Frozen Secrets (Cold Hollow Investigations #1)

Chapter One

This was not supposed to be her life.

Winnie Hutton hauled another box of case files off the floor and onto the dolly she’d borrowed from the next-door neighbor.

Clouds of dust charged at her face, years of neglect and who knew what else driving up her nose and down her throat.

Coughing didn’t help. It felt as though some virus had already taken root inside her.

Swiping the rest of the dust from her face, she sagged back onto the empty space she’d just cleared on the floor.

Dying sucked.

Studying the bedroom her father had turned into an office, she imagined her dad sitting right there behind the old metal, rusted desk she had no intention of moving on her own.

Arthur Hutton—Black Hollow’s very own chief of police—had spent the past few years in this room.

Old newspaper clippings tacked to the walls, markers, highlighters and pens strewn across the surface of the desk, red string connecting empty investigation leads he never shared with her like a serial killer gone mad.

Commendations and photos with the mayor had been framed over the course of her dad’s thirty-year career, and yet, at the very end, the people of this hellhole town had turned against him.

All because of Lila Mercer.

Okay. It wasn’t a dead woman’s fault, but her twenty-year-old murder case had driven her dad into an early grave.

He’d spent hour after hour, day after day, year after year trying to solve it.

Sacrificing everything to find a killer that had left nothing behind, including the relationships that he’d once considered vital to his life.

That, Winnie had no doubt, was why she was sitting here in a neglected, dusty office going through her father’s belongings so she could clear it all out and sell the damn place.

Well, that, and the divorce, but she didn’t want to think about that.

Dan certainly hadn’t thought about her at all since serving her the papers and running off with his work wife.

Pain arched through Winnie’s jaw as she gritted her teeth at the thought.

Nope. She wasn’t going there. She had a job to do, and she was the only one to do it.

After throwing back the tangle of fire-red hair that’d slipped over her shoulder, Winnie swiped her face with the back of her hand.

It would take days to clean out all these file boxes and get the home ready to list on the market.

And then what? Where was she supposed to go?

Dan had sold the house in Seattle and sent her the half of the profits she was owed, and while it’d been a good chunk of money, it wouldn’t last forever, and her remote job as an online psychology writer certainly wouldn’t buy much in the city.

Her ex had been the main income earner in their marriage, but she couldn’t count on the alimony the judge had ordered him to pay. He was just that kind of spiteful.

Winnie took in the mishmash of florals and old carpet stained from too many cups of coffee and hard liquor, and the wallpaper she remembered her mom had rolled onto the yellow walls.

She could stay here. Her childhood home had been paid off, but…

It hurt. Sitting here without her dad in his leather chair, rocking back and forth as he tried to find a connection he might’ve missed, scribbling notes on those legal pads stacked to one side of the desk.

Dozens of them. There’d been nights when she’d snuck out of bed just to watch him work, hiding behind the ugly upholstered rocking chair her mom used to rock her in to get Winnie to sleep.

Days when Arthur Hutton had been her hero and not the ghost he’d become.

She grabbed for the paper box she’d set down and righted it on the dolly. “One of…fifty.” A frustrated growl escaped her as she surveyed the work ahead. She was sweaty and tired and hungry and sad, and her white button-down shirt and jeans looked as though they’d survived some kind of massacre.

No neighbors had come by to offer their condolences.

No casseroles or lasagnas had ended up on the porch in the past few days, since The Hollow Daily had printed her dad’s obituary.

Only her aunt and one of her cousins had shown at the funeral to give their respects, and both had sprinted from Black Hollow as soon as the service ended with promises to check in.

They weren’t ever going to call. She knew that.

Not even her dad’s former partner—she really didn’t want to think about him—or the men and women her father had supervised at the station on the east side of town had made an effort, but had she expected anything less?

Everyone in Black Hollow—a sleepy, cold town made up of 6,000 people she’d spent years avoiding in Northeast Washington State—blamed her dad for failing to capture that teen girl’s killer. Leaving Winnie to pick up the pieces alone.

It wasn’t that the people of her hometown didn’t care.

The entire community had managed to come through for a boy down the street who’d been diagnosed with incurable cancer, raising funds and throwing him a carnival like the town had never seen at Black Hollow Park before he’d succumb to his disease.

She’d found about it in one of the rare days she’d checked the city’s social media accounts.

The people she’d grown up around probably cared more than most. They involved themselves in each other’s lives, raised their kids together and tended to side-eye outsiders who dared to breach the fog that always seemed to surround the town.

As a kid she’d thought Black Hollow to be an isolated magical place straight out of one of the fairy tales her mom used to read, with thick pine forests in every direction, the old logging road the town had been built around and the river hosting a swarm of summer memories.

But the truth was development had come to a complete stop in the ’90s.

Wi-Fi and cell signals failed all the time, the town had stopped growing, provided little opportunity for her graduating class of twenty and had become haunted with disappearances, unemployment and petty crime.

Lila Mercer’s unsolved case being one of them.

While most of her classmates had gotten married, bought houses a couple streets over and started popping out kids while taking over for their parents’ mom-and-pop-type businesses, Winnie had run as far as her part-time job at the Hollow Bean Café could take her.

