Winter Prey

would stutter and go out, the music would stop, everybody would hold their breath . . . and the storm would be there, clawing. Candlelight made it worse; hurricane lanterns didn’t help much. For the kinds of wickedness created by the imagination during a nighttime blizzard, only modern science could fight: satellite-dish television, radio, compact disks, telephones, computer games. Power drills. Things that made machine noise. Things that banished the dark-age claws that pried at the house.
    Claudia stood at the sink, rinsing coffee cups and stacking them to dry. Her image was reflected in the window over the sink, as in a mirror, but darker in the eyes, darker in the lines that framed her face, like an old daguerreotype.
    From outside, she’d be a madonna in a painting, the only sign of light and life in the blizzard; but she never thought of herself as a madonna. She was a Mom with a still-shapely butt and hair done with a red rinse, an easy sense of humor, and a taste for beer. She could run a fishing boat and swing a softball bat and once or twice a winter, with Lisa staying over at a friend’s, she and Frank would drive into Grant and check into the Holiday Inn. The rooms had floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the closet doors next to the bed. She did like to sit on his hips and watch herself fuck, her head thrown back and her breasts a burning pink.
    Claudia scraped the last of the burnt crust from the cupcake tin, rinsed it and dumped it in the dish rack to air-dry.
    A branch scraped against the window. She looked out, but without the chill: she was humming to herself, something old, something high school. Tonight, at least, she and Lisa weren’t alone. Frank was here. In fact, he was on the stairs, coming up, and he was humming to himself. They did that frequently, the same things at the same time.
    “Um,” he said, and she turned. His thinning black hair fell over his dark eyes. He looked like a cowboy, she thought, with his high cheekbones and the battered Tony Lamas poking out of his boot-cut jeans. He was wearing a tattered denim shop apron over a t-shirt and held a paintbrush slashed with blood-red lacquer.
    “Um, what?” Claudia asked. This was the second marriage for each of them. They were both a little beat-up and they liked each other a lot.
    “I just got started on the bookcase and I remembered that I let the woodstove go,” he said ruefully. He waggled the paintbrush at her. “It’s gonna take me another hour to finish the bookcase. I really can’t stop with this lacquer.”
    “Goddammit, Frank . . .” She rolled her eyes.
    “I’m sorry.” Moderately penitent, in a charming cowboy way.
    “How about the sheriff?” she asked. New topic. “Are you still gonna do it?”
    “I’ll see him tomorrow,” he said. He turned his head, refusing to meet her eyes.
    “It’s nothing but trouble,” she said. The argument had been simmering between them. She stepped away from the sink and bent backwards, to look down the hall toward Lisa’s room. The girl’s door was closed and the faint sounds of Guns ’N Roses leaked out around the edges. Claudia’s voice grew sharper, worried. “If you’d just shut up . . . It’s not your responsibility, Frank. You told Harper about it. Jim was his boy. If it’s Jim.”
    “It’s Jim, all right. And I told you how Harper acted.” Frank’s mouth closed in a narrow, tight line. Claudia recognized the expression, knew he wouldn’t change his mind. Like what’s-his-name, in High Noon. Gary Cooper.
    “I wish I’d never seen the picture,” she said, dropping her head. Her right hand went to her temple, rubbing it. Lisa had taken her back to her bedroom to give it to her. Didn’t want Frank to see it.
    “We can’t just let it lay,” Frank insisted. “I told Harper that.”
    “There’ll be trouble, Frank,” Claudia said.
    “And the law can handle it. It don’t have nothing to do with us,” he said. After a moment he asked, “Will you get the stove?”
    “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get the stove.”
    Claudia looked out the window toward the mercury-vapor yard-light down by the garage. The snow seemed to come from a point just below the light, as though it were being poured through a funnel, straight into the window, straight into her eyes. Small pellets, like birdshot. “It looks like it might be slowing down.”
    “Wasn’t supposed to snow at all,” Frank said. “Assholes.”
    He meant television weathermen. The weathermen said it