Chapter 1

They don’t often get big snow storms in the Kootenay area of British Columbia. Lots of snow, that’s a given; sometimes the air is so full of snow that the daytime is as white as the night is black. But there isn’t much wind in these mountains, and the snow falls thick and fast and straight down, where it lies deep on the ground. The word “whiteout”, meaning when high winds whip falling snow around, reducing visibility to nothing, isn’t often heard in Trafalgar.

     Tonight it would be.

     It was Christmas Eve, and as Constable Molly Smith began a twelve hour shift the storm of the decade was settling in over Trafalgar. She’d scarcely had time to say hi to the earlier shift, the lucky ones who got to enjoy the evening with their families, before the first 911 call came in. The first, of what would be many.

Pedestrian struck by a car on Front Street. Appear to be injuries.

Smith reached for the keys to the truck, but she wasn’t fast enough. “I’ll drive,” Constable Dave Evans said, tossing the keys in his hand and heading towards the back door and the parked vehicles.

“You’ll be with Evans tonight,” Sergeant Caldwell, the shift supervisor, shouted after her. “It’s going to be rough in this. And it’s supposed to get worse.”