by Mark McNease
He started slipping slowly through the pages and saw that Teddy had underlined dozens of passages. As he looked at the book he was more convinced than ever that Teddy was sober when he died, that he had changed his life and would never knowingly end it with the appearance of a drunkard’s death. And then, toward the back, he came upon Page 417, so often quoted by Teddy Pembroke. Acceptance. It was a passage on this page that Teddy repeated over and over, like a nun reciting her rosary. Kyle opened the pages and there, slipped between them, was a piece of paper. He took it out and opened it: an email.
“What’s that?” Dylan asked, getting up from the bed. He walked over, staring at the sheaf of paper as Kyle read it over:
From: “Sam Tatum”
To: “[email protected]>
Wednesday, September 12
Sid—Lucky we even stayed in touch, surprised you would, but maybe not. Maybe I was the canary in the mine for you. Frank was for me, that’s for damn sure. I can’t say God rest his soul. That’s a man who’s soul won’t ever rest and shouldn’t. Stone cold killer, Frank was, and look at what it cost us. Someone’s coming, I don’t know who. Frank was killed in Detroit and I know it wasn’t random, they came for him. I only know because he owed me money and some lawyer called to say he was paying me back, from the grave. Landlord found him with a bullet in the head and an empty watch box. Watch box, think about it. Two months later and still no suspects. It’s only a matter of time for you and me, you should know, that’s why I wrote. You gotta keep a look out, check in sometimes, make sure I’m still alive. Kidding. Not really. I’m not counting on being around too much longer. I’m too old and tired to run. I think instead I’ll just get some more nose candy and a pretty young man to share it with. Yes, I haven’t changed. No, I don’t care what anyone thinks. This is some serious shit. I thought we’d made it, but some things you just can’t escape.—Sam
“The 23rd is when we met,” Dylan said, sounding fanciful.
“What?”
“His email name, Sid Stanhope323. Our anniversary is March 23rd. That’s sweet.”
Kyle thought it was an odd time to be sentimental. He’d just read an email that implicated Sid in something terrible, something that would make someone want to kill three men, and he was sure he knew what it was.
“Where does Sid come from?” Kyle asked.
Dylan looked at him as if it was the strangest question he’d ever been asked. “What do you mean?”
“When you met him, where did he say he was from?”
“Jersey, always. He was born in Elizabeth and grew up in Newark. His family moved to Atlantic City when he was in high school. What difference does it make?”
“None, for now,” Kyle said. “I need to take this, or a copy.”
“Take it,” Dylan said, exasperated. “I wish I’d never seen it. This is a horrible situation, Kyle. Something’s going on, something awful, and Sid’s involved. The guy in the email said as much.”
The guy in the email may well be dead, Kyle thought, not saying it. If his warning was right, someone had killed one of the three already, and since they’d now moved on to Sid, it seemed likely that Sam Tatum’s next communication, if there was any, would be from beyond the grave.
Dylan’s mood had darkened still further and he spoke softly, almost in a whisper. “Do you think this has anything to do with the money?”
“What money?” Kyle asked, folding the email and slipping it into his shirt pocket.
“The money for the Lodge!” Dylan said sharply, as if Kyle had not been paying attention when he should.
“I don’t know what the connection is, or if there even is one. I’m going to give this to Detective Sikorksy and see what she makes of it. Whoever’s in on this game isn’t going to stop now, and if they’ve killed several times already, they’re dangerous indeed.”
“‘They,’” Dylan said. “You make it sound like there’s more than one.”
“If you mean more than one killer, I’m afraid so.”
Dylan visibly shivered, rubbing his hands on his upper arms as if a sudden chill had slipped into the room. “What do I do?”
“Wait, just a little while longer,” Kyle said. “I think by tonight we’ll have all the answers we need.”
“None of them answers we want,” Dylan said sadly. “None of them.”
Kyle nodded, aware that as the threads came together it would weave a very different life from the one Dylan had been living, had dreamed himself living. Hopefully no more lives would be lost, but everything, for Dylan and the Lodge, would be changed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cabin 6
Kyle had not stopped pacing since returning from Teddy’s room two hours earlier. He had shown Danny the email, providing the evidence he had insisted he needed to take to Detective Sikorsky. On learning that Danny had already reached her and that she was coming that evening, he had decided not to add fuel to the fire for now. He would wait patiently and give her the email when he saw her. After that, he expected things to move rapidly.
“Why don’t you call Imogene back?” Danny said, having watching Kyle try to sit still and repeatedly fail. It was the last thing he thought he would ever suggest, but he wanted something to distract Kyle from the escalating events at the Lodge. “It’ll take your mind off this.”
“I don’t want to take my mind off this. Focus, Danny, it’s time for me to focus.”
“Wearing a hole in the carpet is not focusing. She’s going to start calling the hospitals, you know.”
“Who?” Kyle said, turning on his heel toward Danny. “The detective? Whatever for?”
“Noooo! Imogene. You never ignore her completely like this, unless we’re in the middle of the ocean and there’s no cell phone reception. I know you sneak texts to her when you think I’m not looking, it’s okay.”
