Frozen Stiff Read online

  Kicking the snow off her boots, she hollered, “Anyone home?”

  Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe he had gone off with someone last night. She decided not to bother taking her boots off. Dan still had the cleaning lady come in every other week. A dirty floor wasn’t her problem anymore.

  She walked through the house and looked into the garage. His car was there. His BMW with every option available. His one true love had always been the cars.

  Cautiously she made her way upstairs. Not only was Dan not in the bed, but it wasn’t even rumpled. She walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the lake. This view is what she would miss more than anything. The windows were west-facing and looked out over the treetops. The lake was covered with snow and shone like a vast expanse of glittering field, cupped in the hollow of the bluffs.

  A red-tailed hawk flew out from the bluff and she went with it, soaring out over the lake. For Dan this view had meant power, for her it had meant freedom, a sense of the earth that she had never had before. She had learned all the birds, could even identify them by the way they held their wings as they glided.

  Dan couldn’t tell a chickadee from a bald eagle.

  Sherri pulled out a carryall and went through her drawers, grabbing the few sweaters she wanted. Most of the clothes she had left in the cabin she didn’t really care about.

  Dan might be sleeping in the downstairs family room. Sometimes he fell asleep in front of the TV. As she walked down the two flights of stairs, she thought of leaving without even seeing him. They had little to say to each other anymore. But when she stepped into the bottom floor she felt how warm it was. He must have left the sauna on.

  She didn’t see him anyplace. The sixty-inch flat-screen TV was dark. The couch was empty. She pulled open the door to the sauna and a blast of hot air hit her in the face. A bottle of vodka sat on the bench in a pool of water, a sodden cigar butt next to it.

  “Dan?” She turned off the heat in the sauna and checked the back door. It was locked, but she went to the window and looked out. Snow covered everything. She looked at her garden and could make out the clump of hostas from the flower stems still sticking up. But it looked like there was a good foot of snow.

  Just as she was about to turn away, she saw an odd form, like a snow-covered log, in the middle of her flowerbed. A tree branch fallen down? A dead deer?

  The lump was quite large, long. She couldn’t remember anything being there this fall.

  She stared out the picture window, then noticed it was smeared with handprints. Even though the cabin might not be her responsibility any more, the prints made her mad. How had they gotten there? What had Dan been up to?

  The wind blew up large eddies of snow, twirling up like miniature tornadoes. As she watched, the snow drifted off the form in her garden, uncovering some of it. She still couldn’t tell what it was. From this distance, it looked like a hand, but how could that be?

  Without thinking, she moved her head forward until her nose bumped the window. She was sure she was looking at a hand. She could make out the glint of a ring. With horror crawling up her throat, she tried to make what she was seeing something else—a dried flower, a pale stone, a piece of statuary. But the ring looked like Daniel’s signet ring. How was that possible?

  If that was Dan’s hand that meant he was buried in the snow. Could he have been so drunk last night that he had fallen down in the snowbank and not been able to get up? What had happened to him?

  She had to get to him.

  Sherri reached down to open the door and found it locked. The dead bolt was in place. How could it be locked? Dan couldn’t have locked it when he was outside unless he had a key.

  Her hand shook as she tried to undo the bolt. She had to get to him. She had to get him help.

  The bitter cold knocked her in the chest. She ran out into the snow, then stopped and stared down at what she could now clearly see was a waxy hand, like that of a mummy, no color to it.

  She sank down in the snow and touched the hand, then wiped clear his face. He had turned to ice.

  He must have been locked out and then froze to death. No one deserved that. Not even her bastard husband Dan.

  In some part of her mind, she knew he was dead, but the thought that he might still be alive pushed her to call for help.

  CHAPTER 2

  New Year’s Day: 9:30 am

  Amy unplugged the block heater on the squad car, climbed into the frigid vehicle, and turned the key. Sluggishly, the car engine turned over, but didn’t catch. She slapped her mittened hands together, waited a few seconds, then tried again. She didn’t want to wear the battery out. This cold weather had gone on for too long. What she wouldn’t give for an attached garage, but she guessed she was lucky that an off-street parking place came with her apartment.

  With relief, she heard the engine come to life, gave it a little gas, turned the heat on full blast, and then climbed back out to clear all the windows. The ice was especially thick on the front window. After she scraped it all off, she saw there was even some ice on the inside of the car.

  Seeing that the heat gauge needle had risen, she backed up and got on the street. No one else around. She only lived about six blocks away from the government center, easy walking distance, except on a day like today. Could freeze your face off in less time than it took to tie up a horse.

  When Amy walked into the sheriff’s department, she caught Tanya yawning at the front desk, a party hat tilted on her red hair like the leaning Tower of Pisa.

  “You look ready to go home,” Amy said.

  “Got that right.”

  “Busy night?” Amy asked.

  “Not really. I’ve lived through worse New Year’s Eves. I think the snow and cold kept the partying to a minimum. Two drunks are sleeping it off in the jail and a kid wandered away from a party, but Bill found him sleeping in the barn, visiting with the cows.”

