by Timothy Boyd
Jonathan’s eyebrows rose with interest. “A man? What did he look like?”
Rita’s strength crumbled, and she began sobbing again. “I don’t know.”
“Try to remember,” he pressed.
“I can’t remember!”
“Colt,” Christine said forcefully, gaining her partner’s attention. “Let me do this.”
He regarded her for a moment, his eyes searching hers for information. She was adept at masking her emotions, but he managed to catch a flicker of her motives flash past, and realization dawned across his face as he shook his head slowly. “Don’t do this, Brody. Not today.”
“Don’t you talk to me about today!” she spat, a fire building within her.
“I’m scared,” Rita cried. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Christine glared at Jonathan, letting a thousand silent words pass between them before turning back to the frightened witness. “Let’s go then,” she smiled softly. “I’ll take you to the station, and we’ll talk there. Is that ok?”
Rita nodded slowly, observing Jonathan for any dissent.
When he rolled his eyes and holstered his weapon, Christine turned to him and said, “I’ll take her. You stay here and help them search for clues.”
“What? No,” he shook his head. “Brody, we stay together,” he said insistently.
“Right now, we need all the info we can get from Rita, and I’m the best person to get it from her,” she rationalized, and then she pointed toward the house. “They need you here. You were the first person on the scene up there.”
“But I need you here,” he argued.
Raising an eyebrow, she matter-of-factly stated, “No, you don’t.” She cradled Rita at her side with a comforting arm stretched over her shoulders, leading her to the police cruiser. She glanced back at her partner, feeling a little guilty about her outburst, and she tried to reassure him. “I’ll call you with any info I get.”
And he watched as Christine helped the blonde woman into the backseat, hopped into the driver’s seat, and pulled away, leaving him standing alone in the growing winter storm.
* * *
Penobscot Bay was quiet, save for the shrill cry of the wind, forcing clouds of snow to blanket the small town of Rockport, Maine. The docks all groaned from the weather’s assault, their long wooden legs stationary within the solid icy waters of the bay. The early morning’s sea smoke had dissipated from the surface of the water, leaving only cracked chunks of ice to wobble on the surface in its place. The roads were white with compacted precipitation, and traffic was scarce as the residents were fleeing to their homes for shelter from Mother Nature’s fury.
At the old house where he had found the first frozen victim, Jonathan Colter stood in the dark parlor, staring pensively out the window at the front yard, now covered with snow. He had already decided that this was an inconvenient day for nature to unleash hell. He wanted to be at home with Leslie, cradling her small figure in his arms, sitting in front of the fireplace, watching one of her old Frank Sinatra movies. He also wondered how Christine’s debriefing of Rita was going. He didn’t like working without her; it felt as though one of his limbs was missing from his body, and his movements and thoughts felt unbalanced.
He sighed, going over the minute details of the day so far. Lifting the yellow police tape, he ducked under it and made his way up the stairs to where the rest of the team was working. He shivered as he neared the master bedroom where the frozen corpse stood. They had had to open the window to keep the room cold, because the statue had begun to melt. Now, the man’s features drooped and sagged with unsettling eeriness, like the actual molecular structure of his body had been altered; simply melting him to do an autopsy would not be possible, unless the coroner was able to work with a vat of liquefied flesh and organs.
“Colter,” a fellow officer called out behind him.
Jonathan turned to meet his call. “What do ya got?”
The young officer handed him a small stack of papers. “Vic’s name is Peter Sheffield. Fifty-eight-year-old white male. Born in upstate New York. Moved here twenty years ago. Been cashin’ in on unemployment for the past five.”
Jonathan scanned the info on the first page while listening to the officer spout his facts.
“Neighbors say he’s a shut-in. Mainly stays inside. Pretty much your typical introvert.”
“Thanks, Evans.”
“There’s… one more thing.”
Jonathan looked up from the papers. “Go on.”
