08 - December Dread

Copyright Information

December Dread
© 2012 Jess Jourey

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

First e-book edition © 2012

E-book ISBN: 978-0-7387-3201-5

Book design by Donna Burch

Cover design by Ellen Lawson

Cover illustration © Carl Mazer

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DEDICATION

To Christine, who always brings the sunshine

One

Wednesday, December 12

It’s sixty-eight degrees inside
the car. The core-heated air smells of pine freshener and coffee. Outside, a winter sky the color of lead blends with the gray snow-slush roads, morphing the landscape into a blurry daguerreotype day. The radio is set to AM. An announcer squawks about a history-making 57-yard Hail Mary. The game took place last Sunday. The show is a replay, its urgency offensively fake, a mystery already solved, shelved, and forgotten.

The killer stabs the radio button and cruises past the woman’s house for the second time in an hour. It isn’t difficult to blend in, even in a rural area. Silver sedans are a dime a dozen, especially borrowed older models with a rouge of rust rimming the wheel housing.

The woman is removing snow from her sidewalk. A quick pass reveals her wide-mouthed shovel digging deep into the drifts and coming up loaded. Her shoulders are strong, her concentration absolute. She tosses the snow to the side, and her mutt tries to catch it before it lands. They’ve been at it for at least ten minutes, and the dog is now more snow than animal. Shovel. Toss. Catch. Shovel. Toss. Catch.

The killer isn’t worried about the dog. Animals are easy to subdue, if a person is quick. The woman wouldn’t put up much of a fight, either, despite a toned upper body. Fear is always an effective paralyzing agent.

Although her ski cap is tucked low, the killer knows that underneath she’s a brunette, just like the rest. She likes travelling and has been to Italy once. She loves a good debate, Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey is her guilty pleasure, and she tends toward the sarcastic side, though she doesn’t mean anything by it. Also, she lives alone. The last point, the killer uncovered by walking past her house and twice, rifling through her mail while she was at work. The rest was revealed in her online dating profile.

“Quiet,” the killer snaps. “I know she shouldn’t have put all that out there. A woman who advertises shouldn’t be surprised when a buyer shows up, right?”

The only response is the hum of the heater. The 12-inch plastic doll strapped in the passenger seat has nothing to add. She sits in her perfect Jackie O dress suit, her immaculate brown hair pulled back into a bun. Her face poses a frustrating half-smile, always. The killer turns the radio back on.

Two

Friday, December 14

The elf grinned at
me from my fossil of a Zenith TV, a row of bow-legged appliances dancing behind him. Flashing lights crawled across the bottom of the screen. The soundtrack featured a helium-voiced singer belting out “Deck the Halls” at a hyper, frenetic speed.

“Did you know there are only ten shopping days until Christmas?” the elf asked. His eyes begged me to say no.

“Yes,” I told the TV, “and did you know that every time a television set is turned off, an elf dies?” I clicked the power button on my remote and showed my back to the tube. I didn’t hate Christmas. In fact, you’ll find no bigger fan of twinkle lights, old-fashioned peppermint candy, and picture cards featuring families in matching sweaters and forced smiles. It was the Christmas
advertising
that rubbed me raw every year, starting before Halloween and ending only when every American was corpulent with credit card debt and buyer’s remorse. That’s why I only turned on the TV this time of year to quickly check the weather report. If that made me a Grinch, so be it.

I stretched and glanced around the double-wide I’d called home since last spring. I was trailer-sitting for Sunny, a friend who had fled to Alaska the previous March to fish salmon with a monobrowed Lothario. She had planned to return in the late summer but when the time came, she couldn’t leave Dean or the great white north. That left me to hold down the fort in Battle Lake, a gorgeous jewel of a town where I’d had the unfortunate luck to discover a corpse each month since May. The people were nice, though—the live ones—and in an odd way, I was beginning to feel like I’d finally found a home. Sure, it was a prefabricated double-wide trailer, and there were no ethnic restaurants within 30 miles unless you counted the gas station that sold fried rice and egg rolls in a shiny buffet warmer near the live bait, but on the whole, Battle Lake and I were growing comfortable with one another.

I sipped my jasmine tea and regarded Luna, the German Shepherd mix that came with the trailer. She was one of my favorite things about living here, but sometimes I wished she wasn’t so smart. I needed to speak with her about a touchy subject, and I wasn’t sure of the best way to approach it. I finally decided to come at it from the side.

“I forgot to pick up eggs and toast again last night.” I trailed my finger along the countertop and watched her out of the corner of my eyes.

She cocked her head.

“And you know breakfast is the most important meal of the day …”

She whined at me. She knew exactly where I was going with this.

“You’re wrong,” I protested, setting my tea down. God, she made me feel defensive sometimes. “I really forgot to buy groceries.”

She looked away, sadly. She would not be party to my addiction.

I turned to my calico kitty, Tiger Pop. “You understand, don’t you?”

He lay in a patch of winter sunlight, not even bothering to flick his tail. I studied him for a good minute before deciding he was ignoring me with approval. That was all the encouragement I needed. I yanked a winter coat on over my pajama T-shirt and slipped my bare feet into boots before pulling open my front door.

The double-wide was perched within throwing distance of Whiskey Lake and on a hundred acres of oak forests and undulating hills. All I had to do was step outside to be afforded one of the most gorgeous views in the entire county. I paused to suck in a deep, cauterizing breath. It was one of those beautiful December mornings where the air feels so clean it scrubs your lungs. It was bracing, but felt temperate after Minnesota’s bitterest cold November in decades. The wind licked at but did not slice my bare knees. Glittering diamonds of light sparkled off the rolling sea of snow drifts that was my massive front yard, leading down to the shores of Whiskey Lake.

I crunched down the steps and over the path I’d recently shoveled toward my beloved Toyota Corolla. The two of us had been together for nearly a decade and except for a bunk thermostat that I’d had replaced last month, she’d never let me down.