who understood. And besides, she wasn’t quite ready to go home to her dark, empty house just yet.
‘Would you like to split this cheesecake with me?’ she blurted out, probably sounding desperate and pathetic, like the kid nobody would play with at school.
‘No, thanks. I already had a piece.’ He paused at the door, looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. ‘But I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee, if there’s any made.’
Maybe he’d recognized something in her eyes, or maybe he just felt sorry for her, but Iris didn’t particularly care what his reason was for staying – she wasn’t above accepting charity at this point. ‘It’s a half-hour old. Will that do?’
‘That’ll do just fine.’ Sampson added powdered creamer and a few packets of sugar for good measure, then took his place on the recliner again. ‘So how does the city girl like living in an old farmhouse?’
‘Well, it’s creaky, drafty, the ceiling leaks, and I just got a notice from the EPA that says I have to update my septic system by next September to the tune of about fifteen thousand dollars. Other than that, it’s charming.’
‘The place sat vacant for a couple years before you bought it. A lot can happen to a house when nobody’s living in it.’
‘I’m surprised it took so long to sell. It’s a beautiful piece of property and the price was right. All it needs is a little TLC.’
Sampson tipped his head to one side. ‘Superstition still runs pretty high out here. Not a lot of people are all that eager to buy a haunted house.’
Iris rolled her eyes.
‘Hey. Don’t make fun. That place used to scare the crap out of us when we were kids.’
Iris frowned. ‘When you were kids? But the lady just died a couple years ago.’
Sampson chuckled. ‘Emily isn’t your ghost. It’s her husband, Lars, and he’s been haunting that place for almost thirty years.’
‘How’d he die?’
Sampson shrugged. ‘Nobody knows for sure. The way the old folks tell it, he was a mean, lazy, drunken son of a bitch and a whoremonger to boot.’
Iris frowned, trying to remember if a whoremonger was a pimp or a john. Who used words like that in this century?
‘Let the cows starve and the few crops he planted rot in the fields,’ Sampson continued. ‘Just kept selling off the land piece by piece to pay for his habits – and that was Emily’s land, by the way, not his. One day he just up and disappeared. Some folks figured he’d just wandered off drunk into the woods one night and died of his own stupidity; others figured Emily finally got fed up, killed the bastard, and buried him somewhere on the land. That’s when the ghost stories started.’
Iris gave him a rueful look. ‘He left her, that’s all. Sometimes men do that.’ She colored a little then, because this was a small place in a big county and of course Sampson knew her history. And now he was looking at her hard.
‘Not all men.’
‘Hmph. Speak for yourself.’
He smiled a little and got up to leave. ‘I always do, Sheriff.’
When Iris left the office a half an hour later, a wicked combination of sleet and snow had already begun to lacquer the roads, and snow-laden tree limbs were sagging perilously close to breaking point under the additional burden of ice. Judging by the fast-deteriorating conditions, Dundas County was going to be one giant hockey rink by sunrise. Sampson hadn’t been kidding about the ice storm.
By the time Iris turned onto the winding county road that would take her home, her speedometer was barely registering, and her palms were slick with sweat inside her gloves. She hadn’t seen another pair of headlights in fifteen minutes, and the absolute blackness peculiar to this alien world without streetlamps seemed to swallow her up. It was always on dark, lonely drives like this when she wondered if she’d ever get used to life in the country.
The one person in this world she counted as a friend had been horrified that she had agreed to move this far north, or as she had put it, ‘to the world center of cultural nowhere and about as far from help as you can get in an emergency. I’ve seen the country, and let me tell you, it’s dark, dangerous, and no one lives there.’
She smiled at that particular memory until it was clouded by the reminder of what a sheep she’d been then, following a soon-to-be unfaithful husband who had childish dreams a whole lot bigger than any other part of his anatomy, including his brain. And her friend had been right about most of it, especially the dark.
In the first weeks after her husband had moved out, it had spooked her whenever she pulled into her driveway at night, saw that creepy old barn jump out at her from the dark, and the shadows of countless trees and bushes that could conceal an army of intruders with imagined, evil intentions. It had taken a while for her to realize that as a rule, there weren’t any intruders out here, and the country was a whole lot safer for a single woman alone than the nicest neighborhood in the Twin Cities, for all their glorious streetlights. But despite all the sound logic that told her this was true, she still looked at simple things – an open barn door, for instance – as vaguely malevolent.
Iris finally pulled into her tree-lined driveway, past the looming hulk of the barn, with its now blessedly closed door, and up to the house. She let out a deep sigh, gathered her things, and marveled that she had made two death-defying trips in one day without a single detour into the ditch.
She was halfway to the house when she noticed the footprints. They were partially filled in with fresh snow, but undeniably footprints – two sets of them – one heading toward the house and up onto the porch, the other heading away, toward the drive.
22
Iris was having trouble moving her feet, and wondered if she could literally freeze in her tracks after a few seconds of immobility. Still, she just stood there while icy pellets spattered against the hood of her parka, staring down at the footprints in the yellow glow of the light from the porch.
Already the weather was starting to distort them, but it was plain that they were larger than hers. Much larger. A man’s print.
She closed her eyes and took a breath. Great, Iris. This morning you were afraid of the dark, tonight you’re afraid of footprints. How silly is that?
Well, maybe not so silly, she decided, because today she’d seen a bloody corpse stuffed in a snowman, heard a ghost story, and learned there was a killer roaming the county. Little things like that could make footprints look pretty darn sinister.
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.
