U.S. 94 going east out of St. Paul looked like a dirty, frozen kitchen sink. Twelve degrees packed the cinder clouds. No sun, no wind and no snow. Tom tensed behind the wheel, running bald tires, ready for a skid. Invisible black ice vapors coughed from thousands of tailpipes and shellacked the frost-etched asphalt. Not the time to get snared in a fender bender.
Questions.
Bomb hoaxes and rumors of human tongues. The feds had denied that a tongue was found in the fake bomb. But Wanger was taking the rumor seriously. So how in the hell was St. Paul Police Lieutenant Keith Angland mixed up in mailing tongues?
And…
Who leaked to him? Probably the FBI. Sending him into the grass to thump around and scare out some snakes. Because he’d been to the house, had interviewed the wife.
Whoever it was, they didn’t know he had been canned from GA and wasn’t supposed to cover federal investigations.
Tom was on a short leash, but fortunately, he licked the hand that held the leash.
He pulled his nine-year-old used Volkswagen Rabbit to the shoulder, cranked open his window, flipped on his company cell phone and punched in numbers.
“Ida Rain.” She answered on the first ring, her best husky telephone voice.
“Ida, it’s Tom. My car quit on me. I won’t make the school board meeting.” He held his phone out toward the whoosh-ing traffic. “It’s the battery. I need a new one,” he said, lowering his voice, “you know, like you told me when it barely turned over this morning,” he added.
“Okay,” she said quietly, “I’ll cover for you. You think you’ll have it fixed by tonight?” she asked with a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Sure. See you.” He smiled. Lick lick. Ida would look out for him.
He rolled up the window and shivered. The Volkswagen had one of those famous no-heat German heaters. The company leased new Fords that had good heaters but also radio antennas, and Keith Angland might spot it lurking around his house.
Tom palmed the manila envelope on the seat next to him: Angland, Keith. Lieutenant, St. Paul Police. The library had filed the house feature about Angland’s wife in his envelope.
Photos fanned out under his fingers. Angland took a good picture, and he’d been in the paper a lot the last few years.
Various awards. Honor graduate, FBI Academy. But those accolades came under the old police chief.
He put the photos aside and consulted his Hudson’s Street Atlas to refresh his memory of the location-an address on a gravel road along the St. Croix River in the quiet community of Afton.
He pulled back into traffic, drove east, sorted the pictures of Angland’s wife out and left them on top of the pile. Tom believed a wife would talk when a marriage was going down, even a cop’s wife. You just had to catch them at the right moment, be a good listener and have patience to wait for the verbal slip that, with the right coaxing and pleading, dropped a detail on which a story could turn.
The wife’s picture cut a rectangle of green whimsy against the winter day, taken against a sweep of summer sunshine and foliage.
Tall and outdoorsy, tanned tennis legs in cutoff jeans, she wore a work-stained pebble gray T-shirt on top, Architectural Digest blazed in script across the front. Hands on, when she had to be. But Tom pegged her as more comfortable in a dress and makeup, flipping through swatches of drapery and wallpaper.
For the camera, she had arranged a row of tall window frames on sawhorses and was removing layers of old bubbled paint with a putty knife. A red bandanna turbaned her tightly curled dark hair.
He fingered another picture, the family shot, that showed her with her husband. No kids. No pet. Keith Angland resembled a blond, two-hundred-pound falcon instantly ready to tuck and dive after a mouse in a square mile of cornfield.
His eyes were intense hazel, he had a cleft in his chin and all the ruddy skin on his body looked tight and hard as the skin stretched over his high Slavic cheekbones. He’d have a radioactive ingot of testosterone for a heart.
In contrast, the wife’s vivid features harked back to a pretelevision beauty that Tom associated with old black and white movies on big screens; when theaters were temples, not cineplexes, and filmmakers used close-ups of faces to carry whole scenes. Hers was heart shaped, with protruding expressive eyes and a classic profile that evoked the Spirit of Westward Expansion Pointing the Way on a WPA mural in a post office. Straight, tall and brave.
A poster wife for Keith, the tough guy cop.
Caren with a C.
Tom turned off the freeway and went south on Highway 95.
He came to the tiny collection of storefronts clustered around a frost-burned, desolate park. Afton, Minnesota. He checked the Hudson’s again. A secondary road paralleled the river and passed through stands of oaks that still clutched brown leaves. He located the house and trolled by.
Once he’d owned a garage full of tools and woodworking manuals. He knew a little about old houses. He’d always dreamed of getting one and fixing it up. But his ex-wife, who didn’t want to live in a cloud of Sheetrock dust, nixed the idea. So they lived cramped with two kids, a dog and a cat in a rambler in Woodbury until Shirley filed for divorce and took the kids to Texas last year. Woodbury was a first-tier bedroom community to St. Paul. Afton lay twenty minutes and several steep income brackets to the east and was, by comparison, country living.
