The Winter Knife: Minnesota Strange

By Laramie Sasseville

Death stalks a snowbound city from below... Feral dogs are blamed when a popular teen is killed. Is it just coincidence that he disappeared after infuriating 14-year-old Haley, who is torn between her anger and her desire to belong? More attacks implicate a creature of Northwoods myth she befriended in its summer form. As the DNR leads a cougar hunt in town, Haley makes a desperate plan to steal a car and use their empathic bond to lead the creature away from the city -- driving alone into the fangs of a blizzard that makes roads hazardous even for experienced drivers. If she fails, either her monster or more members of her community will die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naomi Stone
• Release date: Mar 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386375630

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THE WINTER KNIFE

LARAMIE SASSEVILLE

WILD CULTURE PRESS

All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

Copyright © 2017 by Laramie Sasseville

Published by Wild Culture Press

Cover design by Laramie Sasseville

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Twelfth Night: Saturday

Epiphany: Sunday

Monday after Winter Break

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Epilog: Monday Again

Thank You

Sneak Preview: One of Me is Missing

About the Author

DEDICATION

In Memory of

Howard Harrison,

probably a birdie now

With Thanks

to my wonderful critique partners,

Lizbeth Selvig, Nancy Holland and Ellen Lindseth, to MFW, the most supportive group ever for aspiring writers, to Jill Boughner - for encouragement at very early stages - to the Minneapolis 4th Saturday Filkers

and 2nd Sunday Rise Up Singers,

wonderfully supportive communities for musicians who are just in it for the fun of it.

TWELFTH NIGHT: SATURDAY

HALEY DEVEREAUX HALF-STRODE, HALF-SLID ALONG the icy sidewalk as quickly as she could, encumbered with her guitar and bundled against the frigid night. The wind sliced its way through the achingly cold air. She wouldn’t be surprised to find bloody gashes where her numbed skin was exposed. At ten degrees below zero, even a slight breeze made the wind-chill plummet. This breeze packed weight.

Focusing on the cold kept her from rehashing the way she’d rushed from the Twelfth Night party with barely enough presence of mind to dress for the sub-zero temperatures of the night. Only the long-ingrained habits of a native Minnesotan made her tuck her scarf inside the hooded sweatshirt under her coat and wrap it across her mouth and over her head before pulling the hood up, and then tuck the legs of her cords into the top of her boots, and pull on her fleece-lined gloves — all before leaving the church building. Once she stepped into the weather, the biting air was nearly enough to distract her from the unfamiliar sensations of her simmering rage.

It was only three blocks to the bus stop, but three blocks of watching every step. Even where people had shoveled, icy patches remained underfoot and, where people had failed to shovel, passing boots had packed the snow into slippery, narrow, uneven trails, even more treacherous at the end of a block where they crossed hard-packed ridges left behind by snow plows. Some of these mounds rose more than two feet above the level of the road. Three blocks of this treacherous footing, while being careful to breathe through her mouth or suffer the prickling of ice crystals in her nostrils made it seem like miles.

The cold was almost enough to keep Haley from thinking about the party. Almost, but not quite. And maybe that was a good thing. Being angry helped against the bone-deep chill. She’d never felt such a hot fury before in her life. It alarmed her, but warmed her too. And it kept her from the tears waiting on the other side. They’d freeze to her cheeks if she let them out.

The sky formed a gray lid over the South Minneapolis neighborhood while Haley hurried past older structures with peaked roofs, porches, gables, finely crafted details of woodwork and brickwork. She passed newer buildings - squat, two-story blocks of pale brick. The snow cloaking every roof and crowding up to every door gave the diverse buildings a look of solidarity in the face of Winter, their common deadly foe.

This should have been her night. After all her hard work, the constant practice, the lessons she’d paid for with her baby-sitting money. To think she’d liked George before this! She’d actually admired him. His skill as a musician made him one of the stars of the church’s Select Ensemble. He played guitar like a pro, and sang like one, too. Too bad he was such a total self-centered jerk. He should be the one suffering now: out alone in the icy air, slashed by the cutting breeze. He hadn’t even given her a chance. She should have told him off.

