January Thaw (The Murder-By-Month Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dunk.
    The closer I got to the ice rink, the stronger the smell of hot chocolate grew. I smiled, captivated by the clean, slicing sound of hundreds of skate blades against ice and the sight of people gliding along at various levels of skill.
    “Mira!”
    I glanced toward the warming house. Jed, a local friend, had popped his head out. Jed was a harmless stoner, the local Shaggy always in search of Scooby Doo. His parents owned the Last Resort on the edge of town, and Jed was the local handyman. He’d tried to get a glass-blowing business going in November, but that hadn’t panned out as expected. Since then, he’d gone back to working odd jobs. This must be one of them.
    “You’re running the warming house?” I asked as I walked toward him.
    “Just for the Wonderland.” He smiled his wide grin and nodded agreeably, the tassel on his Nordic winter cap bobbing. A riot of black curls exploded from the base of it. He seemed to be trying to grow a beard and mustache, though both were wispy with more than a little Fu Manchu to them. “Are you gonna skate?”
    A father and his daughter teetered down the carpeted path from the warming house to the ice. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not very good. It’s been years.”
    “If you can walk, you can skate,” Jed said, motioning me into the warming house.
    The blast of heated air and the heavy scent of wet wool were impossible to resist. Within ten minutes, Jed had me suited up and hobbling toward the ice. At least fifty people were already on the lake, which reminded me of a saying in these parts: You know who walks on water? Jesus, and every Minnesotan in the winter.
    I tentatively stepped onto the ice. I was shaky at first, sticking to the edges so as not to mow over children and the elderly. As I gained confidence and grew less wobbly, I swirled in and out of people, remembering my father teaching me how to skate when I was eight. He’d brought an old kitchen chair onto the ice for me to balance with. We spent a whole afternoon on the slough behind the farmhouse, and when we were done, I was bruised but happy, not to mention a decent skater. The memory was bittersweet—more sweet than bitter, as I’d recently started to let go of resentments toward him and accept him as the whole, flawed man he’d been when he was alive.
    The mental shift was hard, and I figured it would be an eternal work in progress, but it turned out to be a lot easier to love his memory than to judge it. Go figure. And once I opened up all that real estate where before I’d been holding anger and regret, I found a lot of things were simpler than I’d made them. Up until a few weeks ago, I’d been able to escape the cage of my thoughts and appreciate the moment more often. I’d even considered taking up meditation.
    “Oh, sorry!” I said, narrowly missing a teenaged couple holding gloved hands as they skated. They rolled their eyes at me, but I didn’t care. Skating felt like total freedom. I could almost hear the stress of yesterday fall away. Sure, it revealed another layer of stress immediately below it, but it was a start. I didn’t even mind when I took a spill to avoid colliding with a chain of skaters playing Crack the Whip.
    “Whoops!” They yelled as they flew past.
    I shrugged and smiled, getting to my knees so I could hoist myself up using my hands and the toe of a skate. It was from this position that a flash drew my attention. I looked up, across the road, and toward the Prospect House. This was a perfect angle from which to see the mansion a few hundred yards away. The grounds were crawling with people dressed in red, blue, green, and patterned parkas, but what had caught my eye was higher. I followed the grain of the house to the second floor, and then to the attic. There it came again, a flash from the round window below the chimney, like a piece of jewelry had caught the glare of the sun. I squinted. Were people up there?
    Then, like a jack-in-the-box, a face