Snowfire

by Heather Graham

  “Sue!” Kristin felt her cheeks reddening.

  “Oh, how romantic!” Sue sighed. “The absolute fantasy. I always wondered what it would be like, the snow falling outside…”

  “Sue, you were telling me about Myra Breckenridge.”

  “Oh, well, what’s to tell?” Sue shrugged again. “She was a bitch. The night we were there was a disaster. Justin came in with us, and she was upstairs. She came running down insisting they had to go back to New York immediately. She barely acknowledged us when he introduced us, and when he told her he’d invited us for dinner, she said something like ‘How quaint.’ We felt like Ma and Pa Kettle.”

  Kristin leaned across the table watching her and grinned. “So what did Justin do?”

  “Oh, he wasn’t about to take anything from her. He told her to go right ahead and leave for New York, because if she was rude again, he’d send her packing himself. She shut her mouth and ran back upstairs and we didn’t see her again until much later.”

  “It must have been awfully awkward.”

  “Oddly enough, it wasn’t,” Sue told her. “Because Justin was charming. They had a cook there at the time—she came with them from New York, I think—and dinner was wonderful. He selected a great bottle of wine for me, and he and Roger sat there drinking beer like a couple of armchair quarterbacks. I’d never met a more natural man. Smooth. He eased over his wife’s behavior with incredible diplomacy.”

  “When did Myra reappear?”

  “Umm, near midnight, just when we were about to leave. And what a difference. She came down in jeans and a T-shirt. I’ve never seen anyone look quite so beautiful in jeans and a T-shirt. And this time she was nice, but it was all a fake. She apologized to Roger and me, she said she had been filming the week before, and she was exhausted. The funny thing about it was that…”

  Sue’s voice trailed away. Kristin frowned, watching her. She waited. “What?” she demanded then, anxiously. “What, what, tell me!”

  “Oh, well, the funny thing is that I think she did love him in her own way. I think she loved him a lot. But they were separated soon after that. She’d been playing in a plastic world so long that she just didn’t know how to cope in the real one, and he wasn’t that type. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Kristin nodded. “I … guess so.”

  Sue sighed softly again, staring at the stove. “I would have loved him.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Kristin said.

  Sue’s eyes shot to hers, riddled with guilt. “Oh, I didn’t mean that the way that it sounded. I adore Roger, you know that. I always have, and I always will. But…Justin is intriguing, don’t you think? Oh yes, well, obviously you agree. He’s got such great eyes. And a fabulous body. What am I telling you? You must know much more about that than I do—”

  “Sue!”

  “Sorry,” Sue grinned. But she couldn’t seem to help herself, and leaned across the table. “But I do want to know,” she said impishly.

  “Well, I want to know what you know about the murder,” Kristin shot back.

  “Oh, that,” Sue said. “I imagine you know more about that than I do, too. I heard about it after the fact. We were happy for Justin, of course, because Snowfire had just opened, another great play like all his others. Rave reviews. We hadn’t seen him in a long, long time. Then we read about the murder in the paper. We heard about it from the sheriff, too. And he seemed unhappy that they’d arrested Justin, because he knew Justin, too. But he and Myra hadn’t been getting on, and all the others there said he’d threatened to kill her just that night. Everyone knew she’d been playing around, and while they were separated, she was still his wife. Personally…”

  “What?” Kristin said, exasperated. Sue kept coming to the point, and then she’d quit speaking.

  “Oh, well, personally… I don’t think he was in love with her anymore. I don’t think she could have made him jealous enough to want to kill her.”

  “But if she was so beautiful…”

  Sue shook her head. “You may become infatuated with someone because he or she is beautiful. But you can’t love them blindly for it. Not forever. Justin needed more from a woman than Myra Breckenridge could give. Maybe she wasn’t capable of more. It’s hard to say. The whole situation was so sad. Roger and I would have been more than willing to stand as character witnesses for him, but he never asked us and it never became necessary. They simply couldn’t convict him on the evidence they had. It was all circumstantial.”

