Snow Light

by Danielle Zinn

  “And you have to go to the hospital for that blood purification, right?”

  “Yes, some patients, who have to do that on a daily basis, have one of those machines at home, but the majority have to go to the hospital… Ah, here it is. Did you know who is in need of dialysis?”

  “Sky!” Thomas’s hand let go of his phone, and it crashed onto the kitchen counter. But that did not matter. The puzzle was finally complete. With a snap, the fog in his brain cleared and revealed the only person with means, motive, and opportunity to commit these three murders.

  Of course, he thought, this makes perfect sense! How blind he must have been… or rather, how badly he had allowed himself to be blinded.

  He dashed to the door, jumped into his boots, and grabbed his parka.

  “No.” Collins laughed. “It’s not Sky, of course… hello, are you still there…? Sir?”

  But Thomas could no longer hear her. He had run outside into the frigid night, both sides of his unzipped parka flapping against his body as he sprinted up the road towards David’s house. Thomas did not feel the cold, or icy wind ruffling his hair, or the frosty air burning in his lungs. This time, his body was fit and trained to fight if necessary.

  His thoughts circled around Sky. Where had she gone? Had someone taken Barney on purpose to lure her and eventually him there? And where was ‘there’?

  Thomas stopped within twenty yards of David’s house. Except for the howling wind and the engine of a distant car, nothing could be heard. He crept forward. He passed David’s house to the right, crossed the road, and quietly pushed open the gate to Kate Adams’s front yard.

  All the windows of the house were illuminated, smoke restlessly left the chimney, and the small passage from the gate to the front door had only recently been cleared of snow. In the light from the window, he found fresh boot prints in the snow and followed them along the left-hand side of the house.

  “Sky?” he whispered. But the wind blew his words into the night. He trudged deeper into the garden. “Sky, are you here? It’s me.”

  A torch went on and shone directly in his eyes. “Nat? Oh, thank God!”

  He found Sky crouching next to a huge flowerpot filled with frozen soil, pulling helplessly on the dog’s collar.

  “What are you two doing here?” Thomas asked frantically. “I told you to come back home right away!”

  “When I walked up the road, I saw Barney turn into Ms Adams’s front yard, so I followed him. She must have been outside clearing snow and gathering firewood from the shed, because when I came, I saw her close the patio door, and Barney kept looking at the window like he was waiting for her to come back. But then he turned around, went straight to this stupid flowerpot and started digging like a lunatic. I can’t get him away. He probably thinks she’s hidden a treat there. She sometimes gives him treats when we’re outside.”

  “Okay, Sky, have you spoken to Ms Adams?”

  Sky shook her head. “No… you know after she caught me cheating, I might not have been particularly nice to her. I didn’t want to see her till Monday.”

  He bent down and took the torch from her, shining the light at a dark blue pot where the dog sent snow and frozen earth flying in all directions.

  “What’s the matter with Barney? She certainly hasn’t put a treat in there,” Sky asked, clinging to his arm.

  Thomas grabbed the spaniel by his collar, lifted the wriggly bundle off the ground, and stuck him between his legs. Then he pushed his hand into the hole Barney had already dug. Something sharp pierced his gloveless fingers, but he could not get a hold of it; his hand was way too large. He motioned for Sky to fish out whatever was in there while he wrestled the dog down.

  Thomas was so absorbed with their potential finding that he did not hear the patio door slide open. A dark-clothed hooded figure was leaning in the door frame, arms crossed over the chest, watching the activities quietly.

  After a couple of minutes, Sky finally pulled out what looked like a foot-long metal spear. Already knowing what she was holding, Thomas inspected the sawn-off front piece of an epee in the torch light. Finally, he had found the most important piece of evidence.

  “Congratulations!” a voice shouted into the noisy night.

  Thomas swirled around and looked into the smirking visage of Kate. Even in the flickering light of the torch her face seemed pale and shrunken.

