The Winter Girl by Matt Marinovich Read Free Book Online Page B

I think we did the wrong thing. As soon as we were safe inside Victor’s house, we turned off every light. We ran around whispering commands to each other and nearly tripping over the ends of rugs. Then we stood by the sides of the living room window, and I mashed the binoculars against my eyes.
    “What do you see?” Elise said. “What are they doing?”
    I twisted the center focus knob on the binoculars, heard the tap of the lens against my own glasses. A blurry ghost of a lighted window became a sharp rectangle, but I just missed focusing on the figure that left the room.
    “There was somebody up there,” Elise said. “Some guy.”
    She was doing better with her naked eyes. I twisted the focus knob again. The house was ablaze now. Someone was flicking switches in every room, and this time I caught a bit of him as he moved past the window of one of the guest rooms. He was thickly built, Hispanic, and his mouth was moving as he turned and glanced over his shoulder, as if he were giving someone else commands. Another face, also Hispanic, appeared in the room, the rest of his body cut off by the window frame.
    “Let me see,” Elise said.
    I handed her the binoculars and watched her watching them.
    “They’re back downstairs,” she said. I reached out for the binoculars and tugged them away. I raised them to my eyes just in time to see their backs as they walked through the living room. I panned the binoculars to the truck idling outside, an F-150 with oversized wheels, the dark color impossible to discern. There were two white letters on the side, joined I thought by a fancy ampersand, but at that angle I couldn’t make it out. I was still focused on it when the larger of the two men walked right into my field of vision.
    “They’re leaving,” Elise whispered. “Both of them.”
    But they didn’t leave. They sat in the truck, smoke from the exhaust pipe curling into the air. I couldn’t see through the rear windows.
    “What’s going on?” Elise said.
    “They’re just sitting there. There’s some company name written on the truck, but I can’t make it out in the dark.”
    I have no way of knowing exactly how much time passed, but it must have been ten minutes at least. Then the driver’s door opened again. He climbed out and walked to the house, and I followed him with the binoculars. Alone this time, he made his way through the same rooms. Once, I saw his shoulder jerk and his mouth pull back into a grimace, as if he had just kicked something. One by one, he turned off the lights. In the bedrooms, in the sitting room, in the guest room, even the light that had been on the timer.
    “He’s leaving again,” I said to Elise, watching him angrily pull open the truck’s door and climb back in.
    A moment later, the triangle of brake lights flared and the truck reversed, pulled away, carrying its own saucer of light all the way back down the long driveway.
    —
    W e lay in the dark, on her father’s bed, arguing about what we had seen. But it wasn’t the normal kind of argument we always had. It was filled with excitement, and every time we disagreed about something, it was only so we could revise and perfect the little we had seen, the little we had to go on.
    “I think the heavier one was wearing a Carhartt jacket. Tan,” I said.
    “It wasn’t tan,” she said. “It was darker than that, and he was wearing a sweatshirt under it. Baggy jeans.”
    “About one hundred eighty pounds.”
    “Heavier than that.”
    “A baseball cap, right?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Blue, with some kind of white letter.”
    We were holding hands, her fingers squeezing mine, then letting go, each time something else occurred to her. We both agreed that we had never gotten a good look at the other guy.
    “What do you think?” I said.
    “They’re working for somebody.”
    “You know what I think?” I said, my big theory seizing up my throat like a little kid.
    “What?”
    “Maybe it’s Swain. Maybe they’ve