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.
They were coming, of course. The empty land on either side of the freeway was starting to fill up, and eventually those Armani-suited hobby farmers would venture this far north, but for now the houses on the road Iris drove were pitifully few and far between.
Her fingers tightened on the wheel as she imagined the long, cold walk for help if any of the locals on the roads this morning lost traction and ended up nose-deep in a snowy ditch. Up here there were still a lot of people – especially the old-timers – who regarded cell phones with deep suspicion.