The Other Husband

At twenty-five below zero the air did strange things. It squeaked under Elias's boots in the staff lot. It stuck the inside of Elias's nose together on the first breath. It carried sound so cleanly that Elias could hear, from the car, a dog barking on the far shore of Whitlow Lake a mile and a half away, and a truck downshifting on the county road, and under everything, from the lake itself, a long low groan that rose and rose and ended in a crack like a rifle shot.

The ice. Two feet thick now and still thickening, and every night when the temperature fell it shrank and split and boomed, and the sound rolled up the lawn to the old sanatorium and rattled the glass in the long porches. Out on the white, a dozen fish houses sat in a rough village with their little windows lit, smoke going straight up from their stovepipes into a sky so clear and cold the stars looked sharp enough to cut.

Elias stood a moment by the car with the scarf pulled over his mouth and looked up at the building. Three stories of yellow brick gone gray in the starlight. Every window on the second floor lit, twelve rooms, and the monitor station glowing at the west end. And at the east end, past the last lit window, the old wing running on into the dark, its glassed-in porch blind and black, its windows frosted white from the inside.

Frosted from the inside. Elias had never noticed that before. The heated rooms had clear glass with frost ferns only at the edges. The east wing's windows were solid white, like cataracts, because nobody heated that wing, and nobody had since 1994.

The lake boomed again, closer. It was the second week of January, the dead middle of winter, the stretch of the year when the sun rose after eight and set before five and the night shift saw it only through a windshield. Elias had worked nights at Whitlow for four months now. Long enough to know every noise the building made. Long enough, lately, to have started wondering which of them to believe. Elias shivered and started walking.