Deep Freeze (8 page)

“No, I’m not,” he lied. “I just don’t know what I can do about it.”

“You mean, you’re too busy.”

“Right. Have you talked to the city police?”

“Not yet. I figured they’d just laugh at me.”

“And I wouldn’t?”

“You might, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“I get it—this is a personal matter, not really a police matter.”

“At least for now. I just thought I should talk to someone about it.” She leaned forward in the chair. “Don’t you think it’s odd that everything that was taken came from Jenna Hughes?”

“Not really,” Carter said. “She’s the most famous person around these parts. It makes sense.”

“In a sick sort of way.”

“Right.” He slid the list back to her and thought of the Jane Doe and the threat of the storm. There had been a break-in at the old logging camp in the forest just to the east. A hiker was missing in the foothills of Mount Hood, and a meth lab had been discovered at the south end of the county. Two drunks had plowed their SUV into the side of Grandy’s store and were in the jail. A motorist had been robbed at a rest stop near Multnomah Falls. And a woman had been murdered. Carter’s phone had been ringing all morning. “There’s not much I can do, Rinda. We’re swamped and it’s only going to get worse with this weather. You might have better luck with the city guys.”

“Never have so far. Keep that.” She wouldn’t pick up the paper lying between them. “It’s a copy, and yes, I will go talk to Officer Twinkle, if that’s what you want.”

“It’s Officer Winkle and with an attitude like that, you won’t get far.”

“Yeah, Rip Van. The guy’s been asleep at the switch for years.”

“You’re talking about Falls Crossing’s finest and another cop. We all watch out for each other.”

“Then you’re in trouble if Wade Winkle’s got your back,” she said, with more than a little acrimony as she climbed to her feet. “He’s too busy hassling teenagers to do any real cop work.”

Carter knew where this was coming from. A few years back, Rinda’s son, Scott, had experienced a couple of runins with the local police. Rinda, who was a mother bear when it came to her only son, had asked Carter to intervene with Officer Winkle.

“Okay, so I’ll keep the list, but I won’t have any men to put on it, you know that,” he said and scooted back his chair. “Talk to Wade, file a theft report, and lock things up, okay? You could even get a guard dog to patrol the theater.”

“So this isn’t a big enough crime for you.”

“It might not even be a crime.”

“I’m telling you—”

“It’s a matter of priorities, Rinda. You know that.” He walked to the door and yanked it open, signifying that their time was over.

Standing, Rinda hiked the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “Okay, okay, I get it. I
know
you’re busy. But this is really worrying me…it’s just kind of creepy.”

He didn’t respond as she made her way to the door and the sounds of the office—computers humming, phones ringing, conversation buzzing—drifted inside. “But you know, Shane, you really should give Jenna a chance, rather than a ticket.” She paused at the threshold, earning a dark look from Jerri.

“I figured that was coming,” he said, bracing himself. “What’d she do, ask you to try and get me to void the citation?”

“Of course not. Look, forget the ticket. Who cares about it?”

“Jesus, Rinda, you never give up, do you?”

“You wouldn’t love me if I did.”

Again a look from Jerri. Jesus, they didn’t need to be discussing his love life here!

“You should meet her,” Rinda insisted as she paused in the doorway. “And not as the big, bad cop. I’m talking socially.”

“I don’t need to meet
anyone
. Got it?” But in his mind’s eye, he conjured up a vision of Jenna Hughes—not the small woman huddled behind the wheel of her beat-up Ford, but the Hollywood star. Every man’s fantasy. Shiny black hair, large greenish eyes, big breasts, small waist, and a tight ass that she’d flaunted in all her movies. They were her trademarks. She had a heart-shaped face that could appear innocent one second and slyly sexual the next. The kind of face that made a man want to protect her, all the while hoping to get her into bed. And she had all that fame chasing her around. A celebrity from Tinseltown. Not his type. Not his type at all.

“I think you’d like her.”

“You’re always thinking I’ll like someone.”

“I was right about Carolyn.”

“At first.”

She pulled a face. “I don’t think we should go there.”

“Probably not.”

“You could have made it work if you’d had enough time. I knew she was the right one for you.”

He caught her gaze, decided she was right—no reason to rake up the muck. “Okay, so you’re batting a thousand, so there’s no need to spoil your record.”

