Freeze

6

There was a problem. Tess knew it immediately. Warren had never been any good at hiding his emotions. Even with half his face buried in his scarf, Tess knew he was worried. She saw it in his eyes, in the slump of his shoulders.

She didn’t say anything until he’d made it all the way inside and shoved the door closed. It took him two tries to do this; the snow had spilled through the doorway and formed a kind of wedge, and he had to push on the door with his shoulder to get it to latch.

Bub got up from his bed and limped over to Warren, and Warren scratched him on the head before pulling off his outerwear.

“Too much snow? Are we stuck?”

Warren wiped layers of melting snow and ice off his face and flicked the mess to the floor. “I don’t know. Probably, but I couldn’t even get the truck started to find out.” He unwound his scarf, dropped it to the floor, and pulled off his cap. His hair—almost entirely gray now, but still fairly thick—had matted and taken on an oily, unwashed look, although Tess knew he’d showered just that morning. She’d picked his damp towel off the floor.

“What’s wrong with it?”

He turned his palms up and raised his eyebrows. “You know me. I normally don’t know a cracked block from a loose fuse, but I took a look under the hood, and…”

“And what?”

He stepped out of his boots and joined her at the fire. He moved the items from the second chair to the floor and sat down with a huff. Bub followed him, circled the area in front of the fire for a second, and then curled up at Warren’s feet.

“Have you ever heard of an engine freezing?”

Tess shook her head, felt a twinge in her neck, like a cut opening back up, and decided to try moving as little as possible. “No,” she said. “Like the gas?”

“Not the gas. I think it has to get a lot colder for that to happen. I mean the actual engine. The mechanical parts. Like the battery and the fuel injector and whatever the hell else is in there.”

“No, I’ve never heard of anything like that. Is that what happened?”

He rubbed his hands together and held them toward the fire.

“Honestly, I don’t know what happened. There was ice everywhere in there. The tubes were cracked and broken, the fluid tanks were destroyed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the thing had been…sabotaged.”

“Sabotaged? With ice? Who would do that?”

He looked at her and took a deep breath. “Outside of a bad Batman villain, I have no idea, which is why I don’t think that’s what happened.”

She twisted in her chair, leaned toward him. “Hold on a second. What if someone did. For whatever reason. I know you don’t believe I saw a person through the window, not really, but what if there was someone out there? What if they’re still out there? Did you check for footprints?”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “No, I forgot. I’m sorry. But I can guarantee you there’s no one outside. It’s nasty out there. I mean really nasty. Almost unbearable. No one could last more than a few hours in that mess without freezing to death. Maybe not even half an hour.”

“Then maybe they haven’t been out in it the whole time. Maybe they’ve been hiding in the shed.”

He shook his head. “I was just in the shed. Nobody’s been out there but me and Bub.”

“The garage then.”

He turned his chair to face hers and leaned forward on her knees. “But why would anybody do that? Break the kitchen window? Freeze—somehow—the truck engine? Why not just break in and rob us or kill us or whatever it is they have in mind? Why just…mess with us?”

She turned back to the fire. She didn’t have an answer to that one.

“Plus,” Warren said, “there was snow on the hood.”

“Huh?”

His eyes were wide, like he’d just solved some kind of problem.

“Yeah. Snow on the hood. A lot of snow. And no footprints anywhere around it. Whatever happened to the engine, it happened before the snow started. Or at least before the storm really got going.”

“That was four days ago.”

He nodded. “Exactly. Nobody would have frozen the engine and then waited around for four days to break the kitchen window just to…what, scare us?”

Tess said, “Nobody sane anyway.”

He nodded his head and flapped a hand at her, a gesture that said, I’ll give you that one.

“So what do we do now?”

Warren sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “It’s getting dark out,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much we can do except cover the kitchen window, put an extra blanket on the bed, and try to stay warm until morning.”

“And then?”

“In the morning, I’ll check around the house and in the garage, make sure there’s not some psycho stalking the place.”

“And then?”

He laughed. “Let’s get to tomorrow first and go from there.”

Before she could say anything else, Warren got up and put another log on the fire. The flames wrapped around the new wood, flickering, licking. Tess sat still and enjoyed the heat.

“I’m going to tape up the window,” Warren said. “Back in a jiff.”

When he was gone, something slid down the side of her face. At first, she thought it must be a tear—although she wasn’t exactly teary—but when she reached up and wiped it away, her finger came back with a smear of red on it.

Blood.

One of her cuts had reopened.

She wiped up the blood with the towel Warren had brought her earlier, folded the towel in half, and then folded it in half again, hiding the blood from sight, pretending she’d never seen it at all.