Page 69 of A Killing Cold

“No, you stay. Enjoy your time with your family,” I say.

He makes another protest, but then he lets me go. As soon as the doors are closed behind me, I start to shake.

I don’t want to wait until morning. I want to get out of herenow.

But I have another twelve hours in this place, and so I need to think. Be strategic. They’re all in there, which means they aren’t out here. They aren’t watching me. This might be my last—my only—chance to look around unobserved.

Run, my mother’s voice tells me, and I am trying to listen to her warnings, but I only just learned her name, and there is so much more than that I need.

I head out, grabbing my coat as I go.

The cloud cover blankets the sky and chokes out the light of stars, but there are the beaming lights of the lodge to glance off the snow and illuminate my way.

Wildflower is tucked out of sight of the lodge. I don’t have to worry about anyone glancing out those big picture windows and seeing me.

If it’s locked, I’m skunked. My curious habits never extended to breaking and entering; a simple dead bolt is more than enough to put an end to my snooping career. But Trevor is in and out of here all the time, and he has a careless nature. Impulsive.

The door is unlocked. I slip inside, intruder and thief, and mindful of how easily light shines between the trees, I leave them off and use my flashlight instead. I haven’t been inside this cabin before. It’s homier than the others. Framed pictures of flowers and birds on the walls; arug with a pattern of roses; quilts instead of expensive white wool blankets folded on the back of the couch. Someone has gone to deliberate effort to preserve the past here.

I start with Trevor’s room. Like his sister, he hasn’t unpacked. Unlike her, he’s flung his clothes around the room with abandon. I move swiftly, atrophied skills coming back to me. I open drawers. Slide my fingers along the tops and bottoms to check for things hidden. Peer inside shoes. Dip my hands into the pockets of coats and pants. I find condoms. An empty baggie with a few white grains sticking to it—predictable. A bottle of vodka, surprisingly full. Trevor might not be as clean and sober as he insists, but he isn’t wasted, either.

The things he’s done, he’s done clear-eyed, I think. Is that worse?

His phone is on top of the dresser. It unlocks with his mother’s birthday—how sweet. His texts are full of him wheedling racy pictures from an impressive array of young women. They arch their backs and pile their hair on top of their heads and pout their lips. At least he’s not a dick-pic guy; his selfies are of the shirtless variety, nothing below the belt.

I’m about to set the phone aside as uninteresting when I see a message a few months old.

I’m so sorry, it reads.I know I’m not supposed to be talking to you. But for what it’s worth, if it’s worth anything, I wish it had been me. If you want to take the money, do it, but if you don’t, I’ll

It ends there. It’s a draft. Never sent. The number is saved underKayla.

The girl he hurt. So Trevor felt contrite. Or he was playing an angle. And apparently decided against pursuing it, either way.

I doubt Trevor will notice anything out of place in this mess, but still I rearrange it all to my mental snapshot before I cut through the living room to the other bedroom. Here I hesitate. Rose hasn’t been warm to me, but Connor loves her. I wanted to love her, too.

Entering her room is a violation; there is no way around it. I push inward against good sense and morals and I invade her sanctum. Everything I touch, I imagine stained—my fingerprints on the pill case thatrests on the dresser, the oils of my hands on the temples of the reading glasses at the bedside.

There is nothing to find. No damning photographs; no convenient diary detailing a campaign against me or laying out what happened years ago. There are only the things you bring on a vacation like this. The only photograph is the one on the wall: Connor, Trevor, and Alexis in the middle, young and smiling, the too-bright light of summer making them squint. On one side of them stands Rose—only a few gray hairs, the faintest wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. On the other side, Nick has his arm around Alexis’s shoulder. He’s beaming; so is she.

No photos of Liam. There was one in the main room of the cabin, but here in her private space she is allowed to cut him away from herself. She’s allowed to be angry.

Angry people do unpredictable things. We all have violence inside of us. It needs only the right fuel.

I retreat. There’s nothing to find here.

I could go to Nick’s cabin next, but I think of the photographs in Alexis’s bag. They’re proof that something happened to my mother. I can’t leave them behind.

The path to Red Fox, recently cleared, has begun to fill up again. Powder spills from the shoulders of my coat as I walk. I catch a snowflake on my tongue, and a memory comes to me—arms outflung, spinning, the sensation of my momentum pulling at my in all directions like I might fly apart as I tipped my face up to the falling snow.

I reach the cabin. I never gave Olena’s key back to Alexis; it’s still in my pocket. Half of me expects the key not to work this time, but of course it does, and then I am standing in the interior where embers still smolder in the woodstove and Sebastian’s stuffed animals are strewn around the room like a great zoo breakout.

I head straight into the bedroom, to Alexis’s suitcase. For an instant I think the photographs are gone and panic closes my throat, but thenI claw aside her clothes and find the envelope jammed in the bottom, a halfhearted attempt to hide it better.

There she is—Mallory. My mother. Not the girl from Trevor’s accident after all, and I can’t believe I ever thought she might be. There are darker marks inside the shape of the bruise on the small of her back: knuckles. That bruise on her shoulder—not a seat belt, but a palm, a stretched-out thumb, digging in. Her face untouched, because it wouldn’t do to leave marks where they could be seen.

Liam Dalton had a temper. He never hurt his own flesh and blood, no, and never touched the respectable girl he married, the one who could stand up to him and his family, but Mallory Cahill, the girl from nowhere at all, she was fair game.

She looks frightened. And she looks resigned. Why did you take these photos, Mallory? Did you think they might save you? Did you plan to run?

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