Little lines appeared across her forehead and she placed a hand over his sleeve. “You can’t grieve forever.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“I think so.”

“Because I’m not in the dating scene?” he baited. “What about you?”

“We’re not talking about me.”

“Good. We’re not talking about me, either.”

“You’d like her, Shane,” Rinda insisted as she finally made her way past Jerri’s desk and through the rest of the department.

He didn’t offer any protest as she left, but he knew she was wrong about his love life. Dead wrong. He suspected Rinda knew it, too. She just couldn’t face the truth.

No more than he could.

“I
hate
it here,” Cassie said, sitting cross-legged on her unmade bed while glowering at her mother through a curtain of thick hair. Her earphones were dangling from her neck and she could still hear the lyrics of her favorite song, but couldn’t concentrate, not with Jenna standing in the doorway like some kind of medieval sentry. “I never wanted to move here and neither did Allie, so you can’t blame me if things aren’t as perfect as you thought they’d be.”

“I didn’t expect them to be ‘perfect,’ Cassie. Nothing ever is.”

“L.A. was.” Cassie was boiling inside. She saw her mother wince and knew she’d hit a raw nerve.

“It wasn’t.”

“Not for you, maybe, but you did exactly what you tell Allie and me not to do. You ran away. Because of Dad and because of Aunt Jill.”

Jenna’s face turned ashen for a second and Cassie felt like she’d gone too far, but then, her mother deserved it. “I brought you girls up here because I thought it would be best for all of us.”

“Yeah, right,” Cassie snarled, furious. “It didn’t have anything to do with
White Out?
”

“Oh God,” Jenna whispered and leaned against the doorframe of the odd-shaped room with its dormers and bench seats.

Cassie felt like a heel but refused to show it.

“You’re right, Cass. I did leave to get away from all that and I…I missed Jill so badly, felt so awful about what happened to her.” Jenna’s throat worked and Cassie turned away.

Cassie didn’t want to see her mother hurt; she just wanted Jenna to back off. “Just leave me alone,” she said angrily, though she wanted to break down in tears.

“Not until we get a few things straight.”

“I thought we already did. You grounded me. I get it.”

“I grounded you last night and you cut class today. I don’t really think you do get it.”

“God, Mom, give it up.”

“You know, honey, I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Then get off my case.”

“I can’t. I’d love just to be your buddy, but I’m your mother and it’s my responsibility to—”

Cassie groaned and didn’t hear the rest. She replaced her earphones and tried to concentrate on the music. But Jenna didn’t leave. She waltzed in and plopped down to sit uninvited on the corner of Cassie’s bed. Like they really were “buddies.” Jesus. Could she just get out? Cassie tried to ignore her, attempted to close her eyes and get lost in the music, but she couldn’t. Not with her mom perched on the end of the bed. Didn’t Jenna get it? Didn’t she understand how hard it was to be Jenna Hughes’s daughter? To look so much like her famous mother?
Everyone
she knew, either at school or in her dance classes, wanted to know what it was like to have a famous celebrity for a mother, a mother who looked more like an older, beautiful sister. How many times had Cassie witnessed astonished faces as she’d heard the same old line: “
This
is your daughter? No way! You couldn’t possibly be old enough to be her mother!” Jenna had always been flattered and Cassie mortified. Cassie suspected that anyone who befriended her did it just to get close to Jenna Hughes, the once-upon-a-time actress, the beautiful woman whose life was marred by tragedy, the single mom striving to leave her glittery life behind for her kids. It was enough to gag Cassie.

Then there was Josh.
Her
boyfriend and quite possibly the worst of the lot. Though he’d never said it, Cassie suspected that Josh only hung out with her because of Jenna. Cassie had found his secret DVD collection, the one he’d hidden in the bottom drawer of his nightstand. And there were pictures of Jenna, too, prints he’d gotten off the Internet. Even more disgusting was the way he acted whenever they were around her mother. Josh had attempted to hide his fascination with Jenna Hughes but had failed. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. He’d stared at her in that certain way Cassie recognized as pure lust. Just the way all men did.

