“No,” I said. “But I will do this for you: I won’t tell any other game-players that the prank isn’t a part of Curt’s mystery. That’ll give your team one up on everybody else.”
“Deal,” she said, and we shook hands.
They got up and wandered off, Jenny glancing back and reminding me that if I didn’t keep my end of the bargain, I’d have to talk to her lawyer; and Jill sat down.
“Who was the dish you were talking to?” she said.
“Don’t pinch me again, please, I think I’d cry.”
“I meant the guy,” she said.
I smiled and shook my head and filled her in. “How were the other interrogation sessions?”
“Interesting,” she said, her tan face impassive. “I don’t have any insights into your fellow suspects, though, I’m afraid. Nobody seemed particularly nervous, including Janis Flint. But one funny thing... did you know that what happened outside our window last night is getting itself worked into the weekend mystery?”
“Tell me about it,” I sighed. “I tried to do some fancy footwork around that and fell all over my feet. How’d the other suspects do, fielding it?”
She lifted one eyebrow for a moment. “A couple of them, it really threw. Specifically, Tom and Pete. Tom actually broke character for a moment and said he didn’t know anything about that.”
“Hmmm. How about the questioners?”
“I’ve got the names of a few intense types written down in my little notebook.”
“Good. Let’s go back to the room; I want to try to call Rath again.”
“Okay. Then some lunch, and then you have to give a little talk, right?”
“Right.”
“And then maybe we can bust out of this joint.”
“I don’t think so. I’m supposed to be on a panel after that, filling in for the missing Mr. Rath.”
“No you aren’t,” she said, with a certain glee. “Tom told me to tell you his private-eye panel won’t be till tomorrow afternoon; Curt’s own talk has been moved up in its place. So it’s official. We’re going over the wall, pal.”
I sat up; sought to be a man despite my nebbish exterior. “Oh yeah? You’re not going to drag me along on some damn nature hike, are you?”
“I most certainly am.”
“Jill, you disappoint me. What was the first thing the pioneers did when they got to the wilderness?”
“I know, I know. They built a cabin and went inside. You’ve told me a million times. But I’m not standing for being cooped up all afternoon with these mystery maniacs and puzzle paranoids—not when there’s a big beautiful outdoors waiting for us out there!”
“Okay. But you owe me one.”
She looped her arm in mine and batted her cornflower blues. “Sure. You can collect right now, back in the room.”
“Before lunch?”
“Why not? But you have to promise me one thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“You’ll leave the little mustache on....”
10
The Mohonk Hiker’s Map listed Sky Top as a “moderate walk” (as opposed to those walks labelled “short and easy” or “strenuous”). If this was a moderate walk, Mussolini was a benevolent dictator.
Of course, just on general principles, I hate the Great Out-of-Doors. I grew up on a farm, and from my early childhood swore I would one day live in the city—Port City, as it turned out, but that counts, technically at least. Will Rogers said he never met a man he didn’t like; I never milked a cow I liked.
The last period of my life during which I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Great Out-of-Doors was a place called Vietnam, where roughing it meant something other than a Winnebago and a six-pack of Bud. Camping trips don’t appeal much to those of us whose boondockers got soggy in a rice paddy. I swore to myself if I ever got back on good old dry American soil I’d spend as much time as possible indoors. Or, as I like to put it, the Great Indoors.
If this seems irrational and rambling, well, so was my state of mind as I climbed with the lovely Jill Forrest—whose very name suggests a kinship to trees, and she can have them—making our way up a seemingly ever-narrowing path with the mountaintop our goal.
Why does one climb such a path? To get to the top. And what does one do once one gets there? One hikes back to the bottom. Ask me why I do not want to climb a mountain and I will tell you simply: because it’s there.
“Quit grumbling,” she said, a few steps ahead of me but not, unfortunately for her, out of earshot. Her rear end looked cute in the black ski pants, which matched her black ski jacket, which matched her black-and-white stocking cap.
