'Twas The Night by Anita Page- written version
Anita Page's short stories have
appeared in The Prosecution Rests (Little, Brown), Murder New York
Style (L&L Dreamspell), Word Riot, Mysterical-e, Mouth Full of
Bullets, Ball State University Forum, Jewish Horizons, and Heresies.
She recently completed a dark traditional mystery set in the Catskills
featuring Hannah Fox and Jack Grundy, who make guest appearances in
"'Twas the Night," published last fall in The Gift of Murder (Wolfmont
Press). She lives in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley.
‘Twas the Night
The dog was waiting for me, as I knew she would be, Martin Broome’s big yellow mutt from across the road. It took three trips to carry groceries and my cameras into the cabin. The rest of it would wait until tomorrow. I started a fire in the woodstove, because April in the Catskills is still winter; made a pot of coffee; topped off a mug with a shot of Irish. Despite the cold I left a window open and let the singing waters of the stream ten feet from my cabin put me to sleep, ending—finally—the worst day of my life.
The next day wasn’t much better, the previous afternoon replaying in my head like one of those goddamn loops you get when you’re on hold, only this one came with pictures. One p.m. email from my boss: See me. Ten minutes later, the face-to-face: Take the buyout because if you don’t they’re going to can you. Not a surprise since a third of the photography staff at the paper had already been laid off, but nothing hurts like your own pain. Twenty after three, arrive home to find my wife’s car and her law partner’s car in the driveway. I think, either they’re working from the house or they’re not working at all. I bet on the latter, and I’m right. Two hours later, after loading up my car, I’m on the road, congratulating myself on not having slugged either of them, though I wish to hell I had.
That first day at the cabin I unpacked and swept up, my mood a toxic mix of rage and self-pity. Around five, desperate to escape my own company, I drove the dozen miles to Filly’s Tavern outside Laurel Pond, the closest town of any size, with the intention of drinking myself blind. I was well on my way sometime later when I attempted to make conversation with the tight-lipped fellow on the next stool. He gave me a look that I took to mean shut up, which I did. He was a big guy and I wasn’t so drunk that I didn’t see cop written all over his face.
Next thing I knew I was curled up on my couch, covered with a blanket, my pounding brain not helped by the daylight, my mouth tasting like a box of used kitty litter. After a shower and two cups of coffee, my head cleared enough to figure out that someone, maybe the cop, had gotten me home and tucked me in.
That simple gratuitous gesture almost brought tears to my eyes. I sat out on the deck, breathing in the woods, taking stock. I didn’t have a job and my marriage was comatose, but I was forty-eight years old, in good health, with enough money to get by for a while without working, and a big yellow mutt for company. Life could be worse.
First thing, I phoned my lawyer because I knew Ellen would go for blood. We’d kept our money separate, something she’d always insisted on and which would have been a sign if I’d been paying attention. I didn’t want what was hers, but I damn well wanted what was mine, including the cabin I’d built more than twenty years before. That done, I made a list of projects: re-shingle the roof, screen in the deck, put in a sleeping loft. Nothing like being unemployed to free up your time.
I called on my neighbor, Martin Broome, a few days later. He was the owner of Lady, the mutt who preferred my place to his. I found him splitting wood in his muddy side yard and made a proposal: If he let me turn over a quarter acre of his cleared land to put in a garden—my property was heavily wooded—I’d give him two-thirds of what I grew. That seemed fair, since he was feeding himself and his mother.
He agreed, as I expected he would. It was obvious the Broomes were living close to the poverty line, their place badly run down. He and his mother kept chickens and I imagined the egg money and Social Security were all they had.
Martin was a dour man, not much for conversation, with a trimmed beard and gray hair that he wore slicked back. His mother was frail, in her nineties I guessed, but her mind was sharp. She invited me to join her on the porch, where she sat in her straight-backed chair, crockery bowl on her lap, shelling peas and wanting a little company. We talked about my plans for the garden and she caught me up on local gossip. As I told the police, I think that was the last time I saw her, but I can’t be sure. There may have been another time after that.
Between the garden and the cabin, I kept busy through the summer. I was lonely, but Lady helped, as dogs do. Friends emailed me—my cell didn’t work in the mountains and only Ellen and my lawyer had my land line number—and after assuring everyone I was alive and well, I cut off contact. I suppose it was my way of pretending that the world I’d left behind no longer existed.
Three or four evenings a week I drove to Filly’s. Typical roadhouse, smelling of beer and the grease from the kitchen. Long bar with a TV above it, booths along one wall. I was there mostly for the company, nursing a beer, checking out the ballgame. Often the cop was there, the one who’d seen me home that night. Jack Grundy was a good man, a bit reserved, but we enjoyed trading cop stories for newspaper stories.
