by Mark McNease
Kyle stared at her.
“Look at this,” he said to Danny. Danny had been resting in bed reading an old New York Post he’d brought with them. Kyle never understood why Danny liked reading that paper, given its politics, but he knew it was a guilty pleasure, like watching a reality TV show that wasn’t real in any way and that made the human race seem doomed.
Danny got out of bed and walked over to the table where Kyle was sitting with the laptop. He peered at the old photograph. “It’s a girl,” he said.
“Well, yeah, but does she remind you of anyone?”
“I can’t say she does, sorry.”
“Look closer.”
Danny leaned down and peered at the photograph.
“Oh my God.”
“Yes,” Kyle said. “Our table mate from St. Paul.” He slid the laptop away and started to pace. “I need to get into that room.”
“Her room?”
“No, Teddy’s. I need something solid to take to Sikorsky.”
“Isn’t this enough?” Danny asked, nodding at the article on the laptop.
“No, it’s not. But I think there’s something to be found . . . and I think Teddy found it. Maybe Happy, too. Or Teddy told him, or something like that. Their deaths are connected, I’m certain of that. And if we trace the line back, back, we can trace it all the way back to a house in Los Angeles thirty years ago.”
“You should call Sikorsky now,” Danny said. “This is dangerous territory. You could get hurt, Kyle.”
“I won’t get hurt. And I will talk to her, soon. Dylan will help me, he’s already panicking over these suspicions he has. He’ll let me in Teddy’s room and I’ll find something there, I’m sure of it. Then I call the police.”
“You have to promise me.”
“I promise,” Kyle said. “Cross my heart . . . “
“Don’t finish that! Nobody hopes to die, it’s an awful expression. You know, Kyle, life is so much simpler when you just take pictures.”
Kyle stopped pacing and shut the laptop. “Let’s go have breakfast,” he said. “I hear murder’s on the menu.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Breakfast at Epiphany’s
Most of the dozen or so people having breakfast didn’t know who Happy was and hadn’t heard about his death. Unlike many of the staff, he’d only been around a few months and seemed to have made the biggest impression on the two men he had dated, Teddy and Cowboy Dave. The other staff, on the other hand, had clearly gotten the news, and it made for a strange emotional mix: guests chatting about their plans for the day and wondering if the good weather would hold out, while Ricki manned the desk with a dazed expression on his face and Elzbetta, on table duty, only spoke when spoken to as she took their orders. Dylan, meanwhile, was visibly pale, with a fear in his eyes that couldn’t be hidden by his wooden smile.
Kyle and Danny showed themselves to a table by the window overlooking the road.
“No camera this morning?” Danny asked, used to seeing Kyle with his Nikon slung around his neck. “It looks like a good day for photographs.”
“I may need to move quickly,” Kyle said, his voice low. “I can’t worry about leaving a camera sitting around or having it swinging on my neck.”
Just then Elzbetta came up to them. She was more sullen than usual, and appeared to have been crying.
“You heard about Happy,” she said, posing it as a statement, as if everyone must have heard.
“We saw the news, yes,” Kyle said.
“We were . . . friends.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We were going to go away, to the Rocky Mountains,” she said. “Denver. He had family there.”
Kyle and Danny exchanged glances: apparently there weren’t many people young Happy did not sleep with.
“He didn’t kill himself!” she blurted out.
Danny was startled. “Who said . . . “
“They speculated, the news guy I saw, he said they hadn’t ruled out suicide, which means they’ve ruled it in!”
“Reporters don’t know much,” Kyle said, trying to reassure the distressed waitress. “That’s why they’re reporters.”
“It’s just fucked up. Seriously fucked up, like everything around here. This place is cursed, I can’t stay. What did you want for breakfast?”
They placed their orders and were relieved to have Elzbetta finally walk away without saying anything more.
“Do you believe her?” Danny asked. “That Pride Lodge is cursed?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Kyle said, immediately regretting his use of a word Danny hated. Danny was not stupid by any definition, but somewhere in his life, probably his childhood, the word had been used to great effect against him. He glared at Kyle.
“I’m sorry,” Kyle said. “I just meant it’s preposterous. The Lodge has been a going concern for, what, almost thirty years, and suddenly it’s cursed?”
“Stu died from a heart attack on those steps right there,” Danny said, nodding toward the steps that led down the hill. “Not to mention the first owner’s wife and children. Curses have to start somewhere.”
“In our fevered imaginations, that’s where.”
Their conversation was interrupted as Bo Sweetzer came walking through the dining room and approached their table. They’d formed their own small group the last two days and it seemed natural to her to invite herself to join them. Kyle looked behind her, noticing she was alone.
“Looking for someone?” she said, smiling. She knew her departure the night before with the beautifully sturdy detective had not gone unnoticed.
Kyle blushed at his own transparency. “I thought you might be dining with someone else this morning.”
“Dining,” she said. “I like that. You don’t usually think of people dining at breakfast.”
Bo was in very good spirits. She either hadn’t heard the news about poor Happy, or, more likely, she had no idea who he was. Most people relegated the deaths of strangers to the general news feed of their day.
