by J L Raven
I tightened my hand around the tumbler. “Whoever is doing this, it seems like they have a grudge against Agonarch. But Tiffany was just the guide!” I wiped angrily at my eyes. “We don’t even know if she’s alive. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
Neither had I. I didn’t deserve to be stuck in a nightmare. To be here in the snow and the cold, cut off from the outside world by an unexpected storm.
I missed Heather so bad it took my breath. What was she doing right now? It was Sunday night, so probably putting together her lesson plan for the week. Maybe having a glass of wine. Even thinking about me, since I was due back tomorrow night.
She probably thought I was having the time of my life. Climbing the corporate ladder. Selfishly putting my own needs ahead of our relationship.
Everything would be different when I got back home to her. Just let me get back home to her. Please.
God, I wish I’d told her I loved her.
“There were no legal findings against us,” Yasmine said, breaking into my thoughts. She held a glass of wine in one well-manicured hand. “No one did anything wrong.”
I sat up straight and glared at her. “Obviously someone disagrees. Otherwise they wouldn’t have left the article. And Rick, Melissa said you put ‘God-knows-what’ in the X-ULT pills.” I shifted my glare to him. “From where I’m sitting, it sounds like you did something you shouldn’t have, and the rest of us are paying the price for it.”
For the first time since I’d met him, anger flashed in his dark eyes. “Oh no. I’m not taking the fall for this. Not when there’s plenty of blame to go around.”
“I’m just PR,” Melissa protested. “You can’t pin any of this on me.”
“Fuck you,” he snapped. “You want to know what happened, Lauren? What really happened? Then strap in and listen. It’s quite the little story.”
“Rick,” Yasmine said in a warning tone.
Rick ignored her. “X-ULT was our first product to really catch on. It put Agonarch on the map. Within a few months of its launch, we weren’t just a scrappy little startup. We were the rising stars of the herbal supplement world. There was nowhere to go but up.”
A bitter laugh escaped him, and he slugged back the rest of his drink. Going to the bar, he snagged the whole bottle and brought it back to the fire with him. “But it turned out some people were having bad reactions to X-ULT.”
“Anecdotal evidence only,” Yasmine put in quickly, as if she couldn’t resist.
“Hard to have anything else when there’s no scientific testing done.” Rick filled his tumbler to the brim with whiskey. “Some people ended up in the ER. One guy spent a few days in the hospital. But X-ULT was our golden goose. We weren’t going to kill it just because some people were having unexpected reactions to it.”
I stared at him, a sense of horror slowly creeping up my spine. “What a minute. You knew X-ULT was dangerous, and you still left it on the market? You didn’t warn anyone?”
“Not my department,” Yasmine said.
“You were there at the team meeting, just like me.” Fury darkened Rick’s eyes. “Just like Melissa. Just like Adam. So don’t you fucking go all sanctimonious on me, Yasmine.”
I wanted to throw my drink at him. I wanted to storm away, go out into the snow even, just to get away from them. “You did it all on purpose. When that girl died…that wasn’t just the start of it. You didn’t spring into action to contain unexpected bad PR. You already had a plan in place, because you knew it was dangerous from the get-go.”
Rick gulped down some more alcohol. “We had a meeting, just the four of us. The founders. To decide what to do. In the end, a combination of denial, pay-offs, and concealing the evidence turned out to be the most…lucrative solution.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They’d known X-ULT was hurting people, and they’d just covered it up.
Adam finally stirred. He’d been sitting quietly in one of the chairs, feet toward the fire, listening to the rest of us talk. “Little Lauren, so easily shocked.” His words slurred slightly; like the rest, he’d had quite a bit to drink throughout the day. “We’re far from the only ones, you know. What we did is standard business practice, and not just in the supplement game. Compared to the opioid epidemic unleashed by the pharmaceutical industry, we’re small potatoes.”
