Frozen Stiff (10 page)

“Yeah, he’s a pretty lucky man.”

Sherri had the urge to sit down on the floor and cry. She was losing Dan anyway, she wasn’t sure why the thought of him dying in a snowbank made her sadder than their divorce. She just kept remembering all the good times they had had before he started in with his old ways. The trip to Paris where they had stayed in bed all day and just had meals delivered. The new car he bought her was fabulous, but looking back she realized it was the smaller gestures she treasured. Going to Stockholm Gardens for plants, him picking up a book for her when he thought she’d like it, buying her a Snickers candy bar when he learned they were her favorite.

She thought back to the beginning of their affair: the sneaking around, the sweet illicitness of it all. Now she had regrets about what she had done to Dan’s first wife. Only recently had Sherri realized how awful it must have been for her.

She sat in the waiting room and wondered how long it would be before the doctor came. After reading most of the St. Paul paper, she started reading the local newspaper, staring at girls she didn’t know in winter formals, boys she’d never heard of playing basketball. Just as she was wondering if she could buy a good book someplace she heard a ruckus out in the hallway.

Danielle was yelling at the same red-haired nurse. “There is no way you can keep me from seeing my father.”

The nurse was standing between Danielle and Dan’s hospital room. “You need to keep your voice down and go sit in the waiting room.”

Danielle tried to push past the nurse, but the young woman grabbed her arm and swung her around. Sherri decided she better step in, much as she wanted nothing to do with Danielle.

“The doctor will be here soon,” she said as she walked up to the two.

“What are you still doing here?” Danielle turned on her. “You’re the one who shouldn’t be near my father. I wouldn’t be surprised if his quote accident was all your fault.”

“Why would I do something like that?”

“Because of the money. That’s the only reason you’ve ever been with my father was just to take his money. Well, it’s too late now. He’s done with you and even if he died, I’m the one who will get everything.”

“Danielle, what are you talking about?”

“When he told me you were getting a divorce, he also told me he had already changed his will. He didn’t want to take any chances with you. He left almost everything to me. I guess he should have told you that—then maybe you wouldn’t have tried to kill him.”

Anger welled up in Sherri, all the anger she had felt toward this bratty, mean-spirited girl for all her years with Dan. Danielle had never given her an inch, never tried to like her, never said thank you for one thing that Sherri had given her or done for her. And now this nasty girl was accusing her of trying to kill the man she had loved for so long, maybe still loved.

Her hand flew out of its own accord. With little thought, Sherri slapped Danielle across the face and said, “I would never hurt your father. Which is more than I can say for you.”

Danielle shoulders shook and her eyes grew wide. A red welt sliced across her cheek. “I could sue you for that.”

“Go ahead and try. I’ve wanted to do that for a long time. You are an ungrateful bitch.”

“Better than a black widow.”

2 January: 3 pm

I
ce fishing had always struck Curt as being as boring as clipping your toenails, but Andy had assured him that it was totally phat. Andy and his father had a ice-fishing house out on Lake Pepin, in small cluster of buildings close to the Pepin marina where the water was relatively shallow—around ten feet or so—and the ice was almost a foot thick.

They were sitting in Andy’s dad’s one-ton pickup in the parking lot of the marina, aimed out onto the ice. The day was brilliantly bright. The sun glaring off the ice made sunglasses a necessity. But the temperature was still below zero. Curt had checked the thermometer by the back door when he left the house. Up on top of the bluff it read four below.

Andy turned the truck down onto the snow-covered beach and approached the shore of the lake. There was a road carved into the snow by the vehicles that had gone out onto the ice before them. Some winters, people used this road to get across the lake and save them the time of driving forty miles to get to Lake City on the other side.

Curt didn’t really like the idea of going out on the frozen lake in any kind of vehicle that weighed more than he did. He
didn’t mind skating on the lake, or skiing across it, but sitting in a truck moving across the ice gave him the willies. He had half a mind to open his door just in case, and he had rolled his window down, claiming he needed the air, but really wanting a quick escape route if the truck crashed through the ice.

