Snowblind (35 page)

Allie tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “You said you had suspicions about what they are.”

The sight of her father’s ghost shrugging with uncertainty was the strangest thing that Miri had ever seen. The strangest thing she ever hoped to see.

“They could be the gods of winter, the tattered remnants of long-forgotten deities, left over from an age when people worshipped the elements.”

Miri studied him. “But you don’t think so.”

“No, I don’t. I think they’re like me. I don’t know how it started or who the first of the ice men might have been, but I think these things only look demonic. I think they’re just hungry ghosts, searching for warmth. I think they’re what will eventually become of us if we let them take us back into their storm.”

“Oh my god,” Allie whispered. “Isaac.”

Niko’s ghost nodded. “
Exactly. Isaac, and the rest of us. But they have limits. They can only exist here for as long as the storm rages. Once it begins to die down, they’ll have to retreat along with it.”

“So, if you can keep from being taken again until the blizzard ends … then what?” Miri asked, knowing that the answer would not be what she desired. Seeing her father like this would be the closest to a miracle she would ever get.

“I don’t know,”
he said, glancing away from her, the fireplace visible through the side of his face.
“I’d like to think that we can go on, then … to whatever waits for us all when we die. Wherever we’re supposed to go. All I know is that I won’t be dragged back to that frozen hell, and I have to do whatever I can to help the others. There may be places they can hide, places the storm can’t reach them, but only if they know it’s possible. I have to find them all, give them hope—”

“But you can’t go out into the snow,” Allie said quickly. “What if they find you?”

“I broke away from them once already, Allie, and I have to believe I can do it again. We have to find the others—”

“You don’t know whose bodies they’ve … possessed?” Miri asked, barely able to get the word out. It felt so strange to say such a thing and have it be real.

“I saw a few faces but I don’t know the names.”

“We have to call Jake. He’ll help,” Miri said.

“Will he believe you?”
the ghost asked.

“He saw them, remember?” Miri said. “The ice men. If anyone will believe us, it’ll be him. In fact, given the call he made to me the other day, it may be that he knows this already. But he hasn’t been answering his phone all day.”

“Isaac,” Allie said, with a hopeful glint in her eyes. “If his spirit really is here, and he hasn’t come to me, he’ll have gone to his brother if he can. He has no one else.”

“Then we go to Jake’s,” Miri said, getting up from the sofa. “I just hope the plows have done their job.”

Allie rose as well. She took a deep, shuddery breath and for the first time she approached Niko’s ghost, reaching out as though to caress his cheek. Her hand passed through him and when she turned away, Miri averted her gaze, hating to see the regret in Allie’s eyes.

“We go,” Allie said. “But we have a stop to make on the way.”

“A stop?”
the ghost asked, his smoky form wavering a little, as if he might vanish.

Allie turned to look at him again, then glanced at Miri.

“I think I know where at least one of them is,” Allie said.

“Who is it?” Miri asked.

Allie frowned. “I’m not sure, but it’s one of the children and I think he’s very confused and very frightened.”

“It’s good that he’s afraid,”
the ghost said, stepping from the shadows and becoming even less substantial.
“Fear may be the one thing that keeps him safe.”

At first, TJ had found it difficult to look at his daughter. His uncle Jim had once told him that Grace had “her grandmother’s eyes,” and the memory of that moment made him want to scream. He’d loved his mother—still loved her—but his conception of reality didn’t allow for something like this. The idea that they both existed now, his mother and daughter both in one body, made him want to crawl out of his skin. It was simply wrong, truly abominable. All he wanted was to hold Grace in his arms but he couldn’t bring himself to do that now.

“Is she still in there?” he asked, forcing himself to look at the little girl with her grandmother’s eyes.

“Of course,” Grace said.

But she’s not Grace,
TJ thought.
She’s Martha.

“Get out!” Ella screamed, making TJ jump. She strode the few paces that separated her from Grace and grabbed the girl by the shoulders, shaking her. “God damn you, get out of her! How dare you do this?”

“You don’t understand,” Grace said.

“Then make us understand,” TJ said, putting a hand on Ella’s shoulder and drawing her back. “Explain this … this insanity.”

