“Get out of here,” I ordered. “Quick, run.”
I followed my own advice, but Tony just stood there, frozen with shock. Before I could return to him and remove him forcibly, there was a crash of crockery and ringing metal. Instinctively I ducked behind the open door. One of the waitresses stood in the doorway. She hadn’t seen me; her bulging eyes were fixed on Friedl’s hideous face. The tray had fallen from her hands.
The sight of her distress jolted Tony out of his. He took a step toward her. She screamed and fled. She went on screaming all the way down the hall.
“No, wait,” I gabbled, grabbing at Tony as he stumped toward the door. “It’s too late. This is what he wants….”
I could see the scheme in its entirety. I should have known the person who had set Tony up wouldn’t neglect to provide a witness. Running away now would be the worst thing Tony could do. Not only would it be taken as an admission of guilt, but if he was a fugitive, pursued by the police, one well-placed shot would give the authorities their murderer—dead and unable to defend himself. The safest place for Tony now was the slammer.
There was no time to explain. Already I could hear running footsteps and cries of alarm. I held on to Tony. “Wait, no time,” I insisted. “Wait.”
He didn’t struggle. All his natural, law-abiding instincts demanded that he stand like a man and face the music.
What I did was a dirty, low-down trick, but I had no choice. The crowd surged in—guests, waiters, busboys—all shouting in horror and distress—and surrounded Tony and the corpse. His poor white bewildered face was the last thing I saw as I slid quietly out the door.
I had to risk going to my room. I met no one on the stairs or in the hall, but when I opened the door, I saw Clara lying on my bed in a welter of tangled ribbon and shredded wrapping paper.
“Dammit,” I exclaimed. “How did you get in here? You’re not supposed to eat ribbons; they can block your intestines.”
Clara raised her head. A curl of scarlet ribbon dangled from her mouth like an outré mustache, and it seemed to me that there was a distinctly critical look in her eyes.
“Right,” I muttered. “Right. No time…” I snatched up my jacket and backpack and ran out.
How had she gotten into my room? The window was closed. John had locked her in the shop….
As I trotted through the lobby, I heard Schmidt’s well-known voice in the distance. He’d keep an eye on Tony. I wished I could have had him arrested, too. But the danger was not in the hotel, I was sure of that; it was heading up the mountain, to the same place I was going.
The twinkling Christmas lights and warmly lit windows of the houses I passed were poignant reminders of a misspent life. If I had settled down to domesticity, I’d be in just such a pleasant cottage, baking cookies and patting the dog and kissing the kiddies, instead of skidding along icy roads under a sky dark as death, on my way to a rendezvous with a murderer.
The traffic was surprisingly light. Not so surprising, actually; it was Christmas Eve, sensible people were safe at home. I swore—at myself—and swerved to avoid some idiot who was standing in the middle of the road waving his arms. As I turned sharply into the narrow track leading up the mountain, it occurred to me that the idiot had been wearing a uniform of some kind.
The wheels hit a stretch of ice and the car went into a skid. Despite the cold, I was sweating when I pulled out of it, and I forced myself to let up on the gas. There was no hurry. He couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes ahead of me, half an hour at the most. And what he had to do would take a long time, even if he had thought to bring the proper equipment. Needless to say, I had not. It wasn’t the gold I was after, it was the man. Not that I had the slightest idea of what I was going to do if I found him.
With a sharp stab of relief I remembered that Schmidt’s gun was in my backpack. Good old Schmidt.
The road was bad. I had to concentrate on keeping a steady pace, fast enough so the car wouldn’t stall on the slope, slow enough so I could handle the frequent skids. Only my own headlights broke the darkness ahead of me. I must have gone half the distance before a flash of light in my rearview mirror betrayed the presence of a following vehicle.
Could I be ahead of him? Certainly I could. My foot had started for the brake; the car wove wildly when I returned it to the gas, a little too emphatically. It made no sense to stop; if I did, I’d never get started again, and there was no place to turn until I reached the cemetery. Perhaps it was the law behind me—the cop I had narrowly missed. Such dedication over a simple traffic violation? I sincerely hoped so, but I wasn’t counting on it.
