The Cabin

by Carla Neggers

  "You came here with Destin Wright," Susanna said.

  Alice nodded. "Yes, we struck up a friendship at Jim's Place."

  "Did he tell you he's after me for money?"

  "Well, we talked about the new company he's working on." She shrugged her slender shoulders, tossing back her red curls. "I don't know much about business, I'm afraid. He said he needs—what does he call it?

  Some kind of money."

  "Angel money," Susanna supplied, her tone neutral.

  "That's right. I'm not involved in any of that. I just wanted to see the Adirondacks and get out of town, figure out what to do now that I was persona non grata in your neighborhood." She smiled matter-of-factly. "I have to tell you, after being in prison all those months, I don't even mind the cold up here."

  Susanna refused to let herself get distracted, either by Alice shifting the subject or trying to charm her. It couldn't have been easy for Jack to investigate her. "Did Destin tell you that Jack is here?"

  "Your husband. Yes, Destin told me. I guess Lieutenant Galway would think it a provocation, me showing up right down the street from you."

  "That's what we all think, Alice," Susanna said calmly. She supposed Jack would want her to stop here, leave and tell him that Alice was at the inn—not let her irritation and concern get the better of her. "He ran into someone at Gran's house the other night and got hit on the head."

  "Lieutenant Galway?" Alice looked surprised—or did a good job of it. "Do I look as if I could get the jump on him? I'll bet you I'm not even half his size."

  "You're an experienced police officer."

  "And he's a Texas Ranger. I'm sorry he got hit, and I can see how you all might think I had something to do with it. Well, I didn't. So, you either prove I did, or you leave me alone. I've served my time. I'm not on parole. I can come and go as I please, provided I don't break the law."

  She was right, and Susanna sighed reluctantly and nodded. "Fair enough. Do you know where Destin is? I'd like to talk to him."

  "He wanted to try bobsledding. I think he might have hitched a ride with someone. I don't really know." Alice shrugged, losing interest. "We're just here for a good time."

  "It was his idea?"

  "I don't know, we just got to talking about you all coming up here, and how I was curious about it, after what Miss Iris had told me—" She stopped, frowning. "How many more questions do you have for me, Mrs. Galway?"

  Susanna didn't answer. Gran turned from the lake and got slowly to her feet. "Alice, I think you should talk to Jack, before you get in over your head and do something you regret."

  Alice's mouth snapped shut. She seemed insulted. "How stupid do you think I am?"

  "How did you land up in prison?" Gran went on, her eyes vivid and alive now, relentless. "You got in over your head, and you did something you regretted. No doubt it all seemed to make sense at the time, but in retrospect, I suspect not. We tend to repeat our mistakes, you know, until we learn from them."

  Alice was breathing rapidly, a flush spreading from her face down her neck. She seemed taken aback at Iris's straightforward words—her insight. But she said nothing, and Susanna remembered her brief conversation with Jack before they'd left for Blackwater Inn. Sam Temple was on his way to Boston.

  "Beau McGarrity," Susanna said, before she could stop herself. "Do you know where he is?"

  "No, but he worries me."

  "If you still have the tape I gave to you, I'd like you to give it to Jack and let him listen to it. I've assumed all this time it's irrelevant, but—I'm not making any more assumptions."

  Alice stood in front of Susanna and touched her shoulder, her fingers ice-cold even through Susanna's heavy sweater. Her gray eyes were intense, and she said in a low voice, "There's nothing on that tape anyone can use against Beau. I'd have given it to your husband if I'd thought it would have made a difference."

  "But you still have it?"

  She shrugged, evasive. "Mrs. Galway, Ms. Dun-ning—you don't have to believe me, but I just did what I thought was right, no matter how it turned out."

  The sunlight caught the wrinkles in Gran's face, but they didn't make her look drawn and ancient—they made her look very alive, a woman who'd lived a full life. She didn't know anything about the tape, but wouldn't ask Susanna about it in front of a friend who'd betrayed her. "If you hadn't lied to us, Alice, we might give you more credit now."

