Drop Dead Cold

by Karin Kaufman

  “You don’t want me to continue?”

  “We’re tired.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Close the book, Kate.”

  Minette appeared so distraught by what I’d read that I immediately put the journal away in a drawer. I could finish reading it later, I thought, when she wasn’t around. In the past I’d asked her about her family and what had driven her from her maple tree home in the woods, but all she’d given me in response to my questions were vague answers and a few hints about some sort of struggle that had taken place between her, her friends and family, and “bad” fairies, as she’d called them.

  All this in the woods across the street from my home! A new world, there all along but previously invisible to me, had opened up the day I met Minette. Just thinking of it, I sometimes had to figuratively pinch myself. This new world was real. And now, Ray’s journal was going to open more of that world to me.

  I reached over and patted the bed. “Stay right here on the other side of this pillow, Minette. You can lay on top the comforter.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling once more. “I’ll sleep in the fluffiness. Your comforter is like ten thousand cotton balls.”

  I flicked off the table lamp and fell into a deep sleep.

  i woke slowly to a tickling sensation, like feathers on my skin. When I opened my eyes, Minette was on my pillow, gently brushing my face with her hands and calling my name.

  “What on earth?” I glanced at the clock and sat up. Still groggy with sleep, I fixed my eyes on my open bedroom door. “What is it?”

  Minette whispered, “Someone is out there.”

  I sat motionless, acutely aware of every sound. “Downstairs?” I said under my breath. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Outside. Someone is walking around in the back yard.”

  “I’ve had it.” I threw off my comforter, grabbed my robe, and headed for my back door.

  At the bottom of the steps, Minette shouted for me to stop, underscoring her insistence by flying at my face, almost knocking me back into the stairs. “Don’t open the door, Kate! You must call the police.”

  “Go back upstairs!” I hissed. “Right now. And hide.”

  She squeaked. “It’s the Comeau.”

  “Now.”

  My cell was upstairs, the land line downstairs in the kitchen. I went for the land line. There was no way I was going to sit in my bedroom and wait while some unseen intruder crept up the stairs. I wasn’t a helpless victim in a horror movie.

  I dialed 911, hung up, and grabbed a hammer from under my sink. When I heard what sounded like a pot overturn by the back door, I called the MacKenzies. Laurence answered, sounding alert for just past midnight, and told me to go to my living room and not answer any door until I heard his voice.

  That man could move like lightning, because less than a minute later, I heard shouts coming from my back yard. I ran to a window, pulled back a drape, and peered into the moonlit darkness. One dark figure was racing for the woods behind my house, and the other—Laurence—was hobbling toward my house.

  I didn’t wait to hear his voice before opening the door. “Are you all right?”

  “Sorry, Kate. My feet froze and I stepped on something hard.”

  “You’re in your slippers!”

  He limped into my kitchen and managed to make it to a kitchen chair. “Sorry I didn’t see who it was.”

  “Never mind that, your foot is bleeding. I’m calling Emily.”

  “It was a man, I know that much. Nosing around your back patio. It’s minus ten out there.”

  I dialed Emily and told her Laurence was safe but could use her first-aid skills. The moment I hung up, I heard the faint wail of a siren in the distance. “What did you step on?” I asked, handing Laurence a couple paper towels.

  “No idea.” He took off his right slipper, revealing a bloodied big toe. “The man was taller than average, and I think he was pretty thin.”

  “Comeau.”

  “I wish I’d seen his face. He was wearing a black cap of some kind.”

  I was about to ask Laurence what he thought Comeau had been up to on the patio when I heard the doorbell ring.

  “I’m here before the police, aren’t I?” Emily said, marching through my door and into the kitchen. “I hear a siren but don’t see any lights.”

  “Give ’em a chance, honey,” Laurence said.

  Emily sat, stared down at her husband’s toe, and then lifted his foot onto her lap. “It’s not a bad cut. Does it feel broken?”

