21. Lily
LILY
Iwatched him lie to a killer's face without once raising his voice, and God help me, it was the most competent thing I had ever seen a man do.
He had been different since the night he told me the boy's name. He was not lighter, exactly. He was emptied out, the way a room is emptied out, with all the furniture still standing where it had always been.
It started with an engine. I was out at the woodpile with the Nikon around my neck, photographing the way the axe head had rusted into a shape like a leaf, and somewhere down the ridge road a car was working very hard at a grade it had not been built for.
Sacha came around the corner of the shed without any sound at all. He did not run. That was the part that frightened me. A man who runs is a man who has been surprised, and he had the flat unhurried face of somebody who had been waiting on this for three days.
"How long do I have?" he said.
"You'll have to tell me what for."
"I have to make you dull. Tell me how many minutes I get."
The car ground its way up another twenty feet and slipped and caught again. He took the camera off my neck, which I let him do, and put it inside the woodshed under a tarp, and then he took my left hand and turned the ring finger toward the light as though checking a serial number.
"You are not wearing a ring, which helps.
You are Lily and you use your own name, because half the county has heard it and a woman who lies about her name in a town like this is remembered forever.
" He was talking fast and low and his eyes never left the road.
"I am Dave. I look after this place for the family that owns it.
They come up in July. You are my problem and not my wife, and you have been here two weeks because your car died, and you are leaving as soon as the shop in town can get to it. Do you have that?"
"Your cover name is Dave," I said.
"It is."
"You had three years up here to pick one and you landed on Dave."
"Lily, focus."
"I'm just filing it."
"Note it later." Then, without any change of tone at all, "If he puts a hand in a pocket, you get behind the woodpile and you stay down. Do not look for me. I will be busy."
And then the strangest thing happened, and I have thought about it a great deal since.
He got smaller.
I do not mean that he crouched. His shoulders came down and rolled forward.
His hands went loose and turned slightly out, the way a man's hands hang when he has spent thirty years hauling other people's firewood.
His chin dropped an inch and his mouth went slack and something switched off behind his eyes, and by the time the rental car crested the last rise and slithered into the yard there was a dull, harmless, faintly put-upon man standing in front of me where the most dangerous person I had ever met used to be.
The car was a tan sedan with city tires and a bar-code sticker in the back window. Gus got out of it with his hands already up in a friendly little wave, and he was wearing the same new flannel and the same brochure smile.
"Look who it is," he said. "It's a small world."
"Road's washed out past the culvert," Sacha said.
His accent had gone somewhere. It was still faintly there, but it had gotten lazy and Midwestern around the edges, the accent of a man who came over young and stopped caring.
"You'll want to back down slow. There's a turnaround fifty yards below the gate. "
"I'll do that. I will." Gus looked at the cabin. He looked at the woodpile. He looked at me and his face did something warm and did not mean any of it. "You're Miss Chen. You were in the diner."
"That's me," I said.
"So you two live up here."
"He does. I'm a guest of the car that died." I made myself sound bored, which was the hardest piece of acting I have ever done, with my pulse going like a bird in a box. "It's at the bottom of the drive if you'd like to say something unkind about it on your way past."
"I saw that," Gus said. "That's a hell of a hole in your gate."
There it was. I felt the whole yard tighten.
Sacha did not so much as blink. He turned his head to the ruined ironwork the way a man considers a chore he has been putting off, and then he sighed the sigh of the eternally unappreciated.
"That's my winter," he said. "She comes through it in a blizzard, and I have to write to the owners in Wausau and explain how a gate they paid four thousand dollars for is now in two pieces. Do you know what four thousand dollars buys? It buys a gate that a little two-door goes through like paper."
And Gus laughed. He actually laughed, easy and real, and something in me went cold, because I understood exactly what I had just watched.
Sacha had handed him the ruined gate before he could ask for it, wrapped in a complaint about money, and a complaint about money is the most boring object on earth.
Nobody investigates a man who is annoyed about a gate.
"So you're the caretaker," Gus said.
"I'm Dave," Sacha said, and did not offer a hand.
"I'm Gus. I'm up here for the hardwater." He rocked on his heels and turned his eyes out past the shed toward the trees, and his voice stayed exactly as friendly as it had been in the diner. "Fella at the bait shop said there's good water in behind here. Deep hole, no crowd."
"There's water in behind here," Sacha agreed.
"There's no ice on it worth standing on.
Springs come up through the bottom the whole length of the east shore and the ice goes soft in patches you can't see.
Two men went in three winters ago and only one came out.
" He scratched the back of his neck. "You want the second bay off the county launch.
Sand bottom, freezes hard, you'll have company but you'll also have your legs. "
That was the moment I fell the rest of the way in love with him, standing in a cold yard while he cheerfully sent an assassin to go fish somewhere else.
Gus asked four more things, and I only recognized them as questions afterward.
He asked whether the owners ever rented the place out in winter.
He asked if the road got plowed all the way up or only to the culvert.
He asked whether Dave had noticed anybody else running around back here, hunters or sledders or whoever, because a man likes to know who else is on the water.
And then he asked, in the same easy way, how long Dave had been looking after the place.
"Three years now," Sacha said. "Four in the spring."
"That's a while."
"It's steady work," Sacha said, and then he did the thing that finished it. He started talking about the septic system.
He talked about the septic system for a full minute and a half.
He talked about the pump and the leach field and the man from the county who drove out in the fall and would not commit to an opinion.
I stood there and watched a professional killer's eyes glaze over, watched him check the time twice, watched him take one step backward toward his rental car in the universal body language of a man who has walked into a conversation about drainage and can see no exit from it.