“I hate this,” I said. My jacket wasn’t wintry enough and, even with the sweater on underneath it, I was cold. The path, which had begun deceptively wide, now left barely room for two people; my legs ached from walking on this bed of snow-dusted pine needles and twigs and rocks.
“No kidding.”
“Let’s turn back. The snow’s really coming down.”
And it was. Not a blizzard, but it had been lightly snowing all day, and it did seem to be picking up.
“Sissy,” she said.
“No, really,” I said. “There’s some ice in it. If it keeps at it, we could have a rough time getting back down, once we get up. By rough I mean slippery.”
And, I should point out, that while at our left was a forest not unlike Jill’s last name, at our right were a few rocks and a whole lot of drop-off. Of the plummeting-to-the-earth-flailing-your-arms-and-legs-and-screaming-holy-hell-all-the-way-down variety.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, stepping on one of the roots that served as a step and slipping just a little, despite her boots. I caught her, even though I was wearing Hush Puppies, and she looked back at me and, with friendly malice, stuck out her tongue. She got snow on it.
“Let’s go back,” I said.
“No! We’ll rest a minute.”
Well, I needed the rest—we were probably halfway up this goddamn glandular-case hill, and I had shin splints and sore calves—but, as I pointed out to her, pausing to rest would only allow the snow to gain on us.
“Coward,” she said, and veered off from the path to the right—you remember the right: a sheer drop-off to nothingness?—across some boulders to a gazebo, where she plopped her pretty butt down on the rough wooden bench and waited for me to develop the cojones to join her.
I did, finally, even if my cojones hadn’t yet developed, and if they hadn’t by my age they were unlikely to, and we sat and squinted down at a cold, gray, but eerily beautiful vista that included the blue-gray expanse of frozen Mohonk Lake and the oversize Victorian dollhouse that was the hotel. Mountain house.
“Takes your breath away,” she said.
“So does a seven-hundred-foot fall.”
She pursed her lips in a smirk. “You’re so romantic.”
“I’m so cold. Let’s press on.”
We both slipped a little on the boulders, heading back for the path, where I pointed out the snow was undisturbed.
“So?” she asked, taking the lead again.
“So, we’re the only ones today foolhardly enough to make this trek, in the snow, in the cold.”
She glanced back. “That’s because the hotel is filled with crazy people. They don’t want to enjoy the scenery. They don’t want to drink in God’s grandeur.”
“You can’t drink it if it’s frozen.”
“They,” she continued, ignoring me, not glancing back anymore, “would rather stay inside and try to solve some phony mystery.”
I didn’t quite understand the appeal of that, either, but I didn’t admit it to Jill; I had enjoyed playing a suspect, but playing detective—if the crime wasn’t real, anyway—held no fascination for me.
“They,” she continued to continue, “would rather sit in a drafty hall and listen to some pompous windbag talk about his theories on mystery writing.”
“Low blow!” I said.
“You wish,” she said.
And now she glanced back, and her smile would’ve been impish, if I were the kind of writer to use a word like impish.
I caught up to her; there was just room enough on the snowy path to walk two abreast. Depending on the size of the breasts.
“I thought my little talk went pretty well,” I said, in a mild pout.
She smiled warmly, despite the cold. “So did I, really. You were cute as lace pants.”
“That’s a Raymond Chandler line.”
“I know. You had me reading Farewell, My Lovely last week, remember?”
“I remember. Did I really seem pompous?”
“Not at all. You were funny.”
I had gotten a few good one-liners off. Not during the speech itself, which was a fairly serious discussion of the difficulties I’d encountered turning real crimes into fictional ones. In my case, some of my books were derived from my own life—crimes I’d been caught up in; times when I had played detective for real.
But the question-and-answer session had gone especially well, and that’s where I managed to get a few laughs.
“Are you going to turn this weekend into a novel?” one of them had asked.
“Not unless I find a body,” I’d said.
Which got a particularly nice laugh.
