by Dean Koontz
Patricia Keene began to scream...
CHAPTER 11
"And then you found the body?" Cartier asked.
Alex said, "Yes."
"Where it lies now?"
"Yes."
"You didn't move it at all?"
"I didn't even touch it."
Constable Cartier consulted a small, black notebook which he had been glancing at throughout his interrogations of the people gathered in the library. Once, when he passed Katherine's chair and was holding the book lower than usual, she saw that it did not contain any writing at all, that his long and thoughtful glances at the supposedly incriminating list of facts it contained were nothing but staged expressions, phony. Ordinarily, she would have been amused by this, but she could not find a smile as long as Yuri was lying dead in the drawing room, currently guarded over by one of the two deputies that Cartier had brought with him.
"Have you ever seen the knife before?" Cartier asked.
"No."
"It is an antique knife, as you could have told from the handle, very ornate and lovely," Cartier said. He looked in his notebook again, looked up when he adjudged a proper amount of time had passed. "It is just the sort of thing one might expect to find in the older rooms of Owlsden, the unremodeled rooms."
"What are you suggesting?" Alex asked. He was clearly angry at Cartier's smugness.
"I am not suggesting anything," the constable said, staring at the blank pages of the book. "All that I am doing is making an observation."
Alex snorted and shook his head. "And it's a muddle-headed observation," he said. Patiently, as if he were talking to a child, he said, "That knife did not come from Owlsden."
"Alex, please see to it that you are more courteous to the constable," Lydia said. She was sitting at her large desk, holding a cup of hot tea in both hands, though she had not, so far as Katherine had noticed, taken a single sip of the stuff.
Alex flashed her an obvious look of exasperation, but he did not say anything further to Constable Cartier.
The policeman turned to Katherine and said, "Miss Sellers, don't you find it odd that the devil's dances, the Satanic markings on your door, and now the murder of Yuri Selenov should all transpire in or around Owlsden?"
"I don't understand what you mean?" She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable.
He said, "Wouldn't it seem to you that there is more to this than a simple coincidence."
"Of course," she said. Anyone could see it wasn't a coincidence that someone had been in the drawing room making Satanic ceremonial patterns on the carpet when Yuri surprised them.
"Then, perhaps, someone in this house is a member of the cult that has, for eighteen months, been a nuisance around these parts."
"Now just a damn minute-" Alex began, rising swiftly from his chair.
"Sit down, please," Cartier said, suddenly embarrassed, jolted out of his previous delight in this abrupt switch of roles between the once-rich and once-powerful, and himself. He seemed to realize that he was not being entirely fair to them and that his bluntness had over-stepped some invisible boundary or other.
"You cannot-" Alex began.
"Alex, sit down, please," Lydia said.
He looked at his mother, still furiously angry, then shrugged his shoulders and returned to his seat.
"Do you think anyone in Owlsden might be connected with this cult?" Cartier asked Katherine.
She barely managed to avoid looking at Alex as she said, "Perhaps not anyone here-but someone else who has a key."
"Oh, for Christsake, we went through all of that before, Katherine!" Alex said.
"Go through it again, for me," Cartier said. She did, and when she was finished, the constable turned to Alex and Lydia and said, "I would like to have a list of names, everyone who has a key to Owlsden."
"That can be arranged," Lydia said.
"To no purpose," Alex mumbled.
When the constable had gotten the list and had taken time to look it over carefully, he said, "It would seem unlikely, but if we have any lead so far, it is one of the names on this list." He tucked the list neatly in the notebook and put the notebook in his hip pocket. "I suppose we ought to be going now."
"Mr. Cartier?" Katherine asked.
He turned, looking infinitely wearier than he had looked only a moment ago, no longer getting much enjoyment out of interrogating the wealthy. "Yes?"
"What will be done with-with the body?"
"We'll take it along with us," he said. "We'll have to put it on ice until the state police have a chance to get into town and take the case from us."
"Tomorrow?"
He shook his head. "Eight inches of new snow down already and as much as twenty more predicted, all dry as powder and blown by a good wind. In another couple of hours, no one could get up to Owlsden-and in another six hours, no one will be driving in or out of Roxburgh itself, not even the state police."
"When will they get here?" she asked.
"Depends on the wind once the snow has stopped. Could be as much as a week if the weather's as bad as it sometimes gets."
"A week! But what if the same people who killed Yuri are-"
"They won't come back here," Cartier said.
"You can't be sure."
He smiled. "I can be sure. They'll know how hot the place is, how dangerous it would be to come here again and cause trouble."
"But they'll also know there isn't anyone here protecting the place. Can't you go ahead with the investigation until-"
Obviously embarrassed, Cartier interrupted her. "Neither I nor any of my men could handle it properly. We haven't been trained for things like this, because we aren't accustomed to anything more troublesome in Roxburgh than drunks and marital quarrels. I'm afraid that we'd only mess up the trail if we started stomping around after clues, and then we'd be in hot water with the state boys. I've chalked the outline of the body in the den, to show where it fell, and I'd be pleased if none of you touched anything in that room until the state police can go over it with all their machines. Other than that, we all have to sit and wait out the storm."
