Snow Blind (8 page)

9

Iris Rikker hadn’t been up before the sun in ten years, and she didn’t like it. By the time she stumbled her way through the dark bedroom to the wall switch, she’d cracked her elbow on the dresser and stepped in a fresh pile of cat vomit.

‘Shit.
Shit
.’

The offending cat materialized when the light came on. She was sitting near her little surprise, blinking her startled pupils down to pinheads.

‘Puck, you puke,’ Iris muttered, then hopped on one bare foot into the bathroom and stuck the other one in the sink.

The water was freezing. Iris sucked air through her teeth when it hit her foot. It would take long minutes for hot water to rise two floors from the ancient heater in the basement, and she didn’t have extra minutes this morning. New water heater. It was first on the list of home improvements she might be able to afford now. That was something, at least.

Even the sound of running water couldn’t drown out the breathy wail of the wind around this north corner of the old farmhouse.
Icy pellets of sleet dived out of the dark to tap at the bathroom window, where a layer of frost had built up on the inside wooden sash again. New windows. Maybe that should be first.

She scowled at the sleet hitting the window as she dried her foot, thinking about moving to California, or Siberia – anywhere she could count on the weather to be reasonably consistent. Two days ago she’d ridden her bicycle the quarter-mile to her mailbox; yesterday the mailbox had disappeared under a foot of snow; this morning a new storm front was adding a coating of ice to the mix, just for openers.

The cat waited until Iris was sitting on the toilet, then came into the bathroom and simply stood there, staring at her.

‘Voyeur. Puking voyeur.’

Puck blinked at her, then came over to rub against her legs. Iris chose to interpret this as a kitty apology, and stroked the thinning black fur. The cat was fifteen this spring, and probably shouldn’t be blamed for the occasional uproar of an aging digestive system. ‘Poor Puck. Don’t you feel good?’

The cat began to purr, then promptly threw up on Iris’s other foot.

It was six a.m. and still dark when Iris finally went
downstairs to the kitchen. She wore the clothes she’d laid out the night before after an agonizing hour of indecision. Black slacks, white pullover, and a black blazer waiting, draped over the back of her chair. She had purplish smudges under her eyes this morning, and makeup wasn’t helping.

She was in the middle of her first cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal when the phone rang.

‘Is this Iris Rikker?’ a male voice asked.

‘Yes, who is this?’

‘Lieutenant Sampson. We’re down at Lake Kittering, public landing, you know where that is?’

‘Uh …’

‘North shore, just past the courthouse, right next to Shorty’s Garage. We’ve got a body.’

Iris stood absolutely still, connected to a brand-new world by the length of a phone cord. She took a breath. ‘I can be there in half an hour.’

‘No, you can’t. The roads are shit. But don’t worry. This one isn’t going anywhere.’

The click of a sudden disconnect made her blink. She eased the receiver back into its cradle, then took a step back from the phone and hugged her arms. She looked around at her cozy kitchen – white cupboards, dark green wallpaper, a jug of dried flowers on an oak table. It smelled like fresh coffee and the cinnamon candle she’d lit last night. It was a
nice kitchen – a homey farm kitchen – and phone calls about bodies didn’t belong here.

There was a full-length mirror on the inside of the closet door, and Iris looked into it as she pulled on a pair of moon boots she’d had for ten years and a black parka she’d bought last week. Something old, something new, she thought, wondering why she looked so small this morning; a little blond-haired woman with blue eyes too big for her face and very pale skin.

Damnit, there weren’t supposed to be bodies. Bodies had never been mentioned, not once.

She stared holes into the eyes of her reflection, mentally reinforcing who and what she was – onetime city girl, substitute English teacher at whatever school in the district would take her, and the brand-new deputy who’d been working a scant two months on night-shift dispatch because part-time teaching couldn’t pay the bills – and then she closed her eyes and took a deep, shaky breath. Yesterday she had been those things. Today she was the newly elected sheriff of one of the largest rural counties in Minnesota, and some jackass named Sampson thought she was the person to call when you found a body lying around.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she breathed at the mirror, and then headed for the upstairs bathroom at a dead run.

Puck found her kneeling in front of the toilet.

Iris looked at her balefully. ‘Watch and learn, Puck.’

Aside from the monster under the bed and other such delicious childhood scares, Iris had never really been afraid of anything. In a life that, by most people’s standards, seemed charmed, there hadn’t been any reason for fear. Until Mark left, the bastard. For some reason, that changed everything. Suddenly the nighttime noises of the old house became sinister, imagined faces lurked just beyond every black window, and now she stood with her hand on the back-door knob, paralyzed by the thought of stepping outside onto her own porch, simply because it was dark out there. Oh, how she hated him for that; for shattering a self-assurance she had always taken for granted.

Damnit, you have never been afraid of the dark, and you are not afraid of the dark now
.

‘Yeah, right,’ she said aloud, then opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

The wind picked up as soon as Iris was away from the shelter of the house. It blew off the hood of her parka and whipped her hair in crazy circles around her head. Four steps away from the porch and the circle of light from the house bled into darkness. She slogged blindly in the general direction of her SUV through knee-deep drifts, cursing
Mark again, because shoveling snow was supposed to be his job. Too bad he hadn’t stuck around long enough for the first snowfall – lots of people died of heart attacks while shoveling snow.

She couldn’t see the truck until she almost stumbled into it, and small wonder – the damn thing looked like a giant ice cube. She swiped at the snow on the windshield and felt a solid layer of ice beneath it that was probably going to take fifteen minutes to chip off. Jesus, why had they bought a house without a garage? It was another thing she badly wanted to blame Mark for, but that particular idiocy fell squarely on her shoulders. He’d actually pointed out that little flaw about the property, but it had been eighty degrees and sunny at the time, and the charming old farmhouse, beautiful yard, and low price tag had lulled her into temporary stupidity.

