CounterProbe Read online

  “I remembered your size from that day in the dormitory,” he told Jane, asking again, “They do fit?”

  She nodded slowly, wearing the uncommitted dazed look she’d hugged shield-close since the… the bluff top. But who could emerge from an encounter that traumatic without a little shell shock? Not he, Kevin thought. He sighed and studied the relentlessly normal environs of an ersatz old-fashioned general store.

  Around Kevin and Jane browsers ambled down aisles arrayed with post-Christmas markdowns and winter gift paraphernalia, ranging from soft-sculpture mallards to plush polar bears and cow-eyed baby harp seals. Sporting goods bristled along every wall; circular racks of winter outerwear formed islands in the stream of shoppers; crockery beribboned like pampered pets anchored a gift alcove.

  And in the middle of it, Jane—wearing nothing more than her big fur coat and brand-new boots—stood dripping onto the hardwood floor.

  The rural Minnesota town of Crow Wing counted on the tourist trade, even in the dead of winter. Shops like the Pine Cone lined a reclaimed Main Street to purvey trendy gewgaws to carloads of bored urbanites escaping the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

  “Oh, a sale…” Jane’s dazed eyes focused expertly on a rack of skiwear. She headed for it with a gleam.

  Only Kevin’s quick hand on her arm delayed her.

  “No, no. Forget ‘sales.’ Staying in Willhelm Hall made you into a coed clone. We don’t need that stuff. All we need is, uh…”

  Kevin’s face absorbed some of Jane’s vacancy as he examined the consumer carousels around him. Nobody showed surprise at his bemusement, or noticed the mental fatigue graying his face.

  He knew he looked completely unremarkable, thank God, a prime example of uncomplicated Minnesota manhood lost in a familiarly alien retail environment—early thirties, clean-shaven, jeans-clad, confused. He could have been any typical husband or father out for a Sunday shopping spree, except that he was neither and he had never been typical.

  And Jane could have been— He glanced at her and blanched. She was reaching out to finger a corduroy jacket sleeve, the damnable, inexpendable fur coat splitting slightly open on her torso…

  “Jesus Christ!” Kevin’s hands jerked the coat edges shut. A woman shopper pawing through a rack behind Jane paused to lance him with a venomously reproving look. “You can’t do that,” he added softly. “If you see something you like, point it out and I’ll pull it off the rack.”

  His crooked elbow soon bore a set of ladies’ thermal long johns, jeans, turtleneck sweater, wool plaid shirt, and gloves. All they needed now was the jacket… He looked around.

  Jane’s dark head was disappearing among the clotted clothes racks, bobbing toward something promising. He overtook her at a chrome carousel strung with Hudson Bay jackets, their characteristic red, green and yellow stripes screaming across the bland white wool fabric.

  “This,” suggested Jane.

  He smiled. “North woods to the zipper teeth, but… too distinctive. Wearing one of these lollipops would be even worse than this.” His hand tugged the sleeve of her fur coat.

  “But… I like it.”

  “It’s not right for where we’re going,” he insisted, gritting his teeth a little. Funny, he thought, how you never notice a headache until it’s ready to eat you alive.

  “It’s right for where we’ve been!” she argued.

  Kevin saw the glint of fine-edged anger sharpen her expression, and almost released his own exasperation. Once she’d been infatuated with him and he had forced himself not to see it. He could have used a little dumb, unquestioning adoration now, when so much was at stake.

  He remembered that once he would have celebrated any tiny sign of autonomy in Jane as a personal triumph. Now it had become simply inconvenient. Risking everything to ensure Jane’s independence, he now found himself the first to quash it. For her own good.

  Kevin’s free hand patted the front of Jane’s coat as if he stroked a living thing. “I know it’s tough to think of replacing… this, Jane, but we have to.”

  Jane’s rebellious expression softened as it met the concern in his eyes. Childlike, she bowed her head and pulled the coat open to examine it. Kevin glimpsed a hand’s- breadth of naked torso before he clamped the fur shut again.

