by Gregory Ashe
Something about what Columbia had just said tickled a thought in Somers’s mind. All of this felt wrong. He spoke because he knew he had to say something, but his mind continued to turn. “I’m very sorry for what happened. Nobody deserves that kind of treatment. But Columbia, right now, you’re making things worse for yourself. You’ve drawn a weapon on a police officer. You’ve threatened my life and the lives of other people. I believe you when you say you’re innocent, but the best thing you can do is put down that gun. We can figure out the rest of it later.”
“There won’t be a later.” Columbia let out another shrill laugh. “Don’t you get it? This is it. We’re trapped here, and someone has to do something or—” She made a dry coughing noise, as though her voice had given out, and when she spoke again, her voice had deepened again. “And you’re not even a cop, we don’t know you’re a cop, we don’t know anything about you. So you just stay over there, and I’ll stay over here for—for—”
Forever, Somers thought. An ice age.
And then it all clicked. It wasn’t the methodical analysis that Hazard would have used; Somers knew he wasn’t as smart as his partner, and he was nowhere near as logical. But Somers also knew he was a good detective, and he trusted his gut. And right then, all the pieces came together. The ice age. Hazard and the damn password. And the only thing he knew, really knew, about Thomas Strong: that scene the first night when Strong had thrown his food at Adaline. Somers turned everything backward and forwards, and it all fit.
“It wasn’t you,” Somers said. He barely realized he was speaking out loud; the shock of the revelation, its suddenness, had left him off balance.
“I already told you that.”
“It wasn’t you,” Somers said. His skin pimpled, the fine blond hairs standing on end, and his next breath made him lightheaded. His eyes came to rest on the huddled women. “It was Adaline.”
As though she had been waiting for the cue, Adaline rolled away from Meryl. From within her down parka, Adaline produced a pistol and fired at Somers.
AS THE GUN CAME UP, SOMERS threw himself sideways and back. He was too slow, and Adaline was already moving. The shot should have found his chest.
Instead, Meryl swept one leg out in a low arc, catching Adaline and jostling the smaller woman. The pistol swung wide. Somers struck the line of bushes, and as their glossy green leaves closed in front of him, the shot rang out. Somers hit the ground, his breath exploding from his lungs. Above him, scraps of leaves fluttered in the air, shredded like confetti by Adaline’s shot.
Run? Or try to get his gun?
Somers ran. He was running before he was even fully vertical, running as soon as he got his feet under him, heedless of the branches that whipped at his face. The taste of blood was sharp in his mouth, and that meant he’d been shot, right? He’d been shot—where? In the chest, most likely. The thoughts jackhammered in his brain. In the lungs. The blood would mix with the air as he tried to breathe, foaming in his mouth. It would be a matter of moments before he ran out of air, and then he’d collapse, and then he’d die.
But he didn’t collapse. Another shot rang out, and this time, there was a scream.
Meryl? Columbia?
Columbia, Somers decided. By now, he was lost. He skidded to a halt, his boots raking up loam and twigs and spindly brown banana leaves. Every movement made so much noise that Somers was sure Adaline could hear him, but he forced himself not to run again. Instead, he crouched behind the wide bole of some tropical tree he didn’t recognize. The woman’s screaming continued, but swearing punctuated it now. Yes, it was definitely Columbia. Adaline must have shot her first because Columbia presented the only potential threat. But Adaline hadn’t killed her—that was important, although Somers wasn’t sure why.
The rustle of branches made Somers hold his breath. Then wood cracked, the sound somewhere back in the direction Somers had just come. It had to be Adaline, and so Somers shifted his weight and began to work his way deeper into the brush. If he could get to the door—
“Detective Somerset,” Adaline called out. Her voice was close. Much too close for comfort. A branch whistled as it snapped through the air. “If you’re heading for the door, you’re going to be disappointed. I’ve locked it.”
Bullshit. She wouldn’t have had time to lock it. Somers tried to count backward: how long had he run? Thirty seconds? A minute?
“You’re thinking I didn’t have time. You’re thinking it’s a bluff. This would be a bad time to gamble.”
Somers wasn’t about to take the woman’s words at face value, but he also wasn’t sure he could take that risk. Running now meant leaving Meryl and Columbia to their deaths. Still crouched, Somers scuttled towards a bank covered in tall ferns. Columbia’s gun might still be in the clearing. Yeah, he thought bitterly. If Adaline were a complete idiot.
It seemed so ridiculous in hindsight. Adaline’s quiet, wilting nature had fooled him and Hazard. It might have been an act, but Somers was willing to bet it was something else—that a part of Adaline really was that shy, retiring woman. Like most people, though, Adaline was more complicated than she initially seemed, and in this case, it looked like Adaline was a hell of a lot tougher than Somers had guessed.
“How did you figure it out, Detective?”
The ferns were at least ten feet away, and between Somers and the ferns, the trees parted. When Somers crossed those ten feet, he would be a clear target. Leaves rustled, moving closer to him, and Somers tensed.
