Dead White on the Chairlift

Chapter 1

When the first body fell out of the dark sky, it landed with a snow-softened “whump,” twitched for a moment and then lay still. Blood gushed from the ripped-open neck below a missing chunk of skull and slowly spread out into the pristine whiteness around it like ink through a blotter.

In seconds, a thin white sheen of ice pellets began to settle over the body from the rumbling snow machine going full blast a few feet away.

Real snow, lacy flakes as big as hunks of cotton had begun to fall in earnest, and it mingled with the sparkling artificial snow to cover Clarence Yoder’s still-warm body, quickly burying it deeper and deeper until it completely disappeared, becoming a lump only distinguishable from the other irregularities on the ski slope by the visibly pink tint on the white surface.

Yoder’s body might have lain hidden there until the FBI showed up to search for victims if Jarred Phillips hadn’t been showing off for his girlfriend.

He wove in and out among the trees lining the slope, then angled as close as he could for a harrowing fly-by of the snowmaking machine.

Just as he flashed past only a foot or two in front of it, his left ski snagged.

His momentum flung him forward through the air, arms pinwheeling, legs and skis askew before he face-planted in the snow, knocking his goggles off and shoving icy pellets up both nostrils.

He sat up sputtering, gasping, and spotted his girlfriend stopped mid-slope, bent over laughing.

He leapt to his feet—foot, his left boot was still attached to a ski—and lurched toward the obstruction that had thrown him.

His ski had dragged sideways across it, scraping the snow off the top, revealing a human face peeking out of the snow, encircled by a bloody halo of shattered-skull gore.

Jarred froze in horror, his mind involuntarily recording a detail that would fuel nightmares for the rest of his life—the bearded man lying face-up in the snow stared sightlessly through little puddles of water that had formed in his eye sockets where his still-open eyes had melted the snow.

Jarred turned away, staggered a step, vomited his breakfast onto the snow, and then started screaming. But the rumbling roar of the snow machine masked his cries, just as it had gobbled up the crack of the gunshot that had killed Clarence Yoder.