“Yes,” Graham agreed.
“Oh,” Shelby said, thinking for a moment. She remembered sitting behind the hatchback for several hours tonight, and seeing the couple inside. It was hard to tell from just silhouettes, but they seemed younger than the Drakes.
She looked at the middle-aged couple. “Were you in the hatchback?” she asked them.
“No,” Joy Drake answered. “We have an SUV. We got stuck just behind the snowplow, up ahead of the tractor-trailer.”
Shelby assimilated this information, glancing down for a moment, then back up.
“Then what about the couple in the hatchback, right in front of me?”
Again there was only silence. She saw Graham and Clark exchange mysterious glances.
“We checked on them,” Graham said. “They were quite comfortable where they were when we left them.” His smile looked forced.
“I see,” Shelby said, but she didn’t really. Graham’s response was a bit off, but she couldn’t quite understand why. “I hope they’ll be okay.”
“We can check on them again later,” Clark offered.
Shelby felt a little more comforted with that response. It sounded genuine. She really shouldn’t worry, she told herself. She had enough on her shoulders just taking care of Macey and Luke without worrying about complete strangers.
But weren’t they all really strangers, thrust together by this unfortunate series of events? And now they had to somehow rely on each other while they waited for…what? Some kind of rescue? It had to be. Someone had to come. The highway would have to be cleared eventually. The storm couldn’t last forever.
Could it?
Mr. Volkmann clapped his hands, which broke the quiet moment.
“Now, who else would like to share their worst winter memory?” he asked, his eyes scanning the room before falling on Shelby. “You, young lady?” The old man grinned.
Even though the RV was warm, the smile Mr. Volkmann gave her chilled her insides, and she tightened her grip around Macey’s shoulder in protective mode. This nice couple had taken her in, so she thought there was no need to be worried. The question he asked didn’t have to linger in her mind long before a memory was conjured up, and it did not have anything to do with her ex-husband tossing their Christmas tree out in a fit of frustration. No, another image came up, one much more frightful.
The eyes of everyone were upon her, waiting for her to respond. She shook her head. “I don’t really have anything,” she said, pushing the memory far back into her thoughts. Not anything she wanted to tell in front of her children anyway.
As if Francine could hear her thoughts, the old woman spoke. “If you’d like, you can let the children lie down in our bedroom. I’m sure they must be exhausted.”
“It is getting late,” Mr. Volkmann chimed in.
“That’s a great idea,” Shelby said.
“Aw Mom,” Luke protested. “I’m not tired.”
“It’s been a long night,” Shelby said, pulling up her sleeve to check her watch. “It must be – oh my God.” She looked up at the others. “It’s after midnight.”
“It’s Christmas!” Luke squealed.
Everyone else voiced exclamations of wonder at how much of the night had gone by since they’d been trapped on the highway. Some of the comments displayed amazement, others frustration. Mason Drake sounded downright angry.
Werner Volkmann got up from his driver’s seat. “Well, this calls for some kind of Christmas toast at the very least.”
“Yes,” Francine said, also rising. “I think there’s still some warm cocoa in the pot.” She squeezed her way to the kitchen area, filled mugs and handed them out to everyone.
Mr. Volkmann raised his mug. “To a very unusual Christmas gathering. May we all have a safe journey home when this storm ends.”
Shelby certainly could drink to that. But would this nightmare ever end? She was beginning to wonder. She brought the mug to her lips, and the chocolate drink was lukewarm, but smooth and soothing.
“Now, how about I get that bed ready?” Francine said with a smile.
“That would be nice,” Shelby answered.
“Do we have to, Mom?” Luke whined.
“It’s late and there’s no reason to stay up. We’ll just be sitting here waiting out the storm. The time will go faster if you sleep.”
“But it’s Christmas already.”
Mr. Volkmann knelt down in front of the boy. “Now be a good lad,” he said, face to face. “You don’t want Krampus to come looking for you.”
Luke glanced up at his mother, and though Shelby didn’t appreciate the old man putting these thoughts in her children’s heads, she saw a look of real concern on her son’s face. Mr. Volkmann looked up at her and winked. There seemed something sinister in that too.
“You heard the man,” she said to her son.
“Will you lay with us?” Macey asked with pleading eyes.
“Of course, baby.”
“This Christmas stinks,” Luke said as his mother started to follow Francine toward the back of the RV.
“Wait,” Joy Drake said, jumping up from her seat at the table.
Shelby turned to look. The woman grabbed a bag she had on the seat beside her.
“Maybe, since it’s Christmas already, your kids would like to open a present. I just happen to have a couple here for a boy and a girl.”
“What?” exclaimed her bewildered husband.
“Oh, no,” Shelby said. “That’s not necessary.” She saw both her kids’ faces light up, then become disappointed.
“Nonsense,” Joy said. “It’s Christmas after all, the season of giving. I insist.”
Before Shelby could say another word and before Joy’s husband could utter a protest, wrapped packages were thrust into her children’s hands and their faces were once again alight. The glittering wrapping was torn to shreds in seconds.
“Wow,” Luke exclaimed. “Space Marines!”