One night in late July, I told Grundy about the Broomes, who were on my mind. They’d neglected to pick up the tomatoes and peppers I’d left on their porch two days before. When I knocked on the door that morning, and again later in the afternoon, there was no answer although Martin’s truck, which he’d been working on for days, was in the driveway.
Jack suggested that maybe someone had given them a ride to town. I’d thought of that, too, wondering if Martin had needed to get his mother to a doctor. If so, I felt bad that he hadn’t come to me. I was right across the road with two working vehicles, the truck I kept at the cabin as well as the car I’d driven up from New Jersey.
“You know how it is,” Jack said. “The old timers don’t like to be beholden.”
The mystery was solved the next day when I saw Martin working on his truck. He barely looked up when I crossed the road. Not wanting to pry, I didn’t ask where he’d been, but said, “If you need to get into town and your truck’s not running, feel free to borrow mine. You don’t have to ask; I’ll leave the keys in the ignition.”
Still with his head under the hood, he mumbled something that sounded like, “Obliged.”
I asked, “How’s your mother doing?”
“Mostly she’s sleeping,” he said, coming out from under the hood. He didn’t look well himself, face drawn, eyes bloodshot. Then he said, “My ma’s not taking much food, so why don’t you keep whatever you pick.”
I took that to mean I’d been right about Mrs. Broome being ill. I assumed that she’d done all the cooking, and with her bedridden, Martin had no idea what to do with the produce I was dropping off. I told him I was going to make a pot of vegetable soup, and I’d leave some on his porch. “An old family recipe,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Your mother might enjoy it.”
All he said was, “Suit yourself.”
Gracious guy. Still, I made the soup and dropped off a container as promised. No thanks, but I didn’t expect any.
I was working in the garden staking my tomato plants—this was about a week later—when a car pulled up at the Broomes’ house. Three women emerged, each carrying what looked like a covered dish or pan. Church ladies, I guessed, bringing food to the invalid. I watched, curious to see how Martin would deal with these callers. When he sent the women away, dishes in hand, I was pissed. His mother was confined to bed and living on gruel, or whatever the hell Martin cooked for her, and he was too stiff-necked to accept their casseroles.
I didn’t see Martin at all in the last weeks of summer. His truck still seemed to be out of commission, but he never borrowed mine. As the days grew cold, the shabby, silent house across the road fed my growing depression, maybe because I saw myself becoming Martin Broome. My mood worsened when the spectacular, but brief, display of fall color was washed away by driving rain.
One morning, in late November, I woke to a feeling of desolation so paralyzing I wouldn’t have gotten up if not for Lady nuzzling me, needing to go out. During the summer, I let the dog run on her own, but this was hunting season, and the county was crawling with drunks from Long Island and New Jersey staggering around the woods with loaded rifles.
The day was bitter cold and bleak—bare, black branches, dark hills, sky the color of steel. I’d been at the cabin for seven months, pretending I was reinventing my life, but that morning as I walked the winding mountain road, I knew what I’d been doing was hiding out. Seven months with no human contact except for Mr. Personality across the way and a cop who was a bar stool acquaintance. My photography equipment was still in boxes, in the same corner I’d set them the evening I arrived at the cabin. Why bother unpacking? I don’t shoot sunrises or horses grazing in a field. I’m about news—fires, five-car pileups, perp walks. If these were different times, I’d be sending out resumes, but today? Why bother. Newspapers were dead.
I spent the next two weeks holed up, never blind drunk but often not sober, eating beans out of the can. Then, on a Sunday night, I heard a car pull into my driveway and next thing, Jack Grundy was banging on my door. He stepped inside, took a long look at me, and said, “Go take a shower. Hannah and I’ll wait in the car.”
I’d met his friend Hannah at Filly’s. A nice woman. Pretty, too, with dark hair and hazel eyes. That night they took me to an Italian place on the other side of Laurel Pond. Tablecloth, bottle of Chianti, Puccini in the background. We were dining in style. After two weeks of beans, I shoveled down my fusilli con melanzane, barely stopping for a breath. We talked of this and that, neither of them asking about my state of mind, which I appreciated. It was clear, though, that they’d been talking about me because halfway through dinner, Hannah mentioned a friend of hers who ran a gallery and might be interested in displaying my photographs.
She brushed aside my disclaimer that I didn’t do scenery and suggested I photograph the people—old people, poor people—struggling to survive in the mountains. “There’s a story in those faces,” she said.
