Murder at Pride Lodge [A Kyle Callahan Mystery: 1]

by Mark McNease

  Linda had not spent the entire night trying to solve a puzzle she had created for herself. She was too tired, and, to be honest, not that concerned with what she had found—or not found—about a woman she would never see again after this weekend. But she made a note to herself to ask Bo about this at the Halloween party that night. She had decided to go, even though it meant pulling together some kind of costume at the last minute. All the years she’d been in New Hope and she had never spent an hour at Pride Lodge. Maybe she’d been avoiding it, maybe it offered answers to questions she had not been fully prepared to ask until last night. But here she was, planning to spend yet more of her weekend there. And not all for fun . . . the questions had changed, and the answers could be fatal. She would need to be prepared.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  On the Ropes

  Sid didn’t know what was happening, only that something terrible was coming his way and leaving dead men in its tracks. First Frank and Sam, then Teddy, and now Happy. It was a trail, he had no doubt about that, and it led to him. Time was not on his side; he would need to make his escape soon. The Halloween party that night seemed like a perfect opportunity, when everyone was distracted, having a good time, drinking too much. No one would notice him driving away, and if they did, they would never dream he would not be back.

  At first he’d thought what everyone else did, that Teddy had fallen into the pool. He had claimed to be sober for several months, but Sid had known a drunk or two in his life and as lovable as they may be, they could not be trusted to tell the truth when it came to their drinking. So he had assumed Teddy had relapsed, “slipped” they called it, and had somehow fallen into the empty pool. But the martini glass was odd. Sid had always seen Teddy with a tumbler of whiskey, never something so sophisticated as a martini. But he also knew that an alcoholic wasn’t generally choosy, and it may have been that Teddy took whatever was at hand. Or at least that’s what Sid had believed, had wanted to believe, until Happy. Too many deaths in too short a time, with the real possibility his own would be next.

  Sid had spent the last twenty-four hours trying to put the pieces together and only getting more confused with each attempt. If the Bo woman was behind this, which seemed a conclusion impossible not to draw, why would she kill Teddy? Why Happy? She would have had to be here days ago, staying somewhere else. Or, as he had begun to fear, was more than one person involved, perhaps even conspiring to pull the noose ever tighter around his neck? Had Teddy found out that Sid Stanhope had been in the Lapinsky house that night thirty years ago? Was he planning to go to the police? That would certainly throw a wrench into the killer’s plans; taking down the last of them would be impossible if Sid was behind bars. It seemed ever more likely that Teddy had unknowingly put himself in harm’s way, directly in the path of someone who had no hesitation leaving dead bodies behind her. But why Happy? And why now?

  The now of it was as mysterious as anything to Sid, maybe the most mysterious. They’d gotten away with it for three decades. They had all moved on, two of them leaving Los Angeles, with nothing to tie them together . . . except a watch. Sid had told himself all these years that he was innocent, really, in the scheme of things. He had never hurt anyone, had never even carried a gun. He was expecting the same thing they’d experienced at all the other houses: a quick in and out, no one home, no harm done, but then the Lapinksys had been there, and Frank, oh Frank . . .

  Sid felt his eyes watering and immediately took control of his emotions. He would have to leave Dylan, and do it without saying why. No one could know what became of him or why he disappeared. He loved Dylan and had counted on spending his last years with him, years that would require companionship as his body found itself more and more worn down. Their age difference would put Dylan in the position of taking care of Sid, but they both knew that and Dylan even joked about it from time to time. It was not, he had said over and over, something he would consider a burden, but an honor, a continued demonstration of his love for Sid. And for this he would be betrayed, abandoned, left wondering for the rest of his life what had happened.

  It was for Dylan’s own good, Sid told himself. Anyone who would murder someone as hapless and accidental as Teddy Pembroke would not hesitate to turn their sights on Dylan if he was seen to be a threat. The sooner and cleaner Sid made his break, the better for them all.

  He got up from his computer where he’d been looking at maps and reading about places where a man could disappear easily enough; not all of them were big cities, either. There are many small towns, not much more than bumps in the road, where there are few people to ask questions and vast spaces into which a man can disappear. He erased his search history and tried to focus on a plan. He was heading soon into New Hope for more supplies for that night. He would fill up the gas tank when he was there and buy some supplies of a more personal nature, food stuffs and water, packing for a long journey whose end he would only know when he got there. And then, sometime that night, when everyone was having a good time and looking the other way, Sid Stanhope would simply go away.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Cabin 6

  Kyle was sitting cross-legged on the bed, the laptop open in front of him. Next to the laptop was his camera, with a USB cable running from it to the laptop: Kyle had downloaded all the photographs he’d taken since they arrived. He had come to believe over the years of taking pictures that people experience the world in images, one instant after another in a series that stretched from birth to death, and that, without intending it, answers could be found among the many accidental photographs he took. It was why he wore the Nikon around his neck nearly everywhere he went. He seldom knew what he would shoot, or, looking back over the forty or fifty pictures he might take in a day, what he would find.

