Out of the Shadows (15 page)

Everything was such a whirlwind that when she thought back on the events, she could only clearly remember about half of it. The stress was wearing on her deeply, and she rubbed her temples, begging for relief from her lingering headache.

Opening the cabinet, she retrieved a bottle of ibuprofen and swallowed two pills, chasing them with a large glass of ice water.

She shivered.

Not realizing before now that it was chilly in her home, she retrieved a simple striped cardigan from the bedroom, sliding her arms into it and cinching it in front of her. Her house was old and drafty with creaky wooden floors, and she was aware of the poor insulation, but the current temperature seemed odd to her. Checking the thermostat in the hallway, she saw that it was fifty-two degrees in her home. She reached her hand up to the ceiling vent, feeling warm air push out into the house.

Huh
, she thought to herself.
The heater isn’t keeping up
. She assumed it was the raging storm outside and decided to stoke the fire in the living room.

As she ventured through the house and made it to the entry foyer, she noticed that her front door was wide open. She stopped and cocked her head, furrowing her brow in confusion. She thought that she had shut it earlier when she had returned home, but perhaps not. She pushed the door closed, giving a few extra heaves for good measure to make sure it latched this time. She turned to head toward the fireplace in the adjoining living room, but then she noticed something odd about the floor at the base of the front door.

A thin layer of ice covered it.

She knelt down, slowly reaching out her fingers, lightly touching it. It was cold and wet, as ice ought to be. She followed the trail to the stairs that led up to a guest room and the attic. She searched the ceiling for a leak of some kind that could explain the icy pavement.

Just when she was about to make her way upstairs to investigate further, she heard a voice that said, “You’ve caused quite a few problems for me today, Rita. And that makes me
very angry
.”

*     *     *

“Shit!” Christine cursed, forcing the SUV from drive into reverse and back again, trying to break the tires free from their snow trap. She pounded the steering wheel with the palms of both hands, furious that she was so stupid as to get the vehicle stuck, knowing that every second they spent in the ditch was another second that they weren’t trying to save Leslie.

“Can you get it out?” Jonathan asked frantically, unnerving her.

She didn’t answer but continued to try to rock the truck back and forth, hoping it would break free, but she wasn’t hopeful.

“Brody?!”

“I’m trying, Colt!” she snapped too harshly, frustrated with herself and the situation.

Jonathan flung open the passenger door and jumped out to examine the back tires.

“What are you doing? Get back in the truck!”

He kicked the tires upon seeing how badly they were recessed into the snowy earth. A look of desperation filled his face. “Brody, I’m sorry. I gotta go.” And he shut the door, taking off down the road on foot.

“Colt!” she yelled after him. He walked down the road, eerily illuminated by the headlights of the vehicle. “Shit!” she screamed loudly, damning whatever supernatural being was responsible for the events of the day.

She zipped up her coat and jumped out of the truck, removing her gun from its holster and following after Jonathan. She had made a choice when she left the station to pursue him; she would not change her mind now.

Her legs quickly grew tired from walking through the thick layer of snow as her face was bombarded with tiny pellets of annoyance, the wind fighting against them. “Colt, wait up!” she called out to him, but he was definitely on a mission, and he charged ahead, clearing a path that she tried to follow. The house wasn’t far, but even with that ray of hope, she wasn’t sure they would have the endurance to make it. If they kept this up, she knew neither of them would survive the night.

Jonathan turned the corner ahead, continuing the slog through the uncooperative precipitation, one arm held up to shield his face. He pushed harder than his body was capable, and Christine could see the strain consuming him.

She tried to pick up her pace to catch him. “Colt, please wait up!” She was close enough now that she knew he could hear her, even over the wind. “Colt!” She was growing agitated at his persistence. The muscles in her legs burned with a fire that failed to warm her. “Colt!”

Jonathan spun on her, a blazing wrath consuming his eyes.
“What?!”
he screamed.

She halted, rendered speechless by his sudden fury.

“What, Brody?!” he growled again.

“I…” Her mind rested on the words, but she no longer was sure she could utter them.

“Say it!”

For the first time since she had met Jonathan, she was afraid of him. “I don’t…”

“Say it, Brody!”

Shame welled within her eyes.

“Say it!” he raged now.

“Calm down, Colt,” she begged, lifting one hand toward him.

In a flash, he raised his gun, pointing it at her chest. “I want you to frikkin’ say it!”

“Whoa! Take it easy!”

“Say it!”

“She’s already dead!”

The wind howled through the evening, like a wail of grief that filled the empty space between the two partners. Jonathan stared at Christine, images of his wife Leslie floating through his consciousness. He relaxed his grip on the gun and slowly lowered it, biting his bottom lip to divert his immense emotional pain.