And Martha did. Through her granddaughter’s voice, she told the story of the night she died, of walking out into the blizzard and the things that came for her there, of the years living in a constant snow, a storm so cold that she knew she would never be warm, and a sudden opportunity for freedom.

“Mom,” TJ said when she was done, his heart like an aching pit in his chest, all the guilt of a dozen years burning inside him. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t here. I told you I’d stay with you and I … I’m so sorry.”

“No,” Martha said, and for a moment Grace’s young features—just eleven years old—did look uncannily like her grandmother’s. “Don’t do that to yourself, TJ. If you’d been here they’d have had you as well, and that would be another kind of hell for me altogether.”

“And now what?” Ella asked, anger and confusion darkening her eyes. “What about Grace?”

“She’s lovely,” Martha said. “And as soon as this storm is over, I’ll leave her. I think as long as I’m here, inside her, they won’t notice me. If they’re searching for the dead, they’ll never realize—”

The wind gusted so hard that it shook the entire house, rattling the windows in their frames. They all flinched, startled, and stared at the window above the kitchen sink. A few seconds passed and TJ exhaled, turning back toward Grace, when the wind kicked up again, shrieking and battering the house, and this time it did not let up.

“What the—” Ella began.

Something scraped along the outside of the house and TJ’s mouth went dry. They heard scratching at the window and turned again, this time to see the fleeting image of a face outside in the snow, a hideous, jagged rictus of ice and glaring eyes. And then it was gone.

Ella screamed, even as Grace—Martha—grabbed both her parents by the hand and tried to drag them from the kitchen.

“We’ve got to hide!” she cried.

“You said you were already hidden!” Ella shouted. “That they wouldn’t find you!”

With terror in her eyes, Grace almost looked like their little girl again. TJ put himself between his family and the window, then glanced back at his daughter.

“What’s going on, Mom?” he demanded. “Why aren’t they just breaking the windows?”

“They move like the storm,” the late Martha Farrelly said in her granddaughter’s voice. “Solid as they can be, they can’t come in unless the wind can find an entrance—an open door or window or a draft space.”

TJ glanced at Ella. “Is the bedroom window still open?”

“I don’t think so,” Ella said, flinching and twisting around at every scrape and scuffle on the roof and walls, her eyes frantic.

TJ had a moment to think about losing her—not just her leaving him, but losing her forever, and losing Grace as well—and a grim calm touched him.

“They’ll find a way in,” he said. “We need to—”

Ella did not have his calm. She spun on Grace … on Martha … and rushed to the little girl, grabbing her by the arms again.

“Let her go!” Ella shouted, her face etched with rage, hair falling wild across her face. “These things are here for you, not Grace! You’re willing to risk your granddaughter’s life for your own! I don’t care what kind of hell you were in—”

“I do,” TJ whispered.

Ella twisted to glare at him. “What?”

“These things are
here,
Ella!” he said, stalking around the kitchen, turning at every sound, ready to fight if it came to that. “We’re all in danger, no matter what my mother does now.”

“What kind of person does this?” Ella demanded, eyes wide with disbelief.

Grace … Martha … pulled free of her grip, staring at Ella. “You haven’t been where I’ve been. You don’t know. I only need to stay safe until the storm dies down—”

“Will it ever?” TJ asked. “Will they let it?”

“They don’t bring the storm,” Grace said in that wise old little-girl voice. “They only ride it.”

TJ racked his brain, trying to figure out where they could hide where the wind could never reach them.

Overhead, he heard the attic roof beams groan with the weight of the snowfall, threatening to cave in.

And what then?

Detective Keenan sat on his sofa, wrapped in a blanket and reading
Lonesome Dove
by candlelight. Without heat or electricity, the only sounds in the house came from the rattle and creak of glass and wood as it stood firm against the storm outside. His wife, Donna, had taken the boys and gone to her parents’ house in Hingham the night before. They had lost power during the last three major storms to hit the Merrimack Valley and Donna had just not wanted to deal with keeping the boys warm and worrying about keeping them calm when they both were so afraid of the dark.

He missed them, but a night or two of quiet would be welcome. Or it would have been, were it not for the lack of heat and the way the cold seemed to take root in everything, its icy grip tightening as the temperature dropped. Had he been able to go with them down to the South Shore, where they would be getting half as much snow and the storm couldn’t even be called a blizzard, he would eagerly have done so. But Lieutenant Duquette had made it clear that, on duty or not, the entire department was to stay on call in case of emergencies, particularly once the storm had ended.

