by Jessica Beck
“Have you been snooping through my things?” she asked me harshly.
Nicole smiled for one brief moment. Now she knew what we’d been up to when she’d caught us earlier. At least part of it, at any rate. “Instead of deflecting your anger, maybe you should explain yourself.”
“It was a standard form,” Dina said. “It’s not necessary at all.”
“Then why bring it with you for Nicole to sign?” Grace asked her.
“My boss insisted that I do it,” Dina explained. “You’re not going to pin anything on me, so you might as well not try.”
“What about the other paper we found in your case?” I asked her, smiling as sweetly as I could manage. “How are you going to explain that?”
Dina had been caught, and she knew it. “So what? Just because I practiced signing Nicole’s name didn’t mean that I was going to try to kill her.” She turned to her now former best friend. “I thought you might be stuffy about not signing it, and my boss said that if I didn’t bring it back with your signature on it, I’d be out of a job. I wasn’t really going to forge your signature. It was just an emergency backup plan.”
Nicole’s lack of comment was chilling enough. No matter what else happened until we were finally rescued, I knew that particular friendship was dead, now and forever.
Almost as an afterthought, Dina added, “I don’t know why you’re so upset about it. It’s not that big a deal.”
“It is to me, and the fact that you feel that way speaks volumes about your character,” Nicole said. She sighed heavily, and then she said, “All of this duplicity has made me tired of being around you all. I’m going for a walk, and don’t any of you try to stop me.”
I bounced up out of my seat. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Nicole.”
“And why not?” she asked me icily.
“I don’t mind you going out, but somebody’s going with you. If you don’t want Grace or me, I’m sure that someone else will be glad to accompany you, but like you said earlier, we’re sticking together from here on out. Whoever tried to kill you before might not miss the mark the next time.”
Nicole considered my words, frowned for a moment, and then she nodded. “Very well. I give up. You have all managed to beat me down to the point where I’m not even all that certain that I care about my personal safety anymore.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Celia said as she moved toward her sister. “I’m here for you.” She reached out and patted Nicole’s hand, who smiled softly at the gesture.
“Thank you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.”
“That’s all well and good,” Georgia said, “but we can’t exactly stay in each other’s hip pockets until help arrives. What are we supposed to do in the meantime?”
It was an excellent question.
I just wished that I had an answer for it.
Chapter 16
Dina walked over to the window and looked out. “Would you look at that? The snow is starting to melt.”
“Great,” Georgia replied. “We have three more hours of daylight, and then it’s probably all going to start freezing again. We’re never getting out of here, are we?”
“That’s not why I said it,” Dina replied as she grabbed the hooded sweatshirt she’d been issued along with the rest of us. “I don’t care if anyone comes with me or not, but I’m going to see if Hank’s body is still out there, so I don’t have to sleep with one eye open all night.”
“You can’t go alone,” Nicole commanded. “Regardless of how I feel about you, it’s much too dangerous.”
“Nobody’s trying to kill me. Besides, would you really be all that upset if I joined Hank at the bottom of that gulley?” she asked her. “Nicole, I said that I was sorry. I don’t know what else I can do.”
“You can pay her back the money you lost out of your own funds,” Celia said.
“If I could, don’t you think that I would?” Dina asked, and then she left us without waiting for reinforcements.
I grabbed my own sweatshirt and started out after her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Georgia asked me.
“It’s the buddy system, remember?”
“Wait for me,” Grace said.
It was clear that Nicole wasn’t happy about it, but she said, “That’s it. We’re all going.”
“If you’re coming, then you need to hurry up,” I said. I couldn’t wait around for them all to get their sweatshirts. Dina could be long gone by then.
I didn’t hesitate as I took off after her.
The only problem was that she wasn’t where I’d expected her to be. As I approached the spot where Hank had fallen over the side, there was no sign of Dina.
“Where did she go?” Grace asked me when she caught up with me.
“I have no idea,” I said. The snow was no longer good for seeing footprints, or anything else, for that matter.
“Can you see if Hank is still down there?”
“I haven’t had a chance to look yet.” Why was I hesitating? Was it because I was afraid that he’d be there or that he wouldn’t be?
Taking a deep breath, I peered over the side, half expecting to find Dina’s body down there beside him, locked in some kind of deathly tableau.
Enough snow had melted so that I could see the spot where Hank had landed clearly now.
The only problem was that there was no body there anymore. There was something dark near the line of trees, but I couldn’t say whether it was just a depression or an actual body hiding in the shadows.
Evidently Grace had been right.
The district manager might not have been killed instantly by the fall after all.
It appeared that he might be very much alive, and that led to all sorts of possibilities, none of them good for the rest of us.
“He’s gone,” Grace said after a moment looking over my shoulder.
“Why do you sound so surprised? You predicted it yourself this morning.”