She yanked on the driver’s-side door and nearly ripped the handle off, but it didn’t budge. Of course, the goddamned doors would be frozen shut, because it was clearly her destiny to be waylaid this morning by every possible inconvenience winter in Minnesota could dish out. In fact, she might as well start calculating odds on whether or not the truck would actually start, since she’d been a bad and slothful person and hadn’t taken the time to stop off at the mechanic’s and get a new battery, even though that very chore had been on her to-do list for the
past three months.
It’s a mild winter, I don’t need it this minute, I don’t have time to wait for them to install it now, it can wait until tomorrow, next week, next month, next year
… The litany of a born procrastinator.

She made a seamless mental transition from really annoyed to really pissed off, and started hammering her fist along the seam of the door, trying to dislodge the small glacier that had formed there overnight, and when that didn’t work, she tried a modified version of a flying drop kick.

The drop kick seemed to work, and the door finally groaned open with a shower of ice shards. She said a little prayer, jammed the key into the ignition, and was greeted by the sickeningly slow, whining sound of a near-dead battery, just as she predicted. This was not good. Not good at all. Did sheriffs get demerits for showing up late to murder scenes? Would her name plaque have a little frowny face after her name?
Sheriff Iris Rikker

She kept cranking the engine because she didn’t know what else to do, and started to panic as the whining got slower, but miraculously the old SUV eventually sputtered to life.

She cleared a patch on the windshield just big enough to see through, let the engine and defroster warm up for a few minutes, then gave it some gas. The truck lurched a little as it broke through a snowdrift, but at least the four-wheel drive was
working and she rolled down her circular driveway until her headlights hit the drafty, spooky old barn where the ghost lived.

Shit. She put on the brakes and sat there for a moment, staring at the little door that had been closed last night, now standing ajar.

It was one of those little things the locals used to embellish the ghost stories they loved to tell about the old farmstead. Doors opening on their own, strange lights flickering in the summer dark, and a faint, howling sound some folks said they used to hear after the old lady who’d owned the place dropped dead in the driveway with a gun in her hand. Delicious nonsense, of course, concocted around the genuine mystery of the gun in the old lady’s hand. Iris knew perfectly well that the flickering lights were summer fireflies, that the howling came from the coyotes that lived in the woods beyond the back field, and the mystery of the opening doors had been nicely explained the first time a weather system moved in.

It had happened a few times in the summer, when the big winds hit the back of the barn and blew through the cracks. The latch on the hundred-year-old door had long since bent out of shape, and wishes and dreams were just about all that kept it closed, and even those didn’t work when the wind got busy. And the wind had been very busy
last night, so of course the door had blown open. Perfectly logical. So why were her palms sweating?

Leave it. Pretend you never saw it
.

And, oh, she liked that idea just fine, but the icy - snow-sleet mix was piling up around the base of the door. Another few hours of that and it would freeze it right to the ground, it would stay frozen open all winter, and snow would pile up inside the barn. They never should have stored the bed in there.

It was the one and only material possession that Iris really valued – a Civil War-era four-poster that had been in her family for a hundred fifty years, and now it was sitting in a drafty old barn younger than it was because it was too big to get through the doors of the house. It was still carefully wrapped in the moving blankets, with heavy padded tarps over that, but as far as she knew, you didn’t preserve old walnut by letting snow blow all over it, and it wouldn’t do the mattress much good, either.

Thirty seconds, that’s all it will take. Maybe a minute
.

And still she sat there behind the wheel, watching the sleet mix swirl in the beam of the headlights while her silly heart sputtered a little, finally making her feel ridiculous.

She got out of the truck fast, plowed through snow up to her knees, and started kicking away the newly formed ice around the bottom of the door. When she had it cleared enough to close, she
stepped through the doorway and into a cavernous dark, reaching for the flashlight she’d left on the seat of the truck.

She cursed under her breath, decided she could find something as big as a bed in the dark, and started shuffling forward. She heard the rustle of her boots moving through straw, old boards creaking in answer to a gust of wind she could not feel, and the contented murmuring of pigeons high in the rafters. She could hear the creak and the groan of the barn’s old timbers complaining to the wind, and tried to find the music in it, but it just sounded like a creepy soundtrack for a haunted-house movie.

Finally the bed was under her hands and she felt the padded moving blankets, still tied in place around the legs, still layered on top of the bed and snugged under the sideboards. And then she found the corner where the wind had dislodged the padded canvas, exposing a slice of mattress.

She took off her glove, breathed a sigh of relief to feel that the mattress was still dry, then snugged the cover back in place before going back out to the truck.

Behind her in the barn, beneath the layers of padded canvas on the bed, two eyes opened wide.

10

Even with four-wheel drive, it took Iris well over half an hour to travel the fifteen miles of county highway to the Kittering Road turnoff. Lieutenant Sampson – whoever the hell he was – had been right about the roads. They were slick with the new glaze of ice, and now fat white pinwheels were spinning out of the dark to splat on her windshield. Four more inches before it was all over, the radio DJ announced with that perverted glee of a born Minnesotan.

The old-timers who lived in Dundas County liked to think of it as Minnesota’s frontier. Sixty miles to the south, the twin cities of Minneapolis–St Paul beckoned to the high school seniors like a two-dollar whore; but one step over the northern county line and you were as likely to run into coyote and bear as you were a commuter.