“Isn’t that how this is supposed to go?” Adaline’s voice, now that he heard it more closely, held a tremor. Perhaps she wasn’t as cold-blooded as Somers had guessed, but even so, she was a killer. Tremor or no, she would still kill Somers if she had the chance. “You lay out your brilliant deduction for me. Tell me piece by piece my mistakes. What gave me away?”
She wanted him to talk, Somers realized. She wasn’t trained in this kind of situation, and she was operating on a mixture of things she had seen in movies and her own common sense. She wanted him to say something so she could locate him. And, Somers realized with a flicker of wounded pride, she sounded like she honestly thought he was stupid enough to fall for that.
To be fair, she had fooled Somers and Hazard once already. The whole scene with Thomas’s dinner had been an elaborate performance. By that point, Somers now realized, Thomas had already been dead for several hours. The window had been opened, and that had thrown them off. Somers—and, for that matter, Hazard—had assumed that the killer had used the window either for egress or for disposal of incriminating evidence. That was why it had been so confusing not to find anything along the side of the house. If something had been thrown out of the study, they should have found it—but there was nothing to be found because Adaline had never thrown anything out the window. She had opened the window and disturbed the snow to make it look like something had gone down the roof. She had used something—the feather duster, most likely, Somers realized—to disturb the snow. And then she had left.
But she had accomplished exactly what she wanted: she had confused them about why the window had been open. And because the window had been open, the cold had made it impossible to determine Thomas’s time of death. He hadn’t died that night after a meeting with Columbia; the meeting hadn’t happened that night. In that regard, at least, Columbia had been telling the truth. Her meeting had happened much earlier, and it had ended successfully for Columbia. Most likely, Somers guessed, it had happened when everyone else had been out of the house. Columbia and Adaline had returned to confront Thomas. Then, for some reason, Adaline had killed Thomas.
Out of jealousy? Perhaps, or perhaps out of a sense of being wronged. She had been under-compensated compared to the other staff at Strong, Matley, Gross. It was easy for Somers to imagine what might have happened: Adaline had overheard the end of Thomas’s conversation, had heard him agreeing to Columbia’s demands, and had flown into a rage. She had killed Thomas—doubtless with the same gun that she carried n
ow. Where she had gotten the gun and where she had hidden it, though, remained questions for another time. Somers remembered now how Adaline had reacted when she had learned about Thomas’s will. She had been angry—not embarrassed, as she claimed, but angry because even in death, Thomas had dangled wealth just out of her reach by sealing it in a trust fund.
Somers realized that Adaline had been quiet for too long. He held his breath, listening for any movement: the rustle of leaves, a branch creaking, the scuff of shoes on loam. Nothing. She could be anywhere. She could be coming up behind Somers right then. She could be standing there, with the barrel of her gun less than an inch from his head, ready to pull the trigger, all because Somers had been too busy solving the murder and had forgotten to pay attention. He fought against the urge to twist and look over his shoulder; the movement would only make unnecessary noise and, most likely, betray his position.
Instead, Somers counted ten slow breaths, and his pulse eased its frantic rhythm. Still nothing that might indicate Adaline’s location. Somers counted another ten breaths, and then he launched himself across the narrow clearing and towards the bank of ferns. A gun fired.
Adaline must have been waiting for him to give himself away because the shot came too quickly for anything else. Something tugged at Somers’s jacket—the bullet? a low-hanging branch?—and then he landed face-first among the ferns. Their leaves feathered against his face, and Somers breathed in their mossy scent. Another shot rang out, and dirt sprayed up from the hill. Somers scrambled forward. The ferns would hide him. The ferns had better damn well hide him, or he’d be dead in the next few minutes.
Two more shots rang out, and Somers’s ears rang from the concussive noise. Five yards, three yards—
A branch cracked overhead, fell, and crashed into the ground less than a foot to Somers’s side. Bark and splinters stung his cheek. He heaved himself forward, reached the edge of the slope, and rolled down into a depression.
Then there was silence. His breathing came in staccato pulses, and Somers did his best to quiet the sound. How many shots had she taken? One at Somers. One at Columbia. Three more just now. The damn thing was, though, that he didn’t know the kind of gun she had. How many rounds could the magazine hold? Nine? Eleven? Fifteen? And damn it all to hell, if she’d picked up Columbia’s gun, or, for that matter, Somers’s, then she’d have plenty of ammo to spare. Enough, at least, to kill two unarmed women and one very stupid Wahredua detective.
Somers allowed himself one more moment. Above him, back in the direction he had come, footsteps rustled against leaves. It was time to move again. He got to hands and knees, testing lines of sight, but he saw nothing. After another heartbeat, Somers pushed himself to his feet and darted towards the densest line of trees.
