supposed to be a meet-cute?"
"She said if I was going to scowl like a gargoyle and scare off all her other customers, I should at least tip better.
" I can hear her. That's the thing about twenty years of mourning.
The memory of her face goes soft around the edges, but the sound stays crystal clear.
"I was nineteen. I went back every night for a month, alone, no Gervasii, and kept ordering from everyone else on staff until she'd finally come out to talk to me herself.
Eventually, she sat down across from me and said, 'Either ask me out or stop wasting my section. '"
"And she said yes?" asks Caroline.
"Nope. Told me I was too ugly for her to date.
" I shake my head in the dark. "But she didn't mean it.
Six months later, we were married. City hall, just the two of us and Gervasii to witness.
She wore that blue dress because it was the only nice one she owned, and I told her I'd be the happiest man on earth if it was the only thing she wore for the rest of her life.
Caroline's hand moves on my chest, slow, back and forth.
"We had a year together," I say. "That December, she drove up to Saratoga Springs to see her aunt.
Her aunt was sick, nothing serious, a bad chest cough, but Yelena was the one in her family who showed up for people.
She made the drive alone. I was supposed to come, but there was work, and Gervasii needed me. I told her I'd take the next trip."
Her hand stills and her face falls. "Afon, you don't have to if you don't—"
"Let me get through it." I breathe. "On the way back, on a county road about nine miles out of town, her car left the road. It rolled twice and came down in a field. The police said she died fast. I've never known whether they say that to everyone or if it was actually true."
Caroline doesn't say anything. Her forehead comes to rest against my shoulder. I keep talking, because the deal was that once I start, I don't stop.
"They ruled it black ice and bad luck. Case closed.
But there were no skid marks on the asphalt.
None. A driver who hits ice fights the wheel and you see it on the road.
Her road was clean. So I drove up there myself, after, and I walked that shoulder for two days.
" I gaze up at the ceiling. "The shoulder was frozen mud, and there were tracks chewed into it.
Snowmobile tracks. Running along the road, right where her car went off. "
Her jaw drops. "Somebody ran her off the road?"
"I don't know exactly. I probably never will. Maybe they fired a shot and scared her off. But the police didn't care about my theories. They said they had other things to do, and they moved on."
"But you didn't."
"No. I didn't." My hand finds the ring without me telling it to, thumb against the bronze, an old habit.
"Gervasii and I had just started running the Lastochka.
Money was moving and people were noticing.
I've spent twenty years wondering if the wrong pair of eyes saw our success and thought they could scare us off and claim it for themselves. "
"Did you ever ask Gervasii if he agreed?"
I bob a shoulder. "He said it was ice. He said grief makes a man see designs in things, and that if I went hunting for a guilty party, then I'd burn down everything we'd built and probably get us all killed for nothing.
" I exhale. "He might have been right. He usually was.
I looked anyway, quietly, for years. But I never found anything certain. "
Caroline lifts her head. I can feel her looking at me in the dark.
"The ring," she says. "You never took it off."
"Never had a reason to."
Caroline is quiet as she thinks for a while. Then: "Was it Reznik?"
I turn so she can't see my face and everything it contains. "All I know is that, somewhere along the line, the trail went cold and the world went on. The only place she still exists is a photograph and the inside of my skull in the middle of the night."
"That's not the only place," Caroline disagrees.
"No?"
"She exists in this room right now. You just put her here."