"Couldn't they send someone in by helicopter?" Katherine asked.
"Perhaps they could, but they won't. It isn't that much of a crime to them, one murder. Like I said, a couple of days or a week. Then they'll be here to handle it."
He nodded to Lydia and left the room.
"With this snow," Katherine said, "the carpenter won't be able to come and change the locks tomorrow, will he?"
"No," Alex said.
Lydia said, "Don't worry, dear. I'm sure that Constable Cartier is right. Those terrible people, whoever they were, aren't going to risk returning to Owlsden in the near future."
"I hope you're right," Katherine said.
"I know I am."
The police trundled Yuri's blanket-wrapped corpse past the library door. The sight of it, like a bundle of weeds, caused Patricia Keene to break into low, mournful sobs.
"There now, there now," her husband said, patting her shoulder and awkwardly trying to cradle her against his chest. He was not a man easily able to offer consolation or comfort. "It's going to be perfectly all right, Pat. Everything is going to be fine."
Katherine wished that he were right. But she knew that he was wrong...
CHAPTER 12
The following day, Owlsden was suffused with a morbid air of death, a deep mood of brooding expectancy that ruled out any quick resumption of the routines of daily life. Outside, the snow still fell hard, with nearly twelve inches of new snow draped across the old, softening the land and the house like a burial shroud softens the harsh realities beneath it. Inside, Lydia remained in her room, uninterested in conversation or in going about the details of correspondence. She seemed to have been stricken more brutally by Yuri's sudden death than she had evidenced the night before. Patricia and Mason Keene kept to the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking in low voices-conversations which they ceased immediately when anyone entered their private domain. The
y were not bothering to produce any culinary masterpieces, for everyone had made it clear that food was not of much interest after the bloody events of the last several hours. Alex Boland went into town, using the ski slope, around ten o'clock and looked to be gone until evening, though Katherine had no idea what he was doing down there. It seemed to her that his time might be better spent in finding some way to secure the doors to Owlsden before nightfall brought a new period of anxiety to all of them.
Katherine remained in her room, like Lydia, and tried to read. When she grew hungry enough to force food into her stomach and keep it there, she nibbled at the things in the refrigerator in her closet. She spent long periods of time at the window, staring out at the clean landscape, the sharp, relentless, white glare of the untouched snow. She found herself methodically adding up the credits and the debits of life at Owlsden, as she had done once before, but she had different results than the first time. The list of debits now far outweighed the credits. It seemed wiser to pack and leave, to go through the unsettling process of locating a new job, than to stay here.
Of course, she would have to stay a while yet. The hard, snapping wind and the huge snowfall dictated a period of isolation before she could make her break for freedom. Even if she could somehow get her luggage down the ski slope, tote it to her Ford where it was still parked in that picnic area and get the car started after it had set several days in the snow, she could not drive out of the valley. She remembered the perilous descent into the valley her first day on the job, and she had no wish to try to make it back up that insanely steep roadway in even worse weather.
And so the day passed.
More wind.
More snow.
She watched them both, watched the woods, thought about the bonfire she had seen from this window, the dancing figures, the wolflike tracks in the snow....
She washed her nylons in the sink, hung them on the shower rail to dry, painted her nails, nibbled at an apple.
She found herself at the window again, attracted like a moth to a flame, staring at the site of the bonfire which was now covered with snow and as unremarkable as the rest of the land.
She remembered Yuri saying that they had singled her out as the next convert to the beliefs which the cult held dear, that certain spells would be cast and that she would not be able to resist, that she might very well become as they...
More wind.
More snow.
In the evening, when darkness had dropped across the snowscape without diminishing the speed of the falling flakes, she went downstairs to the library to choose a book from its richly stuffed shelves. The downstairs was as quiet and chilled as the second floor corridor had been, as if there were no one else in Owlsden but Katherine-or, even more exactly, as if this were not a house at all, but some ancient monument, a burial vault of pyramidal splendor. After twenty minutes of choosing one volume only to replace it when she leafed through it, she found a light romance which seemed just the thing to take her mind off the events in Owlsden. She was stepping out of the library into the downstairs corridor when the telephone rang, crying like a wounded bird in the dead silence.
It rang twice before she picked it up from the table only a few steps to her right. "Hello?"
"May I speak to Miss Sellers, please?" It was Michael Harrison.
"This is me, Mike," she said.
"Katherine?"
"Yes."
He sighed, relieved. "I was afraid that you'd be outside-or that they might not put you on the line."
She laughed softly. Just hearing his voice had done wonders for her, had recalled his warmth, the friendliness of his companions at the cafe-and had recalled, not least of all, the way he looked at her and the way he had kissed her only the night before.
