Girl in Snow(59)

He left the car running. Pulled the clothes from their evidence bags and shoved them to the bottom of a dirty trash can by the light of a moth-clouded streetlamp. As he left the incriminating evidence to the bottom of the public garbage can, Russ thought mostly of Cynthia and Cameron. It didn’t seem fair, how loving someone made their precious things your precious things, too.

On the drive back to his hollow house on his snoozing white street, Russ remembered the security cameras at the police station. When the evidence was discovered missing, two weeks later, Russ took a sick day. He huddled beneath the throw blanket on his living-room sofa, sure they’d come for him the way they came for Lee. Rattling handcuffs. But no. If Lieutenant Gonzalez had watched the security tapes, he never said a thing.



Now Russ stands by the coffee machine. In the conference room, the art teacher’s head is in his hands.

Intimidation before interrogation, Detective Williams tells Russ, though Russ can see through this forced conviction: Detective Williams has no faith in the art teacher’s guilt. The man has been cooperative, if shaky, and he has an alibi—a weekly night class for painting students. He hadn’t swiped out of the Broomsville Community College art studio until after eleven o’clock the night Lucinda died, and stoplight cameras showed him headed straight home.

I found the diary in my classroom, the teacher tells them, and it sounds like the truth. Lucinda must have left it there. I took it to my car, to bring in after the funeral.

Detective Williams pounds the table when he asks questions. Scare tactics. Russ is used to cold weather—he has lived through thirty-six Colorado winters now—but looking at the teacher on the other side of the mirrored glass, Russ is chilled to the bone.

Fletcher, someone says. Fletcher. You okay?

Russ stumbles backward.

Fletcher? Where are you going?



Everything ended the night before Hilary Jameson was assaulted. Russ will think of this night every day for the rest of his life, and when he does, he will feel a shocking combination of regret and yearning.

Patrol was slow. Russ and Lee sipped black coffee. They’d been doing this lately—joining one another voluntarily for the overnight shifts, the ultimate insomniac pairing. This night, they idled in the car beneath the shadow of the cliff, both too tired and dazed to make the climb up for sunrise, though this had been the original plan, the only reason Russ had come along for Lee’s graveyard shift. The houses around them slept, peaceful and stagnant. Russ and Lee kept awake with a game of Would You Rather.

Would You Rather: hear one song for the rest of your life—“Eye of the Tiger” or “Bohemian Rhapsody”?

Would You Rather: have sex with your cousin in secret, or never have sex with your cousin but everyone thinks you did?

Would You Rather: have sex with Detective Williams or the lieutenant?

What the hell? Russ asked.

If you had to choose one, Lee said. Life or death.

Death, Russ said, and they both laughed.

This is a dumb game, Lee said.

It is, it’s really dumb, Russ said.

So they sat. Neither turned on the radio. July—trees danced in a casual breeze. Russ’s uniform pits were damp, so he rolled down the passenger’s-side window. Night had folded itself over the world, a blanket.

Lee shifted in the driver’s seat, rested his right hand on the middle console where they kept cigarettes and condoms and cinnamon gum. Russ’s hand, also on the console, had been fidgeting with a Styrofoam cup. Digging half-moons with his nails into the white. When the cup dropped to the floor by Russ’s dirty work boots, his hand stayed.

Russ and Lee had had ten years’ worth of conversations sitting in these two nylon seats. Now, frenzied July wind streamed in, the same mountain air dipping from Russ’s mouth and into Lee’s. Vice versa. He and Lee had had hundreds, thousands of conversations in the car, but perhaps none as important as this.

Whatever Russ had known about himself before this night—it shifted inside him, rearranged itself, rose up to choke him. He could have rolled up the window, he could have turned on the radio, he could have used the hand on the console to take a sip of cold coffee. He did none of these things.

Instead, Russ left his hand. As it was—bare inches from Lee’s hand on the middle console. They both stared through the glass windshield at the rolling dawn landscape, so conscious of their traitor heartbeats, their own Judas fingers.

He can’t remember who was at fault. Who leaped those two inches of space.

Butterfly: skin. Lee’s thin pinky finger curled over Russ’s pinky finger. Smallest digit on smallest digit. And that unfamiliar desire, blazing and determined, the desire to curl more than pinkies—whole selves—to curl bodies around bodies. The desire to eat someone whole. Smell, taste, swallow. Fill. It was paralyzing and perfect, crippling in its singularity. Here is what I have been alive for all this time, Russ thought. This touch.

They sat this way, rigid in squeaky seats, pretending to count smeared insect carcasses on the windshield while instead counting seconds as they passed. Pinkies on pinkies, children making a promise they would never keep.

Minutes. Twelve, thirteen. All shaking insides.

Then, the call: a Toyota pickup speeding down I-25. Twenty over the limit. Lee tore his hand away, Russ revved up the engine, and they drove away from that unremarkable spot. When the shift was over, the sun rose over the mountains, bleeding an inky orange across the sky. Neither man could look at the other.