  "There's so much you all don't know." Alice flopped onto a second love seat, looking petulant and stubborn and very young, not at all like a small-town Texas police officer or an ex-convict. "Rachel McGarrity—she and I were friends. That's why Beau called me that night to find her body. I know it was him. I can't prove it, but I know. And you, Miss Susanna. You think he started following you after he killed his wife. Well, that's not true."

  Susanna jumped to her feet and stared at her, aware she was giving Alice the shocked reaction she wanted. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean Mr. Beau looked you up before Rachel was killed."

  "When?" Her voice was choked, and she only just managed to stay on her feet. "I never saw him before Jack started investigating you. How do you know?"

  "Rachel was interested in you and your folks in Austin. She wanted me to do some investigative work for her on the side, but I never got much of it done—she never clued me in to the big picture. Beau must have got wind of what she was up to and followed you. After Rachel died, we—the police didn't find anything that linked back up to you. I don't know, maybe there was nothing, or maybe Beau got rid of it before he killed her."

  Susanna couldn't speak.

  Alice raised her eyes, and they were cool now, with a slight gleam of victory. "I followed Beau right to your door."

  "When?"

  "A week or so before Rachel's murder. Your daughters were still at school. You were out front working in the garden. He parked across the street, got out of his car and watched you for about five or ten minutes. Never said a word. And you didn't look at him. When you went around back, he got into his car and drove away." She sank back against the soft cushions in the attractive sunroom. "He did pretty much the same thing a couple days later, except this time you got in your car. He followed you while you picked up your daughters at school."

  "Did you know who I was, that my husband's a Texas Ranger?"

  She nodded. "I imagine we both did."

  "Why didn't you say something?"

  She shrugged, without arrogance or defensiveness now that she had Susanna reeling. "I told Rachel. We were still trying to figure out what was going on when she was killed. You have to understand, Mrs. Galway, we had no idea Beau was going to do what he did. Not a clue in the world. Rachel was a very private woman, but I think she'd have gotten around to telling me everything. She just didn't live that long."

  "Alice," Susanna said, her voice hoarse from tension, "please tell me the truth. Did you tell the detectives on the murder investigation, your chief of police, my husband—anyone—about Beau McGarrity following me? About Rachel McGarrity's interest in me?"

  She shook her head. "No. I didn't want anyone to know I was friends with Rachel. It would have complicated everything. Maybe if I'd had proof." She lifted her small shoulders and let them drop, sighing. "I was up against someone smarter and meaner than I am."

  Susanna said nothing. She was reeling, her mind flooded with thoughts and images and a thousand different questions.

  Alice didn't move from the love seat. "Maybe you can see now why I came to Boston. I was worried Beau McGarrity might come after you. I thought maybe that's why you were up here—because you were afraid of

  him." She swallowed. "I guess none of that matters now."

  "You know I'm going to tell Jack everything."

  "That's what I've always assumed," Alice said, her eyes bright, a little smug. "That you'd tell Lieutenant Galway everything."

  Susanna ignored the jibe. "He'll want to talk to you."

  "Fine. Let him talk to me."

 
"Come on, Gran," Susanna said. "I promised to take you to the cemetery. Let's go."

  They left Alice Parker on the love seat, gazing out at the Adirondack view. Susanna briefly debated calling the local police and asking them to sit on Alice until she could get Jack out here, but Alice seemed willing to wait—and talk.

  Susanna followed Gran out into the hall, feeling hot and breathless, as if she'd been running up and down the inn's stairs instead of chatting in a slightly cool sunroom. Her great-grandmother had died in there. Gran's mum. Suddenly she was overwhelmed, wondering what Rose Dunning must have been like, how they'd all ended up here so many decades after her death—her daughter, Susanna, Alice Parker, Destin Wright.

  They said goodbye to the Johnsons, and Gran added that she thought their inn was wonderful. They seemed pleased, and even a little relieved.

  When they reached the parking lot, Gran said, "Her parents are alcoholics."

  "Whose? Alice's?"

