Snow Blind

25

There was a row of overheads in the peak of the thirty-foot roof, but they didn’t do much to light up the interior of the barn. Not one of them believed that Weinbeck was still in there, but the place itself was enough to spook anyone, with or without an armed killer hiding behind a post or molding hay bale. The intermittent creaks and groans of the old barn that always seemed to shift and complain, even on the stillest of nights, made it sound like the building was about to come down around their heads.

‘Nice bed,’ Sampson said, training his light on the big four-poster. ‘You sleep out here, or what?’

Iris saw the tarp coverings thrown aside and piled on the dirt floor. There was the indentation of someone’s body in the old feather mattress, and she remembered running her hands over that tarp just this morning. Had he been under there then? ‘Not me,’ she tried to say, but her voice cracked and her legs felt rubbery. Who’s been sleeping in my bed? Fairy-tale lines screamed in her head.

Neville was over on the far side of the barn, his neck scarf pressed over his nose and mouth as he moved through a maze of haphazardly stacked hay bales that spewed decades-old mold whenever he brushed against them. ‘Clear over here!’ he shouted as he started to weave his way out, then Iris heard him grunt and fall, and then mutter, ‘Goddamnit.’

He appeared a few seconds later, took the scarf off his face, and coughed hard. ‘What’s under the trapdoor?’

Iris frowned. ‘What trapdoor?’

‘Haven’t you ever been back there?’

‘Not a chance. Mark had allergies, and I wouldn’t go near that hay. It smells, and it’s filled with mold.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Then he shrugged and tied the scarf around his face again. ‘Gotta take a look, I suppose.’

Iris and Sampson snugged their parka collars over the lower half of their faces, tried not to breathe, and followed Deputy Neville through the maze. The odor of years of mold cementing hay bales together wasn’t offensive in itself, but the minute you took the dustiness into your lungs, you knew it was noxious.

From the outside, the bales looked as if they’d been stacked haphazardly, but the deeper they went in, the more purposeful they seemed, like the boxwood maze at the botanical gardens.

The trapdoor was all the way back, set into the wooden floor near the outside wall. Their lights picked up the metal ring Neville had tripped on, poking up through a layer of hay dust, and then the long, heavy metal slide that snugged deep into a rusty hasp, locking it from the outside. It took some effort to kick the slide free of the hasp. It hadn’t been moved in a long time.

Neville lifted the door and aimed his flash down into the hole. ‘Deep,’ he said. ‘Ten, maybe twelve feet.’ He went down on his knees, and then on his belly, poking his head into the space and moving his light around. Suddenly the light stopped moving and Iris heard him hiss, ‘Oh, Jesus…’ He scrambled back from the hole on his hands and knees, blue eyes big in a very white face.

‘Weinbeck?’ Sampson whispered.

‘Hell, no.’

A few seconds with his light and Sampson found what he was looking for: a handmade wooden ladder buried nearby under some loose hay.

‘How’d you know that was there?’ Iris asked as he carried it over and he and Neville maneuvered it down through the trapdoor. She was looking for a diversion, anything to take her mind off what Neville had said was in the room under the floor.

‘A lot of these old barns have root cellars like this, built deep enough to go beneath the frost line. Had to be a way to get in and out of it.’

They went down the ladder one by one, Iris last. She wasn’t really afraid, and that surprised her. She was climbing down into a dark hole in the ground to see something horrible, and all she really felt was a sense of dread.

The room was crisscrossed with cobwebs that almost made a curtain, they’d been undisturbed for so long. Little white beads were stuck to the webs and squeaked underfoot on the floor when Iris stepped down from the ladder. ‘What is this stuff?’ Iris wondered aloud.

‘Styrofoam.’ Neville pointed to the walls and toed up the edge of a rug remnant. Panels of it on the floors, walls, ceiling. Pretty good insulation in a pinch, but you’ve gotta keep it up. Deteriorates in a hurry.’ Then he directed his light to what he’d seen from above, lying on an old metal bed with a rotting mattress, and Iris caught her breath.

There wasn’t much left of whoever it had been – exposed bones that gleamed white in the reflection of their lights, draped with the tattered remnants of clothing. Iris saw thin clumps of hair on the top of the skull and what looked like a few pieces of dessicated flesh that the rats and the insects had missed. More than anything else, it looked like one of the Halloween props from a haunted house.

Iris squeezed her eyes shut for a second, trying to make sense of it. They were looking for a killer and found a rotting, dead person in her barn. It didn’t fit, it didn’t compute. It was like looking for car keys in a drawer and finding an elephant instead. Curious, maybe, but the elephant sure as hell wasn’t going to start the car.

‘Lars,’ Sampson said.

Neville looked at him. ‘You think?’

‘Maybe.’ Sampson brushed aside some of the cobwebs and moved around the room that was only a little larger than Iris’s kitchen. There was an ancient space heater in one corner; a shelf of moldering books that rats had made a mess of; and oddly, a sink and a flush toilet. ‘Damn place is plumbed,’ he murmured.

‘And wired,’ Iris said, pointing her light at a single bulb in a protective cage on the ceiling. She looked around the windowless room, at the rust-stained toilet and sink, the pathetic remains on the bed, at the only exit that couldn’t be reached from the floor without a ladder, and saw the place for the prison it had been.

She didn’t know what had happened in this room, or why; she only knew that she didn’t want to be here any longer. She went up the ladder a lot faster than she’d come down.

And how was your day, Iris? Well, just peachy. There was this bloody corpse in a snowman, then a killer hiding in my house WHILE I WAS SLEEPING, and then big surprise, the skeletal remains of a human being in my barn…

Sampson and Neville had followed her up, closed the trapdoor behind them, and now Sampson was on his cell, listening. He flipped it closed with a snap. ‘They’ve got a break in the fence at Bitterroot, and they don’t know when it happened. Apparently the ice storm shut down all their cameras and motion detectors. We’re moving in.’