  “I think we should talk,” he yelled back over the cutting wind.

  “Hey, you two, stay where you are!” Kate shouted towards Sky and Barney, who had quietly made their way halfway to the gate, with Sky still holding on tightly to the front part of the epee.

  In one quick move, Kate jumped out of the doorway, prompting Sky to break into a run chased by her teacher. Thomas’s brain commanded him to run after them, but he couldn’t will himself to move.

  After what seemed like minutes, he finally started setting one foot in front of the other. He was walking in slow motion. And suddenly the snow was gone, and he found himself in a park surrounded by trees and bushes and a pirate playground ship. He trudged through sand — one step forward, half a step back. All was eerily quiet. Thomas looked around, but his eyes did not want to adjust to the darkness.

  He was blind.

  Then a scream pierced the night. He swirled around and saw a young woman clinging to a climbing wall. He already knew he would not get there in time.

  Could not save her.

  Could do nothing.

  The face of the young woman became clearer. It was not a woman. It was a child. And she shouted his name. Desperately.

  Something cold hit him with full force in the face. He shook his head, and the images became a blur. Melted snow ran down his neck and into his ears. His senses came back. Slowly.

  Sky was shouting his name, and he dashed to the gate.

  Standing on a wall surrounding the neighbour’s property, she clung to a streetlamp. That was the face Thomas had seen. It was not the girl from the park, but Sky, and it was she who was calling him for help.

  A surge of adrenalin rushed through his body, and in one swift move, he jumped over the fence surrounding Kate Adams’s premises and, from there, over a wall of snow on the pavement and further onto the road, blocking Kate’s way to Sky. She had to take the long way through the gate and down the driveway, being too weak for climbing and jumping. A coat of thin ice had encrusted the road, and she came to a stop about five yards away from Thomas.

  “I’m arresting you on the suspicion of murdering Dr Finnigan, Mrs Cleaves, and Dr Lawson. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand?”

  Kate walked a couple of steps closer towards him. “If I understand?” she snorted. “You are the one who doesn’t understand anything!”

  Thomas turned around and lifted Sky off from the wall. He suddenly felt her body go stiff and her fingers clawed tensely into his neck. When he tried to set her down onto the street, she clung to him like a little monkey who had never set foot on the ground before.

  Slowly he moved around to find Kate had drawn a gun on them.

  “Listen, if you want to shoot me, fine, but you will not harm the kid! She’s got nothing to do with it,” he shouted against the Arctic wind.

  “Her stupid dog has no business being in my backyard!” she shouted back.

  “Then you should not have given him treats in the first place; that made him very attached. But believe me, it’s not the dog who solved the case, even though he saved us a lot of time searching for evidence,” Thomas replied, waving the front part of the epee in her face. “A trace, you know, is just a synonym for a mistake, and you’ve made a couple of them. In the end, you got careless. Now, let’s sort this mess out like adults. Let the kid go.”

  Kate curtly nodded her head towards Sky, who was staring mesmerised at her teacher, obviously not understanding a sin
gle word they said.

  Thomas bent down and turned Sky around so she was looking at him instead of at her armed teacher. “Listen carefully. You’ll run home to my house. The front door is unlocked, and you wait in your room for me to come, okay?”

  “But what about you? Why does she have a gun?”

  “I’ll tell you later. I need you to go home now. Can you do that?”

  “Are you two done with the sentimentalities?” Kate barked.

  Thomas got up and gave Sky a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Sky then set off with Barney in tow, skidding rather than running down the road. Thomas only turned back around once she had vanished out of sight.

  Kate was still pointing the gun at him.

  “You can put that down,” he shouted, motioning at the weapon and then holding up his hands. “I’m unarmed. And threatening a police officer won’t make your case any better.”

  “I don’t care! My life has been in tatters for years now. It can’t get any worse. But I’m curious, when did you know it was me?”

