The Stroke of Winter(24)

Tess nodded. “I’m sure.”

Together, they shoved the trunk in front of the door, and Tess sat down on top of it with a sigh. “I know it’s silly. If something is in that room, it might be able to open the door—which we can’t lock yet—and crawl over this trunk.”

Wyatt squinted at the trunk.

“Let’s put some stuff on top of it. Pots and pans. A lamp. Something that would make noise if an animal does try to crawl over it.”

Tess smiled at him. “That’s a very good idea,” she said.

They went from room to room and collected “noisemakers”—a couple of newer lamps that Tess could live without if they got broken, a silver bowl and pitcher, a wrought-iron candelabra. They stacked them on the trunk.

“Perfect,” Tess said. She could almost feel her blood pressure dropping, her stomach untangling at the sight of it. There was no way an animal—or anything—could get out of the room and past that barricade without something falling to the floor and waking her up. And not just her. Storm would hear it immediately if anything made its way out of that room.

She looked around. Where was Storm? She realized she hadn’t seen him since they went down into the basement to check the electricity.

And then, she caught sight of him. He was crouched at the end of the hallway, trained on the back stairs. The fur on his back was standing straight up, his ears at attention. He was growling, a low and menacing sound.

Tess shared a quick glance with Wyatt. He shrugged.

“Hey, boy,” Wyatt said, a little too brightly. “What’s up?”

Wyatt walked toward the dog until Storm turned and gave him a quick bark. Stay back. Wyatt stopped in his tracks.

Tess and Wyatt watched as Storm growled at someone, or something, on the back stairs. Tess’s body vibrated with dread. And then Storm shot off, barking and snarling, running down the stairs at full speed.

Tess wasn’t altogether sure she wanted to follow.

“Come on,” Wyatt said, taking her arm. “We need to see what he’s going after.”

What was happening? Had opening the door let something loose into the house? That was the only thing Tess could think of to explain the dog’s odd behavior. The guys had opened the door and then, perhaps, didn’t realize that an animal—the thing that had been doing the scratching—had slipped by them and gotten into the main house. It was what Hunter feared might happen, after all. And apparently, it had.

But even as the possibility was turning over and over in Tess’s mind, she knew it wasn’t right. There was no animal in this house. Storm would’ve smelled it, heard it, found it hours ago.

So, what was he barking at now? What was he chasing?

Down in the kitchen, Tess saw Storm standing at the back door, growling.

“What’s out there, boy?” she whispered, gingerly walking up to him. She looked out of the window into the whiteness beyond. She didn’t see anything. Or anyone. She glanced back at Wyatt and shrugged.

“I’m going to check it out,” Wyatt said, pulling on his coat. As he reached for the doorknob, Storm began growling again. Fiercer, this time.

As soon as Wyatt opened the door, Storm ran through it.

Wyatt followed, and Tess did, too, with no time to grab her coat. The cold pricked her face and arms and blasted through her sweater. But she didn’t care. She was just watching Storm, who was walking down the driveway, sniffing.

Wyatt was close behind. He turned to Tess. “I don’t see anything,” he said. “Nothing unusual, anyway.”

“Let’s look for tracks in the snow,” she said, walking along the sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front porch. Nothing out of the ordinary. Tess’s own footprints from earlier in the day. Tracks left by Grant and Hunter and Wyatt. There were so many tracks, she couldn’t be sure which, if any, were new.

Tess noticed Jim at the window of his house. He waved. A moment later, he appeared through his side door.

“Everything okay?” he called out.

“C’mon over,” Tess called back. “I have a question for you.”

Jim didn’t bother with a coat, and as he crossed his sidewalk and onto her driveway, Tess could see he was wearing slippers. This brought a smile to her face. It was below zero. A true northerner.

By that time, Storm was satisfied that the threat—if there had been a threat at all—was gone. He was once again his old friendly self, standing at Wyatt’s side. But Tess had noticed that the dog had patrolled the driveway and sidewalk, sniffing carefully, before coming back up to the house.

What had he been looking for?

Tess ushered Jim, Wyatt, and Storm back into the kitchen and shut the door behind them.

“What’s up?” Jim said, scratching behind Storm’s ears. “This fella was barking like the house was on fire.”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” Tess said, and then told Jim the story of how the crew had opened the sealed door earlier in the day.

“Considering the scratching I heard, and Storm’s reaction, I thought maybe an animal had slipped out of the room unnoticed and somehow gotten out of the house or . . .” Her words dissipated into the miasma of unreality that surrounded them. She didn’t think that at all. But she was hoping Jim would corroborate it all the same. Maybe he had seen something that would make sense of all this.