The Cold Nowhere

26

Serena first came into his life at the Duluth airport as she walked off the plane from Las Vegas, dressed like a Bellagio model. Baby blue leather pants, honey sunglasses, a form-fitting white T-shirt and a black raincoat so long it almost swept the floor. She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever met. His first wife, Cindy, had been small and fiery, a sprite who wore every emotion on her sleeve. Serena was as tall as Stride in her sky-high heels, and her attitude was cool and wary. She was as curvy as a showgirl, with a razor-sharp wit, but she wore a sign warning away strangers from trespassing.

Don’t come inside. Stay away.

He wore a sign like that himself. His own sign, with Cindy’s name on it, was about grief and loss. Serena’s was about a childhood wrecked by abuse. They were both damaged, both alike, for better or worse. Two half-souls.

In their first days together they worked a cold case from Duluth to Las Vegas, and along the way their attraction spilled over into sex. They fell in love. He was married then — a second marriage, a bad marriage. He and a teacher named Andrea had pretended to be in love, but when he met Serena, he realized that his marriage was a sham. When it fell apart, he moved to Las Vegas to be with Serena, but he was a fish out of water among the barren mountains and casinos. There was only one place Stride could live, and that was in Duluth, in the shadow of the lake, under the dark cover of the bitter winters.

He came home, and Serena came with him. Neither one of them really thought it would work. You couldn’t take a girl who grew up in the desert, like a saguaro, and expect her to thrive in the frozen north. They were both wrong. Serena had no roots here, but slowly, with each season, she came to feel at home in Minnesota. He’d always taken the idea of home for granted, because every street in Duluth was the sum of its memories for him. Not for Serena. To her, home meant tearing down the past and starting over.

That was what they tried to do on the Point. They ate breakfast on Sunday mornings at Amazing Grace. They made love in the middle of the night, breathlessly, invisibly. They listened to the waves of Superior on the other side of the dune. They were as close and connected as two people could be, but sometimes it was like they lived apart, behind the walls they’d built. He’d feel her pushing him away when she felt vulnerable. He would do the same thing.

Don’t come inside. Stay away.

For him, Michaela was one of those walls. He’d never mentioned her to Serena; he’d never even breathed her name. Michaela, who still haunted him. Michaela, who had been the only woman in his married life to make him wonder, even for a day, whether he could love someone other than Cindy. Michaela, whose death had made him feel every stab wound as if it had gone into his own body.

He stared at Serena in the doorway, and his first thought was: Why did I keep Michaela a secret from you?

*

‘You look great,’ he said, and she did.

She’d lost weight. Her stomach was flat and hard. Her arms looked strong. She wore a black turtleneck that hugged her skin and accentuated the swell of her full breasts. Her jeans made her legs look long and sleek. Standing atop sharp heels, she was eye to eye with him.

‘So do you,’ she said.

He invited her inside. It felt odd, because she didn’t need an invitation. She’d lived here for years. She would wander through the back door, kick off her heels, and drop grocery bags on the counter. She would join him in the living room from the shower, trailing steam, working a brush through her damp hair. The most natural thing in the world was for the two of them to be here together, but they both felt awkward.

‘I heard about Kim Dehne,’ she told him. ‘Did you talk to Bob?’

‘I finally reached him.’

‘They were a sweet couple. It’s an awful thing.’ She added, ‘The girl you found in the DECC — it wasn’t Cat Mateo, right?’

‘Cat’s fine,’ Stride said. ‘She’s on the porch out back.’

‘I got your message, and you were right. Margot knew her. I found an article she wrote, and it’s obviously about Catalina.’ Serena pulled a folded piece of paper from her back pocket and handed it to him.

As he read the article, Serena made a tour of the living room. Her eyes flitted to the walls and the furniture, and he knew she was noticing that he’d changed nothing since she left. Maggie had come and gone from the house without leaving fingerprints. Serena stopped near the attic stairs. Each wooden stair was narrower than the one above it, and at the top were two closed doors. They had talked about finishing the attic, but they had never made plans for how to use the space, so it was still a mess of spider webs and sharp nails jutting from the roof beams.

‘Steve says I need to dust,’ he told her.

‘Yeah, it could use a wipe-down, Jonny. I suppose you’re not home a lot.’

‘You know how it goes.’

‘I do.’

He finished the article and knew that Serena was right. Margot was writing about Cat. She’d done a beautiful job of capturing the girl’s broken life and of making her human rather than a shadowy other who hangs out in doorways. See this girl? She could be your daughter.

He also noticed that Margot made no reference to Cat taking a limo ride up the north shore to service a wealthy man at a vacation resort. He’d read Margot’s writings before, and she loved that kind of savage detail, particularly if it exposed the intersection of heartlessness and power. A sixteen-year-old girl with a rich lawyer or banker? The only way Margot would have skipped that anecdote was if she omitted it deliberately in order to investigate further. She was a reporter, and reporters knew the smell of scandal.

He looked up. Serena was staring at him.

‘So do you want to bring me up to date?’ she said.

She kept their reunion on safe ground. Talk about work. Talk about the case. Don’t talk about each other. He gave her a summary of the events of the weekend. Cat’s story, his suspicions about Vincent Roslak and William Green, the clue from Brandy that led to Margot, the vicious murders overnight. He also mentioned Steve’s speculation about hookers with wealthy clients.

