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  The shower and the gas and the naked light and Cassie still all wet and first trembling then melting against him and the old man’s head shifting on the warped linoleum floor and beginning to snore between their feet.

  And she said, like real perplexed, “Ain’t our fault that the two best-looking people in the eleventh grade have the same last name.”

  He’d been halfway there, again, till she said that. Then she totally sobered him up with her follow-up line, tonguing the words into his ear: “You were first at something, remember.”

  It was just possible her head was so empty because her brain had crawled down into her mouth, where it took up residence in her sucky tongue. It was enough baggage having Cassie permanently in your life as a sister. You’d have to be completely nuts to complicate it by doing the doggie in the bathroom with the shower running and the old man snoring on the floor.

  Morg could have a weak moment, but he was not nuts.

  It was plenty just to feel the cannibal gene slither up and load in his blood. It didn’t have to go off, not at the exact moment. Cassie was the perpetual rain-check girl. Count on her to stay wet.

  But she was right about one thing. It had to stop.

  So he yanked a towel off the hook on the back of the door, covered her, and said, “You ain’t thinking too clearly right now. Get dressed. We’re getting out of here, over to Nygard’s.”

  She studied him, and it wasn’t so much that the moment passed. More like she slowly folded it up and tucked it in her pocket. Except she was out of pockets right then. “You smell gas?” she asked as she carefully stepped over the snoring heap on the floor.

  “Yeah. Stay away from the kitchen. Use the back door. Go out to the barn and feed the damn calves. Sounds like they’re starving.”

  They didn’t take anything with them when they left and went over to the Nygards’ house, because when they usually showed up—because Irv and Mellie Bodine got themselves outrageously drunk—they never brought anything. But the last thing Morg did, after he made sure no windows were open, was close the door tight behind him.

  And not turn off the gas.

  It was like that gas was meant to be, and Morg wasn’t going to interfere with destiny. Uh-uh, not him. And the stove was working off a fresh tank, because he’d hooked it in two days ago.

  No one was surprised when the sheriff went out the next morning and found the Bodines with their lungs soaked with propane and their blood testing off the chart with alcohol. The medical examiner and the sheriff agreed, it looked like the kind of stupid accident that would happen to a couple drunks; passed out, pilot light on the stove unlit. Irv falling down getting off the toilet, bruising his head on the sink, and breathing the slow creep of the rising gas. Hell of a sight, with his bibs down around his ankles. And nobody was surprised when Cassie and Morgun didn’t cry at the pine-box funeral.

  The day after he buried his parents, he buried Morgun when he drove to Bemidji in his daddy’s truck, to a tattoo parlor there, and got the alligator tattoo on his left forearm.

  Chapter Six

  They came through the door and immediately smelled the cigarette smoke. Kit rolled her eyes, made a resigned face, ran up the stairs, and slammed the door to her room. Broker took the long view and accepted it as the exhausted breath of insomnia that inhabited the house. Along with the TV blaring in the kitchen.

  Part of the healing process.

  He made a signal of shutting the front door forcefully behind him, telegraphing their arrival. Then, methodically, he removed his coat in the living room.

  Give her some time…

  Didn’t matter. She barely noticed him come into the kitchen; still in her robe and slippers, one of his old T-shirts she’d slept in. Hair askew, her face puffy with backed-up caffeine, nicotine, and fatigue; she slumped at the kitchen island, worrying at her cigarette with her thumb. She stared at the TV he’d installed in the corner above their one houseplant, a hardened snake plant that thrived on her erratic watering regimen of dumping cold coffee cups, many containing soggy cigarette butts.

  The television screen flashed an image of military vehicles coated in that signature third-world red dust. Some breathless embedded reporter riding in a Bradley, yelling about taking small-arms fire…

  Day two of the War in the Box.

  “How’re the Crusades going?” Broker nodded toward the TV.

  Nina slowly shook her head, and a spark of interest sputtered in her eyes. “Looks cool on the tube. Road race to Baghdad. But I got a feeling they shoulda listened to Shinseki, going in light like this. Those Army kids are going to wind up taking up the slack for the politicians again.”

