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Chapter 2

2

Present Day

Because of how quickly the storm was approaching, Wylie Lark angled into the last open parking spot on the street where Shaffer's Grocery Store was tucked between the pharmacy and the Elk's Lodge. Wylie would have preferred to have driven to the larger, better-stocked grocery store in Algona, but already heavy gray snow clouds descended on Burden.

Wylie stepped from her Bronco, her boots crunching against the ice salt spread thickly across the sidewalk in anticipation of the sleet and two feet of snow expected that evening.

With trepidation, Wylie approached the store's glass windows, decorated for Valentine's Day. Shabby red and pink hearts and bow-and-arrow-clad cupids. She paused before yanking open the door. Shaffer's was family owned, carried off-brands, and had a limited selection. It was convenient but crowded with nosy townspeople.

So far, whenever Wylie made the drive into Burden, she had successfully dodged interactions with the locals, but the longer she stayed, the more difficult it became.

Once inside, she was met with a blast of warm air. She resisted the temptation to remove her stocking hat and gloves and instead inserted her earbuds and turned up the volume on the true crime podcast she had been listening to.

All the carts were taken, so Wylie snagged a handbasket and began walking the aisles, eyes fixed firmly on the ground in front of her. She started tossing items into her basket. A frozen pizza, cans of soup, tubes of chocolate chip cookie dough. She paused at the wine shelf and scanned the limited options. A man in brown coveralls and green-and-yellow seed cap bumped into her, knocking an earbud from her ear.

"Oops, sorry," he said, smiling down at her.

"It's okay," Wylie responded, not looking him in the eye. She quickly grabbed the nearest bottle of wine and made her way to join the long line of people waiting to check out.

The sole cashier's brown hair was shot through with gray and was pulled back from her weary face by a silver barrette. She seemed oblivious to the antsy customers eager to get home. She slid each item across the scanner at an excruciatingly slow pace.

The line inched forward. Wylie felt the solid form of someone standing directly behind her. She turned. It was the man from the wine aisle. Sweating beneath her coat, Wylie looked toward the cashier. Their eyes met.

"Excuse me," Wylie said, muscling her way past the man and the other shoppers. She set her basket on the floor and rushed out the doors. The cold air felt good on her face.

Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket and she fished it out.

It was her ex-husband and Wylie didn't want to talk to him. He would go on and on about how she needed to get back to Oregon and help take care of their son, that she could just as easily finish her book at home. She let the call go to voice mail.

He was wrong. Wylie wouldn't be able to finish the book back home. The slammed doors and shouting matches with fourteen-year-old Seth over his coming home too late or not coming home at all frustrated her to no end. She couldn't think, couldn't concentrate there. And when Seth, glowering at her from beneath his shaggy mop of hair, told her he hated her and wanted to go live with his dad, she'd called his bluff.

"Fine. Go," she said, turning away from him. And he did. When Seth didn't come home the next morning or answer any of her calls and texts, Wylie packed her bags and left. She knew it was the easy way out, but she couldn't handle Seth's secrecy and anger a second longer. Her ex could deal with it for a few days. Except the days turned into weeks and then months.

She moved to shove the phone back into her pocket, but it tumbled from her fingers and struck the concrete and bounced into a slush-filled rut.

"Dammit," Wylie said, bending over to fish the phone from the icy puddle. The screen was shattered, and the phone was soaked through.

Once in her vehicle, Wylie ripped off her hat and shrugged out of her coat. Her hair and T-shirt were damp with sweat. She tried to wipe the moisture from the phone but knew that unless she got home in a hurry and dried it out, it was ruined. She futilely poked at the cracked screen, hoping that it would light up. Nothing.

The twenty-five-minute drive back to the farmhouse seemed to take forever and she had nothing to show for it. No groceries, no wine. She'd have to make do with what she had back at the house.

Though it took Wylie only two minutes to put Burden in her rearview mirror, what laid before her felt like an endless stripe of black highway. Twice she got stuck behind salt trucks, but the farther north she traveled, the fewer cars she saw. Everyone was hunkered in, waiting for the storm to hit. Finally, she turned off the main road and bounced across the poorly maintained gravel roads that would lead her to the house.

Wylie had been staying in rural Blake County for six weeks, and the weather had been brutal. The cold went bone-deep and she couldn't remember seeing so much snow. As she drove, she passed fewer and fewer houses and farms until all she could see was a sea of white where corn and soybeans and alfalfa once stood. They gave no suggestion of the explosion of green and gold that was sure to come in a few months.

Wylie drove another several miles and slowed to a crawl to inch around the hickory tree that inexplicably grew in the middle of where two gravel roads intersected and then over the small pony trestle bridge that spanned the frozen creek below.

Two hundred yards beyond the bridge, the long, narrow lane, lined with shoulder-high, snow-packed drifts, would take her to the house. She drove past the line of tall pines that served as a windbreak and toward the red weathered barn, now covered in white. She left the Bronco idling while she pulled open the wide doors of the barn, which she used as a garage, drove inside, turned off the ignition, and shoved the keys in her pocket. She closed the wide wooden doors behind her and looked around at the open prairie.

