by L. T. Vargus
“I think I’ve got something,” she said when Zoe picked up. “Marjory has a cabin on Lake Huron. It’s mentioned a lot in the journal as a point of contact with Marjory and her loverboy. According to the husband, there’s a pretty elaborate security system up there. Motion-activated cameras and the whole nine yards. So I’m heading up there. Hopefully I’ll find footage of young Killian and his cougar girlfriend in flagrante.”
“That sounds like a scoot,” Zoe said.
“Yeah, it’s up near Bad Axe. Close to the tip of the thumb. The drive will take a couple hours, and apparently cell service is nonexistent. I might have to wait until I’m driving back before I can tell you what I’ve found.”
“Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that you find the dirt.” Zoe huffed, her breath audible over the phone. “We’re gonna need it.”
“How’s the interrogation going?”
“Oh, our Mr. Thatcher is a smug one. We’re playing it subtle for now. Making indirect mentions of a possible relationship between him and Marjory. He claims he has no idea what we’re talking about.”
Charlie merged onto the highway heading north.
“You think he’s being truthful?” she asked.
“Hard to say. I figure we’ll know more around the three-hour mark or so. That’s kind of the magic number in my experience. Lots of guys are real cocky for those first couple hours, but then they start to wear down. The cracks start to show, and they get twitchy.”
“Well, give me a call back if anything happens before then,” Charlie said. “Might have to leave a message if I’m out of cell range.”
“Will do. Good luck, my friend.”
Charlie hung up and settled in for the long drive.
Civilization seemed to fade as Charlie trekked north. The buildings thinned out, and trees and overgrown thicket rose up to take their place. Soon it was all plant life. Shades of green dominated the roadside, flecked with the periodic dark earthen tones of tree trunks. All those leaves waved at her, but she couldn’t decide if they meant to say hello or goodbye.
Most of the ride was quiet. Focused. Intense. Charlie tumbled the facts of the case in her head again and again, trying to stay objective, trying not to get her hopes up about what she might find at the cabin. But once she got to within ten or fifteen miles of the destination, the nerves spilled over into talk for Allie.
“You could probably start a kickass cult up here,” Allie said.
“Oh yeah?”
“I mean, you’ve got all the privacy you could want. No meddling government. No nosy neighbors. Just gotta set up a badass compound, and let the isolation do most of the heavy lifting. Think about it, once you get this far away from the city, all you have to do is go out in the woods at night, and it feels like anything is possible.”
“Not a lot of available recruits nearby,” Charlie said. “Unless you want to start a cult of trees.”
According to the population density map she’d checked before departing, the humanity in this region sharply declined from the 5,000-plus people per square mile in Detroit to a mere 1 to 10 per square mile in the part of Huron County where the vacation home was located. Hard to believe only 115 miles of road could separate such utterly opposing ways of living, Charlie thought.
“You truck the dupes up from Detroit,” Allie said. “Not like it’d be hard to pry them out of that hellhole.”
They took a right onto a private dirt road, Hideaway Lane. Charlie slowed to keep the flinging gravel from beating the hell out of Frank’s car.
“This is it,” Charlie said. “The house is about two miles down this road.”
Charlie swiveled her head, really taking in the surroundings now. More pines mixed into the trees here, and vines seemed to tangle up in things, tentacle-looking tendrils draped up and down the foliage.
They wheeled around a curve and the washboard surface of the road sent a series of shocks through her body. Her palms tingled against the steering wheel, and she slowed further until the shaking receded.
And as they reached the end of the bend in the road, there it was.
The house jutted up from the land, a hulking structure that towered over the pine trees surrounding it. Trevor was right. This was no mere cabin.
Four lodge pole columns stood out from the front of the building, wood stained as dark as mocha. The pillars must have been at least fifty feet tall and fat enough to conjure thoughts of sequoias. The rest of the plank facade was slightly lighter in shade, perhaps the color of caramel, Charlie thought.
“Iced mocha,” Allie said.
“What?”
“That’s the color you’re looking for. Iced mocha is slightly lighter than mocha. Let’s be real, caramel is a step too far into the dreaded tan region.”
“If you say so.”
Charlie turned into the driveway, a long strip of spotless, interlocking pavers that gashed a gently curved pathway up to the house. The tires jostled over the seams in the geometric pattern beneath. Concrete made to look like dark-stained brick. The angular pattern made for a stark contrast to the rough and rustic look of the woods all around. Order amongst all the chaos.
The house came into full view as they moved toward it, the encroaching pines and a few rows of decorative bushes unblocking their view in stages.
Behind the house, the land sloped quickly down toward the lake, and for just a moment Charlie could see the pathway leading from the house to the water. A dock protruded into the lake, with a large boat lashed to it, gently bobbing with the waves. The fading daylight shimmered on the surface of the water, the glowing shapes shifting, disappearing, and reappearing as the wetness endlessly fluctuated.
The curve of the driveway slid these things out of view, the large house slowly filling Charlie’s vision as she got close. She parked in front of a garage large enough to store at least four or five cars. Then she killed the engine and sat in the quiet for a moment, just looking up at the gigantic lodge. Finally, she undid her seatbelt and climbed out.