  “Keep it that way,” he ordered, aware again of being an outsider in even the simplest matters. “We’d better get you into the inside stuff. No regular underwear sold here, I’m afraid,” he noted, shrugging by racks with Jane in his wake. “You’ll have to go New Wave this time.”

  Dressing rooms were impossible to spot in the rambling storescape. Kevin corralled a woman clerk and dumped the clothes into her arms.

  “She”—he nodded at Jane—“wants to try these on.” The clerk weighed the comforting bulk of a multi-item sale on her forearm and quickly led them to the establishment’s rear, where tartan-plaid curtains masked two confessional-size dressing areas.

  Jane docilely ducked under the uplifted curtain, her expression puzzled.

  “Call me if you want anything, dear.” The clerk crimped a brisk smile at Kevin and bustled away.

  Kevin heard the mute motions of “trying on” behind the curtain.

  “If it fits, keep it on,” he hissed through the fabric, hoping Jane would know the correct order in which to install her new layered look.

  She was out in a few minutes—booted, blue-jeaned, sweatered and shirted from toes to chin.

  Kevin sighed real relief, his face losing five years of worry. Behind Jane in the tiny dressing room, the discarded fur coat overflowed a minuscule built-in bench to slump onto the floor like a dead thing.

  Kevin collected the fur, then snagged a teal-colored down jacket for Jane on the way to the front cash register, and a cocoa-colored down jacket for himself. He began peeling hundred-dollar bills from his wallet, silently cursing the high denomination and Kandy’s eccentric money habits, handy as they sometimes were.

  “She’ll take it all, and wear it,” he told the clerk. “Have you got a bag for this?” He hefted the full-length fur onto the countertop.

  Untidy iron-gray eyebrows visited the clerk’s receding hairline. “I’ll have to clip off the tags, sir,” she complained, advancing on Jane with a formidable pair of shears.

  “Fine; no problem,” he said nervously, as much reassuring Jane as the clerk.

  Scissor blades flashed around Jane’s torso like a circus dagger-thrower’s knives. Strands of thin white plastic fishline popped every which way as Jane’s clothing was sheared of its sales tags.

  Kevin tried to keep his booted foot from tapping the wooden floor as he and Jane dangled over the cash register for an eternity while the clerk computed each item.

  “Three hundred and four dollars and eighty-five cents,” she finally announced.

  “Great!” The clerkish face expressed surprise.

  Kevin could have kicked himself for thinking only of the many small, useful bills he’d get in change. Another mistake. Normal people don’t relish spending hundreds of dollars at a whack. He wasn’t going to be good at this, and he had to be.

  “I thought we’d done more damage to the budget,” he backpedaled, joking. “But you can’t get around in this weather without the right gear.”

  “Absolutely, sir,” trilled the clerk, carefully folding the fur coat into a large plastic bag into which it immediately and bonelessly collapsed. She wrung the bag’s neck and secured it with a plastic twist, then slung it over the counter. “A coat like this really should be on a hanger, but this’ll do until you folks get home again.”

  Home. The word hit Kevin in the sinuses right between the eyes, like Chinese mustard.

  Everything familiar dropped away. He felt the weight of the coat, shrouded in something that was first cousin to a garbage bag. He felt removed, as so many of his patients complained of feeling. He felt he stood on a hundred-year- old wooden floor that had turned into a hermit’s pillar in some alien wasteland too vast to sense.
/>
  Something tugged at his arm. Jane’s hand. Her dark eyes pierced his emptiness.

  “I’ll take it,” she was saying, extending her other hand for the yellow sales slip and handful of bills the clerk was pushing at a momentarily nerveless Kevin. “We’ve got a long way to go,” Jane added conversationally, apropos of nothing. And of everything.

  She turned and led him out of the store to a beige ’78 Chevy van waiting by a meter that read “Expired,” as it always did on commercial Main Street, where no one had to pay for parking.

  Nothing on earth approximated the silence of empty woods in winter. Nothing could be so vast and yet anonymous.

  Kevin crouched beside the conspiratorial snowdrifts behind the van’s rear bumper, pouring bottled spring water over the snow he had packed over the license plate.