  "'Total no-accounts,' she called them." Gran half smiled, pulling open the car door. "She has an engaging manner when she isn't so focused on how all her good intentions have never amounted to anything."

  Susanna felt bile rise up in her throat. Alice Parker had never told Jack or her or anyone that Beau McGarrity followed her before his wife was killed. That was a serious omission. It was more than good intentions gone awry.

  "She told me she always wanted to be a Texas Ranger," Gran said, seemingly oblivious to the February cold. The bright sun caught her face, making her eyes seem less vivid, more serious somehow. "She's the type who's always living her life in the future, never in the present. That's the easiest way of all to lie to yourself, I think, by not looking in the mirror and being honest with yourself about who you are."

  Susanna touched her grandmother's thin shoulder. Maybe the trip to the inn had been too much for her— the memories, Alice Parker, the talk of murder and stalking. "Gran, are you okay?"

  She smiled gently, covering Susanna's hand with hers for a moment. "I'm just fine. What about you, love? Are you okay?"

  "I have to talk to Jack."

  "Yes, you do.You've had to talk to him for a long time."

  * * *

  Susanna followed her grandmother to the far end of the snow-covered cemetery, to the Dunning family plot, a dozen or so graves enclosed within a low stone wall. Gran climbed over the stone wall unaided, seemingly oblivious to the cold wind and knee-deep snow that drifted up against the tombstones. She had her red knit hat pulled tightly down over her ears, but her pants were more suited to a trip to her senior center in Somerville than trekking in an Adirondack cemetery.

  A biting gust of wind rocked Susanna back on her heels, but Gran didn't seem to notice. She came to a pair of simple, matching headstones and sank onto her knees, brushing the snow off the stones with her gloved hands. Susanna stood behind her, worried that the winter conditions were too hard on her grandmother. Perhaps they should have waited until summer.

  The graves were of her parents, Rose and John Dunning.

  "No one believed my father would die an ordinary death," Gran said. "He was a risk-taker, he loved the mountains. He respected their dangers, but he never let fear stop him from doing what he wanted to do. And what he wanted to do was spend as much time as he could in the mountains."

  "How did he die?" Susanna asked.

  "Bee sting. He got stung while he was working on the dock in front of the inn and was dead in fifteen minutes."

  Susanna looked at the dates and did the math. He was forty-eight when he died, Gran just twenty. Her mother died a year later.

  "Everyone thought he'd die on a mountain," Gran went on quietly, "or out on the lake rescuing someone in a storm. Or he'd live to be a very old man, and when he was done, he'd walk into the wilderness and go to sleep. He was an extraordinary man. He taught me as much as he could about these mountains."

  "I'm sorry I never knew him," Susanna said.

  "My mother was hard-working, forbidding in many ways. She kept the inn running and the family in food and clothes. That wasn't my father. But she loved it here as much as he did, and she loved him. She was devastated when he died." Gran stood up slowly, balancing herself with one hand on her mother's tombstone. "Those were difficult years."

  "Dad was just a baby when you lost both your parents."

  "Yes, he was all that kept me going." She gestured at some of the other graves. "Those are two of Father's cousins and several people Mother knew from her nursing days in Saranac, former tuberculosis patients who came to work for us at the inn."

  She lifted her leg high and stepped into a deep drift of snow, pushing forward to another headstone in the opposite corner of the plot. Susanna, worried about her grandmother now, stayed with her, ready to catch her if she stumbled.

  "Here we are," Gran said under her breath, stumbling in front of a pink granite marker. "Oh, Jared…"

  Susanna put her arm around her grandmother. "Gran, you're freezing. I don't want to rush you, but we can always come back here when it's warmer—"

  "I'm fine." She glanced up at Susanna, her eyes shining. "This is your grandfather." She pulled off a glove and ran her fingertips over the name carved in stone. Jared Rutherford Herrington. "He had the bluest eyes. He was a preppy, square-jawed Princeton graduate from a very wealthy family. They still own most of the north end of Blackwater Lake."

  Susanna had never known her grandfather's name.