“You’re not scared, are you?” Andy asked.

“Not really,” Curt said. “Did you ever see that old movie about Houdini, the one with Tony Curtis?”

“Who’s Houdini?”

Sometimes Curt wondered about Andy. His scope of knowledge seemed very limited. He explained, “He was this super cool escape artist. Anyways, he has them lock him up in chains and then throw him in the Hudson River through a hole in the ice. He manages to get out of the chains, but by then the current of the river has carried him downstream, away from the hole.”

“Then what?”

“Well, he finds these air pockets under the ice and breathes in them until he makes his way back up to the hole and gets out. Everyone had given him up for dead and then he appears.”

“Why’re you thinking about that? You don’t think the truck’s going to go through the ice?”

“Just reminded me.”

“That Houdini sounds like that guy that froze to death and then came back to life at the hospital.”

“I haven’t heard about that. Was it in the paper?”

Andy shook his head. “I forget who told me about him. Weird stuff.”

They were close enough to the ice houses that Curt could see the smoke coming out of a few of them. Seemed strange to
go out onto the ice and then shut yourself up in a house the size of a coffin and stare at a frozen lake. But Andy had brought a deck of cards so they would have something else to do. Plus, he had brought a few beers that he had swiped from his dad’s refrigerator. He claimed his dad didn’t care and Curt believed him. Andy’s dad seemed not to care about much except drinking beer and fiddling with machines.

Just as they got up to the nearest ice house, a crack thundered across the lake and Curt jumped. “What was that?”

“You get used to it. The ice cracks when the temperature changes. Just like wood cracks in a house when it gets really cold.”

They pulled up next to an ice house and Curt stared at it. The dark structure looked like a playhouse that a goth kid would build out of leftover scraps—the shell was made out of old plywood and painted black, there were no windows, and snow was packed up a foot or so high around the bottom edges.

“Looks kinda dark,” Curt said as they climbed down from the truck. “No windows?”

“That’s part of the deal. You’ll see,” Andy said as he undid the padlock on the door and then motioned Curt to enter.

When they went inside, the small house was brighter than Curt thought it would be—light streamed up from the ice floor. Green murky light from the lake.

“This way you can see the fish. You don’t want any light to get into the house. Cool, huh?”

“Yeah, way cool.” Curt sat down on one of the folding chairs and stared into the water below him. Being able to see the water so clearly made him more conscious than ever that he was
standing on a huge lake that at any moment could swallow him up, but he was getting used to the idea.

However, with no sun coming in, the temperature in the ice-fishing house felt even colder than outside. They were sheltered from the wind, but Curt missed the slight warmth of the sun. He pulled his cap down tighter on his head so it covered his ears and wiggled his toes around in his Sorel boots. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt under a wool sweater under his down parka, but he was still feeling the bite of the cold.

Andy took a sledge hammer that was leaning up against the wall of the house and smashed it into a faint circular outline on the surface, re-breaking open the ice-fishing hole.

“Let’s get our lines in.” Andy showed Curt how to set up what he called a tip-up, a fishing line that sat on the edge of the ice hole with a flag on it that popped up if a fish took the bait. “Now we’re all set. You want a brew?”

“Sure.” What Curt really wanted was something warm—a steaming mug of coffee or hot chocolate—but a beer would do.

Andy handed him a bottle of Leinenkugel’s, then set a couple others into a pile of ice shavings. “Gotta watch out so the brewskis don’t get too cold. You heard about the guy who went out snowmobiling with a flask of brandy in his pack. He didn’t know enough to keep the flask tucked into his jacket. Anyway, he’s way out there, in the middle of nowhere, and he gets out the flask and takes a big swallow and freezes his whole throat. Dies from it. You know ‘cuz liquor doesn’t freeze at the same temperature as water.”

“Yeah, I know.” Curt took a swig of the beer and hoped the alcohol would warm him up. He was pretty sure that Andy’s story
about the snowmobiler was a rural myth. He wondered how long they’d have to be out there. He remembered what Meg wanted him to ask Andy about. “Hey, did you hear about Bonnie?”

