“I don’t understand.”
“I owned the Dallas Kings.”
“The baseball team?”
He nodded. “I sold it during the divorce, to my ex-wife. I bought it for her, anyway, but at least I got my money back, and more. Treena was the sports nut. So nutty that after I caught her cheating on me the second time with a player, I filed for divorce.”
“And what do you do where you can buy and sell baseball teams?”
“Do?” He almost smiled, though his blue eyes were still watery and rimmed red. “I’m an investor. Venture capital. I invest in companies I think have promise, in exchange for a small percentage. I’m good at what I do. Out of twenty-nine investments this last decade, twenty-two were successful.”
“Define successful.”
“Five years ago I invested five hundred thousand in two college students to develop tracking software that helps businesses target their most likely customers. I gave them a little advice on how to sell the software—instead of flat-fee licensing, they get royalties on the license. In two years, they were netting over one million a year. Last year, it was three million. I own twenty percent of the company. In five years, I’ve more than tripled my initial investment. That’s my most successful venture to date. I love those boys like they’re my own sons.”
Patrick seemed impressed, but he was always into technology. Something felt wrong to Lucy, though. “Trevor,” she said, “why would you and Vanessa spend your honeymoon at a lodge like the Delarosa? I’d imagine that you could buy your own cabin anywhere you wanted.”
“Vanessa saw a brochure for the place and wanted to visit. We’re going—” He stopped himself, leaned back and closed his eyes. “We were leaving for Hawaii on Wednesday. Now—I have to call her father and brother. Oh, God, how are we going to make it without Vanessa?”
Lucy and Patrick stood in the dining room, dishing up lukewarm dinner. “I don’t think he killed her,” Lucy said quietly.
“It could be an act.”
“Could be.”
“You don’t think so?” he asked.
“No. You didn’t see him with her body. I don’t think that could be faked.”
They sat at one of the round tables. “Maybe we’re wrong,” Lucy said. “Maybe that mark isn’t an injection.”
“It wasn’t a bee sting.”
“We won’t know until an autopsy.”
They ate for a moment in silence. Lucy added, “The lodge here is struggling. Steve said his father spent their savings keeping it afloat.”
“Upstairs, Beth and Grace were talking about selling.”
“Beth was,” Lucy reminded him. “Grace was worried about Steve.”
“What if Vanessa wanted to buy the Delarosa?” Patrick said. “With Trevor’s money, she could easily afford it. Probably could with her own money.”
“A place like this, with all the land, so close to Kirkwood? It’s worth a lot.”
“Then why is Steve so worried? He could get a loan on it.”
“I don’t know—maybe there already is a big mortgage.”
“We can look into that easily enough. But what if Steve heard that Vanessa wanted to buy the lodge? Maybe she persuaded Grace or Beth. Steve wouldn’t want to sell—”
“You’re suggesting he killed her?”
“If Grace owns the place after his dad’s death, then she could sell whenever she wanted.”
Grace might have been worried about Steve’s health. She could have thought selling the lodge was the right thing to do. “But,” Lucy said, “we don’t know if she owns the land, or if Steve does, or both.”
“We can find out.”
“We’ll need to go to the recorder’s office, or—”
“Or I can look around here.”
Lucy frowned. “You need to be careful.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
She didn’t want to believe Steve was a killer, but he seemed so distraught. Perhaps his mysterious illness made him act rashly.
There was something premeditated about Vanessa’s death. Who keeps hypodermic needles lying around? Who has poison at their disposal—and knows how to use it?
“You need to be careful, too, sis.” Patrick said.
A crash from the kitchen had Lucy and Patrick bolting up from their chairs. Patrick pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen and found Kyle DeWitt on the floor, struggling to stand.
Patrick squatted next to him and helped him sit up. “Whoa, Kyle, hold on a second. What happened?”
“I just felt dizzy.”
“And fainted?”
“I guess.” He touched his forehead. A bump was already forming.
