by Jeff Carson
“Who’s that on the phone?” Wolf asked, walking back to the door.
“Your girlfriend,” Tammy said. “How are you two doing by the way? She come up here lately?”
Wolf ignored her and gripped the handle. When nothing happened, he looked up and gave her a warning glare.
The door clicked and Tammy turned the page on her magazine.
Chapter 4
For a number of reasons, Deputy Heather Patterson loved days like these—blue sky with heaps of snow on the ground and sagging off the trees. First, they reminded her of her youth and fun on the slopes of Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk, and Snowmass. And that reminded her of skiing with her brothers and parents, oh yeah, and her Aunt Margaret too, because her family used to visit her in Rocky Points.
In short, sunny winter days reminded her of her family, and she was feeling a little homesick. It always happened that way on sunny winter days. It was a mental trigger that had always been there, like how the smell of a man’s cologne could remind her of romances past.
Romances. Past. Those two words went hand in hand, she thought.
Her heart thumped in her ears and her breath came fast as she slogged through the thick snow. They were almost all the way down the pine-tree-lined driveway and just a stone’s throw from Edna Yerton’s porch.
Edna Yerton’s home was a no-frills A-frame brown box with two drape-covered windows on either side of a brown front door. A covered porch ran the full length of the house in front, and in the yard was a mound of snow the general shape and size of a Lincoln, or older-model Cadillac. Regardless of the make, the car was worthless for navigating these dirt roads most of the year.
Patterson stopped and turned around to check on Rachette’s progress. Correction: She was just a stone’s throw away. Rachette was still closer to the SUV parked up on the county road than to her.
“Are you okay?” she called.
Rachette had his gloved hands wrapped around the top of his right thigh. To an untrained eye, it would have looked like he was trying to pull his leg out of the snow. But in Patterson’s recent experience, she knew he was massaging his gunshot wound from seven months ago.
It was one of three shots he had taken in order to save Patterson’s life, and by God, it wasn’t something she was ever going to forget. But for a while now, she’d been wondering whether Rachette wasn’t playing the whole injured card a little too much. Every time the thought came up, she felt like she was betraying her partner, but she swore she’d been catching him in an act recently.
For instance, when they’d gone skiing the other day, Rachette had done the same thing. What’s more, it had been when she was talking to the lift operator—that cute Australian kid who was way too young but had an interesting cocky charm nonetheless. That day, she had skied up to the front of the line and stopped, waiting for Rachette. While waiting, she had struck up a conversation about how cold it was for an Aussie in the mountains of Colorado, or something stupid like that. When Rachette hadn’t shown up, she’d turned around, and he had been in this same pose, massaging his leg and looking at her.
“Do you want to go back to the truck and rest, and let me do this?” she called up to Rachette.
Rachette looked up at her and mumbled something. Then his snowshoe lifted, as if finally breaking free from sucking quicksand, and he marched toward her with high steps, kicking up powder that glittered in the sun.
Patterson turned and continued to walk, a smile creasing her lips. She’d used a similar variation the other day. Do you want to sit this run out? I can meet you in the lodge.
“Hello there!”
Patterson turned and saw an old woman in the doorway.
“Mrs. Yerton?” Patterson called.
“Yes?”
“I’m Deputy Patterson, from the Sheriff’s Department.” She turned around and pointed at Rachette, who was now getting close. “This is Deputy Rachette. We were … can we come talk to you?”
Edna Yerton nodded. “Sure, yes. Come in. Come in from the cold!” She laughed gaily, reminding Patterson of her grandmother. “So much snow out there. It’s so deep.”
When Patterson’s snowshoe scraped against a wooden step hidden beneath the snow, she knew she’d reached the edge of the porch. She stepped up, digging the teeth on the soles into the old pine. She bent down, unbuckled the straps, and then stepped out of them and stomped the snow off her boots.
Edna watched quietly, and Patterson turned to help Rachette up the steps. She held out a hand, but Rachette ignored it and tripped on the submerged step.
