Inside Out

4

Concord, North Carolina

Winter Massey had visited the tombstone at his feet countless times in the past three years, most often at night. Tonight it was cold for October, and the wind whipped the black raincoat against his legs while icy rain stung his face. He wore a wool baseball cap and clenched a single long-stemmed rose in his gun hand. He had bought the rose, along with eleven others wrapped in tissue paper, from a young couple outside the airport for ten dollars. He suspected the pair were cult members because they wore identical, vacant smiles.

Winter twisted the gold band on his finger. The vow said until death parted them, but he couldn't let her go even now. Maybe, he thought, that's because the time they had lived together, only fourteen years, was so terribly short… flying by like clouds in a fast-moving thunderstorm.

He should have gone straight home, not driven five miles out of the way to the cemetery. He had spent two months tracking a fugitive, Jerry Tucker, the last two weeks never quitting the trail. After the capture, Winter had spent a full day processing Tucker-working to match the stolen property to descriptions of things known to have been taken from his victims-with homicide detectives from five jurisdictions and three FBI agents. He was tired, irritable, but he was also filled with a sense of accomplishment, knowing he had put a multiple killer on the long march toward the needle.

The fact that a young female deputy marshal had invited him home with her earlier in the evening had spooked him. How could he? Maybe that's what had made visiting this place so important. Or perhaps he held out a faint hope that in coming to this desolate spot he might see his wife one more time, hold her tight against his chest 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.

Rush let his fingers investigate it. Since the accident he had learned to feel, smell, taste, and hear what he couldn't see. What he comprehended using these senses was often remarkable to his father-almost as if the boy had psychic abilities. In his occupation, Winter had to be a reader of eyes, muscle twitches, and body language. But his son seemed to have learned to read those things without being able to see them.

“What is it?” Rush demanded, giggling now with anticipation. God, Winter lived for the sound of his son's happiness.

“It's a bracelet.”

“I know that! What's it made of?”

“Guess.”

“Aw, man. No fair.” But he nodded and played the game, running his fingers over the bracelet, biting down on it, rubbing it against his teeth and his cheek. “Well, it's sort of like braided gold or silver, but it isn't. It's not cotton or wool.”

“It's from something powerful, fearless, had a mouth full of teeth and is strong of odor.”

Rush laughed, delighted. “Shakka! Shakka the lion?”

“I had it woven for you from hair I clipped from Shakka's mane.”

There was a gallery of family pictures in the Masseys' hallway-a conglomeration of old and new, prints of different sizes in mismatched frames, some black-and-white, some color. In one, Eleanor Massey was still Eleanor Ashe, a skinny little girl with missing front teeth. In another, Winter's parents were still together and Lydia held a baby Winter in her arms. In another, Winter was a Cub Scout, and framed beside that was a photo of Rush as an infant being bathed by his mother. The most recent showed Rush wearing sunglasses with his arms around the neck of a moth-eaten lion. The lion's teeth were worn down so close to the gums they looked like small whitecaps on a dark sea.

The lion had been the property of a Charlotte drug dealer, who kept him in a basement and used him to frighten children and drug runners. The federal judge had ordered Winter and another marshal to put the cat in a U-Haul van and escort it to an animal rehabilitation center in Florida. The lion was so gentle that Winter had taken Rush to the warehouse where Shakka was kept before transit was arranged and had let the boy use his hands to get to know it. The old cat's tongue had made a hivelike abrasion on Rush's cheek. Winter had read a book once that described how a man-eating lion used its tongue like a rasp to remove the skin from human prey before consuming it. He hadn't told Rush that.

“Shakka liked me, didn't he?” Rush said now. “He was really big, wasn't he?”

“Nemo sure didn't like Shakka,” Winter reminded him.