Tears still threatened at the corners of her eyes. Catching herself in a slide as she hit a slick patch on the sidewalk, Haley shifted her guitar case from one hand to the other. She drew the chilled digits of the freed hand in from the fingers of their glove, tightening them into a warming fist as she reached a stretch of clear-shoveled walk and strode along with renewed confidence.

She’d bundled herself up and left the church building without a word. No one seemed to notice. Who would notice? Her family hadn’t attended. Mom was out of town again, inspecting the offices of financial advisors in Baton Rouge. Dad was working late on a Saturday because "there’s always a problem with the legacy system. Tammy had a sleepover at her friend, Cheryl’s. Dan was out with his buddies. Whether the ones from the track team or the ones from his debate team she couldn’t remember. He’d just said, If you want to take the bus in sub-zero weather to some lame church party, go ahead; you’ve got your bus pass – you can probably catch a ride home with Tom and Rick." Except Tom was probably still in the music circle and had never even noticed her leave.

She was the only one in her family who participated in the activities at First Unitarian, more because she loved choir than because she was so religious. Sally, currently her closest friend, was Episcopalian. As much as they had in common otherwise, Sally had no interest in the activities at Haley’s church. And Kirsten, who had been her best friend at church all through grade school, now had a cooler set of friends to hang out with. Namely, the members of the Ensemble Haley had hoped to impress tonight.

Apparently, Kirsten didn’t think Haley was cool enough for that new crowd. Tonight should have been her chance to prove her former friend wrong, prove the choir director, Mr. Chassen wrong, prove herself more capable than they knew.

And then George took that chance away from her. It was her turn to play and he jumped in, skipping over her like she didn’t exist. Everyone else, all the kids she knew in choir who attended the party, were oblivious to what had happened, too busy applauding George to notice her as she got up and left.

Maybe no one else had noticed how George passed over her. Maybe she wasn’t as humiliated as she thought? Maybe he hadn’t noticed her. Was that any better? Was it any better that he didn’t notice her at all than if he did notice and decided she wasn’t worth listening to?

Haley warmed with a surge of fresh fury. She’d always thought ‘seeing red’ was just an expression, but the snow- and ice-covered neighborhood around her actually did take on a ruddy tinge. She felt for a moment like a wild beast, ready to rip into George with fangs and claws, and tear him to bloody strips. Geeze! Wasn’t she the same person who squicked at killing flies? But how dare he? How dare he treat her like she didn’t matter? And why had she run away? She should have ripped his effing guitar out of his hands and smashed it over his effing head!

Right, she muttered aloud. Cuz losing my temper in front of everybody would make me look so cool. Her voice sounded alien in the sterile landscape of the ice-bound city. She hadn’t seen a car pass for the last couple blocks. It was past eleven. Even on a Saturday night not many people went out partying in a residential neighborhood in the dead of a Minnesota winter.

The weather reporters had been calling this the coldest winter since 1927 for the Twin Cities. They’d had twenty consecutive days of sub-zero weather, and it was only January. She’d heard reports of animals freezing to death, both on farms and in the wild. There’d already been over a hundred inches of snowfall — when the average for a whole season was seventy, as the weather reporter on Channel four seemed to delight in reminding everyone.

At last Haley reached the deserted bus shelter and ducked out of the wind with a sigh of relief. She punched the button for the heat lamp in the ceiling and looked at the posted schedule. Peeling back glove and coat sleeve, she checked the cheap watch that her mother considered an adequate substitute for a smart phone. Ten minutes before the bus was due. In the limited circle under the warming light, she paced and stomped feet that ached with the cold. At least the stinging in her toes assured her they weren’t frost bitten.

Maybe breaking George’s guitar over his head wasn’t a good solution. There must be some more mature way of handling things than packing up and fleeing like a coward. But she didn’t know the mature thing to do. She was only fourteen. She’d just wanted to leave. She hadn’t wanted to be part of a world where she didn’t count. She wanted to get home, get to her room where she could shut the door and be in her own world. Tears pricked at her eyes. No good. Not now. Better to stay mad.

