P Tracy: Snow Blind

Sheriff Iris Rikker was standing on the shore of Lake Kittering, watching the water lap at the brown sand beneath her boots. March had blown in on a stiff, warm wind, more lamb than lion, and the ice, along with the second lottery car, had disappeared into the spring-fed depths a few weeks later. An even, white chop ruffled the surface of the lake today, and Iris thought that it didn’t look much different than it had back in January, when the waves had been suspended in ice.

She heard Sampson’s heavy footfalls squishing on the soaked lawn behind her. ‘It’s a little early to go swimming, Sheriff,’ he said as he came up beside her.

‘Actually, I was thinking about going fishing.’

‘Bass opener isn’t for another month. Suckers and bullheads are about the only thing you can pull out of there now. Nobody eats them because they taste like mud, but they’re good sport.’ He stooped, picked up a piece of driftwood, and started poking at the sand. ‘But I never really had you pegged as the sporting type, come to think of it.’

She sighed and fixed her gaze upon the distant shore; the shore closest to Bitterroot. ‘I’m not.’

Sampson poked his finger into her arm like a little boy. He’d been doing that a lot lately. ‘Do you want to show me your scars?’

Iris smiled, but she didn’t look at him. ‘Maybe some day.’

Sampson dug his foot around in the sand, making a big footprint. ‘Do you think they’re down there?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you regret it?’

‘Not dragging the lake? No.’

Sampson stood up, pitched the driftwood into the water, and nodded. ‘Probably just as well. We’ve had fifteen drownings in that lake over the past twenty years, and they never found one by dragging. Had to wait until they floated, and not all of them did. You’re as likely to find Mike Jurasik’s grandson as you are to find anybody else.’

‘I got the lab results from the bones in my barn today, Sampson.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘There’s no way to identify them. Even DNA needs something for comparison, and there isn’t a trace of Emily’s husband left anywhere in the world.’

‘It was Lars. Nobody else it could have been.’

Iris started moving her own boots in the sand, looking at the patterns she had made. What was it about the human animal that wanted so desperately to see their footprints in any medium that would duplicate them? ‘He starved to death in that little cell, Sampson. That was the official cause of death.’

Sampson didn’t say anything at first. He just folded his arms against his chest, trying to hold in the imagination that would show him what that kind of death would be like. ‘You know what I think?’ he said at last. ‘I think Emily locked him down there to save herself, and maybe to save her daughter, too. It’s kind of funny, when you ponder it. Emily was the only one in that family who couldn’t kill to save herself, so she did the only thing she could. She locked him away where he couldn’t hurt anybody, as if that kind of life was better than death, and then when the cancer got bad, she decided she had to kill him because there’d be nobody to take care of him after she was gone. In a way, it kind of makes you believe in a God that sees suffering and believes in payback, because he dropped her in the driveway with the gun in her hand, before she could put Lars out of his misery. And say what you like, the bastard probably got just what he deserved.’

Iris looked at Sampson, horrified by what he’d said, so certain that no one deserved that kind of life and death. It took her a full second to forgive him completely, because a man like Lars had done terrible things to Sampson’s sister, and left a painful twist in Sampson’s mind.

She looked back over the lake, thinking of all the horrible secrets she’d discovered in this one tiny little spot on the globe, wondering if every other spot held just as many.