“That’s not what I was doing!” protested Dan. “It’s just that ...” he groped for words.
Ann stood with her face red and her arms crossed. “Just what?”
Dan rose to stand next to her and he took her hand as best he could. “My whole life has been built on understanding the world through science. On believing that each thing has an explainable trigger and an explainable consequence. It’s what helped me understand what was happening when my sister got cancer, it’s what enabled the doctors to help her fight it, and it’s what made dealing with the consequences, when we couldn’t fight it anymore and she died, bearable.” He hesitated. “And when she was gone, she was gone. I’m sure of it.”
Ann jerked her hand away from his. “So if you don’t have the ability, it stands to reason no one else can have it.”
“That’s not what I mean. I only mean there are other explanations for what you’ve experienced and you’ve never had the opportunity to explore them.”
Ann was fumbling into the coat she had draped across the back of the kitchen chair. “I don’t need to explore anything. I’m living it. And I don’t need to spend my life with someone who thinks I’m crazy and is trying to fix me!” She snatched up her purse. “Don’t follow me. I want to be alone now.” What should have been a dramatic exit line was undermined somewhat by the hiccup of tears threatening to erupt.
She walked the several miles to Mike’s house, her hands thrust into her coat pockets, her head down. When she got there, the tears came.
“He thinks I’m crazy,” she sobbed, a beer bottle gripped in her hands.
“Well, you’re not. He’s just being closed-minded.”
“And he acts like he thinks I’m proud of what I can do.”
“Well, aren’t you?” asked Mike, surprised.
“Of course not,” said Ann. “I’m a freak. Do you think I would be this way if I had a choice?”
Ann never forgave Dan for what, Mike believed, she saw as a betrayal. And she rarely talked about her sensing abilities, even with Mike, but Mike now knew there were two warring forces at work in her—one wishing that her skill was greater than it was and one wishing she didn’t have the skill at all.
*****⁷
At 9:00 the next morning, about an hour before Ann and Mike were scheduled to meet Bob Dormand at the second shore house, Mike got a call on his cell phone as they were finishing breakfast in the hotel restaurant.
“Hello, this is Bob Dormand. Listen, I’m sorry to change the plans at the last minute but based on what your sister was able to tell me yesterday, I don’t really think it will be necessary for us to visit the second house. I’ll still pay the whole amount, I’ll get the payment in the mail.”
“You’re sure?” said Mike. “If you’re paying the full amount anyway you might as well get Ann’s assessment of the property, you might find it useful in the future.” He wasn’t thrilled about having to wait for a money order to be mailed, assuming it ever was.
“It was turning out to be inconvenient to arrange the second visit with the realtor anyway so I’d just as soon avoid that. But I’ll have your payment in the mail in the next few days.”
“OK,” said Mike, shrugging at Ann who was looking at him quizzically. “Please let us know if you change your mind.”
“Yes, I will.” And the line went dead.
Mike sighed. “Says he doesn’t need you to look at the second place after all.”
“Why not?” asked Ann.
“I think the second house was an alternative if he got a bad report on the first house. Or maybe, like you said, he got his curiosity satisfied. Anyhow, he claims he’s still going to pay the full amount.”
“Hmmm,” said Ann.
“If he actually does,” replied Mike skeptically.
Ann stood up. “Well, I guess Walt and I can head back.”
“Yup. Poor Walt, I think he was enjoying Atlantic City.”
Chapter 29
Biden ended the call to Mike Kinnear and looked out his motel room window at the small parking lot and, beyond that, the hulking profile of the Adirondacks. He had left Harvey Cedars right after his meeting with the Kinnears and driven to Lake Clear which, he had learned, was about 20 miles west-northwest of Lake Placid. It had taken him about nine hours to get to Lake Clear—avoiding toll roads which he suspected would be more likely to have traffic cameras—and that night he had checked in to a vintage 1950s motel sporting a faux Alpine exterior and a dingy interior.
Biden had had a bad moment when the psychic had her spell in the garage—she had sat down in exactly the place where Biden had put Elizabeth’s body in the sleeping bag. She had said she heard something. And that it was cold. Wasn’t that the popular wisdom—that where ghosts were, the air was cold?
But even the psychic herself hadn’t taken it seriously, had called it a false alarm, so how much did he have to worry about from a person who didn’t even trust her own instincts—instincts that anyone else would reject out of hand as a fraud.
Biden felt better today than he had yesterday. He had nothing to fear from this faker and her officious brother. But as long as he had driven all the way to upstate New York he might as well satisfy his curiosity about where Ann Kinnear holed up when she wasn’t on one of her “engagements.”
Biden left the key in the room—he had paid cash—and found a diner for breakfast. Then he drove to Adirondack Regional Airport.
*****
Ann and Mike found that Walt was, in fact, enjoying himself—he had grown the $50 he had set aside to play the slots to $130 and was hoping for $150—and so they decided to have lunch before leaving to give Walt a little more time to play.
Ann and Walt arrived at Lake Clear in late afternoon. When Ann got to the parking lot she found that her car wouldn’t start. Ann fetched Walt who peered under the hood.
