A Stranger in Town: a Rockton novel

by Armstrong, Kelley

  “You think it’s plausible?” I ask. “The firm ordered them to kill all the hostiles?”

  “We already suspect they staged the car accident that killed Hendricks, the original researcher,” he says. “Do I think those four Danes planned to slaughter a couple dozen hostiles? No. I think they underestimated the numbers. That’s been the pattern all along, right? Clearly, we’re exaggerating.”

  He makes a face. “Maybe I’ve read too many spy novels. Maybe they didn’t intend to kill them, but things got out of hand. Either way . . .”

  “They were unprepared,” April murmurs. “That much seems evident. They mistook the settlers for hostiles, and the actual hostiles then killed them.” She looks my way. “Is that the medical question you had? Whether your theory fit . . . No, that was Eric’s theory, newly formed. What was your question then?”

  “Is there any chance Jay is faking his coma?”

  “What?” Her brows shoot up to her hairline.

  “Yes, it’s probably a silly question.”

  “His vital signs confirm he is, indeed, comatose and likely to stay that way for a while.”

  “That may be for the best. Otherwise, Kenny’s concerns might have been valid.” I look at Dalton. “Émilie did talk to Mathias. She’d asked about recent arrivals and whether any seemed suspicious. That conversation, though, took place yesterday afternoon. When I saw her creeping about, I believe she was coming from an apartment near Mathias’s house. Searching a residence she knew would be empty.”

  “Jay’s,” Dalton says. “Fuck.”

  “Yep, convenient that he knew Danish, right?”

  April frowns. “But he arrived before Sophie.”

  “I don’t think Jay came here because of Sophie. I think he was just a second prong of the Danish mission. Send four agents into the woods to investigate the hostiles. Send Jay here to monitor us. He speaks Danish because he is Danish. It was pure luck for them that he was already here when Sophie arrived.”

  “He offered his help so he could mistranslate. Redirect your investigation if necessary.”

  I nod. “Then her mind cleared enough for her to realize he was mistranslating. That’s why she flipped out. It’s also why she targeted him. She might have still been confused, recognizing him as a fellow employee but not necessarily an ally. Or she was thinking just fine and blamed the firm for her colleagues’ deaths.”

  “Either way, she knew he wasn’t an innocent guy caught in the cross fire.”

  “No one was innocent here.” April’s gaze turns toward the other room, where we’re storing the evidence. “Except those poor settlers.”

  “Yes,” I say, “but unfortunately, while their killers are dead, this has snowballed into new problems with other innocent victims: Felicity, Edwin, and the pilot who came for the Danes.”

  As I rise from my chair, I look toward that room April had glanced at. The repository for our evidence. We’d need to decide what to do with Sophie and the items we’d brought from the dead settlers. Also the foot of Sophie’s lover.

  Or maybe Victor hadn’t been her lover. Jay could have embellished their relationship to support the tourist theory and add an extra layer of pathos to the story. Victor had been something to her, though. She’d snapped when April brought in his boot.

  Wait. Had she actually snapped? We’d interpreted her reaction as grief. Knowing she wasn’t an innocent tourist, I replay that scene and see strategy. We bring in the boot, and she feigns a fit of grief, which throws us off guard and allows her to strangle Jay.

  I tell Dalton my theory that Sophie used the boot to distract us.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Makes sense.”

  “But the whole reason we presumed that foot belonged to the fourth tourist—her lover—was her reaction. That clinched it. Without that . . .”

  “Fuck.”

  I pause, seeing him thinking and piecing it together. Then he mutters another “Fuck.”

  “April?” I say. “The guy we found, the pilot. He was blind.”

  She blinks at me. “While I know there have been immense strides taken to improve accessibility—”

  “Not when he flew. Afterward. He was blinded by the attack. No apparent damage to his eyes, but he’d been struck on the head.”

  “All right . . .”

  “Can that cause blindness?”

  “Total blindness? In both eyes?”

  The incredulity in her voice answers the question. “That’d be a no, then.”

