Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  As they had turned off the road onto the narrower trail, Peterson stopped showing off on his snowmachine and settled down to steadily following the track that led along the gentle slopes between the Peters and Little Peters hills. The pace he set was faster than MacDonald would have chosen, but he managed to keep up, hoping that it wouldn’t be too much farther.

  Setting Hank to keep a watch on Greg Holman had seemed a good idea to him the evening they met to talk at Oscar’s. He had decided that it might accomplish two things: give him an idea what Holman was up to in his supposed search for his missing wife and allow him to keep track of Hank Peterson. Hearing from Jessie later of Peterson’s visit to Holman at his motel had made Mac wonder just what connection might exist between the two men. Had he made a mistake? Had Peterson been keeping track of Holman, or an arson investigator? Though he had not mentioned this possibility to Becker, he now thought he should when he had a chance.

  “Wake up, Jessie. Come on, wake up.”

  Without opening her eyes, Jessie knew immediately who was calling her name and shaking her shoulder. She had found Anne Holman, but not as she wished or expected. Her head hurt in two places, a throbbing on the left side, a sharp burning on the right. What had happened? She tried to move.

  Anne heard the groan that escaped Jessie’s lips, and saw her eyes blink open.

  “Oh, good. You’re going to be okay. I’m really sorry, but you shouldn’t have surprised me like that. How could I know it was you? I thought it was—”

  “What did you hit me with?” Jessie interrupted, but tried to move her head as little as possible for the moment. “It hurts—dammit.”

  “—Greg trying to get in—thought he’d found me. I hit you with a piece of firewood. I’m really sorry.”

  “Okay. You said that. Why does the other side hurt?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that. You fell against the nails in the door and cut yourself.”

  Which I wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t hit me, Jessie thought.

  Raising a hand, she felt deep scratches that the nails had made in her scalp—two or three long cuts, still oozing blood. On the opposite side was the lump Anne had raised with the firewood.

  “O-oh. Am I going to have headaches for the rest of my life? Where’s Tank?” she asked Anne.

  “Outside. I was afraid he’d bite me because I hit you.”

  Jessie listened and could hear him growling outside the door.

  “Stop that, Tank,” she called. “It’s okay. I’m all right; good boy.”

  His growls subsided, and he was quiet for the time being, knowing she didn’t need defending.

  Getting slowly to her knees, she waited out the renewed throbbing in her head.

  “Have you got any aspirin?”

  “Yes. I’ll get it for you.”

  Anne went across and retrieved her day pack from the corner that Jessie remembered it had been in when she was captive, brought back three aspirin and a bottle of water.

  “Thanks.”

  Swallowing them, Jessie looked around for her own pack. It stood across the room under the window, next to the rifle. Anne, seeing where she was looking, stepped between Jessie and these things and stood, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  She said nothing, only shook her head, but Jessie knew that if she tried to go in that direction, Anne could reach the gun first and would. She decided not to make an attempt yet, still feeling a little unsteady. Instead, she sat back down on the floor and waited for the aspirin to alleviate some of her headache while she figured out what to do next—a distraction, maybe, for she was not about to let her personal protection go that easily.

  Anne remained where she was, watching distrustfully, while Jessie looked around the cabin. A hint of steam rose from a large kettle and from the spout of an aluminum coffeepot on the stove. Near it, an untidy sleeping bag lay on a pad on the floor. The built-in bunk had been used as a countertop, food spread out over a couple of paper grocery bags—several cans of soup or stew, a large can of apple juice, a loaf of bread, a tub of margarine. The parka that Anne had borrowed hung on a shoulder-high post at the end—part of the foot board. It looked like Anne had been here for a day or two since she left Knik.

  “What are you doing up here, Anne? Why did you leave my place so suddenly when the fire started?”

  “You said it was time to go.”

  “Did you start it?”

  “No-o,” Anne told her indignantly. “Of course not.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know. But it wasn’t me.”

