by John Verdon
“What time are you leaving for Plattsburgh?”
“Who said I was going to Plattsburgh?”
“Isn’t that what Rebecca’s message was about?”
He recalled playing it while Madeleine was in the bathtub. “You heard that?”
“You should turn down the volume if you don’t want people hearing your messages.”
He hesitated. “She suggested getting together. She’s there for an academic commitment.”
Madeleine’s silence was as questioning as her voice had been.
He shrugged. “I haven’t decided.”
“Whether to go? Or what time to go?”
“Both.”
“You should go.”
“Why?”
“Because you want to.”
He hesitated. “I think it might be helpful to talk to her. But I’m not comfortable leaving you here alone.”
“I’ve been alone in worse places.”
“You could come with me.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Now it was her turn to hesitate. “Why do you think I was willing to come here?”
“I have no idea. Your decision surprised me. Shocked me, to be honest. Given a choice between going straight to a snowshoeing weekend or stopping to look into a case of multiple suicides, I never expected you to choose the suicides.”
“The suicides had nothing to do with it.” She took a deep breath. “When I was in school, going to the Adirondacks for Christmas vacation was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do. The aunt and uncle I mentioned weren’t really my aunt and uncle, just distant cousins of my mother. They were isolated, ignorant people. George was depressive. Maureen was manic.”
“Why would your parents send you to people like that?”
“Sending me to the Adirondacks in the winter and to music camp in the summer was their strategy for getting closer to each other. One-on-one. Simplify. Communicate. Solve their marriage problems. Of course, it never worked. Like most people, they secretly liked their problems. And liked getting rid of me.”
“Are your aunt and uncle, or whatever they are, still alive?”
“George eventually shot himself.”
“Jesus.”
“Maureen moved to Florida. I have no idea whether she’s dead or alive.”
“Where up here did they live?”
“In the middle of nowhere. Devil’s Fang was actually visible from the end of their road. The nearest real town was Dannemora.”
“The town with the prison.”
“Yes.”
“I still don’t think I’m understanding why—”
“Why I wanted to come here? Maybe to see these mountains in a different way . . . in a different period of my life . . . make the memories go away.”
“What memories?”
“There was something wrong with George. He’d sit on the porch for hours, staring out into the woods, like he was already dead. Maureen was as sick as George, in the other direction. Always dancing around. She was wild for collecting rocks—triangular rocks. She insisted they were Iroquois arrowheads. Ear-a-kwah arrowheads. She loved the French pronunciation. She said a lot things with a French accent. Other times she’d pretend that she and I were Indian princesses lost in the forest, waiting to be rescued by Hiawatha. When he’d come for us we’d give him our collection of Ear-a-kwah arrowheads, and he’d give us furs to keep us warm, and we’d live happily ever after.”
“How old was she?”
“Maureen? Maybe fifty. She seemed ancient to me when I was fifteen. She might as well have been ninety.”
“Were there any other kids around?”
She blinked and stared at him. “You never answered my question.”
“What question?”
“What time are you going to Plattsburgh?”
CHAPTER 20
Gurney placed certain restrictions on his tentative plan to meet Rebecca at the Cold Brook Inn.
If the power failure continued, he wouldn’t go.
If the lodge’s cell reception wasn’t restored, he wouldn’t go.
If the sleet storm started again, he wouldn’t go.
But none of those conditions prevailed. The power was restored at 6:22 AM. Cell reception was restored at 6:24 AM. The predawn sky was spectacularly clear. The air was crisp and still and full of a piney fragrance. The lodge heating system had come back to life. All in all, everything was the opposite of the way it had been a few hours earlier.
By 6:55 AM Gurney had washed, shaved, dressed, and was ready to leave. He entered the still-dark bedroom. He could sense that Madeleine was awake.
“Be careful,” she said.
“I will.”
