Frozen Stiff (2 page)

While she lolled in bed, she imagined her life to come. Just travel for a while. Paris sounded good to her. Her French wasn’t half shabby. She knew how to say, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” As long as she could say that, order a glass of wine, and buy some clothes, she’d be set.

A knock sounded on the door of her apartment. Finally. She waited a minute. The next series of knocks came louder, harder.

She rolled out of bed and walked to the door, swishing her hair back over her shoulders.

She opened the door and watched his face open when he saw her standing there, naked.

“Whoa,” the tall boy said.

She led him to the bed without saying a word. There would be time for talking later.

New Year’s Day: 6 am

Clyde Hegstrom knew the cows didn’t really care that he had been up late last night, way past his usual bedtime of nine o’clock, nearly closing the bar. He milked them at six in the morning because that’s when they needed to be milked, their udders filling up to the point of pain otherwise.

His herd of six cows also didn’t care that his 17-year-old daughter Bonnie had delivered a baby two nights ago, and almost lost her life doing it. That he had drunk himself silly last night. That his wife was so upset that she couldn’t even talk. That she hadn’t been home in two days. The cows didn’t care that it was twenty below zero with windchill too low to measure.

Clyde could hear their soft lowing as he trudged to the barn. His head felt heavy on his neck and filled with compost.

The barn smelled of cud and sweet hay. The cows turned their heads to him and greeted him with loud snuffles and moans, all in their own familiar sounds. He didn’t have to think about what to do. The pail came to his hands, the stool sat on the ground. He still milked his small herd the old-fashioned way. He was sure he got more milk out of them that way, and he was even more sure that they enjoyed it more.

He started with Hilda, the oldest cow, who was pushing eighteen, the upper end of her life span. Her mother had rejected her so Clyde had raised her with a bottle. She was his big baby.

He leaned his head into her warm, soft hide, his hands started their work, milk hissing down into the pail. The warmth of the cow’s soft body comforted him and he found tears bathing his face.

New Year’s Day: 9 am

Sherri Walker was not looking forward to going back to the “cabin” as Dan called it. She hadn’t been there in a month, since Dan had dropped the divorce bomb on her as they were having drinks.

He had chucked her under the chin, like a little girl, which she hadn’t been in thirty years, and said, “Don’t think this marriage is working any more.” She had started to cry, but tears never worked on him. The only thing that worked was sex and while he hadn’t turned her down that night, he hadn’t been overly enthusiastic. A week later, he had divorce papers served on her.

As she slid down the long, ice-rutted driveway in her blond Saab, the car Dan had given her for her birthday this last year, she figured he was probably nursing a nasty hangover. Any excuse for overdoing it.

She had decided, come what may, she was going to keep the car. As his gift to her, she didn’t think Dan could take it away from her. But she knew she wasn’t going to walk away from this marriage with much else. Plus, she didn’t know how she was going to support herself since she had been out of the work force for five years. When they had married, Dan had insisted she quit her job, saying he didn’t want to have her working for him anymore, or at least just in bed.

Her eyes prickled as she came into view of the house they had built during the flush of their first year together. Dan had wanted it to be a cabin so they had kept it under 4000 square feet. The structure sat on the edge of the bluffline slightly closer than was legal, depending on where you measured from. After the inspector had been there and signed off on it, Dan had moved the stakes. He was proud of that. He never liked anyone telling him what to do. Especially not her.

While the footprint was modest, the house soared three stories high: the master bedroom filled the whole top floor. The
structure felt like a treehouse. Shingled in cedar, it had a green metal roof. She had insisted on that color so it would blend in to the treeline. Dan had let her have her way on that one decision. He must have loved her then.

Sherri wished she could hate Dan. She wished she could be really angry at him, but the person she was mad at was herself. What a fool she had been. When your boss takes you on a business trip and then buys you a sexy outfit while his wife doesn’t even know you’re with him, you have to know what you’re getting into. How could she have ever thought he would change his ways?