Shelby looked as Macey opened the small jewelry box and held up the snowflake pendant in delicate fingers. It was the first smile Shelby had seen on her daughter’s face all evening. The girl was too amazed to even utter a word.
“What do you say to the nice lady?” Shelby prodded, a hand on each kid’s shoulders and giving in to the fact the gifts were in their hands, despite the look of frustration on Mr. Drake’s face.
“Thank you,” both kids exclaimed in unison.
“Now how about that bed?” an exhausted Shelby said to Francine.
Mrs. Volkmann led them down the hall to the back of the RV, opening a door that led to a small room with a full-sized bed. Shelby let out a breath of exasperation at the sight of how inviting it looked. She turned to the old woman, almost as if to protest their taking the couple’s sleeping quarters, but then thought otherwise.
I deserve this, she told herself. And so do my kids. She didn’t want to give it up to anyone. She removed her boots and crawled into the bed along with Macey and Luke, who were still clutching their first Christmas gifts.
“We’ll try to keep it quiet out there,” Francine said, before throwing a quilt over the three of them. “You just relax.”
When the woman shut the door behind her, relax was what Shelby tried to do. Her arms around her son and daughter, her head pressed into the softness of the pillow, she closed her eyes and tried to shut out everything about the storm outside.
But what she couldn’t shut out was the memory of her worst winter.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Tobin Hill in her hometown of Evergreen, New Hampshire, was a popular sledding spot in the winter. A towrope pulled people up to the top, where a small shack had offerings of hot drinks and greasy snacks.
Shelby was home from college during the winter break with her boyfriend of two years, Kirby Decker, a tall lanky fellow with a too
thy smile and sandy hair. They’d met as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire and realized they only lived a few towns away from each other.
Kirby might not have been the hottest guy Shelby had ever gone out with, but he was certainly the sweetest. And his smile always warmed her heart, especially on a night like the one on Tobin Hill.
They had made several toboggan runs already down the groomed west slope, the towrope bringing them back up each time for another ride.
“One more,” Kirby kept saying, laughing, grabbing her mitten-covered hand. She could feel him squeeze her fingers through the knitted material, not enough to hurt, just enough to show he wanted to hold on to her.
“I’m exhausted,” she uttered at the top of the hill as darkness fell on a still night. “I can’t even catch my breath.”
He pulled her tight. “I’ll breathe for you,” he said and kissed her mouth hard.
What did she expect for an English major? “You’re so corny,” she said, pushing him away in jest.
“Corny and horny,” he exclaimed with a laugh.
“There’s no hope for you.” She laughed back. It felt good to laugh with him.
“One more time,” he said, tugging on the toboggan rope and gesturing down the hill.
“Last time,” she said. “I mean it this time.”
He pulled the sled to the edge of the hill and got in front. Shelby climbed on behind him, wrapping her arms around his thin frame.
“Hang on!” he cried, pushing off with one hand while gripping the rope with the other.
Like a roller coaster breaching the first big hill, the toboggan teetered at the top before tipping forward where gravity reached up and pulled the sled down. It raced down the steep decline, and Shelby buried her face in Kirby’s back to avoid the rush of wind that swirled around them. It was exhilarating as they raced down the hill, and Shelby lifted her head over his shoulder to whisper in his ear.
Kirby turned his head. “What?” he yelled back.
“I love you,” she repeated, a little louder.
His eyes met hers and locked on to them, his grin displaying his big front teeth.
Shelby saw the flash of green ahead and looked up just in time to see them heading toward the pine tree.
There was no time to scream. There was no time for anything.
She didn’t remember feeling the impact. All she remembered was lying in the snow on her stomach, face buried in the powder. The first thing that Shelby sensed was the fluffiness of the snow. They weren’t on the packed trail anymore. They had gone off. Then she remembered the tree.
Shelby lifted her head, brushing snow from her face, crystals sticking to her skin. She looked around. Where was Kirby? She saw the tree and broken branches scattered about. She saw the toboggan. It was split down the middle, shattered bits of wood around it. Several feet away she saw black ski pants.
Kirby!
She thought she yelled his name, but realized she had yet to find her voice. She also couldn’t find her feet, her head swirling in a daze, so she crawled through the snow to get to him. When she reached where he lay facedown in the snow, she shook him.
“Kirby!” she finally managed, though not as loud as she’d liked. She wanted to scream his name. She latched onto his jacket and rolled him over.
A ribbon of blood ran from the top of his head down over his bent nose. His mouth was open, displaying broken shards of red teeth. His eyes were open too, but they couldn’t see anything, and never would again. And then she did scream.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lewis Felker drummed his fingers on the table inside the RV. He looked down at his empty cocoa mug, before shifting his eyes over toward the stove. It wasn’t that he wanted more of the hot liquid. No, not that at all. He was plenty warm, especially since he still wore his damp wool Salvation Army coat. Several times the old lady had wanted to take it from him and hang it up. But Felker didn’t want to take it off. Sure he was warm, toasty in fact, but he wouldn’t relinquish his coat.
