Chapter Three
“I’m hungry. When’s breakfast?”
“When your mother gets home.”
“How much longer’s she gonna be?”
“She’ll be back soon, honeybunch. It’s so nice out, they must be having a great walk.”
Gord Lindsay glanced out the window. He’d have to shovel the driveway soon. Again. Cathy loved snow. She loved to ski in it, she loved to walk in it, she loved to play in it, she loved to sit by the window and watch it fall. He, who had to shovel it, hated the stuff.
She was a mountain girl, raised on a backcountry property until she went to university in Victoria and spent a few years teaching in schools around the Island. Then marriage and children and stability. She’d never stopped pining for the mountains and the snow.
He’d always known she stayed in Victoria for him. He liked the ocean.
When she’d been offered a job at Trafalgar District High, he knew it was his turn to make some sacrifices, and so they packed up and moved. He, after all, could work just about anywhere. That had been ten years ago. His Internet development business was thriving, the children were growing strong and healthy, Cathy was, if not happy, at least content.
He was happy.
Most of the time.
But he still hated the damned snow.
He rubbed the top of his daughter’s head. Jocelyn was ten, Daddy’s girl. That, he knew, wouldn’t last much longer. Look at Bradley. The freckle-faced, gap-toothed boy who’d loved nothing more than to kick a soccer ball around the yard with his dad and had wanted to be an air force pilot when he grew up, had morphed into a sullen, swearing, scowling juvenile delinquent.
Bradley had gone out last night, after scarfing down his dinner, despite Cathy’s pleas that he stay home, just this once. Play a board game perhaps, do something as a family to celebrate the start of March Break. The door slammed shut behind him, his mindless, unfocused anger at the world reverberating through the house.
Gord had popped his head into the boy’s room this morning. Fast asleep beneath a mountain of blankets.
Cathy was an early riser: all that mountain air she’d breathed growing up, Gord assumed. When he woke, her side of the bed had been empty. The kitchen was tidy for a change, dinner dishes washed and put away, coffee-pot full, bacon laid out to thaw, ingredients assembled for pancakes. Cathy liked to celebrate holidays, even a nonoccasion holiday like March Break.
Spot wasn’t in the house; Cathy always took her out in the morning. Yes, their dog went by the name of Spot. Jocelyn had been six when they got her, and the girl insisted on naming the mutt for the black dot on her forehead, the only mark in the mass of curly white fur.
Gord glanced at the clock on the stove. Almost ten o’clock. Perhaps Cathy had run into a friend and gone to the friend’s house for coffee, lost track of time.
He’d better check. He grabbed the kitchen phone and dialed her cell. The sound of ringing in his ear, and then he heard a traditional ringtone beneath a dish cloth tossed on the counter not more than two feet away. She’d left her phone at home.
“Can I have a muffin while we’re waiting?” Jocelyn asked. She looked adorable in her blue flannel pajamas dotted with smiling white polar bears, fuzzy pink slippers, strands of brown hair escaping the pony tail.
“Okay. Then you’d better get dressed if we’re going skiing after breakfast.”
***
The silence was almost total. The gentle whoosh of skis gliding through snow, poles breaking the surface, the sharp puff of his breath. It had snowed in the night and he was breaking fresh trail. The going was tough.
Tough was good.
Tough was what he needed.
His heart pounded a steady rhythm in his chest. Sweat gathered in a pool on his low back and underneath his arms. He’d unzipped his jacket and taken his gloves off about a kilometer back and welcomed the piercing cold.
A line of tracks, paw prints, crossed the path ahead. He slowed to check them out. Might be a large dog, but no human marks accompanied them. A wolf then. A big one too. He’d heard them in the night, calling to each other across the valley. He’d closed his eyes and listened, delighting in the primitive wildness of the sound. He had no fear of wolves. Wild animals didn’t frighten him. He’d faced the most dangerous animal of them all.
And he’d survived.
Sometimes he wished he hadn’t.
Mark Hamilton dug his poles into the snow and pushed off again. A hill loomed ahead. A steep one. It would be tough going.
Tough was good.
Tough kept the demons at bay. When his muscles ached and sweat ran in rivers down his body and his heart felt like it would burst out of his chest, the demons fell silent. They might still be there, outside his range of vision, hovering in the dark corners of his mind, but at least they were quiet.
A man couldn’t ski forever. Nor run nor bike nor lift weights. A man had to slow down; he had to do his job, to live his life. He had to talk to people, smile and be friendly. A man had to sleep sometimes.
Then the demons circled, whispering, calling. Filling his head with pictures of blood and destruction and sounds of terror and pain and the crushing feel of overwhelming loss.
He crested the hill and glided to a stop. Pulling a stainless steel bottle out of his pack, he twisted off the cap, leaned his head back, and glugged water. The drink felt cold on his lips; it dribbled down his chin and into the depths of his two-day growth of beard where it began to freeze.