“I’m sorry, Colt,” she said sincerely, fighting to keep her composure. “If that maniac was actually at your house when he called you…” she hesitated before finishing, “then she’s already dead.”

His lip quivered, and tears finally released from his eyes with thick sobs of anguish. “She could a’ been abducted.”

Christine looked at him with pity, but she nodded. “Maybe.”

She slowly closed the gap between the two of them and awkwardly placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. She nearly lost her balance when he lunged forward and fell into her arms, crying into the shoulder of her coat, his arms clutched tightly around her.

She held him until his emotions ran dry, the wind forming a frigid cocoon around them.

Eventually, he pulled away from her and wiped his face on his sleeve, taking a deep breath to calm himself. He cocked his gun and looked at her as if nothing had happened, his face matted with redness. “We’re wastin’ time.”

Glad to be done with the emotional outburst, she nodded, admiring the man’s persistence. “Then let’s go,” she added, raising her own gun.

They continued down the street a few hundred feet until they reached the incline of the driveway that led up through the trees to the Colter House. Instead of taking the path, they edged off to the side and used the trees as leverage to pull themselves up the steep hill. The house rested on a beautiful cliff that overlooked Penobscot Bay, but in this moment, with the remaining daylight beginning to disappear beyond the horizon, making it more difficult to see through the hilly forest, Christine wished they all could live in the middle of the Great Plains or somewhere equally as flat.

She watched as her partner deftly pulled himself up toward the house, his mission stronger than ever. She was not a religious woman, but she silently prayed to a higher power that Leslie was safe and warm inside the house, and the phone call had all been a bluff.

The Colter House resembled a modern log cabin, made mostly of wood. It was beautiful and quaint, the windows warmly illuminated from the inside but completely fogged over. A light stone chimney stretched into the sky, a thin stream of black smoke escaping into the air, indicating a fire had recently gone out.

As they finally breached the top of the hill where the ground leveled out, Jonathan began calling out to his wife, and they ran across the front yard and up the steps of the front porch.

And then they came to a halt.

Seeping out from under the front door was a slick pool of ice that covered the brown welcome mat and crept up the door, spreading out across the façade of the house. Christine quickly made her way down the length of the porch, noting that a frozen layer covered nearly the entirety of the front of the building, including the fogged up windows.

Jonathan pounded a fist on the frost, hollering his wife’s name once more. The blockade was strong and thick. He dashed down the steps and began to circle around toward the back.

“Colt, wait!” Christine called out.

He stopped and turned to face her.

“Going to the back isn’t smart in this weather. One wrong step, and you’ll slip down the cliff and end up in the bay!”

He held up his hands, frustrated by the time they were wasting. “What options do I have, Brody?”

She thought for a minute and realized he was right. There weren’t many options. They would either need to break through the ice or carefully circle around through the hilly backyard, hoping they didn’t slip and fall to their deaths.

And she certainly didn’t feel like dying today.

Jonathan stood in the thick layer of snow that protruded up to the base of his knees. As the wind whipped furiously around them, he could almost feel the accumulation rising higher up his legs while staring at Christine, waiting to hear her better idea to gain entrance into the house. As the seconds passed, it was growing more difficult to make out her features, the sunlight ever setting in the distance. Soon, it would be nighttime, and the snowfall would have grown to such outrageous heights that any thought of catching a killer would have to wait until morning, or possibly late afternoon tomorrow.

Christine looked at her partner, seeing the yearning for expediency in his pained expression as she thought of one stupid idea after another to attempt to break the coating of ice on the front of the house. In an act of desperation, she leaned back and raised her leg sideways, kicking the slick mass with the full force her legs would allow. A sharp pain wracked a nerve in her foot, shooting excruciating agony through her leg and up her back.

The ice did not so much as crack.

Cursing herself and shaking her leg out, limping around in circles to keep her blood flowing, she angrily aimed her gun at the ice wall and fired a round that ricocheted off into the distance. Only a small chunk broke free, falling to the wooden deck. She knew it would take more bullets to get through than she had available.

Before she had time to come up with another foolish plan, Jonathan grew restless and continued down the side of the house, headed toward the back. He treaded as carefully as he could manage, but his focus remained on the visage of his radiant wife, hoping she had somehow managed to escape the house; although he wasn’t sure to where she would go in this blizzard. He mentally kicked himself for not checking around for footprints first.

He felt the lower half of his legs pushing past the chilled tingle of exposure and beginning to fall numb, which concerned him. But he could worry about his limbs another time; he could still live a happy life with Leslie without his legs. Each step took more muscle than the one before as he neared his small backyard overlooking the rocky cliff leading down to the frozen bay.