Which wasn’t very far at all. But Seattle had provided opportunities and excitement and people who didn’t call her Winnie the Pooh. Emphasis on the Pooh.

But her mom wasn’t here anymore, had passed away from pneumonia a decade ago, and her dad…

Her dad was gone, too. And now, she was stuck in the same town.

Broke, homeless and heartbroken. In more ways than one.

She could practically hear the taunts in her former classmates’ voices if she ventured outside this house.

Winnie, you haven’t changed at all with that red hair.

It’s cute you get to work from home. We always thought you would end up right back here.

Where’s that lawyer husband of yours? Acid burned up her throat at the thought of their digs before she’d gotten into her car and driven the two-hundred-plus miles from Seattle.

But it wasn’t her bullies who’d practically turned her into an agoraphobic over the past few days.

It was the possibility of seeing the one man who’d driven her from Black Hollow in the first place.

Winnie hauled the next box onto the dolly, spilling the top manila files all over the brown carpet. Tipping her head back, she growled at the popcorn ceiling. “Ugh. Give me a break.”

No. There was no reason she’d have to see Adrial Tucker’s stupid handsome face, with that stupid thick scruff she’d teased him about countless times but secretly loved.

No reason for her to set sight on those incredibly dark eyes she could still picture perfectly, or the broad shoulders she swore her hands remembered.

Or the way the divot in his eyebrows deepened whenever she caught him staring at her.

She hadn’t seen her dad’s former partner since she’d left Black Hollow.

Not since that one night they were supposed to be celebrating their engagement with all their friends and family.

Last she’d heard he’d gotten married to a girl who’d been a grade behind her—Winnie couldn’t remember her name—and started his own private investigation agency here in town, but that was fine.

She’d moved on, too. Obviously. She’d gone to Seattle to start college, graduated with her bachelor’s degree in psychology with every intention of going onto her master’s, met Dan Reynolds and the rest was history.

And it had nothing to do with the fact her ex-fiancé had sent her father a wedding invitation, or that her dad had called to tell her all about it a mere year after her ex had ghosted her.

Winnie collected the three files that’d spread across the floor like they’d planned an escape.

She was breaking her own rule. Thinking about a man who no longer existed.

Besides, all of that was years ago. She’d lived an entire life since last seeing Adrial Tucker, and she’d probably live another decade without seeing him in person.

Now, if only she could stop his damn face from floating through her brain every time she was close to falling asleep.

A burst of heat flared up her neck and into her face as she read the handwritten label of the top manila folder in front of her.

Lila Mercer, complete with the year of her disappearance.

Of course. This entire office was filled with the memory of a woman who’d never stepped foot in this house, who’d claimed her father’s last years so completely, and she was now the one responsible for getting over a decade of research, notes and dead ends back to the Black Hollow police station.

Fisting the files between both hands, she slammed them against the floor over and over. “Why. Won’t. You. Just. Stay. Dead!”

A bright yellow sticky note escaped the folders, and Winnie sat back on her heels, blowing a tendril of hair out of her face.

It wasn’t Lila Mercer’s fault her dad had ended up being a crappy parent in the end.

She’d disappeared when Winnie had been sixteen years old, found bludgeoned to death with cinder blocks partially chained around her feet in Hollow Lake.

The water level had dropped due to an abnormally hot summer that year, and a fisherman had snagged his lure in her clothing, pulling Lila Mercer right to the surface, breaking her free of the rusted chains holding her down.

Winnie remembered she’d spent most of her time jumping off one of the docks in that lake.

Right up until the news had broken. No more swimming after that.

She grabbed for the sticky note, then opened the top folder in the stack to get on with a job nobody wanted.

And froze. Her breath rushed out of her as she scanned over the first page, recognizing her dad’s familiar handwriting.

Tears burned in her eyes. He’d dedicated not only his entire career, but also his life to a woman he’d never known, and now, he was gone.

No answers. No closure. No justice. Boxes and boxes of case notes, evidence lists and witness statements with nothing to show for it in the end.

Was this all she had left of him? Would anyone remember him as the man who’d fought to protect Black Hollow? Or would they just see his failure?

Winnie flipped through the top few pages of the file.

Family interviews, crime scene notes, timelines of Lila Mercer’s final days.

Her dad had made annotations along the way.

The information was out of order and scribbled over, but all this paperwork wasn’t completely different than what she did for work.

Reading through peer-reviewed journal articles, isolating the most important pieces of information and breaking them down for easier public consumption.

She could probably do the same here. Make it easier for whomever took over the case.

Or… She shifted, glancing around the office as though she expected her father to walk through the door and catch her going through his things any minute.

Or she could solve the case.

Restore her father’s reputation with the town that’d turned on him.

Give him the credit he deserved.

And maybe figure out what she was supposed to do with the rest of her life.

He’d been a good man and a good father…up to a certain point. She could do this for him. She wanted to do this for him. Turning over the sticky note to press it back where her father had kept it, Winnie caught herself laughing at three simple words and what they might have meant.

Cold Hollow Investigations.

Her father hadn’t been working the case alone after all.