So here he was, alone on his sofa with his book and a couple of candles and a plate with the crust from his peanut butter and banana sandwich on the coffee table.

Headlights washed across the living room, casting his surroundings in an unearthly glow. Keenan glanced up from his book, listening for the scrape of a plow, but this engine was too quiet for one of those lumbering metal beasts.

Folding the page of his book, he set it on the coffee table and rose, going to the window. The snow fell so heavily that he could barely make out the snow-covered vehicle parked at an angle in front of the snowbank at the bottom of his driveway. Then the blue lights turned on, strobing the blacked-out houses up and down the street, and he saw the driver step out. The officer was a giant, and as he made his way through the sixteen inches or more of snow already on the ground, Keenan knew who he was long before he reached the front steps.

The detective didn’t wait for the cop to knock. He pulled open the door.

“Evening, Harley,” Keenan said. “Not much warmer in here than it is out there, but come on in.”

Officer Talbot stepped inside and stomped the snow off of his boots and Keenan swung the door shut behind him.

“Better get your coat, Joe,” Harley said. “I kept trying your numbers but the landlines are tied up and your cell is all static. The storm is messing with everything.”

“Shit,” Keenan muttered.

All through this storm he had been unable to avoid thinking of the blizzard twelve years past and all those lives lost. Sitting alone in his cold, dark house, he had been grateful that he would not be the one to respond first if something awful happened. Yet here was Harley, dragging him out into the snow, and he wondered if the night would be any less terrible simply because he hadn’t been first on the scene.

“What’s goin’ on?” Keenan asked. “Don’t tell me we got a homicide in the middle of this.”

Harley narrowed his eyes. “No. It’s nothin’ official, actually. Nothing I wanted to call in.”

Keenan had grabbed his boots from the spot by the door where he’d left them to dry, but now he paused to shoot Harley a curious look.

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

“Remember how I said Jake had been acting weird?”

“Jake Schapiro?” Keenan said, pulling on his boots.

Harley frowned. “Yeah. Who else? I went—”

“Up to his door, right? You thought he had a girl inside.”

Harley looked queasy, like whatever thoughts were in his head had made him sick.

“He had someone inside,” Harley said. “But it wasn’t a girl.”

Keenan had knelt to tie one boot, but he snapped his head around to look up at Harley. A little tug of suspicion pulled at his gut, but he didn’t want to believe it.

“Whatever you’re trying to say, I wish you’d spit it out.”

“He had cards in his hand when he came to the door,” Harley said, his nose wrinkling in disgust or perhaps dismay, the words coming reluctantly to his lips. “I thought they were playing cards, man. But a little earlier, I realized they were something else. I recognized them, Joe. The guy was holding a bunch of Pokémon cards.”

Keenan’s gut gave a sickening twist. “You’re saying he’s hiding a kid out there?”

Harley only stared at him, jaw grimly set.

“You think it’s Zachary Stroud,” Keenan said.

“I think it could be,” Harley admitted. “But if we report that and we’re wrong, Jake’ll never live it down. Never mind forgive us. He’s my friend, Detective.”

“And if he snatched a lost kid whose parents were just killed?” Keenan asked.

“Then that isn’t my friend out there in that farmhouse. It’s a damn monster.”

Keenan finished tying his second boot, then grabbed his jacket and gloves and hat from the chair by the door.

“Let’s go find out.”

Allie sat in silence in the passenger seat of Miri’s rental car, wondering where Niko had gone. Swaddled in her white down coat, she huddled into herself, constantly checking her peripheral vision for ghosts.
Stop,
she told herself, but she couldn’t deny the chill that danced along her spine. No man had ever been as kind to her as Niko Ristani. She had loved Jake and Isaac’s father but they had married because she had gotten pregnant with Jake and just assumed that true intimacy would come in time. That had never happened; the army had kept him away from her more than he was with her, and then he had been killed in action. Allie had never really understood what it meant to be in love before Niko, never felt as if her heart had set sail from her body. Allie had lost him and grieved for that loss ever since, had wished for just one more day, one chance to tell him what he truly meant to her.