  “It’s not impossible, but without damage to the eyes, the most likely cause of total binocular blindness would be a clot, unrelated to the attack.”

  Colin isn’t blind, and Petra didn’t take him anywhere.

  He took her hostage.

  Colin Berger is Victor, the fourth Dane.

  * * *

  It’ll be dawn in an hour, and there’s no time to waste, but we need to make one stop first. Dalton goes to fetch Storm and gather supplies while I stop in to see Maryanne. Despite the hour, she’s gracious, inviting me in.

  I give her the briefest rundown on our hostile encounter. As soon as I mention the young man, she shakes her head.

  “That isn’t my group,” she says. “There was no one nearly that young. I’d have mentioned it.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I describe the dead hostile, and there’s a flicker of potential recognition, but when I describe the woman I shot, her eyes round.

  “That’s the shaman,” she says.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.” She shivers. “You were lucky. She’s the worst of them. Brutal and smart. I always got the sense she drank less of that narcotic than the others, to keep her wits sharper.”

  I tell her about our brief conversation, which was clearer and more lucid than I expected.

  She nods. “That is undeniably her then. That means I do know the man who was killed. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was her new husband, though he’d never have been leader. Once she seized the reins, she’d hold them tight.”

  “Then the young man?” I say. “Either the two groups have joined or he’s new.”

  “New . . .” she murmurs. “I didn’t consider that, but it makes sense. He must have joined after I left. Perhaps recently, which explains why he isn’t as indoctrinated. He could be an ally, but be careful, please. The shaman will not hesitate to use him against you.”

  I thank her, and she gives me more advice plus all possible details about the two groups. When I step outside, Dalton is sitting on the front step, sipping steaming coffee as Storm wanders off toward the woods to do her morning business.

  I settle in beside him to await the dog’s return, and he fills a tin mug from the thermos. I tell him what Maryanne said.

  “That’s what you figured, right?” he says. “That this woman was the shaman?”

  “It is. I just wanted independent corroboration. I still don’t know whether these people have Felicity and Edwin. I have no idea who does. So my focus will be on Petra, though by now I’m sure Victor has her on a plane to Whitehorse.”

  “Nah.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a set of keys. “Our pilot’s not going anywhere.”

  “Nicely done. You suspected his story, then.”

  He pauses, mug halfway to his lips.

  “You can tell me if you did,” I say. “In future, I’d rather you shared that right away, but I’ve been guilty of the same thing. We need to share our hunches, even when they seem far-fetched.”

  “That’s not it. I hesitated because I’d love to say I suspected the guy. Truth is . . .” He shrugs. “When I peeked into his pack, I just grabbed these. I figured if I found his plane, there might be first-aid supplies you could use, and with him being blind, it wasn’t like he needed the keys.”

  “Huh. Well, good call either way. And may I suggest, when we tell this story to the council, we say that we took the keys because we doubted his story?”

  “Works for me.”


  “Then Victor is in the woods, trying to figure out his next move. He has Petra and his backpack, with a few days’ supplies. He probably has a gun, too. That’s why I didn’t find one. He’d have hidden it when he heard us coming. He can also summon help. He has a . . .”

  I turn to Dalton.

  “Sat phone,” he murmurs. “Victor has a sat phone, and so does Émilie. We may not need to go poking around the forest after all.” He pushes to his feet. “Let’s go see if there’s any way we can broker a deal.”

  34

  The problem is, of course, that we need Victor’s number. We bring Émilie on board, in hopes she can obtain it. We also bring in Phil. If either of those choices is a mistake, well, right now, we’re on a sinking ship hailing passing vessels. They might help . . . or they might fire another shot through our bow, and it’ll only speed up the inevitable.

  Émilie tells us that she flew to Rockton as soon as she heard about the “Danish tourists.” Finding a newcomer whose application had been rushed through—and who conveniently speaks Danish—she had a good idea what Jay had been up to, but by that time, he was in a coma and Sophie was dead.