  Laurence wiggled the toe.

  “I’m sorry about this, guys,” I said, leaning against the refrigerator. “I got scared.”

  “Of course you did,” Emily said.

  “What are neighbors for?” Laurence said. “I only wish I could’ve nailed him. I might have if my foot hadn’t frozen up in this blasted cold. What do you want to bet he parked his car on Elm Street?”

  I agreed. Elm Street was a seldom-traveled road on the other side of the narrow strip of woods that ran through the back yards in my neighborhood. It was the smartest place to leave a car if you wanted to cause mischief and lower your chances of being discovered.

  The siren grew louder and then cut out. “The police are here,” I said. “I only wish it was Rancourt.”

  CHAPTER 12

  After finally falling into a fitful sleep as the sun was coming up, I rose late the next morning and made a breakfast of buttered toast and maple syrup. The syrup was for Minette, who looked more dejected than I’d ever seen her. We were about to leave for the woods, and she couldn’t return to my house until Comeau was out of our lives, one way or another.

  The police had briefly questioned me and Laurence the night before and then taken a cursory look at my back yard. In their eyes, the pertinent question was this: Had the “trespasser”—that’s what they called him—tried to enter my house? I couldn’t say that he had, so they logged a trespassing report, not a Comeau-breaking-in report. Without giving them evidence, I had told them that the trespassing was connected to Nadine Sullivan’s murder, but that didn’t raise a blip on their radar. With Rancourt out of commission, it was clear that solving Nadine’s murder and removing Comeau as a threat was up to me.

  Minette sat cross-legged in front of her teaspoon of maple syrup, taking a sip now and then but not saying a word. No matter how I tried to reassure her that she would return to my house, she didn’t believe me. In her mind, I was exiling her in the dead of winter.

  “You’ll be safer in your tree,” I said for the umpteenth time.

  “But you have to be safe too, Kate.”

  “I will be. You heard how fast Laurence got here last night. One minute. Faster than the police. I’ll be fine, and so will you. This will be over soon.”

  After breakfast, I coaxed her into my coat pocket and we headed into the woods across Birch Street. It was another bitterly cold day, and on our way to her old tree, I had second, third, and fourth thoughts about my plan to leave her behind. She had always said fairies were sturdy in the cold, and I’d brought cotton balls and two of Michael’s old handkerchiefs to keep her warm, but this was no ordinary February cold snap. It was more like early January, and I worried that I was leaving her to freeze.

  A minute into the woods, I halted and told Minette it was safe to snuggle in my coat’s collar. “I want to talk to you,” I said. “Is it too cold for you? Tell me the truth.”

  She wiggled out of my pocket and floated upward to my shoulder, nestling between my coat collar and hair. “I’m not too cold.”

  “Show me the way to your tree. All the maples look the same to me.”

  “Keep walking straight.”

  The winter sun was streaming through the branches of the balsam firs and maples—dazzling fingers of pale, white light—and it shimmered on the undisturbed snow over which I trudged. The only sounds were a chickadee in some far-off tree and my boots on the snow.

  “It’s beautiful here,” I said.
r />   “You stopped coming to the forest.”

  “After Michael died, yes. I’m glad you brought me back.”

  “God makes beauty, Kate.”

  “Does he?”

  “Of course.”

  “I suppose you know him personally.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve never met him.”

  Minette didn’t laugh or giggle as she usually did when I said something goofy for her amusement. She was so quiet it made my heart ache a little.

  “As soon as this is over, I’ll come back for you.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Because you don’t believe me.”

  “You don’t believe in all kinds of things, no matter what I say. What’s the difference?”

  Every so often the fairy with the voice and face of a child admonished me like a human adult. I stopped dead in my tracks. “So you not believing me is payback for me not believing you?”

  “You don’t have to believe me.”

  I threw my hands in the air. “I know, I know. Believe in God, he sent you to me, blah blah blah.”