“Not the battery,” he muttered. “I could ask Casey to take a look at it tomorrow.” Casey, Walt’s nephew, was a mechanic in Tupper Lake. “I can give you a ride home tonight.”
Ann waited in the passenger terminal while Walt got the Arrow cleaned up, then they stopped at Walt and Helen’s house to pick up Beau. Fizz decided to come along for the ride so it was a tight fit in Walt’s pick-up, especially with Fizz trying to climb on Ann’s lap to get to the window.
Walt dropped Ann and Beau at the cabin, never noticing the black Mercedes that had followed them out of the airport parking lot.
Chapter 30
Biden gnawed his thumbnail. He was beginning to think his plan had gone awry. He had calculated the time it was likely to take for Ann Kinnear and her pilot to get to the Atlantic City airport and fly back to Lake Clear and that time had long since come and gone. Would she have gone somewhere else? It seemed unlikely ... although maybe they had flown to West Chester, which seemed to be the base of operations for their business. With each hour he waited, knowing where Ann Kinnear lived had become increasingly vital. Not only did he want to know where to find her if circumstances demanded, but he wanted to rectify his earlier unsuccessful attempt to find her home, when he thought he could just follow her by car from the “engagement” at his house.
He continued to vacillate between dismissing Kinnear as a charlatan and fearing her as a threat, the latter feeling bolstered by Joe Booth’s evident interest in her. Maybe Booth was baiting him, maybe Booth had counted on Biden following Ann when she left his house ... he shook his head. He couldn’t let himself get paranoid. But Pironi had said she had had a reaction in all the locations in the house tied to Elizabeth’s death—the library and the foyer and the garage. How could she have known that? Had he left any evidence behind that a normal person could perceive? No, he had been too careful ... maybe she really could do what she claimed to be able to do.
He had to piss. He had gone into the small terminal building to use the restroom once, he didn’t want to go in again—someone was more likely to remember him if they saw him more than once. He briefly contemplated using the large
styrofoam cup that had held the take-out coffee he had bought at the diner, the remnants just an oily puddle in the bottom of the cup. Jesus, he could be home—or maybe in some nice Old City bar with a Glenfiddich on the rocks—if it weren’t for Ann Kinnear.
She needed to mind her own goddamn business. She needed someone to teach her a lesson. She needed a pair of hands—his hands—around her neck, and he’d twist—
He swam back to the present as he tasted blood and there was a moment of muddled confusion until he saw his torn thumbnail.
Biden was dabbing at the oozing wound when he saw the Arrow coming into Lake Clear.
*****
Even after they landed there was more delay while they investigated some problem with the psychic’s car and, after more work on the plane, they left together in the old man’s pick-up truck. Once they were on the road there was a stop at a tidy ranch house a few miles from the airport that Biden initially took to be Ann’s house but after a time Ann and Walt came out of the house with two dogs—Biden had not counted on dogs—and drove away in the pick-up.
Biden tried to follow at a discreet distance but when the pick-up turned off the two-lane state road onto a gravel road he knew there was no way he could follow them unobserved. He pulled the Mercedes over and confirmed on a map he had purchased at one of the local gas stations that the road was a dead end. Keeping the map out as a prop for the benefit of passing motorists, he waited about fifteen minutes then saw the pick-up heading back; as far as he could tell there was only the older man inside, with the small dog leaning out the passenger window.
When the pick-up was out of sight, Biden turned into the gravel road and began driving slowly along it. For a time it skirted a large pond or small lake on the right but then the road turned away from the lake to accommodate the waterfront properties that lined it and Biden caught only an occasional glimpse of water through the trees. Biden counted nine driveways on the lake side of the road before it dead ended, the houses themselves generally out of sight among the pine trees, the lots rather large based on the spacing of the driveways. Some of the houses had names on the mailboxes—none of which was Kinnear—and Firth thought he could probably, but not definitely, eliminate these as Ann’s home. The other side of the road must have been Park land because there was no sign of habitation.
One driveway had a For Sale sign next to it and, on the way back, Biden pulled into it. It wound through the pine woods and ended at a large, modern vacation home. The house itself looked well maintained but a drift of leaves against the front door suggested that it hadn’t been visited in some time. Biden walked down to the water and looked up and down the shoreline; the houses were set back from the water so they weren’t easily visible from where he stood, although he could see where the houses must be based on the docks dotting the shoreline. The dock of the For Sale house had two kayaks and a rowboat chained to it.
Biden spent a few minutes standing on the dock looking out across the expanse of water then returned to his car and drove to Tupper Lake, the nearest town of any size. He located a hardware store, purchased a pair of bolt cutters and a couple of locks and then returned to what he had learned was Loon Pond. (It figured that a crazy woman would live on a body of water called Loon Pond.) He drove to the For Sale house and, using the bolt cutters, cut free the rowboat and opened the dock box where he found the oars.
The For Sale house was about halfway along Loon Pond Road and, based on the time it had taken the old man to reappear after dropping Ann off, Biden decided to explore the houses toward the end of the road first. He saw lights on in one house but Biden calculated that it was one of the ones that had shown a name on the mailbox so he passed it by for the time being. He was nearing where he estimated the road to end when he saw a movement on one of the docks that dotted the shoreline; at first he began to row away from the dock but then he saw that it was not a person and rowed closer. It was a large dog, like the one that had gotten in the pick-up truck with Ann Kinnear. He had found where she lived.