I had to keep both hands tight on the wheel, but how my fingers itched for that lovely gun. Time enough for that later, I told myself, and set my mind to considering alternative strategies. Or was it tactics? I can never remember which is which. Any attempt at innocent coincidence—“Fancy meeting you here”—was O-U-T, out. There was only one reason why anyone, including me, would visit the abandoned churchyard on such a night—and it wasn’t the desire for a quiet spin in the country. No, it would be a direct, honest confrontation for once, no pretense, no kidding around. I would have to get him—or her—before whoever it was got me.
I think if I had known who it was, I wouldn’t have been so nervous. Dieter or Jan or Elise? I wasn’t afraid of any of them, or of any hypothetical third party. I was afraid of the unknown. And of the possibility that it might be someone I did know but had not wanted to suspect.
The following headlights behind me alternately shone out and vanished, as I swung around the tight upward curves. The car wasn’t making any attempt to catch up; it stayed at the same discreet distance. So, I thought, not the police. No flashing lights, no siren.
Intent on the car behind me, I almost passed the cemetery. My turn was too sharp and too fast; the Audi slid sideways into a high snowbank, and the engine died.
I had closed my eyes involuntarily. When I opened them, I saw nothing but snow. Mercifully, my door was still clear. I fought my way out, pausing only long enough to snatch my backpack and turn out the lights.
There was no moon to shine on the breast of the new-fallen snow, but the pale surface was lighter than the sky. The desolate church loomed like a crouching dinosaur, its tower the stiff, raised head. I floundered through the drifts, leaving a trail a blind man could follow. Maybe abandoning the car had not been such a great idea after all. But the prospect of being trapped inside, with the opposite door blocked, was even more unpleasant.
The night blossomed with light. I fell face down, burrowing into the snow.
After a while I realized the light was gone. The car had passed by. It hadn’t turned into the churchyard; I would have heard the engine cut off.
I got slowly to my feet and brushed the snow from my face, and listened. The night was not silent. The wind blew shrill from the east, wailing under the eaves of the church and rattling the branches of the trees. It made a lonely howling in the night, like the poor demons of paganism, cast into outer darkness and bewailing their banishment from the throne of light.
As I stood there slowly congealing, I faced the unpleasant truth. I had panicked. I do that sometimes; what the hell, I’m not Superwoman. While I was thinking patronizingly about poor old Tony’s inability to react quickly in a crisis, I was reacting too quickly, mounting my horse and riding off in all directions. I should have tried to find help. Though whether I would have succeeded, on Christmas Eve, with a new-laid murder preoccupying the small police force, was open to question.
Either I was all alone in the cemetery, or the other denizens of the region were singularly silent types…. Obviously nobody had arrived on the scene before me. There was no sign of activity near the lonely grave. It would require a blowtorch or a long-burning fire to soften the frozen earth before anyone could begin digging. The driver of the car that had been following me must have been an innocent local, homeward bound to his cottage on the other side of the mountain.
Obviously I c
ouldn’t spend the night squatting on Frau Hoffman’s grave, waiting for the unknown to turn up. I could freeze to death before that happened, if it ever did. I decided I had better get back to the car. In the enthusiasm of new-car ownership I had stocked the trunk with a variety of suggested emergency equipment. Some of it might even be there. The blanket was kaput; I had used it to cover the seat one day when I took Caesar to the vet, and he had eaten most of it. But if memory served, I still had a small folding shovel and a few other odds and ends. If I couldn’t dig the car out and get it back on the road, I might at least survive until morning.
It was at that point in my cool, deliberate reasoning that I heard something that was not the wind moaning in the branches. The wind wouldn’t call my name.
The voice came behind me—between me and the car. Did I panic? Of course I did. I started forward, my progress agonizingly slowed by the depth of the snow. Get behind something—that was my only thought. A snowbank, a wall—how about a tombstone? Plenty of them around.