  “What are you looking for this time?” Danny asked. He was wearing beige shorts and a sweatshirt, settling in to rest until dinner and the party. The weather hadn’t turned especially bad, but the sky had filled with clouds and a chilly rain looked likely. He had no desire to go sightseeing or make a trip into town. For Danny, the weekends at Pride Lodge were about resting, about not looking at seating charts (even though he did peek), about lying in bed reading a newspaper with the television turned low in the background. He knew Kyle was looking for answers in his photographs, but that was his process for making order of chaos, of connecting dots that otherwise formed no pattern.

  “I don’t know, you know that. That’s the point. I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it.”

  “Are you calling Imogene back?” Danny asked. Kyle’s boss had been trying to reach him since early that morning, but Kyle had successfully ignored her voicemails and texts. Danny wondered if he had finally convinced Kyle that he was not on call for Imogene twenty-four hours a day.

  “It’s just withdrawals,” Kyle said absently, peering intently at his laptop screen. “She has to go cold turkey. Forty-eight hours from now and I’ll be back, handing her a cheese Danish and a cup of coffee from Cecil’s and it’ll be like I was never away.”

  Cecil’s was a diner on 46th Street near the studios where Japan TV3 rented space for their programming. Kyle happened upon it the first day they were working there and had presented Imogene with of cup of their rich, distinctive coffee most mornings since then.

  “You’re making progress,” Danny said.

  “You forget there’s been a murder,” Kyle said, reminding Danny of the one thing that could take his attention away so completely; unfortunately, it also reminded Danny that he was not that thing, that only the puzzle of death by suspicious circumstances was enough to get Kyle to let Imogene go to voicemail. It had happened the year before, when they had gone on a cruise to Canada and a woman was found dead in one of the steam rooms at the ship’s very pricey spa. Sudden and unexplained, they’d said, but surely natural. A stroke, or a heart attack, perhaps an aneurism. Kyle had seen the woman being intimate with a man who was not her husband, and when the authorities thanked him for his informat
ion, clearly intending to ignore it, he had spent the rest of the cruise proving the cause of death was most unnatural. For that he had been thanked a second time, though no more sincerely, and never been credited for bringing the woman’s husband to justice. Now here they were, in their own territory, so to speak, with friends and acquaintances at their favorite resort—a gay resort, where one would expect to find nothing more exciting than a drunken argument or a fling gone wrong—and Kyle was lost in thought again, trying to find connections.

  The luck of the lens did not appear to be with him this time. Nothing in the dozens of photographs he had taken since they arrived told him anything. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, some image that would tell him what words could not. It had been a picture of the woman on the cruise ship kissing her paramour by the hanging lifeboats, taken accidentally when Kyle was aiming for a shot of the walkway, that gave him the evidence he needed in the cruise ship murder. But so far this weekend at Pride Lodge . . . nothing.

  “A picture wasn’t worth any words this time, apparently,” Kyle said, resigned. He closed the laptop and decided he was finished with the camera. He needed to be present now, to stay alert and pay close attention to his surroundings and the people in it. Sometimes the camera was a way of hiding, of giving himself to distraction. He would put it in the drawer and let his eyes be the camera from here on in. Whatever he’d been looking for in the photographs he had probably missed because of them. The time had come to watch everything closely and commit what he saw to memory.

  Kyle’s phone vibrated just then and he picked it up. A text had come from Dylan: “Sid leaving, come up in 10.”

  Kyle got up from the table and put his camera in the dresser.

  “Where are you going?” Danny asked, wishing for once that Kyle had answered Imogene’s calls instead, that he’d given in to her needs and not pursued something that would certainly lead to trouble.

  “I’m meeting Dylan.”

  “Stay out of this, Kyle. What’s Dylan involvement?”

  “Nothing, but he can let me into Teddy’s room. Hopefully that’s where I’ll find what I’m looking for.”

  Kyle slipped on his shoes and grabbed his jacket. “I’ll be back, hopefully soon,” he said, and opened the cabin door to leave.

  “But you don’t know what you’re looking for!” Danny said too late, as the door closed. Within a minute of Kyle leaving, Danny’s worry got the best of him and he began searching for the business card that Detective Linda Sikorsky had given to everyone she had interviewed. Kyle may think he needs to wait, but Danny feared waiting was precisely the wrong thing to do.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Teddy’s Room

  Dylan watched from the empty restaurant window as Sid drove off in their Highlander toward town. No sooner was the car out of sight than Kyle came walking up from the cabins. The two men waved at each other, Dylan looking anxious and forlorn in the window.

  Kyle had never been upstairs at the Lodge. There had not been any reason to go there, since he and Danny always stayed in the cabin. When he entered the main room, he saw several people he did not know sitting around chatting and drinking coffee, and there in his recliner perch sat Jeremy Johnson, wearing the same clothes he’d been in the night before. Maybe they were duplicates, like someone who dresses only in black. Maybe it’s all Jeremy wore.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been here all this time,” Kyle said, closing the outside door behind him.

  “No,” said Jeremy, “I’m still capable of making it up the stairs. And I wasn’t here earlier when you came for lunch.”

  “You know, I didn’t notice.”

  “But I noticed you,” Jeremy said, winking.

