Envy the Night

7

__________

Nora hung the CLOSED sign on the front door as soon as Jerry left, and turned off the lights in the office with every intention of leaving early herself. The weekend stretched ahead, a chance to relax, get some much-needed Nora time. She’d spend an hour or two with her father and then be free of all responsibilities until Monday at eight. There was a pang of guilt at lumping the visit with her father into the responsibilities category, but she didn’t think anyone would blame her. They were difficult visits.

She was locking the back door of the shop when she remembered Frank. Damn it. She’d told him six. So used to staying late that it had seemed the most appropriate time to suggest. Now, with the shop closed and a sudden yearning for a shower and a change of clothes in her mind, that extra hour was torment. She stayed at the door for a moment before turning the lock back with a sigh and stepping into the shop. There was nothing to do but wait.

It was dark inside, lit by just one emergency lamp above the door. Nora made her way through the room without bothering to turn on the lights, so familiar with the building that it was easy. She knew the placement of every tool by now, and knew their purposes. Navigated around the chain fall in the corner, frame rack beside it, paint booth behind that, toolboxes lining the walls. When she got to the office door, she took her keys out of her pocket but didn’t use them. There was a stool beside the door, and rather than enter the office she just sank onto the stool, pulled her feet up onto the seat and hugged her knees to her chest, sat there smelling the paint and the dust and staring at the shadow-covered room. Instead of building a garage divided into separate bays, her grandfather had simply jammed everything into one large warehouse, a space that cooked you in the summer and chilled you in the winter. Her father had upgraded the equipment over the years but never considered a new building. Though earlier in the day she’d told Jerry she’d been learning about the work that went on in here since she was a girl, she really remembered being inside only a handful of times, usually accompanied by her mother, who stalked around the place with an expression of haughty distaste.

They’d gotten divorced when Nora was six. It had been a marriage of whim and romance: Her mother was from old money in Minneapolis, and her father was third-generation Lincoln County, Wisconsin, son of a body shop owner who also drove a plow in the winter. He’d been bartending at a supper club up near the Willow when twenty-two-year-old Kate Adams arrived for a vacation with her parents and some cousins. The family bored her; Ronald “Bud” Stafford did not. He was tall and good-looking and appealing in a way that only an outdoorsman can be, but also quick with a joke and a compliment. It was supposed to be a summer fling. Only problem was, Kate didn’t realize that until Stafford had replaced Adams at the end of her name and a baby was on the way.

If there’d been good times when she was a child, Nora couldn’t remember them. Couldn’t remember the bad times, either, just a vague sense of tension. After the divorce Kate moved back to Minneapolis with Nora in tow. Nora’s relationship with her father had been slow building at best. He would come to Minneapolis about once a year, usually around Christmas, take her down to the Mall of America and patiently wander through girls’ clothing stores with her, laughing at the way she insisted on trying everything on. Her mother had only permitted a few visits to Tomahawk when Nora was young, and always came along, as if she were afraid Nora would never come back if left alone for a few days. It wasn’t until high school that Nora finally began to make a weeklong trip by herself in the summer. She and her father started writing letters more frequently then, a couple of times a month, exchanging photographs—her in a prom dress, him with a thirty-six-inch northern pike—and news. From the time she was a little girl he’d promised to put her through college. Her mother had remarried by the time Nora was ten, remarried to plenty of money, but on that issue Bud was firm—he would pay for college.

He and her mother just couldn’t live together, that was all. Everything Kate had found so charming about Tomahawk that first summer disappeared under a blanket of snow in November, and even when the thaw came and the tourists returned the luster was gone. And for Bud Stafford, moving to Minneapolis wasn’t an option. He’d been born into a pocket of the earth he considered superior to all the rest, and he’d never leave . . .

Someone was at the door. Nora put her feet back on the ground and started to stand up as the door opened. Not the front door of the office but the back door. Frank, she thought as the knob turned and the door swung inward. Had to be him. Then the visitor stepped inside, and as his silhouette filled the space she saw it was too tall, too broad. Without even seeing his face she knew him. It was the man who’d come by to ask about the Lexus.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t take a step forward. If the lights had been on, she would have, but since they were off, and the stranger clearly hadn’t noticed her standing back here in the dark, she kept silent and watched him.

