Winterkill - C. J. Box [10]
A battered blue Dodge pickup, the last of the caravan, swerved slightly and slowed as it approached. The back was piled high with bulky shapes covered by a soaked canvas tarp. Behind the pickup, Sheridan could see the red lights of the bus approaching, and Lucy pointed at it and yelled “Yay! Here it comes . . .”
But the Dodge stopped in the street directly in front of the three girls. Sheridan watched as a water-streaked window rolled down. A tiny, pinched-faced woman looked out at them. Her hair was mousy brown and had blond streaks in it, and her eyes were piercing and flinty. A cigarette hung from her lips, and it bobbed as she rolled the window down all the way.
Sheridan stared back, scared, squeezing tighter on her sisters’ hands. The woman’s look was meaningful, hard, and predatory. It took a moment for Sheridan to realize that the woman was not looking back at her, but lower and to the side. She was staring at April.
The truck started to roll again and the woman swung her head inside and barked something at the driver. Again, the pickup stopped. The school bus was now right behind it, crowding the blue Dodge, the bus driver gesturing at the stopped vehicle in front of him and the faces of children filling the windows to see what the problem was.
The woman continued to look at the three girls. Slowly, she reached up, pulled the cigarette from her mouth, and tapped the ashes into the snow. Her eyes were slits behind the curl of cigarette smoke.
The bus driver hit his horn, and the moment was over. The pickup lurched forward and the window rolled up. The woman had turned her head to yell at the driver. The blue Dodge raced off to join the rest of the caravan, and the big school bus turned into the bus stop.
As the accordion doors wheezed open, Sheridan could hear the raucous voices of children from inside the bus, and feel a blast of warm air.
“That was creepy,” Sheridan said, leading Lucy and April toward the door.
“I’m scared,” Lucy whined, burrowing her face into Sheridan’s coat. “That lady scared me.”
April stood still, and Sheridan tugged on her arm, then turned. She found April pale and shaking, her eyes wide. Sheridan pulled harder, and April seemed to awaken and follow.
On the bus, April sat next to Sheridan instead of Lucy, which had never happened before. She stared straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of her. She was still shivering. The bus driver had finally stopped complaining about the “gol-danged gypsy hoboes” who had blocked his route all the way into town.
“Where in the heck is that group headed?” the driver asked no one in particular. “No one in their right mind camps in our mountains in the middle of the gol-danged winter.”
“Are you cold?” Sheridan asked April. “You’re still shaking.”
April shook her head no. The bus pulled onto the road. Long windshield wipers, out of sync, painted rainbows across the front windows against the snow.
“Then what is it?” Sheridan asked, putting her arm around her foster sister. April didn’t shrug the arm away, which was unusual in itself. Only recently had April started to show, or willingly receive, real affection.
“I think that was my mom,” April whispered, looking up at Sheridan. “I mean, the mom who went away.”
Three
With the storm moving in, Joe found himself with no backup, no ability to communicate, and a dead district supervisor of the Twelve Sleep National Forest. Standing in the timber with Gardiner’s body pinned to the tree and fresh snow quickly covering their tracks back to his pickup, Joe needed to make some decisions and he needed to make them now.
He had just returned from the stand of trees where he assumed the arrows had been fired, assured that the killer was gone. Enough snow had fallen that the tracks left by the killer, or killers, were already filling in.
Joe looked skyward into the swirl of falling snow. He wasn’t sure what to do. Of course he should leave a crime scene undisturbed.