The Snow Falcon (21 page)

“So what do you think?” Carl said, bringing Michael back to the present.

Michael shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Carl didn’t say anything, just drummed his fingers on the old countertop. He looked away and pushed his glasses up on his nose, then pursed his lips.

“I’ve got another offer,” he said.

“What?”

“Two hundred and seventy-five thousand. For the house as well,” he added.

The last figure, offered the day he’d arrived back in town, had been two twenty-eight, and it was about right. “How come the big jump?” Michael asked.

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“You won’t get a better price than that,” Carl said, ignoring the question. “It’s more than both places are worth. You don’t have to take our word for that. Get it checked out.”

Michael frowned. ” ‘Our’?”

“What?”

“You said ‘our.’ ‘You don’t have to take our word.’” Michael was puzzled, and Carl looked uncomfortable. “Who is Ron Taylor, anyway?”

“A developer. Listen, what’s important here is … See, that kind of money is… Well, it’s a good offer, Michael. I wouldn’t tell you it was if I didn’t think so.”

“And it’s this Taylor guy who wants the store?”

“Yes. He plans to redevelop it.”

“And he wants the house, too?”

“Not really, but he’s prepared to take it to get the store. Listen, you should think about this. That kind of money, you could go somewhere. Wherever you want. Europe, maybe.”

“Europe?”

“I just mean, you’d have options. You’re still a young man, Mike. You could get a job in advertising again somewhere.”

Something didn’t feel right. Michael felt that Carl was holding something back, but he wasn’t sure what. “Our.” Why had he said “our”? Was he a partner with this Taylor guy? It didn’t matter, anyway. “I don’t want to sell.” He looked about the empty store again, and an idea came to him. Maybe it had been forming in his mind for a while. ,

“I might reopen this place,” he said.

Carl blinked in astonishment. “Reopen it?” He looked around as if he expected to see workmen and tools already, as if Michael were pulling some kind of conjuring trick. “There’s a hardware store in town already,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have to sell hardware.”

Carl bit his lip and fiddled with his papers. He cleared his throat. “I, uh, I’ve been authorized… I mean, we could maybe go to two eighty-five. Two ninety.” He shuffled, a little nervous sidestep.

Michael said, “You said ‘we’ that time. Is this you and Ron Taylor, Carl?”

“Not exactly.”

The way Carl looked at him, just across his shoulder, the light

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catching his glasses so they flashed clear, made the moment a telling one. It still took Michael a second to get it, but then he did.

“This offer. It doesn’t have anything to do with Taylor, does it?”

Carl hesitated. “No, he hasn’t changed his original figures. He thinks the offer fair.” His voice started weak but gathered strength as the pretense fell away.

“And it was,” Michael said.

“You ought to think very carefully about this,” Carl said. He was a different man now. He drew himself up, and his voice lowered. “Two ninety is a lot more than you’ll ever get anywhere else. You’d be a fool not to take it.”

Michael nodded slowly. “Just so I know, who is it that’s making me this generous offer, Carl? I mean, I think I ought to know who wants me to leave town so much they’re willing to pay over the odds. There’s you, of course; I know that. Who else?”

“There’s no reason for you to take it like that,” Carl said. “Look at it from our point of view. We’ve got kids. This is a respectable town. We don’t have that kind of trouble around here.”

Michael echoed his words. ” ‘That kind of trouble.’ You mean people like me? Killers. Crazy people?” He shook his head, slowly, too stunned for anger. “You know what happened, Carl. I didn’t kill anybody.”

“You shot a man. The cops thought you were going to shoot your own wife and daughter.”

“I never once threatened them, for chrissakes.” Michael didn’t know why he was arguing. What did it matter? He was wasting his breath with someone like Carl Jeffrey. “Who else is a part of this deal?”

“Just some people I know. Some businesspeople.”

“Like George Wilson? Good citizens of the community. He was going to give me a job, did he tell you that? I was going to be his promotions manager. He said he liked my ideas, until he knew who I was.”

