In the Dark

by Loreth Anne White

  “Which is why most veteran homicide cops are not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Normal.”

  She laughed. The sound was soft, gentle. Mason found it made her more attractive to him. Which was not a good thing. He began to feel edgy.

  Callie is married. She’s in a vulnerable place. And so are you. Don’t even think of going there.

  His inner voice shocked him. Mason had not felt like going “there” with anyone since Jenny’s death. Callie, or time, or both, had managed to crack something in him. The idea that he could even begin to feel again made his heart beat just a little faster. It sent a soft warmth into his gut. And that was enough. For now. Just to feel a little bit alive again. To want to keep living. And he was grateful to Callie for giving him that.

  He inhaled deeply and said, “I’m going to turn in, call it a night.”

  She nodded and pushed to her feet. “Yeah. Me too.”

  He stood, and for a moment they were close. She looked into his eyes and he felt it. A surge of something invisible but tangible. A thickening and an electricity in the air between them. She turned away quickly, clicked on her headlamp, and made for her tent.

  He just stood watching her beam of light dance through the trees and bounce against the thick mist, his body tense.

  Spending time with Callie Sutton was either going to be good for him, or it was going to be very bad. Because she was spoken for. And he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit he was being drawn to her on a sexual level.

  He exhaled and made for his own tent.

  Somewhere in the trees, the owl hooted softly.

  THE LODGE PARTY

  STELLA

  Monday, October 26.

  That night, Stella lay in her bed upstairs. They’d cut Katie down from the rafter, wrapped her in a sheet from her bed, and carried her out to the shed, where they’d managed to get her body into the large chest freezer with Bart’s.

  Uncertain what to do next, the five of them had rewarmed the stew Deborah had prepared, eaten in sheer exhaustion, and decided to try and get some sleep so clearer heads in the morning might help them figure out a plan.

  They’d watched each other going into their respective rooms and locked their doors.

  Outside, the wind had died, and Stella could no longer hear rain falling. Perhaps it had turned to snow. But she could hear the distant chug of the generator. She couldn’t decide if the mechanical sound was comforting or horrific, given the contents of the freezer.

  For the bazillionth time she ran through the sequence of events leading to the deaths. It seemed that almost everyone had had an opportunity to take the cleaver from the kitchen and murder Bart.

  The same for Jackie disappearing with the plane. And Stella was now certain that Jackie Blunt must be dead.

  Katie Colbourne? The optics were clearly that Katie had taken her own life for some dark reason unbeknownst to the rest of them.

  Stella tossed in her bed, punched her pillow, and lay back staring at shadows on the ceiling. An hour later, she checked her watch.

  Only 1:45 a.m.

  She tossed and turned for a few more minutes, then sat bolt upright. Someone was banging on a bedroom door down the hall.

  She heard a woman yell. “Help, we need help here! Someone help!”

  Stella swung her feet over the side of the bed, then hesitated. No one could be trusted, could they?

  “Please, help. Steven is throwing up! He’s sick.”

  Stella grabbed her fleece jacket and pulled on some pants. She unlocked her door and peered out.

  Monica was wrapped in her dressing gown. She stood outside Steven’s door.

  She pointed into Steven’s room. “Nathan is with him in the bathroom. He’s throwing up all over the place and has terrible diarrhea. There’s blood in his vomit.”

  Tuesday, October 27.

  By late morning the next day, Steven was finally sleeping. They’d brought him downstairs with a bucket and helped him lie down on the sofa. His vomit and diarrhea had gotten progressively bloodier during the night. And they’d all stayed up with him while Nathan had kept the fire going into the early hours of the morning. Deborah now sat at Steven’s side and continued to bathe his brow with a cool cloth that had been soaked in water. Stella had found some electrolyte tabs in her medical kit and given them to him, because Steven’s blood pressure had been dropping, and they feared dehydration. He’d appeared delirious for a time, too. His complexion was ashen, and the hollows beneath his eyes were deep and bruise colored.