What being careful meant in his own mind was keeping a safe emotional distance from Rebecca, with whom there always seemed to be possibilities. He wondered if that might have been what Madeleine meant by it as well.
“When will you be back?”
“I should get to the inn by eight. If I leave there an hour or so later, I should be back before ten.”
“Don’t rush. Not on these roads. With the sleet last night, they’ll be slippery.”
“You’re sure you’ll be all right here by yourself?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, then. I’m off.” He bent down and kissed her.
The crimson-carpeted corridor was now brightly lit, a startling transformation from the previous night’s creepy backdrop for Barlow Tarr’s lamplit face. As he descended the broad staircase to the reception floor, an aroma of fresh coffee mingled with a woodsy evergreen scent.
Austen Steckle was standing in the doorway of an office behind the reception counter, speaking with some intensity on the phone. He was wearing the kind of chinos that cost five times as much as the Walmart variety. His woodsman’s plaid shirt fit his barrel physique so faultlessly Gurney guessed it had been custom tailored.
When Steckle caught Gurney’s eye, he ended his call with a statement plainly loud enough for Gurney to hear. “I’ll get back to you later. I have an important guest here.”
He came out from behind the counter with a toothy smile. “Hey, Detective, beautiful morning, eh? Smell that? That’s balsam. From the balsam fir. Aroma of the Adirondacks.”
“Very nice.”
“So, everything okay with you folks? Suite to your liking?”
“It’s fine. Got a bit chilly last night with the power outage.”
“Ah, yeah. Part of the wilderness experience.”
“We did have a midnight visit from Barlow Tarr.”
Steckle’s grin faded. “What could he want that time of night?”
“He warned us about the evil here at the lodge.”
“What evil?”
“‘The evil that killed them all.’”
Steckle’s mouth twisted into an expression between disgust and fury. “What else did he say?”
“More of the same. Is this all news to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is what I’m telling you new information—this kind of thing with Tarr?”
Steckle rubbed the stubble on his shaved head. “You better come into my office.”
Gurney followed him around the reception counter into a room furnished in the same “Adirondack” style as every other space in the lodge. Steckle’s desk was a varnished pine slab standing on four upright logs, bark intact. His chair was a rustic bentwood affair with trimmed branches for legs. He motioned Gurney to a similar chair on the opposite side of the desk. When they were both seated, he leaned his thick forearms on the pine slab.
“Hope you don’t mind a little privacy, but we may get into some areas here that are not for general consumption. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“We got a difficult situation here. You asked me about Barlow. Between you and me? Barlow is a crazy pain in the ass. Delusional. Scares the shit out of people. Talking all the time about wol
ves, evil, death, all kinds of crap. Delusional crap.” He paused. “So you’re maybe thinking, why the hell do we put up with crap like that? Why not just kick the fucker out and be done? Or maybe you’re thinking the bigger question, why was this crazy fucker Barlow ever allowed to be here to begin with?”
“I was told that someone or other from the Tarr family has been working at the lodge ever since it was built a century ago by Dalton Gall.”
“Well, it’s true. But that’s still no reason to put up with crap. The real problem was Ethan. A great man, Ethan, don’t get me wrong. But that greatness—and the determination that came along with it? That could be a problem.”
“His determination to turn every loser into a productive citizen?”
If that characterization hit a sore spot with Steckle due to his own past, he concealed it well. “Like the Good Book says, every virtue has its vice. But, hey, how can I complain, right? Maybe you heard what Ethan did for me?”
“Tell me.”
“I was a thief. An embezzler. I did some time. Luck of the draw, I got chosen for Ethan’s rehabilitation program. Suffice it to say, the program worked. Turned me into a new person. I even changed my name. My name for most of my fucked-up life was Alfonz Volk. That was the name of the guy my mother married when she got pregnant. But I found out later he wasn’t really my father. My mother had got pregnant by another guy who got killed in a car accident. Guy by the name of Austen Steckle. So she lied to Alfonz Volk so he’d marry her. A very fucked-up situation. My name should’ve always been Steckle. That was my genes. So to change my name to Steckle was the perfect new beginning. When I graduated from Ethan’s program, he hired me to work on the books up here. Incredible, right? I’ll have gratitude to that man till the day I die.”
