Frozen Stiff Read Free

there. Maybe he had gone off with someone last night. She decided not to bother taking her boots off. Dan still had the cleaning lady come in every other week. A dirty floor wasn’t her problem anymore.
    She walked through the house and looked into the garage. His car was there. His BMW with every option available. His one true love had always been the cars.
    Cautiously she made her way upstairs. Not only was Dan not in the bed, but it wasn’t even rumpled. She walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out at the lake. This view is what she would miss more than anything. The windows were west-facing and looked out over the treetops. The lake was covered with snow and shone like a vast expanse of glittering field, cupped in the hollow of the bluffs.
    A red-tailed hawk flew out from the bluff and she went with it, soaring out over the lake. For Dan this view had meant power, for her it had meant freedom, a sense of the earth that she had never had before. She had learned all the birds, could even identify them by the way they held their wings as they glided.
    Dan couldn’t tell a chickadee from a bald eagle.
    Sherri pulled out a carryall and went through her drawers, grabbing the few sweaters she wanted. Most of the clothes she had left in the cabin she didn’t really care about.
    Dan might be sleeping in the downstairs family room. Sometimes he fell asleep in front of the TV. As she walked downthe two flights of stairs, she thought of leaving without even seeing him. They had little to say to each other anymore. But when she stepped into the bottom floor she felt how warm it was. He must have left the sauna on.
    She didn’t see him anyplace. The sixty-inch flat-screen TV was dark. The couch was empty. She pulled open the door to the sauna and a blast of hot air hit her in the face. A bottle of vodka sat on the bench in a pool of water, a sodden cigar butt next to it.
    “Dan?” She turned off the heat in the sauna and checked the back door. It was locked, but she went to the window and looked out. Snow covered everything. She looked at her garden and could make out the clump of hostas from the flower stems still sticking up. But it looked like there was a good foot of snow.
    Just as she was about to turn away, she saw an odd form, like a snow-covered log, in the middle of her flowerbed. A tree branch fallen down? A dead deer?
    The lump was quite large, long. She couldn’t remember anything being there this fall.
    She stared out the picture window, then noticed it was smeared with handprints. Even though the cabin might not be her responsibility any more, the prints made her mad. How had they gotten there? What had Dan been up to?
    The wind blew up large eddies of snow, twirling up like miniature tornadoes. As she watched, the snow drifted off the form in her garden, uncovering some of it. She still couldn’t tell what it was. From this distance, it looked like a hand, but how could that be?
    Without thinking, she moved her head forward until her nose bumped the window. She was sure she was looking at ahand. She could make out the glint of a ring. With horror crawling up her throat, she tried to make what she was seeing something else—a dried flower, a pale stone, a piece of statuary. But the ring looked like Daniel’s signet ring. How was that possible?
    If that was Dan’s hand that meant he was buried in the snow. Could he have been so drunk last night that he had fallen down in the snowbank and not been able to get up? What had happened to him?
    She had to get to him.
    Sherri reached down to open the door and found it locked. The dead bolt was in place. How could it be locked? Dan couldn’t have locked it when he was outside unless he had a key.
    Her hand shook as she tried to undo the bolt. She had to get to him. She had to get him help.
    The bitter cold knocked her in the chest. She ran out into the snow, then stopped and stared down at what she could now clearly see was a waxy hand, like that of a