  They all kept looking at the checkerboard, half expecting another figurine to suddenly lose its head and topple over. Dead.

  “It’s like he ingested something toxic,” Monica said yet again, standing behind the sofa. She looked like a wreck. Stella would barely recognize her as the well-made-up and manicured woman in expensive outdoor gear who’d boarded the plane only two days before.

  “But we all ate the same thing,” Deborah said. “I put a bit of stew and a bit of chili from each of the tins into all of our bowls.”

  Those bowls of stew had grown cold while they’d cut Katie down from the rafter, wrapped her in a sheet, and carried her out to the freezer. But Monica had rewarmed the contents.

  “Maybe it was something else he took? Like some pills or something,” Nathan offered.

  “There was nothing in his room that would indicate anything like that,” Stella said.

  Steven groaned, and his eyelids fluttered open. His lips were dry.

  “Hey,” Stella said. She tried to smile. “You’re alive, Doc.”

  He moaned and held his hand to his brow. “Need . . . something to drink. Thirsty, so thirsty.”

  Nathan came to his feet. “I’ll go make some sweet black tea. I think that might be good. Anyone else want some? I saw tea bags and sugar in the cupboards earlier.”

  They all nodded.

  Nathan made his way into the kitchen as Steven pushed himself into a sitting position. Stella began to think that the worst was over for Dr. Bodine. Whatever had poisoned his system had worked its way through.

  Nathan yelled suddenly from the kitchen. “Guys! Oh Christ. Guys!”

  Stella surged to her feet as Nathan appeared in the doorway. He held a shallow earthenware bowl in his hands, a terrible look on his face.

  He held the bowl out for them to see.

  Mushrooms.

  “Do you know what these are?” he asked.

  Stella glanced at Monica, who looked at Deborah. Steven stared, confused, at the bowl in Nathan’s hands.

  “Death caps,” Nathan said. “Amanita phalloides.” He picked a mushroom out of the bowl and held it up for them to see. “Accounts for ninety percent of all fungus-related fatalities.”

  Monica leaped to her feet. “Put that down, Nathan! Don’t touch it!”

  He set what looked like a common, edible variety of mushroom back into the bowl. “It’s not lethal to the touch, Monica. Only if you eat it.”

  “There were mushrooms in the stew last night,” Steven said in a croaky, weakened voice.

  “Not in mine,” Deborah said.

  “I didn’t taste any in my bowl,” Stella said quickly.

  “Nor me in mine,” Monica said.

  “Certainly were no mushrooms in my stew last night,” Nathan said. His attention settled on Steven. Worry creased his brow.

  “Do you think someone could’ve put some death cap into only Steven’s food?” Monica asked.

  “I prepared the food,” Deborah said. “And I didn’t use mushrooms. I never even saw that bowl of mushrooms in the kitchen. And it was Monica who took the bowls and rewarmed them.”

  “But the bowls of stew were also sitting unattended on the table downstairs while we were all busy with Katie upstairs,” Stella said. She turned to Nathan. “Where exactly did you find those?”

  “They were just sitting there in this bowl, next to the chopping block in the kitchen.”

  Silence pressed in
to the room. The fire crackled. Stella cleared her throat. “Someone’s been inside.”

  “Or one of us put them there while the rest of us were upstairs and not looking,” Nathan said.

  Steven narrowed his eyes onto Nathan. “And who among us would know which mushrooms could kill, and where to find them?”

  “Oh no, no, this was not me,” Nathan said, looking stricken. “God, I hate you, Steven, you know that, but I’m not a killer.”

  Electricity crackled between the men.

  “Do they even grow here?” Deborah asked.

  Nathan set the bowl down on the dining table. “They’re being reported all over BC now. And there have been several deaths. The BC Centre for Disease Control has been putting out warnings. These look like they could have been harvested a few weeks ago. Death caps usually grow in BC from June to November. They are easily confused for edible mushrooms, depending on the stage of maturity.”

