FOR THREE DAYS, Andrea managed to keep her resolution to stay away from that lovely stone house by the river.
As she predicted, it hadn’t been easy. A dozen times a day, she fought the urge to call him or walk up the street to check on him, just to make sure he was all right.
At every mealtime, she worried that he wasn’t eating, though she knew that was an unwarranted concern as she had seen Charlene stop by twice in those three days, loaded with bags of groceries each time.
Whether he liked it or not, his family would take care of him, she assured herself. He didn’t need her anymore. That didn’t stop her dreams from tormenting her or her thoughts from constantly wanting to travel down Riverbend Road to his house.
Her children had made it more difficult by asking constantly if they could go visit “Sheriff Marshall”—if they could see his Christmas tree from their house, if his broken leg was all better now, if he might want to play with Sadie.
The weather didn’t help her restless mood, with three days of uncertain, on-and-off-again storms. Though no significant precipitation fell, it was cold and bleak, with a steady, moaning wind and a low pressure system that made her bones ache.
Finally the long-anticipated major storm started in earnest late Tuesday afternoon, five days before Christmas. The snows started just before dark—lightly at first, with huge flakes that seemed to hover in the air and spin in place before plummeting to the ground.
When she looked out the window twenty moments later, all she could see was a curtain of white.
“Look at all that snow!” Will breathed, his eyes wide.
“Maybe we’ll have a snow day tomorrow,” Chloe exclaimed, looking more excited about that than the prospect of Christmas in a few days.
By their bedtime, that was looking more and more likely. Everything was covered in white and the wind blew hard, rattling the windows of her house, moaning under the eaves, whipping branches against the glass.
She stayed up later than usual, sitting by the fire and wrapping the last of the children’s presents while she listened to the wind and watched a sweetly romantic Christmas movie on TV. The happy ending made her sigh through her sniffles, though it did nothing to help her restlessness.
When she looked out the window after hiding the gifts and then brushing her teeth, she saw five inches of new snow crowning the fence posts. The forecasters had said another eight to twelve inches could be on its way before morning.
It took her a long time to fall asleep. When she did, her dreams were once more haunted by a certain county sheriff with a slow smile and serious blue eyes.
She dreamed someone she couldn’t see was chasing them through the booths at the Haven Point Lights on the Lake festival, waving a crutch at them.
Marshall carried Will and Chloe on his back, though he had the thick black boot on one leg, but she still had to run hard to keep up with him as they ducked in and out of tents and people and the Christmas village.
And then they were cornered just on the other side of the biggest Christmas tree at Lakeside Park, with nowhere left to run, and the crutch wielded by a menacing form in a parka and balaclava turned into the same cold and deadly Sig Sauer that Rob Warren had used to pistol-whip her and had pressed to her chin that horrible summer evening mere months ago.
Just as terrified as she had been that night, she screamed and tried to push Marsh and her children out of harm’s way, but she was too late. She heard a fierce crack and the huge town Christmas tree exploded and she awoke abruptly with her heart pounding fiercely and every muscle tense and alert.
She lay in her bed, her breathing sawing in and out. That crack had sounded so real!
Had the dream awakened her or had something else? She heard a small, whining sound and realized after a beat that it was Sadie outside her door.
She reached for the lamp beside her bed and flipped the switch, but nothing happened. The wind must have blown out the power. Grateful for cell phones and the ever-present flashlight app, she reached for hers, turned on the light and slid out of bed.
Her room was freezing. The furnace was powered by natural gas, but the blower couldn’t turn on without electricity, which she had always thought was poor engineering.
Sadie rushed inside the moment Andie opened the door. She plopped at her feet and whined again.
“What’s going on, girl? We don’t have a well, so I know nobody could have fallen in.”
The dog gave her a quizzical look, which led Andie to conclude her lame humor wasn’t particularly well received at 2:00 a.m.
“Don’t worry. The power has gone out, no big deal. We’ll figure out what’s going on.”
She shoved her feet into her fuzzy slippers with multicolored owls on them and pulled her robe off the chair by the bed. When she peered out her second-floor bedroom to the ground below, she saw the snow had eased somewhat. It wasn’t blowing as hard, anyway, and the intensity of the flakes had diminished.