Page 18 of A Killing Cold

“Something interesting about the dumpster?” says a voice, and I jump. Magnus Dalton stands behind me, maybe twenty feet away. He’s wearing a gray jacket, the cuffs stained a dull brown from age and use. I try to picture the man in a business suit—I know he owns several companies, that he spends his days in boardrooms, but the crags of his face belong so clearly to this place.

“Just lost in thought, I guess,” I say. I gesture toward the house. “We’re baking.”

“Ah. Pie day.” His eyes glint in understanding, and he jerks a thumbover his shoulder. “I could use a hand. Think the ladies can spare you a minute?”

I nod mutely, relieved and nervous. Magnus takes off without another word. I scramble to follow. Multiple sets of footprints trample down a path that he follows, leading to a small wooden shack. Halfway there, the footprints join up with wide wheel tracks and, following behind them, drag marks. Here and there, blood dots the snow. My stomach knots as the pieces click together.

The door of the shed stands open. Outside, a green ATV—or rather, UTV, with two seats side by side—sits parked, a sledge hooked up behind it. Just inside the door, the deer that must have recently been carried on that sledge is laid out on a tarp, eye glassy, head tilted grotesquely where its antlers prop it up. A bloody hole punctures its side, at the ribs.

“Good shot,” I say, trying to keep my expression from twisting with distaste. I know where my food comes from. It doesn’t make staring at death any more appetizing. “Rifle?”

He shakes his head. “Wrong season for it. Get a good shot with a broadhead and it’ll go straight through just as well as a bullet. Clean kill.” He pauses. “Mr. Vance tells me you had quite the encounter.” He moves as he speaks, getting a thin rope from a nearby table. He loops it around the antlers and ties a practiced knot.

“I guess Mr. Vance isn’t as good a shot as you are.” I fix my eyes on Magnus, not the dead stare of the deer.

He grunts a laugh. “No, he is not. You could have been killed, you know. Never go near a deer until you’re certain it’s dead. No sense getting gored.”

I remember, then, Joseph telling me the same thing. How I leaned in close to listen as he crouched down in front of me, showing me the parts of his rifle, his knife. Making me hold every piece until they felt natural. The Scotts were always putting knives in my hand. They shouldn’t have been so surprised I’d pick one up myself.

“You said you’d been hunting,” he says. “Who took you? Your father?”

That was what I was supposed to call him, at least. I hadn’t minded it, not at first. I’d adored him. He didn’t have his wife’s temper— or his father’s. Joseph’s father, he’d told me, was a congenial man with a loud laugh and a deep affection for the sound of a snapping belt. Seemed to like that clean, sharp sound even more than he liked the fear it instilled. Joseph tried out his father’s favorite method of discipline only once. Often he let me get away with things. Palmed me pieces of candy, just pressed a finger to his lips when he saw me sneaking a piece of bread after Beth ordered me upstairs without my dinner. For a little while I’d thought I could really be someone he loved.

“Yes,” I say, realizing I’ve been silent too long. “My adoptive father.”

There’s a pulley screwed to the beam that runs down the center of the shed, and threaded through it is a cord terminating in a hook, which Magnus draws down to snag the rope he’s used to secure the deer. “Help me haul this up,” he instructs, and I step forward. An instinct to please that I haven’t felt in years tugs at me like marionette strings. I haul on the cord with him, struggling with the weight of the deer. Watch as its neck distends, as its body heaves from the ground, swaying. Settling.

“Good,” Magnus says. He ties off the cord. I step away, palms stinging. “Did you learn how to dress a deer, when you went hunting?”

“It’s been years,” I tell him.

He takes a folding knife from the table. The handle is carved from antler. The blade looks hand-forged. Joseph had a knife like that—not his best knife, but his favorite, because he knew exactly where it had come from. Magnus holds it out toward me, fingers folded loosely over the handle. “Would you like to learn?” he asks.

I take the knife in answer.

“When you did this before, was it hanging head up or head down?” he asks.

“Down,” I say, and he nods like this is expected.

“There are arguments for both, and I could tell you all the reasonswhy my way’s better, but the truth is, it’s what my father did, so it’s what I do,” he tells me. “We are what our parents make us, after all.”

He takes hold of my hand, the one holding the knife, and walks me through half-remembered steps. Shows me just how deep to set the knife to slit the skin and the membrane beneath without puncturing the organs. He tells me to step back as he pulls out a slopping mass of intestines and stomach, letting them spill into a metal tub he’s placed beneath for that purpose. Gorge rises in my throat, but I don’t look away—he doesn’t want me to, and I want him to approve of me. Not just because of Connor. There is a yearning inside me, shameful, a thing that twists like a worm in my gut.

I want to be what you want me to be, it says.I will get it right this time.

“You don’t flinch,” he notes. There’s no approval there, just fact, but I get the feeling it’s as close as he gets.

He removes the liver, heart, and lungs with more care, wielding a second knife. The deer hangs all but hollow. It’s shocking, how quickly a living thing becomes a body, how quickly a body is disassembled.

“My grandfather made the family rich. He was afraid it would make us soft, so he made sure we weren’t. My father did the same. I did what I could, but I lost track, focused on the wrong things. Liam, Connor’s father—he was soft. Not like me. Didn’t know what to do about that.”

My fingers tighten around the polished antler handle. “Soft isn’t a bad thing,” I say, thinking of Connor, his arms around me in the night. “Soft doesn’t mean weak.”

“No, that’s true,” he acknowledges, to my surprise. “Soft isn’t the problem. Softandweak, though. It’s only if you’re weak that you need to learn to be hard. Need that kind of strength. You’re not weak, are you.”

“I’d like to think that,” I say. My mind skitters over shameful things, secrets and failings and the lights of a police cruiser flashing rhythmically, cast against the shimmering surface of a wet road. No, weakness isn’t my sin.

“You’re not soft, either,” he notes.

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