by M. K. Wren
“What happened to the dog?” Tuttle asked as he slouched over to the card table. When he extended a hand to Heather, she responded with a growling display of teeth. He quickly withdrew his hand.
Offering no apology for Heather’s unfriendly attitude, Lise replied, “She cut herself on something outside.”
“Yeah? Well, ain’t it nice having a vet in the house—even if he is a doctor.” Tuttle seemed to find that irresistibly amusing. He was still laughing when he leaned over Lise’s shoulder, oblivious to her annoyed glare. “Hey, that’s good. That’s real good. Ms. Black Beauty, herself.”
Demara turned, her glare echoing Lise’s. Then she came over to the table and studied the drawing. “That is good. Would you sell it to me when you’re done?”
Lise didn’t get a chance to respond to that. Tuttle was eyeing Demara with a grin that hovered near a leer as he said, “Maybe she oughta do a real art picture—Ms. Black Beauty in the buff.”
Demara drew a hissing breath and snapped, “Just shut up.”
“Hey, it was just a joke. What’s wrong with you people, anyhow? You all act like you’re at a funeral.”
This he also found amusing, even when it brought every eye into burning focus on him. Tiff sprang to her feet, her birdlike features strained with outrage. “A funeral!” she spat out. “Yes, that’s exactly right! Three people we all loved died yesterday—as if you didn’t know!”
“Now, just a goddamned minute!” Tuttle retorted. “Hell, Tiff, how was I supposed to know? I’m just a guy come in out of the storm.”
Demara took a step toward him, her open hand connecting with his face with a cracking slap that rocked him. She shouted, “I wish you’d stayed out in the storm! You owe everybody here an apology, Mr. Tuttle!”
Heather barked frantically despite Lise’s attempts to restrain her, and Tuttle scowled at Demara, his hands in potent fists, his gaunt face chalky except for the red mark left by her palm. Conan, like Will, rose, ready to intercede in the explosion that seemed inevitable.
But it didn’t come. Tuttle’s scowl slackened, then he said in a conciliatory tone, “You’re right, I was outta line, and I apologize.” He turned to Tiff, added, “I just didn’t know what I was saying. Sorry.”
This met with silence, but it seemed a silence of surprise more than anything else. Then Demara nodded regally and stalked over to the fireplace, while Tiff slumped into her chair and reached for her glass. The apparently chastened Tuttle went to the bar, hitched himself up on the stool nearest the wall, and busied himself lighting a Marlboro. He took a long drag and turned his attention to the gun collection.
Given time, Conan thought, Tuttle’s arrogance would unmask him. He couldn’t seem to resist a bit of sly goading. Was it typical that he backed down so easily?
Kim was the first to speak. “I think we should have an early supper and a proper one. Doris left a couple of fryers in the fridge. I can microwave them. Will, would you mind turning on the generator?”
Will nodded, casting a hard look at Tuttle as he passed on his way to the garage. Loanh and Demara volunteered for kitchen duty, and for the next half hour the crackling of the fire and muted scraps of music, voices, and static from the radio were the loudest sounds in the room. Lise returned to her drawing, Tiff to her crocheting, while Mark closed the drapes against the chill, then joined Will by the radio for a game of gin. Tuttle remained at the bar, smoking one cigarette after the other, moving only to help himself to a beer.
Conan had unfinished business upstairs—he hadn’t yet searched the master bedroom—but he wanted to be here if the radio coughed up a weather report, so he preempted Demara’s solitaire deck, losing every game he dealt out.
At five o’clock, Mark’s announcement that he was getting a weather report on the radio ended the unnatural quiet. Within seconds, everyone in the living room—even Tuttle—had gathered around the radio, while a shout from Will brought the cooks out of the kitchen.
The announcer detailed rising temperatures in northwestern Oregon and southwestern Washington. The freezing rains that had plagued the coast and the Willamette Valley had stopped, and high-wind warnings were canceled. The report ended with, “An Oregon Department of Transportation spokesperson announced that snowplows have already been dispatched into the Cascade Mountain passes, and all of them should be open by early tomorrow morning.”
