Page 42 of Snow Creek

“Theory?” he asks.

“It’s all about the claw hammer. I think that Merritt Wheaton killed Ida and wrapped her up in the carpet.”

“Where? In his workshop in the Quonset hut, or in the barn?”

I nod. “She was hit in the back of the head. Had to be at home. No one carries a hammer around.”

“Carpenters do.”

I make an annoyed face. “I guess so. But not this control freak. He’s going to kill her where no one can hear or see anything.”

“Motive?”

He’s lobbing the easy ones at me. I answer anyway.

“Like I said, control freak. You heard Dan. He said Ida was pushing back on her duties, I guess. They come from a fundamentalist sect that, as far as I can tell, is their own invention. No church that I can find. After spending time with Ida’s sister Ruth, I definitely got aChildren of the Cornvibe.”

He smiles at the reference.

“There,” I point, “that’s the Torrance place. Pull in there.”

“You sure?”

I look at the plat map. “Yes. And by the looks of it, this driveway is about a mile long.”

“More like a road, than driveway,” he says.

“Apparently that’s the way they like it out here.”

The road, or whatever it is, is deeply rutted. No effort has been made to stabilize its surface. Sheriff expertly navigates the deep dips. He slows to cross a pool of mud and water.

“Shouldn’t have had my car washed yesterday,” he says.

I see a potato chip bag stuffed next to the console.

Shouldn’t be eating chips, I think.

“Well looky here,” he says as the barn and house come into view. “A real house.”

I’m surprised too. The sight of the Torrance farm is unexpected and makes me think of a bias that I have about Snow Creek. Yes, they are off the grid. Yes, they want to be by themselves. Dan, Maxine, the Wheatons, and now Regina and Amy Torrance… they carved out their own lives in the woods. They weren’t living in squalor—with the exception of Maxine’s herd of cats—like a bunch of tweakers or head and neck tatted white supremacists.

We get out and go to the door where we find a note referencing an RV trip and someone named Jared, who was watching the animals.

“No one on the county property rolls around here with that name,” I say.

“He must be from town,” Sheriff says, peering through the window on the door. “A caretaker, I guess. Someone has to be taking care of the animals around here.”

A hint of smoke from the barely burning embers of a firepit across the yard between the house and the goat barn fills my lungs.

“Must have just missed ’em,” I say. “I’ll leave a note for Jared to call me.”

I tuck my card with a message into the door jamb next to the note.

“No one’s in trouble,” I write. “Just trying to find out if anyone knows anything about the Wheatons. Please call me.”

Just as we hit the highway off Snow Creek Road, my phone pings. I feel an adrenalin surge even before I play the voice message from the crime lab on speaker.

It’s the call that I’ve been waiting for.

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