Lucy walked over to the refrigerator for ice and stepped into a puddle of spilled juice amid broken glass.
“Sorry,” Kyle said. “I dropped my glass.”
Grace rushed in. “What happened?”
“I’m fine. Really.” The guy looked embarrassed. “Just slipped.”
Grace stared at the mess on the floor.
“I’ll clean it up,” Lucy offered.
“No,” Grace snapped, “I’ll do it.” She strode over to a cabinet and grabbed some rags and a broom and dustpan.
Lucy and Patrick exchanged glances. She was wound tight. Maybe they all were tonight, with a dead body in the root cellar.
“You fainted,” Patrick said. “You didn’t just slip.”
Grace said, “We’re at a seventy-five-hundred-foot elevation. The air is thinner up here.” She knelt to pick up the biggest pieces of glass.
Lucy said, “Grace is right. The thin air could affect you, especially if you overexert yourself. Usually symptoms of high-altitude sickness don’t occur until eight thousand feet—”
Grace cut her off. “That’s arbitrary. People are affected differently.”
“True,” Lucy said, though she didn’t completely agree. The human body processed oxygen at different ranges comfortably; it was when the atmosphere started to thin at eight thousand feet that the oxygen level sharply declined. Kyle was a grown man, physically fit, and he shouldn’t have a problem here. But she wasn’t going to quibble over five hundred feet. “Do you have a headache?” Lucy asked.
“No, I just felt light-headed and dizzy. I didn’t really faint.”
Patrick helped Kyle to his feet. “I think we’re all tired and under stress. You should go to bed. We all should.”
“Good idea,” Grace said.
Angie walked in. “What’s wrong?” She looked at the bump on Kyle’s head. “My God, Kyle! What happened?”
“I slipped. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing!”
Lucy handed Angie the makeshift ice compress she was holding. Angie put it on his head. “Ouch, that’s cold!”
“Let’s go to bed,” Angie said. “I need to keep my eye on you.”
He kissed her, then pulled her into a hug. “I’m fine, babe, really. You can have your way with me.”
Angie hugged her husband back tightly, her voice filled with emotion. “You’d better be.”
“Hon, I am. Really.”
Kyle kept his arm around his wife, and they said good night to the others as they walked out together.
Lucy watched them leave the kitchen. She reflected that even after two years with Cody, she’d never felt that comfortable with him, where she could joke about their sex life or show public displays of affection. With Kyle and Angie it was entirely natural, not in any way forced. Their affection showed in their expression, how they looked at each other, how they touched each other. It was the subtle hints that showed Lucy that Kyle and Angie truly cared for each other, the little things that Lucy had worked hard to remember when she and Cody were still together, but usually forgot.
She wondered if she would ever find someone where she didn’t forget those small touches that said I love you.
FIVE
Lucy couldn’t sleep.
Her first night here, it had been the silence that kept h
er awake. Tonight, it was the howling wind as the snow continued to fall. That, coupled with the disturbing thought that someone in this lodge had murdered Vanessa Russell-Marsh.
She tried a hot shower, and while that eased her sore muscles, it did nothing to help her sleep. Finally, she put on her robe and left her room just after midnight. There was no light under Patrick’s door, but she knocked anyway. “Patrick?” she said quietly.
She heard a moan and movement. Patrick opened his door, alert. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I—” She felt stupid. “I can’t sleep.”
He groaned. “Warm some milk in the microwave.”
“Never mind. I’ll go find a book to read.”
She half-expected Patrick to go downstairs with her, but he closed his door and went back to bed. She wasn’t surprised, she supposed. They’d had a busy and strenuous day, physically and emotionally.
The hall lights were left on low throughout the lodge. Lucy padded silently in her slippers down the staircase, across the foyer, and slowly opened the double doors to the library. They’d left Trevor there to sleep; Grace had made up the last available room for him, but he was too drunk to walk upstairs and had ended up back on the couch.
