Free The Winter Girl by Matt Marinovich Page A

all I know.”
    I pictured Richard Swain leaning over a new mistress in the fighting chair of a fishing boat, bobbing on the limpid waters off the Florida Keys, helping her reel in a sailfish skittering in the distance. Tucked between the bank papers was a copy of an investment questionnaire. In a wobbly hand, he’d written his desired bond and stock ratio, his timeline for retirement, eight years away, and specified that he had a low appetite for risk. At the bottom of the sheet of paper, he’d included his contact information.
    “We could pick up the phone right now and call Richard Swain,” I said. “I’m looking at his phone number.”
    “And say what?” Elise said, poking her head around the kitchen door, just in time to see me pour another pre-Christmas ration of Cutty Sark into the chipped crystal glass.
    “I know what you did, Dick.”
    I watched Elise smile against her will and then touch her forehead, gently shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what I’d just said. But why would that be any more complicated than what had come before? Hadn’t he forced us into this position by sending his hired gang to the house?
    “You’ve got to use a lower voice,” Elise said. “More calm and monotonous.”
    I tried it again, and for a moment she stopped smiling, as if I might actually have the balls to do this.
    “Let’s sleep on this one,” she said, walking toward me. She held out her hand, and I gave her the glass. She took a sip, winced, and handed it back to me.
    “I’m going to give you a number, Dick,” I said in my blackmail voice, which had taken on a faint Eastern European accent. “And you’re going to write it down very carefully.”
    “I’m sure he’ll write it down very carefully,” Elise said. But something made her stand in front of me, carefully folding a dishtowel like a small flag, waiting for me to say something else. I think she liked my Eastern European blackmail voice, as far-fetched as it was.
    “Three hundred and seventy-eight thousand,” I said, sliding my hand up her ribbed leggings. She gripped my wrist before I reached her thigh.
    “Five hundred even,” she said. “Only amateurs come up with odd numbers.”
    —
    W e made it look nice before we sat down. Elise found a box of tapered candles and we set them all around the dining room. We put on some thundering Bach organ chorale and added each dish to the sideboard as if we were some kind of proof. Proof of love, proof of stability, proof of a single unadulterated ordinary moment.
    And then, just like he did every year, her brother called. She picked up her cell phone and immediately I could hear his voice wishing her a Merry Christmas as she walked back into the kitchen.
    I turned down the stereo, just as I’d once turned down the television in Brooklyn, so I could hear Elise’s end of the conversation. She was trying to keep her voice low, but I could tell she was upset about something.
You stupid shit,
she said.
    Her brother spoke for a good long time, explaining something to her that I would never hear. I could hear my wife try to interrupt his monologue on the other end by repeating his name again and again, only to go on listening to whatever Ryder had to say.
    I was watching her through the frosted glass of the kitchen door as she anxiously paced and shifted the phone to her other ear, and then I suddenly imagined that her own brother had molested her too. Or Victor had done something to both of them. Why would they talk to each other once a year, adhering to this one last, painful custom?
    Whatever Ryder was saying to her must have reassured her because suddenly she was asking him if
he
was safe. Then it hit me. There had been no recorded voice asking her if she wanted to accept the call from the Hamilton County Jail.
    I was standing to the side of the door now, the stupid platoon of violins on the stereo beginning their slow build. I tried to hear over them, but now I was just catching a word or