When I dismissed her suggestion, saying it had been done, she gave me a sweet smile and a one-word assessment of my lame response.
Jack, who’d been eating through this exchange, said, “Don’t fight her because you won’t win. The woman’s relentless once she gets an idea in her head.”
Hannah punched his arm, and he winced, laughing. Watching them, I was hit with a wave of loneliness so strong I could taste it.
The next day, I unpacked my cameras and made some phone calls. Later that week, I dropped in on the Senior Lunch Bunch at the Methodist church. They were a lively group, nine women and two men, late seventies to early nineties, all but one—a man temporarily without teeth while his partial was being repaired—were delighted to sit for me.
One woman, Mrs. DeBuck, round-faced and with what my father used to call bazooms, looked familiar. When she settled herself in the folding chair I’d placed in front of a window, I realized she was one of the church women Martin had turned away.
I chatted her up as I worked, curious to hear what she knew about Helen Broome. Mrs. DeBuck went on for a while about poor Helen and dear Martin, winding up with: “Of course it’s hard on him with his mother up in Saratoga, but I’m sure she’s getting better care with her niece than he could manage on his own.”
Saratoga was news to me. I wondered when and how she’d gotten there. Mrs. DeBuck was vague on both points, but assumed Martin had driven her. A logical assumption except for the fact that the truck hadn’t been moved for months.
The next Friday night, I told Jack and Hannah about my conversation with Mrs. DeBuck. We were back at the same Italian place, my turn to treat.
Grundy’s response, setting down his wine glass, made me think of Lady when she caught a scent of rabbit. “So what you’re saying is, no one has seen this woman since … when? July, August?”
I thought back, trying to place the date. “I know I saw her in April, the day we arranged about the garden, and maybe one time after that.”
Hannah said to me, “Notice the cop mind at work. Poor Mr. Broome has spent years taking care of his old mother and now Jack thinks he bumped her off to collect his inheritance.”
“Notice how she thinks she can read my mind,” Jack said, which made her laugh.
Some inheritance, I thought. A few rocky acres and a dozen chickens. Still, the implication behind Jack’s question made me uneasy. I decided to do a little prying and the three of us discussed how that might be done. Then our food came and we changed the subject, talking about the nor’easter predicted for the next day, and our holiday plans, with Christmas a week from Sunday.
When Martin opened his door to me the next morning, my first thought was: If I passed him in the street, I wouldn’t know him. His hair was long and matted, his beard grown out, and he’d lost so much weight that his clothes, which were filthy, hung on him.
He greeted me with a surly, “What do you want?”
I felt like a fool, given that this man’s life was obviously falling to pieces, but I went ahead and asked for his mother’s address, saying I wanted to send her a Christmas card. That was the excuse I’d come up with.
He stared, bleary-eyed, then said, “I don’t recollect it.”
I started to ask for the last name of the niece, but he was already shutting the door. I stopped him with my foot, and said, “Martin, is there something I can do for you? Pick up some food at the supermarket before the weather hits?”
“What you can do is get your foot out of my house,” he said.
So much for my detective work.
The storm began at noon, with wind so fierce the snow was horizontal. By evening we had eight inches on the ground. Between the wind and the occasional crack of falling limbs, I spent a restless night. It was still dark when I got out of bed on Sunday and fired up the woodstove. Power was out, so I got my generator going, made a pot of coffee and some oatmeal, then dressed. Once it was light, I’d start plowing.
Mid-morning, snow was still coming down, the radio predicting we’d get two feet. The power outage was countywide, and rescue crews were preparing to pick up the elderly and disabled and bring them to the high school where cots had been set up. I thought about my neighbor, knowing damn well it would take a backhoe to get him out of that house. He had a good woodpile, but without electric to pump his well, he wouldn’t have water. I hesitated after our encounter the day before, but in the end filled a couple of plastic jugs and carried them across to his porch. I banged on Martin’s door, then said the hell with it. If he didn’t find the jugs, he could melt snow on his stove.
Our road was still without power on Thursday. Fresh snow had fallen overnight, and by the time I went out to shovel, we’d had a few more inches. I checked Martin’s chimney, as I normally did. Today, for the first time, there was no smoke. I started across the road, Lady at my heels.
There were no footprints, no tire tracks, no signs of life. I trudged through the deep snow onto the porch. I banged and waited, then tried the door. It swung open and the dog charged in ahead of me. I followed her, not knowing what to expect, afraid Martin had fallen, or worse. But there was no sign of him, not in the three downstairs rooms or in the three small bedrooms above, not in the attic or the cellar. I was coming up from the cellar when I heard Lady barking. She was in a utility room off the kitchen, a space crowded with a hot water heater, an ancient washing machine and a large freezer.