  “Then why’d you take off when I really needed your help?”

  “I was afraid,” she whined, and Jessie recognized the familiar it’s-not-my-fault tone. “You knew that. I told you Greg was coming after me. Why wouldn’t you believe me and help?”

  “How did you go? Nobody saw you on the road.”

  “I don’t think I need to justify myself to you. You just wanted me gone, so I went. Never mind how.”

  Jessie shook her head and instantly wished she had not.

  “That’s not enough. You’re just trying to slip out from under again. I want some answers. Did someone pick you up?”

  Anne stared at her belligerently, refusing to say any more.

  “Oh, for Lord’s sake, Anne. All right. How’d you get up here, then—and why?”

  “It’s a good place to hide.”

  “From who?”

  “Greg, of course. He followed me from Colorado, like I knew he would. I told you. You just didn’t care.”

  Whatever happens to Anne, someone else is always responsible, Jessie thought. Holding both hands to her aching head, she slumped forward in hurt and discouragement, elbows on knees. The fingers of her right hand came away sticky with blood that had run down the side of her face from the cuts in her scalp.

  “Have you got something I can use to wash this blood off?” she asked.

  Anne gave her another doubting look.

  “Hey. Just get me something will you? Please? What’s the matter with you?”

  Still watching, Anne went to her open suitcase that lay on the floor beside the sleeping bag. Taking out a towel, she dipped one end into the hot water on the stove, wrung it out, and brought it across the room. As she handed it over, Jessie took a deep breath and caught a scent she recognized. Startled, she looked accusingly up at the woman in front of her.

  “You took my lotion—my Crabtree & Evelyn freesia lotion. I can smell it on your hands. You didn’t have to steal it, Anne. If you’d asked, I would have given it to you.”

  But another memory was surfacing, immediately behind her astonished recognition. She had smelled the same scent just before someone had put a cloth soaked in some sleep-inducing chemical over her mouth and nose to knock her out—when she had been blinded by the light and unable to identify that person—when she had been held captive in this very cabin.

  “It was you up here in the dark, wasn’t it? You—”

  Her indictment was interrupted by a sudden thunderous pounding on the front door followed by Tank’s anxious bark.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Anne said, turning toward it, raising her hands as if to ward off an attack. “It’s Greg. It’s got to be Greg. He’s here.”

  The pounding continued, steadily, rhythmically, shaking dust into the room from the front walls of the cabin. It hung in the air like the motes Jessie remembered seeing when she’d been lying, bound, on the floor. She could see the heavy planks move with each new blow. Why didn’t Greg—if that’s who it was—just open the door and come in? For a second or two the noise stopped, then began again, lower on the door this time.

  “Anne. Open the door,” she shouted.

  “No-o. Oh, God, no. It’s Greg.”

  She whirled and grabbed up the rifle from under the window. Pointing it at the reverberating door, she stood facing it, an ugly expression of rage and hatred on her face. The barrel of the rifle caught the light as she raised it, her finger on the
trigger.

  “No,” Jessie yelled above the noise, and the other woman hesitated, glancing around. “You don’t know that it’s Greg, Anne. It could be someone else. Don’t shoot without being able to see who it is.”

  “Who else could it be?” She spat out her contempt, but there was a slight uncertainty in her voice. The rifle wobbled in her hands, and she did not pull the trigger.

  “It could be anyone,” Jessie told her, standing up and starting to move slowly across the room. “You won’t know unless you open the door and find out.”

  The barrel of the rifle was immediately turned in her direction.

  “Sit down,” Anne demanded coldly. “You’ve done enough to screw up my life. Sit back down and shut up. Just shut up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, you bitch. You and Greg thought I wouldn’t know that…”

  The pounding paused, then once again resumed, this time on the left side of the door by the hinges.

  Jessie sank back to her knees, astonished at the angry outburst and accusation. What was Anne talking about? The rifle barrel was turned back toward the crashes coming from outside.