‘Did you find any hints in your investigation that Margot could have been looking into upscale prostitution?’ he asked.

‘I can’t be sure, but it’s definitely possible. Based on her phone records and credit card info, she met with a lot of one-percenters around the northland in the weeks before she disappeared. Nobody volunteered anything about escorts, but it’s not like they would. I can get a list of names and photos of the people Margot saw. Maybe Cat will recognize one of them.’

‘Margot may have been thinking the same thing,’ Stride suggested. ‘That would explain why she was trying to find Cat again.’

‘And why someone would be desperate to get rid of both of them,’ Serena said. ‘I want to find out exactly who Margot talked to that last weekend. We know she was in Duluth trying to find Cat, but nobody breathed a word about it to the police after she disappeared. That sounds like somebody didn’t want us to connect the dots.’

‘I know where I would have started if I were Margot,’ Stride said. ‘Cat’s guardians. William and Sophie Green.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

They both turned toward the kitchen as a young voice shouted from the porch.

‘I finished the puzzle!’ Cat announced.

She slid into the great space in her socks with a girlish excitement that made her seem younger than she was. ‘That was a really easy one-’ she began, but she skidded to a stop as she saw Serena standing by the stairs to the attic. ‘Oh!’

‘Hi, Cat,’ Serena said.

Cat’s eyes flicked between the two of them. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name’s Serena.’

Cat studied her with curious interest, as if she were a model on a runway. ‘Wow, you’re like really gorgeous.’

Serena laughed. He’d missed her laughter. ‘I was about to tell you the same thing.’

Cat blushed in embarrassment, but Stride could tell she was pleased by the compliment.

‘You used to live here, right?’ Cat said. ‘Mr. Stride let me wear one of your shirts.’

‘Mr. Stride,’ Serena said, with amused eyes. ‘I bet he’d be okay if you called him Stride. Most people do. And yes, you’re right, I used to live here.’

‘But you don’t anymore?’ Cat asked.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Serena works for the sheriff’s department in Itasca County,’ Stride interjected quickly. ‘She’s investigating the disappearance of that reporter you met. Margot Huizenfelt.’

‘Oh, okay.’ Cat’s mouth twitched with concern. ‘Is she dead?’

‘I hope not,’ Serena said.

‘Do you know why she was looking for me?’

‘No, but Jonny and I are going to find out.’

The name slipped easily from her lips. Jonny. She’d always called him that. Just like Cindy did. Cat didn’t miss the familiarity in her voice or the fact that they stood on opposite sides of the room, like nervous boxers. For a young girl, she didn’t miss much.

‘People are dying, and it’s my fault,’ Cat said.

‘It’s not,’ Stride told her.

‘He’s right, Cat,’ Serena added. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

‘I ran away. If I’d stayed home with the Greens, none of this would have happened.’

Serena sat down on the attic steps. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. ‘We don’t know if that’s true, and from what Jonny tells me, you didn’t have much of a choice about running away. You were being hurt, right? It’s okay to say so.’

‘Yeah, Mr. Green would hit me sometimes. A lot of times, I guess. I probably deserved it.’

‘You didn’t. No child deserves it.’

‘I could have done something. I could have said something.’

‘That’s not always how it works,’ Serena said. ‘It’s nice if you can, but sometimes you can’t. I get it.’

Cat shrugged. ‘You’re strong. Someone like you would have just kicked him in the balls.’

Stride watched Serena and saw the hardness in her face come and go. The memory. The pain. He wondered what she would say, if she would say anything at all. Back then, she would have kept her past hidden; she would never have shared it with a stranger.

‘I wish I had,’ Serena told Cat softly, ‘but I ran away, too.’

Cat’s head cocked in confusion. ‘What do you mean?’

Serena said nothing, but she held Cat’s stare across the room, girl to girl, woman to woman. Eventually, Cat understood. ‘You?’ she asked.

‘Me,’ Serena said. ‘Not just physical abuse. There was more. Bad stuff.’

‘How old?’

‘Your age. Sixteen.’

Cat’s brown eyes welled with tears. She stuck a finger in her mouth and chewed a nail.

‘I don’t talk about it a lot,’ Serena went on, ‘but I live with it now. You will, too.’

Cat swallowed hard. Her hair fell across her face. She danced on her feet, and without saying a word, she turned and ran through the kitchen. Serena winced, as if she’d breathed on a house of cards and made it fall. He heard her swear at herself under her breath.

Stride followed Cat and found her on the musty sofa on the rear porch. He sat down next to her. The young girl stared at the completed puzzle of the lift bridge, its pieces knitted together. She continued to chew a nail. One tear made a glossy line on her cheek.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

Cat shrugged her shoulders.

‘You don’t have to deal with any of this alone,’ he said. ‘Serena knows what it’s like. She can help. So can I.’

Cat still said nothing. Her stare was blank. He felt her pushing him away.

‘Serena and I have to go out for a while,’ he told her. ‘I have a police officer coming to stay with you while we’re gone. We won’t leave until he gets here.’

Stride stood up, and Cat turned and threw her arms around his waist. He didn’t move. She clung to him silently, and when she finally let go, she wiped her face and ducked her chin into her neck. He reached out and stroked her hair.

‘Hey, Stride?’ Cat murmured, as he turned to leave.

He stared down at her. ‘What is it?’

‘I like her.’