I’d noticed a musty smell in the house as soon as I walked in the door. Not a surprise with the windows closed tight and covered with plastic, an old man who may not have bathed much living on his own, keeping the place neat but I’m sure not scrubbing floors. In the utility room, however, there was a different smell, faint to me but not to Lady, who was pacing back and forth in front of the freezer, alternating between whining and barking. I felt sick; I’d worked for newspapers long enough to recognize that smell.
I dragged Lady out of the house by her collar. Then I called the state police and asked for Jack. When he picked up, I said, “I don’t think Mrs. Broome is in Saratoga.”
It didn’t take long for the state police and ambulance and crime scene van to get there. I stayed in my cabin not particularly wanting to see Mrs. Broome carried out wrapped in tin foil or whatever the hell he’d done with her. I kept seeing her as she was that day in April, shelling peas on her porch.
I made fresh coffee, knowing the police would turn up, which they did. Jack Grundy and another detective stomped snow off their boots, then warmed themselves in front of my stove while I told them what I knew. I wasn’t much help with the big question: What had become of Martin? The police assumed he’d left on foot. If so, the snow had covered his tracks.
By evening the roads were clear enough for me to drive to Filly’s. I hoped Jack would be there, but knew the kind of hours cops pulled when they were working that kind of case. He turned up at nine, alone and looking tired. After we took a booth, he ordered food, then said, watching for my reaction, “According to the M.E.’s preliminary report, Mrs. Broome died of natural causes.”
I said something brilliant, like, “Holy crap.” I was relieved that Helen Broome hadn’t been murdered by her son, but I was confounded, too. “What was he doing, saving up for a funeral?”
“The old woman dies, he sticks her in the freezer, tells people she’s staying with her niece. Why?” Waiting for an answer, like he was Mrs. Nudleman, my third grade teacher.
It took me a minute. Then I said, “Her Social Security. He’s been cashing her checks.”
“He didn’t have to cash them. She had direct deposit into their joint checking account,” Jack said. Then, “He sold his chickens to one of your neighbors earlier in the week.”
“Once the power went out, he knew he had to run,” I said.
“In this weather, no vehicle, he can’t have gotten far.”
I drank my beer. Ten minutes earlier, in my mind, Martin Broome was a monster. Now I wasn’t sure.
They didn’t find him that day or the next. By Saturday, I was convinced they’d find his body when the snow melted in the spring. Some irony in that, him freezing to death after what he’d done with his mother.
I could have gone to Filly’s Saturday night, but I wasn’t up for the Christmas Eve cheer. I walked the dog, bending my head against the biting wind. Then I went to bed. Lady’s barking woke me a little before midnight. I heard a noise outside and saw a thin beam of light in my driveway. I pulled on boots and a jacket and let myself out.
Martin was engrossed with whatever he was doing under the hood of my truck, but he knew I was there. The wind had died, but it was frigid, the only light from a sliver of moon and the beam of the flashlight wedged under Martin’s arm. Eventually he said, “I’m taking a couple of parts.”
I didn’t know what good they’d do him, since we drove different models, but that wasn’t his worst problem. “Every cop in the state will be looking for your truck once they see it’s gone,” I said.
“I’ll take my chances.” He got out from under the hood, breathing into his bare hands, his wool cap pulled down over his ears.
“Were you planning to keep her in the freezer forever?” I wasn’t expecting an answer, but I couldn’t help asking. I’d known the man—or thought I had—for twenty years.
“Come spring, I was going to take her to the North Country. I know a place up there to bury her. I would have done that right away if my truck was working.”
“The police think you did this so you could get her Social Security checks,” I said.
“That was the idea.”
“And you thought you could get away with it?”
“I told her it wouldn’t work, but she said it would. It might have, if not for my truck and then the storm.”
“Who said it would work?”
“My ma. Who do you think I’m talking about?”
I got it then. His mother had been the brains behind the scheme—though I doubted the freezer had been part of her plan.
“She made me promise,” Martin said. “She was worried about how I’d do with only the one check once she was gone.”
So there it was, the story of the Broomes. A hard life and a lousy ending. The next words came out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about them. “The police won’t be looking for my truck,” I said. “It’s yours if you want it.”
He stared at me like I was talking Chinese. Then he said, “Why would you give me your truck?”
I couldn’t begin to answer, not at five below with frost bite setting in. What I said was, “Merry Christmas, Martin.”