  Kyle was struck again by how enigmatic Jeremy was: the guest who’d been coming the longest, whose presence everyone was aware of, but who blended in so well he might be said to be invisible; and he clearly enjoyed his status as a fly on the wall. Kyle knew there couldn’t be much that went unnoticed by the old sentinel.

  “Speaking of upstairs,” Kyle said, nodding at the staircase. “I’ve never been up there and thought, why not take a look.”

  “I’m sure Dylan can show you around,” Jeremy said, winking again before turning and reaching for his cup of tea, the string dangling over the side.

  Kyle suddenly had the idea that Jeremy thought he was having some kind of affair with Dylan. It was unnerving enough to have himself so astutely observed, but that wink when he mentioned Dylan, as if something was going on between them, was a step too far. He made a mental note to set Jeremy straight before the day was over. He would not have anyone, however imaginative, thinking he was cheating on Danny. That was untrue, unfair, and just the kind of innuendo that could spread through Pride Lodge like a brushfire.

  He turned then and headed for the stairs, leaving the others to their lively conversation and old Jeremy to his fantasies.

  Bo saw him coming up the stairs just as she was about to head out and she quickly backtracked into her room, closing the door until only an inch was open, just enough for her to peer through. She didn’t need to know that Kyle had never been upstairs to know something was different. The old man in the chair wasn’t the only one skilled at watching, and if there was one thing Bo could spot in human behavior, it was the clandestine. It was the way he climbed the stairs, as if he didn’t want to make any noise, didn’t want anyone to see him. And then easing his way down the hall, glancing at each door, still moving carefully so he would not alert anyone to his presence. Only a man up to something acted this way. It wasn’t even conscious, she knew, but the body’s way of accommodating a guilty mind, a mind that feared it might be caught. And when she thought that, she, too, wondered if Kyle Callahan was meeting someone up here, someone with whom he was being unfaithful. Or maybe faith had nothing to do with it. Maybe Kyle and Danny had an arrangement. Bo knew such relationships existed. “Open marriages,” they were called. But if that was the case, why the stealth?

  And then the door to room 208 opened and Dylan waved at Kyle, equally careful to be quick and quiet. (Her great luck had been to get a room so close, having never been here before, but finding the room assignment exceedingly favorable to her plans.) Her first thought was that this was the man Kyle was having his affair with, but when she saw Dylan hurry Kyle into the dead man’s room, glance back out into the hallway to make sure no one had seen, and close the door, she suddenly had a different thought, an uncomfortable suspicion: what if this wasn’t about sex at all, but about looking for something with Sid gone? She, too, had watched him drive away, and not more than ten minutes later Kyle Callahan came skulking up the stairs. If the two men were meeting for lust, they could have used any empty room, or met somewhere on the grounds away from prying eyes. It would be macabre in the extreme to meet in a dead man’s room for any reason other than to search it. (She knew room 208 was Teddy Pembroke’s room because the police had gone through it, but not sealed it off; they were probably looking for a suicide note, just in case Pembroke had decided to end his life in grand fashion by flinging himself to the bottom of an empty swimming pool, martini glass in hand.)

  Once Kyle was in the room and the door closed, Bo quietly slipped out, made sure the door was locked, and headed downstairs. Things may be moving more quickly than she’d wanted.

  Dylan thought he saw the door to Bo Sweetzer’s room opened a crack, then close as Kyle walked by. He gave it only a moment’s thought, his mind on more important things, and quietly welcomed Kyle into Teddy’s room.

  Kyle was taken aback at the thought of anyone living in a single room. He and Danny had always taken Cabin 6 and he never stopped to wonder how small a room seemed without a bathroom. There was only a bed, a dresser, a flat screen TV mounted on a wall, a makeshift kitchen Teddy had set up on a bookcase, with a hotplate, some dishes and cups, and essential items for making coffee. He had eaten all his meals in the restaurant or in town, and he didn’t seem to own many clothes. The small closet wasn
’t even full.

  Kyle was able to get the complete tour by simply standing in the middle of the room and turning around.

  “Did he have a computer?” he asked. It was unusual these days for someone not to at least have a cheap laptop or a low-end tablet, and he’d emailed Teddy enough times to know he had access to one.

  “Teddy wasn’t very computer literate,” Dylan said. He had slumped down onto the corner of Teddy’s bed, his shoulders hunched, clearly not wanting to be in the room. “He would use the guest laptop if he needed to go online. Sometimes he would use ours.”

  Yes, Kyle thought, he used yours and it got him killed.

  “I don’t know what you’re expecting to find,” Dylan said. “Teddy was a simple man in most ways. You can see he didn’t own much.”

  Well, of course not, Kyle thought, there’s no place to put anything!

  “I just want to look around. You’re right, there’s probably nothing here, but humor me a moment.”

  And then he saw it: the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous. On the shelf underneath the coffee pot and hotplate. It was their bible of sorts, the text they used to turn their lives around. Kyle only knew what he’d learned about “the program”, as it was called by people in it, from friends and acquaintances he had known. He had never even held their book, and when he took it from Teddy’s shelf he had the odd sensation he was holding some sort of holy manuscript.