A Wicked Snow

     My thanks to fabulous agent Susan Raihofer of the David Black Literary Agency for saying, “You can do it”; to Kensington Publishing’s editor extraordinaire, Michaela Hamilton (“You did it”); and to my wife, Claudia, and our daughters, Morgan and Marta. Thanks for all the sage advice, savvy comments, and kindly nagging. My gratitude also to Kathrine Beck, Tina Marie Brewer, Susan Higgins, Julie O’Donnell, and Phyllis Hatfield, for their much- appreciated support along the way.

Don’t miss Gregg Olsen’s next mesmerizing

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A COLD, DARK PLACE

Coming from Pinnacle in Spring 2008!

Chapter One

Emily Kenyon was thrashed and she looked it. She pulled herself from her gold Honda Accord, picked up her purse, and walked toward the front door. She turned her tired gaze toward the end of Kestrel Avenue. The neighborhood of vintage homes was safe. Not one fish-scale shingle from the three-story painted lady across the street had been harmed. Not so much as a splinter. Emily could even hear kids playing a couple of doors down. Everything was as it had been. The only hint that the world had turned over was the slight scent of acrid smoke that wafted through the air. It was faint—but enough of a reminder that across town, homes and cars had burned.

It had been two days since the tornado pounced on a section of Briar Falls Estates two miles away. It came nearly without warning and left a jagged swath of destruction that stole the hard work of homeowners and gardeners in ten minutes’ time. Roofs had been peeled off, play sets and bicycles hurled into trees. There was no making sense of whose house had been spared and whose hadn’t. Destruction reigned on the west side of Hawes Avenue, while the east side was pristine. Across the street from a home that had been nearly ripped in two, a birdbath stood without a drop spilled.

None had died. It was true that an elderly lady who had holed up in her bathroom had been hospitalized in bad shape. Emily expected that the woman, in her eighties, would survive despite her trauma. The lady was a fighter.

Emily stepped into the foyer. As she set down her purse on an antique walnut console table, its contents shifted. Her detective’s badge holder slipped out; along with a pink lipstick she wished she’d used up and could toss. But she was thrifty, and though it didn’t really work with her dark brown hair and eyes, she’d wear it until it was gone. She scooted the badge and lipstick tube back inside the pouch and called out for her daughter.

“Jenna? I’m home.”

The scent of cinnamon toast and the emptied glass of milk on the counter indicated her daughter was somewhere in the house. Emily didn’t wait for a response.

“I’m going to take a shower. Then let’s go out and get something to eat.”

“Okay, Mom,” a voice finally came from down the hall. “I’m on the phone. I’ll talk to you when you’re out. I’m hungry. Take a fast shower!”

Emily smiled. Jenna was seventeen, but still very much her little girl. It was just the two of them now. David had left for Seattle and had become a somewhat shadowy figure since the divorce was final. There had been a few dates with new men—even a fairly serious affair with a local lawyer. But Cary McConnell was too possessive and controlling, and Emily had had enough of that with her first—and only—marriage. He still called, but she avoided him whenever she could. That wasn’t easy. Cherrystone, Washington, was a town of less than 15,000. She was in the courthouse two or three times a week, and so was he.

Emily snake-hipped out of her black skirt and unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall to the floor. She was slender, blessed with long legs and a figure that looked more twenty than forty, which she was approaching on her next birthday. She clipped her dark tresses in a ponytail and twisted the shower knob with the red H all the way to the left. The C she moved a quarter turn. The old pipes clanked and steam swirled. Emily liked hot water.

“Pietro’s?” she called out before stepping inside the white and black tiled interior. “I’m thinking pizza.”

Of course, she really wasn’t. She was thinking of the tornado and its aftermath. It had come in the darkness of Saturday evening, almost unexpected as twisters were rare in Washington State. Only a handful of damaging storms had been recorded there; the worst had been one that killed eleven near Walla Walla in 1952. The twister that came to Cherrystone on Saturday had howled in the darkness and snatched up all in its wake. Houses and cars were shredded as if in a giant steel-toothed blender. Almost two dozen homes were destroyed or seriously damaged. A few, sucked in the air like Dorothy Gale’s Kansas house, had risen above the pines and landed, not in Oz, but in a neighbor’s pasture. A dairy near the junction of Wayne Road and U.S. 91 had been pulverized to such a degree that it would take a magnifying glass to determine what color the barn paint had been on the splinters of siding, which had been flicked like balsa. The Winston Granary was flattened which meant already scarce jobs had instantly become even scarcer. Five trucks that had been carefully parked in a row after shift had been tossed to utter ruin. Power lines had been snapped like frayed jute. A semi had been lifted more than a hundred yards and slammed into a hillside.

Emily tilted her head backward, a funnel of water pouring from the chrome fixture. Hot water, beyond a temperature most could endure, flowed over her naked body, sending the stress of the tornado, the worries of a long day, down the drain. Stepping from the shower, Emily wrapped a thick cotton towel around her torso. She bent over, wrapped a second one around her head, then flipped her hair back. She called once more to Jenna.

“You never answered, honey. Is Pietro’s all right?” Again, silence.

Steam swirled in the bathroom and she flipped on the fan. A moment later, she slipped on a terry robe and padded down the hall to Jenna’s bedroom—a space that had been hers when she was a girl. A rectangle of yellowed glue on the door revealed the spot were she’d once put up a NO BOYS ALLOWED sign to keep her little brother, Kevin, at bay. With each step, a memory. Through a knife-slit of light in the doorway, she could see Jenna typing out a message on her girly-girl pink Macintosh computer. Jenna was a petite girl, a little small for her age. Her stature didn’t diminish her, though; indeed, it only made her stand out. Long hair like her mother’s framed her delicate heart-shaped face. Her eyes were blue, the cool color of the Pacific. She tapped on the keyboard with frosted pink fingernails, chipped and ready for another mother/daughter manicure session in front of the TV with one of the Law and Orders on.

Emily pushed open the door, startling Jenna, who looked up with a frozen smile.

“Oh, mom, I didn’t hear you.” She closed the chat window and swung around to face her mother.

“Are you up to no good?” Emily asked, allowing a smile to come to her lips, but deep down, the very idea of her daughter chatting with anyone was more than she could take. She’d seen the way perverts worked the keyboards of personal computers and stalked their prey, unsuspecting children in houses all across America.

“Just talking with Shali,” she said. “And yes, we were up to no good. There’s a nice