  She’d resorted to investigating on her own, begging off time with Petra by claiming exhaustion and then talking to Mathias and, last night, searching Jay’s apartment. She’d found a sat phone smuggled into a secret compartment in Jay’s luggage, one that bypassed Dalton’s tech-device checks. In the same place, she found notes in Danish. They were in code, but the fact that he was making notes in Danish means it wasn’t just some language he knew passably well, as he claimed.

  When we check the sat phone, we find a few preprogrammed numbers. One is to another sat phone. Victor’s? We certainly hope so.

  Émilie calls the number, and it goes through, but no one answers. There’s voicemail, though, in Danish, and she leaves a message. We’ll give it an hour, and then we’ll go on foot to find Petra.

  We tell Phil everything, and then we eat breakfast. Well, everyone eats except Phil, who’s still processing. Not arguing. Just processing.

  He doesn’t confirm or deny any of it. He can’t. As Émilie has warned, the Danish connection operated above his pay grade.

  A few older members of the council were aware of the original drug trial and undoubtedly saw the connection to the “narcotic brew” reported by Maryanne, but they had feigned ignorance. Then there’s the element that’s on the Danish firm’s payroll. All other council members have a justifiable claim to ignorance. I’d still say they’re guilty of not taking the problem seriously. But it’s understandable that Phil knew nothing . . . with one exception: the plans to close down Rockton.

  “I had raised concerns,” he says when he returns from a walk. “About the dwindling numbers. It was a matter of budget and long-term planning. If this was a permanent decrease, then we’d need to close buildings, and we should allow higher-contributing members to take larger quarters. I suggested a plan for reconstruction, doubling the size of some apartments. I also noted that if the decrease continued, we’d need to reevaluate our storage requirements and possibly reconfigure jobs. They insisted it was a temporary drop only—we’d had a decrease in applications and tightening of the extension guidelines.”

  “Yeah, I remember you mentioning that,” Dalton says. “Wait. Nope. You never said anything about downsizing. Or tightened extension rules. Funny you didn’t mention that last part when you brought Jen to us.”

  “I considered it a management issue.”

  Dalton just waits, gaze fixed on him.

  Phil meets that gaze with an equally cool one. “There are management issues that I bring to you, and there are ones I do not, ones that seem primarily about supply and resource. I was under the impression you appreciated not being bothered with that.”

  Dalton grunts. It’s grudging concession. Yes, he’d been happy to turn that over to Phil, but in this case, supply and resource concerns implied something larger. It had not, admittedly though, grown to the point where anyone, including Phil, realized that.

  As Dalton said, it seemed a normal fluctuation in numbers. If there are plans to shut us down, they’re restricted to a very small number of people, with the general council—and Phil—knowing nothing about them.

  “What if we fix this?” I ask Émilie. “If we prove the Danes were behind the hostiles and they’re the ones who wanted to shut us down, then we’ll be okay, right?”

  She doesn’t answer. She can’t, and I hear my words, and I hear a child’s hope in them.

  I can’t get a dog because they’re too much work? What if I promise to look after it and, if I don’t, you can take it away?

  Even as a child, I’d known that denying me a dog because they were “too much work” was an excuse. Is it the same here?

  Émilie opens her mouth to speak. Then the phone jangles.

  She answers it on the third ring, sounding breathless, the old lady who scrambled to grab a phone.

  “Hello?” Even her voice is tremulous. “Hello?”

  She holds the receiver from her ear so we can listen in. She wears hearing aids, very discreet and—I’m sure—the best money can buy. She doesn’t strain to hear with the receiver a few inches away.

  “Is this Émilie?” a male voice says.

  “Y-yes, yes it is. Please tell me you have my granddaughter.”

  Petra calls out, “It’s me, Nan. Don’t worry. I have this under control. Whatever he says . . .”

  Petra’s voice fades as he must be moving away. She doesn’t shout to be heard. She knows we got the message, and she also knows that if Émilie called this number, then we’ve realized that “Colin” isn’t a hapless pilot looking for his tourist clients.