“Saying it and believing that it’s true are two different things,” she said. “That still doesn’t explain where Dina is.”
In my discovery of Hank’s absence, I’d forgotten all about Dina. “She couldn’t have just vanished.”
“Why not? After all, Hank did,” Grace reminded me.
If she saw the same dark area below that I did, she didn’t mention it, so neither did I. “He didn’t just disappear. Clearly we overestimated the impact of his fall. That still doesn’t explain where Dina is, though.”
The others soon joined us, and it was up to me to break the news to them. “Hank’s body isn’t down there anymore.”
“I don’t believe it,” Nicole said as she peered down over the edge.
“We all saw him there! He was dead!” Janelle was in danger of losing it when Georgia grabbed her shoulders and gave her a hard shake.
“Snap out of it, Janelle! This is good news, remember?”
“To anyone but the person who shoved him,” Grace said softly beside me.
“Janelle?” I asked her softly. “Is there something you want to tell us?”
The implication of my question finally hit her. “What? Do you think I did it? There’s no way I’d shove him like that.”
“I was the original target, though, remember?” Nicole reminded her. “You had a beef with me, didn’t you?”
“Maybe so, but not enough to kill you,” she said.
“So you say,” Georgia answered, neatly pivoting back to the antagonist’s role yet again.
“Would you make up your mind?” Celia protested. “Either you’re this woman’s friend or you’re not. You’re driving us crazy with your flip-flopping. I’m just glad that Hank is still alive.”
She may have been the one to say it, but I was pretty sure that the rest of us had been thinking it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Georgia said.
“Enough,” I interjected. “We have two missing members of our party now, and it’s going to be getting dark in a few hours, so we need to find both of them.”
“How do you propose we go about doing that?” Nicole asked. She seemed fairly calm, given the circumstances.
“Half of us need to look for Hank outside, and the other half need to look for Dina. We don’t have a great deal of time, so we’re going to need to split up into two groups after all,” I said. “Grace, why don’t you and Celia come with me, and we’ll look for any sign that Hank climbed back up that hill, either here or somewhere else. Nicole, you take Georgia and Janelle and see if you can find Dina.”
It was fairly clear that Nicole wasn’t interested in the team I’d assigned her, but let her deal with her problem employees. I was done with their bickering, and I wasn’t all that certain that either one of them, alone, would be much better. Georgia took verbal shots at every opportunity, while Janelle’s martyr complex was getting on my nerves just as much. I hadn’t been all that certain about Celia at first, but after spending some time with her away from her sister, I was starting to warm up to her.
Nicole wasn’t having any of that, though. “My sister stays with me. You can have either one of mine, but I get Celia.”
“It’s okay,” Celia said, trying to calm her sister down. “I want to go with Suzanne and Grace. Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll look out for me.”
“You bet we will,” Grace said.
“I’m not so sure that I like being anyone’s second choice,” Georgia said, and I saw Janelle nod in agreement.
Before we wasted any more time debating, I said, “We’ll all meet back at the lodge when we’re finished. Be careful, everyone.”
With that, I led my team away from the edge and toward the road. I planned on going as far as I could on foot with Grace and Celia until I satisfied myself that Hank hadn’t come that way. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Nicole’s team heading for the boathouse, which was as good a plan as any. Maybe I should have taken the search for Dina for myself, but I thought tracking Hank down would be more complicated, and I’d had experience investigating before. Still, I hoped that Nicole would check the gazebo, the cottages, and even the maze. Dina could be anywhere.
For that matter, so could Hank.
“I still don’t know how he could survive that fall,” Celia said. “He’s strong, but I didn’t think he’d be that strong.”
“How well do you know him?” I asked her as we tracked the land below us by intermittently peering over the edge. In a hundred feet, I noticed something that I’d missed before. There was a hiking path of some sort below us, close to the level where Hank had fallen. What had looked to be an arduous climb after the fall was soon a worn path. The real question, though, was where did it ultimately lead?
Celia replied, “We had dinner together a few times. With Nicole, of course,” she said. Was that a glint in her eye when she spoke of him? Maybe little sister had a crush on big sister’s onetime boyfriend. It wouldn’t be the first time it had ever happened in the history of the world.
“What do you think about his relationship with your sister?” Grace asked her as we continued to walk toward the Shadow Mountain Resort entrance.
“They were never right for each other,” she said.
“How about you?” I asked her gently.
“What are you talking about? Me and Hank? No. No way. Of course not. That’s insane.”
She was protesting an awful lot over a lightly made suggestion, which led me to believe that was exactly what was going on. Celia must have been crushed when she thought that he was dead.
“Sorry. I was just wondering.”
“Well, you can put your mind at ease,” she said. “Hank and I are just friends.”