  Amy was glad to hear that Bill had worked last night. Even though they hadn’t been seeing each other for a while, she still kept track of him and hated to think of him having fun without her. Right after she broke up with him, he had been mad for a few days, then he ignored her for a couple weeks. Now they were almost back to being friends, casual friends, but at least he would say hi to her. She knew it wasn’t very nice of her, but she wanted to be the first one to start seeing someone else.

  “Roxie coming in?” Amy asked.

  “She called to say she’d be late,” Tanya lifted up her party hat, then let it snap back down. “I just want to climb in bed and sleep until tomorrow. I guess it’s called hibernating.”

  “Anything going on this morning?”

  “Yeah, we got a call from near Stockholm, something about a dog.”

  “I’m going to drive down that way. They had a break-in down at the Short Stop a couple days ago and I want to check back with them.”

  “Perfect. On your way you can check out the Walker residence. A woman called and said that there was something in her backyard. She didn’t call on the emergency line so I don’t think there’s any big rush.”

  “Sure. Did she say what?”

  “She seemed pretty calm about it. I think she said her dog. I couldn’t hear her that well. She kept breaking up. I think she was calling on a cell phone.”

  “Why’s she calling us about her dog? She should have called animal control. Last thing I want to deal with this morning is a dead dog.”

  “Why don’t you swing by—it’s on your way.”

  At least the car was still warm, Amy thought as she climbed back into the vehicle, a cup of steaming coffee balanced in her hand. She drove down 25 waiting for the sun to crest Twin Bluffs. These bitter cold days were always bright, clear, and often still. Absolutely beautiful. Right as she approached highway 35 the sun lifted up over the bluffs, sundogs on either side of it. She pulled into the wayside stop there, a convenient spot to tuck in and catch speeders, drank her coffee and stared at the two lines of rainbow, frost glinting in
the milky sunlight.

  Ten miles down the road, she turned the car up the bluff. The plow had already been through and the road was slippery, but cleared.

  The Walker house rose over the crest of the driveway, an odd tower of a house, all the lights on in the early morning dawn, the sun barely topping the field. Amy was always amazed at these houses that lined the bluff, like masters of another race come to live among the peons for a while.

  A gorgeous fawn-colored Saab sat in the driveway, its tracks the only sign that marred the new snow. Amy parked the squad car behind it and got out. Still below zero, breathing in the cold air made her cough. Before she had even taken a step the front door was flung open and a blond-haired woman stuck her head out.

  “Thank god, you’re here. I can’t get him out of the snow.” The woman was crying and her hands were red.

  Amy knew how hard it could be to lose a pet. She walked up the front step. “Let’s see what you have here.”

  The woman was shivering, her skin was pale and her lips were turning white. Amy could tell she was going into shock. “Let’s get you in the house. You need to put a coat on.”

  The woman babbled, “I didn’t know what to do. I tried to uncover him, but it’s so cold. I think he’s frozen stiff.”

  “What kind of dog is it?”

  The woman looked at Amy in astonishment and said, “It’s no dog. He’s my husband.”

  New Year’s Day: 10 am

  Since he was old enough to sit at the kitchen table, he could remember this same red and white gingham tablecloth covering it. John Gordon sat in the kitchen, watching his 80-year-old mother pouring him a cup of her weak coffee, running his finger on the checkerboard pattern.

  He couldn’t quite imagine a world without his mother—Edna Wheeler Gordon. Not that they had always been close, but no matter how far he had gone, spun out from her, she had always seemed the center of the universe.

  His father had died when he was ten; he was killed when a tractor tipped over on him. After the funeral John’s mother had told him that he had to be the man of the house. His sister Beth had only been five, too young to help out much. Together, he and his mother had run the farm for over twenty years.

  If only he hadn’t taken that job in Oklahoma this fall, but they had needed the money. Farming wasn’t what it used to be and, in the winter months, he often needed to supplement their income. He should have known that his mother wasn’t up to being on her own anymore. But he had asked Beth to keep a close eye on her and had thought that would be all the help she needed.

  He watched Edna move slowly back across the kitchen floor and set the old coffeemaker down on the stove. Her knee was bothering her again, but she insisted she didn’t want that blasted surgery.

  “Why bother fixing something that I hardly use anymore? I’m not going to be around much longer,” she’d say.

  He hated to think of her alone in this house, but she was as stubborn as they come and she said the only way they’d get her out of here was to carry her feet first.

  Edna walked back across the floor and sank into the chair across from him with a sigh, soft like air escaping from a pillow. Her body looked like a pillow, stuffed into the faded house dress she was wearing with an old sweater thrown over the top.

  “Shit, you’re still angry,” she said.

  “Mom, I’m not mad at you.”

  “I thought you’d be happy about it. I really did. I know I’m nothing but a burden to you and I thought this would take care of your problems.” She turned her head down and her hands wrung themselves in her lap.

  Edna had told him she wanted to surprise him. She thought that he would be happy that she had sold the farm and for such a tidy sum. But he knew it was only about half the going value of the place, 200 acres of land right on the bluff edge. Any developer would jump at the chance.