Kyle sighed and sat at the table, channeling his restless energy into his shaking foot. “She doesn’t even know where we are. I mean she does and she doesn’t. Manhattan is her universe, get her outside the City and she doesn’t know east from south. All she knows is we’re in the countryside somewhere, which to her is the entire continent, with the possible exceptions of Los Angeles and Chicago.”
Kyle took the email from Teddy’s room out of his shirt pocket, flattened it on the table and read it over again.
“It hasn’t changed since the last time you read it,” Danny said. He was doing his best not to get caught up in Kyle’s anxiety. “You act like it’s going to disintegrate if you don’t keep handling it.”
Kyle didn’t respond for a moment, choosing to lose himself in thought instead. “It seemed a little easy, “ he said.
“What did?”
“Finding this! I can’t be the only one Teddy was always quoting that passage from the AA book to. It was his mantra, ‘Page 417, ‘Acceptance is the answer to all of my problems today.’ He’d repeat it two or three times in a conversation. It’s almost as if someone wanted me to find it.”
“He did!” Danny said, exasperated. “Teddy wanted you to find it! He was afraid something might happen to him.”
Kyle wasn’t fully convinced and let his imagination take over, trying to make connections of events that seemed random. Teddy’s death, Happy’s body found in the creek. Sid was a killer, or at least a bystander to murder. He’d been there in the Lapinsky home when it happened. And so had Bo Sweetzer, then young Emily. And now the collision course they’d been on was coming to a head.
“Imogene will survive,” Kyle said absently, trying again to regain his composure, and the mention of his boss gave him a most unexpected idea. “Maybe she can turn it into something for Tokyo Pulse.”
“Oh, great,” Danny said. “Never miss an opportunity when there’s news to be made. She really has you trained.”
“That’s not what I mean. But there’s a story here. They’re looking to beef up their general news and she wants off the finance beat, she doesn’t have the head
for it.”
“She has a head?!” Danny said, trying to bring a little levity to the situation.
Kyle frowned. “She’s a very good reporter, Danny. It’s not that she can’t do this job, it’s just that it bores here. You have to admit finance is not very sexy. She might be able to take a story about murder at a country resort and get some attention.”
“Don’t forget the ‘gay’ part. Pretty soon we’ll be completely assimilated and lose the curiosity factor, better hurry.”
Kyle waved him off, not willing to get further into it. It was not that he disrespected his friend Teddy, or the Lapinksy family, or anyone else. But he was a realist as well. For one thing, they were all dead and wouldn’t care, and for another, someone should tell their story, it was a hell of a feature, and not some talking head from Philly6, either. The story was going to be reported regardless of how Kyle or Danny or anyone else felt about it. It might as well be Imogene who broke it.
“I’m going to call her back,” Kyle said, and he got his phone from the dresser. He dialed Imogene, glancing at his watch as he did: 5:30 p.m. They would need to leave soon for dinner and the party.
“Imogene, it’s Kyle,” he said into her voicemail as he headed into the bathroom to get ready. “There’s a story here you might be interested in. Not Manhattan-local obviously, we’re in Pennsylvania, but a seriously meaty story with history and cold cases and more angles than you could shake a microphone at. Maybe Lenny-san would go for it.” He was referring to her boss, Leonard Baumstein, who ran the small newsroom and reported up to his boss in Japan. “Call me when you can.”
“I don’t know about you, Kyle,” Danny said from the living room.
“I don’t always know about me, either,” Kyle said, “but I’m in the land of the living and Teddy’s dead. He’s not coming back, he wouldn’t care who told the story. Hell, he would’ve been the first to tell me to call her anyway. He always liked attention, so why not give him that?”
Kyle closed the bathroom door before Danny could say anything else. Danny shook his head, reached for the remote and un-muted the television just in time for the local news. He had the uneasy feeling they would all be part of it the next time he turned it on.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Room 202
Bo sat on the bed staring across at the wall. It felt to her almost like a trance state; she would know because she had been in this state before, just before killing Frank Grandy and Sam Tatum. A calm overtook her, and a sadness, too. Especially this night. It brought a finality the others did not. She had to admit that once she’d found Grandy and set off on her mission there was a sense of anticipation, of taking the next step, but after tonight there would be no more steps. Or, rather, she would be stepping finally into oblivion.
She would be fooling herself to think they wouldn’t connect her to this murder, and then the others. For all she knew, Linda Sikorksy had already been following her leads and instincts and may be closer to the truth than Bo could guess. She would be driving off from Pride Lodge, going west somewhere, maybe Chicago, where she would stop and plan, stop and re-arrange. She would never see St. Paul again.
She took her father’s gun from the velvet cloth she kept it wrapped in and held it in her lap. It felt heavier tonight. It weighed on her in a way it hadn’t before. The last time she used in, in Frank Grandy’s apartment in Detroit, it had seemed almost weightless, an extension of her hand. She had felt exhilarated, so thrilled to be able at last to silence the cries of her parents’ ghosts that she nearly levitated, or at least it felt that way. She had no remorse when she shot Grandy; certainly no more than he had had when he shot first her father, then her mother. Bang, bang. Just like that. Why hadn’t she cried out from the closet? Was it fear, or was there an instantaneous determination to survive this, and to survive it for vengeance? Could a ten year old girl in the moment of her life’s greatest crisis really be that calculating?
