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Cold Girl
Dedication
To Daniel
Prologue
Fall Fair
SHE WAS THE ONLY PATCH of stillness on the planet,to Dion, the dark-haired girl sitting on the far wing of the bleachers, second to lowest tier, watching the band play.
She wasn’t alone, surrounded by people on all sides, but she was a break in the pattern that had caught his eye, her solidity and forward gaze, while all around her the crowd pitched and bobbed in response to the music, volume up so high it vibrated the blood in his veins. Clouds drove across the dimming skies and the lights from the fairground beyond flickered and twirled. People danced on the grassy patch in front of the stage, and above them the Rockabilly Princess leaned into the mic to sing the bouncy refrain. Something about small change and love letters. Much of the crowd sang along.
Seated next to Dion, high up on the bleachers, Penny sang along too, loudly and not so well, arms lifted high to clap. Dion didn’t sing or cheer but tried to clap his hands to the beat now and then, following procedure. Proof that he was as present as anyone. He’d come out tonight determined not to brood or drift. He worked on listening to the music, and it was lively and noisy, but it really wasn’t great, and he couldn’t stay with it. First his ears went out of sync, then his eyes. He checked Penny’s profile, saw that she looked happy, then surveyed the crowd and saw more than heard the chaos and motion, all but the dark-haired girl down there who sat perfectly still, her attention fixed on the band, the singer, the guitar player. Unlike Dion, she was completely in sync. Just another fan, he decided. But one of the silent ones.
He looked down and sideways at the pink denim of Penny’s skinny, pumping knees, but the thoughts kept ticking, not in words but little kicks of anxiety. It was all part of the healing process, this constant kicking, ticking, and going in circles, and now he was at it again, watching the girl down there. She was native, he was sure of it, while most of the fairgoers were white. And there was something else that set her apart: baggage. Next to her he could just see the hump of some kind of bag, a large backpack or duffel, which said that maybe she was just passing through, a drifter. From his position seven tiers up he could see little of her face, only the full curve of her cheek. Her long hair was loose and whipping in the breeze. Nothing special about her, a woman in her twenties, probably, on the heavy side, in faded jeans, and in spite of the chill just an ice-blue T-shirt.
He told himself he wasn’t obsessing, just whiling away the time as he sat through a long stretch of rockabilly noise he couldn’t tune in on. Maybe it was a good thing, a throwback to better days, when it had been his job to analyze situations, pull out the anomalies and turn them over till he had it figured out. He frowned down at the dark-haired girl. When she turned and glanced up his way, he felt caught out and flicked his gaze away, back to Fling.
The pop and boom of the monster speakers frayed his nerves, along with Penny’s pumping knees and the sea-like motion of the crowd. The song came to an abrupt end, there was another round of applause, and in the lull he could breathe easier, like coming up for air. As the band fussed with their instruments, gearing up for the next assault, Penny touched his arm, got his attention, and pointed at the heavy bank of clouds moving in over the mountains. “Snow’s coming, I can smell it in the air.”
She said it like it was a good thing. He glanced at the heavens and saw them hung with some kind of floating debris catching the last of the sunlight. The only smells he could pick out from the general fairground pong were cow dung and candyfloss, and the occasional whiff of suntan lotion and sweat.
What did snow smell like? What did it feel like? How would he survive it?
A new hailstorm of notes from an electric guitar made him wince and stare back at the stage, at the guitar man working the strings again, hard.
“My lord, he’s a hottie,” Penny said, “that Frank Law.”
Dion leaned elbows on knees, no longer clapping along, no longer trying to fool anybody. He pulled the brim of his baseball cap lower, checked his watch, and did the math. Six songs so far, just a couple more to go. The dark-haired girl was still down there, a stillness in a choppy sea, but he’d lost interest in whoever she was and wherever she was headed.
Touch didn’t come easy to him, these days, but he made the effort, grabbed Penny’s hand, found it warm, and interlocked her fingers in his. She responded by leaning her shoulder against his. The music ramped up, and he could feel through his body the thumping of appreciation from the crowd, some three hundred fans shaking the frail structure like they were working together to bring it down. He thought about steel rods criss-crossed and linked to suspend too much weight too high, and about metal fatigue, the chain reactions of a snapped bolt, the carnage that would come with collapse, and his own death, twice in one year.
The next song was slower, its lyrics turning from hanky-panky to slow romance, and the thumping stopped too. Dion took a breath. Penny looked away to the midway rides, the languid revolving silhouette of the Ferris wheel. “It’s Kiera’s take on ‘The Banks of Red Roses,’” she said, sounding distant. “It’s song nine on her CD. It’s about murder. It’s so depressing. I always skip it.”
Penny hated violence. She liked romance novels and happy news of rescued animals. She seemed to believe that men were faithful and good, which bothered him. He’d tried to educate her, being a man himself, knowing well how unfaithful and ungood men really were. The average man follows his dick and grabs what he wants, and if he appears to behave, that’s all it is, appearances. Rein it in to hang onto the job, or marriage, or whatever he values. He had explained it all to Penny just the other day, and then put it to her: if a man has nothing to lose, then what?
Kiera finished her song of murder and yelled into the mic, “Thank you, Smithers, you’re the best, see you next year, hey?”
Penny said, “No way she’s going to leave it on that crummy note,” as singer and band walked off, and she was right. Enough of the audience came to its feet and demanded an encore that the band filed back on stage. Kiera took up the mic again and crooned, “I love you too. Here’s one more for the road. I wrote this one especially for you cow-babies.”
She closed her eyes and swayed. Penny recognized the intro and said, “Oh, geez, I love this one. The blown kiss. Watch Frank.”
Dion did as he was told. The song was much like all the others, wild and discordant. The Rockabilly Princess was flipping her skirts, showing her legs. The boys in the crowd whistled and cheered. Frank the guitar man leaned into a second mic, and the song became a lovers’ duet. Frank stopped playing long enough to kiss his palm and blow that kiss at Kiera. Kiera reached up and caught the kiss and made to blow it back, but Frank missed the obvious cue. Distracted or ill-rehearsed, he failed to catch the kiss but kept strumming at his guitar strings, looking not at his lover but down into the crowd. Kiera twirled and sang on.
“Ouch,” Penny said. “She’s not too pleased.”
Frank was bowing back into his guitar strings, playing hard for the song’s climax. Maybe he knew he’d screwed up, or maybe not, but Dion found the missed kiss funny. He looked at Penny to see if she did too, but her eyes were fixed on Frank with what looked like pity.
Frank was the love of Penny’s life, on some level Dion couldn’t understand. She had a glossy Fling concert poster pinned to her bedroom wall showing the Princess dancing aggressively into the camera lens in denim dress and cowgirl boots, and next to her Frank in clingy tank-top, electric guitar slung across his chest. Penny had pointed to the poster on one of Dion’s rare visits to that bedroom and said, “Only