  The fact that it was Dan Walker who bought it out from under him burned even more. Stupid schmo that he was, he had thought they were friends. John had spent the tail end of the summer building a sauna in the basement of that house Dan called a “cabin,” and they had shared many a brewski. Dan’s wife Sherri would stir up some dinner while he and Dan would smoke a cigar and look out at Lake Pepin. The view was almost as good as the one from the edge of his farmland.

  Edna had signed away the land with the proviso that she be allowed to stay on in the farm until she died. Wouldn’t be long now.

  John looked up at his mother’s face, weathered from years in the sun, tending the family garden, sometimes even driving the tractor. Her hair had gone completely white and her eyes shone bluer than ever.

  He had been so mad when he came home for Christmas and learned what she had done. He had never yelled at his mother before, but he had not been able to contain himself.

  Edna had been sitting in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. He had taken the cast-iron frying pan and thrown it against the wall, breaking her old blue vase. Looking up at her, he realized he should never have left her alone. Her brain was starting to muddle. He could tell, talking to her on the phone, that she was forgetting things and mixing up others.

  When his mother died, the land that he had been born on and had sweated over for fifty years would be gone. He wasn’t sure there was anything he could do about it, but he was going to try to get it back.

  He held his mother’s hand and whispered, “Sorry, so sorry.”

  CHAPTER 3

  New Year’s Day: 10:00

  Claire couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Amy had told her and she still hadn’t been able to take it in. All the way on the drive over, she had wrestled with what she might find. Now she stared down at the frozen man curled into a fetal position—how we came into the world was the way we left it—one hand reaching out, fingers blistered, his skin waxy blue, his hair turned white with frost. The vulnerability of his pose made Claire’s eyes water. Or the cold.

  Only once before had Claire seen a man frozen to death. That had been during the coldest winter she had lived through, 1996. In February, when the temperature had dropped to 30 below with a windchill of minus 50, the governor had closed the state. No one was to go any place, except for cops. She had been on regular patrol and taken the call.

  A neighbor, taking garbage out, had found the old man curled up against a wall in the alley. At least he had been wearing a coat. Somehow that made him seem not quite as vulnerable.

  Remembering her lessons on hypothermia, Claire bent down, took off a glove, and put her fingers on Daniel Walker’s neck. If there was a pulse there, it was too low and slow for her to tell. But it was still possible that there was life in this man.

  She knew that people could survive in a deep freeze for hours, even days. The cold would have shut down his metabolism. The lungs would need less oxygen and the heart would pump less frequently. As the brain cooled off, it needed less oxygen to survive. Cardiologists even used chilling to get a patient ready for heart surgery, her pharmacist sister Bridget had told her.

  So Claire knelt down in the snow and placed her head on his bare chest. She thought she heard something. A tick. A twig snapping. It might just be her own heart beating. She pushed in closer and listened again.

  Yes, a slow, slight thud was coming from deep in the man’s chest. A liquid thump which meant he lived.

  She stood and yelled at Amy, “Get a blanket. We’ve got to get him inside. Call for an ambulance.”

  Claire took off her mittens, put her bare hands on his chest and rubbed in slow circles. Whatever life was left in him, she wanted to keep stoking. Maybe even just the warmth of human touch would keep him hanging on.

  A minute later, Amy slammed out the door with a large down comforter filling her arms. “This was what I could find.”

  “Lay it out on the ground next to him. We have to move him very slowly. Any jarring at all will cause a heart attack. We don’t want that.”

  They tucked the edge of the comforter under his body in the snow and then gently rolled him onto his
other side, which moved most of his body onto the quilt. “Wrap it over him and then grab that end tight.” Claire turned and yelled at Dan’s wife, who was standing in the doorway. “Keep the door open. We’re bringing him in.”

  Lifting him up in the comforter, they carried him slung between them. Claire backed up carefully as Amy directed her toward the door. “Slow and easy,” she said as much to herself as to Amy.

  Once through the door, they set him down on the floor.

  “How about the sauna?” Amy suggested.

  For a moment that sounded like a good idea to Claire, as much for herself as for the frozen man, but then she remembered more of what she knew about hypothermic victims. “That intense heat would be too much for him.”

  “We could turn it on low,” the wife said.

  “I’d rather not risk it. There’s a weird phenomena known as rewarming shock. That’s what a lot of people with hypothermia die from. They need to be rewarmed very slowly. Let’s just keep the comforter on him.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” his wife asked as she sank to the floor next to Walker.

  “Put your hands on his chest. Let him know you’re there. Give him some of your warmth.”

  New Year’s Day: 10:16 am

  Meg ran her finger down the kitchen window, melting the hoarfrost that had gathered around the edges. She loved the patterns it formed, like miniature ice floes, like snow flowers. Whorls and twirls that shimmered in the pale sunlight.

  “What’s up with you today?”

  Meg jumped. She hadn’t heard Rich come in the room. “I don’t know. Don’t feel like doing much of anything. Too cold.”

  He had a million layers of clothes on, his fur-lined hat with the flaps hanging down, his leather-mitten choppers, a dirty down coat. The front of his dark hair had turned even grayer with frost from his breath. “The first day of the year and you don’t know what you’re going to do? Not a good start. Have you made any resolutions?”