He looked at me for what felt like a full minute, then got back under the hood of my truck, undoing what he’d done earlier. When he was behind the wheel, engine running, he rolled down the window and said, “Lady’s all yours now.”
“Sounds like a fair trade,” I said. Then I tapped the truck with my fist, and watched him pull out, heading north.
# # #
‘Twas the Night
The dog was waiting for me, as I knew she would be, Martin Broome’s big yellow mutt from across the road. It took three trips to carry groceries and my cameras into the cabin. The rest of it would wait until tomorrow. I started a fire in the woodstove, because April in the Catskills is still winter; made a pot of coffee; topped off a mug with a shot of Irish. Despite the cold I left a window open and let the singing waters of the stream ten feet from my cabin put me to sleep, ending—finally—the worst day of my life.
The next day wasn’t much better, the previous afternoon replaying in my head like one of those goddamn loops you get when you’re on hold, only this one came with pictures. One p.m. email from my boss: See me. Ten minutes later, the face-to-face: Take the buyout because if you don’t they’re going to can you. Not a surprise since a third of the photography staff at the paper had already been laid off, but nothing hurts like your own pain. Twenty after three, arrive home to find my wife’s car and her law partner’s car in the driveway. I think, either they’re working from the house or they’re not working at all. I bet on the latter, and I’m right. Two hours later, after loading up my car, I’m on the road, congratulating myself on not having slugged either of them, though I wish to hell I had.
That first day at the cabin I unpacked and swept up, my mood a toxic mix of rage and self-pity. Around five, desperate to escape my own company, I drove the dozen miles to Filly’s Tavern outside Laurel Pond, the closest town of any size, with the intention of drinking myself blind. I was well on my way sometime later when I attempted to make conversation with the tight-lipped fellow on the next stool. He gave me a look that I took to mean shut up, which I did. He was a big guy and I wasn’t so drunk that I didn’t see cop written all over his face.
Next thing I knew I was curled up on my couch, covered with a blanket, my pounding brain not helped by the daylight, my mouth tasting like a box of used kitty litter. After a shower and two cups of coffee, my head cleared enough to figure out that someone, maybe the cop, had gotten me home and tucked me in.
That simple gratuitous gesture almost brought tears to my eyes. I sat out on the deck, breathing in the woods, taking stock. I didn’t have a job and my marriage was comatose, but I was forty-eight years old, in good health, with enough money to get by for a while without working, and a big yellow mutt for company. Life could be worse.
First thing, I phoned my lawyer because I knew Ellen would go for blood. We’d kept our money separate, something she’d always insisted on and which would have been a sign if I’d been paying attention. I didn’t want what was hers, but I damn well wanted what was mine, including the cabin I’d built more than twenty years before. That done, I made a list of projects: re-shingle the roof, screen in the deck, put in a sleeping loft. Nothing like being unemployed to free up your time.
I called on my neighbor, Martin Broome, a few days later. He was the owner of Lady, the mutt who preferred my place to his. I found him splitting wood in his muddy side yard and made a proposal: If he let me turn over a quarter acre of his cleared land to put in a garden—my property was heavily wooded—I’d give him two-thirds of what I grew. That seemed fair, since he was feeding himself and his mother.
He agreed, as I expected he would. It was obvious the Broomes were living close to the poverty line, their place badly run down. He and his mother kept chickens and I imagined the egg money and Social Security were all they had.
Martin was a dour man, not much for conversation, with a trimmed beard and gray hair that he wore slicked back. His mother was frail, in her nineties I guessed, but her mind was sharp. She invited me to join her on the porch, where she sat in her straight-backed chair, crockery bowl on her lap, shelling peas and wanting a little company. We talked about my plans for the garden and she caught me up on local gossip. As I told the police, I think that was the last time I saw her, but I can’t be sure. There may have been another time after that.
Between the garden and the cabin, I kept busy through the summer. I was lonely, but Lady helped, as dogs do. Friends emailed me—my cell didn’t work in the mountains and only Ellen and my lawyer had my land line number—and after assuring everyone I was alive and well, I cut off contact. I suppose it was my way of pretending that the world I’d left behind no longer existed.
Three or four evenings a week I drove to Filly’s. Typical roadhouse, smelling of beer and the grease from the kitchen. Long bar with a TV above it, booths along one wall. I was there mostly for the company, nursing a beer, checking out the ballgame. Often the cop was there, the one who’d seen me home that night. Jack Grundy was a good man, a bit reserved, but we enjoyed trading cop stories for newspaper stories.
