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.