and perhaps fill, if only for an instant, the aching void inside him.
Winter remembered how hard he had prayed in those hours before she stopped breathing. Those prayers had done no more good than a wish tossed with a penny into a fountain. He knew that visiting her grave was tantamount to visiting a pair of her shoes, or a dress she could no longer wear. But he couldn't escape her memory. He would wander from it for a time, but a thought of her, triggered by a scent, a sensation, a sound, or a random feeling, would always slam him back to the past like a rifle shot.
Winter Massey looked five years younger than his age of thirty-seven. He was five-feet-ten, weighed one- sixty-five, and could look forward to twenty more years of doing what he loved before he would have to retire at fifty-seven. He took good care of himself, ate as well as he could, ran, did push-ups, lifted weights, and swam. He had recently taken up boxing, sparring a few times a month.
Before his wife's death, it had never occurred to him that he was powerless to keep harm away from his family. He had spent so many years hunting down the scum of the earth, trying to protect society from evil beings. He hadn't known he was the cobbler whose children go barefoot, the photographer with the empty family album.
Feeling sorry for himself was not his style, and after three years he had no tears left to shed, just a sense of loss he had steeled himself to. He removed the withered rose from the vase in front of the stone and slipped the fresh one in its place. As he walked away, the heavy pistol in his shoulder holster swung like a pendulum against his ribs, a ticktock reminder of what he was.
Winter had moved his wife and son to North Carolina six years earlier, when he was assigned to the Charlotte office. While they were house-hunting in nearby small towns, looking to get the most bang for their buck, Winter and Eleanor had taken a wrong turn down a side street. After a couple of curves they saw a FOR SALE sign in front of a place on the hill that looked like a Spanish restaurant to Winter. “Look, Eleanor, the Alamo,” he said.
“I love it!” she exclaimed. He thought she was joking until she made him pull over and peer in through the windows, both of them circling the house like opportunistic thieves.
The yellow-brick home had been built in 1938 and it had most recently belonged to a writer. It was an example of California Spanish Mission Revival, a style not often seen in North Carolina. It had arches on the front and a red barrel-tile roof, and to Winter's dismay, Eleanor had to have that house. Of the three other couples who had looked at it over that weekend, two had already made offers that were being considered by the owner. Winter figured that the other bidders would try to beat the owner down, demand repairs, dicker on every crack in the mortar, every patch of peeling paint. So he offered the asking price-and the house was theirs. Four bedrooms, four baths, three parlors, three working fireplaces, a breakfast room, a formal dining room, and two porches. Three thousand square feet of solid oak floors under ten-foot-tall ceilings. For three years straight it devoured their weekends, chewed holes in their savings, soaked up electricity in the summer and hogged natural gas in the winter. Eleanor had attacked the house, painting and directing Winter like a drill sergeant. God, he remembered, how she had loved life.
Winter steered his Ford Explorer up the steep driveway and, as the vehicle passed hidden sensors, bright security lights illuminated the front of the house and walkway. As he passed the back corner of the house, another bank of floods lit the backyard and driveway. He parked in the two-car garage beside a dark LeSabre. He took his canvas duffel out of the backseat, picked up the eleven roses from the floorboard, and dropped them into the trash on his way to the door. The remaining roses would only serve to remind him of the one he'd left behind.
His mother had woken when he came up the driveway and had beaten him to the door. Seen through the glass panels, Lydia Massey looked like a wraith bent on haunting his entrance. She snapped the lock and opened the door as if she didn't believe that he could locate the lock without her assistance and would stand there frozen all night with his key poised. She was wearing a wispy robe over her rayon gown, and as he kissed her cheek he was overwhelmed by the lemony scent of her cold cream. She patted his arm absently and said, “I wasn't expecting you back until tomorrow,” then set about trying to reshape her hair where the pillow had flattened it. “I'll fix you something to eat. We had hamburgers for supper.”
Winter said, “I've already eaten.” He hadn't eaten since morning, but food was the furthest thing from his mind. The US Air steward had handed him a rubbery turkey sandwich, but he had given it to the man beside him and substituted it with a Johnny Walker Black.
Lydia studied him. “You look like a gaunt old tomcat that needs a meal and a week under the porch. Your son went to bed early. I don't think he felt well.”
Winter's mother was a product of rural Mississippi, the daughter of a Methodist minister, and in her world breakfast was breakfast, but lunch was “dinner” and dinner was “supper.” She referred to African Americans as coloreds, sometimes negroes, the way older Southerners occasionally did.
“Did Rush have a fever?” he asked, trying to squelch the panic he felt. Since Eleanor's death he knew that he had become overly protective, but he couldn't help it.
“No fever,” Lydia answered. “I double-checked. But he's been dragging around the last few days. Just sits there listening to the television. I think something happened, but he isn't going to admit it to me. Boy's just like his father. Keeps everything inside where it can make ulcers, heart troubles, strokes, and cancer. I haven't seen you smile in a very long time, Winter Massey. You lighten up and so will he, I bet.”
“I'm beat, Mama,” he said, “but let me give this smile thing a shot.” He grinned, showing his mother his large even teeth. She swatted his chest and he hugged her. “I promise I'll smile once a day from now on, whether I want to or not, Mama.”
His watch said it was only ten-he hadn't reset it since Memphis. He pulled the stem and spun the hour hand around. “I'll check in on him.”
He watched his mother head toward the guest room, her home since his wife's death. He then stuck his head into his son's room, which always seemed to smell like a hamster cage, or how he remembered the cage smelling when the boy had owned one.
“You awake, Rush?”
The three-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Nemo, whined loudly. Nemo licked Winter's hand, delighted to see him again. Rush was sitting upright in bed, staring in the direction his father.
“Nemo heard your car.”
Winter took a seat on the bed and hugged the boy, who smelled of shampoo and whose cheek was as soft as satin. At almost twelve, Rush was between the age when he wanted to be hugged and when he would be mortally embarrassed by any sign of affection. Nemo lay back down near the bed, his muzzle pressed into the rug, eyes locked on Rush.
Rush ran his hand over his father's face, the fingertips as light as a butterfly's touch. “You're purely tuckered, Marshal. You get your bad guy this time?”
“Villain's freshly acquainted with the sound of a jail-cell door slamming shut.”
“Way to go, man!” The boy raised his palm and Winter slapped it. “Wow, howdy, he never should have gotten himself in your sights, right?”
“Yep, drawing the attention of this deputy marshal was the biggest mistake of that desperado's ill-spent life.”
They both laughed.
In the shadows of the bedroom Winter couldn't see the scar on his son's face. In the light it was a line no thicker than a kite string, which ran from the middle of the right temple, to the edge of the left one. It passed over the eyelids, the bridge of his nose. In the dark, Winter could pretend nothing terrible had happened to his boy. Each time he looked at that scar he experienced that hollow feeling he got as a child when the roller-coaster car he was in topped the first hill.
The light that had once radiated from his son's beautiful blue eyes-exact duplicates of Eleanor's-had been replaced by spots of white paint expertly applied to the surface of the acrylic replicas. An artist had painted them using, for reference, a color photograph Winter had taken of Rush only weeks before the accident.
“So, what did you bring me?” Rush asked, his tone businesslike. When he was three, they had started a tradition. Every time Winter was away from home for more than a night he would bring his son a gift. The memento could be a pack of gum or just a seashell. There would always be an entertaining tale about the trinket, the longer the better.
Winter reached into his pocket for the dark hoop, pushed it over his son's left hand, and squeezed it down to fit his wrist.
