“So what did she use?”

“A shotgun.”

The snow lay before our headlights like a freshly placed sheet, draped from curb to curb without a wrinkle and pinned in place by white-capped parking meters. The snowstorm had passed quickly, leaving a star-packed sky and a freezing clarity that made me feel we were driving into a black-and-white photograph.

We were on Main Street, inching our way downhill to where Main becomes Canal before climbing the opposite slope.

“Slippery?”

The patrolman driving the car gave an embarrassed smile. “Well, I think so. You wouldn’t. I haven’t really gotten used to this stuff yet.”

This was his first New England winter-he’d only been here for six months or so. Marshall Smith had been a deputy sheriff in Florida before coming here and he was getting a lot of ribbing for his fumbling in the snow. During the first light dusting of the season, he’d rear-ended a truck

“Floor it a little at the foot of the hill-it’ll give you more traction.”

Flooring it brought us up to twenty. It didn’t matter. The car had snow tires and we were in no rush. From what I’d heard, everyone was dead who was going to die, at least for tonight.

You don’t get many killings in a town the size of Brattleboro. In ten years, we’d had four, and for some reason they’d all been clumped together. The last of them had been about three years ago.

I placed both hands against the roof behind my head and arched my back in a stretch. The car’s heater was making me drowsy. I rolled the window down a crack and watched the run-down buildings slide by. In the reflection off the glass, I noticed Smith turn his head to glance at me. Lit only by the car’s green panel lights, his face had a ghostly, dreamlike translucence, as if he, like the pajamas I wore under my clothes, had been part of my sleep only ten minutes earlier.