To his surprise, though, he found himself at a dead end a moment later: instead of more black soil and sprawling tropical trees, Somers faced a wall of reinforced glass. Against the ashen light outside, Somers cast a translucent reflection in the conservatory wall. Once more he thought of—
—the ice age—
—the snow globe, that inverted snow globe with the storm outside and everyone trapped within the glass. That’s how his reflection seemed to him: inverted, as though he were the creature of smoke and the real Somers were somewhere else. Somewhere a lot warmer, he hoped.
More steps sounded, and Somers turned away from the noise. She was driving him towards the rear of the greenhouse. That was the thing about this place: it was a damn box, and if she kept moving in this direction, she’d pin him in a corner. She might sound scared, she might even look scared, but she definitely had enough nerve to corral a detective and put a bullet in his head.
For the moment, though, there wasn’t a better option. Somers followed the glass, chased by his faded reflection. He needed an advantage—either a way out of the conservatory, or a way of evading Adaline’s net. Well, what did he know about this place? When he’d been here with Hazard, they’d found a whole lot of nothing. Just the track that looped in on itself and the boiler room. The boiler room might work as a trap. If Somers could lure Adaline into the room, he could brace the door shut and, with any luck, lock Adaline away until the situation improved.
Just how, exactly, Somers was going to lure her into the boiler room seemed like an important question, but Somers dismissed it. For the moment, he had to survive long enough to get to the far end of the greenhouse.
As he slipped between the rippled bulk of palm trees, as the sticky-sweet banana leaves glued themselves to his jacket, as the familiar smell of lemongrass and magnolia grew stronger, Somers felt his movements becoming automated: check his surroundings, sprint to the next cover, breathe. Repeat. And as his body adapted to the demands he was placing on it, his mind turned back to the question of the murder.
That Adaline was the murderer was a simple fact. She had killed Thomas at some point in the afternoon—after his meeting with Columbia and before everyone had returned to the house—and she had staged a performance for Meryl and the detectives that made them believe Thomas was still alive. Combined with the open window and the drastically reduced temperature, it made determining Thomas’s time of death almost impossible.
There was, however, still the question of the text that Thomas had sent to Leza, the text that suggested a meeting with Columbia was going to happen that night. The text, which had been sent at half-past nine, had pushed all their estimates of Thomas’s death into the late evening. What had happened? Somers was sure the answer was staring him in the face, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The simplest answer was that Adaline had sent the text as another effort at misdirection, but that posed its own problems. In order for Adaline to send that text, she would have needed Thomas’s passcode, and Somers had seen firsthand with Hazard how difficult—
And there it was. In spite of the life-threatening danger, in spite of his burning muscles, in spite of the fatigue, Somers grinned. It was easy. A phone, once unlocked, stayed unlocked for a few minutes. Adaline must have gotten lucky; she had killed Thomas and noticed his phone was unlocked. Or maybe she had timed her shooting with that aim in mind. Once she had the phone, it would have been easy to schedule a text, which the phone would have sent automatically later that evening. When the phone locked itself again, it would have looked like it was impossible for anyone besides Thomas to use it. Somers knew, though, that this wasn’t the case: he had made the same point to Hazard the day before.
It would be satisfying to explain it all to Hazard. To see that normally reserved exterior crack as Somers explained what had happened. The crack in Hazard’s facade wouldn’t be deep—a hairline fracture at best. For all Somers cared, that was as deep as the Grand Canyon.
But before Somers had a chance to surprise Hazard, he had to get out of this place alive. The greenhouse had fallen silent. Aside from the irregular whisper of fans kicking on overhead, aside from the crinkle of snow batting the glass, there was nothing. No sound of movement that might indicate where Adaline was. And—this hit Somers as a shock—no more screaming and crying. What had happened to Columbia and Meryl? Were they dead?
Ahead, the trees and bushes began to thin, and beyond the glittering emerald screen, a metal door led into the boiler room. The door, Somers noticed, was still propped open. Instead of approaching the boiler room, though, Somers found a dense clump of bushes with long, spidery leaves, and took in his surroundings.
In this part of the greenhouse, the vegetation was sparse, perhaps because it was the end of the trail. The paving stones completed their loop here and doubled back towards the front of the structure. It was a part of the greenhouse where few people would linger—no doubt the intention of whoever had designed this place. A little farther down the trail, there was the bird feed dispenser, and beyond that, the orchids. People would hurry past this particular spot and, in most cases, they would never notice the battered metal door that led into the more utilitarian portion of the greenhouse.
Now that Somers found
himself near his goal, though, his original problem presented itself again: just how was he going to draw Adaline into the boiler room?
Footsteps interrupted his thoughts, and Somers shrank into the spidery leaves. Then copper hair flashed in the fluorescent lights, and Somers let out his breath. Meryl crept through the brush towards him, her hair now fallen completely free from its bun, her coat discarded at some point, dirt smudging her cheeks. Her gaze flitted around the tropical plants with the restless movement of a hunted beast: taking in everything and, in panic, seeing nothing. As though to prove the point, Meryl took another step and a branch cracked underfoot. The last of the color slid out of her face, and she froze.