  Broker nodded. “Let’s hope the fix is in.” She saw the war as inevitable. He thought it was a mistake. They agreed on one point; during the run-up to the invasion they’d assumed that the Iraqi generals had been bought off, that they’d resist symbolically to preserve their honor, then turn over Saddam and his inner circle. So far that hadn’t happened. Any other plan was just too dumb, given Iraq’s history and ethnic composition.

  “Nina,” he said softly, “give it a break.” Did she really miss it? Want it more than being with him and Kit? Did she feel left out, flawed because she’d been left behind? He found the remote among the unwashed breakfast dishes and thumbed off the TV. He faced her and said, “The thing at school—Kit got into a fight. This kid wouldn’t stop pushing her, so she punched him. One-day suspension. There’s a readmission conference tomorrow.”

  Nina stared at him, and he could almost see his words methodically crawl over her face, searching for a way to get inside. Finally she focused and said, “Did she get hurt?”

  Broker shook his head. “Skinned her knuckles. But the boy she hit wound up with a bloody nose.”

  Slowly she nodded. Then she dropped her cigarette into the sink. “I’ll go up and talk to her.” The words had no force, seeping out like a last puff of smoke.

  “Let’s wait, do it over supper. Maybe, ah, you should take a shower and try a nap,” Broker said gently.

  Nina slowly raised her right arm and touched her fingers to her right temple in a smirk of a salute. She let the arm fall back to her side and walked from the kitchen.

  Broker smiled. Two months ago she would be wincing with the effort when she hit the painful range of motion at shoulder level. Would be trembling by the time she got her hand up to her forehead. The ROM therapy had made slow but steady progress rebuilding the shoulder. She was healing. The shoulder faster than the rest of her. But healing.

  He turned the exhaust fan on over the stove. Then he opened the patio door to the deck and the side windows and turned on the ceiling fan. To air the place out.

  Next he emptied the dishwasher, put the plates, glasses, cups, and bowls away. Then he rinsed off the dishes in the sink and started loading the washer.

  Kit came down the stairs and into the kitchen carrying her school backpack. “Mom’s taking a nap,” she said.

  “How’s your hand?”

  Kit looked at her raw knuckle. “Don’t think I need a Band-Aid anymore. Mom put some hydrogen peroxide on it.”

  “Stung, didn’t it?”

  “A little.” She held up her hand so he could see the white residue of disinfectant etched into her knuckle. Then she stared at him.

  So he debated whether to address the unsaid question hanging over her. Should he do it now, or wait? Whatever he said would be tempered by the fact that he’d knocked the kid’s dad down. “We’ll talk about the fight at dinner,” he decided. “Put on your stuff. We’ll go outside so we don’t wake her. Maybe you could put some wax on the skis.”

  Kit brightened when he said that, walked to the patio door, and studied the thermometer fastened to the deck rail. “Twenty-two degrees. Purple wax.”

  “Sounds about right,” Broker said.

  As Kit worked with the skis in the garage, he took a white package of venison round steak from the freezer and set it on the counter to thaw. Then he
checked the pantry and the refrigerator to make sure he had all the ingredients he’d need. Satisfied, he put on his coat and went outside.

  As he pulled on his cap and gloves, he checked the overcast sky and the surrounding woods. Griffin bought this parcel of land with frontage on the west shore of Glacier Lake twenty years ago, when it was cheap and the lake was almost totally uninhabited. Broker had spent part of a summer helping him put the kitchen addition on the gutted house. Not much older then than Nina was now, not long out of his own war.

  Broker returned to his maul and chopping block, knocked apart a few armloads of kindling, took it into the kitchen, and stacked it in the wood box next to the Franklin stove. When he came back out, he saw Kit come out of the garage, lean the skis against the side of the building, and use a cork to smooth out the long stripes of wax she’d applied. His were the long skinny Nordic racers. Hers were shorter, combos for both Nordic and skating.