Yes, she thought. Yes, I was. Maybe I’m just cold inside and always have been. Maybe when I saw my father shot I knew then and there I would shoot back someday. Shoot back, or stab back, or strangle back, but the score would be settled, and yes, I knew even then.
She felt foolish in her cat costume. She was not a cat by nature. A serpent, perhaps, patient and deadly, but not a cat. That was part of her thinking, she knew, to obfuscate who she was and why she was here. It distorted the picture anyone might form of her, and distortions served her purpose. Cats did not shoot people, although they did pounce, and the thought of it made her smile. She reached up with her free hand and touched her face, so peculiar did the smile feel. Her smile had never been genuine since the day her parents died. It was a mask, a device, and suddenly the falseness of it startled even her.
She rose slowly, slipping the gun beneath the waistband of her costume. She would go to the party, smile and be a Halloween cat for a time, and she would wait. Once the opportunity came, and it would, she would lure Sid away from the crowd having its party, and she would put an end to him and to it, this lifelong ache and obsession. Within minutes after that, she would be gone. As for luring him, that might not be the right word. Challenge would be more accurate, since he knew who she was. He’d made that clear, and he would be looking for a chance of his own. Who struck first would decide the matter, and she had no doubt about who that would be.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Master Suite
Sid knew he should leave now. Maybe his instincts were too rusty after all these years; he hadn’t had to act this quickly since the day he fled Los Angeles. And maybe it was sentiment, hesitation from loving the life he had with Dylan. A soft life, despite the demands of running a resort. A life of love and coffee in the mornings and the absolute quiet of the Pennsylvania countryside. He would never see it again, and he wanted to make as slow an exit as he could, providing it did not ensnare him.
Dylan was already downstairs at the party. He had been too nervous to linger in the Suite. He loved this life, too, but he worried much more about the details and the requirements than Sid did. Dylan was a fretter. He’d gone to the basement an hour before anyone else would arrive, determined to have every chair in place, every balloon and paper ghost. The good thing about his being so distracted was that Sid would be able to leave quickly, quietly and unnoticed. He just wanted one more look around, one more deep breath of air he would not breathe again.
He was taking only a suitcase with him. There was no need for more. He had no idea how to go about changing his identity if it came to that. He knew he could learn much from Bo Sweetzer, but she was the last person he ever wanted to see again. She had destroyed his life and it wasn’t fair. He had not pulled the trigger. He hadn’t even taken anything from the house! Yet she had targeted him and Sam for revenge, as well as the only man who really deserved it. Could he blame her? Yes, he could. He could blame her for saving her rage all these years and aiming it at an old man who had never meant her harm. Her obsession was costing him everything.
There was no plan A, let alone a plan B. His only plan was to get in his car and drive to New York City, or Queens or the Bronx. Somewhere he could melt into the urban landscape and make a plan. He’d have to get rid of the car. Maybe not get another one, cars were too easy to find. In a big city like New York or Boston he could live out his life never driving again. Would he need to change his name? How, exactly, does someone do that?
He was thinking it all through, trying to let it gel into definite, clear actions he could take, when a knock came at the door.
Odd, Sid thought. No one ever came to the Suite. Dylan would just walk in, of course. He sighed, annoyed that one of the guests would take the liberty of bringing some minor problem to his attention here, where he lived, and here was considered off-limits, even if there was no official policy about that. There were boundaries to keep, and someone was crossing them.
Sid left the small suitcase on the bed and went to answer the door. Whoever it was, with whatever needless com
plaint they had, could be dispatched quickly enough and he could get on with the sad task of saying goodbye without uttering a word.
Chapter Thirty
Unhappy Halloween
After falling off some the last few years that Pucky and Stu owned Pride Lodge, the Halloween party was back to its all time highs. Fifty-six guests, not including staff, and another seventy-five locals that Dylan had counted, all packed into the basement bars that had been turned into one large frightfest. No detail had been spared that day as every hand on deck spun cobwebs, hung spiders and placed cackling witches and howling skulls along the bar and table tops. DJ Slam, a college kid from Princeton, had driven in to make $500 for the night and keep the crowd on its feet.
The space was dark, and as Kyle and Danny ordered drinks at one of the corner tables in Clyde’s, Kyle had trouble telling the guests from the locals, and one person from another. He thought he saw Maggie dressed as a firefly, taking pictures on her smartphone, and Eileen not far from her as a mummy ordering beer at the bar.
“What do you think is going to become of the place?” Danny asked, having to raise his voice over a Lady GaGa song being played too loud for his tastes. Danny had never liked loud music, or any music when he was talking, and would even turn the radio news off in the car when they were having a conversation. It all became noise to him, especially when it was competing with him.
“Dylan’s still here,” Kyle said, sipping his margarita while continuing to scan the crowd.
“You think he’ll still want to be here if Sid . . . “