In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (2 page)

“Just a bad dream, baby,” she’d told him, feeling his shaking, hearing his teeth clicking together. “Just a bad dream.”

The second one that week.

Annie sighed again and stood, drawing her nightgown over her head. She neatly folded the fleecy material and opened her dresser drawer to lay the gown inside. Taking out panties and bra from another of the drawers, she happened to glance at herself in the full-length mirror beside the dresser and began a critical survey.

Annie, at thirty-one, was eight years younger than her husband, but already there were silver threads in her short, fine brown hair. Her eyes were still good, despite having to wear glasses to read, the hazel orbs framed with long dark lashes. She wasn’t especially tall for a woman—five foot five in her stocking feet, just right for her husband’s six feet plus height. Her weight needed work, as did her hips, but her breasts, according to Gabe, were just right.

“More than a handful’s wasted anyway,” he’d once remarked with a leer.

Her legs weren’t all that bad, but her thighs were in dire need of exercise. Or liposuction. Or both. But the one thing she hated most about her body was her nose.

“There’s Indian blood in you, darlin’,” Gabe had teased. “Just enough to give you that ‘Buffalo Head Nickel’ look that’s so in vogue.”

She’d thrown a wet washcloth at him and locked him out of the bathroom.

Gabe turned off
the snow blower and leaned against the handle as he stared down the street before his home. The snowplow hadn’t been by yet and the road was a ribbon of white untouched by any of the neighborhood cars. He sniffed, feeling the cold air invading his lungs. He shivered. He knew he’d never get used to the Iowa cold. He hated the winters with a depth of passion even his wife didn’t suspect.

“Store closed today, Gabe?”

Gabe turned his head within the restriction of his ski suit and waved a hand at his neighbor across the street, Jake Mueller.

“I’m off today!” he yelled back. He jerked his thumb at the accumulated snow. “Just as well, I guess, huh?”

Jake waved in reply, then trundled back into his garage. The whine of the electric door opener pierced the still air and a dog barked down the street in protest.

A stiff wind howled around the side of the house and rocked Gabe. He glanced up at the sky and frowned. Off to the west, clouds were building again.

“Damn,” he spat, hating the threat of more snow. He turned on the snow blower to finish the walkway.

Annie stuffed two
pairs of her husband’s jeans into the washer after zipping them and buttoning the top button. She wondered why Gabe couldn’t remember to do it when he pulled them off. She reached for a third pair, absentmindedly going through the pockets just in case Gabe had left a crumpled dollar bill or two thrust deep inside.

“That’s mine!” he’d grumbled once when he’d seen her stuffing a five dollar bill into her shirt pocket.

“You leave it in your pants, sonny boy, and it’s the property of the cleaners,” she’d informed him. She’d giggled at his wagging brows as he told her “everything in his pants belonged to the cleaners.”

Her fingers closed around paper and she smiled, looking down at her canine companion. “I think Daddy left us some money, Kibs.”  Drawing out her find, her brow crinkled when she came up with a folded section of newspaper. Unfolding the page, her brows lifted in surprise when she saw the masthead. She scanned the page, made note of the date, and her eyes narrowed in puzzlement.

“Where the heck did you get a week-old copy of the
Pensacola News Journal?”
she asked, turning over the page.

There was nothing much to the news on that sheet of newsprint. Nothing, at least, that she had not seen plastered on that date’s
Des Moines Register.
There was the usual Middle East crisis report, economic disaster, multiple slayings in Detroit, the normal slandering of Vice-President Quayle.

Nothing out of the ordinary except the three-inch column devoted to the death of a policeman in some place called Navarre, Florida, which Gabe had outlined in red pencil. ‘Cop Slain in Convenience Store Shoot Out,’ it read.

Annie lifted her eyes and stared at the bright display of brown gingham wallpaper behind her washer. A cold finger of unease scraped down her spine and she shivered. Looking back at the article, she began to read.

After rolling the
snow blower back inside his garage, Gabe plucked a snow shovel from its wall peg and trudged back into the cold, blustery wind. He swung the shovel up to knock icicles from the eaves of the garage, batting the stalactites away with obvious joy. He watched them sail across the driveway with a grim smile of satisfaction on his numb lips. When he was finished, he hung the shovel back in its niche and stomped the snow from his boots as he walked to the door leading into the kitchen. His mind was on the cup of mulled cider he would heat in the microwave.

“Gabe?”

He turned, spying Annie in the opened doorway of their laundry room, a separate room built into the garage.

“Yeah, just a minute.” He shucked off his heavy thermal-insulated gloves and laid them on the garbage can just outside the kitchen door. He turned and headed for his wife. “What ya need, doll?”

Annie held something out to him. “Where did this come from?”

Gabe looked at what was in her hand and glanced up.

“Where’d you find that?” he asked, a slight stiffness to his voice.

“In your jeans.” She thrust the paper out to him. “Where’d you get it?”

He shrugged, but his expression belied the nonchalance of his attitude. “I had the newsstand over in Grinnell order it for me.” He took the newspaper page, folded it and stuffed it into the left pocket of his snowmobile outfit. “No big deal.” He turned to walk away.

“I haven’t seen that newspaper around here.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “I keep it at work to read when I’m on break.” He walked to the kitchen door and started to open it.

“Why’d you circle that article?”

Gabe stilled with his hand on the doorknob then turned to face her. There was a tight, annoyed look on his lean face. “What is this? Twenty questions?”

Annie’s face burned hot, but she held her ground. “I just wondered. Did you know the policeman?”

He jerked open the door. “It was just an interesting article, okay?” he snapped, eyeing her with a look that told her he didn’t want to discuss it further. He slammed the door behind him as he went into the house, not even remembering to remove his snow boots.