“We only had coffee and dessert,” she said, quelling Kyle’s curiosity.
Danny hadn’t been all that interested to begin with and was hoping their food would arrive soon. He reached for his water glass.
“She’s questioning,” Bo continued.
“And a sucker for a California girl, I’m guessing,” Kyle said.
Danny nearly choked on his water.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kyle corrected himself. “You’re from Minnesota. St. Paul. My mistake.”
The smile on Bo’s face remained, but took on a rigid quality, as if it wanted to fall but she was keeping it in place by force of will. “It must have been the accent,” she said, knowing there was no such thing as a California accent. “I did live there for a few years, when I was a child.”
Danny carefully watched the two of them, worried that Kyle had tipped his hand too readily.
“We’ve been there a few times, haven’t we, Danny?”
Danny nodded, hoping the subject would change.
“We stayed with friends in the Los Feliz area. Did you live anywhere near there?”
And now she knew. Kyle had all but told her who he thought she was. Unfortunately for him, she was close to her endgame and losing her need for concealment with each passing hour. She had come to believe, since her time with Detective Sikorsky the night before, that while she would see an end to her mission, her mission would also be the end of her. If she made it away from Pride Lodge, having fulfilled the promise she had repeated to her parents’ ghosts for thirty years, she would have to abandon Bo Sweetzer as completely and easily as she had abandoned Emily Lapinsky. Sid Stanhope was not the last person she would kill after all.
“Oddly enough,” she said, the smile now gone, “that’s one of the few neighborhoods I never saw. We were on the west side, not far from Century City. I was just a kid, I don’t even remember the name of where we lived.”
“Have you gone back?” Kyle asked.
&
nbsp; “No, I’ve never had the interest,” she said, and Kyle could see a sadness come over her. She suddenly struck him as very old, and very tired, a woman coming to the end of her journey, whatever that journey might be.
“Does anybody care that Happy’s gone?” Elzbetta said, coming up to their table carrying plates with their breakfast. “It doesn’t seem to me anybody gives a shit.”
“Who’s Happy?” Bo asked. “What happened?”
While Elzbetta gave a quick rundown on who Happy was and that he’d been found dead in a creek the night before, Kyle looked over to see Dylan signaling him, nodding toward the kitchen.
“Excuse me,” Kyle said, standing and putting his napkin on his chair. “I need to wash my hands.”
Kyle left the table and headed toward the restrooms. When he got to the hallway that led back to them, he veered left into the kitchen and saw Dylan standing there with an apron on.
“Cece called in sick. She’s our morning cook,” he said. “When you run a place like this you have to know how to do everything.”
Dylan wiped his hands on his apron and began to pace. “Happy’s dead, before Teddy, from what they said on the news. Do you think Teddy knew?”
“I think Teddy knew too many things,” Kyle said. “That’s why I need to get into his room.”
“Do you think he did it?” Dylan asked.
“What, kill Happy?”
“No!”
And with that Kyle knew he meant Sid. It struck him how quickly Dylan had allowed himself to believe Sid could be a thief, and now a murderer.
“I wouldn’t read too much into the timing of this,” Kyle said, trying to calm the situation. “Happy left days ago.”
“Yes, and he didn’t say anything to anyone about it, and he turned up dead in a creek. Before or after Teddy died at the bottom of the pool, we won’t know until they announce it. Maybe Happy died last night, maybe he died the day he disappeared! Can you imagine being dead in the woods for three days? Oh my God, the animals. Unless his body was moved!”
“Listen, Dylan,” Kyle said, “I need to get into Teddy’s room. It’s not sealed off. There isn’t any crime scene at this point, as far as the police are concerned. You can be there, I’ll be very respectful, but I have to have something solid to show Sikorsky. So far it’s all just crazy imaginings, however un-crazy they are to you and me.”
“I want to wait until Sid’s not around,” Dylan said, nodding. “He’ll know something’s up if we go in Teddy’s room.”
“Just tell him I want something to remember Teddy by.”
“He’s a very smart man, he’ll know better. No, let’s wait.”
Kyle would normally not go looking through someone’s belongings, let alone a dead man’s, but he was convinced a significant piece of the puzzle might well be in Teddy’s room.
“Sid’s going into New Hope this afternoon,” Dylan said. “For more party supplies. We’ll have plenty of locals coming tonight, we always run out of something. That’s the time for this, when he’s safely away for a few hours.”
“Perfect,” Kyle said. “Text me when it’s time, we’ll be in the cabin. And now I think I’ll get back out there. You wait a minute so it’s not too obvious we’re having an affair.”
Dylan smiled for the first time that day and watched as Kyle went back to the table.
