“Uh, yes.”
“I’m just saying, if you were trying to figure out if there was any kind of routine, you could drive right by here a few times and observe everything that goes on down there.”
I hit the gas and we kept on going. As we looped around to the driveway, I saw that it was covered with a good ten inches of snow, so I put down my plow and started pushing.
“Mighty neighborly of you,” Maven said.
“She said she wanted to ask us a favor, right? Maybe this was it.”
I ran the length of the driveway, then backed up to do it all over again. If I’m going to plow, I’m going to do it right. Maven started getting a little impatient, but I finished the job and then we finally got out of the truck.
“Tell me the truth,” he said as we walked to the door. “Are you trying to get on their good side? Or would you have done that anyway?”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t ask that.”
I pressed the doorbell and heard a three-note chiming deep within the house. As we waited I looked around and saw nothing but the road curving around the farm, the woods, the barn, an old fence and a piece of rusted farm equipment here and there. Plus a hell of a lot of snow. Besides that there were no signs of life at all.
“Did they tell you they’d be here?” Maven said.
“Mrs. Steele did, yes.”
Finally, the door cracked open and we saw a woman’s face.
“Mrs. Steele?”
“Yes,” she said, pulling the door open a few more inches. She was thin and pale and I got the feeling she wasn’t quite as old as she looked. But then she’d been through a hell of a winter. “You must be the man who called.”
“I am. Can we bother you to come inside for a moment?”
“Of course.” She stepped aside and let us in. She was wearing something that looked almost like a bathrobe. A housecoat, I guess you’d call it. She went through the motions of offering us coffee, but we told her we were good and we didn’t want to take up any more of her time than we had to.
“Is Sergeant Steele around today?” I asked. “I was hoping to talk to him at some point.”
“No, he’s not.” She looked away from us as she said it. “He’s not here.”
“Oh, is he at work today?”
“No, he hasn’t been back to work yet. Since it happened.” Still not looking at us.
“Um… do you expect him back soon?”
She shook her head.
“Why don’t we sit down,” Maven said, his voice softer than any time I’d ever heard him. “I hope we haven’t come at a bad time.”
“It’s all bad times anymore.” We were sort of lingering at the entrance to her kitchen. There was a table full of papers in the middle with four chairs around it. She pulled out the closest chair and sat down.
“Mrs. Steele,” I said, “are you all right?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Can I get you anything? A drink of water?”
She shook her head again.
“We’re terribly sorry to hear about your loss,” Maven said. He took one of the other chairs. I did the same.
“I shouldn’t have asked to come out here,” I said. “I’m sorry. This was clearly a mistake.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m glad you came. I saw you outside, plowing the driveway. Now I can get out and go to the store.”
“Mrs. Steele, where’s your husband?”
“I don’t have snow tires, you know.”
“Mrs. Steele. Your husband.”
“He hasn’t been spending much time at home,” she said. “Ever since it happened. I guess I can’t blame him for that much. If I had somewhere to go, I wouldn’t be here, either.”
“Where is he?”
“Brandon never saw his eighteenth birthday. Did you know that? It happened just a few days before he turned eighteen.”
“We didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t know what else to say. We could have kept on saying we were sorry for a thousand years and it wouldn’t have helped her one little bit.
“He liked lemon cake. I was going to make him a lemon cake for his birthday.”
She stopped talking for a while. We sat there, one on each side of her. All of us staring at the floor. Then finally she sat up straight and smoothed out her hair.
“Brandon was very much into his guns,” she said, her eyes suddenly more alert, her voice more animated. “I wasn’t so sure what to think about this, but Donald felt that it would be a healthy activity for him. Something to get him outside and away from the television set. There’s a big sand pit behind the barn. If you go out there you won’t be able to see much now with the snow, but you’ll see where Brandon had put some wooden posts along the edge there, in front of the incline. It was very safe that way. Because he could shoot all he wanted to and none of the bullets could ever go anywhere.”
She seemed to lose steam there for a moment.
“It was very safe,” she said. “Very safe.”
I was sure we were about to lose her again, but then she snapped right back.
“On the day it happened, he went outside with two of his guns. Two pistols. I’m sorry, I don’t know what kind they were. What exact caliber or anything like that. All I know is that one was a revolver and one was an automatic. Or a semiautomatic, I think he said. I don’t know the difference. Anyway, he went behind the barn to shoot at his cans. I was in here doing the dishes and listening to the shots going off. In the wintertime, it doesn’t seem to be so loud. The snow absorbs some of the sound, I guess. He was shooting and shooting, just like always, but then I didn’t hear the sound anymore. I was waiting for him to come inside, but he never did, so I went out to see if he was still out there and there he was, lying in the snow.”
She stopped again and this time she drummed her fingers together. I looked at Maven and he looked back at me and we both knew there was no way we’d be leaving this place without trying to get her some help. All this time alone in this house, right next to that barn we could see from our chairs, right out that kitchen window. It wasn’t good for her to be here.
“We had a service for him up at the church right up there on H Street. We don’t have more than a dozen streets in town so why they used letters to name them, I can’t even imagine. But that’s neither here nor there.”
“Mrs. Steele…” I said.
“He’s buried out in that place on Old U.S. 141. That’s just a number, but it used to be the highway so I guess you can understand it.”
“Is there somebody we can call for you?” Maven said. “I’m not sure you want to be here all by yourself, do you?”
“No. No, I don’t want to be alone. That’s what I wanted to ask you to do for me.”
“This is the favor you were talking about,” I said. “On the phone, you said you had a favor you wanted to ask us.”
“My husband. I want you to bring my husband back. Will you do that for me, please?”
“I don’t think you mentioned where he is. If you tell us, I’m sure we can-”
“He’s across the river. At his girlfriend’s house.”
“Mrs. Steele,” Maven said, shooting me another look, “this sounds like it might be a bad situation all the way around. God knows you’ve got enough to deal with already.”
“Just go talk to him. Man-to-man. Tell him this is where he belongs. I know it’s not easy, but we have to face it. Tell him I’ll let him go forever if he just comes back and helps me get through this. That’s all I want him to do. Is that so much? Just be a man and come back until we can find some way to-”
She started waving her arms around, and the tears started coming down her face.