Was she actually blushing, or were her cheeks red from the cold? I couldn’t say. We approached the sign at the entrance, and I noticed something that I’d missed before. There was another, smaller sign off to one side. TRAIL TO WIDOW’S FALLS. So the path actually led somewhere after all. I had started down it when Celia grabbed my arm. “Where are we going?”
“Isn’t it obvious? We need to follow this path until we get to the spot where Hank fell.”
“He’s not there anymore, though,” Celia protested. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
“That doesn’t mean that he’s not still down there somewhere and in trouble,” I said. Another thought had occurred to me when I’d first seen that Hank was gone. The fall might not have killed him, but it still could have injured him badly enough to eventually end his life. I beat myself up for not realizing how close he’d fallen to an actual path. If we’d gone down there when it happened, we might have been able to help him. Then again, the trail we were now on, if it could actually be called that, was dangerous enough in the slush, even in the broad light of day. Doing it at night would have probably caused one or more of us to fall as well. I still wished that I’d known about it. Even with the odds against us, I wouldn’t have been able to rest until we’d at least tried. I hadn’t been that big a fan of Hank’s, but that didn’t mean that I’d wanted him to die out there in the elements, cold, injured, and alone. I wouldn’t wish that fate on my worst enemy.
We kept going on the path, keeping a lookout for any sign that Hank had passed that way, but there were no footprints to be seen, just layers of slush and mud beneath. Surely he would have made some kind of impact on the path if he’d come that way. By the time we got to the place where our trail veered away from the spot where Hank had fallen, I’d just about given up hope of finding him, dead or alive.
And then I spotted something fluttering in the breeze ahead of us.
Was it Hank or something else?
There was only one way to find out.
After I pointed it out to the others, we decided that we had no other choice but to press forward and see what it could be.
Unfortunately, we’d been right the first time, though not immediately.
Evidently, Hank had recovered enough from his fall to crawl a dozen feet away into the dense undergrowth beyond our line of sight from above, and it pained me to think of him as he tried to save his own life by inching his way along, only to die in the effort.
Chapter 17
“Oh, no,” Celia cried out the moment she spotted him. “I can’t believe he’s dead!” She threw herself onto the body before we could stop her, and her sobs tore through her as she mourned what might have been, at least in her mind.
I knelt down and put a hand on her shoulder. “Celia, I know you’re in pain, but we need to take a step back and think through what this means.”
“I know exactly what it means! It means that someone killed him!” she shouted as she turned on me.
I looked at Grace, and she came closer to us. In a calming voice, she said, “Celia, let’s step out of the way for a minute. Suzanne needs to check out a few things.”
“Like what?” she asked as she allowed Grace to help her up. “He’s dead! He feels so cold. I wish we’d brought a blanket with us.”
It didn’t make any sense given the circumstances, but I understood it nonetheless. I knew that at times like she was facing, doing anything was better than doing nothing at all, even if the end result was the same. Once Grace had her off to one side, I studied Hank’s body. His hands were bruised from his effort to crawl toward help, and there was blood on his left temple. He might have survived the fall, but the strike on his head had ultimately done him in. It hadn’t been an intentional murder, at least not as far as I could tell, but he’d still been killed in an attempt on someone’s life. If only he’d been able to give us a clue as to who had pushed him. I searched him as gently as I could, but I found nothing that might point to one of our suspects. If only he’d tried to leave us a mess
age with his last throes of life instead of trying to save it, we might know exactly who he’d saved Nicole from.
I stood and brushed off my hands.
Grace asked me, “Anything?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“That’s too bad,” she answered.
Celia looked at us as though we were speaking Greek. “Suzanne, what were you looking for?”
“Any indication as to who might have pushed him,” I admitted.
“What does it matter now?” she asked me. “He’s going to be just as dead whether we find anything or not.”
“Don’t you want his killer caught?” Grace asked her. “The only thing we have left to give him is justice.”
“You’re right,” she said, drying her eyes with the back of her sweatshirt arm. “But there’s nothing there, is there?”
“Maybe he left something at the place he fell,” Grace suggested.
“I’ll go look,” I volunteered.
“I’ll come with you,” Grace said, but Celia grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let her go.
“Do you have to leave me with him?” she asked, nearly sobbing again.
“No, I’ll stay with you,” Grace said as she shrugged in my direction and mouthed the word “sorry.”
It was up to me. I followed Hank’s path from where he’d fallen. It wasn’t as though it was a very hard trail to backtrack. He’d not only scraped the dirt on his way, but he’d also destroyed several small bushes and seedling trees, pulling himself along until he reached some kind of shelter. As I got closer to the spot where he’d landed, I searched the ground all around it. The slush left behind was translucent, and I could see if there’d been anything left behind.
As far as I could tell, there wasn’t.
Hank had died in vain after all, without leaving us a single clue.
But there still might be a way to work his demise in our favor. It meant lying to the others, but it was the only chance we had.