Angie DeWitt gasped. “Oh, you startled me!”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “I didn’t know anyone was up.”
Angie was curled in a chair wearing a fluffy robe, a stack of books next to her. Trevor was snoring on the couch, all blankets on the floor. “I couldn’t sleep and thought reading would do it, but Kyle can’t sleep with the light on. And I wanted to check on Trevor. He was so upset. Justifiable, but—I didn’t want him to do anything stupid.”
“You have a kind heart.”
She shrugged. “Kyle says I have a bleeding heart, but I just laugh at him. He can act like a hard-ass sometimes, but he’s the sweetest guy on the planet, especially when he doesn’t think anyone is looking.”
“That’s when it’s most important,” Lucy said. “I won’t stay long. I just wanted to grab a book since I couldn’t sleep either.”
Lucy perused the bookshelves, but nothing jumped out at her. She realized that she was worried about Steve Delarosa, and Grace, and Trevor Marsh. She couldn’t get Vanessa out of her mind, or the cryptic postcard she’d had the Larsons send her brother. Lucy didn’t want any of them to be guilty of murder.
She found it doubly odd that Kyle DeWitt had fainted—or nearly fainted—and complained of being dizzy. Very similar to Steve. Had the two of them been somewhere that no one else had? Could Vanessa have been exposed to the same thing and been killed by it?
There was no place for any of them to go now. And with Grace and Beth both living here, it didn’t seem likely that whatever was causing the dizziness was airborne.
Lucy understood Steve’s deep desire to keep his family lodge running. Businesses were hurting everywhere, and it couldn’t be cheap to maintain this place, especially with only six guest rooms in the winter, and a few cabins open in warmer weather. The food, the heating, the generator for electricity, routine maintenance. And losing Leo to a heart attack had been doubly tragic, because being this isolated had delayed getting him quick help. And then for Steve to find out that his father’s nest egg was gone …
Lucy liked the family and wished she could help. That was one of her greatest assets, Patrick had always told her, as well as one of her greatest weaknesses.
“You want to save the world, Lucy. But sometimes the world doesn’t want to be saved.”
How many times had she heard that! She wanted to scream, “I don’t care!” But she did care. About the world, and the people in it. And she could never seem to sit idly by and watch good people suffer.
But what could she do? She wasn’t a doctor; she couldn’t examine Steve. She wasn’t a businesswoman; she couldn’t tell the Delarosas how to run their resort. She wasn’t even a cop yet. She shouldn’t even like any of these people personally, knowing that one of them killed Vanessa Marsh.
Logic reasoned that the person who had killed Vanessa knew her. The only person fitting the bill was Trevor Marsh, her childhood sweetheart and new husband.
Unless …
What if someone else at the lodge also knew Vanessa? Trevor said that Vanessa’s ex-husband had been an asshole. What if he was lurking around?
She shivered. Don’t be such a conspiracy nut! Where would he hide while it was a gazillion degrees below zero and a blizzard raged outside? And poisoning or faking a suicide attempt was hardly the standard method of a jealous or vengeful ex-husband.
A chill ran over her skin, raising the hairs on the back of her neck. At first she thought it was only her, but she noticed that Angie pulled her bathrobe tighter around her neck. Trevor’s snores halted momentarily, before the annoying noise returned.
Lucy grabbed a book without looking at the title and said good night to Angie. She entered the foyer and saw a wet spot on the hardwood floor, right inside the main door.
She stared. She’d watched Grace Delarosa dry the floor after Patrick and the others came back from securing Vanessa’s body. Grace and Steve had gone to their house via the door in the kitchen, which was closest to their cottage.
Someone had gone in and out. Or out, then back in.
Who? And why?
Lucy ran up the stairs, taking two at a time. She knocked on Patrick’s door. There was no answer.
Her heart pounded in her chest. She had the extra key to Patrick’s room and used it to unlock his door.