A raven, black against a stark background of black and white, watched him from the skeletal branches of a dying pine.
Mark Hamilton lifted his bottle in greeting and the bird took flight. He sucked in a deep breath, felt cold air move into his lungs, fresh and invigorating.
In a couple of days he’d have to go back to town. Back to work. What if he didn’t go? If he sold the house, he’d make enough of a profit to pay off the mortgage and buy a place out here, free and clear. Maybe he could offer to buy out Jürgen. Not that Jürgen was likely to sell.
A hundred acres of mountain wilderness, a log cabin, a generator, an adequate well. Mark didn’t need much else. He could survive, grow vegetables in the summer, can and freeze them to last the winter. Jürgen told him the hunting was good out here, but Mark no longer hunted. He no longer ate meat.
He’d seen blood and brains leaking into the dust, seen creatures, human creatures, struggling to stand with half their head blown off, trying to run without understanding they no longer had legs on which to run.
He’d given up eating meat, and that seemed to appease the demons. Even if only a small bit and for a short while.
He settled into a slow steady pace as he retraced the tracks of his skis. He might want to live out here, in a cabin in the woods. Off the grid. Alone.
But not yet. One day perhaps, one day when it all got too much and it became time to check out. No, he’d head back to town when his vacation ended. Back to the classroom full of slouching teenagers who didn’t give a rat’s ass about the beauty of mathematics, the gossiping neighbors who tried to fix him up with their divorced daughters, the teachers with their pleasant middle-class lives and sexless husbands.
He didn’t like most of the people he dealt with on a day-to-day basis. He found them boring, shallow, self-obsessed. But they, with their chatter and their gossip and their mundane problems, helped to keep the demons at bay.
If he secluded himself in the wilderness it wouldn’t be long before his defenses crumbled and he took the coward’s way out.
And ended it all.
Through the trees he could see the building. A two-room log cabin in a clearing, close to a small stream, now frozen over. No smoke drifted from the chimney. He’d been gone for four hours, long enough for the fire to go out. Jürgen kept the woodshed well stocked, but Mark would take the axe out later, chop down a couple of dead trees, cut them into suitable size for the stove, stack the logs.
Someday he’d give into the demons.
But not today.
Chapter Four
Molly Smith knew the hiking trail well. She and Adam went there when they needed a walk or to give Norman a run but didn’t have enough time to go far. It was located on an old abandoned railway bed, high above the city. Within the town limits, but you felt as if you were in the wilderness. The trail itself was roughly maintained, but nothing else. No restrooms or picnic benches or directional signs. Just a path meandering through thick woods that occasionally opened up to give the best view in Trafalgar. A parking area had been put in at one end of the trail, but people often parked on the streets that ended at the top of the hill.
Trafalgar was built into the side of a mountain; streets got steeper and steeper as they climbed. They also got narrower and narrower as snowplows continually pushed snow up against the edges. More than one vehicle was trapped, surrounded by a mountain of snow where the plow had simply gone around it. The mountain was so steep houses at the top could experience different weather than those at the bottom. Up here, there hadn’t been as much melt over the past few days.
A woman waited for Smith at the end of Martin Street. She was young, practically clad in good, but not expensive, winter gear. A shaggy brown dog of indeterminate breed, what Smith’s dad, Andy, would have called a Heinz 57, waited politely at her feet. The dog’s muzzle and the tips of his toes were as white as the snow he sat upon. Smith pulled in behind a blue Honda Accord that had seen a lot of miles, switched off her lights, and climbed out of the truck.
“That way. It’s that way. Hurry,” the woman said.
“Hold on a sec. You called in a body?”
“Yes, a woman. She’s not far. Rex found her.” The dog gave Smith a rheumy-eyed once-over. Not impressed with what he saw, he turned his head and set about chewing at his nether regions.
Another siren broke the quiet. An ambulance, leaving the hospital. Smith glanced over her shoulder.
“You won’t need the ambulance,” the woman said.
“Are you sure?”
She took a deep breath. “Oh, yes. My husband’s with her. He’s waiting for you.”
Smith stepped onto the path. “Are you coming?”
“I’d…If you don’t mind, I’d rather not. I’ve seen more than enough. And…” she nodded to the dog. “I don’t want to take Rex back. Follow my footsteps. It’s not far.”
“Tell the paramedics where I’ve gone.” Smith broke onto the trail. The snow on the sides was deep, but the path was well used and firmly packed under the fresh dusting. The footsteps of the woman and dog were easy to follow. Below lay the roofs of houses clinging to the edge of the hill, the steep winding road, the quiet town, the black river meandering between the mountains, the bridge leading to the other side.
Smith broke into a jog, calling out as she ran, and before long a man answered, “Over here.”