Only a part of me didn’t find that so funny—the part that was still trying to figure out whether what I’d seen out my window last night was histrionics or homicide.
And, before my little speech in the big Parlor, where high windows looked out on the lake and pictures of old Smileys (the Mohonk founding family) looked down on me and my audience like the bearded faces on cough-drop packages, I had discovered something disturbing: Kirk Rath had indeed not made it home yet.
From our room I had called the business number at Rath’s house and got one of his coeditors.
“No sign of Kirk here,” he had said, followed by a nervous laugh. Whenever somebody from the Chronicler called me on the phone—which they did from time to time, to acquire publishing information for their news column—they invariably followed whatever they stated or asked with a nervous laugh. I read that as embarrassment out of having to deal face-to-face, even if it were over the phone, with another human being whose work they had inhumanly lambasted in their smug pages (and if you don’t think a page can be smug, you’ve never read the Chronicler—even the ink is smug).
“Do you expect Kirk?” I asked him.
“No. He’s on vacation this week.”
“Well, he was here at Mohonk.”
“Oh, you’re calling from the resort?”
“Yes. And Kirk left here last night. I wondered if he’d gotten home yet.”
“No, but then we don’t expect him. He was going to go into New York City after Mohonk.”
“Business?”
“No. Vacation. We don’t even have a number to reach him.”
“Does he do that often?”
“Now and then, Mallory. But why the questions?”
“I need to talk to him. Personal matter.”
“Oh. Well, he may have told Rick Fahy where he was going.”
“Rick Fahy... isn’t he one of your contributors?”
“Yes. He’s there at Mohonk, playing the mystery. We’re going to do a story on the weekend from the point of view of an attendee.”
“I’ve never met Fahy; I’ll look him up and ask him.”
“Fine. If Kirk does show up, would you like me to have him call you?”
“Yes, immediately. Here at Mohonk. My room number is sixty-four. I’ll be here till Sunday afternoon.”
I’d made one other call, to the guard who’d been on duty at the Gate House last night. Mary Wright had provided his number. He hadn’t seen Rath leave, but that didn’t necessarily mean Rath hadn’t left.
“I log in every car that enters,” he said, a young voice, college kid maybe, “but don’t pay much attention to who leaves.”
It seemed a good number of Mohonk employees were residents of nearby New Paltz, so a rather steady stream of them left during the evening hours. Rath, if he had left, left unnoticed.
Which meant my question about the reality, or lack thereof, of what I’d witnessed out my window remained no closer to being established. All this really nailed down was that Rath did not leave and come back through the Gate House, because if he had, he’d have been logged in.
And now I was in the Great Out-of-Doors, on a rocky, rootveined hard dirt path upon which icy snow was settling, only it was too late to turn back. We were almost there.
And in five minutes, we were. Our path merged with a crushed-rock road, a one-lane affair used by horses and service vehicles (our map called it a carriage road), which had wound its own way to Sky Top, that plateau where on a clear day you could see forever, or anyway New Jersey and four or five other states. This wasn’t a clear day but, from the outcroppings of boulders along the edge, you could see a panorama of winter gray, broken up by evergreens, that did take the breath away, or maybe it was just the climb.
“Oh, Mal,” Jill said, her gloved hand grasping mine. “Isn’t it breathtaking!”
“Maybe it’s just the climb,” I offered, but I smiled at her.
Sky Top was a clearing about half the size of a football field, and in its midst was a tower of rough-cut stone, a fairly squat two stories or so, with a spire that aspired to another story, capped by a gray-green helmet wearing a flagpole. No flag flew today, and when we tried the tower door, it was locked.
The crushed-rock carriage road extended around the tower, and as we strolled, gloved hand-in-hand, around it to try out another view from Sky Top, we noticed something.
A car.
A car parked on the carriage road, behind the tower. It was fairly well covered with snow, a sporty little dark blue Fiat. I tried the doors, but they were locked. I rubbed the frost from a side window and peered in. On the backseat a stack of magazines sat like a forgotten passenger.