  Minette didn’t answer.

  “Right, Minette?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right.” In no mood for a theological argument, I started walking again. “How far away is your tree?”

  “One minute.”

  When I closed in on Minette’s maple tree, I thought I recognized it from the short but chunky log behind it, which in the fall had been carpeted with mushrooms. The log was at a forty-five-degree angle to the tree and shaped like a fat trumpet. But when I didn’t see the silver ornament I’d hung from one of its branches on Christmas Eve, I wasn’t sure I had the right place. I’d wrapped that ornament hook tight. Then again, we’d had quite a ferocious winter—snow, wind, ice.

  “My tree is here,” Minette said.

  “Where’s the ornament?”

  “It was there when I was looking for winter berries.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two days before you went looking for birds.”

  “Then it should still be here. It didn’t last all January and most of February only to blow away now.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Someone must have taken it. A hiker, maybe. But who would hike this deep into the woods?”

  “Never mind, Kate. Give me the handkerchiefs.”

  Now that we were at her tree, Minette wanted a quick end to our goodbye, and I couldn’t blame her. I rolled the first handkerchief into a cigar shape and gave it to her, whereupon she shot skyward, a pink blur that seconds later vanished among the towering treetops. Her old home was sixty feet or more high, in a hole in the century-old tree. I’d never seen it, but from what she’d told me, it was smaller than a soup can in depth and circumference, but with a bowl shape at the bottom, protecting her from the elements.

  Minette dropped down again, feet first and slowing as she neared my shoulder. I rolled another handkerchief and gave it to her. “The wind must howl up there,” I said.

  “I used to put moss over me to stop the wind, but now I’ll put Michael’s cloths and the cotton. I’ll be very warm.”

  “You’re trying to reassure me.”

  “It won’t be as cold tonight. And tomorrow will be warmer.”

  “And you’ll stay hidden all night?”

  “Of course,” she said, once more hurtling into the air.

  God, this was awful, bleak business. Was I doing the right thing? Would she really be safer here than at my house? I glanced around me, looking for signs of movement in the trees, but all was still. Someone had walked back here, hadn’t they? Minette had seen that silver ornament just two days ago. I searched the ground around the tree but found nothing. It blew off and rolled away, I told myself. Stop with your paranoia.

  When Minette returned, I began to give her the cotton balls, and two at a time she took them up to her tree. With the last two clutched to her chest, she told me goodbye.

  “If it gets too cold, come down my fireplace into my house,” I said. “I’ll leave it open. Do you understand? Don’t stay here if you’re too cold.”

  “I won’t be cold.”

  “Baloney.”

  Her tiny hands clenched the cotton balls to her chest, and as her eyes filled with tears, she shouted, “Baloney!” and soared off, leaving me standing at the foot of her tree.

  I turned and began to walk in the direction of Birch Street, listening for the chickadee’s sweet song and watching for other footprints in the snow. Anything to keep my mind off Minette until I was behind my own front door. If I could find the way home, that is, and not end up closer to Ray Landry’s old house when I exited the woods. The last people I wanted to see were the Dearborns.

  Less than a minute later, off to my right, I saw a set of boot prints in the snow—and then two sets, one nearly on top of the other. By the size of them, they’d been made by men’s boots. They looked fresh, too, their outlines well defined, not worn by wind or more snow.

  For twenty feet I followed the two sets of prints as they first ran parallel and then separated and met again in a muddle of prints I couldn’t make sense of. Several feet ahead, I caught sight of something glinting in the sun. The ornament! It was unbroken, laying on top the snow. My gaze traveled from the ornament to a boot . . . to a body and face.

  Gavin Dearborn.

  I gasped and staggered backward.

  Was he still alive? I gathered my wits and drew closer. “Gavin?”

  But his skin was bone white, and I saw now that though his eyelids were open a slit, his blue eyes were waxen and sightless. The muscles at the back of my neck tightened.