She crossed over the driveway and stepped onto a smooth concrete walk that snaked up to the front door, and the foliage reached out for her. Clumps of fern and wispy elephant grass. All of it a little too manicured, a little too presentable in this otherwise pastoral setting. A bit of the bourgeois family background creeping in where it didn’t belong.
When Charlie reached the front door, she paused to take one last look out over the grounds. Everything was very still here in the wilderness, and it would be dark soon.
Then she turned, found the keypad, and punched in the code.
SEVENTY-TWO
A vaulted ceiling, crosscut by exposed wooden beams, stretched nearly to the heavens in the front room. A large stairway sloped upward in the center of the room, more of that mocha-colored wood heading up some twenty feet to the second floor.
It smelled like pine in here, that bracing green odor of crushed pine needles.
“Wood details accented with wood,” Allie said. “Keep it simple.”
Charlie stood just inside the door and took it all in. The house made her feel small, threatened to swallow her whole.
She turned back to swing the huge front door shut, and the sound of it closing echoed loudly in the empty space. Charlie flinched at the way the thud reverberated through the house.
Charlie pushed herself deeper into the cabin, moving past the stairway to take a quick glance around the downstairs. She didn’t need to search the whole place. She reminded herself of that. Still, she thought maybe taking a quick peek into some of the rooms and getting a feel for the place would strip it of some of its strange power. Demystify it. Reduce it to the bougie vacation lodge it was. Nothing more. Nothing less.
To the right of the front room she found a den with a river rock fireplace—finally something prominent that wasn’t brown. And a room off of that looked like a full-blown sports bar. Flat-screen TVs lined the wall behind the glossy wooden bar, fully stocked with booze. It even had stools and a brass bar running
along the front of it. A dartboard occupied one corner, and a pool table was sprawled in another.
The kitchen looked industrial, like something that could legitimately serve as a restaurant kitchen at a place seating perhaps forty to sixty people, everything gleaming silver-gray. She peeked into the walk-in freezer and a pantry, both loaded with food. Crazy for a place that a small group of people used sporadically.
“Isn’t it weird?” Allie said.
“What?”
“How no matter how much time you spend around rich people, you can’t get used to the way they live?”
Charlie walked back to the front room. No more putting it off. She needed to head upstairs and get a look at that security footage.
She took a breath and started up the steps, wood creaking beneath her feet, creepy and loud in the quiet. Jarring. It made her stop and listen for a second.
Saliva welled in her mouth, and she swallowed. She tried to be quieter as she climbed the rest of the way, even if there was no one else here.
At the top of the steps, she checked a couple more doors, looking in on luxurious bedrooms with huge wooden four-poster beds covered in Pendelton throws and mounds of pillows.
Behind door number three, she finally found the utility-closet-turned-security-station, which she recognized by the bank of screens Trevor had told her about. Eight wall-mounted flat-screens completely filled the wall from the middle up. Blank, dark, and still. She couldn’t help but be a touch disappointed, even if she knew it wouldn’t last long. Still, even in its lifeless state, it was certainly the most elaborate security system she’d seen in a private residence. There was no denying that.
She took a seat in the small chair, a menagerie of controls laid out before her. Buttons. Switches. Faders.
She found the appropriate buttons, flicked on the screens, watched them come to life. The empty rooms of the lodge took shape on one screen after another, the live feeds coming up in stunning clarity until brilliant color filled all eight monitors.
SEVENTY-THREE
Charlie glanced once more at the screens, and all the empty rooms of the lodge gazed back at her. Nothing moved on any of the monitors, save for the fronds of a potted fern whisking gently in the front room, a furnace vent blowing them around. These were the live feeds, though. She needed to figure out how to access the archived footage.
Again, she ran her fingers over the assemblage of buttons and switches before her, scanned the variety of shapes and colors.
“What do you think that big red guy does?” Allie said, her voice suddenly hushed with reverent excitement.
Charlie ignored her, still looking for something that seemed likely to open the system’s control menu.
“That one there, I mean,” Allie said. “See it? It’s like the shape of a stop sign.”
Again, Charlie said nothing.
“Ohh…” Allie said, her voice increasing in volume. “Purple triangle! Charlie, for the love of God, push the purple triangle!”
Instead, Charlie fingered a small black button in the bottom left corner of the panel that read, “Main.”
“What?! No!” Allie sounded like a toddler throwing a tantrum. “What part of ‘purple triangle’ did you not understand, idiot?”
The screens flickered to black, and then a blue menu popped up on the screen directly in front of her seat. White text listed the various options. It took Charlie a second to realize that it was a touchscreen. She leaned forward and tapped the “Video Archive” icon.
A new list populated the screen, generic file names and timestamps. She selected one of the most recent videos first.
Her own figure appeared there on the screen, peeking into the kitchen. She took a few steps into the room, poked into the walk-in freezer and pantry. She was slightly embarrassed to hear herself talking to Allie out loud. On video, the one-sided conversation made her look crazy.