  “Only half an hour ago. I admit I was blind to all the clues that lay in front of me. You didn’t go to the hospital to visit a friend with a broken leg. You have kidney problems and are a dialysis patient. You need blood purification three to four times a week, and sometimes your body doesn’t tolerate it, which is why you collapsed at the bake sale. You were one of Dr Lawson’s patients when you were younger. He operated on you and removed a kidney without your knowledge, and now you’re suffering complications,” Thomas shouted again against the howling wind.

  “A year ago, I had acute pyelonephritis, and I’ve been in need of dialysis ever since then. I urgently need a donor kidney. So, I’ve got nothing to lose!”

  Thomas did not have any proof for what he was saying, but he soldiered on. “When we were in the kitchen at the bake sale and I felt the scar on your abdomen, you told me you had your appendix removed. But it wasn’t your appendix, it was your kidney. The scars are nearly at the same place.”

  “Very sharp. But wrong. Dr Lawson did indeed remove my appendix but decided to go for a kidney as well. He ruined my entire life! In school, I couldn’t do the sports I wanted to do, like fencing. I would have been a great athlete, but I was the one who was always left out. Too weak. Too slow. No stamina. My only kidney wasn’t strong enough to support competitive sport. All they let me do was drama and art club. What a defeat. You can’t possibly imagine how much that hurt!”

  Thomas shielded his eyes from the increasingly forceful wind. “And then they put The Three Musketeers on stage at your drama club. A play where you could finally fulfil your dream of fencing; of being a sporty and athletic girl. I saw the photos above your desk. However, you couldn’t do competitive fencing as you needed a medical certificate, and no doctor would issue that in your condition. But the smile on your face, as a Musketeer proudly wielding an epee spoke volumes. You should have thought about that before you let me in. Another mistake. Another trace. But now I’m curious… how did you find Dr Lawson?”

  She looked at him pouting. “You disappoint me, Nathaniel. I thought you had found out by now. But I’ll give you a hint because I don’t want to stand in this icy cold for much longer, but I also don’t want you to die stupid. I was the one visiting him on his last evening.”

  And another piece of the puzzle found its place in Thomas’s mind. “He was extremely happy that evening. We know that from his girlfriend in Africa, because he thought he could finally make peace with the past. There was one person he especially wanted to apologise to. You. You were the main reason he suffered remorse all those years. Because you…” And suddenly he remembered the photograph he had taken from Lawson’s cabin on the first day of investigating the case.

  He slowly moved his hand inside his parka, but Kate immediately raised the gun to his chest.

  “I want to show you something. A picture. It’s in my inner jacket pocket. I’ll take it out slowly.”

  Once he had fished it out, he carefully walked towards her, holding the picture up for her to see. Kate flexed her teeth but did not show any emotion. The black and white photograph depicted the backs of an adult and a small child holding hands and looking up at the pyramid on the market square. The child was holding the leash of a sleigh.

  “This is you, hand in hand with your grandfather.”

  “No!” Kate shouted furiously. “This is me with the monster that ruined my life! You don’t understand. I could never do the things other children did. Play as long as they could. Run as fast as they could. Because my body always set me boundaries. I wanted to be a fencer and in the US, where I grew up, I had the best opportunities. But he robbed me of a kidney, selling it for a profit. He did not even have the courage to tell my mother what he’d done. We found out by coincidence after my first kidney failure when the doctors asked me why I only had one; they clearly saw I was born with two. You wouldn’t believe how much the beast cried when I visited him at his cabin. I sometimes saw him from my classroom window. Waiting outside school, trying to catch a glimpse of me, until the mayor chased him away. He thought I hadn’t recognised him, waiting for the right time to talk to me, but he was the reason I came back to this godforsaken area, hoping to find him here somewhere, and… I was lucky. Look who had come back, as well — my grandfather. And this time, I wanted to show him what a fine fencer I had become,” she spat.