  Victor comes on again. “I’m guessing that detective did her detecting and figured out what happened, if you have this number.”

  “Actually, no.” Émilie’s voice comes clearer, still with a quaver, but as if the savvy businesswoman is wresting control from the fretting grandmomma. “I know what’s going on. That’s why I’m in Rockton. To make sure Casey doesn’t dig deeper than she already has, which is quite deep enough, as I’m sure you know. She thinks my granddaughter has taken you hostage. I knew better, and I obtained this number, which I am using to negotiate my granddaughter’s release.”

  A humorless chuckle. “All right then. Let’s negotiate. I want one thing and only one thing. Get me out of this hellhole.”

  “You don’t have a plane? Casey thought she saw keys.”

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t just see them. She stole them. Doesn’t matter. That bird is a useless hunk of metal right now. Those people got hold of it. Fucking vultures. Picked the corpse clean. What I need is your plane, which your grandgirl here says you have, and she’d better not be lying because that’s the only reason I made this call. What’ve you got?”

  Émilie tells him. He’s still suspicious, particularly about the possibility Émilie flew it in herself. So he quizzes her, and meets each answer with a sniff that reminds me of when guys quizzed me on guns. Instead of nodding at my answers with grudging acceptance, they’d give this sniff, as they watched their chance to mock me plummet. Victor might be really hoping Émilie has a plane, but he can’t help being annoyed, too, that she isn’t fitting into his prebuilt little-old-lady box.

  Finally he says, “Fine. You know how to fly and you own a plane. Doesn’t mean you brought it here.”

  “Would you like me to fly a loop over the forest for you?”

  “Can’t fly loops in that.”

  “Then might I suggest you’ve never flown one?”

  She doesn’t say a Cessna TTx is out of his price range. She doesn’t need to. He mutters in Danish as she tugs control into her corner of the mat. He’d fooled us with his unaccented and idiomatic English, but that’s our fault—failing to remember that not everyone who speaks perfect English is a native English speaker.

  “Fine,” he says. “I’ll take the plane.”

  “Borrow it, you mean.�
��

  “Hell, no. I need to get out of this mess, and that baby is worth a pretty penny. That’s the price of your grandgirl, Miz Émilie.”

  “All right.”

  Hesitation, as if he realizes he should have asked for more.

  Émilie continues. “I’ll tell the sheriff that I’m flying to search for my granddaughter. If they insist I take a copilot, I’ll bring the council representative. He isn’t aware of the situation, but his silence would come cheap. He’s been exiled here, and he’s rather desperate to leave.”

  Victor grunts. “I know how he feels. I was brought in on this damn job by a buddy who swore the company knew the value of good employees. I have a feeling his opinion changed, but I can’t ask him, since he’s lying in pieces somewhere in this fucking forest.”

  “I would point out that I am not your employer,” she says. “I have not been affiliated with your employer in thirty years. But that is hardly your point or your concern. You feel that you’ve been betrayed and you want out, and I am going to provide that. Tell me where you left your plane, and I will join you there in one hour.”

  * * *

  The plane isn’t within easy walking distance. The Danes must have been given an area to search for hostiles, and they’ve landed on the other side of it, as far as possible from Rockton. So we’re taking the ATV while Émilie flies.

  Phil is not going with Émilie. Dalton is. He’s playing Phil. Yep, when I first suggested that, I got a split-second “Huh?” look from Dalton, as if I’d forgotten that he’d been there when we found Victor . . . who isn’t actually blind.

  “You’ll be wearing shades and hearing protectors,” I say. “You should fit into Phil’s business clothes.”

  A tiny whimper from Phil, who clears his throat to cover it.

  “We’ll get them dry-cleaned after,” I say. “Or, more likely, replaced. If Eric has to wrestle Victor down, he might break a seam or two.”

  “If that is a disparaging comment about my physique, I am in perfectly fine shape,” Phil says. “Eric is hardly Will. He won’t burst from my shirts like the Incredible Hulk.”