  “Could those have been growing outside the lodge, or along the forest trails we searched?” Stella asked. “I saw lots of different fungi out there.”

  “It’s possible,” Nathan said. “But I personally didn’t see anything resembling Amanita phalloides.”

  “Well, thank heavens that Steven is okay now,” Deborah said. “Whatever it was, it seems the worst is over.”

  But Nathan remained silent, watching Steven closely. Stella’s chest tightened, and a sense of tension increased in the room. Nathan dragged his hand over his hair, as if struggling to voice something.

  “What is it, Nathan?” Monica snapped. “Just spit it out, please.”

  “He’s going to die.”

  His words hung on the air in the great room. The clock tock, tock, tocked.

  “I feel better,” said Steven. “I’m getting better.”

  “It’s the lag phase.”

  “Nathan—talk to us!” Monica said, her eyes going wild. “Please.”

  He seated himself carefully on the edge of one of the chairs, and he met their gazes in turn.

  “If Steven has consumed Amanita phalloides, he’s gone through what is called the gastrointestinal phase. It usually hits about six to ten hours after ingestion as the body tries to expel the toxin. Then, clinically, the victim will appear to be getting better. He will feel as though he’s on the mend. It’s called the lag phase. But during this lag phase, the amatoxins are busy destroying his liver.”

  “What does that mean?” Deborah asked.

  “It means that in another thirty-six to forty-eight hours, signs of liver impairment will start to appear. They will get progressively worse. The toxins will totally damage his liver and kidneys. Organ failure will result, and then death in one to three weeks, unless he gets medical help fast, or a liver transplant in short order.” He paused. “Steven is going to die if we don’t get expert medical intervention. Soon. There’s nothing else that will stop this.”

  Stella’s pulse raced as her gaze went to the piece of paper with the rhyme still on the table.

  Five Little Liars filed out the door.

  One met an ax, and then there were four.

  Four Little Liars lost in the trees.

  One got stabbed, and then there were three.

  “It’s not prescriptive,” she said quietly. “Things haven’t happened exactly like the rhyme said. It doesn’t mean we all will die. We can stop this. We must stop this.”

  Nathan said, “Either way, Steven is going to die if we don’t get him to a hospital.”

  THE SEARCH

  CALLIE

  Wednesday, November 4.

  The gray rain-whipped day dawned to the thud of choppers approaching in low clouds. Callie called Ben on her satellite phone as she watched the back-and-forth of helicopters disgorging crime scene crews, a coroner, officers both in and out of uniform, a police K9 team, military tents, and other equipment. Mason was inside the lodge, working with the lead detective, Gord Fielding, each updating the other on aspects of the case thus far.

  “Heya, Ben, it’s Mom,” Callie said, blocking one ear with her hand and moving deeper into the trees to better hear her son’s voice. “Did you have a good night?”

  Benny told her about the movie they’d watched last night, and how his class was going to visit the fire station today. As she listened to her son, she watched two officers go by, stringing yellow crime scene tape among the trees all the way down to the water’s edge. It billowed and flapped in the wind. It felt surreal. But she was relieved to hear Benny sounding so happy.

  “Sounds like fun,” she said. “Maybe Mason will have you guys over to the police station soon. And you can come to see the SAR base.”

  “I’ve seen the SAR base, Mom.”

  “Yeah, but your classmates haven’t, right? You could help show them around. We could do a mock search.”

  “That would be cool!”

  She smiled. “Okay. Be good. I might be away for a few days, but you can always get Rachel to call me on the sat phone if you need to talk to me, okay?”

  “’Kay, Mom. Bye!”