“Vicky!” Unmistakably my name, though the wind snatched the syllables and played with them. High-pitched and distorted by emotion, it could have been the voice of a man or a woman.
I reached an area where the snow was slightly less deep—only about to my knees. The black square framed in whiteness was Hoffman’s tombstone. The snow lay deep and untouched over the graves. One of my wreaths had toppled forward, only a black half-circle showed, partially veiled by the drifting snow.
I could hear him now, thrashing after me. I reached into my bag and found the gun. My hands were stiff with cold, despite my gloves. I realized I’d have to remove one of them to get my finger around the trigger.
“Vicky!” Then, at last, I knew the voice.
He was a dark featureless shadow against the paler blanket of snow, but I would have known that shape anywhere. His voice was rough and uneven, barely recognizable. “What the hell are you doing? It’s thirty degrees below freezing; are you trying to turn yourself into an icecube?”
I said, “Friedl is dead. Murdered. Strangled.”
“Ah.” His breath formed a ghostly plume against the darkness. After a moment he said, “It’s here. I should have known. The bulb.”
“The wrong time of year, you said.” My lips were numb with cold. “Bulbs are planted in the fall, before the ground freezes. I expect he put the chrysanthemums in at the same time. Even if anyone noticed, in this remote place, the signs of digging would be explained.”
“And what more appropriate spot than the grave of his Helen,” John murmured.
Had he read Hoffman’s love letters? Not necessarily. His quick, intuitive mind was capable of appreciating the poetry of real life, even if he couldn’t feel it himself.
When he spoke again his voice cracked with anger. “So you came rushing up here in the dead of night, with a blizzard forecast, to catch a killer. Are you out of your mind? Even if he knows—”
“She’s safe until he finds out, you said.”
“I said a lot of things. What am I, the voice of God? He may have had other reasons for murdering her.”
I said, “I have a gun.”
“How nice.” He had regained control of his breathing; his voice was almost back to normal, light and mocking. “I suppose you could use it to start a fire. But if I may venture to make a suggestion, a packet of matches would be more useful.”
“I’m not so sure. What are you doing here?”
“I followed you, what do you think? You came haring out of the hotel as if your jeans were on fire and took off like a bat out of hell.” The dim shadow shifted, and I said warningly, “Don’t come any closer.”
“For God’s sake, Vicky! Do you want them to find us frozen in place, like Lot’s wife and her brother? Let’s go back to town and have a hot drink and a nice long—” His voice broke, in a long indrawn breath. Then he said quietly, almost reverently, “My God.”
Even the great John Smythe couldn’t have feigned that emotion. I glanced behind me.
It was almost upon us. I caught only one flashing glimpse before it engulfed me, but the sight burned an image into my eyes.
Snow. A solid, opaque wall of whiteness, silent, deadly, moving down from the mountain heights.
Within three seconds it had filled my mouth and nostrils, weighted my lashes, hidden the world. I heard John call out, and tried to fight my way toward him, but the wind tore his voice to tatters and drove me to my knees. When I struggled up, I had lost all sense of direction. Groping blindly, I stumbled forward. My foot caught on a tombstone and I fell again. The faint far-off wail I heard might have been his voice, or the wind—or my own whimper of fear. I couldn’t even see the ground, it was the same color as the air around me, but I felt it cold against my face as I slid forward. The blackness that filled my vision was a pleasant change after all that uniform white.
Warmth. Still dark, but warm and therefore wonderful. Surely there was a faint red glow, a specific source of heat not far away…. I was afraid to open my eyes. Mother always warned me I’d go to the bad place if I didn’t mend my sinful ways. Little did she know. After being frozen to death, hell seemed like…
“Heaven,” I murmured blissfully.
“You aren’t the first woman to tell me that,” said John’s voice.
I turned my head slightly and burrowed deeper into the lovely, prickly warmth of his sweater.
“How did you find me?” I asked drowsily.