I felt ill. “I know, but…”
“But you signed a non-disclosure agreement when you came to work for us.” He tipped back his glass and drained the last drops from it. “I wouldn’t want that to slip your mind later.”
My hands shook with suppressed emotion. I couldn’t sit here with these people another moment. I turned my back on them and stalked toward the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Melissa called.
“Nowhere,” Adam said. “None of us are.”
“Just let her cool off.” Rick sounded subdued. As if he wished he hadn’t said anything after all. It occurred to me that he’d actually believed we might be friends.
I needed to think. No—I needed to act. I’d lose my mind if I was trapped in here with them much longer.
Cold air flowed over me. I blinked, then backed up. One step, then another, then another, until I was almost out of the kitchen.
“Lauren?” Rick must have been keeping an eye out for me. “What’s the matter?”
I turned to them. My face reflected in the window behind Rick: a ghostly white oval.
“The kitchen door,” I said. “It’s open.”
Eighteen
Pandemonium followed my pronouncement.
Rick ran past me to the kitchen, as if he needed to verify it for himself. He slammed the door shut and threw the lock, though to me it seemed a case of too little too late.
Melissa let out a panicked shriek of: “He’s inside! He’s inside!” Adam’s drink fell to the floor as he staggered upright.
Yasmine sat up straight, eyes wide with alarm. “Who was supposed to lock it?”
“I did,” Rick said as he rejoined us. “And before you ask, yes, I’m one-hundred percent positive I locked it.”
I looked around frantically. “Tiffany had keys to the lodge. Whoever this guy is, he must have taken them from her.”
“He’s in here with us,” Melissa wailed. “Just waiting for his chance to kill us.”
“Stay calm,” Adam ordered. Nothing like fear to sober up a person. “He wants us to panic.”
“We can’t just sit here and wait for him to do something,” I said. “We have to arm ourselves and find him.”
Adam nodded approvingly. “Put an end to this. Right. Okay, everyone, grab something to use as a weapon.”
Rick picked up the fireplace poker and held it like a baseball bat. Melissa gripped her meat cleaver. The storage cabinet held a knife and several pairs of scissors. Adam took the knife, and Yasmine took one pair of scissors. I took another. Everyone except Melissa selected a flashlight or lantern to carry with them.
Once we were ready, Adam said, “Okay, we need to canvas the entire lodge. Yasmine, you check the laundry and storeroom. Rick, the bathrooms. I’ll take the loft. Melissa and Lauren, you stay here and make sure he doesn’t slip out behind us.”
“I can re-check the kitchen,” I offered. “I don’t think he could be hiding in there, but neither Rick nor I searched it.”
“You can’t leave me here alone!” Melissa’s hand closed over my wrist.
“For fuck’s sake, Mel, she’ll just be in the kitchen.” Adam looked us all over. “If you see anything, yell and the rest of us will come running. This ends here and now.”
Rick waved the poker threateningly. “We’ll make the bastard sorry he ever screwed with us.”
“Let’s go.” Adam started for the loft, and Rick and Yasmine for the hallway leading to the back. I hesitated and turned to Melissa.
“I’ll be right there,” I said, pointing at the kitchen. “If you need anything, I’ll come running, okay?”
She nodded, but I could tell
she was terrified. The corners of her mouth were white, and her hand shook on the meat cleaver.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll all be over soon.”
The kitchen was utterly silent, except for the whisper of my boots on the tiles.
I stopped just inside the door, looking and listening. Enough light filtered in from the fireplace in the main room that I didn’t have to turn on my flashlight just yet. The kitchen had an industrial feel to it, since it was used to cook meals for the groups who booked the lodge.
Hopefully those other groups had a better time. For a wild moment, I imagined leaving a Yelp review. Five stars, beautiful setting for a bit of murder.
God. My nerves were shot, and I felt like I was losing it. I took a deep breath; my sternum ached where the seatbelt had caught me during the crash. I needed to focus.