“Shh—” he hissed, thankfully cutting his expletive short.
Patterson turned to Edna. “Do you have a wood pile?”
Edna raised her eyebrows and tilted her head, her face contorted with confusion.
“A wood pile?” Patterson repeated. “For a fire?”
“Ohohoho,” she laughed. “I thought you said worthwhile.”
Patterson swallowed. “Oh, no. I—”
“It’s around the side of the house,” she said, and a hand materialized out of the heap of layered clothing and pointed to the right.
Patterson took a hard look at Edna. The woman’s gaze was distant and her lips were curled in a small smile, as if she were thinking of a favorite movie she’d seen forty years ago. Her hair was matted to her head and she was bundled in thick layers of clothing underneath a wrapped blanket. A lot of clothing. Patterson could see a plaid bathrobe, a green knit sweater, two flannel shirts, a hooded something, a turtleneck, plaid pants, candy-striped wool socks and fuzzy slippers.
“I’ll get the wood,” Rachette said, taking off his backpack and clunking it at Patterson’s feet. “You go inside. Dump this stuff in the fridge.”
Dump this stuff in the fridge. “All right. You okay?”
He walked away through the thick snow to the side of the house.
“May I come in?” Patterson asked. Edna stepped aside for Patterson and she entered.
“It’s cold in here,” Patterson said. Her breath was still visible inside the entryway.
Edna shut the door, locked it with two latches, and then walked down the hallway toward a darkened kitchen.
“Uh, can we keep that unlocked? Deputy Rachette needs to …”
Edna disappeared around the corner. Patterson could hear canned laughter coming from a television somewhere in the depths of the house.
Patterson unlocked the door, opened it again, and stuck her head out. Rachette was headed back with an armful of logs. “Just come in when you’re done,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Just walk in when you’re done,” Patterson said louder, and then she shut the door and walked into the kitchen.
It was filthy, and in mind-boggling ways. A dead mouse lay next to the scratched-out floorboard near the refrigerator. There was a broken ceramic bowl underneath the kitchen table from which four beat-up wooden chairs were pulled out at all angles. Junk mail covered every square inch of the tabletop. Dead mice, chunks of mud, straw, wires hanging out of the ceiling, grass clippings … Where was the food mess? The empty cans of soup, spent packages of pasta?
Patterson stood still, letting her eyes pass over the litter, attaching a sad explanation to every element. She felt her eyes tear up and her breath constrict, and then she cleared her throat.
The front door opened all the way and bashed into the interior wall, and Rachette stumbled inside with an armload of lumber.
He kicked the door closed and then walked down the hall toward Patterson. He gave her a double take and then stopped, looking around.
“Where is she?” he asked quietly.
Patterson nodded to the flickering room where Edna had gone.
“This is a nice place,” Rachette said as he made his way past her.
Patterson felt her face redden with anger at Rachette’s insensitivity, but then figured she wouldn’t have expected him to tear up like she had. She’d long suspected that Deputy Rachette’s tear ducts sec
reted dust.
Patterson took off the backpack and set it on the table. The leaflets, flyers, and envelopes shifted, and a few dropped on the ground. She picked them up, pushed everything into a pile she would deal with later and walked into the room after Rachette and Edna.
Rachette was already digging in the black stove in the corner, making no attempt to talk to the woman.
Edna sat on a recliner chair, nibbling from a bag of potato chips that sat next to her and watching an episode of Seinfeld. At least she was eating.
“Have you had any food today, Edna?” she asked. “I mean, besides the potato chips?”
She looked at Patterson with that same look of confusion.
Patterson backed away and went into the kitchen, unable to take whatever was about to come out of the sad old lady’s mouth. She shook her head, unzipped the backpack and began unpacking. Everything went on the counters, which were relatively clean compared to other surfaces. Canned veggies, beans, bread, peanut butter, pasta, soup, a six-pack of soda, and a bag of fried chicken—all in plain view, so Edna would know it was there after they’d left.