No, Josh didn’t love Cassie because she was special, as he’d claimed a thousand times. She knew better. If he did love her, which she sometimes doubted, it was because she was Jenna Hughes’s daughter. How sick was that? Cassie’s throat thickened and got hot. Oh, crap, she was gonna cry! No way! No friggin’ way! She squeezed her eyes tighter, determined not to shed one solitary tear over anything, or anyone, so stupid.

“Cassie?” Her mother’s voice was gentle. She felt a hand on her jean-clad knee.

“Go away.” Cassie upped the volume on her CD.

“We really do need to talk.”

Was it impossible to drown out her mother’s concerned voice? Damn it all! “Leave me alone, Mom. I got the message. Loud and clear.” She refused to open her eyes, and cranked up the volume again, until the singer was screaming in her ear. The hand on her knee dropped and the mattress moved a bit as Jenna, presumably, got to her feet.

At the end of the song, Cassie barely lifted one eyelid. The room was empty, the door ajar. Finally Jenna had taken the hint and left. Cassie felt a jab of remorse. Deep down, she knew her mom really did care about her and Allie, but Jenna had made a colossal mistake uprooting them and hauling them to this podunk town in the middle of nowhere.

Cassie’s social life had nose-dived and Allie had become shyer than she’d been in L.A. Yeah, she had the horses and piano lessons, but other than that, the kid was always holed up in her room with her Game Boy.

Like you are with the TV and CD player?

She wouldn’t think about that; wasn’t a nerd like her little sister.

Angry with her mother, herself, and the whole damned world, Cassie scooted off the bed and crossed the room, quietly shutting the door. Then she let out a long breath and grabbed her remote control. She flipped on the TV, searching for a reality show when she caught a glimpse of the local news. The reporter was up in the mountains, at Catwalk Point where the dead woman had been found. Cassie let the image linger for a second. It was morbid. The word in school was that the remains had been beheaded and torn apart, maybe by animals…some of the stories she’d heard were pure gossip, but Cassie figured whatever had happened up in the mountains, it had been gruesome.

She shivered and flipped the channel until she found an ultimate dating challenge and, opening her chemistry book in case her mother barged in and invaded her space again, settled against the pillows.

Still stinging from Cassie’s cruel words, Jenna made her way down the hall and told herself to be strong. Cassie was angry and had lashed out. She’d felt backed into a corner and probably hadn’t meant all the hateful things she’d said. But it still hurt. It hurt like hell.

Because she was too close to the truth?

Jenna didn’t want to go there. Didn’t want to think about Jill and all those dark reasons she’d had to leave California. The divorce was bad enough, but she could have handled that. Jill’s death was another matter altogether. Guilt gnawed at her as it had ever since the accident. Once again, Jenna attempted to ignore the overwhelming sense of responsibility as she made her way down the stairs and into the kitchen.
Don’t let Cassie get to you. That’s what she wants. Remember who’s the mother and who’s the daughter, Jenna. She’s only trying to hurt you because she’s hurting. Give her a couple of hours to cool off, then try again. You’re the one in control here.

Or was she? Sometimes it didn’t seem like it at all.

She reheated coffee she’d made from the bottled water she’d bought in town, then checked on Allie and found her seated on the floor of the den, playing her Game Boy while watching television. “You have all your homework done?”

“Almost,” Allie said, concentrating on the tiny screen.

“What does ‘almost’ mean?”

“That I don’t have any. I did my math at school and I just have a book report.” She finally looked up and added, “I’ll do it after dinner.”

“Okay.” Jenna wasn’t up for another fight. She blew across the top of her coffee cup and walked to the kitchen where she pulled out a phone book from a cupboard near the telephone, then scanned the yellow pages. She’d already called several handymen she’d found listed in the local paper, not reaching a single real person, just answering machines. So far, no one had responded. Time to call in the big guns. She leafed through the section on home repairs and scanned the names, some of whom she’d heard, others who were complete strangers; still others were yahoos, self-proclaimed handymen who hadn’t known which end of a nail to hammer who had come out here in their own sweet time, sworn they’d fixed the alarm system, or the gate, or the stove, and left, only to have whatever it was go out a few days or weeks later. She avoided those flakes.

You could call Wes Allen.

She discarded that idea as quickly as it popped into her head. She didn’t like the idea of being alone with him. At all.