“Looking a little slouchy, Chuck,” Allie said. “Better get that posture righted before old age sets in, especially if you want to bag a man with some money before it’s too late. Trust me, last thing any man of means wants is a hunchback.”
Charlie scrolled back a few videos to the first one today. Clicked it. Watched herself walk through the front door. She realized that the video kicked in with the door already halfway open, so the motion-sensor took a second to trigger. That could be significant, depending on what she found later.
Anyway, all the videos from today were of her. That made sense. She needed to dig deeper.
She tried the last one before today, dated three days ago. A cleaning lady vacuumed the upstairs hallway, then another of her dusting. OK. Fair enough. A place like this would have a lot of staff coming and going. It was a huge place to keep up, especially to the exacting specifications of the ultra-wealthy.
She’d jotted a few notes from Marjory’s journal in her phone, and she checked them now. She scrolled to the last date confirmed to have involved Marjory being at the cabin with her paramour. That’d be a good starting point. She tapped it.
The monitor fluttered, and then Charlie saw Marjory drying herself in the upstairs hallway. A towel wrapped around her body, held in place with one hand. The other arm worked at swishing a second towel at the back of her hair, which was sopping.
Charlie remembered the story about getting wet in the rain and then warming up in the hot tub. This must be that, she thought. So her adultery square-dance partner would be there, somewhere.
Motion in the corner of the screen caught her eye. A door behind and to the left of Marjory swung open, and the bright light of the bathroom shone out, all the lights above the vanity glowing white-hot. Marjory turned to face the motion.
And Charlie saw an arm appear there in the doorway—a man’s arm. The rest of his upper body swung into view. Based on the motion of his arm, she could tell he was brushing his teeth, but he was facing away from the camera.
“Is that Killian the loverboy?” Allie said. “I can’t tell.”
It could be, Charlie thought. The size was about right. Tall and lean. Some muscle to him, enough to not be considered skinny, but no real bulk to his build.
The hair was wrong, though. Too dark. At first, she thought it could just be the wet making it look darker, but no. This was dark brown hair, nearly black. And Killian was, as Allie had mentioned several times, as towheaded as a kid in Village of the Damned.
Marjory walked off the screen, and the video cut out.
Charlie scrolled down, tapped an earlier video. The screen flickered, and an error message popped up. Something about missing data.
She tried another. Got the same error message. She tried several more before she gave up.
All the files before the drying scene had been erased.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Charlie sat very still, staring at the last of the error messages. Some new fury spiraled in her head. Made her grit her teeth.
Nothing. No evidence. No win.
She pushed herself off the corner of the desktop where the security console lay, the office chair thrust backward with a forceful jerk. It butted into the wall behind her.
Then she stood. Stormed out into the hallway. Paced a few steps down and then back.
Now what?
She replayed the short snippet of video in her mind as she paced the hallway. Saw the flash of a man’s arm appear there in the doorway. Saw his back, his dark hair.
It’d seemed such a close thing, the truth right there, close enough to touch with the tips of her fingers, but it had all come to nothing. Missing data.
“If it’d make you feel any better, I saw all the fixins for grilled cheese down in the kitchen,” Allie said. “A couple of those bad boys would really hit the spot, would they not? Have you eaten anything today?”
Charlie mumbled her answer, but her mind worked at something else, another memory flashing in her head.
“I ate a couple of Nutri-Grain bars on the drive.”
“Wait. Aren’t those Paige’s?”
/> A memory from earlier in the day flickered in Charlie’s mind. Something she’d read in the journal.
“There was a hiding place,” Charlie said, freezing in place.
“For the Nutri-Grain bars?”
“No. In Marjory’s journal.” Charlie started moving again. “She talked about a hiding place at the cabin. Remember? The story about Marjory’s dude drinking too much and needing to take Viagra?”
“Like I’m going to forget the story about loverboy not being able to get it up. That was the only decent laugh in the whole journal.”
Charlie walked down the hall with purpose now, peeking in doors along the way. So far the bedrooms had been the same size, but she had a feeling that wouldn’t be the case for all of them.
“Looking for the master suite, I take it?” Allie said.
Charlie nodded.
“It’s no sure thing, but it seems the most likely place for a hiding spot,” Allie said. “I mean, it sounded like Marjory loved bringing guests up here. What do you expect to find, though? Naughty photographs?”
“Well, if loverboy had a prescription for the Viagra, and the bottle is still there…”
“It’d have his name on it,” Allie finished the thought. “Charles, you magnificent son of a bitch.”
Charlie shrugged.
“It’s at least a place to start. There’s no way we can search this entire house.”
At the far end of the hall, the last bedroom held what she sought. The master suite was a good three times the size of the guest bedrooms, and the high ceiling gave it a cavernous feel. Paintings of mountainous landscapes and hunting parties hung on the walls. In the center of the room, a double-sided fireplace divided the bedroom from the en-suite bathroom with columned openings on either side.
“What is with the bathroom being completely open to the bedroom?” Allie asked. “That’s just weird and gross.”
“Yeah.” Charlie’s voice echoed in the vast space. “It does seem weird to intentionally not have bathroom doors.”