She took a deep breath and held it, then opened the refrigerator. Six, no, seven bundles of blackened bananas were stacked on the shelves amid a clutter of condiments stacked two high on each shelf. Bread bags with science experiments growing in them. At least four dozen eggs.
She shut the door and exhaled, then caught the stench she’d unleashed on her next inhalation.
She opened a cupboard and pulled a plate off the stack, thankful she’d opened the right cupboard on the first try, and relieved that didn’t look more depressing inside. No dead squirrels.
She put a chicken drumstick on the plate, pulled off a soda from the six-pack, and walked back into the room.
Rachette was kneeling down in front of the open furnace door. His eyes were narrowed and his face glowed orange as the fire crackled and popped inside.
Patterson walked to Edna, who was oblivious to the life-giving heat now filling the room, and held out the plate. “Okay, Edna. Here’s some chicken. Eat up.”
Edna looked up and smiled, and then took the plate. She set it down on her thin stomach, tipping the bag of potato chips over, and started devouring the chicken.
There was a framed picture on the wall of a tanned couple with three children, all lounging on the deck of a yacht with different colored drinks in hand. She narrowed her eyes and walked closer to it. It was definitely a yacht, not a cruise ship. The man wore a gold watch and a dangling gold chain hung around his neck. His eyebrows were arched and he smiled with one side of his mouth, like Hey, you seein’ all this?
“That’s my daughter’s family,” Edna said with a dreamy smile. “They live in Miami.”
“They ever come visit?” Patterson curled her lip in a snarl and Rachette looked over at her. She hadn’t meant to make the question so loud.
Edna put the chicken to her mouth.
Patterson sighed and closed her eyes, and then returned to the kitchen. She went to the sink and turned on the water faucet, letting out a breath of relief when the water came out in a steady stream.
Opening the cupboards and checking underneath the sink, she saw that someone had wrapped the pipes in blankets and duct tape, and it looked to be keeping them above freezing. Maybe Sheriff Wolf had done this on an earlier visit. Now, if they could do the same for Edna—wrap her up and keep her from freezing … Rachette seemed to be handling that part well, so Patterson decided to do what she saw fit to improve Edna’s situation.
For the next thirty minutes, Patterson went on a cleaning and tidying rampage. There was no way she was going to leave this woman in this place looking like it did.
She found a few trash bags and doubled them up, and then dumped all the bad food from the refrigerator; then she got started on the rest of the kitchen. After she’d finished—the strange debris cleared and vital things set out on the counters for Edna to find later—she moved on to the other rooms. She vacuumed with an old Dirt Devil she’d found in the closet, and she scrubbed, swept, wiped, threw away, and organized. Patterson went into machine-mode, doing all that was necessary for this woman without an ounce of emotion, like she was cranking out a particularly tough cross-fit workout and kicking its ass.
Rachette took the same time to re-educate Edna on the workings of the stove. Edna didn’t look like she’d been paying attention, and another tinge of concern hit Patterson in the gut like she was on a bumpy boat ride on the ocean. On a yacht.
By the time they left, however, the air inside Edna’s was sauna-like compared to before, and Patterson felt good that they’d set her up for at least a few days.
“I’ll check up on you in a couple days,” Patterson said to Edna as they shut the door, and she meant it.
…
Rachette two-fisted the wheel of the SUV, sticking to the ruts they’d made on the way up as they crept down County Road 15, which led into town. The dashboard heater was working overtime, sounding like a jet engine, and the sun flickered through the trees into Patterson’s window, making it a comfortable ride after enduring the elements outside for so long.
“You got pretty emotional in there,” Rachette said.
The comfort was short-lived.
She turned and glared at Rachette. “That didn’t disturb you? That a resident of our town lives like that? Barely clinging to life, completely helpless? And did you see that picture of her daughter’s family? They’re loaded, hanging out on a luxury yacht.”