Evergreens were piled with snow, the branches of the few aspens and cottonwoods stark and bare. She rounded the bend and could see him up ahead, standing in the trail. Something dark lay near his feet, not moving. The rocky face of the mountain rose sharply above them.
The man was young, bearded, dressed for outdoors in the cold. He looked at her, but said nothing more.
On the ground, a black coat, a green scarf. Red snow. A dog barked and Smith glanced around. Small and white, the animal blended into the surroundings. It bared its teeth and lunged, but couldn’t reach her. It had been tied to a tree by a blue leash.
Smith took off her winter gloves and pulled thin blue disposable ones out of her pocket before dropping to her haunches. A woman lay face down in the snow, her arms spread out to either side. Smith slipped on the gloves and touched her fingers to the skin beneath the woman’s scarf. Still warm, but cooling rapidly. Nothing moved. Blood soaked the back of the coat, not a great deal of it. The snow had been churned up all around her by bloody paw prints.
Smith got to her feet. She stepped backward, trying to keep her boots in the prints she’d already made.
She touched the radio at her shoulder.
“Five-one.” She coughed to clear her throat.
“Go ahead, five-one.”
“I’m at the trail at the top of Martin Street. I need a detective, and he’ll be wanting forensics. Probably the RCMP dog also.” She looked at the man, watching her with wide eyes. “Is that your dog, sir?”
“No.”
“Better send someone from the humane society too.”
She heard a shout, probably the paramedics, and called out to them.
Chapter Five
Eliza Winters wasn’t much of a cook. Good food, to her, was what restaurant chefs prepared. She’d been a model since the age of sixteen, and for many years food, when she wasn’t dining out, was by necessity not much more than rice crackers and carrot sticks. The minimum required to keep body and soul together. Now that she was well into middle age, no longer modeling, she could eat what she liked. But old habits die hard, and she could not summon up much interest in her kitchen.
John stood at the stove, his attention focused on four slices of bacon sizzling and spitting fat in the cast-iron frying pan. He wielded a spatula like a weapon, as if expecting one of the rashers would attempt an escape.
She smiled. Her husband wasn’t much of a cook either, but he did like a hearty breakfast on his days off and had soon come to realize Eliza wasn’t going to stand at the stove in a frilly apron the way his mother had when he was a young man living at home.
“Perfection,” he said, placing the bacon carefully on a layer of paper towel. He cracked two eggs into the hot fat.
“Perfection indeed,” she said, encompassing far more than the plate of bacon.
Toast popped up, and he took his attention away from the eggs long enough to flip a slice onto a side plate and present it to her.
“Thank you,” she said. John massaged the muscles in her shoulders. He smelled of wood smoke, and his chin scratched against her cheek when he bent over to kiss her.
“Fire lit?” she asked, wiggling her shoulders into the most favorable position.
“Might even last this time.”
She twisted to smile up at him, looking forward to a simple day lazing about the house. Together.
The cursed cell phone fastened to his waistband rang.
He tossed her an apologetic grimace and flipped open the phone. “Winters,” he barked, sliding the frying pan off the heat.
Eliza always maintained that John had two personalities. His cop face and his husband face. She could see one morph into the other and didn’t need to be told this was a summons he could not ignore.
Those separate faces had only merged twice, the night they met when he as a young patrol officer answered her 911 call, and about two years ago when a man she’d once known had been murdered. John had, momentarily, actually believed Eliza, his wife of twenty-five years, might have killed him.
It had taken a long time for their marriage to recover from her sense of betrayal.
But recover it had. She got up from the table and began putting together a bacon and egg sandwich for him to eat in the car.
***
Detective Sergeant John Winters drove down the steep mountain road toward town, munching on the remains of his hastily-assembled breakfast. Fortunately, they hadn’t had much snow overnight and the driveway was clear. He and Eliza had come to Trafalgar househunting in spring. They’d fallen in love with the house and garden. The view down to the shimmering river was spectacular and not a neighbor could be seen.
They’d been warned that a lot of snow could fall at the higher elevations. He was from Vancouver, and he’d dismissed talk of fourteen feet of snow as an exaggeration.
It wasn’t.
Traffic was light this morning. He made it down his stretch of mountain to the highway meandering along the river, over the bridge, through Trafalgar, and up the hills on the other side in near record time.
A police truck and an ambulance were parked at the top
of Martin Street. As Winters climbed out of his car, an RCMP vehicle pulled up behind him. Adam Tocek and his dog, Norman, jumped out. Norman’s head was up, his ears pointed, his expression eager. Norman loved going to work.
The men, not so much.
“Body in the woods, Molly says.”
“Fresh, by the sound of it.”
Another car labored up the hill. “Party time,” Alison Townshend, the RCMP forensics officer, greeted the men. “First day of school holidays and I have to leave a note for the kids telling them I’ve gone out. Do you know what we have, John?”
A Cold White Sun: A Constable Molly Smith Mystery (Constable Molly Smith Series) Page 2