One night in late July, I told Grundy about the Broomes, who were on my mind. They’d neglected to pick up the tomatoes and peppers I’d left on their porch two days before. When I knocked on the door that morning, and again later in the afternoon, there was no answer although Martin’s truck, which he’d been working on for days, was in the driveway.
Jack suggested that maybe someone had given them a ride to town. I’d thought of that, too, wondering if Martin had needed to get his mother to a doctor. If so, I felt bad that he hadn’t come to me. I was right across the road with two working vehicles, the truck I kept at the cabin as well as the car I’d driven up from New Jersey.
“You know how it is,” Jack said. “The old timers don’t like to be beholden.”
The mystery was solved the next day when I saw Martin working on his truck. He barely looked up when I crossed the road. Not wanting to pry, I didn’t ask where he’d been, but said, “If you need to get into town and your truck’s not running, feel free to borrow mine. You don’t have to ask; I’ll leave the keys in the ignition.”
Still with his head under the hood, he mumbled something that sounded like, “Obliged.”
I asked, “How’s your mother doing?”
“Mostly she’s sleeping,” he said, coming out from under the hood. He didn’t look well himself, face drawn, eyes bloodshot. Then he said, “My ma’s not taking much food, so why don’t you keep whatever you pick.”
I took that to mean I’d been right about Mrs. Broome being ill. I assumed that she’d done all the cooking, and with her bedridden, Martin had no idea what to do with the produce I was dropping off. I told him I was going to make a pot of vegetable soup, and I’d leave some on his porch. “An old family recipe,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Your mother might enjoy it.”
All he said was, “Suit yourself.”
Gracious guy. Still, I made the soup and dropped off a container as promised. No thanks, but I didn’t expect any.
I was working in the garden staking my tomato plants—this was about a week later—when a car pulled up at the Broomes’ house. Three women emerged, each carrying what looked like a covered dish or pan. Church ladies, I guessed, bringing food to the invalid. I watched, curious to see how Martin would deal with these callers. When he sent the women away, dishes in hand, I was pissed. His mother was confined to bed and living on gruel, or whatever the hell Martin cooked for her, and he was too stiff-necked to accept their casseroles.
I didn’t see Martin at all in the last weeks of summer. His truck still seemed to be out of commission, but he never borrowed mine. As the days grew cold, the shabby, silent house across the road fed my growing depression, maybe because I saw myself becoming Martin Broome. My mood worsened when the spectacular, but brief, display of fall color was washed away by driving rain.
One morning, in late November, I woke to a feeling of desolation so paralyzing I wouldn’t have gotten up if not for Lady nuzzling me, needing to go out. During the summer, I let the dog run on her own, but this was hunting season, and the county was crawling with drunks from Long Island and New Jersey staggering around the woods with loaded rifles.
The day was bitter cold and bleak—bare, black branches, dark hills, sky the color of steel. I’d been at the cabin for seven months, pretending I was reinventing my life, but that morning as I walked the winding mountain road, I knew what I’d been doing was hiding out. Seven months with no human contact except for Mr. Personality across the way and a cop who was a bar stool acquaintance. My photography equipment was still in boxes, in the same corner I’d set them the evening I arrived at the cabin. Why bother unpacking? I don’t shoot sunrises or horses grazing in a field. I’m about news—fires, five-car pileups, perp walks. If these were different times, I’d be sending out resumes, but today? Why bother. Newspapers were dead.
I spent the next two weeks holed up, never blind drunk but often not sober, eating beans out of the can. Then, on a Sunday night, I heard a car pull into my driveway and next thing, Jack Grundy was banging on my door. He stepped inside, took a long look at me, and said, “Go take a shower. Hannah and I’ll wait in the car.”
I’d met his friend Hannah at Filly’s. A nice woman. Pretty, too, with dark hair and hazel eyes. That night they took me to an Italian place on the other side of Laurel Pond. Tablecloth, bottle of Chianti, Puccini in the background. We were dining in style. After two weeks of beans, I shoveled down my fusilli con melanzane, barely stopping for a breath. We talked of this and that, neither of them asking about my state of mind, which I appreciated. It was clear, though, that they’d been talking about me because halfway through dinner, Hannah mentioned a friend of hers who ran a gallery and might be interested in displaying my photographs.
She brushed aside my disclaimer that I didn’t do scenery and suggested I photograph the people—old people, poor people—struggling to survive in the mountains. “There’s a story in those faces,” she said.
When I dismissed her suggestion, saying it had been done, she gave me a sweet smile and a one-word assessment of my lame response.
Jack, who’d been eating through this exchange, said, “Don’t fight her because you won’t win. The woman’s relentless once she gets an idea in her head.”