Amid the expressions of hope and relief, Tiff emitted a shriek of joy. “Oh, thank God, oh, I thought we were gonna be trapped here forever and nobody’d ever know what happened. I mean, I thought we were gonna be buried here like—like…oh, it’s been so awful….”
Mark took her in his arms, offering a reassuring, “We’re going to be okay, sweetheart, we’re going to be okay.”
The cooks rose to the occasion for dinner, despite electrical limitations, but it was largely a silent meal, with Jerry Tuttle as the ghost at the banquet, polite and generally quiet. Again the relief engendered by renewed hope had dissipated to be replaced by an equivocal tension.
Afterward Kim and the other women—with the exception of Tiff, who slumped in her chosen chair with yet another Scotch—accepted help from Will and Conan in clearing the table, then sent them away, declaring them an unnecessary crowd in the kitchen.
Since the dishes had to be done by hand—the dishwasher put too much demand on the hot-water heater and the generator—and Conan could be sure Kim would be occupied for some time, he slipped upstairs to take care of his unfinished business in the master bedroom. He had no illusions that he’d find anything there, but it satisfied him to try.
He stopped first in his room for a flashlight, switched on the ceiling light so it would show under the door, then went on to the master bedroom. He closed the door, but didn’t turn on any lights, depending on the flashlight.
He set about his task methodically, noting in passing the bright blue, yellow, and white Wedding Ring quilt decorating the bed on the west wall; the old, two-man saw, at least six feet long, hanging on the east wall; the small bronze sculpture of a mounted cowboy on the chest of drawers, an excellent copy of a Remington, if it wasn’t an original. The mantel provided a showcase for photographs of friends and family. In one, Carla posed formally with the four children when Al was perhaps fifteen, Mark about ten, Lucas and Lise no more than five.
Conan studied that portrait with an aching regret that approached grief: regret for promises unfulfilled, hopes extinguished.
But he was roused from his reverie by the sound of footsteps in the hall. He went to the door and listened, feeling his quickened pulse in his throat. He would not relish trying to explain his presence here to Kim.
But it wasn’t Kim. Tiff and Mark. Tiff was rambling through one of her chaotic monologues, while Mark worked in a reassuring comment now and then. With the sound of a closing door, their voices ceased.
Conan let his breath out and continued his search, extending it to the bathroom, which had been modernized with an ostentatious spa as its centerpiece. When he had done as thorough a search as he felt he had time for and had found nothing—no gun, no detonator, no Nitrostat bottle, and nothing to link Kim with the murders—he went to one of the windows flanking the bed and looked out. The snow had stopped altogether, and no wind moved the trees. The moon hid behind a thin layer of clouds as it had last night before the blizzard swept down, and the diffuse light glowed softly on the clean expanse of snow that blanketed the lawn. Not a track on it.
Last night. Only last night. It seemed something remembered from a long time past. A life is changed past knowing….
Conan vacated the bedroom, went to his room, where he left the flashlight and turned off the ceiling light, then hurried downstairs. In the living room, the fire burned hectically, and every light was on as if someone were preparing for a party, giving the room a forced cheeriness that failed to dissipate its claustrophobic atmosphere. Lise and Will were kneeling on opposite sides of Heather’s bed, which had been returned to its place in front of the f
ire, Will frowning intently as he checked Heather’s bandage, while Lise offered her a bowl of water and regarded Will with a hint of speculative surprise, as if she were studying a familiar object that had occupied the house of her life for years, but one she had never examined closely.
Conan sat down on the hearth ledge, savoring the heat at his back, noting that Tuttle had taken Mark’s place at the radio from whence a reedy female voice bewailed the vicissitudes of love. Tuttle slumped, a beer can in one hand, watching Will and Lise with a gaze that was both cold and curious, yet underlying both, monumentally indifferent.
When the grandfather clock sounded seven-thirty, Kim, Loanh, and Demara emerged from the kitchen. Kim frowned at Tiff’s empty chair as she crossed to the armchair at the other end of the couch. “Have Tiff and Mark gone upstairs already?”