“You’re an accountant?”
“I got no credentials, no titles, just a thing about numbers. I’m like one of them idiot savants, without the idiot part.”
“You appear to be a lot more than the lodge’s bookkeeper.”
“Yeah, well. Time passed. Things changed. Ethan saw that my head for numbers could be used in a lot of ways. So I progressed to general manager of Wolf Lake Lodge and financial advisor to the Gall family. Pretty amazing ride for a small-time thief, right?”
“I’m impressed.”
“Right. So how the hell can I criticize Ethan’s determination and faith in people? Yeah, sometimes it means that a Looney Tune like Barlow Tarr lasts here way beyond the point when he shoulda got the boot, but it also means that this particular small-time thief you’re looking at right here in this chair got lifted out of the gutter and got trusted to manage not only a thousand-dollar-a-night enterprise but the whole fucking Gall fortune. Which is like a fairy tale.”
“With Ethan gone, what’s keeping you from getting rid of Tarr?”
“I ask myself the same thing. Maybe it’s superstition.”
“Superstition?”
“You know, like I’m only here because of Ethan’s decision to put me here and keep me here. And that’s why Tarr’s here, too. Maybe I’m afraid that if I get rid of him, somebody’ll get rid of me. Some karma shit. But that don’t really make practical sense. And I’m a practical guy. So I’m thinking one of these days pretty soon Mr. Loon is out on his crazy ass.”
“Speaking of which, I gather you’ve decided to honor Richard Hammond’s contract for another year.”
“What’s fair is fair, right?”
“You’re keeping an open mind about him?”
“Presumed innocent, right?”
“Even with all that negative media coverage?”
“That’s nasty shit, but sometimes we got to live with that kind of shit, right?”
“So, despite all the bad publicity, you decided to stand by Hammond because of a legal presumption of innocence and a sense of fairness?”
Steckle shrugged. “Also out of respect for Ethan. Before all this shit went down, he agreed to renew Hammond’s contract. I want to abide by that decision. Maybe that’s just my superstition again, but that’s the way it is. Who am I gonna respect if I don’t respect Ethan?”
“So you have a presumption of innocence and an oral promise on the one hand. On the other hand, there’s the possibility that Hammond might be implicated in the death of Gall himself, as well as three lodge guests. Puts you pretty far out on a limb if Hammond is convicted.”
Steckle’s eyes narrowed again. “Convicted of what?”
“Some form of felony involvement in all four deaths.”
“You avoid the word ‘suicide.’ There a reason for that?”
Gurney smiled. “It doesn’t make sense to me. How about you?”
Steckle didn’t answer. He leaned back in his chair and began rubbing his scalp as though his thoughts were giving him a headache.
Gurney continued. “So I’m thinking, considering the big downside possibilities and you being a practical guy, maybe there’s another reason you decided to keep Hammond around?”
Steckle stared at him, his mouth slowly stretching into a hard smile. “You want a practical reason? Okay. Simple. If we got rid of Hammond now . . . yeah, that could look like we were dumping garbage overboard, sending a message to the media that we’re on the side of the angels. But you gotta consider all the outcomes. And one of them outcomes would be the kind of message it would send to all those people who came here over the past two years to be treated by that man. We dump him now, the message to those guests is that all the shit in the media is true and we put them at the mercy of a monster. Believe me, that’s no kinda message to give your paying guests, some of whom are very wealthy people. But if we keep Hammond here, the message is that we have confidence in him and the media stories are horseshit. That practical enough for you?”
“It does help me understand your decision.”