  And he was gone. Callie gave a wry smile as she signed off and slotted her phone into the sheath at her belt. From her pack she retrieved her clipboard, a water-resistant notebook, and a graphite pencil she could use in the rain. She made her way through the trees to join Oskar and the other SAR guys. They were working with the K9 team to assess tracks that appeared to show the remaining survivors had headed into the woods near the lake. The Survivor Five, as they were being dubbed.

  The energy was buzzing everywhere, and the questions were flying as the painstaking process of collecting every tiny bit of evidence, and flagging and recording it, had begun. Callie had never personally witnessed an operation the scope of this one—certainly not one involving multiple homicides. While it was horrific, shocking, she also found aspects of it thrilling.

  The coroner, who was a retired pathologist, felt both Bart Kundera and Katie Colbourne had died about a week earlier. From his cursory examination, the pathologist believed the cleaver had killed Bart Kundera, and that it appeared to have been thrown from a distance. It had sunk into Kundera’s skull at considerable velocity. Callie didn’t know many people who could throw an ax or cleaver with enough accuracy to hit someone neatly in the back of the head. The question was whether one among the Survivor Five had cleaver- or ax-throwing skills.

  Either Katie Colbourne had hanged herself, or someone else had killed her. It would have required considerable strength to string Colbourne from the rafters, or possibly teamwork. Or Katie might have been threatened and forced up onto the seat of the chair found overturned near her feet, which could then have been kicked out from under her.

  Mason had also told Callie that someone inside the lodge had been sick with bloody diarrhea and vomit. From the contents of one of the rooms, and the adjoining bathroom, it appeared the sick person had been Dr. Steven Bodine. It was also possible a rifle had been taken, judging by markings and hooks on a wall, and the bullets emptied from a box that had been left in the shed.

  Clothing and other belongings found in the rooms had been examined, and more information on the Survivor Five, plus the three decedents, was coming in from detectives who were talking with the respective families. So far Callie had been given the heights, weights, and shoe sizes of the Survivor Five, along with basic personality traits.

  Katie Colbourne, Callie had learned, was divorced and the mother of a six-year-old girl named Gabby. Not much younger than Benny. Callie hated to think of the child dealing with this heartbreaking news, learning her mother would never be coming home. The legacy of her mother’s murder would haunt Gabby Colbourne for the rest of her life. If there was one thing that would enable Callie to endure and survive anything, it would be her fierce need to get home to Ben and Peter. To never leave them alone.

  “Hey!” Oskar called out as he saw Callie approaching along the narrow trail.

  He left the K9 team and SAR techs and came over to her with his tracking pole in hand. “We�
�ve located five sets of different boot prints,” he said in his deep singsong voice. “Got some good trace over this way.” Oskar led Callie to prints that had been made in thick mud beneath the heavy branches of a hemlock that had so far protected them. “There,” Oskar said.

  She got down into the mud with Oskar. He pointed his pole to one print—he used rubber bands, castration rings, that he’d threaded onto his pole to measure the average stride for each person. If he knew generally how long each subject’s stride was, it showed him where to look for the next print in relation to one he’d just found.

  “This print shows a distinct starburst pattern on the ball of the foot. And this one here, small rectangle ridges. That one over there has circular pieces on the heel, and damage in the lugs near the toe. These here are worn smooth at the heel. This one has interlocking triangle-shaped lugs.”

  Callie began to measure and sketch the five distinct patterns, impervious to the rain coming down on her shoulders and dripping from the bill of her cap. Her fingers were going numb from the cold, her breath coming in clouds as she took her tape measure to another sole imprint.

  “This one with the starburst pattern looks like an Outrigger brand boot,” she said. “It’s a seven.” She consulted her notebook. “According to next of kin, both Monica McNeill and Deborah Strong wore sizes six and a half to seven, depending on the shoe brand.”

  Callie moved on to sketch another pattern. She took photos of the different prints as well, but KSAR volunteers understood well the limitations of batteries and high-tech devices in the wilderness. Having waterproof maps, old-style compass-reading skills, and water-resistant notebooks and pencils was protocol for the team.