Winter Prey

that you’re right. You keep thinking, if I can just clear away this last thing, if I can just make it through next Wednesday or next month or through the winter, then I can get my life going. But time passes. Sneaks past. And all of a sudden your life is rushing up on you.”
    “Ah . . . the old biological clock,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. And it’s not just ticking for women. Men get it just as bad.”
    “I know.”
    She rolled on: “How many men do you know who decided that life was passing them by, and they jumped out of their jobs or their marriages and tried to . . . escape, or something?”
    “A few. More felt trapped but hung on,” said Lucas.
    “And got sadder and sadder.”
    “You’re talking about me, I think,” she said.
    “I’m talking about everybody,” Lucas said. “I’m talking about me.”

    After a carafe of wine: “Do you worry about the people you’ve killed?” She wasn’t joking. No smile this time.
    “They were hairballs, every one of them.”
    “I asked that wrong,” she said. “What I meant to ask was, has killing people screwed up your head?”
    He considered the question for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t brood about them, if that’s what you mean. I had a problem with depression a couple of years ago. The chief at the time . . .”
    “Quentin Daniel,” she said.
    “Yeah. You know him?”
    “I met him a couple of times. You were saying . . .”
    “He thought I needed a shrink. But I decided I didn’t need a shrink, I needed a philosopher. Someone who knows how the world works.”
    “An interesting idea,” she said. “The problem isn’t you, the problem is Being.”
    “My God, that does make me sound like an asshole.”

    “Carr seems like a decent sort,” Lucas said.
    “He is. Very decent,” Weather agreed.
    “Religious.”
    “Very. You want pie? They have key lime.”
    “I’ll take coffee; I’m bloated,” Lucas said.
    Weather waved at the waitress, said, two coffees, and turned back to Lucas. “Are you a Catholic?”
    “Everybody asks me that. I am, but I’m seriously lapsed,” he said.
    “So you won’t be going to the Tuesday meetings, huh?”
    “No.”
    “But you’re going over tonight, to talk to Phil.” She made it a statement.
    “I really don’t . . .”
    “It’s all over town,” Weather said. “He’s the main suspect.”
    “He’s not,” Lucas said with a touch of asperity.
    “That’s not what I heard,” she said. “Or everybody else hears, for that matter.”
    “Jesus, that’s just wrong,” Lucas said, shaking his head.
    “If you say so,” she said.
    “You don’t believe me.”
    “Why should I? You’re going to question him again tonight after Shelly gets out of the Tuesday service.”
    The coffee came and Lucas waited until the waitress was gone before he picked up the conversation. “Is there anything that everybody in town doesn’t know?”
    “Not much,” Weather admitted. “There are sixty people working for the sheriff and only about four thousand people in town, in winter. You figure it out. And have you wondered why Shelly’s going to Tuesday service when he should be questioning Phil?”
    “I’m afraid to ask,” Lucas said.
    “Because he wants to see Jeanine Perkins. He and Jeanine have been screwing at motels in Hayward and Park Falls.”
    “And everybody in town knows?” Lucas asked.
    “Not yet. But they will.”
    “Carr’s married.”
    “Yup. His wife is mad,” Weather said.
    “Uh . . .”
    “She has a severe psychological affliction. She can’t stop doing housework.”
    “What?” He started to laugh.
    “It’s true,” Weather said solemnly. “It’s not funny, buster. She washes the floors and the walls and the blinds and the toilets and sinks and pipes and the washer and drier and the furnace. And then she washes all the clothes over and over. Once she washed her own hands so many times that she rubbed a part of the skin off and we had to treat her for burns.”
    “My God.” He still thought it was mildly funny.
    “Nothing anybody can do about it. She’s in therapy, but it doesn’t help,” Weather said. “A friend told me that she won’t have sex with Shelly because it’s dirty. I mean, not psychologically dirty, but you know—dirty. Physically dirty.”
    “So Carr solves his problem by having it off with a woman in his Pentecostal group.”
    “ Having it off is such a romantic way to put it; British, isn’t it?” she