Michael waved a hand. He’d started to feel anger rising in his throat, bubbling up like bile he needed to spit out, but it faded. “Get the fuck out of my sight,” he said wearily.

“Listen…” Carl took a step forward.

“This is my property.” There was a warning in Michael’s tone. “Get out.”

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His words fell hard and flat, and Carl faltered. He gathered up his papers and made to leave, skirting around Cully as he did so. At the door he turned, looking as if he was going to try one more time, but on seeing Michael’s expression, he changed his mind.

“I’ll tell you this for free. If you open this store again, you’re crazy.” He went out, slamming the door shut behind him.

RACHEL ELLIS FEIGNED sleep, waiting for her husband’s deep breathing to turn to snoring. It was dark in their room, but her side of the bed was closest to the window; outside, through a gap in the curtain, she could see stars. Pete stirred, muttering something unintelligible, and his heavy hand slid from her belly to flop loose. The stubble of his chin scratched against the back of her neck.

She got out of bed and put on her robe. The kids were asleep, and the house was quiet. It was a habit of hers these days to go down to the kitchen and sit in the dark when she didn’t feel like sleeping. She poured herself a glass of milk and tried not to think about the pile of bills on the shelf waiting to be paid.

Earlier that night she and Pete had argued, which these days wasn’t unusual at all. It was the same old thing: no money coming in except what she made herself, him drinking, the business going to hell. Lately things had become worse. As usual, it had fallen to her to smooth it over with the bank. That afternoon, Richard Wells had looked at her across his desk when she’d gone in to talk to him, all dressed up with her hair done and wearing a skirt that showed off her legs, and she’d read sympathy in his smile. She’d clenched her hands in anger, digging her nails into her palms. She’d felt humiliated, angry at herself for thinking a little makeup and eyelash fluttering would change anything, but mostly furious with Pete for making her act like a smalltown whore, or at least feel that way.

“Things have been a little quiet for Pete lately,” she’d said, a flush of heat rising in her cheeks.

Richard had looked at their account record, and after a moment he’d laid down the file. “I understand how things can get, and we’re not talking about a lot of money here,” he’d said.

She’d known it would be okay then. When he’d shown her to the door, he’d asked about her family and said to give his regards to her dad. As she’d left, he’d given her a kind of sad smile that had cut to

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her heart. She guessed he felt sorry for her: for being married to Pete, for having to put on a dress and try to talk her way around a few hundred lousy dollars. All the while, Pete was drinking nights, running up credit where he could get it or stealing from her purse. People told her they’d seen him in Clancys or one of the places out of town.

She lit a cigarette, the match flaring orange in the dark, and caught sight of her reflection in the window, all shadows and light across her forehead. She was thirty-three years old. Her kids were both in their teens and becoming independent, much quicker than she had at their age. She lived in a house that needed painting inside and out, and she drove a car that regularly broke down on her. Maybe it was time she cut her losses and admitted she was fighting a losing battle. If she left Pete, the kids would go with her. They could stay with her parents for a while—over in Williams Lake, where they’d moved seven years ago—until she found herself a decent job. She could start again.

Her parents would be happy, she knew that. There would be the stuff about how they’d always told her she was making a mistake marrying Pete, but she was used to that by now and it wouldn’t be for long. Seems like they’d been right anyway, though that was something she’d started to admit to herself only recently.

“He comes from bad stock,” her dad used to warn her. “I know how that sounds, but it’s true, Rachel. Just look at the boy’s father.”

Well, there was no denying that, all right, and nobody ever had, least of all Pete. His dad was a drunk and a bum who’d abused both his wife and his kids for most of his worthless life.

“Pete’s not like him,” she used to say, believing every word. “He knows what his dad is, and he doesn’t ever want to turn out like that.”

Her dad had worn a pained expression. “I hate to say it, but Pete Ellis is exactly like his old man. He’s just trying hard to fight it right now.”