“Neighbors also said that once a week, they’ve been seein’ the same white car parked in front of the house at the curb.”
Jonathan’s brow furrowed at this news. “Did they say which day?”
“Ayuh,” the officer nodded. “And I’ll give ya three guesses…”
He wouldn’t need any of them to know that at that moment, the white car was sitting outside. A sedan, in fact. He knew, because he’d seen it as he’d swept the area for clues, but there had been nothing suspicious about the parked vehicle at the time.
“Get a team out there before the snow gets too high to get into the frikkin’ car,” he told the officer, who nodded and trampled down the steps. Jonathan observed the small team of men and women inside the bedroom daintily dusting the furniture for fingerprints. “Let me know if you guys find anything,” he said to them, even though he had a hunch that they would turn up with nothing. He moseyed down the steps, ruminating on the information in the packet he’d just received. He was hoping that something tangible would come from the search of the white sedan parked out front.
He strolled through the parlor once more and scanned the furniture with his eyes, hoping to spot any fragments of clues that could be pieced together. The couch, the end table, the ashtray, the whiskey bottle, the television. He searched the bookshelves and found a surprising lack of dust. He poked his head into the first floor bathroom but found nothing immediately unusual – no hair or toothpaste in the sink, no stains in the toilet, no scum in the shower.
In the kitchen, other than the plate from yesterday’s dinner on the cheap table, the counters and cabinets were clean. Placing his stack of papers on the table next to the dirty plate, he bent to examine the stains on the laminated flooring that he’d observed earlier, and he noticed that none of them appeared to have been there long. Residue from haphazardly throwing together the meal still on the table. No dirt along the baseboards though.
“You find somethin’, Colter?” asked Evans from the kitchen entrance.
Jonathan didn’t look up, his focus remaining on the details of the kitchen. “Somethin’ doesn’t add up here.”
The other cop waited for elaboration.
Eventually, Jonathan stood, brushing his hands on his pants and exhaling. “A lazy guy past his prime, nursin’ from the tit of unemployment for five years, an entire room upstairs filled with boxes nevah unpacked, passes out on the couch with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other… But look at this place. The only grime is from last night’s dinner. This doesn’t seem like the type of guy to have the motivation to get up every mornin’ to clean house.”
“I’m not sure what you’re gettin’ at, man.”
“He had a housekeeper. Or at least someone that stopped by to help him out. And I’d bet my left nut that that’s their car out front.”
Evans shifted his weight and went to retrieve the papers from the table. “I’m pretty sure there was somethin’ here about a cleanin’ lady,” he mumbled, flipping through the stack to find the information.
“Keep me posted. I’m gonna call Brody to see how she’s doin’,” Jonathan said as he retrieved his cell phone from his pocket, excusing himself to the parlor and choosing the speed dial that belonged to his partner. He held the phone up to his ear and waited, listening to the monotonous ring repeat itself over and over.
Finally, the voicemail picked up: “Hey, it’s Brody. I’m busy right now. And I don’t listen to messages, so call
back later.” And then the phone beeped. Jonathan hung up, his brow furrowed in thought, thinking it odd that she didn’t answer.
“Colter, I found it,” Evans announced, rejoining Jonathan from the kitchen.
“Housekeeper?”
“Yeah, for about six months.”
Jonathan retrieved a small pad of paper from his pocket and produced a tiny pencil to take notes. “I’ll check the name with the car’s owner when they figure it out.”
“Says here the name is…” Evans looked back down at the paper to read the information. “Mayes.”
Jonathan’s heart stopped, and his breath caught in his throat. “Say again?”
“Rita Mayes.”
The Dead of Winter
IV
The angry, churning sea of snowflakes pummeled the town of Rockport, forced into action by the vicious wind gusts that made the buildings cry out, creaking and swaying on their foundations. Many inches of snow had accumulated, encasing the town in a dangerous blanket of blinding white. Ominous clouds of gray veiled the stark sky, making it nearly impossible to discern the time of day without a clock to confirm that it was, indeed, early afternoon.