The latest issue of The Mystery Chronicler, forty or fifty copies, probably.
“I think I know whose car this is,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Jill asked; her eyes were wide.
“Let’s have a look around.”
We found him in one of the outcroppings of rocks. Like his car, he was fairly well covered with snow. The front of his jacket was slashed and blood was dried there, or frozen, or something. Dark and crusty, whatever it was. His face was slashed several times, and the wounds were not recent; they had snow in them, and were jagged and crusted with black blood, but the features were recognizable.
It was Kirk S. Rath, all right.
And Jill, not being a stereotypical female, did not scream; neither did I. I’d seen dead bodies before. I’d even seen this dead body before. I bent over him, poked at him a bit: no question he was gone. There seemed to be two deep wounds in his chest; those stab wounds, not the facial slashes, had killed him. Rath’s face seemed oddly passive, for having been slashed; peaceful, youthful, though older than this you don’t get. I checked his pockets. His billfold, containing several hundred dollars in cash, was intact in his back pocket. The envelope in which he’d received his mystery weekend instructions was folded in his pocket; in it was the list of the suspects in his—or Roark K. Sloth’s—murder.
Then I backed away from him. Away from the rocks, away from the drop-off, away from the long, cold fall. For all my bitching, I hadn’t noticed the sound of the storm till now; but now the wind seemed to be fairly screaming. The snow was really coming down, now, and there was indeed ice in it. Crystals glistened on the slashed face of the corpse sprawled on Sky Top’s rocks.
Jill and I stood shivering together, not entirely from the cold, and then started down. The map suggested walking the carriage path on the return, for a “gentler” return trip. But our near-panic and the increasing snow and the steepness of the way had us stumbling, sliding. By the time the carriage road intersected with Sky Top Path at the foot of the mountain, we were walking through a blizzard
. We were just about to really panic when suddenly the Mountain House loomed before us.
11
We stood under the bare beams of the east porch, breathing hard and smoky, shaking the snow off our clothes onto the bare gray wooden slats beneath us. Despite the blizzard out there, the direction of the wind was such that the floor of the open porch was barely dusted with white, when I’d expected it to be drifted. Which it soon would be—the wind was whirling and would get around to it; the lake already was gone, its gray-blue surface buried beneath the white. Faces in the windows along the porch stared out into the ever-whitening world, some awestruck, others indifferent, while below the windows countless rocking chairs made a wooden chorus line. This time of year no one sat out in them, not in this cold, so the chairs were turned on end, rockers up, like a row of curved yellowed tusks in some elephant’s graveyard.
We stamped the snow from our feet on the mats inside the porch doors, but didn’t take off our outer winter clothing, barreling right on into the Lake Lounge, where Curt Clark was giving an informal question-and-answer session during the traditional Mohonk afternoon “tea”—cookies and cups, very genteel. Just like in a British drawing-room mystery.
Only I didn’t remember grotesquely maimed corpses like Kirk Rath’s showing up in such polite mysteries; or, if they did, the author would present an image considerably more tasteful than the police-photo-accurate dead-body picture that was burned in my brain like a concentration camp tattoo.
Curt glanced at me, smiled, squinted, not knowing what to make of our barging in, all bundled up and with winter dandruff on our shoulders. A hundred or so Mystery Weekenders were seated at tables and some again sat Indian-style on the floor as he stood before them fielding their questions, one of which he was currently in the process of answering: “So, while you may find it hard to accept, there are several movie versions of my novels that I have not seen. That I refuse to see. Friends have warned me off them. And I trust my friends.”
Upon the word friends he had glanced at me, squinting again, shaking his head in some unasked question. Perhaps my expression was sufficiently grave to tell him something was up; I glanced at Jill and her expression told nothing—like the Great-Out-of-Doors we’d just left behind us, her face was frozen.
Nice Weekend for a Murder (A Mallory Mystery) Page 9