There was nothing to alert him.

The farmhouse sat in rural Minnesota, surrounded by silence and snow, and the person dying fifteen feet from his door was beyond making any sound that would reach him.

Jean Hilliard spent six hours on that porch step.

In those six hours, the cold did to her body what cold always does to biological tissue at sufficient depth: it reduced the rate of every chemical reaction to a fraction of its normal speed.

The enzymes that drive cellular metabolism operate more slowly at lower temperatures.