Steckle appeared to relax, sinking more comfortably into his chair. “I guess I sound a little cynical. But what can I say? I got to protect the Gall interests here. That’s what Ethan trusted me to do. And I owe everything to that man.”
GURNEY HAD MORE QUESTIONS FOR AUSTEN STECKLE—QUESTIONS about Ethan and Peyton, about the Gall New Life Foundation, about the three guests who ended up dead.
If he pursued any of that now, though, he’d miss his chance to meet with Rebecca—whose knowledge of Hammond, hypnosis, and dreams could be very helpful.
His solution was to secure Austen’s agreement to meet with him again when he returned from Plattsburgh later that morning.
He thanked the man for his time and candor and hurried out to his car.
The air was bracing, the visibility extraordinary. A glass-smooth sheet of ice had formed overnight on the surface of the lake, reflecting an inverted image of Cemetery Ridge.
As Gurney was pulling out from under the timbered portico onto the lake road, his phone was ringing. Seeing that it was Jack Hardwick, he took the call.
“Hey, Sherlock, how’s life in the grand lodge so far?”
“It’s . . . unusual.”
“You sound like you’re in your car. Where the hell are you?”
“On my way to Plattsburgh to meet with Holdenfield. She seems to have an interest in the case.”
Hardwick uttered his bark of a laugh. “Becky Baby’s interest is mainly in you, ace. Where does she want to meet you?”
“I told you—Plattsburgh.”
“That’s the name of the city. But what I’m asking is—”
Gurney cut him off. “Jack, in a little while I’ll be driving out of the range of the lodge’s cell tower. Could we cut the crap and get to whatever you called about?”
“Okay, I might have a line on Angela Castro, missing girlfriend of the Floral Park corpse. She has a married brother who lives in Staten Island. I called his number. Young, nervous female voice answered the phone. I told her I was taking a survey for the utility company about appliance usage. She said she couldn’t tell me anything because it wasn’t her house, I should call back later. I figure I’l
l pay her a visit. Something tells me this is our Angela. Assuming I’m right, is there anything special you want to know?”
“Beyond the obvious questions about Steven Pardosa’s death—what did she see, what did she hear, what does she think, why did she disappear—I’d like to know what he was like before and after his trip to Wolf Lake, his moods, his comments, his nightmares. Why did he go so far away to deal with his smoking habit. How did he know about Richard Hammond?”
“That it?”
“Ask her how Pardosa felt about homosexuals.”
“Why?”
“Just a shot in the dark. It was an area of Hammond’s practice years ago. There was some controversy about his approach at the time. And this minister, Bowman Cox, is obsessed with the subject, claiming Hammond’s focus on it was the cause of Christopher Wenzel’s suicide. Speaking of which, I’d like to know whether Wenzel himself had any strong feelings on the subject. Maybe that’s what drew him to Cox, what made Cox the man he wanted to discuss his nightmare with. I know this is pretty vague, but we’ve got to start somewhere.”
“I’ll look into it.”
“You have anything else for me?”
“Some background on Austen Steckle. He’s a reformed bad boy, formerly known as Alfonz Volk.”
“He told me that himself. One-time embezzler, magically transformed by Ethan’s program into the Gall family’s financial advisor and lodge manager.”
“Did he mention the drug-dealer chapter in the drama?”
“Steckle—or Volk—was a dealer?”
“Sold coke and other shit to a fancy clientele. A customer who ran an ethically challenged stock brokerage liked his style. Hired him to push crap stocks like he pushed white powder. Turned out he had a talent for it. Made more money on stock scams than he made on coke. But it wasn’t enough. That’s when the embezzlement started—scumbag employee robbing his scumbag employer. The feds, who had their eye on the firm, pressured yet another scumbag to testify against him. Volk got banged up, did some time, came up for early parole. Enter the Gall New Life Foundation. Alfonz Volk is magically transformed into Austen Steckle, the rest is history. So what’s your bottom line on him?”