Hannah punched his arm, and he winced, laughing. Watching them, I was hit with a wave of loneliness so strong I could taste it.
The next day, I unpacked my cameras and made some phone calls. Later that week, I dropped in on the Senior Lunch Bunch at the Methodist church. They were a lively group, nine women and two men, late seventies to early nineties, all but one—a man temporarily without teeth while his partial was being repaired—were delighted to sit for me.
One woman, Mrs. DeBuck, round-faced and with what my father used to call bazooms, looked familiar. When she settled herself in the folding chair I’d placed in front of a window, I realized she was one of the church women Martin had turned away.
I chatted her up as I worked, curious to hear what she knew about Helen Broome. Mrs. DeBuck went on for a while about poor Helen and dear Martin, winding up with: “Of course it’s hard on him with his mother up in Saratoga, but I’m sure she’s getting better care with her niece than he could manage on his own.”
Saratoga was news to me. I wondered when and how she’d gotten there. Mrs. DeBuck was vague on both points, but assumed Martin had driven her. A logical assumption except for the fact that the truck hadn’t been moved for months.
The next Friday night, I told Jack and Hannah about my conversation with Mrs. DeBuck. We were back at the same Italian place, my turn to treat.
Grundy’s response, setting down his wine glass, made me think of Lady when she caught a scent of rabbit. “So what you’re saying is, no one has seen this woman since … when? July, August?”
I thought back, trying to place the date. “I know I saw her in April, the day we arranged about the garden, and maybe one time after that.”
Hannah said to me, “Notice the cop mind at work. Poor Mr. Broome has spent years taking care of his old mother and now Jack thinks he bumped her off to collect his inheritance.”
“Notice how she thinks she can read my mind,” Jack said, which made her laugh.
Some inheritance, I thought. A few rocky acres and a dozen chickens. Still, the implication behind Jack’s question made me uneasy. I decided to do a little prying and the three of us discussed how that might be done. Then our food came and we changed the subject, talking about the nor’easter predicted for the next day, and our holiday plans, with Christmas a week from Sunday.
When Martin opened his door to me the next morning, my first thought was: If I passed him in the street, I wouldn’t know him. His hair was long and matted, his beard grown out, and he’d lost so much weight that his clothes, which were filthy, hung on him.
He greeted me with a surly, “What do you want?”
I felt like a fool, given that this man’s life was obviously falling to pieces, but I went ahead and asked for his mother’s address, saying I wanted to send her a Christmas card. That was the excuse I’d come up with.
He stared, bleary-eyed, then said, “I don’t recollect it.”
I started to ask for the last name of the niece, but he was already shutting the door. I stopped him with my foot, and said, “Martin, is there something I can do for you? Pick up some food at the supermarket before the weather hits?”
“What you can do is get your foot out of my house,” he said.
So much for my detective work.
The storm began at noon, with wind so fierce the snow was horizontal. By evening we had eight inches on the ground. Between the wind and the occasional crack of falling limbs, I spent a restless night. It was still dark when I got out of bed on Sunday and fired up the woodstove. Power was out, so I got my generator going, made a pot of coffee and some oatmeal, then dressed. Once it was light, I’d start plowing.
Mid-morning, snow was still coming down, the radio predicting we’d get two feet. The power outage was countywide, and rescue crews were preparing to pick up the elderly and disabled and bring them to the high school where cots had been set up. I thought about my neighbor, knowing damn well it would take a backhoe to get him out of that house. He had a good woodpile, but without electric to pump his well, he wouldn’t have water. I hesitated after our encounter the day before, but in the end filled a couple of plastic jugs and carried them across to his porch. I banged on Martin’s door, then said the hell with it. If he didn’t find the jugs, he could melt snow on his stove.
Our road was still without power on Thursday. Fresh snow had fallen overnight, and by the time I went out to shovel, we’d had a few more inches. I checked Martin’s chimney, as I normally did. Today, for the first time, there was no smoke. I started across the road, Lady at my heels.
There were no footprints, no tire tracks, no signs of life. I trudged through the deep snow onto the porch. I banged and waited, then tried the door. It swung open and the dog charged in ahead of me. I followed her, not knowing what to expect, afraid Martin had fallen, or worse. But there was no sign of him, not in the three downstairs rooms or in the three small bedrooms above, not in the attic or the cellar. I was coming up from the cellar when I heard Lady barking. She was in a utility room off the kitchen, a space crowded with a hot water heater, an ancient washing machine and a large freezer.