  Kit came back with the ski poles. Lined everything up, then turned to him and held up her hands, palms up, in a question. In addition to being quiet, the west end of Glacier was only a couple hundred yards from fifty winding kilometers of some of the best cross-country ski trails in the state.

  “After lunch,” he said. She went inside, and he went back to his wood.

  As the maul rose and fell and his woodpile grew, he went back over the morning. The tiff on the playground didn’t concern him that much, and his first impression was that the principal and that chubby kid’s mom were overreacting. Kids had to learn how to work out problems for themselves. Should think about that, though. How maybe his approach was too old-fashioned for the current social climate.

  More to the point was the fact that he had to keep explaining to an eight-year-old that, as a family, they didn’t need to draw extra attention to themselves right now. Explain it in a way to make it stick.

  After a fast grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup, and a glass of milk, they changed into long underwear and wind pants and laced on their ski boots. During the three months they’d been on the lake, the quarter Norwegian in Kit’s blood had taken to the skinny skis with a single-minded intensity some people might find scary in a kid her age.

  They’d hit the ski trail a lot. What Kit had this winter instead of friends.

  Back outside, he watched her toe into her ski bindings, grab her long skating poles, and power off into the woods on the connecting route they’d blazed to the groomed trail. He stayed a few yards behind her in parallel tracks as she swept left and right in the athletic skating technique that he, the die-hard purist, rejected. She’d learned the rudiments last year, when she was living with her mom in Italy. And now her initial clumsiness had fallen away with the last of her baby fat.

  Broker dug in his poles and pushed off. They met a family plodding in fat waxless skis and snowmobile suits. Passed them.

  A moment later two athletic high school boys powered around them, wearing orange camo hunting parkas. Locals by their dress. Out taking advantage of the new snow.

  The confrontation with Jimmy Klumpe still replayed in Broker’s muscles, a not unpleasant afterglow. Dumb to dwell on it. Put it behind you. He tried to lose himself in the rhythms of the kick and glide. The crisp air bit into his lungs, and the sweat froze on the tips of his hair as they swept through the silent forest.

  Chapter Seven

  Gator closed the door to his shop and stood for a few moments looking across the empty fields and into the woods beyond. The eighty acres was fifteen miles north of Glacier Falls, at the edge of the Washichu State Forest. He’d signed it over to Cassie when they both turned twenty-one, when he was in the Navy.

  Spent three years at the Idaho National Engineering Lab by Idaho Falls. Nothing but razor-sharp black basalt fields, used nuclear fuel rods, unexploded ordnance, and a Navy facility that trained submariners on nuclear engines. Mechanic/machinist mate. Never did get to see the ocean.

  Cassie had tried renting the place out. Didn’t have much luck. People didn’t like it up here in the big woods, said it was too spooky.

  He’d moved in when he got out of prison two years ago. He liked it just fine. No people, and lots of machines that needed fixing. His parole officer had remarked how Gator had cleaned the place up considerably. People grudgingly admitted he was a local success story. No small accomplishment for a Bodine.

  So he stood for a few minutes looking over his domain; uninhabited—now—for a ten-mile radius. The low clouds almost scraped the crowns of the pines, going off forever like the bottoms of a million gray egg cartons. He sniffed the crunchy air. March in Minnesota. It would snow again.

  He cocked an ear, listening. Earlier today he’d heard the pack. Nothing now.

  He approved of the way the snow carpeted the fields and frosted the evergreens. Was up to him, he’d have winter all year. Liked the way it imposed a kind of order; compressed the colors into manageable whites and grays. Covered up all the crud.

  Made the big woods even more inaccessible. Kept people away. The wolves coming back helped, too.

  Going in the farmhouse, like now, sometimes he missed his dogs. The two big shepherd pups he bought had been poisoned last year by some uptight citizen who didn’t like homeboy felons moving back into the neighborhood. He’d brought in some geese for lookouts but got rid of them because he couldn’t abide the green crap everywhere. Decided the isolation was security enough.

  There were no animals on the farm now. The land was in the crop rotation. Just him and his tools and the quiet.

