Winter Prey

bookkeeper, handles businesses in town. Judy stays home. They been here for twenty years, must be—come from over in Vilas County, I guess. You just never see them unless you see Andy going in or out of his office. They don’t socialize that I know of. I don’t know if they’re church people, but I don’t think so. Here, that’s their driveway.”
    “Private house, too,” Lucas said.
    The Schoeneckers lived on an acreage at the north end of town, in a neat yellow rambler with blue trim. The lawn was heavily landscaped, dotted with clusters of blue spruce that effectively sheltered the house from both wind and eyesight. Lucas drove up to the garage and parked.
    An inch of unbroken snow lay in the driveway.
    “I got a bad feeling about this,” Climpt said. “Nobody going in or out.”
    Lucas scuffed the snow with his boot. “They cleared it off after the last storm. This is all blown in.”
    “Yeah. Where are they?”
    They went to the front door and Lucas rang the bell. He rang it twice more, but the house felt empty. “Got good locks,” Climpt said, looking at the inner door through the glass of the storm door.
    “Let’s try the back, see if there’s a door on the garage,” Lucas suggested. “They’re usually easier.”
    They followed a snow-blown sidewalk around to the back. The locks on the back door were the same as on the front. Climpt tried the knob, rattled it, put his weight against the door. It didn’t budge. “Gonna have to break it,” he said. “Let me get the bar.”
    “Hang on a second,” Lucas said. A power outlet with a steel cover was set into the garage wall, just at light-switch height. Lucas lifted the cover, looked inside. Nothing. A post lantern with a yellow bug light sat at the corner of a back deck. He waded through thigh-deep snow to get to it, looked into the four-sided lantern, then lifted one of the glass elements, fished around, and came up with a key.
    “Fuckin’ rural-ass hayshakers,” he said, grinning at Climpt.
    The key worked on the door into the garage. The door between the garage and the house was unlocked. Lucas led the way in, found the inside of the Schoeneckers’ house almost as cold as the outside. They walked through quickly, checking each room.
    “Gone,” Lucas said from the master bedroom. The closets and dressers were half-empty. A stack of wire hangers lay on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom. “Packed up.”
    “And not coming back in a hurry, either,” Climpt said from down the hall. “Look at this.”
    Climpt was in the bathroom, staring into the toilet. Lucas looked. The bowl was empty, but stained purple with antifreeze. “They winterized.”
    “Yup. They’ll be gone a while.”
    “So let’s go through it,” Lucas said.
    They began with the parents’ bedroom and found nothing at all. The second bedroom was shared by the Schoeneckers’ daughters. Again, they came up empty. They worked through the bathroom, the living room, the dining room, took apart the kitchen, spent half an hour in the basement.
    “Not a goddamned thing,” Climpt growled,scratching his head. They were back in the living room. “I never seen a house so empty of anything.”
    “Not a single videotape,” Lucas said. He walked back down the hall to the master bedroom, checked the television there. A tape player was built into the base. In the living room, a bigger television was hooked into a separate tape player. “They’ve got two videotape players and no tapes.”
    “Could rent ’em,” Climpt said.
    “Even then . . .”
    “Did those boxes in the basement . . . just a minute,” Climpt said suddenly, and disappeared down the basement steps.
    Lucas wandered through the still, cold house, then went to the garage, opened the door, and looked in. Climpt came back up the stairs, carrying two boxes, and Lucas said, “They’ve got two cars. The garage is tracked on both sides.”
    “Yeah, I believe they do.”
    “How often do families go on vacations and take two cars when there are only four of them?” Lucas asked.
    “Look at this,” Climpt said. He held the boxes out to Lucas. One was the carton for a video camera. The other was a carton for a Polaroid Spectra camera. “A video camera and no videotapes. And last night Henry Lacey said that Polaroid was taken with a Spectra camera.”
    “Jesus.” Lucas ran his hand through his hair. “Okay. Tell you what. You go through that file cabinet with the bills, get all the credit card