Better to think of ripping George to bloody shreds. He wouldn’t be ignoring her then, not with her fangs sunk in his bleeding flesh, not while lying torn and contorted with pain…

Where was this coming from? She stood still, shocked at her own bloody thoughts, at the fury that had washed away all her normal squeamishness and usually mild disposition. What was with that? She had no fangs, nothing but perfectly normal human teeth. Not that she’d really bite him if she had fangs. Not when everyone else would be on his side and only think the worse of her. He was popular. Everybody liked him. All she’d get for her trouble was ostracized, by everyone in the choir, in the church, in her family, in the whole world. She wasn’t up for that. Choir was all she had. Singing was the only thing in the world that made her feel like she belonged somewhere.

High orange running lights appeared a few blocks down the road. The bus. Thank God. Her stomach sank. She’d gotten away from the party, but she’d just be going back for church in the morning. All the same people would be there.

Every summer until she was twelve, when Mom qualified as an Examiner, and Grandma’s health failed her, Haley and her siblings spent most of the summer at the cabin. Sometimes their mother stayed there with them, sometimes their father, sometimes both, depending how lucky they were in arranging vacation times. But the kids stayed for the whole of July and part of August, sometimes with Grandma as the only adult.

Grandma and Grandpa Larson’s cabin stood on the shores of Snake Lake, not far out from Grand Marais. The property bordered on the trackless miles of Superior National Forest where there wasn’t much further north to go before you weren’t in the USA anymore. The countryside grew thick with white pine and balsam fir. Birch and poplar filled in where the land still recovered from the era of heavy logging.

Grandpa’s law practice had offices in Minneapolis and Duluth. He only visited the cabin on weekends, if then, but Grandma loved the wilderness and the bit of garden she’d wrung from the stony, iron-rich reddish earth by the lake. The kids loved the lake, even though its ‘shore’ consisted of rough-edged, flat red stones that meant you had to wear your tennis shoes to go wading or swimming.

Calling it ‘the’ cabin, gave the wrong impression, though that didn’t stop anyone. They should call it the cabins, plural. In addition to the main cabin where Grandma lived all summer and the kids stayed with her when their parents weren’t around, and the uncles stayed in the fall when they came up for the hunting season, there were also the guest cabin, the boat house with its bunk room, the garage with the apartment up above, the well house (which housed only the pump that drew up water from an artesian well), plus several sheds devoted to fishing and hunting gear, and various sorts of machinery used in maintaining the property.

The various structures stretched in a scattered way along a good section of the shore line, with stands of trees and wild meadow in between, so that each seemed isolated in its own bit of woods, with pine boughs up against the windows, and views of the lake. Only the main cabin, garage and guesthouse were wired for electric power. Only the main cabin and guesthouse had indoor plumbing.

Haley took all of it for granted. She loved the lake. She loved the woods. She loved watching, and sometimes capturing and taming the variety of living creatures sharing the property with her family.

Frogs and snakes, chipmunks and squirrels abounded. Birds flitted through the woods and swam on the lake: woodpeckers, loons, gulls, jays, cardinals and hummingbirds. Rabbits, fox and raccoons ran rife. One summer Haley repeatedly spotted a doe and her fawn in the wood lot up behind the fence that marked Mr. Coleman’s property. Grandma told stories about moose and bear, but none had been seen at the lake since before Haley’s older brother Dan’s birth. A moose head had hung on one wall of the main cabin — before it fell on Uncle Steve’s head, fortunately damaging only his dignity.

Hunter also inhabited the woods — the odd little creature Haley first met when she was ten, the next-to-last summer she got to stay at the cabin. Haley didn’t know exactly what kind of animal Hunter was. He looked like a relation of a ferret or otter, larger than the one, smaller than the other, but she’d never heard of an otter or ferret with green fur. Not grass green, more of a green-tinged brown, like fresh pine needles fallen among old dried ones.

She didn’t want to ask anyone about him; keeping him secret made her feel special. No one else had a green-furred pet. Besides, the others would scare him away and she wanted to tame him.

A colony of chipmunks scurried and darted among the splits of a woodpile stacked beside the shed housing the hunting gear. The shed and woodpile stood about as far from the main cabin as you could get and still be on the property — at the very end of the access road, with only the woods and the National Forest beyond that. Haley first saw her green-furred friend there.