  Cold had crippled his leather driving gloves into claws. He slapped at the snow and continued the ritual. This roadside baptism didn’t confer an identity—hopefully, it would disguise one. And they would be coming, he knew that. They had to keep coming. It was their job.

  He looked up. Through the trees on his right, an occasional car hissed past on the plowed highway. This clearing that concealed the van while he performed his bizarre ablutions sat only fifty yards from Highway 61 outside of Crow Wing, Minnesota. Yet it seemed secure, probably because he wanted it to be. John Donne was wrong, Kevin mused bitterly. We are all islands, and safest when we are most set apart.

  Jane was tramping around the clearing, her new boots driving footprints into the untouched snow, gloved hands swelling her jacket pockets, cheeks and nose rosy, thick dark hair riffling in the breeze.

  Kevin paused to watch, tenderness and fear weaving a saraband of frustration in his mind. He’d seen something once in a book when he was a kid—a kid’s book—a painting of a small black pony against the snow, with a dark-haired girl in a muffler. And a small red apple offered across the blank canvas of the winter.

  Right now Jane looked like that child, although she was well into her twenties. She even looked like she should be playing, although she never had.

  “Done?” she shouted across the clearing.

  He stopped himself from telling her to speak quietly and stood, dusting off cold-cracked leather palms. “Done.”

  “I like it here,” Jane said, lifting her head to a bloodless blue sky marbled with insipid clouds.

  “Me, too.” Kevin stamped closer through the drifts, his feet long since having become leaden ice lumps in his boots.

  “But we can’t stay.” Jane’s eyes were level, very focused now.

  He shook his head.

  “Kevin, where are we going?”

  “Away.”

  “Away?” she challenged. She had been challenging more lately.

  “Somewhere.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…” The reasons didn’t belong in this fir- pillared nave of snow. He spread his stiff hands in a wordless gesture.

  She stared at him, into him, her eyes keener than kerosene. Then she mirrored his gesture, spreading her arms. Her lips parted with question and with cold, her eyes warming with intelligence, with understanding even.

  Kevin wanted to kiss her. Before he could move, Jane sat down in the snowbanks, sinking from view like a drowning woman.

  “That’s what you did, in the woods,” she said, laughing. She lay back in the snow, her figure a dark starfish beached on endless anonymity.

  Her arms and legs—tentatively, slowly—began moving up and down, in and out. As if she were leaping off the earth, or trying to. As if she were flying, or trying to. Around her, the snow shifted into the cookie cutter impression of an angel—a winged, full-skirted angel. A Christmas tree angel, as white and soft… and deadly… as fiberglass.

  “Get up,” Kevin said, his voice raw. “Get up!”

  Bewildered, Jane stared at him, still smiling. “I saw you do it. In the woods. Last night. After… before. Why did you do it?”

  “I—regression, I guess. Pointless regression. Get up.” He waded into the fragile construction, his feet blurring its outlines, and pulled her up. His gloves beat lumps of snow off her back.

  “You’ve ruined it,” Jane lamented. “Kevin, why—?”

  “Jane—” No more words came, just the name—the pseudonym—that they had both paid such an unfathomable price to retain.

  Kevin enfolded her in a bearish embrace, his cheek pressing the cold softness of hers. It felt strange without the barrier of his beard between them. He missed it. Damn… needed to shave again. Didn’t want to look like a vagrant, attract attention. Already he was tiring of the rules of the game, and it had just begun…

  “I don’t know where to go,” he confessed, more to himself than to her. He still viewed Jane as his charge—his precious, dangerous, two-edged charge. “I don’t know where to take you. I only know that I have to do one thing at a time.”

  He broke their embrace to look back at the van, sitting bland and innocent in the snow.

  “The license plates are taken care of,” he said. “If that’s enough. Those flashy C-notes of Kandy’s have probably alerted every state trooper on Highway 61 by now. Or maybe they have to keep quiet about this. Maybe their hands are tied, too.”

  “Kevin, who? The men who followed us on the highway, the men in the woods who—?” She stopped, frowned, and looked into herself.