Andy got a weird look on his face. “What about her?”

“I guess she had a baby.”

Andy threw his head back. “What’d you know, a virgin birth.”

“You think?” Curt asked.

“Who’d have anything to do with that little porker?”

“Oh, come on, Andy, she’s not so bad.”

Andy shook his head. “You won’t catch me with any girl from around here. I mean, Meg’s great and all, but she’s about it. The chicks from the cities are way hotter. Let me tell you.”

Just then the flag tipped up. Down below in the water Curt could see a shadowy form swimming in a figure eight, tail swirling through the sluggish green water. He slid down on the ice and grabbed the line and began to slowly pull the fish to the surface.

3 pm

“Okay, so what I want you to do is lift prints from any likely surface,” Claire said to Bill as they both slipped on latex gloves. “Get them off all the doorknobs, the locks, the glasses.”

“I know the drill,” Bill said testily.

She wondered if he had a hangover. Not so unusual for the day or so after the new year, but both the foul mood and worse breath were becoming a habit with him. Since Amy and Bill had broken up, he had been drifting into some bad patterns—
often late for work, surliness, and general sloppiness in his reports. She supposed she’d have to talk to him about it, but she certainly wasn’t up to it today. The way he was feeling, he just might stomp out on her and leave her to do all the work. Plus, the truth was he was better at lifting fingerprints than she was.

“I’ll be wandering around, looking things over so holler if you need anything,” Claire said.

Claire hadn’t been in the house since they had found Daniel Walker in the snowdrift. At that time she had been so involved in getting him into the house safely and then into the ambulance that she had had no time to notice anything about the place itself. As Bill started to work, she walked the house. Mainly to see if anything caught her eye, but also to marvel at the structure.

She had heard Sherri call their house “the cabin,” but it was certainly larger than what she thought of as a cabin. Maybe the conceit allowed the weekenders to think that they were building a quiet retreat in the woods, instead of a ginormous eyesore on the bluff.

As she stared at the Berber carpet, the wood-paneled walls, the stone fireplace, she had to wonder what it cost to build a place like this. She guessed at least a half a million. All that for a second home that they used for weekends mainly in the summer. Although it sounded like Walker had been living down here since he and Sherri separated.

As much as she was prejudiced against the monstrosities that were cropping up as close as they could legally get to the bluffline, she had to admit that the house was a masterpiece. Daniel Walker might be a piece of work, but he had good taste—or maybe it was Sherri who supplied that.

The fireplace was spectacular—raw chunks of limestone beautifully fitted together formed an elegant, compact surround. How wonderful it would be to sit down and light a fire and just stare into it.

But she had work to do.

She walked into the kitchen, which was obviously the heart of the house. Her churlish side came out as she wondered if they ever cooked in it. The room was outfitted, of course, with a huge, granite-slab island, a necessity in any state of the art facility. Two ovens and a microwave were built in. There was also an espresso machine, a built-in water purifier, a trash crusher, a restaurant-sized stove with six burners, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator with panels that matched the woodwork.

Rich would be in heaven. The kitchen alone probably cost more than what their whole house was worth.

Claire started pulling out drawers. The one next to the phone was usually where she found the household management stuff and sure enough a checkbook was tucked into the drawer.

Daniel Walker was meticulous. He wrote the full number of each check, carefully filling in the date written, and then to whom. She even saw the checkmarks that showed that he went through his statement and balanced his account. Figures he’d be a good businessman, he had to have made all that money somehow.

He had also written in the front page of the checkbook: expenses for cabin. So he kept a separate checkbook just for this place. Maybe it was a tax write-off. Claire slowly read through the checkbook—Excel Energy, Schaul Gas, CenturyTel, the usual bills. Then a few checks to John Gordon. Amy had mentioned
that he had done work for Walker. A few checks for another neighbor—Claire guessed they were for mowing the lawn.

Then she noticed Sara Hegstrom’s name and remembered that she was the cleaning lady. On an off chance, Claire counted back some months and looked through those checks. There was Bonnie Hegstrom’s name. She must have cleaned for her mom in the spring.