I’d noticed a musty smell in the house as soon as I walked in the door. Not a surprise with the windows closed tight and covered with plastic, an old man who may not have bathed much living on his own, keeping the place neat but I’m sure not scrubbing floors. In the utility room, however, there was a different smell, faint to me but not to Lady, who was pacing back and forth in front of the freezer, alternating between whining and barking. I felt sick; I’d worked for newspapers long enough to recognize that smell.
I dragged Lady out of the house by her collar. Then I called the state police and asked for Jack. When he picked up, I said, “I don’t think Mrs. Broome is in Saratoga.”
It didn’t take long for the state police and ambulance and crime scene van to get there. I stayed in my cabin not particularly wanting to see Mrs. Broome carried out wrapped in tin foil or whatever the hell he’d done with her. I kept seeing her as she was that day in April, shelling peas on her porch.
I made fresh coffee, knowing the police would turn up, which they did. Jack Grundy and another detective stomped snow off their boots, then warmed themselves in front of my stove while I told them what I knew. I wasn’t much help with the big question: What had become of Martin? The police assumed he’d left on foot. If so, the snow had covered his tracks.
By evening the roads were clear enough for me to drive to Filly’s. I hoped Jack would be there, but knew the kind of hours cops pulled when they were working that kind of case. He turned up at nine, alone and looking tired. After we took a booth, he ordered food, then said, watching for my reaction, “According to the M.E.’s preliminary report, Mrs. Broome died of natural causes.”
I said something brilliant, like, “Holy crap.” I was relieved that Helen Broome hadn’t been murdered by her son, but I was confounded, too. “What was he doing, saving up for a funeral?”
“The old woman dies, he sticks her in the freezer, tells people she’s staying with her niece. Why?” Waiting for an answer, like he was Mrs. Nudleman, my third grade teacher.
It took me a minute. Then I said, “Her Social Security. He’s been cashing her checks.”
“He didn’t have to cash them. She had direct deposit into their joint checking account,” Jack said. Then, “He sold his chickens to one of your neighbors earlier in the week.”
“Once the power went out, he knew he had to run,” I said.
“In this weather, no vehicle, he can’t have gotten far.”
I drank my beer. Ten minutes earlier, in my mind, Martin Broome was a monster. Now I wasn’t sure.
They didn’t find him that day or the next. By Saturday, I was convinced they’d find his body when the snow melted in the spring. Some irony in that, him freezing to death after what he’d done with his mother.
I could have gone to Filly’s Saturday night, but I wasn’t up for the Christmas Eve cheer. I walked the dog, bending my head against the biting wind. Then I went to bed. Lady’s barking woke me a little before midnight. I heard a noise outside and saw a thin beam of light in my driveway. I pulled on boots and a jacket and let myself out.
Martin was engrossed with whatever he was doing under the hood of my truck, but he knew I was there. The wind had died, but it was frigid, the only light from a sliver of moon and the beam of the flashlight wedged under Martin’s arm. Eventually he said, “I’m taking a couple of parts.”
I didn’t know what good they’d do him, since we drove different models, but that wasn’t his worst problem. “Every cop in the state will be looking for your truck once they see it’s gone,” I said.
“I’ll take my chances.” He got out from under the hood, breathing into his bare hands, his wool cap pulled down over his ears.
“Were you planning to keep her in the freezer forever?” I wasn’t expecting an answer, but I couldn’t help asking. I’d known the man—or thought I had—for twenty years.
“Come spring, I was going to take her to the North Country. I know a place up there to bury her. I would have done that right away if my truck was working.”
“The police think you did this so you could get her Social Security checks,” I said.
“That was the idea.”
“And you thought you could get away with it?”
“I told her it wouldn’t work, but she said it would. It might have, if not for my truck and then the storm.”
“Who said it would work?”
“My ma. Who do you think I’m talking about?”
I got it then. His mother had been the brains behind the scheme—though I doubted the freezer had been part of her plan.
“She made me promise,” Martin said. “She was worried about how I’d do with only the one check once she was gone.”
So there it was, the story of the Broomes. A hard life and a lousy ending. The next words came out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about them. “The police won’t be looking for my truck,” I said. “It’s yours if you want it.”
He stared at me like I was talking Chinese. Then he said, “Why would you give me your truck?”
I couldn’t begin to answer, not at five below with frost bite setting in. What I said was, “Merry Christmas, Martin.”
He looked at me for what felt like a full minute, then got back under the hood of my truck, undoing what he’d done earlier. When he was behind the wheel, engine running, he rolled down the window and said, “Lady’s all yours now.”
“Sounds like a fair trade,” I said. Then I tapped the truck with my fist, and watched him pull out, heading north.
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