A large metal table for food prep dominated the room. Pots and pans hung from hooks above it. Two different ovens, both enormous, took up much of the space, along with the biggest microwave I’d ever seen. Coffee maker, espresso machine, bean grinder. Two toasters with different sized slots. Waffle maker. Giant refrigerator. And of course, the door to the walk-in freezer.
Of course.
I approached the door slowly. Warily. I’d helped Tiffany take some of our frozen meals out of it; the interior was cavernous. You could store any number of things in there. Ready-made meals. Vegetables. Whole sides of beef.
A body.
I felt almost like an outside observer, watching my fingers reach for the handle. My heart thumped against my ribs, blood pulsing in my ears.
The seal around the door sighed as it let go. A breath of icy air, now only a few degrees colder than the rest of the kitchen, whispered over my face. The interior was pitch black; I reached for the light switch before I remembered there wasn’t any electricity. The scent of freezer-burned food hung in the air, combined with something almost metallic.
I switched on the flashlight.
Shelves lined either side of the freezer. The heat-and-eat trays Tiffany never had the chance to make filled those closest to the door. There were also a few random bags of vegetables, along with a pack of chicken wings. But for the most part, the shelves were empty.
There was something at the far end of the freezer, on the floor.
A sudden terror of getting locked in gripped me. I imagined myself pounding on the door, screaming myself hoarse. There was a safety latch on the inside, but what if it broke and I couldn’t get out? I’d be trapped in here with…whatever was on the floor.
I grabbed the frozen chicken off the shelf and wedged it between the bottom of the door and the jam. Then, taking another deep breath, I steeled myself and stepped farther into the freezer. My flashlight beam played off frost-covered steel and threw odd shadows that pulled my nerves even tauter.
I took one step closer. Then another.
The flashlight revealed the sleeve of a familiar pink coat. Except the rest of it was no longer pink.
It was red with blood.
I lifted Tiffany’s coat in shaking hands. The blood had soaked into the fabric, then frozen, making the cloth weirdly stiff. This wasn’t a few spatters, or a stain. This was a lot of blood.
How much blood could a person lose and still survive? I didn’t know.
Gripping the coat to my chest, I shuffled out of the freezer. The frost made the floor slippery, and I concentrated on keeping my footing instead of what I held in my hands. I had to focus.
I passed back through the kitchen and into the main room, where Melissa waited by the fire. Even though her foot must have been in agony, she stood ready to run or fight. The firelight played off the blade of her knife, and I found myself distracted by the gleam.
“Lauren?” Her brows drew down over her dark eyes in worry. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I shook my head and kept walking. As I drew closer, her eyes widened. “Wh-what are you holding?”
I went to the fire, still cradling the coat to my chest. Tiffany had built this fire every morning, making sure we had a warm welcome when we staggered in from our cabins. She’d poured drinks and made campfire coffee, and always had a smile for everyone.
No one thanked her but me. No one asked about her family, or her life outside this place. Her dreams, her hopes: none of those were of interest to a group so caught up in their own drama no one else might as well have existed.
And when she went missing, we’d tried to just drive off and leave her here. Drinking champagne to celebrate, all the while not knowing if she was dead or alive.
I turned to Melissa, the warmth of the fire against the backs of my legs, and let the bundled coat unfold.
“No.” She put her free hand to her mouth. Tears spilled over, streaked down her face. “No, no, no, no.”
Rick emerged from the hallway behind her. He must have finished checking the bathrooms. A frown crossed his face as he caught sight of us, but he didn’t say anything.
“We’re going to die here,” Melissa sobbed. “I had so many things I wanted to do. James and I were going to have babies.” A wail escaped her. “I want James. I want my husband. There’s a murderer on the loose right now, here in the lodge with us, and he’s going to do terrible things, and we can’t get away!”
A look of genuine compassion crossed Rick’s face. As he came up behind Melissa, he stretched out his arm and put his hand on her shoulder.
