by Kate Bell
Alec reached into the backseat of my car and pulled out the two white buckets and two small shovels we had brought. The buckets had originally held ice cream and were two and half gallons each and I wondered if we needed that much snow. It seemed like overkill.
“Come on,” he said, taking my gloved hand.
The snow along the side of the road had been plowed and the area was smooth, but as we got closer to the edge of the woods I realized I’d made a mistake in not putting boots on. My feet were already wet and cold and we hadn’t even walked through deep snow yet.
“I’m not wearing appropriate shoes for this,” I said.
“I know, but it will only take us a few minutes. I promise,” he said. “We’ll turn the heater on high on the way back.”
We walked into the woods and the snow was surprisingly still light and fluffy. I looked at it, wondering how many animals had tread through it, but I didn’t see any obvious signs. Maybe Alec did know what he was talking about.
“How much further?” I asked, as my breath left my mouth in puffs of white clouds.
“Just over here, I think,” he said. “We want to try and scoop up the top layer, as much as possible, otherwise our snow cream will be filled with hard ice.”
“Okay,” I said. “What about over there?” I saw a mound of snow and it looked pristine. I was sure no animal had gone anywhere near it.
“That looks good. You start over there and I’ll start right over here,” he said indicating a smaller mound on his left.
“Are we going to fill up both buckets?” I asked, heading to the larger mound I had spotted.
“Yeah, mound them up, too. Some of it will melt on the way home. We can put the buckets in the trunk so it’ll stay colder.”
I stopped in front of the mound and examined it, then walked slowly around it. I bent over and stuck my finger in it. It looked clean beneath the surface. I stood up straight and appraised it. It looked as clean as could be and I decided it would pass muster.
Using my small shovel, I scooped up a layer of snow and put it in the bucket. I scooped a second time and hit something solid. That’s odd. I tried another spot and scooped some off the top and put it in the bucket, and then tried again in another spot and hit something hard again. I tried a few more spots and kept hitting something solid after the first scoop. I glanced over at Alec who seemed to be scooping away at the light, fluffy snow, and getting his bucket filled nicely. Huh. This might be harder than I thought.
Chapter Two
I scooped up some more snow and put it in my bucket, and then went for another scoop and hit something solid again. Figuring the mound must be a fallen tree covered in snow, I moved over to the other end and tried again. The first scoop of snow came easily, but the second hit the solid thing.
I leaned over and peered at the mound and saw something pink. What is that? I scraped the snow away from the pink area and realized it was fabric of some kind. I couldn’t imagine what pink fabric would be doing on a fallen tree trunk, so I scraped some more. The pink led to something blue and I realized it looked like a knit scarf. I scraped some more and when I saw blue tinged lips, I screamed for all I was worth and stumbled backward until I fell on my backside. I screamed some more and scrambled to right myself and get on my feet.
“What is it?” I heard Alec call.
“Oh, oh, oh,” I said, dancing around in a circle once I got up. “Alec!”
Alec was at my side before I could finish saying his name. “What is it? What’s going on?”
I pointed at the mound. “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” I said, trying not to look at it, but not able to keep from doing so.
Alec stepped in closer, and then kneeled and brushed some snow away. “Wow.”
Without another word he took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed. “George, this is Alec Blanchard. Allie and I are out in the woods. We found a body,” he said. He gave George the particulars on how to find us and pressed end on his phone.
“This is horrible,” I said, feeling on the verge of tears. “It’s a woman, isn’t it?” That much I had seen.
He nodded, squatting next to the body again. He took his phone out and took some pictures. Then he carefully wiped snow away from the area I had seen the lips. “Do you recognize her?” he asked me after a couple of minutes.
“I don’t know, I looked really fast,” I said. I took a couple of steps closer, but I didn’t really want to look.
Alec began silently taking more pictures with his phone from different angles. Then he stepped back and took some of the surrounding area. When he was done, he brushed more snow from her face and neck. She was wearing a pink coat with a baby blue scarf. He took more pictures of her.
I took a couple of steps closer and leaned over. “Oh my gosh, I do know who that is.”
“Who?” Alec asked, looking up at me.
“Iris Rose,” I said.
“Sounds like a hippie name?” he asked, looking at me quizzically.
“No, she’s a second grade teacher at Belmont Elementary. She’s kind of blue in the face, but I’m pretty sure that’s her. She was Jennifer’s second grade teacher. It was her first year of teaching. Jennifer just loved her.” I was suddenly sad. Iris had been fresh out of college and starry-eyed at the idea of making a difference in a room full of second-grader’s lives.
Alec shook his head. “That’s a shame.”
“I wonder what happened to her? Can you tell?” I asked, taking another step forward. Iris’s pale blue eyes stared sightlessly up at the mid-morning sky. I shivered and looked away.
“No, I don’t want to uncover any more of her without the police getting here and taking a look,” he said and then chuckled. “It sounds kind of nice saying “the police”, and not meaning myself.”
