She opened her eyes and squared her shoulders, breathing fast and hard, as if oxygen were courage she could suck right in.
Smart cops call for backup. Stupid cops die. Her instructor in procedures had drummed that mantra into her head for weeks. For a woman suddenly alone in life, she’d found it strangely reassuring to know that she’d never be alone on the job. The tricky part was learning when to apply the lesson. Hello, this is Sheriff Rikker, and I have footprints here. Send backup.
She had a little brain giggle at that, and reversed her earlier decision. Damnit, she was being silly after all. Close to paranoid, actually. So she had footprints in the yard. So what? Sure, she was really off the few beaten paths they had out here and hadn’t had a single drop-in all year, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Maybe someone was looking for directions; maybe Mark had come by to pick up some of the winter things he’d stored in the basement and she’d missed a chance to shoot him with her new big gun; maybe the Jehovah’s Witnesses were out proselytizing in a snowstorm.
She got disgusted and cold at the same time, and truly weary of being afraid. What would her constituency think if they ever found out their new sheriff had been scared out of her wits by a couple of sets of footprints? She hadn’t counted on this job, but now she was stuck with it, and it was time she started thinking and acting like a cop instead of a timid, apologetic woman who got nervous every time she drove home after dark.
She pulled out her flashlight and moved her feet at last, following the set of prints that led away from the porch and around the side of the house.
It was breathless and silent, except for the hiss of sleet and the intermittent creaks of tree branches complaining under the new weight of accumulating ice. Every few steps, she’d stop and sweep the cone of light on the yard around her, but the snowy surface was pristine except for the set of prints she followed.
The ugly, tubular shape of the five-hundred-gallon propane tank came into view on the far side of the house, its metal sides flashing back her light. The trail of footprints turned into a jumble around the tank.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Iris mumbled, and felt her shoulders drop a full inch as the tension drained out of them.
The propane man. Her one and only regular visitor, and she’d forgotten all about him. A tall, round teddy bear of a nice guy with big feet and a big laugh and enough black magic to know when her tank was getting low and needed a refill. So he came to make a delivery, stopped at the house to say hello as he always did, and went about his business when he found she wasn’t home.
She shook her head at her own foolishness and turned around to slog back to the porch. Nice going, Iris. You almost called the cops on the propane man.
She never saw the prints behind the tank, close to the house. Never noticed the narrow basement window that was almost closed, but not quite.
In spite of the pokey water heater, the laboring furnace, and the windows that leaked warm air like a sieve, magic happened whenever Iris walked into the old house. No matter how badly the day had gone, the minute she walked into her cozy kitchen, it all simply fell away, almost as if the house itself refused to admit bad things. She didn’t know what it was about the place – a homeyness that came with old-fashioned woodwork and arched doorways and big fireplaces, maybe – but she did know that she’d never felt it before.
Puck was sitting in front of the refrigerator, blinking big green eyes in silent greeting. Even before taking off her coat Iris picked up Puck, stroked her silky black fur, and felt the rumbling hum of her purr against her cheek. It wasn’t much of a warm body to come home to, but tonight it felt like enough. Puck meowed a complaint when Iris set her down, and Iris knew just how she felt. Every living creature needed a hug now and then.
She shrugged out of her coat, then hung her car keys on a handmade pegboard that made it look like a janitor lived here. There were five pegs, all jammed with loaded key rings, most of which had been here when they bought the place. A hundred keys at least, and Iris had no idea what they were for. She was afraid to throw them out, thinking that eventually she’d find the secret doors they all belonged to.
Yes, she’d been a brave little soul, following the scary footprints until they proved her a fool, but she still felt compelled to make a pass through the house before she did anything else, flipping on each and every light until the place was glowing like a centenarian’s birthday cake. Once she was satisfied that she and Puck were the only two inhabitants, she dumped out a plate of tuna for the cat and poured herself a glass of wine. ‘Cheers, Puck.’
Puck sniffed the plate, bolted down an enormous mouthful, then blinked up at her mistress, seemingly confused by the rare gift of human food.
‘We’re celebrating my first day on the job, so you get albacore, I get chardonnay.’
Puck seemed satisfied with the answer, and went back to the work of eating.
What coming home to this house started, the wine finished. By her third sip, Iris felt the last of the tension seep out of her body, letting the exhaustion move in. The simple act of locking the back door seemed monumentally difficult. It was so hard to turn the ancient deadbolt, so draining to move through the house, flipping out the lights one by one, focusing on the window locks, trying to remember if they had to be turned to the right or to the left.
Great, she thought, on top of everything else, turns out you’re a cheap drunk. Three sips of wine and you’re over the moon.
She forced weary legs up the full flight of stairs to her bedroom, feeling like an Everest climber without a flag to plant in the summit. She marveled that she didn’t drown in the shower, remembered to brush her teeth and hang her holster on the front bedpost, and then she didn’t remember anything else, except how to pull the covers up to her chin.
A good night’s sleep, she thought, remembering Sampson’s words as she closed her eyes.
But there were other eyes in the basement that had looked up at the creaking floorboards as Iris had moved through the house, waiting for the floors to go silent.
23
Iris was never certain what awakened her in the middle of the night – not in this house. Squirrels in the attic bowling with their winter cache of nuts; mice in the walls, shredding what was left of the hundred-year-old newspapers they used for insulation in the old days; branches from an overgrown tree scraping the siding; and once, a black bear coming out of hibernation long enough to poke around her barbecue grill for summer leftovers. You never knew.
And tonight she revisited her day in her dreams, from the slow grinding of her almost-dead battery in the morning to the crunch of snow under her feet as she followed the propane man’s footprints at night. Once again she saw Steve Doyle’s dead face and Julie Albright’s ruined one, which didn’t do a lot for a restful sleep, either.
She rolled her head to the right to read the digital clock. Three a.m. Plenty of time to snuggle back under the down comforter for a few more hours before her bare feet hit the cold floor, to start another day. She closed her eyes and started to drift off, thinking that she had to stop turning the heat down so low at night, because, damn, it was cold.
Some noises disturbed your sleep; some yanked you up out of blackness like you were a hooked fish on a line, snapping open your eyes and making your heart pound. Was it a real noise, or one you dreamed? You never knew that, either, so you lay there holding your breath, listening hard, waiting for it to happen again, afraid that it would, because the noise that Iris had heard sounded like a wild animal screaming.
She counted her breaths, thinking they were way too fast, trying to keep up with her heart. She got all the way to fifteen before she heard it again and sat straight up in bed.