There was something not quite right outside, and despite the fact that things seemed safe and secure inside this RV, he wanted his coat and boots on in case he needed to make a run for it. His gloves were tucked inside his coat pockets, and his cap lay on the table before him. He had everything he needed right there, except one thing.
His flask was empty. That’s why he looked at the chocolate remnants swirling around at the bottom of his mug. He didn’t miss the cocoa; he missed what he had emptied into it. As he stared over toward the stove and the cupboards above it, he wondered. These old people must have more liquor in here than the bottle of bourbon the old man pulled out earlier. Who goes traveling without a bit of booze in tow? He thought about asking the old couple. No harm in that. But if he did, he might end up having to share it with everyone else. It could be a long night, so he didn’t like that prospect. But it was so crowded in the RV that he didn’t think he’d get a chance to poke around.
I’ll bide my time, he thought, and wait for a distraction.
He gazed across the table at the Drakes on the other side. Their faces were familiar and it only took a moment for Felker to remember them from the department store earlier that night. They had come out of the store and passed him on the sidewalk as he rang his bell by the Salvation Army kettle. The way the storm was building, not many people were stopping, so he wasn’t surprised when they passed him by. But then the woman stopped and turned around, getting out her wallet, and came over and dropped some bills into the pot.
Felker smiled, thanked her and wished her a merry Christmas. When he glanced up at her husband, he noticed the annoyed look on the man’s face. As they walked away, he heard Mr. Drake mutter under his breath. “Do they have to keep ringing the damn thing? It’s not like we don’t know they’re there.”
Did the guy think he liked standing out here freezing his nuts off ringing this bell? He was the one who had to listen to it all night. That along with the damn Christmas carols blaring over the department store’s loudspeaker on a never-ending loop. Try listening to that all day, for Christ’s sake.
He was doing this to be charitable, to help out those unfortunates. Felker had imagined flipping the guy off behind his back, and now here he was, sitting across the table from him and his wife, sharing the shelter.
The old lady got up from her seat and moved to the bench seat in the vacant spot created when Shelby had taken her kids to the bedroom. “I’ll share my worst winter memory, if no one else wants to,” Francine said, “now that the children have gone to bed.”
She began her tale about the winter when she was ten years old, living in Berlin, New Hampshire. That winter was fierce, the region trounced by multiple nor’easters that swept arctic air down from Canada and pummeled the state with heavy snowfalls. The town plows worked around the clock trying to keep the streets clear so people could maintain their daily routines. But once one storm was finished and cleaned up, another was on its way. The snowbanks piled up along the streets, eight feet high in some spots.
At first the kids enjoyed the snow. Francine told them how most of the streets were shut down, so she and her friends would go sledding down Mt. Forist Avenue during February school vacation week. The street sloped down toward Main Street and they didn’t have to worry about cars coming up the hill.
But soon the fun ended, she told the others, her face growing grim. A city plow made a grisly discovery on Unity Street, just down the road from the paper mill. As the truck’s blade cut through the banks along the road, widening it, a body was uncovered. It belonged to a man who worked second shift at the mill, and usually walked home on Western Avenue after work. At first there were concerns the man had been hit by a plow. But they soon found out otherwise. The man’s throat had been punctured on both sides of his neck, a frozen puddle of blood beneath him.
And he was only the beginning.
&n
bsp; Not long after, the body of a waitress was found on the pedestrian bridge over the Dead River near the railroad tracks by First Avenue. The body lay in a pool of blood, the same round puncture wounds on both sides of her throat.
“People were afraid to go outside,” Francine said. “Not that people wanted to go out anyway. Berlin was a very frigid town in the winter, but that year there was no end to the deep freeze and the snow kept coming!” She threw up her hands in dramatic exclamation.
Francine told them how schools remained closed even after vacation ended. Shops downtown shut down as most people either couldn’t get out of their houses, or were too afraid to. The paper mill and the factories kept running; people still needed to work. But businesses struggled.
“I remember staring out the window into the whiteness of my front yard,” Francine said. “It was beautiful, the pure untouched snow. No footprints or boot marks to mar it. No snowman or snow fort built by my brothers. And though I wanted to go out and play, it was just too cold.” She said the only thing good about being stuck inside was not having to smell the pungent odor of the paper mill.
Francine said as the weather got more brutal, even the killings seemed to have stopped, as if it were too cold for murder.
But then the temperature finally climbed above freezing, and she remembered begging her mother to let her go outside. Her mother said she could, just to check the mail as she had seen the postman walking down the street by their house just a few minutes earlier. Francine said her mother bundled her up in her winter coat, hat, mittens and boots and sent her out to fetch the mail and come right back.
Francine thrashed through the snow down the front walk, to the edge of the road before the mailbox. She needed to stand on her tiptoes to reach the box. She pulled the lid down and took off her pink right-hand mitten to reach in and grab the envelopes stuffed in the mailbox. As she pulled her hand out, one letter slipped from her cold fingers and fluttered to the ground. She bent to retrieve it when she noticed, a few feet away, a red line in the snow. Her eyes followed the line up the street to its source.
Snowball Page 9