Dan was what they called a
puer.
Sherri remembered this term from her college psychology class. A Jungian term, it described a man who never wanted to grow up: Peter Pan, Mick Jagger. Bill Clinton for that matter.

Sherri parked the car right by the front door. They had had a pretty civil conversation two nights ago. She had asked Dan if she could come to the cabin and get some things. She was staying in their house in town, but wanted a few of her sweaters and a book she had left out here.

The front door was locked. Sherri shook her head. Dan brought his city mentality with him. When she was staying alone at the cabin, she never locked the doors. But then she had grown up in a small town where no one ever locked anything.

She dug her key out of the bottom of her purse and unlocked the door. Stepping in the house, she could smell the faint whiff of cigars, one of Dan’s many vices. The kitchen light was on and the house was very still. She had noticed how the snow blanketing everything also muffled sound. Dan must still be
sleeping. She hoped to god he didn’t have a visitor with him. Even he couldn’t be that crass.

Kicking the snow off her boots, she hollered, “Anyone home?”

Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe he had gone off with someone last night. She decided not to bother taking her boots off. Dan still had the cleaning lady come in every other week. A dirty floor wasn’t her problem anymore.

She walked through the house and looked into the garage. His car was there. His BMW with every option available. His one true love had always been the cars.

Cautiously she made her way upstairs. Not only was Dan not in the bed, but it wasn’t even rumpled. She walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the lake. This view is what she would miss more than anything. The windows were west-facing and looked out over the treetops. The lake was covered with snow and shone like a vast expanse of glittering field, cupped in the hollow of the bluffs.

A red-tailed hawk flew out from the bluff and she went with it, soaring out over the lake. For Dan this view had meant power, for her it had meant freedom, a sense of the earth that she had never had before. She had learned all the birds, could even identify them by the way they held their wings as they glided.

Dan couldn’t tell a chickadee from a bald eagle.

Sherri pulled out a carryall and went through her drawers, grabbing the few sweaters she wanted. Most of the clothes she had left in the cabin she didn’t really care about.

Dan might be sleeping in the downstairs family room. Sometimes he fell asleep in front of the TV. As she walked down
the two flights of stairs, she thought of leaving without even seeing him. They had little to say to each other anymore. But when she stepped into the bottom floor she felt how warm it was. He must have left the sauna on.

She didn’t see him anyplace. The sixty-inch flat-screen TV was dark. The couch was empty. She pulled open the door to the sauna and a blast of hot air hit her in the face. A bottle of vodka sat on the bench in a pool of water, a sodden cigar butt next to it.

“Dan?” She turned off the heat in the sauna and checked the back door. It was locked, but she went to the window and looked out. Snow covered everything. She looked at her garden and could make out the clump of hostas from the flower stems still sticking up. But it looked like there was a good foot of snow.

Just as she was about to turn away, she saw an odd form, like a snow-covered log, in the middle of her flowerbed. A tree branch fallen down? A dead deer?

The lump was quite large, long. She couldn’t remember anything being there this fall.

She stared out the picture window, then noticed it was smeared with handprints. Even though the cabin might not be her responsibility any more, the prints made her mad. How had they gotten there? What had Dan been up to?

The wind blew up large eddies of snow, twirling up like miniature tornadoes. As she watched, the snow drifted off the form in her garden, uncovering some of it. She still couldn’t tell what it was. From this distance, it looked like a hand, but how could that be?

Without thinking, she moved her head forward until her nose bumped the window. She was sure she was looking at a
hand. She could make out the glint of a ring. With horror crawling up her throat, she tried to make what she was seeing something else—a dried flower, a pale stone, a piece of statuary. But the ring looked like Daniel’s signet ring. How was that possible?

If that was Dan’s hand that meant he was buried in the snow. Could he have been so drunk last night that he had fallen down in the snowbank and not been able to get up? What had happened to him?

She had to get to him.

Sherri reached down to open the door and found it locked. The dead bolt was in place. How could it be locked? Dan couldn’t have locked it when he was outside unless he had a key.