  “Who’s there?” Anne called loudly.

  There was no answer but the clamorous pounding.

  “What the hell do you want? Go away.”

  No response.

  “Just open the door,” Jessie suggested again, calmly and just loud enough to make herself heard. “You’ve got to open the door.”

  It might be Greg Holman. But, if it was, she doubted that he really meant to kill his wife, especially with a witness, unless…

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Both of you? No, I won’t open it.”

  “Then let me,” Jessie begged. “You stay there—with the rifle—and I’ll open it, see who it is.”

  The indecision was unmistakable on Anne’s face. It was plain that she didn’t want to shoot some unknown person, but she was clearly convinced that it was her husband. Fear had drawn the blood from her face and tightened her mouth. She stared at the door and the pounding seemed to rattle her thinking along with the wall.

  “I don’t know…all right,” she said finally. “But I’m watching, so don’t think you can get away with anything this time. Just walk over there and open it, then step back.”

  Cautiously, Jessie got up and approached the door. As she reached out a hand, wondering why whoever was making such a noise hadn’t opened it already, the pounding suddenly stopped. For a long minute everything was utterly silent.

  “Who’s there?” she called and received no answer.

  Then she could hear someone walking from the cabin. Footsteps crunched in the sublimating snow and ice outside, growing fainter as they moved away, but no one spoke. Tank was quiet.

  Determined to see who it was, she grasped the handle of the door, thumbed the latch open, and pulled. The door did not move. Again she tugged, then suddenly realized the significance of the pounding.

  Whoever it had been had not been knocking—had not wanted to come in. What they had wanted was for no one inside to be able to go out. The door had been nailed solidly closed. She was, again, a prisoner in the cabin she had occupied ten years before, this time with Anne Holman. Why?

  Tank barked sharply outside again.

  Turning to look at Anne, who had lowered the barrel of the rifle and stood frowning uncertainly, Jessie caught sight of the smoke that was beginning to rise in a small but growing ribbon from between two of the foundation logs in the corner of the room.

  25

  BELOW THE CABIN, ON THE FLANKS OF THE LITTLE PETERS Hills, the three snowmachiners had followed Black Creek, crossed the ridge, dropped down along the frozen swamp, and turned west at Sand Creek. MacDonald, still managing to keep up, was surprised, when Becker suddenly stopped, to hear him swearing over the growl of his idling machine.

  “Hey, where’s Peterson?”

  “Bastard took off,” Becker told him, waving a fist in the direction of tracks that MacDonald could see swinging away to the west along the side of a slope and disappearing into a stand of trees. “He just goosed it all of a sudden and took off like a bat out of hell.”

  “Why?”

  “Evidently, he’s bailing out as tour guide,” Becker snapped angrily. “I’ll bet we’re not even close to that cabin—that he’s got us completely turned around and headed somewhere else.”

  MacDonald sat for a moment, thinking hard. Was this the answer to his question about Peterson’s eagerness to accompany them on this trip? Had he intended to lose them somewhere along the way? It would make sense if he were somehow involved in the confusion of fires and murder, responsible for some part of it, knew more than he had told.

  If he had meant to lose them and purposely gone—wherever—without them, where would Peterson be most likely to go?

  “Two ideas on where he’s gone,” he said to Becker. “Either he’s planning to leave us here and has gone back to the road, or he’s headed for the cabin by himself. If he’s involved, he’ll probably go to the cabin. You agree?”

  Becker nodded. “But why bring us out here at all?”

  “Who cares about his reasons? There’s nothing we can do now, right? I think we should go ahead and try to reach that cabin by ourselves—not follow his tracks off down the hill but go up there and hunt around till we find it.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to do much hunting,” Becker, who had been looking past him toward the top of the Little Peters Hills, said. “Somebody’s sending smoke signals.”