Jonathan sped in his police cruiser down what he hoped was the street, faster than was safe, ignoring the weather advisory about staying indoors. The windshield wipers tried desperately to keep his visibility clear, swiping sheets of snow and ice from the glass with frantic, rhythmic groans. A salt and plow truck trying foolishly to keep the roads cleared caused him to swerve, forcing his rear tires into a fishtail from which he quickly recovered. While he vehemently cursed Mother Nature’s injustice, he also silently thanked Her for keeping the roads devoid of other vehicles and pedestrians, making Rockport an eerie and abandoned ghost town.
Christine was not answering her phone, and this concerned him greatly. He knew she could take care of herself, but on this day specifically, her head was not in the right place of focus that it would be on other days. There were a number of reasons that could cause her unavailability, but one thing floated through his mind that clouded his rationality.
Rita Mayes.
This young blonde woman was the housekeeper of the late Peter Sheffield, found frozen in fear in his master bedroom a few hours previous. For whatever reason, she had decided to leave out this little detail when talking to the two cops. And now, Jonathan was terrified for his partner.
He pulled into the area that he knew to be the parking lot of the police station, only identifiable from the few other cars and SUVs parked nearby. The small, red brick building was quaint, but it was as big as it needed to be. Jonathan had barely put the car in park before flinging open the driver’s door, being blasted in the face with frigid winds and tiny ice pellets, and tromping haphazardly through a foot of snow, his heart pounding and his throat dry.
He threw his weight against the white door, turning the knob and hurling it inward, tracking mounds of snow onto the tan linoleum tiles inside. Slamming the door behind him, he ignored the handful of officers staring at him and charged through the room past the rows of wooden desks laden with the personal effects of the other officers.
And then suddenly, he halted in place.
He stared at the desk at the back of the room, the last one before the offices of the chief and sergeant. Sitting in her chair, wide-eyed from the shock of his abrupt entrance, was Christine, unharmed and not a frozen statue. Rita sat at the other side of the desk sipping a mug of hot chocolate, her back to Jonathan. She turned around in her chair and gave him a quick smile. “Hi, Officer Colter!” she greeted.
Jonathan’s mind swirled with confusion. He approached his partner’s desk, gasping for breath from his exertions, not knowing quite what to say.
“Colt, what’s going on?” Christine said, brushing a short piece of hair behind her ear, a look of alarm on her face.
“You… you’re all right.”
“Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Jonathan felt a wave of embarrassment roll over his body for creating such a scene at the station. He felt his cheeks flush and began to grow angry with his partner. “I’ve been tryin’ to call you!”
She looked down at her cell phone on the desk. “I’m sorry. I must have had it on silent.”
Fury rumbled within him, and he wasn’t sure how to contain it. There were so many things that weren’t making sense about the day so far, including the unbelievable fact that innocent people seemed to be freezing to death. “Our victim’s name was Peter Sheffield.” He turned to Rita. “Does that name ring a bell to you?” he spat.
She fidgeted in her chair, setting her ceramic mug down. “No, I… I don’t think so.”
Christine stood. “Colt, what’s this about?”
But Jonathan ignored his partner, a sickened grin on his face. “Ya don’t think so? Well, that’s funny, considerin’ you’ve been his housekeeper for six months.”
Rita remained silent, staring at her mug of cocoa, her blonde hair slipping from behind her ear and falling into her face.
“Is this true?” Christine asked her, a hint of shock and betrayal in her tone.
After another moment of silence, Jonathan noticed Rita’s back begin to tremble, and then she began sobbing and mumbling, “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Christine asked.
“I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you guys,” she blubbered. “Everything happened so fast this morning, and when I heard Mr. Sheffield scream, I was afraid, so I ran out the back door and called the police.” She gasped for breath, wiping her face on her sleeve. “I haven’t lived here long, and I didn’t want to get into any trouble. I just wanted a second chance, you know?”