“Patrick?” she called into the dark.
He moaned from his bed.
She turned on the lights. He was lying in his bed, the covers kicked off, his bare chest bathed in sweat. His face was flushed. She rushed to his side and felt his head. He was warm.
“Patrick, what happened? What’s wrong?”
“Hey, sis.”
His words were slurred. He grinned.
“Patrick, what is wrong? Are you sick?”
“I’m fine. Really, I can drive. Nope, well, Carina is the designated driver again.”
She frowned. Carina was their sister. She and Patrick were thirteen months apart in age and had been very close growing up. The last time either she or Patrick had seen Carina was at Christmas, two months ago.
Thirty minutes ago she’d woken him up and he’d sounded fine. Groggy, but normal. Now he was hallucinating.
She looked around the room. Thirty minutes … there were lots of drugs that had a thirty-minute or less reaction time. Maybe after Lucy had woken him up, Patrick had drunk something.
She saw nothing on his nightstand. In his bathroom there was a water bottle, half full.
She ran back to Patrick. “Did you drink the water in the bathroom?” She picked up his arm and let it go. It flopped back to the bed. He tried to raise it, but couldn’t.
Patrick looked at her. “I’m so glad you’re here. But why did you do it?”
“What?”
“If you’d just told me, I would have fixed everything.”
Lucy didn’t know if he thought she was someone else, or what he was thinking, but his comments and physical symptoms told her he’d been slipped a sedative that suppressed his central nervous system. A date rape drug, like Rohypnol or ketamine, or a Mickey Finn—but why on earth would Patrick be drugged? Had someone tried to incapacitate him to prevent his investigation of Vanessa’s murder?
That meant Patrick had already learned something that the killer feared would expose him.
Lucy and he had been together the entire time. Except when Patrick had gone out to stow Vanessa’s body, and when she’d gone up to bed he’d been talking to Steve in the office.
“Patrick, please.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
Then he moaned and Lucy knew what was next.
She turned him to his side and he vomited.
SIX
Lucy could not trust anyone.
She’d stayed awake most of the night
watching over Patrick. After he vomited, she cleaned up and helped him stagger across the hall to her bedroom. She gave him water from the tap, not the bottle left in her bathroom. He was still hallucinating, but mostly he slept.
She was angry beyond measure—Patrick had been in a coma for nearly two years. Any drugs that depressed his central nervous system could potentially put him back into that coma. The doctors didn’t know why he’d reacted in the first place—he’d been conscious prior to his brain surgery after an explosion had injured him, causing swelling in his brain. The surgery saved his life. One doctor believed that the coma was a direct result of the brain surgery—that after the damage had been fixed, he’d simply gone to sleep for two years. Another doctor believed that Patrick had an adverse reaction to the anesthesia, based on his medical history. When he was nine, his appendix had burst and he’d undergone emergency surgery. He’d been in a coma for two weeks then.
Whatever it was, any sedatives were incredibly dangerous for Patrick.
Lucy watched him sleep deeply as the digital clock turned from 5:59 to 6:00. She’d woken him up every hour just to make sure he could be awakened. He’d mumble something unintelligible, then quickly fall back to sleep.
Lucy wished she could ask someone to watch her brother, but she was going to have to leave him alone. It was time to talk to the sheriff herself.
She crept from her room back to Patrick’s. Though she had cleaned up after him, his room smelled foul. She went through his notes and found the sheriff’s name and number that Steve had given him. Would Steve have passed along the information if he were the killer?
The house was still silent. She walked downstairs and peered into the library. Trevor was still on the couch, no longer snoring, but bundled under a blanket. Angie must have put it back on last night.
Lucy closed the library door and padded silently to the lodge’s office. She picked up the phone and was relieved to hear a dial tone. Outside, the wind still blew like an angry god, dawn barely visible in the white that rained down around them.
“Alpine County Sheriff’s Department.”
If I Should Die Page 35