Her hand shook as she tried to undo the bolt. She had to get to him. She had to get him help.

The bitter cold knocked her in the chest. She ran out into the snow, then stopped and stared down at what she could now clearly see was a waxy hand, like that of a mummy, no color to it.

She sank down in the snow and touched the hand, then wiped clear his face. He had turned to ice.

He must have been locked out and then froze to death. No one deserved that. Not even her bastard husband Dan.

In some part of her mind, she knew he was dead, but the thought that he might still be alive pushed her to call for help.

New Year’s Day: 9:30 am

A
my unplugged the block heater on the squad car, climbed into the frigid vehicle, and turned the key. Sluggishly, the car engine turned over, but didn’t catch. She slapped her mittened hands together, waited a few seconds, then tried again. She didn’t want to wear the battery out. This cold weather had gone on for too long. What she wouldn’t give for an attached garage, but she guessed she was lucky that an off-street parking place came with her apartment.

With relief, she heard the engine come to life, gave it a little gas, turned the heat on full blast, and then climbed back out to clear all the windows. The ice was especially thick on the front window. After she scraped it all off, she saw there was even some ice on the inside of the car.

Seeing that the heat gauge needle had risen, she backed up and got on the street. No one else around. She only lived about six blocks away from the government center, easy walking distance, except on a day like today. Could freeze your face off in less time than it took to tie up a horse.

When Amy walked into the sheriff’s department, she caught Tanya yawning at the front desk, a party hat tilted on her red hair like the leaning Tower of Pisa.

“You look ready to go home,” Amy said.

“Got that right.”

“Busy night?” Amy asked.

“Not really. I’ve lived through worse New Year’s Eves. I think the snow and cold kept the partying to a minimum. Two drunks are sleeping it off in the jail and a kid wandered away from a party, but Bill found him sleeping in the barn, visiting with the cows.”

Amy was glad to hear that Bill had worked last night. Even though they hadn’t been seeing each other for a while, she still kept track of him and hated to think of him having fun without her. Right after she broke up with him, he had been mad for a few days, then he ignored her for a couple weeks. Now they were almost back to being friends, casual friends, but at least he would say hi to her. She knew it wasn’t very nice of her, but she wanted to be the first one to start seeing someone else.

“Roxie coming in?” Amy asked.

“She called to say she’d be late,” Tanya lifted up her party hat, then let it snap back down. “I just want to climb in bed and sleep until tomorrow. I guess it’s called hibernating.”

“Anything going on this morning?”

“Yeah, we got a call from near Stockholm, something about a dog.”

“I’m going to drive down that way. They had a break-in down at the Short Stop a couple days ago and I want to check back with them.”

“Perfect. On your way you can check out the Walker residence. A woman called and said that there was something in her backyard. She didn’t call on the emergency line so I don’t think there’s any big rush.”

“Sure. Did she say what?”

“She seemed pretty calm about it. I think she said her dog. I couldn’t hear her that well. She kept breaking up. I think she was calling on a cell phone.”

“Why’s she calling us about her dog? She should have called animal control. Last thing I want to deal with this morning is a dead dog.”

“Why don’t you swing by—it’s on your way.”

At least the car was still warm, Amy thought as she climbed back into the vehicle, a cup of steaming coffee balanced in her hand. She drove down 25 waiting for the sun to crest Twin Bluffs. These bitter cold days were always bright, clear, and often still. Absolutely beautiful. Right as she approached highway 35 the sun lifted up over the bluffs, sundogs on either side of it. She pulled into the wayside stop there, a convenient spot to tuck in and catch speeders, drank her coffee and stared at the two lines of rainbow, frost glinting in the milky sunlight.

Ten miles down the road, she turned the car up the bluff. The plow had already been through and the road was slippery, but cleared.

The Walker house rose over the crest of the driveway, an odd tower of a house, all the lights on in the early morning dawn, the sun barely topping the field. Amy was always amazed at these houses that lined the bluff, like masters of another race come to live among the peons for a while.