Evening Street by Julia Keller

hoped, had built up enough scar tissue in the last minute or so to handle the heat. Bell realized that she’d been looking at the snow without actually seeing it. Now she squinted out the window, exploring the particulars.
    Not a single tire track had yet marred the street’s frozen perfection. She gauged the snow’s depth to be about fifteen to eighteen inches. Not impenetrable, especially not for the heavy-duty, four-wheel-drive vehicles favored by people who lived in the midst of mountains—but something you had to consider, to factor into your plans, before leaving your house. A county road crew would come along eventually. The slowpoke snowplow would do what it could. But the crew, quite rightly, would focus on the main arteries first. They might not reach the residential streets until late this afternoon.
    Now there was action. Bell watched as a black Chevy Blazer fought its way through the thick drifts that striped Shelton Avenue like nature’s speed bumps. Every few feet, the Blazer stalled out and fell back, stymied by ridge after ridge of frozen snow. The driver was forced to put it briefly in reverse and then attack from another angle. The sound of the engine—the chopped-up vrrrr vrrrr vrrrr of its constant revving—had a kind of seething exasperation embedded in it, and an Are you freakin’ kidding me? weariness, too. Bell assumed it was just channeling the feelings of the driver.
    The Blazer stopped in front of her house. “Stopped” was a generous interpretation; it really just stalled out and quit. The door flapped open. A man in a thick black overcoat and knee-high black boots jumped out. He shuddered briefly at the cold. He closed the door behind him. Bell took note of what she’d seen before but had willfully chosen to ignore: the round white county seal on the door, encircled by the words RAYTHUNE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT.
    No question about it. This was official business.
    Bell scarcely had time to set her mug on the mantel and pull on a ratty, dignity-preserving bathrobe before the knocks came, a series of three serious-sounding assaults on the ancient oak door. There was a doorbell in plain sight, but for some reason, Deputy Jake Oakes—she’d recognized him as he fought his way up the long front walk, or at least up a path that constituted his best guess as to where the walk might be lurking under the snow, and then struggled up the front porch steps—always preferred to knock, loud and long. He’d been a Golden Gloves boxer in his youth, he’d told her once, and she wondered if he secretly missed using his fists on a regular basis.
    She opened the door. The deputy’s nose and cheeks were bright red from the cold. His blue eyes watered profusely. He seemed slightly stunned by the ordeal of walking just a few yards in this weather. His lips, she saw, were cracked and split.
    â€œSorry to barge in on you like this,” he said.
    Bell nodded. She didn’t know the details of the situation that had prompted his visit, but she was sure its essence could be summarized in a single word:
    Trouble.
    *   *   *
    The body of a woman identified as Darlene Strayer had been found just before sunrise. That’s what Oakes told her, his words flat and informational. He knew she preferred to hear it that way: facts arranged in chronological sequence. She didn’t like it when people hemmed and hawed and hedged, trying to pretty things up, temper the blow.
    A trucker named Felton Groves had come upon the mangled wreckage off to the side of the road. Darlene had been ejected from her midnight blue Audi when the car hit a pine tree about twenty yards beyond the tight interior curve of the nasty switchback. Groves was negotiating that same help-me-Jesus stretch of the descent when he spotted the carnage, his headlights splashing up on the crusty white snow like a flung bucketful of some glittering substance.
    That