“I believe the usual answer is, with great difficulty. To be quite honest, I fell over you. Lucky for you…. Lucky for both of us, in fact. It helped orient me; I was heading straight for the cliff.”
“Where are we?”
“Why don’t you open your eyes and find out?”
So I did.
The only light came from the flames of the fire by which I was lying. An empty, echoing darkness reached out beyond the light. At least it was enclosed; there was no wind and no snow, but it was warm only by comparison to the out-of-doors. Though the few details I could make out were indistinct, reasoning told me that there had only been one source of shelter near at hand.
“The church?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
“Where did you find the wood for the…Oh, John, you didn’t!”
“I hadn’t much choice. Luckily the pews were old wooden affairs. They burn very nicely.”
“But you’ll set the place on fire!”
“No fear. The baptismal font makes a handy little fireplace. Really,” John went on in a meditative voice, “I had no idea how convenient an abandoned church can be. I must remember to look for one the next time I’m benighted.”
“Good God,” I said helplessly.
“I couldn’t agree more. If you are sufficiently recovered to tend the fire, I will go questing to see what other useful items I can find. I felt a fire was the most important thing. You were unpleasantly frigid to the touch when I towed you in.”
I sat up. Once away from the warmth of his body, I realized the temperature of the air was well below freezing. I felt like a piece of bread in one of those old wire toasters, singed on one side and cold on the other.
He had removed my wet outer clothes and laid them on the floor near the fire. I heard him move away, cat-footed in the dust. He was whistling softly.
Well, I could think of worse people to be caught in a blizzard with. My lips twisted in a reluctant smile as I saw the crumpled papers next to the makeshift fireplace. They were pages from a hymnal.
I looked over my shoulder. The flame of his lighter gleamed like a star in the dimness, and I thanked God he had taken up smoking. “Haven’t you got a flashlight?” I called, and then recoiled as the high ceiling threw the last syllables back at me like the voice of the Inhabitant himself.
“Yes. In the caaaar…. Fascinating echo, isn’t it? Yodayahlalala…”
He came back carrying an armful of wood, which he dumped onto the floor. “I wonder if I could invent a torch,” he mused, squatting. “My lighte
r isn’t going to hold out indefinitely. We ought to save it in case the fire needs to be restarted.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked, as he straightened with a burning fragment in his hand.
“A bottle of sacramental wine would hit the spot.”
“I doubt that a thrifty Bavarian would overlook anything like that. Besides, this isn’t a Catholic church. Some offbeat local sect.”
John came back to the fire to rekindle his makeshift torch. “Please,” he said, in tones of the utmost sincerity, “Please don’t start talking about the Old Religion. The ambiance is grisly enough without that.”
“The Old…oh, you mean the witchcraft cult—the theory that it was a survival of pre-Christian religions. There are plenty of survivals around here.”
His teeth gleamed uncannily with reflected firelight. “Yes, I saw you gibbering at the Buttenmandeln. Or was that just an excuse to fling yourself into Perlmutter’s arms?”
He went off again before I could answer. I huddled closer to the fire.
The torch burned fitfully, now flaring up, now sinking to a sullen glow. Gliding through the darkness, it resembled a giant, diabolical firefly. A dry, inhuman squawl made me jump before I identified it as the sound of rusty hinges. The dancing light disappeared. An interminable time seemed to pass before it appeared again.
“Found the sacristy,” John announced. “Or the off-beat local version of same. Not much there.” He tossed a bundle onto the floor. Dust billowed up in an evil-smelling cloud.
“God,” I said involuntarily. “It smells like a grave.”
“Mold. Let’s eschew suggestive similes, shall we, and say mold.” John nudged the bundle with his foot. “Curtains. They’re rotting and filthy—and moldy—but we’re in no position to be fastidious. It’s going to be a long, cold night.”
“No wine?”
“No wine.” He sat down next to me. I edged away.
“Now don’t tell me you are going to come all over prim propriety,” he jeered. “Bundling, I have been informed, is a thrifty old New England custom which ought equally to have applied in the frigid tundras of Minnesota.”
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