She’d thought her father was being unfair, and she railed about how was anybody ever to make something of themselves if they never got a decent chance? She was right, of course, and her father’s attitude was undoubtedly wrong. But maybe his observation wasn’t.

What she remembered about Pete from high school wasn’t very much because he was four years older than her, but in a town the

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size of Little River you get to know everybody in some way. In Pete’s case, his reputation mostly preceded him. His was a loudmouth, and pretty good at throwing his weight around, always getting in fights. Had anybody said when she was sixteen that she’d end up marrying someone like that, she’d have laughed. She didn’t meet him again until he came back, and then she hardly recognized him.

What had struck her chiefly about him then was his good manners, which seemed like a funny kind of old-fashioned thing to say, but it was true. The last time she’d seen him, he was this scruffy obnoxious guy she would have crossed the street to avoid; then suddenly there he was again, a whole different person. When he asked her out, he was so polite and serious that curiosity, more than anything else, motivated her to accept: She wanted to know how somebody could change so much, and if it was just an act. It hadn’t been, though. He’d opened doors for her, even pulled out her chair when he took her to a restaurant, and he’d never tried to lay a hand on her.

Soon enough, his appeal had become something more serious to her than curiosity. He was kind of shy around her, and admitted it was because he hadn’t been out with many girls like her. She hadn’t asked much about what kind of girls he had been out with, guessing she knew the answer to that question. He talked a lot about the future he planned. He had this ambition to get on in the world, and as she got to know him, she found it was fueled a lot by the fact that he hated his father and was determined to prove to everyone that he would never be like him. That would take some doing, as most people had already decided otherwise.

They got married for the oldest and stupidest reason there was: She got pregnant. But if she was honest with herself, she’d have to admit that it probably would have happened anyway. It would have been nice if she could think that afterward everything had worked out well, that Pete had proved to the world he was his own person and no reflection of his parentage. Even if they’d always had to struggle for money, that would have been okay, but life, Rachel thought, is never as simple as all that.

She found out early on that Pete had a weakness that meant there was always going to be a gap between his ambitions for himself and what he was capable of. He’d done poorly at school because he hadn’t studied or been expected to, and when he started the lumber business,

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that lack of education showed up. He was no good at arithmetic, and he couldn’t read or write that well either. Things like contracts totally floored him, and any kind of complicated “legal speak,” as he put it, went way over his head. None of that had to have mattered, because he could have overcome those things if he’d wanted to work at it, and she was always there to help out with the books and so forth, but Pete’s real weakness was his conviction that he was as good as anybody just the way he was. He didn’t want to go back to school. He didn’t want to do things the hard way. He preferred to get by with bluster and determination. He used to tell her proudly that he’d work every hour of every day that came if he had to. The trouble was, hard work was only part of what was required; smart work was needed just as much. Pete was always looking for the shortcut, but he found that it rarely led him where he wanted to be.

It had been his dad’s weakness, too: a generational cycle of bad parenting and poor education producing failure and bitterness. Pete had thought he could rise above it by sheer force of will, but he’d been wrong. He’d thought he could make his business work without properly understanding contracts and proposals and business plans and loan repayments and all the rest of it, and he’d been wrong about that, too. Maybe he’d sensed early on that if he married someone like her, she would somehow make up for the things he lacked, and in a way he’d been right. For years she’d been the foundation on which the family was built, this being an unspoken knowledge in their lives. Early on, the lumberyard had done okay, but she’d virtually been running it. As the kids were growing up, though, she’d had to devote more time to them, and Pete had taken on more of the quoting and office work at the yard. Business had declined—just a temporary thing, Pete had said. He’d claimed he didn’t need her help anymore, but still, she’d gone out to work because he just didn’t make enough money. By then she’d had even less time to check over the books, even if his pride had allowed her to.

She had seen what was happening, of course, but she’d stood back and let him try to work his way through it. Now they were in a desperate situation, she knew that. The business was all but finished, crippled with debt, no assets to speak of, and any customer goodwill had long since been used up with Pete trying to cut corners. The order book, as she’d seen the other day, was empty. The only option