With the chill air from the opened garage door blowing in at her, Annie stepped back into the large laundry room and shut the door. She was more worried now than when she had found the newspaper page. She had wanted to ask him about the policeman who had died, a man named Bill Hinote. Her woman’s intuition told her Hinote’s death and Iowa State Trooper Kyle Vittetoe’s vicious beating by two would-be robbers were somehow connected.

“You
must
have known him,” she whispered as she added detergent to the washer and closed the lid. She stood there, her hands planted on the machine’s lid, and stared at the wallpaper.
“
Did
you know him, Gabe?”

She pushed away from the washer, put her hand on the doorknob, and as she did, she heard her husband’s car rev up in the garage. A frown marred her forehead as she opened the door.

Gabe caught sight of his wife as he pulled out of the garage. He could see the look of astonishment on her lovely features, saw her lips open to call out to him. He furiously shook his head and drove out of the garage at a faster speed than was either necessary or safe. Pulling out into the street, he glanced sideways to see her framed in the opening of the garage, staring after him as he drove away, the tires crunching and sliding on the fresh snow.

The week of
Thanksgiving, Annie made up her mind to unpack the Christmas decorations early so she and Gabe could put up the tree after the Thanksgiving meal. It was not a chore she looked forward to each year, but habit, family custom, and a long-ingrained obligation to carry on a tradition that was generations old. She put her hands on the pull cord of the attic and her feet on the rungs.

Normally, the task of dragging down the ornaments would be left up to Gabe, but her husband was still at the store, logging in Christmas merchandise, and she knew he would be there until long after closing. Annie never ventured into the attic for, in the summer, wasps built nests in the rafters and cupola, and in the winter, it was like the outer reaches of the North Pole. But since things had been strained of late between her and Gabe, she wanted to surprise him by having everything down where it would be handy, saving him the trouble.

Climbing the ladder always made her dizzy for she was afraid of even the simplest heights, but lugging the lightweight boxes down proved to be more of a chore than she had anticipated. It wasn’t the heaviness of the boxes of lights and decorations, or even the bulk of the artificial tree that bothered her. It was the knee-weakening trip down the squeaking ladder, the fear of falling, that had her sweating as she toted three boxes of decorations and the tree down to the garage and carried them into the laundry room for safekeeping.

Outside, the wind howled, freezing rain snicked at the overhang and tickled the black walnut tree limbs. A light patter fell on the windows now and again, and scraped against the fiberglass garage doors. It was a bit chilled in the laundry room; she had neglected to turn on the wall heater that morning since she was not going to be doing wash. She grumbled at her lack of foresight, cursed her stupidity, for the room was colder than normal.

“Just get to it and get out of here, Patricia Ann,” she mumbled as she walked briskly to the wall heater. After rubbing her hands together, she flipped on the dial of the heater and set about sorting which boxes were which in the hierarchy of decorating. When she discovered she had not found the box that contained the blinking lights for the tree, she rolled her eyes to the heavens and sighed, knowing another trip up the shaky ladder would be required.

The attic was now as frigid as a walk-in freezer. The overhead timbers crackled, rain fell heavily against the roof and her lips were trembling, her teeth chattering, as she searched for the errant box of lights. Pushing aside box after box, she was about to give up when she spied a carton emblazoned with the single word: blinkies.

“You idiot,” she said with a giggle, smiling at her husband’s childish scrawl. Gabe James would never think to categorize the Christmas ornaments with such inane words like tree, decorations, lights, or swags.

Pushing her way through to the box, she was about to take hold of it and wiggle it past two other boxes when a footlocker caught her attention and she stopped, frowning. She could not remember ever seeing the army-green footlocker before. Somehow its presence in the attic seemed forbidding and sinister, and it sent a warning through Annie’s whole being. Squatting down before it, she saw no lock, and feminine curiosity being what it is, she flipped open the lid and was surprised at what she found.

“
Gabe
?”

He turned, smiling at the older lady who trudged toward him through stacked cartons of steering wheel covers, license plate holders, and other ‘stocking stuffers.’ His eyes lit with genuine affection as he extended his hand to help her through the maze of boxes.

“Did it come in?”

He nodded. “I’ve got it saved for you, Miss Edna,” he assured her.

Edna Mae Menke beamed. “You’d damned well better have, young man!” She gripped his strong fingers in her frail arthritic ones and let him pull her into the safety and comfort of his arms. Nestling against his tall bulk, she hugged him back.

“What are you doing out on a day like today?” he asked, easing her back so he could look down into her heavily lined face. “You ought not to be out in this mess.”

Edna Mae shrugged away his admonishment. She allowed a pretend sulk to pout her ruby-red lips where tiny rivulets of lipstick were trying to escape along the wrinkles. Her watery brown eyes twinkled as she peered up at him through her trifocals.

“Son, I’ve been driving in this kind of weather for over fifty years. Longer than you’ve been living.” She patted his back, then reluctantly removed herself from his light embrace. “I reckon I can drive another fifty if the good Lord’s willing.”

Gabe shook his head and wagged a finger at her. “And God help those who get in your way, huh?”

The twinkle in her eyes turned to a brilliant sparkle. “Damned right!” She nodded her shock of white hair in emphasis. “I’m hell on wheels when I want to be!”

Gabe laughed, enjoying the way her fading eyes were flirting with him. “Let me go get your wheel cover, Miss Edna,” he told her, stepping around grouped-together boxes of accessories.

Winding his way through the store’s warehouse, his mouth stretched into a grin of merriment, Gabe chuckled as he searched for the box of wheel covers. He located the stacked column of six wire-spoke covers and lifted one from the stack. Each of the six boxes bore the name of the lady for whom they’d been saved.

“She lose another one?” Mary Bernice Merrill called to him from her perch where she sat inventorying curtain rods.