  She wasn't even sure her father knew it. "Why is he bur

  ied here?" she asked.

  "Because of me."

  "Gran…"

  "I took my father's place as Jared's guide on a day hike up Whiteface Mountain. He was twenty-five, and I was eighteen—we fell in love on our way up the mountain. I can remember—" She shut her eyes tightly and smiled. "All of it. Every minute we had together."

  Susanna tried to picture her grandmother at eighteen, madly in love with a handsome Ivy Leaguer. "What was he like?"

  "He was smart, charming, well-traveled, much better read than I. He used to write me poetry. I knew the mountains, every inch of Blackwater Lake, and I was down to earth—we were so in love. But there was a problem," she said, looking up at the blue sky, as if she could see him. "He was married."

  Susanna remained silent, sensing what it cost her grandmother to talk about her past.

  "He had a son," Gran went on. "He loved his little boy very much, and I think but for him—well, those were different times. It was an unhappy marriage, for both of them. He'd asked for a divorce, but agreed to come up here for a few months separation. He was supposed to be hiking and canoeing, not carrying on with a girl guide. But when he told me he had a wife—I was furious." She tucked her hand into Susanna's, pulling herself to her feet, wisps of white hair coming loose out of her hat. "He left her late that summer and asked me to marry him as soon as the divorce was final. We never had that chance."

  "My God, Gran." Susanna could feel the tears in her eyes. She'd seen the date on her grandfather's grave. A few months before her father was born. "I'm so sorry."

  "He went out one day on the lake, alone. And he never came back. I found him that winter, five months later. I was snowshoeing on my own, debating whether I should fling myself off a cliff or cut a circle in the ice and jump in."

  Susanna held back her shock. "Because you were pregnant?"

  "Pregnant, alone, despairing of ever finding happiness again. I was thinking about whether I'd freeze to death or drown first if I went into the water when suddenly here at my feet was this man I loved. He must have tripped over a rock or a tree root and hit his head. Just like that, and it was over." A sudden strength came into her step, and she pushed through the snow toward the stonewall. "I knew then that I had to carry on."

  "Your parents—"

  "They accepted what had happened, and your father was such a charming baby—how could they not accept him? Then my father died, and my mother came down with a sudden, virulent case of tuberculosis, of all things. It too
k her so quickly. There was no chance for her to cure."

  "You lost everyone you loved in such a short time. Gran, my God, I don't know how you survived."

  "Because I didn't lose everyone." She smiled up at Susanna. "I had Kevin. I had Jared's son. My son. I sold the inn and worked as a guide for as long as I could. I'd strap Kevin on my back, and off we'd go. But those were hard years, and I knew I couldn't stay here. So, I moved to the city and started over."

  A breeze floated through the evergreens, whistling slightly, almost eerily, as they climbed over the low stone wall.

  Gran wasn't even breathing hard. "I've had a good life, Susanna, if not always a happy one."

  "I think I understand."

  "Oh, you don't understand a thing." She spoke without any edge or condescension, simply stating a fact that was obvious to her. "Life brings with it hardship and loneliness from time to time. I learned to move forward from where I am, not to keep insisting I ought to be where I once was, not to keep dreaming about where I might be one day. To truly embrace where I am."

  Susanna sensed where her grandmother was headed and smiled, trying to veer her off subject. "Did you learn to talk this way in your seniors' yoga class?"

  But Gran wasn't letting her off the hook. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "Sure. Live for today—"

  "No." Gran shook her head, impatient. "Figure out where you are and move forward from there, that point and no other. That's different from living for today."

  "Gran, if you're talking about Jack—"

  "I'm talking about you. You can't move forward until you know where you are."

  Susanna gave up. "Okay."

  Her grandmother cast her a sideways glance. "You're a smart-mouth, Susanna Dunning Galway. I can see how you give that husband of yours a run for his money."

  "Most of the time he deserves it, you know."

  "I imagine that's a two-way street." They came to the car, and Gran paused, looking out at the cemetery, the snow, the evergreens, the blue sky. "It's lovely here, isn't it?"