  “All this was going on in my own cousin’s backyard and I didn’t even know it,” Kristin said.

  “You were just divorced at the time and trying to avoid the family,” Sue reminded her shrewdly. She shrugged. “And we never mentioned Justin afterward because he came here to get away from the curious. And you were never a rag reporter. You do in-depth things on the environment or orphans or animals. I’d have never thought that you’d want to do anything on Justin Magnasun.”

  “It’s a pity you can’t tell Justin that,” Kristin murmured.

  “Oh! Well, I’ll tell him. I’ll be delighted to tell him—” Sue began.

  “No! I’ve nothing at all to say to him anymore. Nothing at all.”

  “Kristin, if that’s just pride—”

  “It’s not pride. It’s survival,” Kristin said firmly. “Besides, he had nothing to say to me. And I trusted him, Sue. Even when he announced he had been accused of murder, I trusted him!”

  Sue was silent for a minute. “Think of it from his perspective. A reporter has called looking for a good piece of gossip. Then this young attractive woman appears at his door in the snow. She seduces him—”

  “I never—”

  “Okay, but it sounds better that way,” Sue said pragmatically. “She doesn’t seduce him, she charms him into seducing her.”

  “It was a mutual decision over chess,” Kristin said primly.

  Sue cast her a quick doubting glance and then continued. “Okay, they seduce each other—a mutual decision over chess—and then he finds himself giving her all sorts of information about himself. Then he discovers that she is a reporter. What did you expect from him?”

  “I expect,” a voice announced from the hallway, “that I should have taught you how to play chess better!”

  Kristin swung around.

  Roger was leaning against the door frame. “Then this whole thing might have been prevented!”

  “How long have you been standing there listening?” Sue demanded.

  “The chess part, that’s all,” Roger said woefully. “Just think, if I had been a better teacher, she could have put him into checkmate and they could have moved on to backgammon or checkers instead of sex.”

  “Oh, Lord!” Kristin groaned, allowing her forehead to fall against the table. “I swear, if you two don’t have a heart soon, I’m going home.”

  “The roads aren’t clear yet,” Roger told her, rubbing her nape affectionately. “Hey, kiddo, we’re really just trying to make it better, you know,” he told her softly.

  She lifted her head and smiled. “I know.” She sighed, then she sat straighter. “Do you know what?”

  “What?” Roger and Sue said in unison.

  “I am going to do a story on Justin Magnasun.”

  “Oh, boy, he’ll really trust you then,” Roger said.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? What matters is that…”

  “Is that what? What?” Sue demanded.

  Kristin grinned ruefully. She was doing it now herself. “Well, the real killer has never been apprehended. Maybe I can find something, some motive, some evidence, against someone else.”

  “And maybe the killer was just someone out for a walk that night,” Roger told her. “They could never tell anything from the footprints—there were far too many all over the estate.”

  “Roger, do you really believe that a killer just stumbled through a town this small to murder a woman at a remote estate?” Kristin asked him.

>   “No, I don’t. But it isn’t impossible.”

  “But it’s far more probable that it was someone there. A motive, Roger, that’s what we need.”

  “That leads you right back to Justin.”

  “That’s because the entire thing hasn’t been properly investigated,” Kristin told him. She could feel the excitement for the task ahead sweeping through her.

  She had, of course, told Justin that she never wanted to see him again. She’d been absolutely furious with him. She was still absolutely furious with him.

  She did owe him. He had saved her life. If she had stayed in her car, she’d have frozen to death. Even if he had been an unwilling host, he hadn’t let her die.

  For that, she would prove him innocent.

  No matter what it would seem to prove to him about her.

  She knew she was still in love with him. Not even the depths of her hurt and anger could take away the strength of that emotion.

  The three of them suddenly started as a loud whirring sound was heard from outside.

  “Snowplows,” Sue said briefly. “The roads will be cleared soon enough now.”