She also planned to call a tow truck to have her Jeep taken to the dealer in Gresham, nearly fifty miles west, or she could try a local guy, the owner of one of the two gas stations in town. “Decisions, decisions,” she said as she reached for the receiver.

As she waited for someone to answer, Cassie’s accusations about why she’d left California echoed painfully through her mind.
It didn’t have anything to do with
White Out?

She felt the old familiar ache deep in her center. Jenna still couldn’t talk about the accident that had taken her sister’s life.
White Out
, the movie that was never finished.
White Out
, a movie she hadn’t wanted to make.
White Out
, Robert’s pet project that seemed cursed from the get-go.
White Out
, the end of her career, her marriage, and life as she’d known it.
White Out
, the reason Jill had died.

“RS Plumbing,” a cheery female voice said, breaking into Jenna’s thoughts. She realized she was talking to a living, breathing person, not a voice mail machine with a series of prompts.

“Great.” Jenna tried to put a smile into her voice and push all thoughts of the tragedy that had propelled her to Oregon out of her mind. “I’m hoping you can help me. I’ve got a problem with my pump and—”

“Can you hold?”

Before Jenna could respond, the woman clicked to another line and Jenna was left listening to silence. Hoping the woman on the other end of the line hadn’t disconnected her, Jenna waited and nothing happened. The line seemed dead. She hung up and retried, but the phone line was then busy. Of course. Today nothing was going right. She tried again and got nowhere.

“Great,” she said, and hung up feeling cursed. “Get over it,” she told herself as she rested against the window ledge and glanced through the glass to the wintry twilight where the ranch’s few security lights were blazing, giving an eerie blue glow to the grounds. The wind had finally died and with it came a stillness that seemed weird and out of place. Unearthly.

The calm before the storm,
she thought, and felt a shiver as cold as death trickle down her spine. There was something about the coming night, something dark and lurking, something deadly. She could feel it.

Stop it! Don’t do this to yourself,
she silently admonished and noticed the first few flakes of snow beginning to fall from the sky.

She was there.

Inside.

Somewhere in the rambling log home.

No doubt Jenna Hughes felt secure. Safe.

But she was wrong.

Dead wrong.

As the flakes of winter snow drifted from the gray sky, he watched from his hiding spot, a blind he’d built high in the branches of an old-growth Douglas fir that towered from this high ridge. Her ranch stretched out below in frozen acres that abutted the Columbia River.

The rustic old house was the core of what he considered her compound. Graying logs and siding rising upward to peaked gables and dormers. From the ice-glazed windows, cozy patches of light glowed against the frozen ground, reminding him of his own past, of how often he’d been on the outside, in the freezing weather, teeth chattering as he stared at the smoke rising from the chimney of his mother’s warm, forbidden house.

That was long ago.

Now, focusing the military glasses on the panes, he caught a glimpse of her moving through her house. But just a teaser, not much, not enough to focus on her. Her image disappeared as she turned down a hallway.

He refocused, caught a bit of movement in the den, but it was only the old dog, a broken-down German shepherd who slept most of the day.

Where was she?

Where the hell had she gone?

Be patient,
his inner voice advised, trying to soothe him.

Soon you’ll be able to do what you want.

The snowflakes increased, powdering the branches, covering the ground far below, and he glanced down at the white frost. In his mind’s eye he saw drops of blood in the icy crystals, warm as they hit the ground, giving off a puff of steam, then freezing slowly in splotches of dark red.

A thrill tingled up his spine just as a stiff breeze, cold as Lucifer’s piss, screamed down the gorge, stinging the bit of skin above his ski mask. The branches above and around him danced wildly and beneath the mask, he smiled. He embraced the cold, felt it was a sign. An omen.

The snow was now falling in earnest. Icy crystals falling from the sky.

Now was the time.

He’d waited so long.

Too long.

A light flashed on in the master bedroom and he caught another glimpse of her, long hair braided into a rope that hung down her back, baggy sweatshirt covering her curves, no makeup enhancing an already beautiful face. His pulse accelerated as she walked past a bank of windows, then into a closet. His throat went dry. He refocused the glasses, zoomed in closer on the closet door. Maybe he’d catch a glimpse of her naked, her perfectly honed body, an athlete’s body with large breasts and a nipped-in waist and muscles that were both feminine and strong. His crotch tightened.