Rachette smiled and shrugged. “There’s a shit-load of people like that in the world. You can’t save everybody, Patterson. It’s gotta be, like, eighty percent of people living like that. And look at the mayor’s wife. Just because you have a boatload of money doesn’t mean you’re happy and don’t off yourself.”
Patterson twisted her face and looked at him, then turned away and shook her head.
“Easy,” Rachette said. “I’m just saying, some people choose to live differently than others, and it’s not up to you to save them.”
“You think Edna lives like that by choice? She doesn’t know what the hell is going on around her. She can’t even light a fire. Can’t even see that there’s a dead fucking mouse on the ground that needs to be scooped outside. And her shit-bag family ignores her from life in paradise. And as far as the mayor’s wife goes … just shut up about that.”
Rachette held up a hand. “O-kay.”
Patterson rolled her eyes. Sometimes she wondered why she talked to her partner.
Up ahead was a little mound that ran across the road, and beyond was freshly plowed the rest of the way down. Rachette slowed, broke through the snow, and then let off the brake and coasted a little faster on the packed powder.
“Listen,” Rachette persisted, “we’ll go check on Edna again in a few days.” He curled his lips down and nodded. “Yeah, get her fire goin’ again. You can cook her some … ramen noodles.”
Patterson laughed in spite of herself because Rachette was ribbing her, and doing a good job of it. What he knew was that Patterson was a self-proclaimed terrible cook, and had proven so on two occasions to the entire department. The first time was when she’d made a seven-layer Mexican dip for the Sheriff’s Department Halloween party, accidentally adding relish instead of green chili, and catching some serious flak from everyone. The second time was when she’d brought a pasta salad to the Christmas party, and the pasta was rubber-like-chewy-to-rock-hard, thus solidifying her reputation as the worst cook in Rocky Points.
Patterson looked at Rachette. His cropped blond hair stuck up at the back, there was a glint on his face where five days of blonde stubble had grown in patches, and he wore his confident “dreamy” look that worked on no woman, ever. She rolled her eyes and looked out the window, suppressing a smile for fear of encouraging him. She had to admit, he’d gotten better at steering conversations away from the yelling matches they’d had early in their partnership. Just a little.
“Shit,” R
achette said.
The SUV began shuddering, anti-lock brakes struggling to keep the truck from skidding on the packed snow.
Patterson sat up and gripped the ceiling bar as she watched the pines twirl past the windows. As the truck stopped spinning at three quarters of a revolution, exactly why they were spinning became clear to Patterson.
She looked out the window and gasped. They were headed straight for the black underside of a truck that had upturned on its side on the right snow bank.
The tires of the SUV squealed as they continued gliding on the slick road.
Patterson leaned toward Rachette as the truck got closer to impacting her door. They were slowing, but it looked like they were going to connect. She pulled on the seatbelt to get away from the door as much as possible, but it had locked itself in place.
Just before they hit, Rachette revved the engine and the SUV lurched forward, narrowly avoiding the collision. Rachette overcompensated, jerking the wheel to the right. They spun in the opposite direction and rammed into a waist-high snow bank beyond the upturned truck, abruptly stopping the SUV.
“You okay?” Rachette asked with wide eyes.
“Yeah, you?”
“These guys with their piece-of-shit trucks and their piece-of-shit plows.” Rachette pushed on his door, unable to open it against the snow. He looked over at Patterson. “I gotta climb out your side.”
Patterson opened her door and got out.
Rachette climbed over the seat, kicking the dash computer in the process. “Shit. Ah!” As he stepped onto the ground, he cried out and clenched his leg.
That was real pain.
Rachette slammed the door and marched toward the truck.
“Make sure everyone’s all right,” she said, half warning him to keep his cool.
The truck was an older-model Chevy, painted sky blue and rusted-out brown near the window wells. On the front was a large yellow plow that now stood straight up in the air, and it looked like the crash had wrenched and bent it to an awkward angle. The old Chevy lay on its passenger side, leaning toward the roof with all four tires off the ground. The deep snow looked to have saved the truck from flipping onto its top.