  “And then you dragged him onto the pyramid… why? To publicly humiliate him? Barely anybody here knew who he was. You tampered with the brakes on Dr Finnigan’s car, but it looked like an accident. You pushed old Mrs Cleaves down the stairs, but at first glance it looked too like an accident. Why suddenly change strategy? That’s, by the way, how we caught you in the end.”

  “Firstly, you haven’t caught me yet. And secondly, yes, I killed him outside his cabin… gave him his coup de grace… but I did not put him onto the pyramid. You wouldn’t believe how surprised I was to hear from the school kids that a dead body had been found perched on the pyramid! I left him outside his cabin in the snow with the epee stuck in his bloody heart.”

  “After you killed him, you took his phone with you?”

  Kate only nodded.

  “Did you know about the letter he had written?” Thomas asked.

  “Yes. I browsed through his stuff once he was dead. Didn’t take long to find it.”

  “And?” he asked, testing her credibility.

  “He gave you the names of his victims… all except one. He only referred to me as the grandchild. He was too ashamed that he had made a profit with his own flesh and blood. The Bohemian kids were worthless; he used them as guinea pigs. But he told me that my kidney went to some celebrity’s spoilt brat. My grandfather made a small fortune with that. All illegal money, of course, but he just could not resist the deal. And as a nice little addition, his reputation as charitable doctor shot through the roof overnight.”

  “Why didn’t you take the letter with you?”

  “Because he had provided you a list of fifty-two possible suspects, plus relatives. That’s why I kept checking on the progress you’d made. I knew it would take you a while to research your way through all of those names. And since my mother was an illegitimate child and Lawson had never been registered as her father, I knew it would be next to impossible to find me.”

  “And yet here we are,” Thomas replied straight-faced.

  “Still, I didn’t put him on the pyramid. I would not have had the strength to drag that swine up there.”

  “Then who did?” Thomas asked, but more to himself than her.

  “You are earning the big bucks here, but unfortunately you won’t have time to find out.”

  Kate lifted her gun and he took a couple of steps back. “I warned you, Nathaniel, but you didn’t want to listen.”

  “Did you seriously think because of some slashed tyres and a creepy note on my windscreen I would stop investigating? So, you can wrap me around your little finger? Just out of curiosity… what do you g
ain from killing me?”

  “Time! To leave this awful place. I’ve been here long enough.”

  “Don’t be stupid. They’ll arrest you in the next village. Technology is fairly advanced, you know, even in this area.”

  “Shut up. I’ve allowed you way too far into my life already.”

  Thomas looked at her pleadingly. “Don’t do this, there’s always a way—”

  A shot rang out, and echoed back from the mountains surrounding a village that had already seen too much misery.

  Thomas’s knees gave way, and he fell head first onto the icy road.

  33

  THOMAS’S brain sent an impulse through his entire body to locate the pain and, eventually, the place where the bullet had hit him. But he felt nothing.

  When he lifted his head slightly, a small rivulet of blood was slowly seeping into the crisp white snow in front of him. Apparently, the bullet must have lodged in a part of his brain where he did not feel any pain. He lifted his right arm to his head and felt the scar on his temple, his hair, and his skull. But his hand did not find any blood.

  Thomas pushed himself up on his elbows, brushed the snow off his face, and looked at the spot where Kate had stood seconds earlier. Now she lay on her back pressing her hand to her shoulder and doubled over in pain.

  The blood he had seen was actually hers.

  Thomas took her gun, discharged it, and stuffed it in his belt. Then he turned around and looked at his best friend’s house. Light arches illuminated all the windows, smiling back at him in silence… mute witnesses comforting him no matter what.

  Everything was as peaceful as it could possibly be.

  But then his eyes reached the small gable window where a little wooden star used to hang. It had been removed, and in the pale light of the streetlamp, he saw Collins holding a gun with a silencer screwed on.

  She looked down at him, motionlessly, and he gave her a thumbs-up. She nodded once, retreated, and was immediately swallowed by darkness.

  Thomas walked back to Kate and bent down.