“Yes,” Lise replied. “Tiff…well, she was getting a bit wobbly.”
Loanh murmured, “She is under a great strain. She has never had to learn how to deal with…with tragedy.”
“I know, Loanh,” Kim said, almost gently. “None of us are very good at that. Except you, perhaps.” Then as if she felt she was slipping out of character, she added briskly, “If that weather report was right, I guess we can afford to leave the generator on a little longer tonight.”
“I hope to hell it was right.” Demara sighed as she sank into Tiff’s vacant chair. “God, I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again.”
Will said lightly, “Heck, Demara, we figured you’d be buying a cabin up on Mount Hood so you could spend the winters here. Damn good skiing.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever ski again, either,” she said with a brief laugh. “I’ve had enough snow this weekend to last a lifetime.”
“This weekend has been a lifetime,” Loanh said softly, as she picked up her book from the couch, then crossed to the bar. “I think I will need something to help me sleep tonight.” She poured a gin and tonic with little tonic and no ice, and headed for the stairs.
With her departure, an uneasy silence set in. Finally Kim looked across the room at Tuttle, who still sat with his beer, watching. Her nostrils flared, as if she were trying to identify a strange scent, then she rose. “I’m going upstairs. Lise, are you staying down here with Heather tonight?”
Lise looked vaguely startled, perhaps because Kim had called the sheltie by her name instead of the dog. “Yes. I don’t want to have to move her upstairs. I’ll just bed down on the couch.”
“Well, you can turn the generator off when everyone settles down.” Kim too made a stop at the bar, fortifying herself for the night with a brandy. She departed without another word.
Within a few minutes Demara made her exit, but without a stop at the bar. Will, Conan, and Lise sat in silence in front of the fire, and finally Tuttle turned off the radio, sauntered to the bar for another beer, and drawled acidly, “Well, good night, folks. It’s been a blast.”
Conan waited a few seconds, then went to the atrium to be sure Tuttle had gone upstairs. Satisfied, he returned to the fireplace and said quietly, “I’m going to the studio tonight. Just to check it out.”
Will asked, “Check what out?”
Lise answered for Conan, her voice flat, wrung dry: “To see if Al or Lucas is hiding in the studio.”
“Yes, Lise,” Conan said, a little surprised. “It’s a possibility I have to eliminate.”
“Well, if you find anyone there, it’ll be Al. Lucas didn’t have it in him to kill anyone. For God’s sake, I grew up with him. He was…he was my dearest friend.”
Conan didn’t attempt to reply to that, and after a while Will said, “I’ll go with you, Conan.”
“Thanks. Lise, do you have a key to the studio with you?”
“I didn’t lock it.”
“But someone else might have.”
She seemed to need a moment to digest that, then she nodded as she came to her feet. “My keys are upstairs. I’ll go get them.”
“By the way, that gun A. C. gave you—where do you keep it?”
“In the drawer in the bedside table.” She turned to leave, then stopped and about-faced. “Conan, you won’t find Lucas there.”
Conan nodded, wondering if she had thought past that defensive assertion, if she understood that if Lucas wasn’t in the studio, he was buried under tons of rock at Loblolly Creek.
Perhaps of the two options, she preferred the latter.
Chapter 22
At the moment, Conan could think of nothing that would instill in him more dread than what he was doing: stepping through the back door into the frigid world outside the lodge.
He stood shivering on the deck in snow up to his knees, gasping out steaming puffs of breath, hands deep in the pockets of his parka, left hand curled around a flashlight, right hand grasping the Ruger P-85. The snow had stopped, the wind had died, yet the cold was still stunning, and in spite of his boots and borrowed mittens, it struck immediately at his vulnerable hands and feet and set them aching miserably. The memories revived by that pain, by the sensation of freezing air in his lungs, awakened in him, briefly, a black panic.
Will Stewart, similarly bundled up and steaming, closed the back door, muttering, “Damn, Conan, nobody in their right mind would be outside in this. Must be twenty below.”