Christine sat once more and reached her hand forward, softly grasping one of Rita’s. “Yeah, I do know.”
Rita looked up at Jonathan, her eyes bloodshot, her face matted with moisture. “I swear to you,” she began, her lip quivering as more tears flowed down her cheeks. “I didn’t have anything to do with whatever happened to Mr. Sheffield.” She sobbed into her hands while the room remained silent.
Jonathan shifted awkwardly, ashamed but yet still not satisfied that Rita had told all there was to tell.
Christine came out from behind her desk and put her arms around the sobbing woman. Looking up at Jonathan, she said quietly, “Will you please let me handle her? I got this.”
“Colter,” came a gruff voice at the end of the room.
Jonathan looked up and saw the slightly rotund yet tall figure of Markus Kelson, the Chief of Police, commanding authority by simply standing in the threshold to his office, his gray moustache displayed proudly across his top lip. “Yes, sir?”
The chief waited, like he was debating how to phrase the words about to come from his mouth. “How are things going out there?”
Jonathan looked down at the crying woman and his partner consoling her, and he sighed. “It’s goin’ ok, sir. I’m just tryin’ to put the pieces together.”
The chief nodded. “I understand how frustrating that can be.”
Jonathan knew exactly what was happening, as did every other cop in the room. This was the chief’s way of diffusing the tension in the station without having to directly call out a rowdy officer. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath in an attempt to calm down. “I’m also a little on edge ‘cause of the storm, sir. I apologize. My wife had some shoppin’ to do today, and I haven’t had time to call her and make sure she’s safe.”
The chief nodded again. “It sure is nasty out there, that’s for sure. But we’ve also called in some of the guys from Camden to help us out with this one. Why don’t you take a seat at your desk and give Leslie a call?”
Jonathan picked up on the indirect order and complied, realizing that he was about to be sent home for the day, and he wouldn’t allow that to happen; he needed to see this mystery through. He nodded slowly. “Yes, sir.”
The chief looked around the room. “Ok, everyone. Let’s get back to work a
nd get through this day.”
Christine rubbed Rita’s back to calm her, and when the sobs began to slow, she glanced over and saw that her partner was talking on the phone, presumably with his wife. She was genuinely glad Leslie was home and safe.
Rita wiped her face on her sleeve one last time and took a deep breath to center herself. “Thanks, Officer Brody. I’m so embarrassed for making such a scene here.”
“You’re fine. It’s not a full day at work unless I’ve made a scene at some point,” Christine smiled.
Rita glanced over at Jonathan talking on the phone and said quietly, “Your partner seems like kind of a jerk.”
She smirked at the supportive thought but replied, “He’s really not. He just cares about me a lot and gets worried.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that from men before.”
Christine paused, her brow furrowing. “No, he’s really not like that. He’s just trying to do his job.”
Rita examined the cop’s face and realized she needed to end the conversation. “Sure. Sorry.” She finished the last of her hot chocolate and replaced the mug on Christine’s desk. “Thank you so much for your kindness today. Do you guys need more from me, or can someone take me back to my car at Mr. Sheffield’s?”
Christine thought for a moment, looking over at her partner talking to his wife on the phone. “I would volunteer to take you myself, but I think for now it may be best if someone else escorts you so I can catch up with Colt.”
“I understand.”
As Jonathan hung up the phone, Christine said to Rita, “Let me go talk to him real quick.” And she strolled over, plopping down onto the corner of his desktop.
He sighed, recognizing the demeanor and not wanting to deal with the mood she was currently in. “Hey, Brody.”
“So…” she began, taking a slight pause for dramatic effect. “How are things back at the Sheffield house?”
“Neighbors told us about a white car that shows up at his house weekly.”
“Yeah, that’s Rita’s.”
“Yes, I know that now.”