"I'll let you get on, then," Gus said.
"You'll want to back down slow past the culvert," Sacha said.
"Slow it is."
He got in. He backed down slow. We stood in the yard and listened to the engine complain its way toward the county road, and neither of us moved until the sound had thinned out to nothing.
I looked over at the two birches by the approach then, and the line was gone.
He had run it between them at shin height two nights ago with a half dozen empty cans hanging off it.
The cans were back in the shed and the wire was coiled on a nail, and there was no way he had done that in the ninety seconds it took a rental car to climb the last rise.
He had taken it down before first light. He had known.
Then Sacha came back into himself, and it was worse than watching him leave. The shoulders squared. The hands closed. The whole slack, harmless, put-upon caretaker drained out of his body in about two seconds, and what was standing beside me was somebody else again.
"Okay," I said, mostly to keep my hands from starting up. "I have notes."
"Lily, not now."
"I'm serious. That was an eight." I ticked it off on my fingers.
"You made far too much eye contact. Boring people don't hold your eye, they look at your shoes and the weather.
That's one. Second, you gave him no backstory whatsoever.
You handed that man a first name and a septic tank and nothing in between, and a real Dave would have volunteered his bad back, his ex-wife, and his opinion on the Packers inside ninety seconds. "
"He left with nothing."
"That's only because you buried him in drainage, which I concede was genius.
Third, you dropped the contractions when you warned him off the ice.
" His head came round. "You did. Boring men don't say there is no ice on it worth standing on.
Boring men say the ice ain't worth a damn.
" I let that sit. "If we ever do this again I'm writing your character properly.
You get a wife named Sherry. You get a fantasy football league you take much too seriously and a bad knee you mention twice.
" I looked up at him. "And you get a better name than Dave, which was frankly an insult to Daves everywhere. "
He did not laugh. He was looking down the empty road with the same shut face he had worn on the porch the first night, and I felt the ground start to tilt under the conversation.
"He was here to make certain," he said.
"Then he's not certain."
"He is closer than he was this morning." He turned to me. "You did well. I am not pretending otherwise."
"Say the rest of it, then. You've had it loaded since he drove off."
"You are on a road out of here at first light."
There it was. I had known it was coming from the second his shoulders came up, and it still landed like a slap.
"That's not happening," I said.
"This is not a negotiation."
"Everything is. Ask any nurse who has ever gotten a ninety-year-old man to take a pill." I stepped in front of him so he had to look at me. "Before you go any further, I want to tell you what I saw, and then you can shout at me all you like."
"I do not shout."
"That's true. It's honestly more frightening.
" I pulled my sleeve down over my fingers, because the cold had gotten into them and to buy myself the half second.
"He's on something for his blood pressure.
His ankles were swollen over the tops of those boots, and he had a patch on the inside of his left forearm when he pushed his sleeve up, and he turned down coffee at ten in the morning in weather like this, which men do when they've been told to watch their fluids.
That's a man in his fifties with a bad heart and a doctor he actually listens to. "
Sacha went very still.
"Keep going," he said.
"He never looked at the dog."
The silence after that had a weight to it.
"Everybody looks at Tank," I said. "Every single person does.
Earl looked at him. Marge asked about him twice.
He's a hundred and forty pounds of dog and he was standing in the yard the entire time, and that man's eyes went over the woodpile, the cabin, the gate, my car, and me, and never once landed on him.
" My voice did something I did not authorize.
"He already knew the dog was here. He's been up here before, or he's been watching from somewhere he could see this yard, and either way he didn't need to be told. "
Sacha studied the tree line for a long moment.
"I did not have that," he said.
"I know you didn't. You were busy being Dave." I made myself keep going while I still had the nerve. "So here's my problem with first light. You put me in a car and you handle this alone, and you're doing it on half the information."
"I have handled worse than this alone."
"I'm sure you have. How did that go for the last person who got left outside the room?"
I should not have said it. I knew it while it was leaving my mouth, and I watched it land, and he did not flinch, which was somehow the worst thing he could have done.
"That was not fair," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm frightened and I fight dirty when I'm frightened, and you can put that on my chart."
"It was fair." His voice had gone quiet. "It is also the whole reason. Do you understand? I know exactly what happens to the people who are standing near me when this goes wrong. I have carried one of them in a coat pocket for three years."
"And I know exactly what happens to the people who get sent somewhere safe.
" I had not planned to say any of the next part either.
It came up out of me the way it always does, without permission.
"A nurse who meant every bit of it walked me down to the family room at two in the morning and told me to put my head down, because she was being kind, because she wanted to spare me one hard hour.
My mother died at four. I was ninety feet away on a vinyl couch with my coat over me, being spared. "
The wind moved through the pines and neither of us said anything.
"You are asking me to bet with your life in the pot," he said.
"I'm asking you to stop deciding what I'm allowed to survive.
" I was crying by then, in the useless leaking way that has nothing to do with how steady your voice is.
"You want me somewhere with a locked door and no phone signal, waiting to find out.
For two years I have been the moving target, and I spent every week of it being nowhere and being nobody and being safe.
It was killing me slower than any of this will. "
"Do not do that to yourself."
"I know what I'm choosing. I want it written down that I knew." I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and got my breath back. "Nurses get told the survival numbers before they walk into the room. It's not the same job when you've been told."
He stood there with the cold coming off the snow and the whole ruined afternoon behind him, and I watched a man who solves things for a living come up against the one problem in his life that would not hold still to be solved.
"I didn't survive burying my mother to spend the rest of my life being kept safe on a shelf," I told him. "If you're in danger, I'm not leaving. You'll just have to learn that about me." He looked like a man realizing the storm never actually left.