Conan looked across the field of snow that had so recently been a lawn where people could toss Frisbees, now bordered by trees transformed into bizarre snowmen, and he found himself thinking of Robert Service and particularly of Sam McGee. The sky was still overcast, the glow of the moon providing a pale light that stripped everything of dimension and substance.
“Come on, Will. Let’s get this over with.”
Conan pushed through the snow to the steps at the end of the deck, nearly fell when he miscalculated the location of the first one, then set off along the south perimeter of the lawn. The only sound in this silence, so profound that it made his ears ring, was the crunching shuffle of their footsteps.
They had traversed perhaps fifty yards through knee-deep snow, which left both of them panting and a plowed trail behind them, when Conan stopped and looked back at the lodge, a gray monolith against a slope brocaded with snow-burdened trees. There was a light behind the curtained windows of the master bedroom. On the back wall, he could see the dark windows of Tiff and Mark’s room, then his own. A clutter of branches hid Demara and Tuttle’s windows.
Will said, “Looks like Kim’s still awake.”
Conan nodded as he turned and slogged on to the opening in the trees that marked the beginning of the path to the studio. The snow under the alders was still up to his knees, but when he reached the conifers beyond, it was only half as deep. It was pristine, devoid of tracks. The light in the shadow of the firs and hemlocks was only a few degrees short of darkness, but Conan glanced back at Will, said, “Don’t use your flashlight. If anyone’s in the studio, we don’t want to give him fair warning.”
Will grunted as he stumbled over a snow-hidden root.
“Okay, but if you get us lost, I’m not treating you for hypothermia again.”
Conan laughed and tramped on. The snow at least made following the path easier. It seemed to have a crepuscular light of its own. For a long time the silence, punctuated by their squeaking footfalls, held. Finally Conan realized that the shadow shape above and to their left was not indigenous to the wintry landscape.
The studio. He stopped, heart pounding with an equivocal mix of dread and doubt. No trace of light shone behind the windows.
“Will, when you and Lise came up here Saturday night, did you close the curtains?”
“Yes, and we left water running in the kitchen and bathroom to keep the pipes from freezing.” He gave that a caustic laugh. “Probably froze anyway.”
Conan squinted at the roof, trying to separate the chimney from the tree trunks beyond the building, but he couldn’t tell which shadow was the chimney, much less whether any smoke was coming from it.
The lack of light from the studio
was not conclusive. Even if the curtains were thin enough for light to show through, there might be no candles or kerosene lamps available or in use right now, and the wood stove was enclosed and would emit no light even if it were burning at full capacity. A lack of smoke would be conclusive, but the darkness precluded that test. He asked, “You have the key handy?”
“Right here in my pocket.”
With Will only a pace behind, Conan made his way around to the south side of the studio and moved cautiously across the porch. At the door, he pushed his hood back and leaned against the screen to listen.
Silence. But even that meant nothing.
He removed his right-hand mitten and took the gun out of his pocket, gasping at the electric pain as his bare hand closed on the cold metal. He pushed off the safety and whispered, “Will, get ready with your flashlight.” He heard the rustle of Will’s parka, then eased the screen door open, forcing it back against a bow wave of snow. Will slipped the key into the lock, turned it, and whispered, “It’s not locked.”
“All right. Get ready to open it.” Conan took a deep, chill breath then shouted, “Now!”
Will shoved the door open, his flashlight coming on as they rushed into the studio, the light moving in quick arcs around the room, while Conan followed the light with his eyes, the gun raised and ready.
Nothing.
The only movement was a rattle of brushes scattering on the floor when Will accidentally knocked them off the palette table.
Conan’s racing pulse slowed, dread and doubt giving way to chagrin and—what? Anger? Whom could he rationally be angry at? Himself for being so obviously wrong? Al or Lucas for not being here?
The icy scent of the air in this room was evidence enough that there had been no fire in the stove since the blizzard began. The water in the jar where Lise had cleaned her brushes was frozen, and in the sink in the kitchen area, a thick icicle hung from the faucet.
Conan returned the gun to his pocket. “I was wrong, Will. No one took refuge here. And that means both Al and Lucas are dead.”