The Cold Nowhere

21

Serena Dial couldn’t sleep.

Her eyes stared into the bedroom shadows. Outside, oak tree branches scratched like fingers on the wire screen, as if they wanted to creep inside and crawl into bed beside her. Spatters of mist blew through the open window onto her skin, stroking her bare breasts like the touch of a lover. The sensation unnerved her, but she’d grown addicted to fresh air, even on the bitterest nights. That was Stride’s influence. She was a desert girl, but he’d taught her to love the cold.

‘It’s me.’

She heard his voice again. She’d spent an hour replaying his message in her head. Finally, when sleep continued to elude her, she got out of bed in frustration and decided to go downstairs to the kitchen.

Tea would help.

Serena didn’t turn on a lamp. The skylight above her head allowed her to see in the dark. She slipped a T-shirt over her torso; the fabric was cool. She poked her feet into sandals but left her long legs bare. Outside the bedroom, she tiptoed on the hardwood floor so as not to awaken her roommate, Valerie, who slept in the master bedroom with her daughter. When she passed their door, she heard Valerie’s little girl, Callie, humming a lullaby in her sleep. It made Serena smile.

Downstairs, she opened a window and started an electric kettle. When it boiled, she filled a mug and sat at the breakfast table, dipping a tea bag in and out of the water like a see-saw. The porch bloomed with the aroma of raspberry. She stared toward the lush woodlands of Pokegama Lake beyond the wall of windows, but she could see only her own reflection staring back at herself. Long, thick black hair, in need of a wash. Fair skin, winter white, not the burnt tan she wore in Las Vegas. A flash of emerald in her eyes.

She was distracted. When she sipped the tea, she burnt her lip. She reached to the kitchen counter behind her and pushed the button on the answering machine. This was the tenth time she’d played it.

‘It’s me,’ Stride said.

A long silence followed. It was the silence of being apart. Five months of lonely separation. The real message, from him to her, was in that clumsy pause. It said everything; it got under her skin; it made love to her. The rest was work.

‘Listen, I have a case that just got ugly. A street girl named Catalina Mateo is involved, and we think there’s a possibility that Margot Huizenfelt was looking for Cat the day before she disappeared. Nothing definite, but the timing is suspicious. Cat is — well, her mother was someone I knew. Anyway, we should talk.’

That was all.

She didn’t expect him to say anything about the two of them. He’d apologized long ago. He’d said he loved her, and she’d said she loved him, but their idea of love was to live behind walls, locking away their pain from each other. She wouldn’t live like that anymore. She’d worked too hard to face her demons.

Serena propped her feet on a chair. She was tall, nearly six feet, mostly legs. In the past five months she’d run four times a week with Valerie, and she’d lost fifteen pounds, making herself as svelte and strong as she’d felt in years. She was nearly forty, but she looked and felt younger. When she’d first arrived in Duluth, she had brought her Sin City glamour with her. She liked the hunger she saw in Stride’s eyes; she liked the stares on the gray Duluth streets. Since then, she’d tried to fit in, which meant not standing out. She dressed down. She wore less makeup. She didn’t fight the scale.

This winter, she’d changed all that. With Valerie’s help she became more of who she was again. Glamorous. Sexy. She liked what she saw in the mirror now.

Except for the scars. White, jagged, tough, ugly scars. She’d had to make peace with them. When she touched her legs, she remembered the fire two years ago, and she remembered the agony of recovery. The scars went back much further, though. She carried invisible scars all the way to her teenage years, and she wore them inside and out. So did Stride.

Now she would have to see him again. She had known this moment would come sooner or later. It was inevitable. He would call her, and when he did, he would use the job as a pretext to see her. They were on a collision course with each other, and the only question was what would happen when they met. How he would react. How she would feel. She knew through the grapevine that his relationship with Maggie had crashed and burnt almost as soon as it started, but that was no surprise. She took no pleasure in it.

Well, maybe a little pleasure. She was human.

She’d forgiven Stride for crossing the line, but it wasn’t about that for her anymore. It was about whether they were better together or apart. She missed him, she loved him, but she didn’t know if she could live with him again.

Serena played the message from Stride one more time, and this time she thought: Margot Huizenfelt.

One month ago, Margot vanished, leaving behind a brand new SUV on a dirt road by the banks of the Swan River. There was nothing accidental about her disappearance. Someone had rifled her garage apartment at her parents’ home in Grand Rapids, taking any notes or clues that might have explained why she’d been abducted. As a liberal blogger, Margot saw conspiracies everywhere, but this time she’d been right to be paranoid. Someone had come after her.