  I wheeled back and raced through the woods, zigzagging around logs and tree trunks and barren shrubs, forcing my legs to keep moving, telling myself not to falter, not to hesitate.

  Where the woods met Birch Street, I lurched to a stop and looked back, half expecting to see Comeau behind me, chasing me down like a hound of hell.

  But he wasn’t there. No one was there.

  I darted across the street and then shot to my right until I was at the foot of my driveway. Heaving for breath, I halted again and looked back. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

  I slipped twice as I hurried up my driveway. In my kitchen, I went straight for the phone, called the police, and then dropped to a chair at the table. Good Lord, what had Gavin been doing in those woods? And why was Minette’s ornament inches from his body? By the looks of it, he’d been dead for hours. Did Sierra know he was missing? Had she called the police?

  Shutting my eyes, I recalled the scene, committing it to memory. No obvious signs of a struggle, aside from the jumbled boot prints. No blood on or around the body. No signs of any injury at all. If it hadn’t been for the bitter cold and his half-lidded eyes, I might have thought Gavin had fallen asleep.

  For the second time in twelve hours, a siren’s shriek pierced the silence of Birch Street. At any moment I would face Officer Bouchard or, if I was fortunate, another junior police officer. Somehow I would have to explain why I’d walked so deep into the woods on this cold winter morning and how, in the vastness of those Smithwell woods, I’d just happened to stumble on the body of my neighbor.

  CHAPTER 13

  Bouchard rolled his eyes. He was tired, probably working overtime, and he was getting rude. “That’s a long way to go for a walk in zero-degree weather, Mrs. Brewer.”

  I was “Mrs. Brewer” again. I figured Bouchard, acting in Rancourt’s stead, felt the need to bolster his authority by reinstating formality in his absence. “I walk in those woods all the time, Officer. That’s what they’re there for.” Feeling a little snarky myself, I added, “If you think I killed Gavin Dearborn, arrest me.”

  Another eye roll. “I don’t think you killed him, but what you’re saying doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “It does if you like to walk.”

  “Mr. Dearborn must have enjoyed a brisk walk himself, huh?”

  “How l
ong has he been lying out there?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll let the medical examiner handle that, shall we?”

  Shall we. “How’s Rancourt?”

  “Better.” Bouchard closed his notebook and slid it into an inside jacket pocket.

  “When will he be released?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked down his nose at me as if to say, I’ll be as forthcoming as you are.

  Deep down Bouchard was a decent guy, but at times he acted like a smart-alecky jerk.

  “I have to talk to Sierra Dearborn,” he said, rising from my couch. He yawned and stretched his arms.

  “Did she report him missing?”

  “Not that I heard.”

  “That means Gavin probably went out early this morning. He wasn’t overdue at home—or not by much.”

  “Mmm.”

  “But by the looks of him, he died more than an hour ago. Though in this cold, who knows?”

  Bouchard headed into my kitchen and acknowledged Emily with a chin nod. She’d heard the siren and sped to my front door. Now she was drinking tea at my table and waiting patiently for Bouchard to leave so she could grill me.

  Someone rapped once on the side door then flung it open. An officer stood on the top step. In his hand was an evidence bag, and in that bag was the silver ornament. “We found this about a foot from the body,” he said.

  “Christmas in February?” Bouchard said, taking the bag. “Any idea what he was doing with it?”

  “Maybe the murderer left it at the scene,” the officer said.

  “We don’t know if there was a murderer,” Bouchard countered. “I’ll show it to Sierra Dearborn, see what she says.”

  I cleared my throat. “It might be mine.” I pretended to look closer. “Well, yes, it’s mine.”

  An angry glint in his eyes, Bouchard said, “Did you foul the crime scene?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! You think I left it there this morning after I found Gavin? I took it out there last Christmas Eve, on the anniversary of my husband’s death. We used to walk in the woods.”