Melissa screamed in shock.
Rick yanked his hand back.
The meat cleaver gleamed in the firelight as Melissa spun, swinging wildly in her terror.
The blade made an odd, almost crunching sound as it buried itself in Rick’s neck.
For an instant, the whole world froze. Rick’s eyes were wide with surprise. Scarlet blood pumped from severed arteries, splattering Melissa’s face.
Rick’s knees buckled. He collapsed to the ground, clawing at his throat and making a horrifying gurgle as he tried to breathe through his severed windpipe. Then his hands went limp, eyes going glassy as his brown irises relaxed into death.
Someone was screaming. After a moment, I realized it was me.
Now
Tears pour down my face, dripping onto my arms. “It all happened so fast,” I manage to say. “It was such a shock.”
Sheriff Hassan passes me a tissue. “I’m sure it was.” His voice is gentle—is he playing Good Cop for some reason? Or just being a decent person? “Had Melissa and Rick been fighting before it happened?”
“Everyone was fighting,” I say wryly. “The others went from being college friends to running a multi-million dollar company together. My impression was that the weekend was supposed to relieve tensions. That…didn’t exactly happen.”
“I suppose it didn’t,” he agrees.
“Everyone had been drinking all evening.” I wipe my eyes with the hand that doesn’t have an IV taped to the back of it. “Melissa was just…wild. She was scared. We all were. You can’t imagine what it was like, trapped out there in the dark, no communication, no electricity, no way out.”
“It sounds like you’ve been through a terrible ordeal,” the sheriff says kindly. Again, I wondered if he means it, or if this is always how he acts when investigating a suspicious death. “Did Melissa seem to be particularly affected by what was happening?”
“I guess? She was…I hate to use the term, but ‘hysterical’ about sums it up.” I hesitate, then reluctantly add, “Rick said she had problems with alcohol before. A DUI, where someone died.”
“Did he bring it up in front of the group?”
“Yeah. Melissa got really mad about it.” I shake my head. “That was on Thursday or Friday, I don’t remember. When I found that out, I realized I’d come into the wilderness with a group of people I didn’t really know. Yeah, it was work-related, but they were all strangers to me, and not each other.” My throat is dry, and I take a sip of ginger ale. “If I’d known, I would never have come.”
“I’m certain. I wouldn’
t have wanted to be in your shoes.”
“I wasn’t even supposed to be there. My boss, Tom, was going on the trip, but had to cancel at the last moment when he came down with food poisoning.” I glance up just long enough to see surprise and pity in Hassan’s eyes. “I thought I’d lucked out. I thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime.”
“I’m sorry it turned out the way he did,” he says. “Can you tell me what happened next? After Rick died?”
I take a deep breath in a futile attempt to calm my nerves. “After that…I thought things were going bad before. But after Rick died, everything got so much worse.”
Day 5: Monday
Nineteen
Utter silence shrouded the lodge, except for the crack and pop of the fire. I glanced at my watch; it was after midnight.
Monday. The day we were initially supposed to pack up and head for home. Before the storm blew in and upset all of our plans.
The room reeked of blood. I’d tried to soak up as much as possible with towels, but there was only so much I could do. With no power, the only water we had was whatever was still in the hot water tank. We couldn’t afford to waste it on scrubbing the carpet.
God, I’d never wanted a shower as much as I did right now.
While I mopped up with the towels, Adam dragged Rick’s body to the walk-in freezer and left it there. Then he took the knife from Melissa’s unresponsive hand, opened the front door, and chucked it as far out into the snow as he could.
I lifted my gaze from Tiffany’s coat, which I’d absently picked up when I found a perch on the edge of the hearth, as close as I could get to the fire. Everyone seemed to be in shock. Melissa sat on the floor away from the fire, off from everyone else, her arms around herself. Rocking back and forth, back and forth, her face blank. Maybe she’d had some kind of psychotic break.