She said, "Why shouldn't they let me talk to you? Do you think they're all conspiring against me or something?"
He paused too long for comfort and said, "Not Lydia, anyway."
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
"I'm afraid to tell you," he said, "for fear you won't believe me, that you'll get angry with me."
"Never," she said, surprised at the boldness in her tone.
Again he paused, considering his choice of words. "If I were to have the Rover up there at eleven this evening, do you think you could have your luggage outside, waiting for me-without letting anyone know what you are up to?"
"Michael, this is hardly a time for jokes that-"
"No jokes."
She thought a moment, said, "What is the matter?"
"You know how Alex is prejudiced against me," he said.
"Only too well."
"I hope you also understand that I would never talk against him just to ruin his character or for spite. I would not behave the way he does."
"I know you well enough to understand that," she said.
"Then understand that I fully believe what I'm about to tell you is the truth."
"Tell me, then, for heaven's sake!"
Michael took a deep breath as if to fortify himself for the explanation, or as if he still was afraid she might not believe him. "I have some fairly convincing evidence that Alex Boland is a member of that Satanic cult which has been causing so much trouble lately."
"Alex?" she asked, stunned at the possibility. She had been willing to consider his friends-but not the son of her employer himself. Those who did awful things were always strangers, not people you knew. People you knew were better than that, unable to commit crimes. Or was that nothing more than her optimism working against her again?
"Alex," he confirmed. "And not only does it seem that he's a member of the cult, but that he's the head of it, the chief priest."
"I can hardly see why-"
"These people don't need reasons that normal people would understand," Michael said. "They operate in another dimension altogether, on a plane of lesser sanity."
"Still-"
"Think, Katherine!" he demanded. He sounded desperately concerned for her. She remembered the kiss, the way he had been so protective about her in the cafe... "Think of all that's happened in Owlsden since you've come there-including Yuri's murder. Doesn't it seem likely that someone in the house is a cultist?"
"You mean-Alex might have-"
"Killed Yuri."
She did not reply.
She could not reply.
All that she could think of was Alex Boland's unpleasantly negative outlook on life and the strange, pessimistic conversation of his closest friends...
"Are you there, Katherine?"
"Yes."
"Will you be ready by eleven?"
"It won't be easy. Couldn't we wait until morning..." Even though she was frightened badly, she did not want to admit that what Michael had told her might be true.
"Then leave your bags," he said. "Just come along with me and look at the evidence. If you don't think it incriminates Alex, I'll take you right back to Owlsden. But I don't believe you'll want to go back, not after you see what I've seen."
"Can't you tell me on the phone?" she asked.
"It loses its dramatic impact that way. I'm not taking any chances on under-selling this to you. I want you to see it, to be as frightened as I was-as I am."
"I'll be outside at eleven," she said.
"Not in front of the house."
"Where, then?"
"At the top of the ski slope," he said.
"You can bring the Rover up that way?"
"As easy as the road," he said. "Maybe easier."
"I'll be there."
"Take care."
"I will."
"Eleven."
"Sharp," she said.
She hung up and turned around to go upstairs, the book in her hand forgotten now, and she confronted Alex who stood only a dozen feet away, as if he had been listening.
"Going out?" he asked.
His eyes seemed darker and more intense than ever.
"In the morning," she said, thinking fast. She tried desperately to remember
how much she had said, what details he might have learned from hearing one side of the conversation. "If Lydia doesn't have anything for me to do."
"Going with Michael Harrison?" he asked.
"Yes, as a matter of fact."
How long had he been standing there? How much did he know, and how much was he guessing at? Had he heard her mention his name...?
"I wish you wouldn't, Katherine."
"You've got an obsession about him, haven't you?"
"No. I just know him better than you do."
"Your mother thinks he is-"
"I know him better than she does."
"Well, I like him."
"Katherine, I honestly believe that he is capable of almost anything." He stepped into the center of the hall, his arms spread slightly at his sides, as if he were pleading with her. Or as if he were blocking the way so that she could not get past him unless he permitted it.
"Must you always think the worst of everyone and everything?" she asked, a bit too harshly. She was goaded on by fear as well as by anger. "You never look at the positive side, the bright side of anything, Alex. Sometimes, you're absolutely morbid."
He seemed shocked by the evaluation, but he recovered quickly as she took a step toward him, his hands still slightly open at his sides. "Are you going skiing with him?"
She hesitated, realized that he must have overheard something to do with the rendezvous point. It would be better to admit to this much so as not to make him doubt her word that the meeting was not until the following morning. "Yes, skiing," she said.
"Maybe I could go along, make it a threesome," he said, though it was surely the last thing in the world he would enjoy.
"Maybe you could," she said, rather than antagonize him. Since she wouldn't be going skiing with Michael in the morning, what harm did it do to agree with Alex now?