Chapter Twenty-Three
A Late Start
Detective Linda Sikorsky. Even after fifteen years on the force, three of them as the only active homicide detective in New Hope (a job she performed for other towns in the area when needed, so seldom did murders occur in this bucolic stretch of Pennsylvania), Linda still felt uncomfortable with the title. As if she’d come to it by accident, or been given the position when someone else had displayed more merit for it. But there was no one else, and she had worked long and hard to get where she was. It just seemed like such a dream come true, regardless of how few people dream of being homicide detectives. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d hear from little girls asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A nurse, maybe, or a teacher, or a pop star, but not someone whose job it was to investigate the killing of one human being by another. Still, it had been her dream ever since she’d been a child in Cincinnati and her father, a cop on the Cincinnati Police Department, was gunned down in the most absurd way: as a bystander when shots broke out during a fight outside a grocery store. A grocery store! Not a bar, not a craps game he was breaking up, not anything that said “hero” when the papers covered the story the next day. Oh, they called him a hero. Every person in uniform was instantly transformed into a hero when they died, even if it was from a heart attack in a church parking lot. But try as she did, she was never able to think of her father’s death as the death of a hero. It was a cruel, capricious, meaningless death, when he had stopped at the store to pick up a short list of groceries her mother had given him over the phone, and as he was walking to his car in the parking lot, two thugs started shouting at each other outside the main entrance. By the time Peter Sikorsky was even aware that trouble was happening, a bullet had entered his skull on the right side, just about the temple, and taken a sizable chunk of his head with it on the way out.
It had never made sense to her, and she had long ago stopped trying to make it. Ideas like “closure” and making sense of random tragedy were for people more desperate to believe everything happened for a reason. She knew better. She knew people were felled by stray bullets and children were raped and very few people were heroes. But while she would not humor others by calling her father’s death anything but senseless, she would honor him by becoming a police officer and seeking out a career he had been deprived of. That was thirty-five years ago, in a world and life so removed from the one she now lived that she only believed it had ever happened because it had happened to her. Her mother, Estelle Sikorsky, had met another man two years after her father’s death, and the three of them had moved to Philadelphia. Her stepfather, too, had died, but from a stroke, something less dramatic but no less sudden or pointless, and her mother now lived alone six blocks from Independence Hall. She recently retired from her job teaching fifth and sixth graders, and Linda visited her once a month, making the hour’s drive to sit and talk about this and that, never anything too deep, including the men who had died on Estelle and left her sitting alone in her kitchen on Sunday afternoons.
That they never spoke of anything too sensitive was a big reason Linda had never told her mother, or anyone else, that she was—all things being considered—a lesbian. Linda didn’t like calling herself anything. And, at the same time, she was very honest and always had been. Someone who could not kid herself about the brutal and meaningless nature of her father’s death could not kid herself about her own nature. She had known she was attracted to women long before she was one herself. Back when she was a child, in middle school, probably earlier. But she had chosen, for reasons she still did not fully understand, to never label it, to never call herself anything other than Linda. She had chosen as well not to act on it. Not because she was ashamed, or wanted to be something other than who she was, but because she feared the loss it could bring. That, she had finally come to realize, was the real reason: not any perceived hostility, not some sad self-rejection, but because a bullet had taken away the one man she had loved in her life, and she feared, in a way words could not express and consciousness could not quite define, that acting on her desires would open the door to love, and love would open the door to loss.
Even last night, when she had asked Bo out and they’d had coffee at the diner, she felt herself as much repelled as attracted, as if something were in front of her that she both wanted and feared. Something that simultaneously promised pleasure and threatened pain—comfort with a caveat. It had been her way of testing waters whose shore she had stood gazing from for twenty years. It had not been a particular attraction to Bo Sweetzer, but a way of finally saying, yes, this is me, this is who I am and who I want to be. She was grateful t
o have made this initial foray into her truest identity with someone as nice, patient and free from expectation as the woman from St. Paul. That this woman, Linda now knew, was not who she pretended to be complicated things but did not take away the simple joy she’d had the night before, sitting in a diner with another woman, for all to see (most of whom, she knew, had assumed she was gay all this time anyway). It had given her a sense of freedom she had always hoped was available but was never really sure, until then, until that moment when she went from questioning to certainty. That was hers to keep, despite what came of the things she’d learned after going home and, instead of sleeping, doing what an obsessive detective does: investigating. Bo Sweetzer, jewelry maker, website, history, dead end. And if there was one thing Linda Sikorksy did not like, it was a dead end. There were already too many at Pride Lodge for comfort.
In this day of social networks, data mining and seemingly endless public access to anyone who has ever typed their name online, it’s a major accomplishment to have nothing about yourself available to anyone with a keyboard. The jewelry site was easy enough to find, its whole purpose was to sell jewelry and Bo gave the URL to everyone she met. But when Linda tried to dig a little deeper, find a college record, a past, it stopped. Bo Sweetzer had told her in their initial interview she was from St. Paul. Apparently that was truer than Linda could imagine: there was no Bo Sweetzer before St. Paul. Bo had managed to emerge fully formed from the world’s womb, if not her mother’s. And while it wasn’t all that miraculous for her to remain off Facebook and Twitter and the other hubs of virtual friendship, followers and fanatics, it was nearly astonishing to simply arrive online as a twenty year old.