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.
As she made the left turn onto a twisting, narrow road she felt the tires of the Explorer spin, then catch, then spin again, and wondered if she’d die en route to her first day on the new job. Lake Kittering waited on her left, fifty feet straight down from the road that clung to the side of the hill. In a couple months there would be patches of black water scattered across the white ice like dozens of open mouths, hungry for the next car that would challenge the much-dented guardrail and lose.
Local lore had it that the road up Kittering Hill to the County Courthouse had dispatched more defendants than any judge in the district, and on this particular morning, Iris Rikker believed it.
By the time she topped the treacherous slope, Iris had eaten all the lipstick off her lower lip, and she couldn’t feel her hands anymore. She loosened her grip on the wheel and flexed her fingers to bring back the circulation.
She skidded past the two-story brick building that housed the Sheriff’s Office and jail, its windows throwing yellow light out into the snowy dark. Her eyes briefly darted left and she shivered, thinking of walking into that building later, facing the people who had awakened this morning subordinate to the first female sheriff in county history. She should have brought doughnuts or cookies or something. It was probably the only way they’d let her in the front door.
A block beyond the courthouse, the road started a sharp downslope toward the lake. She figured she was at the public boat landing when the road ended and the ice shacks began. Shorty’s Garage was a gray metal pole building a block beyond the courthouse, right on the lakeshore. The lot was cluttered with unlicensed vehicles in various states of demise, including an ice-encrusted green junker that was tethered to a tow truck like a homely dog on a leash. An equally ice-encrusted Dundas County deputy was standing at the rear of the car.
Iris left the Explorer blocking the entrance and slogged through the snow toward him.
‘You Rikker?’ he asked from behind a hood that nearly obscured his face.
Iris stifled the impulse to answer ‘Me Rikker,’ wondering why no one in this county ever spoke in complete sentences. ‘Yes. Are you Lieutenant Sampson?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ Iris said, sticking out a mittened hand, which Lieutenant Sampson either didn’t see, or chose to ignore. The people of the county gave her seven more votes than the incumbent sheriff, but it was pretty obvious that the deputies weren’t happy about it.
Sampson smacked the trunk of the junker, making her jump. ‘Lottery car.’
Iris squinted through the snow at the old wreck. ‘You’re kidding. That car is a lottery prize?’
He snorted or sighed or made some kind of a sound Iris couldn’t interpret. Or maybe it had just been the wind. ‘Forgot. You’re not from around here.’
She considered telling him she’d lived in the county for a whole year, that her latest pair of Keds hadn’t even seen a city sidewalk, then decided against it. You were always an outsider in a place like this, unless you’d been born in a farmhouse your great-grandfather built with his two hands and a pair of mules, or some such nonsense.
‘We put a junker out on Lake Kittering every winter,’ he explained. ‘The whole county bets on the day and hour the car will finally fall through the ice. Been doing it since I was a kid. Winner gets bragging rights, proceeds go to charity. This time some asshole put the car over a spring, and that warm spell for the past couple weeks cracked the ice yesterday and she went down, just before the first storm hit.’
Iris suppressed a shudder and tried to look sheriff-like. ‘So the body is in the car?’
‘Nope. Just making conversation. Body’s out there.’ He jerked his head toward the lake. ‘Just beyond that cluster of shacks. Come on.’
He was ten feet away and almost lost in the increasingly heavy snowfall by the time Iris got her legs to move
