Deep Freeze (West Coast 1)

She shivered and flipped the channel until she found an ultimate dating challenge and, opening her chemistry book in case her mother barged in and invaded her space again, settled against the pillows.

Still stinging from Cassie’s cruel words, Jenna made her way down the hall and told herself to be strong. Cassie was angry and had lashed out. She’d felt backed into a corner and probably hadn’t meant all the hateful things she’d said. But it still hurt. It hurt like hell.

Because she was too close to the truth?

Jenna didn’t want to go there. Didn’t want to think about Jill and all those dark reasons she’d had to leave California. The divorce was bad enough, but she could have handled that. Jill’s death was another matter altogether. Guilt gnawed at her as it had ever since the accident. Once again, Jenna attempted to ignore the overwhelming sense of responsibility as she made her way down the stairs and into the kitchen. Don’t let Cassie get to you. That’s what she wants. Remember who’s the mother and who’s the daughter, Jenna. She’s only trying to hurt you because she’s hurting. Give her a couple of hours to cool off, then try again. You’re the one in control here.

Or was she? Sometimes it didn’t seem like it at all.

She reheated coffee she’d made from the bottled water she’d bought in town, then checked on Allie and found her seated on the floor of the den, playing her Game Boy while watching television. “You have all your homework done?”

“Almost,” Allie said, concentrating on the tiny screen.

“What does ‘almost’ mean?”

“That I don?

??t have any. I did my math at school and I just have a book report.” She finally looked up and added, “I’ll do it after dinner.”

“Okay.” Jenna wasn’t up for another fight. She blew across the top of her coffee cup and walked to the kitchen where she pulled out a phone book from a cupboard near the telephone, then scanned the yellow pages. She’d already called several handymen she’d found listed in the local paper, not reaching a single real person, just answering machines. So far, no one had responded. Time to call in the big guns. She leafed through the section on home repairs and scanned the names, some of whom she’d heard, others who were complete strangers; still others were yahoos, self-proclaimed handymen who hadn’t known which end of a nail to hammer who had come out here in their own sweet time, sworn they’d fixed the alarm system, or the gate, or the stove, and left, only to have whatever it was go out a few days or weeks later. She avoided those flakes.

You could call Wes Allen.

She discarded that idea as quickly as it popped into her head. She didn’t like the idea of being alone with him. At all.

She also planned to call a tow truck to have her Jeep taken to the dealer in Gresham, nearly fifty miles west, or she could try a local guy, the owner of one of the two gas stations in town. “Decisions, decisions,” she said as she reached for the receiver.

As she waited for someone to answer, Cassie’s accusations about why she’d left California echoed painfully through her mind. It didn’t have anything to do with White Out?

She felt the old familiar ache deep in her center. Jenna still couldn’t talk about the accident that had taken her sister’s life. White Out, the movie that was never finished. White Out, a movie she hadn’t wanted to make. White Out, Robert’s pet project that seemed cursed from the get-go. White Out, the end of her career, her marriage, and life as she’d known it. White Out, the reason Jill had died.

“RS Plumbing,” a cheery female voice said, breaking into Jenna’s thoughts. She realized she was talking to a living, breathing person, not a voice mail machine with a series of prompts.

“Great.” Jenna tried to put a smile into her voice and push all thoughts of the tragedy that had propelled her to Oregon out of her mind. “I’m hoping you can help me. I’ve got a problem with my pump and—”

“Can you hold?”

Before Jenna could respond, the woman clicked to another line and Jenna was left listening to silence. Hoping the woman on the other end of the line hadn’t disconnected her, Jenna waited and nothing happened. The line seemed dead. She hung up and retried, but the phone line was then busy. Of course. Today nothing was going right. She tried again and got nowhere.

“Great,” she said, and hung up feeling cursed. “Get over it,” she told herself as she rested against the window ledge and glanced through the glass to the wintry twilight where the ranch’s few security lights were blazing, giving an eerie blue glow to the grounds. The wind had finally died and with it came a stillness that seemed weird and out of place. Unearthly.

The calm before the storm, she thought, and felt a shiver as cold as death trickle down her spine. There was something about the coming night, something dark and lurking, something deadly. She could feel it.

Stop it! Don’t do this to yourself, she silently admonished and noticed the first few flakes of snow beginning to fall from the sky.

She was there.

Inside.

Somewhere in the rambling log home.

No doubt Jenna Hughes felt secure. Safe.

But she was wrong.

Dead wrong.

As the flakes of winter snow drifted from the gray sky, he watched from his hiding spot, a blind he’d built high in the branches of an old-growth Douglas fir that towered from this high ridge. Her ranch stretched out below in frozen acres that abutted the Columbia River.