Margot was forty-five years old, middle-height and heavy, with a mannish look. She kept a chopped haircut covered under a Twins baseball cap, and she lived in sweatshirts, jeans and trail boots. Serena had investigated her love life and found nothing. No one remembered seeing her involved romantically with anyone, male or female. She had one brother, who lived in Anchorage. Her parents spent seven months of the year in Coral Gables while Margot looked after their Minnesota home. As far as Serena could tell, Margot spent most of her time hiking in the state parks and writing her freelance stories.

She had a quirky eye for journalism. Sometimes she spent weeks on the rural highways, writing about ethanol plants, small-town religion, and farm suicides. Sometimes she haunted city streets, digging up stories about violence and homelessness. She had a hatred for politicians and powerful men that showed up in her writing like a giant flag flying on the lawn. Serena had read a banker’s box full of articles and blog posts going back fifteen years, as well as her book, Lost Life, which was a compilation of vignettes on girls who had fallen off the grid. For a loner who wasn’t particularly likable, Margot showed a surprising tenderness for the damaged lives these girls led.

A street girl named Catalina Mateo is involved.

Serena took her tea and padded in her sandals to the far end of the house, where she’d taken over a small den as her home office. The room was a shrine to Margot Huizenfelt now. Photos. Phone records. Credit card receipts. Magazine clips and print-outs from her web site. None of that effort in re-creating Margot’s life had brought Serena any closer to finding her.

She was under no illusions. It had been a month. Margot was dead. Maybe with the spring thaw they would find her body, or maybe they wouldn’t. There were too many miles of wilderness in northern Minnesota and too many scavengers. She could smile for Margot’s parents and tell them to keep hope, but everyone knew the truth. Their daughter wasn’t coming home.

From under the desk, Serena slid out a box that contained copies of Margot’s writings. The reference to Cat Mateo struck a chord in her memory, not because of the name, but because of the story. She knew about Stride and Michaela. It had come up once when they were driving through the dirt roads of the Antenna Farm and Stride had stopped near a run-down bungalow. He hadn’t said much, even when she pressed him. I knew the woman who lived here. She was killed. Instead, it was Maggie who’d told her the whole story, confirming what Serena had already suspected when she looked in Stride’s eyes. Losing Michaela had been one of the most devastating moments of his life. More than that, his relationship with her obviously went deeper than he’d ever admitted.

She pawed through the copies. It took her fifteen minutes to find the essay she remembered. The article had appeared three months earlier in a Duluth e-zine. There was no photo accompanying the story, which wasn’t uncommon. Most of the girls didn’t want their faces showing up online or in print. Margot had used an alias, calling the girl Tina. She described her:

You know how sometimes you find a quartz on the beach amid all that muddy sand? That’s Tina. She’s a shiny quartz, huddled against a wall that’s wild with spray paint. Pretty. No, make that gorgeous. Prom queen gorgeous.

You want her? You can have her. Fifty bucks, and guess where she’ll put la boca. You like? She’s sixteen.

Serena winced at Margot’s directness, but that was something she’d come to like about the woman’s writing. Margot didn’t sugarcoat. She told it as it was. Further down the page, Serena saw the passage she remembered:

Tina loves her father. Daughters like to tell stories on their fathers. She wears a ring he gave her on a chain around her neck. Sweet. It’s gaudy paste, but she won’t let you near it because you might try to steal it. If you try, watch out, because Tina is quick with a knife. Daddy taught her well.

Thing is, Daddy’s dead. He stabbed her mother a few dozen times, and when he saw what he had done, he blew a hole in his head. Tina? She was hiding. Heard the whole thing. Dad murdering Mom. Dad committing suicide. You and me, we might skip Father’s Day after something like that, but not Tina. She says he’s still looking out for her. He still talks to her sometimes, like a guardian angel.

I really hope she’s wrong about that.

Even with a fake name, the girl named Tina was clearly Catalina Mateo. There weren’t two girls with her story in Duluth. Anyone who knew her would make the connection. Three months ago, on one of her hikes through the seamy belly of the city, down near the graffiti graveyard, Margot Huizenfelt found Cat Mateo and made her the latest lost girl in her series of profiles.

If Stride was right, Margot came back to Duluth a month ago to find Cat again.

Then she vanished.

Why?