  “We can go see about your car.”

  “Oh,” Kristin said stiffly. Her car was too close to Justin Magnasun’s house. “Roger, couldn’t you just—”

  “No, you can come with me,” he said.

  “You’re cruel.”

  “I am not. I can’t drive two cars back to the house.”

  He smiled, and left the room.

  “Sue—” Kristin began.

  Her cousin-in-law shook her head. “I think you should go, too, Kristin. I mean, you’re not afraid of him, are you? At this point?”

  There was an innocent innuendo there. “I’m not afraid of him,” Kristin said.

  Sue stretched out a hand across the table, covering Kristin’s fingers. “Kristin, I think this is madness. Don’t go investigating this case. For one, you could get hurt. The real killer can’t possibly want to get caught, and someone who has killed once might find it very easy to do so again. And there is still the matter of you and Justin—”

  “No,” she said softly. “Sue, he said horrible things to me. Really horrible things.”

  “Well, Roger has said a few to me, too. And I’m certain that I’ve done the same to him. But I love him, and I know that he loves me, and we kiss and make up and get by those things. Take a chance, Kristin! You’ve never trusted anyone, not since your marriage. And you had something there. Something that must have mattered very much.”

  “I can’t forgive him. And he doesn’t even want to be forgiven. He certainly hasn’t made any attempt to come after me.”

  “What do you want? The white knight to come and sweep you up on a white charger?”

  “Yes, maybe. I don’t know. Oh, Sue, I don’t really want anything at all. I just want him to come and tell me that the days we had together really meant what we said they did. I want him to know that I didn’t come there to use him in any way because he knows me—and knows I wouldn’t do something like that!”

  “Maybe he does—”

  Kristin shook her head firmly. “No.”

  Sue sighed. “Well, you’re going to need your car. To investigate him.”

  “You won’t go for me?”

  “You’re really not afraid of him?”

  “Oh!” Kristin threw up her hands in exasperation. “What if I said I was afraid of him?”

  “I’d tell you not to be,” Sue said complacently. She was standing and picking up the few breakfast dishes that remained on the table. She set a plate in the sink. “At least, I’m almost positive that you shouldn’t be.”

  “That’s like Roger. He thinks Justin isn’t a murderer.”

  “Well? We’re behind him.”

  “No,” Kristin said softly. “I know he’s not a murderer. There’s a big difference.”

  Sue smiled, her eyes lowered. “Then you definitely aren’t afraid of him. So go change that bathrobe and go and get your car.”

  “Can I borrow something else to wear?” Kristin asked her, staring down at the soft pink fluffy robe of Sue’s that she had already borrowed.

  “Make yourself at home. My closet is yours,” Sue said.

  And Kristin gave up on being reprieved and went to get dressed.

  As it happened, though, the plows didn’t finish the job that day, and it was the next morning before Kristin and Roger could venture out to try to retrieve the Cherokee from the snowbank.

  As they neared Justin’s property, Kristin studied the lovely, clean lines of the house. She had never really looked at it from the outside before. She could see the glass windows of the breakfast room off the kitchen and she bit her lower lip, remembering how she had sat in a window seat with Justin, watching the snow fall. The room had been so warm. And the kitchen had seemed as if it had been created for her, with her love of cooking and gadgets. She’d been wonderfully comfortable there.

  Though Justin had never explained it, she thought she understood now. The house had originally been a dream for him. A place to go with someone he loved. To share long winter nights. Maybe to learn to cook together. To make delicious dinners and sip hot coffees.

  Myra had just had different dreams.

  But to Kristin, the house had been perfect. She had loved it, every inch of it. She’d been so comfortable.

  So at home.

  With his house…

  With him.

  She gritted her teeth and looked away from the house just as Roger began to slow his Blazer.