The only sound was the rising wind. Wylie was alone. There was no other human being for miles. This was precisely what she wanted.

Icy sleet fell from the sky. The storm was here.

Wylie slid the damaged phone into her pocket and headed for the farmhouse.

Once inside, she locked the back door, kicked off her boots, and replaced them with fleece-lined moccasins. Wylie rushed to the cupboards in search of a box of rice so she could dry out her phone. There was none. She would have to get it fixed or buy a new one. Wylie hung her winter parka on a hook in the mudroom but left her stocking cap atop her head.

At the beginning of December, Wylie had made a phone call, discovered that the remote farmhouse where the twenty-year-old crime took place was currently unoccupied, and decided to make the trip. The farmhouse was a hundred years old and was as creaky and contrary as an old man. The furnace chugged along but couldn't keep up with the cold air that snuck between the windowpanes and beneath the doors. Wylie had meant to stay for only a week, two at the most, but the longer she stayed, the harder it was to leave.

At first, she blamed her ex-husband, and the prickly patch she had hit with Seth. She was so weary of arguing with them. She needed to focus and finish her current book.

The house had only the basics—electricity and water. No Wi-Fi, no television, no teenage son to remind her what a bad mother she was. She'd be fifteen hundred miles away from any distractions. Now that she'd dropped and destroyed her phone, her only connection to the world was the landline. Her access to the internet, text, FaceTime was all gone.

She was working on her fourth true crime book and often traveled for research, but she had never been gone from home for so long. The longer Wylie stayed in Burden, she realized there was more to it, or she would have finished the book by now and been back home.

Tas, a geriatric coonhound mix, looked languidly up from his bed next to the radiator with his yellow eyes. Wylie ignored him. Tas yawned and lowered his long snout to his paws and closed his eyes.

Sunset was three hours away, but the storm cast a gray pall through the windows. Wylie went through the house, flipping on lights. She hauled the last of the cut wood from the mudroom, set it by the fireplace, and built a fire. She hoped the kindling would last through the night; she didn't relish the thought of having to go out to the barn to bring in more.

Outside, the sleet was picking up momentum, slashing at the windows and covering the naked tree limbs in an icy glaze. It would be pretty if Wylie wasn't already so tired of winter. The groundhog had seen his shadow, more snow was coming, and spring seemed far away.

Wylie began her routine just as she had every afternoon for the last six weeks. She went around the house, double-checking that the windows and doors were locked, and closed the shades. Wylie might have preferred to be alone, spent her life writing about horrifying crimes, but she didn't like the dark and what might be lurking outside after the sun went down. She opened the drawer of her bedside table to make sure that her 9 mm handgun was still there.

She showered quickly, hoping to beat the moment when the hot water turned tepid, and towel dried her hair. She pulled on long underwear, wool socks, jeans, and a sweater and went back down to the kitchen.

There Wylie poured herself a glass of wine and sat on the sofa. Tas tried to heave himself up next to her. "Down," she said absentmindedly, and Tas returned to his spot next to the radiator.

Wylie thought about using the landline to call Seth, but she ran into the chance that her ex would be nearby and insist on speaking with her. She'd heard it all before.

Inevitably, their conversation would collapse beneath a bevy of harsh words and accusations. "Come home. You're acting unreasonable," her ex-husband said during one of their last phone calls. "You need help, Wylie."

She had felt something crack inside her chest. Just a small fissure, just enough to let her know that she needed to get off the phone. She hadn't talked to Seth in over a week.

Wylie carried her glass up the steps and sat down at the desk in the room she was using as her office. Tas followed behind and lay down beneath the window. The room was the smallest of the bedrooms, yellow with Major League Baseball stickers lining the baseboards. Her desk sat in the corner facing outward so she could see both the window and the door.

The manuscript she printed the week before at the library in Algona sat in a stack next to her computer, ready for one final read through. But still, Wylie was hesitant to bring the project to a close.

She had spent over a year studying crime scene photos, reading through newspaper articles and official reports. She contacted witnesses and individuals key to the investigation including deputies and the former sheriff. Even the lead agent from the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation agreed to talk to her. They were surprisingly candid and gave Wylie little-known insights into the case.

Only the family members wouldn't speak to her. Either they had died or flat-out refused. She couldn't really blame them. Wylie spent endless hours writing, her fingers flying across the keyboard. Now the book was finished. Had its resolution, as meager as it was. The murderer had been identified but not brought to justice.

Wylie still had so many unanswered questions, but now it was time. She needed to read through the pages, make any final revisions, and send the manuscript to her editor.

Wylie tossed her red pen on the desk in frustration. She stood and stretched and made her way downstairs to the kitchen and set her empty wineglass on the counter. Her hands ached with cold, but she was determined not to turn up the thermostat. Instead, she filled the teakettle with water and set it on the stove. While it heated, she hovered her hands over the burner.