Not stopping to see if Christine was following, he imagined them falling to their deaths, snapping their necks, and becoming submerged under a deadly sheet of ice in the bay. A few months later, the fishing boats would flood the harbor, and one of them would end up snagging the corpses of the one and only Brody & Colt.

Shaking from his mind the morbid image of his own frozen carcass tangled in a fishing net, he reached his hand out to grab the corner of his house, hoping to pull himself around and onto the level ground right outside his back door. A particularly strong gust of wind pummeled his back mid-step, knocking him off balance.

And he slipped.

*     *     *

Even though he knew little more than a second had passed, his mind slowed the speed of time as the windy blast assaulted him, knocking him off balance. He felt himself wobble, one foot in the air getting ready to step down into the snow. As his weight shifted, he lost his traction, and he felt himself fall forward. Knowing the momentum would carry him down the hill, forcing his body to bounce relentlessly off of the frozen rocks and boulders before his broken cadaver would crash through the ice on the surface of the water below, he closed his eyes and waited for death.

But he didn’t fall.

His senses were muffled, and his face stung, his arms outstretched before him. He felt something gripped onto the back of his pant leg and assumed he had snagged a bush. Once he realized that he had fallen face-first into the snow, he struggled to rise up, but his hands only pushed farther down into the snowdrift. He flailed his arms, struggling to right himself before he felt a hard tug from whatever had grasped him.

He managed to flip over onto his back and looked up to see Christine, crouched to the ground, one hand grasping tightly to a metal conduit that ran up the corner of the house, and the other hand clutching his pant leg. He struggled as she assisted, climbing his way back to steadier ground, brushing the excess snow from his coat and hair.

The two leaned against the side of the house, panting to catch their breath. She looked over at him and said, “You got your gun?”

He nodded, raising it to show it was still clutched in one of his hands.

“Colt?” she said between painful inhalations, her lungs freezing from the frigid air.

“Yeah?”

“Every year I tell you the same damn thing, and every year you ignore me.”

“What’s that?”

“Build… a damn… fence.”
She rose to her feet, carefully stepping around the corner to get a better look inside the house through the windows on either side of the back door.

Moving to a flanking position, she carefully peeked into the house so as not to be seen from anyone inside. As she lightly pressed her face against the chilled glass, she saw the brightly lit kitchen and dining room. It didn’t look like any kind of huge struggle had taken place. Jonathan retrieved his house keys from his pocket, but he knew that the second the door opened, whoever may be inside would be alerted to their presence from the vicious sounds of the storm. So once the lock became unlatched, he and Christine would have to move quickly, sweeping the house.

Making eye contact with her, she understood the silent directive and nodded, raising her weapon for potential combat. Crouching under the window, she quickly crossed her partner, readying herself on the other side of the door to charge in when he opened it.

In a flurry of movement, he flung the door open, and Christine slipped over the threshold, quickly panning back and forth, checking the kitchen for signs of movement. She didn’t stop her fluid motion, continuing into the adjoining dining room as Jonathan entered and quickly closed the door behind him, headed the opposite direction around the small kitchen table at which he had eaten his breakfast with his wife earlier that morning. His heart cringed as he continued into the next room, hoping that every item in the house wouldn’t become a “last time with Leslie” memory.

In the study, he remembered the last time he rubbed her feet, the last time they made love on the couch, the last time they fought, the last time they kissed. He took a deep breath, pushing his pain back down into his gut where he hoped it would stay for a while.

He hated how cold it felt in the house, and he wondered whether he would ever truly consider the building “home” again after this night. He made his way into the entrance foyer, seeing where the barricade of ice began at the front door, spreading across the whole front wall. The only place left to check was the parlor, where she would have been curled up on her chair in front of the fire reading her book. But from the black smoke they had seen escaping the chimney outside, he knew that one no longer burned.

“Colt!” Christine’s voice rang out through the small house, thick with frightened urgency that sent a weight of dread dropping through Jonathan’s body, freezing his feet in place.

He shook with fear and trepidation, not wanting to enter the living room but knowing that he must.

“Colt, in here! Now!” she called out again.

Willing himself to push forward, he broke free of his invisible shackles and dashed into the living room. In the center of the space was a large globe made entirely of ice. The surface was smooth and moist, glimmering in the warm light from the lamp on the end table. For a flicker of a moment, he thought that it was a stunning creation, and then he noticed that there was a small wooden chair in the center of it – a chair from the dining room table. And bound to the chair at the wrists and ankles was his wife, Leslie.