  She thought back to the day when she had arrived here. The car had stalled first at the end of the driveway leading to the house. She thought she had driven quite a distance after that. It had certainly felt like it when she had been trudging back on foot. But she hadn’t really. Not at all. She had merely made it around a curve where the road skirted the hill on which the house sat. A few hundred yards perhaps. And the house, the big beautiful house, was clearly visible, sitting up on the hill. In the daylight, the property was even lovelier than she had remembered it.

  The snowbank around her car had been partially cleared, as if some kindly state employee had seen her plight and done his polite best to help her out. She made a mental note to write a letter of thanks to the proper department to see that credit went where credit was due.

  But there was only so much that a snowplow could do to help. The nose of the Cherokee was still pointed into a huge pile of snow. The front wheels were caught in it, but the back of the vehicle was clear. She could see all her belongings piled up in the back, her suitcases and overnight bag, her little laptop computer and her small dot matrix printer. One of the suitcases had popped open and some of her clothing was floating on top of the bags. It was the wrong suitcase. Soft frothy underwear and a pastel nightgown seemed incongruous spilled out there, so close to the snow.

  “You still pack well, I see,” Roger told her.

  “Oh, will you shut up!” Kristin begged him.

  He shrugged. “Well, I’ll attach a chain and see if the Blazer can drag her out,” he said.

  “What do I do to help you?”

  “Leave me alone, for the moment, I think,” he told her pleasantly.

  She made a face at him and leaned against the side of her car, staring out at the forest of trees on the other side of the road. She hugged her arms around herself, shivering. The snow had stopped, but it was bitterly cold outside. There were icicles hanging from many of the trees. The sun, however, was trying to appear. The sky was both blue and gray, still a winter sky. The ice and snow was still spotlessly clean, though. The picture was beautiful, a fairy-tale land, encompassed in a glasslike splendor.

  And this was Justin’s world.…

  It was also where Myra Breckenridge had died. She had hated it here, hated the wintry beauty.

  He hadn’t done it, she was certain. Then she was angry with herself for being so determined he was innocent.

  He wasn’t determined as she was.


  But being here…

  She closed her eyes for a minute, trying to imagine the party. It had been winter. Winter, like this. Snow would have lain on the ground, thick. The air would have been cold. Myra was still in love with Justin, but he was no longer in love with her. He had written a play for her, though, a starring vehicle for her. And the major actors had been gathered, a cast of beautiful people, people who were bigger than life. Then there were the agents, Justin’s and Myra’s. All gathered at the house, with the play a huge success.

  Who could possibly have wanted Myra dead? Had it been a crime of passion, or had someone planned it out carefully? What had the conversations been about that night? And what had been the undercurrents within the house?

  What an interesting gathering it must have been. Myra, so very beautiful, so highly adulated, but perhaps feeling the strain of the passing years beneath her veneer of casual confidence and command. And the other woman …what had she been like? Roxanne Baynes, the ingenue in the play, young, just beginning. She wouldn’t have had a chance to grow so jaded.

  Had she been a threat to Myra?

  Myra was the one dead, Kristin reminded herself. Not the lovely young ingenue. Time to try again.

  What about the men? The handsome leading man, Jack Jones. Perhaps he had been in love with Myra. Secretly. Perhaps she had made him terribly jealous.

  What of the critic? Maybe he had been blackmailing Myra.…

  It seemed hopeless. She didn’t know any of them, and she couldn’t just imagine a motive for murder.

  But what about the critic’s wife?

  She started suddenly, violently, hearing a voice.

  “You want the hooks down on the bumper like that?”

  She pushed away from the car, suddenly wary, and taken by surprise.

  It was Justin’s voice she heard.

  She stared at him with a certain panic as he came crunching across the road with Roger’s towline. He was wearing a ski jacket and his shoulders looked huge, making him seem even taller than he already was. He was hatless, and his dark hair had fallen free over his forehead. His eyes were a brilliant blue near the dark hair and his ruddy cheeks. She felt her stomach and heart lurch as one, and she gritted her teeth, fighting a wave of emotion that took her entirely off guard.