“Well, I’m off. Could eat the ass of a low-flyin’ duck,” Teagan said suddenly. “We on this thing together, yeah?”
“Yeah, looks like,” Jack said, leaning an elbow on the table. “You, me, and Morris. Tomorrow, nine a.m. My office.”
Teagan nodded and jogged off to his car. Jack watched him go, then turned his attention back to the chunk of wood in the bag. He took a deep breath, frigid in his nose and throat, and let it out in little white puffs. It was time, he knew, to start the job.
* * *
Although the official start of summer was a month away, the forecast of eight to ten inches of snow for Colby, Connecticut, raised few eyebrows, as late in the season as it was. It had been a particularly harsh winter; temperatures often dropped into the negatives and a leaden sky had dumped snow by the foot on a weekly basis for months. When it didn’t snow, the rain during the day turned to black ice at night. The children’s spring break had been eaten into by the accumulation of snow days. The county had run out of salt for the roads by early March and had been having a tough time acquiring more to clear them.
Still, most people believed this storm would be the last of them for the year, and patiently suffered the weather to exhale its arctic breath one last time over all. The town of Colby warmed up the snowplows and salt/sand trucks in preparation for winter’s last hurrah, and the townsfolk swarmed the local supermarkets, the Targets and Walmarts, the Costcos and the gas stations, to stock up on gasoline and supplies.
Most were still blissfully unaware of the body found hanging from a tree in Edison Park, but they felt it, in the vaguest, unarticulated way. They felt the cold trying to wrench their skin from their bones, and they felt something else, too—a kind of forlorn loneliness trying to wrench peace of mind from their souls. Just as they stocked up on food and bottled water, shovels and gloves, they squinted into the night outside their homes before drawing blinds and locking doors, double-checking on the kids in bed and huddling closer to each other than usual. Something other than a late winter was in the air, and it chilled them just as much, if not more, when they thought too long about it.
Though not even the gossips would give voice to it, the people of Colby knew something was coming with the snow.
About the Author
Mary SanGiovanni is the author of Chills, as well as the Bram Stoker nominated novel The Hollower, its sequels Found You and The Triumvirate, Thrall, and Chaos. She is also the author the novellas For Emmy, Possessing Amy, and The Fading Place and numerous short stories. She has been writing fiction for over a decade, has a master’s in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University, and is a member of The Authors Guild, Penn Writers, and International Thriller Writers. Her website is marysangiovanni.com.
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