Through the ice, her body appeared distorted and warped, almost fluid, but he knew without a doubt that it was Leslie. The bottoms of his eyes brimmed with tears, and his muscles quivered, feeling the anguish rise into his throat, forming a lump around which was nearly impossible to breathe.

And then from within the icy sphere, her head turned to face him, her eyes wide.

At the realization that she was alive and that the globe was hollow, adrenaline flooded his body, and he began pounding on the ice, screaming for his love. “Leslie! Leslie, I’m here! I’m gonna get you outta there!”

Seeing her husband seemed to have given her new hope, for she struggled against her bindings, trying to break free from her cloth chains. Her skin was pale, and her movements seemed lethargic, but she was struggling nonetheless.

Christine searched around the room, frantically looking for the solution of which she had not previously thought when she was dealing with the front door earlier. Jonathan pounded and kicked, viciously trying to tear his way inside the globe, desperately needing to grasp hold of his wife.

“Leslie!” he hollered again, reminding her that he was there and was trying to help her. He felt an emotional storm swelling within him, a typhoon of anguish on the precipice of release. “Brody, help me!”

“I’m trying!”

Jonathan watched as Leslie’s struggling became less fierce, and she began to grow docile. “What’s wrong with her?”

Next to an ice slick on the dining room floor, Christine found a black iron stoker for the fireplace, and she snatched it up in the hand that didn’t contain a gun. “She’s running out of air.”

Jonathan imagined his wife slowly suffocating inside her personal snow globe, the panic overtaking her before that final moment of calmness where she would accept her fate and close her eyes.

“Move!” Christine ordered him, dashing toward the ice globe, the stoker clutched tightly in both hands, rearing back to swing. The iron rod collided with the ice, breaking tiny chunks away. The globe was thick, like the ice across the front of the house. As she swung again, slowly chipping away at Leslie’s frozen prison, she thought back to how fragile the crystallized people had been compared to how impenetrable this new ice seemed to be. Clearly, whoever was doing this had a certain level of control over the outcome.

Again and again, Christine assaulted the slick dome, small chips falling to the floor, her arm muscles beginning to burn with discomfort. Inside the globe, Leslie’s movements grew less pronounced as her oxygen depleted.

Jonathan grabbed the end table lamp, raising it above his head and bringing it down fiercely on the ice, shattering the lamp’s frosted shade.

Another chunk fell to the ground.

Leslie’s body jerked awkwardly in the restraints.

Christine swung, making a small crack split over the globe’s surface.

Jonathan attacked again with the broken lamp, vision blurred with salty tears.

Leslie lurched in the chair, but subtly this time.

Stoker to ice, Christine used every ounce of force her muscles would allow, but she watched the life slowly slip away from her partner’s wife.

Jonathan cried now, whimpering his wife’s name while trying to break through.

Harder and harder Christine assaulted the ice.

And then Leslie’s head slowly drooped forward, limp.

Everything fell still in the Colter House in that brief moment of time. The storm outside raged, making the walls cry out in misery. Quietly sobbing, Jonathan lowered himself to the ground, one hand still on the ice, wishing he could touch his wife and tell her he loved her one last time. All of the “what ifs” in the past thirty minutes flooded his mind with regret. What if he had ended the phone call differently? What if the SUV hadn’t gotten stuck in the snow? What if he had not taken a minute to cry in the middle of the street? What if…?

Christine watched her partner break down before her, and her own eyes began to sting with loss. She shared in his suffering; perhaps not as deeply as he, but she still felt that she had been gutted with a serrated knife, a dry knot forming in her clenched throat.

Suddenly filled with fury, she reared back and continued swinging the stoker, breaking off chunk after chunk of ice. Each collision echoed through the empty house like a nail being driven into a lonely coffin. She continued to swing, an intense anger building inside her at the frustrations of the day that was still only half over.

Before she realized what she had done, a large section of the icy dome crashed to the floor, scattering frozen debris across the room.

She allowed only a brief instant of shock to wrack through her body before she dropped the iron rod and ran inside the half-globe, quickly untying Leslie’s bonds. “Colt!” she called out for help, but he was already behind her, ready to assist.

They carried her body out and laid her on the floor, Christine immediately proceeding with her emergency training, tilting Leslie’s chin back ever so slightly and performing CPR on the woman. Breathing into her mouth, and pressing firmly on her chest repeatedly, she felt tiny beads of sweat ooze from her pores.

Jonathan knelt beside her, nearly holding his breath. “Brody…” he pleaded quietly, afraid that his voice would be enough to destroy any hope that was slowly filling the room.

She ignored him, counting to herself so she didn’t screw up.

Seconds ticked by, filling voids that felt like hours.

Breathing – watching Leslie’s chest artificially rise and fall. Compressing – trying to push blood through her body.