“What are you wearing on your feet?” Molly asked me.
I sat down on the sofa and took a deep breath. The day was warm, but the cold air of the freezer seemed clogged in my lungs.
“I saw a dead body,” I began, peeling the booties off.
I told Molly and Luce about finding Holt Everand dead and practically frozen in the warehouse and hearing someone before I got out of there.
“Then Sheriff Hardy took my shoes because they had blood on them.”
Molly had her hands up covering her mouth. Luce was clenching an empty cup with white knuckles.
“Do you think the killer saw you?” Luce asked.
“I heard a noise . . . maybe someone saw me.”
The thought was chilling. What if—
“What if they saw you and followed you back here so they could get rid of any witnesses!” Luce yelled.
“Calm down,” Molly snapped at her.
“Calm down? Calm down? There could be a psycho ice warehouse killer out there watching us right now!”
Luce dramatically pointed out the front window.
Across the street, old Mrs. Osterman was shuffling along behind her equally elderly terrier, Rumtum. He was wearing a plaid jacket that protected him from the weather. A light puff of wind would have taken both of them down.
“Pretty sure it wasn’t Mrs. Osterman,” I said.
“Yeah? That’s how they get you. It’s always the person you least suspect.”
“Well, in that case, we should tell Sheriff Hardy to round up all the six-year-olds in town, because I saw a bunch of them this morning, and they were cute and adorable and definitely not on my murder suspect list.”
“This was a methodical killing,” Luce murmured to herself.
I decided to ignore her until she came back to reality.
“What did Sheriff Hardy say about it?” Molly asked.
“Not much. They’re investigating. From the frozen blood, he could have been killed any time in the past day.”
“. . . probably lunatics traveling cross-country, bashing in heads as they go . . . ”
I gave her the Butter Festival flyer. Her eyebrows rose when she read Zero Bend’s name.
“Did you see the graffiti?” she asked me.
“On my walk here. Pretty weird for him to graffiti his own name, though, right?”
“. . . network of serial killers, filming their kills, sharing them online . . . ”
“He does look weird. Wasn’t he the guy who threw someone out a third-story window?”
“Haven’t done my research yet. The photos were my first work.”
“. . . draining the blood of the living, making some creepy spell most likely . . . ”
The photos! I’d completely forgotten about them despite Sheriff Hardy asking me to bring a copy to the station.
I opened my bag and pulled out my camera. It looked big and expensive, but actually it was about third-hand, slower than a wet week sometimes, and I really wanted to upgrade it. I flipped out the small view screen.
“I took a whole lot of photos before I found the body! Maybe there’s something in them.”
Molly came over to sit beside me as I scrolled through the images.
“. . . need to close the town borders, trap the murderer here, hunt them down . . . ”
“Butter, more butter, butter from a different angle,” I muttered. The view screen wasn’t very big, only a few inches across, so I’d have to double-check them later, but I was fairly sure I hadn’t accidentally caught a murderer in the background leering at me from the shadows.
Luce finally stopped talking to herself and sat down on my other side to look through the images.
“You took a lot of butter photos,” she said as I zoomed through another twenty or so.
“I don’t think there’s anything here—”
I hit the final photo. The one I took accidentally when I pressed the button in shock.
It showed the warehouse, the frozen pool of blood, the neat butter packages, and . . . no Holt Everand.
Just a black aura, like a hole in reality, where he should have been.