The birches rustled in full-leaf, white boles dappled in the summer sunlight. The sky emerged as shifting patches of blue between the leaves. Daisies growing wild among the tall grasses brushed her bare calves as Haley approached, carrying a brown paper bag half-full of birdseed and a bologna sandwich for her own lunch. The cardinal-mix included a lot of sunflower seeds; the chipmunks went crazy for those. She sat perched on a stump conveniently near the woodpile and the trodden-down patch of weeds and wildflowers surrounding it.

Facing the woodpile, with the shade of birches and pines across her back and the warm breeze blowing in from the lake to her left, she tossed out a handful of the seeds and sat still in anticipation. Only the shifting of leaves and grasses in the breeze and a motorboat’s growl from across the lake sounded through the quiet woods. A jay squawked from one of the taller pines.

Magically, first one small, striped-back ‘chipper’ appeared, nosing among the grass and fallen pine needles, then another, and then half a dozen of its brethren twitched through the grasses surrounding them. It amazed her to see the size their cheeks grew, like little balloons stuffed with the seeds.

Haley moved slowly, fluidly, tossing out more of the seed. This was not the first time she’d played this game. The chipmunks knew her now, and only drew back a little when she moved. Some came nosing right up to her feet in pursuit of their seed-prizes.

A flurry among the crowd of little creatures startled her. Most of the chipmunks disappeared, streaking through the grass, darting between splits of wood, while only one remained, to lie struggling between the paws of… something.

Haley choked back a squeal of alarm. The new arrival wasn’t much larger than a cat, but a cat didn’t have such a long, sinuous body, or thick tail, or such greenish fur. It appeared nearly invisible among the grasses and pines. She’d never seen it until it struck.

Its eyes stayed on her, as if waiting to see what she’d do. The chipmunk seemed unbloodied as it squirmed between the creature’s dainty front paws – more like a raccoon’s little hands than like a cat’s paws.

Here, Haley spoke in a low, soothing tone as she reached slowly for her sandwich. You don’t want that little bit of fur, do you? Not when you can have some bologna…

She kept her eyes locked with those of the green-furred predator as she worked her fingers through the napkin to her sandwich, and tore off a corner. She lobbed the chunk to land just in front of the strange creature.

It flinched at her motion but didn’t run. Its nose wriggled, and it leaned forward, glancing away from her only for an instant as it sniffed at the meat and buttered bread. Haley held as still as possible, but continued to speak in soft tones, It’s okay. It’s good. I made it myself this morning. But you might not like the pickles or lettuce.

The creature took a step forward. The chipmunk left like a shot, bounding to the woodpile in a single leap, disappearing into a crevice between the gray lengths of cut wood.

Green-fur nosed the bit of sandwich, nudging it while keeping his wary dark-water-green eyes on Haley. Then he snatched up the hunk of sandwich in teeth that looked needle sharp. He squatted back on his haunches, and held the food between his forepaws as he ate it down in quick, neat bites.

Haley tore off another piece of her sandwich for the creature, then took a bite herself. Dan would make fun of her. What difference did it make whether a chipmunk or a cow (what was bologna made of?) died for the predator’s lunch? And the creature probably ate chipmunks every day anyhow, when Haley wasn’t there to tempt it with something new. But she hadn’t wanted to watch one of her little friends die today. Especially not since she had drawn them into the open with her tempting gifts of seed.

And maybe she could make a new friend here.

The creature seemed to like her bologna sandwich well enough. She fed him most of it, saving only a couple bites, and the lettuce and pickles for herself. She had to call him something besides ‘creature.’

"What are you, anyhow?"

He studied her with intelligent, deep green eyes. As if he expected her to read his mind. It must be a mind as cool and green as his eyes, as the shadowed woods where he hunted.

Hunter, she announced. It fit him. I’ll call you Hunter.

He stared at her for a moment more, then slipped back, disappearing into a stand of seedling pines no taller than her waist, at the edge of the small clearing.

At supper every day for the rest of the summer Haley saved bits of her burgers, or hot dogs, or the fried fresh perch and sunnies from the lake. She wrapped the scraps in a paper napkin, took them out to the clearing by the far shed and fed them to Hunter.

Haley made it home from the bus stop on the closest corner without freezing to death. Her outrage at George had faded to a kind of numbness that went nicely with her numbed toes, fingers and nose. She shed her coat and scarves, hooded sweatshirt, boots