The Angland house was roomy and old enough to have a stairway off the kitchen for the servants. It had bird’s-eye maple on the ground floor. And a mansard tin roof and a square turret topped by a delicate scrim of blackened metalwork.
The house sat on a big lot back from the road overlooking the water. Last summer, the peeling paint had been seaweed green. Now that paint was gone. The wood siding had been sanded, but only half the surface had been sealed with primer. It gave the structure a mangy, deranged aspect that was amplified by missing sections of gingerbread trim. A scaffold, fouled with frozen leaves, leaned, stranded, against a wall.
Work interrupted; that could signal a marriage on the rocks? And other homes on this road had put out wreaths, boughs, and strings of lights. The Angland house displayed no holiday garnish.
No one seemed to be home. No lights on. The windows winked, cold black rectangles, a hundred yards off the road, behind a screen of red oaks. As he drove past, he rolled down the window and inspected the cobbled drive next to a back door. Empty. Garage doors closed. Keith would drive an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria from the police motor pool.
He saw Caren in a sports utility or maybe a small truck.
In back, a patio hugged the bluff. A stairway descended to the water, the rails silhouetted against the iron and brown hedgehog of the Wisconsin river bluffs. The nearest neighbors were a quarter mile in either direction, separated by brittle regiments of standing corn.
A long gust of cold wind swirled up from the river and rattled the cornstalks. Closer in, curled oak leaves skittered down the cobblestone driveway like hollow scorpions.
There was no place for him to hide his rusty blue Rabbit near the house, so he drove on, turned and waited at a bend in the road.
Staking out the house was a long-shot gamble. People were naturally defensive at the threshold of their castle. Angland could be home, his car out of sight in the garage.
He needed Caren to go out, on an errand, to the grocery, to the bank. Then he would slide up and start a conversation to test her mood. If he saw the right signals, he would put his questions.
But right now it was just cold. Should have made a move ten years ago, when he still had the legs. Someplace warm.
His breath made a chalky cloud. Not a very big one. Was that really the size of a lungful of air?
A measure of his life.
Tom hugged himself and looked around suspiciously.
Other measures, the numbers, were never far away. He kept them at bay by staying busy, by keeping on the move. Now he was stationary, and he imagined them creeping out from the cornfield. A picket line of strident dollar signs circled him and banged on his car.
The rent.
Two augured-in VISA cards.
Sears, Dayton’s, and Target. His ex-wife had run them into the ground just before she filed for divorce. Tom had taken them on as part of the divorce agreement. Another price of freedom.
The big-hit child support.
The car loan for this piece of junk. Insurance.
All the numbers merged into one monthly figure that exceeded, by many hundreds of dollars, his salary.
His blackjack strategy having failed, he’d have to skip out on his rent.
Possibly he could move in with Ida Rain.
If he moved in with Ida he could pay down the credit cards. But Ida didn’t need a roommate. She didn’t appear to need anything. She was thirty-nine, never married, a confirmed femme solo and a very thorough lady. Other women at the paper bought whistles when one of their coworkers was attacked in the ramp where they parked. Ida bought a hefty, five-shot, 38 caliber Smith amp; Wesson Bodyguard model revolver with the recessed hammer and a two-inch barrel. She took a police course of instruction and learned how and where to shoot it: “Three shots, center mass.” In her thorough way, Ida had “taken him on” in every sense of the phrase, as a reclamation project. It was a problem. When her concern left her body, it was compassion and affection.
When it touched him, it became control.
Tom shivered.
Jesus, it was cold.
Thirty-four icy minutes later a set of low beams swung down the gloomy gravel road and a bronze-colored Blazer turned into the driveway. Hatless, coat unzipped in the hard wind, Caren Angland got out and walked stiffly to the back door. Tom watched lights switch on, marking her progress through the first floor.
Ten minutes later, the back door opened again and she stepped back out. Now she wore faded jeans and had exchanged the long coat for a green and black mountain parka.
She still wasn’t wearing a hat. She paused to test the lock on the door, then got in the Blazer.
He trailed her back through Afton, north up the highway that skirted the river and connected with I-94. Short of the interstate, she turned left up a gravel road that wound through a tract under construction where fields and rolling woodland were losing to tiny plots with huge new wood frame homes.
For the second time he saw a sign that advertised HANSEN’S CHRISTMAS TREES-CUT YOUR OWN TREES. Caren turned at the sign. Tom smiled. She was going to get the tree.