Chapter 31
Ann sat curled in an overstuffed chair in front of a small fire in the sitting room of the cabin. In her lap was the first book of Shelby Foote’s massive history of the Civil War—Mike had gotten her the set for Christmas after they had enjoyed the Ken Burns documentary together. This was Ann’s third start on it and she suspected that once again she would get no further than Fort Sumter.
Tonight, though, she was distracted less by the density of the information and intimidating heft of the book itself than by memories stirred up by the trip to Atlantic City. She was thinking back to her first meeting with Garrick Masser.
Corey Duff, the producer and director of The Sense of Death, had invited the documentary’s subjects, key crew members, a few History Channel bigwigs, his parents and siblings, and their guests to his hometown—Pittsburgh—for a premiere of sorts. Ann’s first instinct was to decline the invitation but she liked Corey and he was so obviously excited by the prospect of having all his subjects together that she couldn’t bring herself to disappoint him. Plus, she was curious to meet Garrick Masser.
In the afternoon they did an interview with a reporter from WESA—to Ann’s relief, Corey and the visualizer from New Mexico did most of the talking. The evening started out with a screening at a historic old movie theater in the center of town (Corey had even rented a red carpet for the occasion). Then they were taken by a quite luxurious private bus to an inn and restaurant several miles outside the city that was reputed to be haunted. The owner, a short, portly man with a ridiculous mustache and a dramatic comb-over, met them at the door accompanied by servers with trays of champagne glasses.
Garrick swept up the stairs but waved away the proffered glass, requesting sparkling water which the owner dispatched one of the servers to fetch. The owner himself handed a glass to the New Mexico visualizer and, after a brief consultation with Corey, who gestured toward Ann, hurried over to where she stood and grandly offered a glass to Mike.
“So pleased to welcome you to our humble inn,” he said.
Mike jerked his head toward Ann.
“Of course,” said the owner, swinging toward Ann, some of the champagne sloshing onto the pebbled driveway. Ann took the glass from him wordlessly.
The inn’s owner turned to the group and clapped his hands. “If I could have your attention ... I thought that before we started dinner we might take a tour of some of the locations in the inn rumored to be haunted and see if our esteemed guests might shed some light—or perhaps I should say some darkness!—on the situation!”
Ann noticed Corey trying to get the innkeeper’s attention and shaking his head vigorously but the owner was already heading into the inn, one of the servers holding the door for the guests, Masser the first through the door.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Ann muttered.
“Come on, it might be fun,” said Mike, taking her arm. “Maybe Carnac the Magnificent will drop a quote that the Mayor of Munchkinland can dine off for the next year.”
“That’s a terrible combination of references,” Ann said, draining her glass and swapping it for a full one from one of the servers’ trays.
They trailed the group as the owner, casting hopeful looks at Masser and the visualizer, escorted them from room to room. Masser, with barely a glance around, intoned “Nothing” in each room. The visualizer, with no mementos of the dead to work with, just shrugged. When they had visited all the rooms, the owner took them to the private room where dinner was to be held and after bowing them into the room turned away with a muttered “Freaks,” which only Ann and Mike, as the last ones in, heard.
After dinner, which was quite good—although as far as Ann could see, Masser ate only rolls—the group moved into one of the inn’s sitting rooms for coffee and after dinner drinks. Ann left to use the ladies’ room and when she came out Masser was standing in the hallway.
“Did you sense anything?” he asked.
“No. You?”
“Come wit
h me.” And he turned and strode down the hall toward a door to a patio, not bothering to check to see if Ann would follow.
Ann briefly considered ignoring him and returning to the party but curiosity got the better of her and she followed him outside.
He was standing on the stone patio gazing out into the dark back yard. Ann looked at him for a moment expecting him to say something but when he didn’t she also turned her gaze to the yard.
The moonlit night revealed an expanse of carefully manicured grass bordered by a low stone wall on the other side of which was a grove of short, gnarled, evenly spaced trees—a fruit orchard of some type. Between the trees Ann could see a flickering light. She crossed her arms against the chill of an evening breeze.
“Someone’s having a bonfire,” she said, nodding toward the light.
“I don’t think so,” said Masser.
Ann looked curiously at him and then back toward the light. He was right, it wasn’t a bonfire—she could see now that it was actually a number of separate, faint lights moving among the trees, only taking on a bonfire brightness when they came together and then fading as they moved apart. “What is it?”
“Let’s find out,” he said, and descended a few stone steps to the grass, then turned to look at her. She hesitated a moment and then followed him.
They crossed the lawn and stepped over the stone wall into the orchard. Masser strode purposefully forward but she found she had to pick her way along, the heels of her shoes sinking into the soft ground and twigs scratching at her legs. She had gone about fifty yards, glancing up occasionally to make sure she was still headed toward the light, when she came into a clearing next to Masser and could see the source of the light up close.
The Sense of Death: An Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel (The Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels Book 1) Page 19