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“Dillon, do you want to call Ruth, bring her back in?”

Savich started to nod, then thought of how excited she’d been about the trip, about going into a cave this time, and just wait until he saw what she brought back. “No, let her have her time off. There are enough of us here. She’ll be back on Monday.”

They looked up to see an older woman striding toward them, boots to her knees, a head scarf tied tight around her face, a thick wool coat flapping around her calves. She stopped at the cruiser, leaned in, and screamed, “What did you do, Raymond?”

Savich cocked an eyebrow. “Marlene, I presume.”

CHAPTER 4

MAESTRO, VIRGINIA

FRIDAY EVENING

SHERIFF DIXON NOBLE shrugged into his leather jacket, pulled on his gloves, and left his office at Number One High Street just before five o’clock. It was colder than Brewster’s nose against the back of his knee in the dead of winter. Snow was coming, forecasted to dump a good one and a half to two feet. He really didn’t want to think about the phone calls it would bring, from downed power lines to car pileups, older citizens with no heat, sick folks without a way to get to the hospital—the list was endless. He’d learned a long time ago to have a solid number of what he called “disaster deputies” he himself had trained to handle the worst that bad luck and nature could throw at them.

It had been a slow February anyway, he thought, except for Valentine’s Day. Will Garber had brought his wife, Darlene, a three-pound box of Valentine chocolates as an apology, but Darlene wasn’t buying it. She grabbed up a handful of chocolates and rubbed them in his face, at which point he slugged her, slammed out of the house, got drunk at Calhoun’s Bar, broke Jamie Calhoun’s nose, and ended up in jail.

“Hey, Dix, anything going on this weekend for you?”

Dix paused a moment, nodded to Stupper Fulton, owner of Fulton’s Hardware, as his father had been before him, and said, “Not so’s you’d notice, Stup. Me and the boys will be sledding down Breaker’s Hill along with half the kids in town if this storm coughs up enough snow. If it coughs up too much, I’ll be all over town with a shovel, digging people out of ditches.”

“Don’t think I’d want to sled in a storm,” Stup said. “At my age, I’d break bones if I hit a tree.”

Dix saw Stup was obviously cold but he wasn’t moving. “You got something on your mind?”

“Well, yeah, it’s like this, Dix. Rafer wants a job.”

“Rafe’s fourteen, old enough, but his grades in English and biology stink, and I’ve already told him there’ll be no part-time job until he gets both of them to a B average. I’m trying to help him out myself, helping him build a model of the double helix for biology in the evenings and even reading Othello with him for English. The guy’s an idiot.”

“Rafer? He’s not an idiot, Dix, he just needs some good motivation.”

“No, Stup, not Rafer, this guy Othello. You know, the guy who murders his wife in Shakespeare’s play.”

“Oh, well then. Rafer wants a job so much he even promised me he’d work extra fast, do all I asked him to do in half the time it would take anyone else, and then he’d study.”

Dix laughed. “That kid’s always got a line. What did you tell him?”

“That I’d speak to you about it.”

“Tell him you pay by the hour, so if he does the work in half the time, he’ll only make half the money. Let’s see what he has to say to that.”

Stup rubbed his arms and broke into a grin. “That’s good, Dix. He’s supposed to come see me tomorrow, so I’ll try it.”

Before he reached his Range Rover, Dix walked along High Street, as he usually did, and spoke to a half dozen more citizens of Maestro, including Melissa Haverstock, the local librarian, who asked him if he’d like to come with her to the First Methodist Church potluck supper on Saturday night. He kindly refused.

When he pulled into his driveway eleven minutes later, it was already getting dark. He was getting real tired of the long winter nights. It was cold, the naked branches shuddering in the frigid air. He sniffed the air. Snow was coming,