Black Cat Weekly #97

Chapter 7

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

The Barb Goffman Presents series showcases

the best in modern mystery and crime stories,

personally selected by one of the most acclaimed

personally selected by one of the most acclaimedshort stories authors and editors in the mystery

short stories authors and editors in the mysteryfield, Barb Goffman, for Black Cat Weekly.

field, Barb Goffman, for .

bySetting, the sun lays down a golden path across the snow and the water. You could follow it straight to Paradise if you were ready, but you’re not—that’s for another day. Now, this is enough. The air: sharp, new, and yours alone. The muffled crunch of packed snow under your boots. The silence, vast and complete when you stop. The cold bites but is not bitter; the cold, here, meets you as an equal, and when it fights you, it fights fair. The years Outside, the years in New York, you met a different kind of cold: mean, sneaky, the damp its sneering toady as it slipped between your skin and your bones. In New York, snow was gray and thick and betrayed itself into slush and ragged water. In New York, people called you many different names, none of them yours. You lived in run-down rooms, caged above, below, around by other people’s rooms, and you ate take-out food, greasy and indistinguishable, off soggy paper plates. But Kenai people know you. Kenai people call you Joe. Here, when you’re hungry, you head through the long blue shadows that cut across the golden light, head back toward your cabin, a solid, square black home absolutely alone on the hill. You’ll eat trout from the stream that wraps the slope, trout smoked and put by over the brief summer (two fresh, warm months, not the endless, glaring furnace you knew in New York, in those years). This morning, when the light was thin and white, Mom came by, sat and had coffee, left you some pickled beans from last summer’s garden; maybe you’ll eat them too, absolutely alone, sitting at the window in the spare, empty cabin, watching the ice on the distant river waiting for its chance to find the sea.

“Joe. Joe Craig!”

You look around. Whose voice? There’s no one here. You hear knocking. The wind, slapping a shutter against the cabin wall, up on the hill? But the wind is still.

“Anyone in there?”

Your eyes open slowly. With a sadness so deep and soft it almost suffocates you, you know it’s happened again. You were dreaming, again. You haven’t gone home. You’re still Outside. This is New York. This is that rancid room, that stinking summer. The whining fan blows thick, damp air across your sweating face. That’s the shrieking of the TV upstairs; there goes the roar of the elevated train. You can hear it but not see it; you can’t see anything through the soot-streaked glass but the crumbling brick wall four feet away, the pulled shade on your neighbor’s window.

You’re still here.

Your heart crashes against your chest, but you tell yourself: someday. You tell yourself, as you always do: one day, you’ll be able to go home. You’ll find a way to go back to the emptiness, the vast stillness, where you can be alone, where you can be Joe.

You feel yourself calming; your racing blood slows. Someday. And until then, knowing it’s there is enough.

But here, now, who’s calling you? The knocking’s turned into pounding, pounding on your door. Who is this?

“Open up, Joe. Come on, I know you’re in there.”

You rise from the bed, glance around at the nothing you have: sagging mattress, sprung couch, yesterday’s coffee in a pot on the stove. There isn’t anything here that’s Joe; it’s all another guy, one of those other names. You open the door.

There is a man, shorter than you are, younger too. He wears a white polo shirt, the underarms darkened with sweat. You don’t know him.

“Joe Craig? No, I know you haven’t gone by that for a long time now,” he says, “but it’s Joe Craig, right?”

You shake your head.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been looking for you. Your brother sent me.”

“Got no brother,” you say.

“Uh-huh. Tom. He wants you to go home.”

“This is home.” The words almost choke you.

“To Alaska. I’m a private investigator, out of Anchorage. Mick Burke.”

He puts out his hand. You reach for it slowly, shake it, tell him, “You got the wrong guy.”

“No. Took me six months. That last guy, Lester, you gave him the slip, huh?” He grins.

“Don’t know any Lester. What do you want?”

“Look,” he holds up a briefcase, “I brought the paperwork. Tom thought maybe you don’t believe it.” He lifts his eyebrows, looks past you, so you step aside, let him in the room.

He pushes away a crumb-covered plate, a sticky spoon, opens the briefcase on the rickety card table. Back in the cabin, the table is heavy, solid: two thick slabs of fir you set on wide legs, sanded and rubbed and oiled.