  Kevin’s rough gloves wrenched her naked face to his and kissed it away—the frown, the memory. Most of all the memory. Not many days before, his job—his only passion —had been helping Jane to remember.

  She kissed him back with an ardor that always surprised him. He relaxed into that small inlet of warmth in this large ocean of cold called a world.

  “We’ve got to keep moving,” he said when their faces separated. Their breaths mingled into phantasmagoric traceries of vanishing frost. “Come on, we’ve got to dump the coat.”

  He turned back to the van, forced energy in his yard-long steps. Jane floundered behind him, gamboling like a pony. Her eyes brimmed curiosity as he pulled the yellow plastic bag from the back of the van, heaved it over his shoulder Santa-wise and forged across virgin snow to a ring of towering pine trees.

  And like a dog, Jane tilted her head to watch as Kevin laid down the burden, then studied the area.

  “Where, do you think? A good, out-of-the-way spot,” he consulted her, trying to give her a role in their melodrama.

  She looked around, then leveled her finger at a top-lofty, emerald-black fir tree.

  Kevin grinned. “You don’t have to keep pointing. Your coat’s not going to fall open and reveal the Sally Rand of the Iron Range anymore. Okay, the tree it is. There’s a good-size drift there anyway. Very Freudian, you know, to choose a ‘fir’ tree.”

  He crouched at the tree trunk, crouched and began pawing at the hip-high mound of snow driven under its branches. Jane joined him, laughing, snow spraying from her gloved hands, stars of glitter tangling in her eyelashes, her cheeks and lips red, red, and the snow so white, so light, so fresh, so cold.

  “That’s enough.” Kevin sat back on his heels and slung the bag into the snowpit they’d made.

  Jane’s face stiffened as she finally realized what he was doing. He gave her a quick smile before pushing snow over the plastic, burying it in soft, silent handfuls.

  It was quiet in the woods. And empty. Then Jane spoke.

  “Zyunsinth,” she said, her voice deep, so deep he turned to make sure it was Jane who had spoken.

  Her eyes stared at the rumpled snow, and the crumpled plastic bag half-buried by it.

  “Zyunsinth,” she repeated, on a rising note of denial.

  “Yes, I know, but it’s… it’s a dead giveaway, Jane. It’s too easy to trace, an expensive, eye-catching coat like that. We can’t afford to stand out.”

  “You’re not… leaving… Zyunsinth here?”

  “I have to. Jane—”

  She hurled herself atop the sack, burrowed herself i
nto the snow with it, her gloves tearing uselessly at the plastic. She wrenched them off and her bare fingers poked ragged holes in the material. Patches of fur pushed out. Jane’s palms petted them feverishly while Kevin tried to stop her.

  “Jane, we have to leave the coat! It’s a hazard.”

  They tussled through his words. It was like interning at the state hospital again, Kevin thought, agrip with déjà vu. Like trying to subdue a schizophrenic. But he knew how to exert force in a crisis.

  “It can hurt us, hurt you,” he panted between efforts to confine her awesome energy. “I know how attached you are to the damn thing, but—”

  Her eyes grew leaden with loss. She lay still under him at last, like a victim, her hair in her teeth, the snow in her hair, her cold white hands pinned to the death-pale earth.

  Kevin shut his eyes and released her. When he looked again, she had sat up and was wiping a stream of tears from her face with icy palms. The tears frightened him more than the fury. He had never seen Jane cry before. Never.

  “Jane…” His hand didn’t quite connect with any part of her, but hovered—nearby and irretrievably distant.

  “Zyunsinth,” she mourned, rocking.

  “I know I can’t begin to understand what… it… they… mean to you,” he began, fighting for the cool control of a therapy session, fighting to become again the iceman in the white lab coat, if he had ever been that.

  Her hands, twining, covered each other on her mouth. Her eyes were holes in the snow all around them, deep and dark.

  “Home,” she said.

  He was silent.

  Jane sat back on her heels, the tears still sliding down her cheeks reminding him of springwater icing a license plate. Kevin wanted to wipe them away and strip her of obscurity. Instead, he must act against his instincts, his profession, his ethics even. He had to help her to hide, even from herself, no matter what.