Outside, the wind whipped and cried mournfully, and after a few minutes, the teakettle joined in with its own howl. Wylie took her cup of tea back to the desk and sat down again. She set aside the manuscript and her thoughts turned to the next project she might take on.

There was no shortage of grisly murders. Wylie had plenty to choose from. Many true crime writers chose their subject matter based on headlines and public interest in the crime. Not Wylie. She always began with the crime scene. This was where the story snaked into her veins, and she wouldn't let go.

She would pore over photos taken at the crime sites—images of the locations where the victims took their final breaths, the position of the bodies, the faces frozen in death, the frenzy of blood splatter.

The photos she was reviewing now were from a crime scene in Arizona. The first picture was taken from a distance. A woman was sitting propped up against a rust-colored rock, tufts of dusty scrub brush surrounded her like a wreath, her face tilted away from the camera. A black stain darkened the front of her shirt.

Wylie set aside the photo and looked at the next one in the pile. The same woman but up close and from a different angle. The woman's mouth was contorted into a pained grimace. Her tongue poked out black and bloated. Carved into her chest was a hole big enough for Wylie to stick her hand into, surrounded by a ragged fringe of skin, revealing bone and gristle.

The pictures were gory, disturbing, and the stuff of nightmares, but Wylie believed that she needed to get to know the victims in death first.

At 10:00 p.m., Tas nudged her leg. Together they went down the steps; Tas moved more slowly, his joints clicking rustily. It wouldn't be long, and Tas would no longer be able to manage the stairs.

She wondered what her ex-husband would say when Wiley told him she picked up an old stray she found sitting outside the farmhouse's front door. No matter how much she tried to get him to leave, the dog stuck around.

Wylie figured he was left behind by the people who had rented the place before she arrived. She named him Tas, short for Itasca, the state park where three young women's bodies were discovered and who were the subjects of Wylie's first true crime book.

Wylie didn't like Tas much, and the feeling was mutual. They seemed to have come to the understanding that they would have to coexist for the time being.

She unlocked the front door, opening it just enough to let Tas out, and shut it behind him. Still, cold air, snow, and sleet found their way into the house, and Wylie shivered.

One minute passed, then two. Tas, not fond of the cold, was normally quick about doing his business and would scratch at the door to signal that he was ready to come back inside.

Wylie went to the window, but the panes were fogged over and lacquered with ice. She rubbed her eyes, gritty from staring too long at the grainy photos, and leaned her back against the door to wait. She wouldn't be able to sleep until the sun rose.

The lights flickered, and Wylie's heart flipped in panic. She stared at the lamp and held her breath, but the warm glow remained steady. She added more wood to the fire. If the power went out, the pipes could freeze, and she would have a real mess on her hands. Wylie opened the door a crack and peered out into a sea of white, but there was no Tas.

"Tas!" she called out into the dark. "Here!" The rain had transformed into hard pellets that hit the house with an incessant rodent-like scritch-scratch. Wylie couldn't see past the weak light that spilled from above the door. "Great," she muttered as she reached into the front closet for a spare set of boots, an old barn coat, and one of the many flashlights she kept stowed around the house.

Once bundled up, she stepped outside, careful not to slip on the steps leading from the porch to the front yard.

"Tas!" she called again in irritation. She hunched her shoulders to the biting wind and ducked her head to combat the sting from the tiny beads of ice striking her face.

Several inches of snow had already fallen, and now of all things, it was sleeting, transforming the yard into an ice rink.

Another flash of uneasiness went through Wylie. Heavy ice or snow on the power lines was sure to lead to their collapse and an outage and complete darkness. She wanted to find Tas and get inside.

Using the porch rail to steady herself and the beam from the flashlight to guide her, Wylie eased along, calling out to him. She squinted through the dark and aimed the flashlight toward the lane that led to the road. Two eerie red orbs flashed back at her. "Tas, you come here," she ordered. He lowered his head, ignoring her commands.

In resignation, Wylie began the trek toward the stubborn dog. She bent slightly forward and moved, flat-footed, trying to keep her center of gravity directly over her feet. Still, she slipped, landing with a thud on her tailbone.

"Dammit," she snapped as she got to her feet again. The sleet had worked its way into the gap between her coat and her neck. Her hands were bare, and she longed to shove them in her pockets but didn't dare. She needed them out, extended, in case she fell again.

Tas stayed put. As Wylie got closer, she saw that Tas's attention was squarely focused on something on the ground in front of him. Wylie couldn't tell what it was. Tas circled around the object, sniffing at it tentatively.

"Get away from there," Wylie commanded. As she shuffled forward, she could see that it was not an object but a living or once-living creature. It was curled in a tight ball and covered in a sheath of ice that glistened in the light from the flashlight.

"Tas, sit!" she shouted. This time, Tas lifted his head to look at her, then obediently sat back on his haunches. Wylie crept closer; her eyes followed the coil of the body. A scuffed shoe, the faded blue of denim, the downy gray of a sweatshirt, a shorn head of dark hair, a small fist pressed to pale lips. A thin, frozen river of blood branched out around its head.

What lay before them was no animal. It was a little boy, frozen to the ground.

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