  MacDonald twisted around to look where Becker was pointing. A column of smoke was rising out of the trees just under the crest of the hill to their left.

  Later, recalling their wild ride up the hill toward that cloud of smoke that was larger every time they caught sight of it through the trees, he would wonder at his own ability to stay aboard the roaring snowmachine. Following close behind Becker, with periodic glimpses of the frozen Kahiltna River below them on the right, he somehow managed to keep to the tracks the trooper left with little awareness of their speed or the complicated maneuvers they executed in avoiding trees and brush that seemed to fly past. All his concentration was on reaching the source of the smoke and finding out what was burning.

  If Jessie Arnold was on that hill, it was clear to him that whoever had started another fire would not hesitate to add another victim to the growing list. She had barely escaped one blaze. Had this one also been lit in her name?

  “The cabin’s on fire!”

  Anne Holman, who had still been totally focused on the door, whirled at the word, caught sight of the growing cloud of smoke rising in the corner, and panicked. Dropping the rifle in a clatter on the floor, she ran to the door and began to yank repeatedly with all her strength at its immovable handle.

  “Oh, God—oh, God,” she shrieked with each yank. “Let me out. I’ll be good. Oh, ple-ease, let me out. Oh, God.”

  Unable to open it, she gave up, ran to the corner farthest from the smoke, flung herself into it, sank to the floor, and curled into a fetal position, face turned away from the sight that terrorized her, eyes tightly shut. There, she began to rock, bang her head against a log, and wail incoherently.

  Jessie’s first thought at seeing the smoke was more rational—put it out.

  “Water.”

  Grabbing the bottle of water she had used to take the aspirin, she dumped its contents onto the smoke, hoping to reach its source. For a moment, no more, the smoke thinned, but it was soon seeping in between the logs more heavily than before. Listening, she could hear the crackle of flames out of reach on the outside of the wall.

  Maybe it would help if she could pour water through from a higher crack. Snatching up a knife that lay on the edge of the countertop-bunk, where Anne had evidently been using it to make sandwiches, she dug at the insulation between two of the logs at waist level above the smoke. When she had extracted enough to open a narrow foot-long crack through which she could se
e daylight, she took the large kettle of hot water from the stove and carefully poured it through, so the majority of it drained down the outside. There was a sizzle of water hitting fire and a small amount of steam rose, but, when she looked down, the smoke that had been coming in at only one location had spread along the wall to her left and was now rising in three new places.

  There was no more water. It was time to get out somehow.

  “Anne,” she said sharply. “Anne. We’ve got to find a way out of here.”

  Huddled in the corner, Anne did not respond—didn’t even seem to hear.

  Crossing the room, Jessie took hold of her shoulder and jerked the woman around.

  “Help me, dammit. Do you want to burn?”

  The word elicited a moan from Anne, as she struggled to turn back and hide her face.

  Raising a hand, Jessie slapped her, hard.

  “I said help me.”

  “I can’t. I can’t. Oh, God, don’t let me die.”

  “You can. Grow up. We’ve got to get out, or we’ll burn with this place!”

  Pushing and shoving, she got Anne to her feet and dragged her toward the window, picking up the rifle from the floor on the way. Once there, she used the stock to knock out the dirty panes.

  The glass shattered easily, shards falling back into the room as they hit the boards that had been nailed across outside. When Jessie had broken off most of the sharp fragments that remained, however, and tried pounding at the boards themselves, she encountered not resistance but complete refusal. These boards, too, had been reinforced at some time with heavier, additional boards. The rifle stock was not heavy enough to knock them loose from the nails that held them securely.

  The air that now flowed through the broken windowpanes allowed a fresh supply of oxygen to reach and encourage the fire. Jessie could see that flames had followed the smoke and were beginning to finger the logs on the inside. From the loud crackling sound, it was evident that the fire was making headway and had involved most of the outside wall. The smoke grew thicker, billowing into the room, making it hard to breathe without coughing.