Winter had left Nemo at home that day, and when they got back to the house the dog planted his nose against Rush's chest. He growled fiercely for a long time, the fur over his spine standing like quills. Winter had been afraid at first that he was going to bite the boy, and, when he tried to pull his son away, the usually gentle dog had snapped at Winter. His behavior seemed to be a chastisement for allowing Rush so close to something that smelled like an enemy of children. Nemo's breed originated in South Africa. Some ancient warning had obviously risen up within the dog.

“How are you feeling?” Winter asked his son.

“Fine. Why?”

“Gram said you moped around all day, went to bed early.”

“Is a bracelet for a man?” Rush asked, avoiding the question.

Winter saw a corner of one of his late wife's bandanas peeking out from under Rush's pillow. They had been one of Eleanor's trademarks; she'd used them to keep her long blond hair under control when she was outdoors or working on the house. Rush had taken to carrying one in his pocket. After three years, he was down from a half dozen to a pair; one red and one blue. When it was absolutely necessary, he washed them by hand and laid them on a towel to dry.

“Sure. I.D. bracelets are for men. Lion-hair bracelets are strictly for men who need some luck. So why the moping?”

“Well, Angus is mowing yards next summer and when I said I would help, he said if I took a tin cup and some pencils downtown, people would buy them.”

“That was mean.”

“No, Angus didn't mean it like that. We were talking about ways to make money, but it made me think a lot about what I'm going to do someday. It sure as heck won't be selling pencils.”

“No, it won't. But you need to get some sleep.” Winter kissed his son's cheek, tucked him in, hung Nemo's Seeing-Eye harness on the chair, and walked out. Nemo was supposed to sleep in the harness, but tonight Rush had merely leashed him to the bed, a minor violation of the rules for Seeing-Eye dogs. In the hallway he paused to look at the picture of Eleanor standing under the wing of a Cessna 120 she had soloed in at sixteen. He kept a picture of another Cessna, the one the insurance company sent him, in his file cabinet. He still couldn't look at it without feeling lost, like being pinned under tons of earth and rocks.

He lay down on his bed in the dark. A few weeks after Eleanor's death, he had changed the room, bought a new bed, moved the furniture. He kept her jewelry in his gun safe, thinking he'd give it to his son's wife someday. Eleanor had three gold bracelets, a small strand of cultured pearls, a wedding ring, a Seiko tank watch, her flight chronometer, and a pendant made from Winter's Kappa Alpha Order fraternity pin. Nothing worth putting in a bank vault. Her favorite piece had been a pin that Rush picked out in a Walgreens. It was small, shaped like a soldier's medal, and said MOTHER on the gold-toned bar at the top, with a pink plastic heart hanging by a ribbon. Winter had asked the funeral director to pin it to her gown before the casket was closed, because she would have wanted it close to her.

Winter had not looked at his wife's body after she stopped breathing. He had not left her side from the moment he was ushered into her hospital room until he gave the nod to pull the plug and she ceased to exist. Her face had been so swollen that she hadn't looked like Eleanor, which had allowed him to imagine that some stranger was in her bed, dying or dead. She was breathing, but not on her own, and for no good purpose except to keep her organs alive for someone else. At that point he knew that he was on the edge of exactly how much he could endure.

He had managed to get through his wife's funeral by convincing himself that the casket was empty, that Eleanor was waiting for him at home, that some other woman had crashed the plane. After all, his wife was a master pilot, an instructor. In a glider she was a thing of the air, knew the secret winds, soaring on the thermals with the arrogance of a hawk. He had only once sat in front of her in a glider. He'd been certain the wings would fold up as she performed lazy loops so high above the earth. But he had loved every second of the sensation, sharing her passion.

Rush had stayed in the hospital for a full month after the crash and spent months after that adjusting to his blindness. He seemed resilient and began testing the limits of his handicap almost immediately.

Before Rush was blinded, the dark had been the one thing he was afraid of. Since he was first put into his own bedroom at the age of two, he had slept with the door open a crack, a night-light in the hallway illuminating the way to his parents' bedroom. Since the accident, Rush hadn't cared whether the door was left open or closed. Another small thing that feasted on Winter's heart.