The man—Burke, he said—pulls out a folder, starts handing you papers. “They dropped the charges,” he’s telling you. “That’s why Lester came here, if you stayed still long enough to listen. Though I can see why you didn’t. Twenty-eight years on the lam, must get to be a habit.” He looks at you, right in your eyes.

A shadowy memory, like another dream: a different room, a different stranger.

You say, “You want some other guy.”

He taps one of the papers in your hand. It rustles with a sound like dead leaves skidding across the ice. He says it again: “They dropped the charges.” He tells you more: “A guy in Idaho, in prison, he was dying. Wanted to clear his conscience. He confessed. Alaska murder warrant for you’s been voided. You can go back any time.”

You look at the paper. You think you’ve seen it before.

He pulls out a file: news clippings. They tell the same story. He looks over your shoulder, points to a date. “A year ago,” he says, as though you can’t read that. “Couple of months after your mother died. Sorry,” he says, seeing your face. “Didn’t know if you knew. Lester, he swore up and down he found you, told you the whole thing, but Tom said it was crap. If he told you, you’d have gone back. So Tom hired me.” He grins again. He doesn’t stop talking. “I started with Lester’s report. The way I figured it, Lester located you, but you got wise to him, scrammed before he actually got to you. Right?”

You shake your head again.

He shrugs. “Yeah, whatever. Anyway, Joe, you can go back. And man, that place’s changed!” He shakes his head. “It’s terrific. I hadn’t been down to Kenai in what, twenty years? Until your brother called me. What I remember, it was real nowhere, more moose than people. But now they got a great road there down from Anchorage, keep it plowed most of the year. Good airport too. Now it’s more tourists than people.” He laughs at his own joke. “Houses everywhere. They got a new high school. It’s a real town now, Joe. Population’s maybe tripled since you left. Hill where your cabin used to be? Tom showed me. Beautiful development, just beautiful, nice big houses, know what I mean?”

You know what he means. The other stranger—that must have been Lester—told you. You remember him now, remember that time, in that other room. He told you a lot of things. The new roads, the new houses. Fishing licenses now, so many tourists fishing the river. And Mom—what had he said about Mom? Your head begins to pound.

Burke says, “Your brother, he got a lot for that land. Lives right in town now. Wants you to go stay with him. Real convenient, Joe, right near the new supermarket, the movie theater. Just like you’re used to, all these years here.” He grins again, and his teeth are white, like snow. Sweat crawls down your back.

“Yeah,” Burke is saying, “that’s how Tom knew Lester was lying. Lester said he came back the second day with the plane tickets and you were gone, but Tom said as much as you loved Kenai, if you knew you could have gone home you would’ve, first chance you got.”

Another train rumbles by, screeching as it rounds the curve. Somewhere close, someone’s frying fish, the smell tossed into your room by the fan. “Christ, it’s hot in here.” Burke wipes his forehead, takes out a cell phone. “Tom said, call him as soon as I found you.” He presses in a number, saying, “You’ll really like it up there, Joe. Place has really changed.”

You look at the door, but he’s between you and the door, and he’s got the phone against his ear. You turn, reach into the sink. The knife that’s there is dull, rusted. But it’s enough.

It’s quick, and after, you pick up the couple of things you need, step over what you’ve done, and leave this room behind, as you’ve left so many cramped and squalid places. You leave behind the name you used there too, and take another as you hurry down the baking city streets. Your heart is kicking in your chest but begins to slow again as you think of home. Your cabin, alone on the silent hill. The stream, the ice breaking up, trout running soon, you can fish all day and see no one. Mom will come over, sit at your smooth, heavy table, drinking coffee, laughing. Your skin feels the cold. Your ears are filled with silence. In front of you is a city sidewalk, but you don’t see that; you see, as you have seen for so long, the hill, the cabin, the golden path and blue shadows. You will see them, and follow them, until the day—and you know it’s coming—when you can go home.

S.J. Rozan’s eighteen novels and eighty-plus short stories have won multiple awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon. She’s been honored with the Private Eye Writers of America Life Achievement Award and the Short Mystery Fiction Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Born and raised in the Bronx, SJ now lives in lower Manhattan. Her latest book is Family Business. Learn more at sjrozan.net.

Family Business