He stood just inside the door and didn’t move. Letting his eyes adjust to the dark, maybe. Turned the knob back and forth, then looked from it back up across the room, probably thinking the door would’ve been locked if the shop were empty. It was dark, though, and the sign outside said CLOSED. After another hesitation, he swung the door shut very slowly, so it hardly made a sound as it latched. Then he walked farther into the shop, toward the Lexus that sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by its own trim pieces.

She should have said something as soon as he opened the door. Called out in a loud, authoritative voice, stopped him. But she hadn’t, and now he was inside and moving in a way that unnerved her. Cautious, on the balls of his feet, with attention to quiet. It was just past five on a weekday, in town, with plenty of people passing by outside, and this guy had walked into a business, that’s all. Somehow it didn’t feel like that, though. More like she was standing in a closet watching someone crawl through a window and into her home in the middle of the night.

Stop it, she thought. It’s your business, you’re in charge, and this asshole has no right to creep in here.

It wasn’t much, one brief bout of internal scolding, but it was enough to get her moving. She stepped to the side and reached out and up, flicked the light switch, and said “You want to tell me what you’re doing?” in as hard a voice as she could muster.

He moved at the first sound of her voice. Whirled and came toward her, fast and aggressive, and she had the sudden thought that surprising him like that had been a bad idea. The overhead lights were long, old-fashioned fluorescent tubes, and they didn’t snap on like an incandescent lamp would. There was a hint of a glow, followed by a short humming sound, and then the room filled with light. By that time the guy had closed the gap between them to about five feet, and Nora stepped back, stumbling over the stool. When she pulled up short, he did, too, but her sense of command over the situation was already gone. He’d frightened her—she knew it, and he knew it.

“I said—”

“I heard what you said.” His eyes took in the room around them, seeing the emptiness, the dark office behind her. It was obvious that she was alone. She wished she’d stayed on the stool, kept the lights off, just waited and watched.

“You have no right to be in here,” she said. “Can’t you read the sign out front? We’re—”

“Closed,” he said and took another step toward her, that damn belt buckle glinting under the fluorescent lights. “Yeah, I saw the sign. You usually sit here in the dark after you close up?”

“Maybe I should start to more often, if people keep breaking into my shop. Now get out. You want to talk to me, I’ll be back in on Monday.”

“I didn’t break in anything.” He was one pace away now. “Door was unlocked.”

“I want you out. I don’t know who you think you are, walking in here like this, but I want you out right now. I told you before, if this car’s owner wants to call me, he can. Otherwise, stay the hell away from here, unless you’d like me to call the police.”

“No, I don’t think I’d like that, at all,” he said. “And neither would you.”

The phone was in the office. All those times she’d had to rush back in to catch a call because she’d forgotten the cordless unit paled in comparison to this. Her cell phone was in the truck, where she always left it because she couldn’t be bothered with personal calls during the day.

“Get out,” she said again. He was in her space, almost chest to chest, and she’d backed up against the office door, which was still locked. To open it she’d have to turn her back to him, and that didn’t seem like a good idea.

“You’re going to listen to me, hon, and listen good,” he said, and a sour chill went through her stomach, the words and tone sounding like something a drunk would say as he advanced on his wife with a belt in hand. “You got no problem here, okay? Just tell me where the guy who drove this car went, and I’m gone.”

“I’ll ask you one more time to leave. Then I’m calling the police.”

He didn’t say anything. She gave it a few beats of silence and then went for the office door. The keys were already in her hand—had been since she sat down on the stool—and she reached for the lock, standing so close to the door her nose almost brushed it when she turned. Had the key raised but not inserted into the lock when his hand closed around her wrist.

Her first reaction was to reach back with her free hand and claw at his face. A year ago, it would’ve made an impression, too—long, French-tipped fingernails—but you didn’t work on cars with nails like that. Now her fingers slid harmlessly over his cheek. So she twisted and kicked at his knee, using her heel instead of the front of her foot. Caught him on the side of his knee, so his leg buckled, and for a moment he was off balance and she thought she’d get free. He didn’t lose his hold on her wrist, though, used it instead to jerk her forward and spin her around and then she felt a wrenching pain in her shoulder and her face hit the door and she knew it was going to get very bad, very fast.