“My uncle needed me,” said Shadow. “The time kind of got away from us.”
She placed the last suet brick in its cage, and began to fill a net sock with thistle seeds from a plastic milk jug. Several goldfinches, olive in their winter coats, twitted impatiently from a nearby fir tree.
“I didn’t see anything in the paper about Alison McGovern.”
“There wasn?
??t anything to report. She’s still missing. There was a rumor that someone had seen her in Detroit, but it turned out to be a false alarm.”
“Poor kid.”
Marguerite Olsen screwed the top back onto the gallon jug. “I hope she’s dead,” she said, matter-of-factly.
Shadow was shocked. “Why?”
“Because the alternatives are worse.”
The goldfinches hopped frantically from branch to branch of the fir tree, impatient for the people to be gone.
You aren’t thinking about Alison, thought Shadow. You’re thinking of your son. You’re thinking of Sandy.
He remembered someone saying I miss Sandy. Who was that?
“Good talking to you,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “You too.”
February passed in a succession of short, gray days. Some days the snow fell, most days it didn’t. The weather warmed up, and on the good days it got above freezing. Shadow stayed in his apartment until it began to feel like a prison cell, and then, on the days that Wednesday did not need him to travel, he began to walk.
He would walk for much of the day, long trudges out of the town. He walked, alone, until he reached the national forest to the north and the west, or the cornfields and cow pastures to the south. He walked the Lumber County Wilderness Trail, and he walked along the old railroad tracks, and he walked the back roads. A couple of times he even walked along the frozen lake, from north to south. Sometimes he’d see locals or winter tourists or joggers, and he’d wave and say hi. Mostly he saw nobody at all, just crows and finches, and a few times he spotted a hawk feasting on a roadkill possum or raccoon. On one memorable occasion he watched an eagle snatch a silver fish from the middle of the White Pine River, the water frozen at the edges, but still rushing and flowing at the center. The fish wriggled and jerked in the eagle’s talons, glittering in the midday sun; Shadow imagined the fish freeing itself and swimming off across the sky, and he smiled, grimly.
If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing. When he was exhausted, his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming.
He ran into Police Chief Chad Mulligan in George’s Barber Shop in the town square. Shadow always had high hopes for haircuts, but they never lived up to his expectations. After every haircut he looked more or less the same, only with shorter hair. Chad, seated in the barber’s chair beside Shadow’s, seemed surprisingly concerned about his own appearance. When his haircut was finished he gazed grimly at his reflection, as if he were preparing to give it a speeding ticket.
“It looks good,” Shadow told him.
“Would it look good to you if you were a woman?”
“I guess.”
They went across the square to Mabel’s together, ordered mugs of hot chocolate. Chad said, “Hey. Mike. Have you ever thought about a career in law enforcement?”
Shadow shrugged. “I can’t say I have,” he said. “Seems like there’s a whole lot of things you got to know.”
Chad shook his head. “You know the main part of police work, somewhere like this? It’s just keeping your head. Something happens, somebody’s screaming at you, screaming blue murder, you simply have to be able to say that you’re sure that it’s all a mistake, and you’ll just sort it all out if they just step outside quietly. And you have to be able to mean it.”
“And then you sort it out?”
“Mostly, that’s when you put handcuffs on them. But yeah, you do what you can to sort it out. Let me know if you want a job. We’re hiring. And you’re the kind of guy we want.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, if the thing with my uncle falls through.”
They sipped their hot chocolate. Mulligan said, “Say, Mike, what would you do if you had a cousin. Like a widow. And she started calling you?”
“Calling you how?”
“On the phone. Long distance. She lives out of state.” His cheeks crimsoned. “I saw her last year at a family wedding. She was married, back then, though, I mean, her husband was still alive, and she’s family. Not a first cousin. Pretty distant.”