“I guess it would,” I said. “I think retiring was a smart move.”
“I do too,” he said and stood up. “There’s not much else we can do besides wait. The fresh snow that fell last night covered any footprints there might have been. I don’t remember there being any tire tracks in the area where we parked.”
As we stood there, dark clouds gathered overhead and blocked out the sun. I looked up. “Do you think it’s going to snow again?”
“Could be,” he said, looking up at the sky.
It was getting colder and I wanted to go home. It seemed like it was taking George a long time to get here and I just wanted to distance myself from Iris’s body.
“Do you think she was murdered?” I asked him after a few minutes.
He looked at me. “Allie, did you think she walked out here and committed suicide by laying down and freezing to death?”
I sighed loudly. “No, Alec, I guess not.” Smarty pants.
“Oh, did you want to put your snow in the trunk of the car?” he asked, eyeing the bucket I still held in my hand. I had somehow managed to keep hold of the bucket when I hit the ground.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “We are not making snow cream from snow that was on a dead body, do you understand me?” I dropped the bucket where I stood.
He just laughed at me.
***
“Wow, you know who that looks like?” George Feeney asked Alec.
“Iris Rose?” Alec answered.
George nodded. “That’s right. She was a real nice lady.”
“All my kids had her in second grade and loved her,” Yancey Tucker said, shaking his head.
Yancey, George, and three other police officers had shown up after twenty minutes and the coroner was on his way. It was only the fifth of January and the year wasn’t starting off as bright as I had anticipated.
The police took more pictures of the body and the area, and then began scraping snow away. Iris was good and frozen. I felt heartsick and tried to remember if she had any children. I hoped that if she did, they were grown. Not that it would change the fact that they would grieve, but somehow in my mind, it made it easier if they were grown.
Alec bent down and touched
her jacket. “That Jacket’s really not ideal for being out here in the woods. It’s not very heavy and it isn’t zipped.”
I peered over his shoulder. “She has a scarf and knit cap. Maybe that makes up for it.”
“Maybe. But if I were going to be out in the woods in the snow, I’d wear something heavier. Especially since the past four or five days have been windy and snowing, and frigidly cold,” he said, as he removed the snow from around her body. “She doesn’t have gloves on.”
“Yeah, you’re right. She isn’t dressed for cold weather,” I agreed. Iris’s poor fingers had turned blue and the plain gold wedding band she wore glinted in the sunlight. As we stood there, a light snow began to fall.
“We’d better get this done,” George said.
George and Yancey worked to remove the remaining snow from her body and I saw she was wearing jeans. Those wouldn’t be very warm either, unless she was wearing thermals underneath.
“She’s a tiny thing, too. You’d think she’d get cold easily,” Yancey said.
“Can you tell how she died?” I asked. I couldn’t see any blood from where I stood.
“Nothing obvious,” Alec said. “We might not know the cause of death until the medical examiner does his job.”
I nodded. I was stumped on who would do such a thing to Iris. I had never heard a negative thing said about her.
“She’s laying very straight, with her hands folded over her stomach,” Alec noted.
“Almost like she was laying in a coffin,” George said.
“Exactly,” Alec agreed and kneeled down beside her. “And there’s something in her hand.”
“What?” George asked.
Alec stuck his finger near Iris’s thumb and index finger and worked it under her hand. “I don’t know. Her hands are too frozen to move.”
The chief of police, Sam Bailey, showed up and the guys got him caught up on what they knew so far. Alec hadn’t really gotten along with Sam when he worked for him, but he always behaved as if it didn’t bother him. I was pretty sure that was just an act.
Sam sighed. “Alec, what do you say you help us out with this investigation?”
Alec jerked his head up to look at him. “Sure,” he said, nodding. It surprised me that Sam would ask, but Alec was his usual cool self about it.
Alec was working on getting his PI license but was nowhere near done with the requirements. He must have been as shocked as I was to hear Sam ask for his help.
“I’d appreciate it. With you retiring and Mills transferring out, we’re a little shorthanded,” Sam said.
“No problem.” Alec looked him in the eye. “I can do that.”
I wanted to stick my tongue out at Sam. The big jerk. If he’d treated Alec a little nicer when he worked for him, he might not have retired as early as he had. Alec still hadn’t gone into any detail about what the issue was with Sam, but it was obvious to me Sam didn’t like him much.
We stayed until the coroner arrived and he had been briefed. The snow was really starting to come down by that time, making everyone’s job harder.
“Let’s go. There isn’t anything else we can do here,” Alec said and took my hand.
My feet were soaked and frozen and I was more than ready to head home. All I wanted was to soak my feet in some warm water and build a fire in the fireplace.
“What do you think about it?” I asked him as we headed to the car.
“I don’t know. Like I said, I didn’t see any obvious signs of trauma. We may not know how she died for a while,” he said, as we got into the car.
When Alec started the car, I turned the heat on full blast and groaned. “That feels so good.”
“Now we’re going to have to wait to make snow cream another time,” he said.
