That’s how it happened. That hesitation, that long silence while she thought about it, I figured that was just natural. Just part of the dance, the getting to know someone new.
Of course it wasn’t that at all. It was something else entirely. But I didn’t know her well enough yet. I didn’t know the way she was, the way she has been for most of her life. The way she had to be. Above all, I didn’t know the one most important thing about her- that she never, ever hesitated that long about anything. Not unless it was something big.
Really big.
Damn it all to hell. If I had only known.
Chapter Two
Natalie Reynaud. That was her name. Apparently, some of her friends called her Natty, but I never did. Not once. Natty didn’t work for me. Natty didn’t sound miraculous enough. To me she was always Natalie.
She was a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police, stationed in a little town called Hearst, way the hell up there on the last road in the world, the Trans-Canada Highway. The first time I saw her, she was jumping out of a floatplane, having flown back from a remote outpost to look for five missing men. She had dark brown hair pinned up under her OPP hat. She had green eyes.
She didn’t find those missing men that day. Or the next. Vinnie and I found them, in a way I was still having nightmares about. Then a senior constable named Claude DeMers came looking for us. He was Natalie’s partner, but he came without her. DeMers ended up dead and Natalie ended up looking like a bad partner. It was something I knew a little bit about myself.
There was something else I knew, too. Natalie’s partner didn’t leave her behind just to protect her from a little danger. He left her behind because he had a secret of his own out there, buried in the ground with the dead men. So he came out alone to try to keep that secret in the dirt, and he ended up with a bullet in the back.
Natalie took an administrative leave of absence from the OPP. I went back home to Paradise, but I kept thinking about her. I found out she was living in Blind River, just a couple of hours away from the International Bridge. So I went to see her. It was New Year’s Eve, with only a trace of snow on the ground. I drove across the bridge and followed the Queen’s Highway due east, along the shore of the North Channel. I arrived at her doorstep with a bottle of champagne and something else-what I thought would be a final answer to all the questions I knew she was living with. I had lived with the same questions, after all, with my own partner gunned down right in front of my eyes, on a hot summer night back in Detroit, in that one-room apartment just off Woodward Avenue with the tinfoil all over the walls.
I remembered the hell I had lived in for all those years afterward. I knew Natalie was in that same hell now. I thought I could give her a way out, the way out I never had.
Claude DeMers was buried a hero. He was the man who flew out to that lake to try to save the two Americans. When I told her the real story, I knew it would have to stay between us. When your partner’s dead, you can’t be the one to stand up and defame him. You can’t point to his grave and say there lies a dirty cop. I knew that, but I figured what the hell. As long as she knew. Maybe she’d be able to sleep at night.
I had another reason to find her. I admit that. I sat in the dining room of that old farmhouse, watching what the antique light did to her green eyes, and how it picked up a faint hint of red in her hair. We talked and then we drank the champagne and made an awkward toast to the new year at midnight. She finally told me she wouldn’t mind if I stayed the night, just so she wouldn’t have to be alone.
“I don’t trust many people,” she said to me that night.
“But you trust me.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can tell,” I said. Although, of course, I couldn’t. I had no idea what she was thinking. In another five minutes, I could have been back in my truck, heading home.
“That would be a miracle,” she said. “I mean a real miracle.”
“I think it already is,” I said. “Look how we met. And now here we are.”
“I guess I should thank you for coming out here, Alex. It was a completely insane thing to do. But I’m glad you did.”
I didn’t say anything then. I drank some more champagne and so did she. She had a way of looking up from her glass, eyeing me carefully, not like she was shy but maybe just the opposite. Like she was sizing me up. She asked me what sports I played, because it was obvious I was an old athlete. I shook off the “old” business and told her about my baseball career, such as it was. She told me she was a hockey player, back when a woman who played in college had nowhere to go with it. No women’s hockey in the Olympics, just back to the frozen pond in the backyard. It surprised me a little. I would soon find out that the game of hockey fit her perfectly.
And then, for whatever reasons had brought me to this house, on this one cold night, after the grandfather clock at the top of her stairs chimed twelve times and the new year began, we stood up at the same time and met in the middle of the room. Because of the things that had happened to her, and to me. All these things we had in common. Hell, and maybe a little champagne on an empty stomach. It all came together in that minute after midnight. We kissed first, then she took me by the hand and led me upstairs.
We stopped in front of one room. Inside there was a canopy bed with white lace and stuffed animals all over it. “No,” she said and pulled me past yet another room, with a double bed made up neatly, with more white lace. I saw two portraits, one on each end table, but I couldn’t make out the faces in the dim light. “This one,” she said as she pulled me into the third room. She was strong and the way she was pulling me, it felt like she was angry at me, and maybe she was. Maybe that was part of it.
The room she pushed me into was different from the others. The light was on, the bed was unmade, and there were two suitcases opened up on the floor with clothes spilling out of them. She turned the light off. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, she struck a match and lit three candles. Then with her back to me she unpinned her hair and let it fall down onto her shoulders. She took her white shirt off and then reached behind and unhooked her bra. She kept her jeans on for the moment, turning around to face me in the candlelight. It’s always been shoulders for me, more than any other part of a woman, and hers were perfect. She had small breasts and her nipples stood out erect in the chilled air of this bedroom in the corner of this old, silent house. I took my shirt off as she watched me, and then she came close and kissed me again. I felt her skin against mine. Her hair smelled faintly of smoke and something sweet like cinnamon.
She pulled away and left the room. I stood there, not quite sure what to do. When she came back, her white panties glowed in the candlelight. She put something in my hand, a foil wrapper, and in the half second it took to register, she knocked me backward onto the bed.
“That’s two minutes for cross-checking,” I said.
“Shut up and take your pants off.” She climbed on top of me.
“I can’t. That’s another two minutes for interference.”
“Just shut up,” she said, and then she slapped me lightly across the mouth. It may have been a love tap, on her scale anyway, but it got my attention. “Okay, no more jokes,” I said. I rolled her over and kissed her hard. She bit my lip and dug her fingernails into my back. Then it got serious.
Somehow, we ended up on the cold wooden floor with the sheets tangled all around us. She grabbed my hair with both hands when she came, holding on so tight it would make my head hurt for the rest of the night. Afterward, she sat back against the side of the bed. She didn’t collapse on me, didn’t put her head on my shoulder. She just rolled away from me and sat there with her eyes closed. In the candlelight I could see the beads of sweat on her neck.
We sat like that for a long time, until she finally opened her eyes. “So talk to me,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. But then I had no idea what to say.
“Tell me more about yourself.”
I gave her the whole rundown. Growing up in the Detroit suburbs, my mother dying when I was eight years old. My old man getting up every morning to work for Ford Motors. Going to single-A ball right out of high school, four years in the minors without a call-up. Good hands behind the plate, but struck out too much. Went after too many bad pitches.