  The farmhouse was pretty much the way it’d been; just a lot cleaner now. Same old furniture covered with blankets. He’d hung a few tractor posters on the wall. His ribbons from high school cross-country. A framed certificate that announced that Morgun Bodine had finished twelfth in the Bierkebinder Cross-Country Ski Marathon five years ago, in Hayward, Wisconsin. A souvenir German battle flag hung on the wall that his dad had brought back from Europe, when he was the best mechanic in four counties, before he went on the booze. A good sound system.

  A 5,000-piece puzzle was half constructed on the kitchen table.

  He heated some water and put on a Johnny Cash CD, the one recorded at Folsom Prison. When the water boiled, he made a cup of Folger’s instant coffee, lit a Camel, and got out his maps and refamiliarized himself with the ski trail loop that followed the east shore of the lake, where the old Hamre place was located.

  He picked up the phone, checked down the list of numbers taped on the wall, and called Glacier Lodge. The clerk told him, yeah, they’d run the tractor on the ski trails this morning—what the hell, probably the last chance to ski this season.

  Gator thanked the clerk, ended the call, and returned to his maps. One loop of the trail skirted the Griffins’ rental. He thought about it. Go in fast, scout the place, mess with the guy’s stuff. Get out. Just enough to keep Cassie happy so she didn’t bounce weird.

  The other thing toyed with him. Cassie said he didn’t fit? Like a puzzle. Something to figure out.

  Cassie had always expected him to attend to her dramas, large and small. Like he was on this open-ended retainer because she’d talked Jimmy into bankrolling the repair shop. When he got out of the joint. Back when she had her nose in the air, when they were flush, all full of plans.

  That was almost two years ago, and he’d owed them. Gator grinned and knuckled the bristle of spiky growth on his chin. Yeah, well, now—the way it worked out—they owed him. Big-time. And now he had the plans.

  But he had to keep them in line, on task. Especially Cassie, who had boundary issues when she got herself all worked up and got wired and got to talking too much. So she wanted to see her brother teach the guy a lesson, country style. Like he had learned last year, the accepted way around here to send a message was to kill an animal. Okay, if that was the price of keeping her quiet.

  Kid’s stuff. And messy. He put on a pair of old rubber gloves, went to the icebox, poked around, and found half a pound of hamburger starting to turn brown
. Quickly he packed the meat into a squishy ball, eased it into a Ziploc bag, then stepped onto the mud porch and carefully lifted a liter of Prestone, took off the twist cap, and sloshed antifreeze into the plastic bag. Leaned it gingerly on a workbench against the vise. Let it stew. One green greasy meatball slurpy for Rover.

  Gator made a face. So what if the guy doesn’t have a dog?

  He went back in the kitchen and dug in the utensil drawer next to the sink until he found the skinny ice pick. I know he’s got a vehicle.

  He placed the pick in the narrow side pocket of his backpack. He thought for a moment. Probably have to do some creeping. He went to the shelf on the mud porch and selected a pair of old oversize felt boot liners. Then he selected his small bear-paw snow shoes. After he loaded the footwear in his pack, he nestled the meatball baggie in among the boot liners.

  Okay.

  Next he changed from his work clothes, pulled on long underwear and lightweight Gore-Tex winter camo. He yanked a ski mask over his head and down around his neck like a muff, so he could pull it up if he needed to hide his face. He put a bottle of water, an energy bar, and his smokes in a small backpack. After he laced on his ski boots, he checked the thermometer on the porch.

  Twenty-two degrees. Blue Kleister.

  Carefully, liking the routine, he waxed his Peltonen racers.

  He put his cell phone in his chest pocket, then loaded his skis and gear in the back of his battered red ’92 Chevy truck and headed out. He slowed five minutes from the farm to check the intersection of County Z. The crossroad was all fresh undisturbed snow, no tire tracks. He continued on County 12 south through the deserted jack pine barrens, going slow, inspecting the deserted houses scattered along the road for signs of recent activity. Half an hour later, he arrived at the trail head at the north end of the lake.