“I tell you what. I’ll just set a bucket out to catch the snow when we get home. That will make the most perfect snow cream you’ve ever tasted,” I said.
“You just don’t know how to live,” he said, pulling onto the highway.
I sighed. “I just cannot get it out of my mind. Who would have done that to Iris? She was so sweet. All the kids loved her.”
“That’s a shame, for sure,” he said. “Was she married?”
I nodded. “Yes, but I can’t remember if she had any children. When Jennifer was in her class, she was still young and had just gotten married. Her husband is a teacher too, if I remember right. Over at the high school.”
“First stop tomorrow is to pay her husband a visit,” he said.
“Who’s going to tell her husband she’s dead?” I asked him.
“Sam will probably have George or Yancey go talk to him. They’ll ask him a few questions, but probably not much, unless he’s in the talking mood.”
“How sad. I bet you’ve had to tell a lot of people that their loved one was murdered,” I said, turning toward him.
“Oh yeah. Lots of times. It’s not a part of the job I’m fond of. Fortunately, I’m no longer an officer, so that’s out of my hands. I don’t wish it on anyone though.” He sighed and a weary look crossed his face.
I agreed with him on that. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone either.
Chapter Three
“Jennifer, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said gently. She was sitting on the sofa, watching an old episode of I Love Lucy, with one eye on the television and one on her phone.
“What?” she asked without looking up.
I sat next to her and picked up the remote and turned the television off. She looked up from her phone, questioningly.
I sighed. “I have some bad news.”
“What?” she asked, anxiety creeping into her voice.
“When Alec and I went into the woods, we stumbled upon a body,” I said, trying to figure out how to make this easier. But the truth was, there wasn’t going to be anything easy about this.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“Mrs. Rose,” I said.
She gasped. “My teacher? Mom, I just saw her at Walmart a week and a half ago. There’s no way!”
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said.
She stared at me wide-eyed. “I just can’t believe it. She asked me how college was. She said she was proud of me. She encouraged me and said I could do anything I wanted to do if I set my mind to it.”
“She was a really good teacher,” I said. “She was a really good person.”
She started crying and I pulled her to me. All I could do was hold her.
***
It was nice being able to ride over with Alec to interrogate a suspect without either begging him to take me along, or having to hide the fact I was there so that his boss didn’t jump all over him. Of course, the fact that I owned the car Alec was driving helped. It’s not like he could tell me to stay home when he needed my car to get to the suspect.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” I said, looking out the window as we drove along Allen Road. When Alec didn’t answer, I continued. “I think now that you’re no longer bound by the police department’s rules and regulations, we should take a more aggressive stance on interrogating suspects. You know, really drill into them with the questions.”
Alec chuckled. “I’m going to make you stay home.”
“No, you can’t. It’s my car. Remember?”
“First off, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Therefore we will be nice and sweet to people. In the beginning, at least. Second of all, Mr. Rose is not a suspect. He is a grieving husband. We are not interrogating. We are merely interviewing and gathering information.”
I snorted. “The husband always did it. It’s classic.”
“Interviewing is a much sweeter word, don’t you think?” he asked, ignoring my comment. “Besides, what if it was you that was being interviewed? Wouldn’t you want someone to be nice? Especially if you didn’t do it and you’re grieving the loss of a loved one?”
“I know, you’re right,” I relented. “I just want to play good cop bad cop one of these days. Will you
let me do that?”
He chuckled again. “Yes. One day, when I’m relatively certain we are interviewing the bad guy, I’ll let you play the bad cop.”
“That’s all I ask,” I said.
I really had no desire to be unkind to someone that was grieving the loss of a loved one. I knew about grieving all too well. My husband had been killed by a drunk driver and my children’s and my life had been changed forever. I did rather enjoy giving Alec a hard time about interrogating, though. I’d seen more than my share of old detective shows and I liked the idea of being the bad cop. I doubted I could ever pull it off though.
We pulled up to a modest looking home in a family neighborhood on the South side of town. Iris Rose lived in the Sandy Creek development, established in the early eighties. The homes were still kept up nicely and were smaller in size. It was the sort of area I would expect a schoolteacher to live.
Alec knocked on the door and I could hear movement on the inside. I glanced at Alec. There were more sounds of movement from inside, but no one came to the door after several minutes. Alec rang the doorbell and we heard more movement, then the door opened. A middle-aged man stood at the door, his hair uncombed, and dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. He looked like he had been through the mill. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I didn’t think I had ever met Mr. Rose before.
“Mr. Rose?” Alec asked.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head, looking from Alec to me.
“Mr. Rose, I’m De—Alec Blanchard,” Alec said, stumbling over the fact that he was no longer a detective. I noticed a slight tenseness on his face when he said his name and I wondered if losing his title bothered him more than he let on. He had been a detective for so many years, it had become his identity. “And this is Allie McSwain. We wanted to express our condolences on the loss of your wife, Iris. We’re also working with the Sandy Harbor police department and we’d like to have a word with you.”
