by Karen Harper
However, the truth was that she was going to do that after she dropped Bryce off. What she was keeping from Bryce was that she intended to be back to help him in a hurry, whether he wanted her there or not. She’d given Suze one hint about the fact this trip wasn’t just a jaunt to town, though: she made her promise to phone her if Getz left the lodge in his truck.
“And why would that be?” Suze, ever savvy, asked with her knowing, narrow-eyed look.
“He just makes me nervous. I don’t want to run into him or have him trailing me.”
“Okay—right.”
Rather than discuss that further, Meg gave her a one-armed hug and went out to climb in the driver’s seat next to Bryce.
“You’re not going to be part of breaking and entering, even if I am,” he told her.
She could see his breath even in the truck, so she quickly started the engine and the heater.
“After all we’ve been through together?”
“You’ve really changed from wanting nothing to do with this—and with me.”
“Call me crazy.”
“Call me in love and overly protective of a very strong woman.”
She almost stopped the truck right there to hug him, but he was obviously in a hurry. Suze had said Getz had talked about going home tomorrow. Were they really off base to think he might be some sort of spy? And who would have hired him?
“Boy, Getz’s place is way out in the boondocks too. Guess it’s common out here,” she told him. “It’s far back in the forest off a one-lane road on the other side of a salmon stream. He actually hikes in over big stones in the stream or walks the ice. His dad was an early settler, and I hear he still lives in the same house where he grew up.”
“So, no other family? How did his father die?”
“A natural death, I heard, maybe of a broken heart after Bill’s mother died young. Not everyone is cut out to live here.”
“You and Suze seem to thrive here. Would she be okay running the lodge if you ever moved away?”
The truck hit a bump, and she nearly drove off the road. Not only because the steering wheel jerked, but at that apparently innocent question and what he might be thinking. “I—I never considered that—before. It depends—would depend on so much.”
Relieved they were there so she wouldn’t stammer around more, she parked in a pull-off spot across the frozen stream from Getz’s house.
“I forget the name of this waterway,” she told him as he pulled on his gloves and earflap hat over his snow goggles. “But it has a small salmon run every year. No electricity lines out here, but I heard he recently bought a generator.”
He turned to her. “Take your time delivering your candy, and I’ll meet you here in an hour. What a place. All the piecemeal additions out the back—some sections are clapboard and some huge slabs of tree bark.”
“It reminds me of some kind of monstrous snake. I’ll be back, or you’ll have to walk too far.”
She hoped he wouldn’t be angry when she returned in less than half that time and came across the stream to see how he was doing, see if she could help. Four eyes were better than two.
He hesitated a bit before he got out. “Like I said, I’m going to drag my feet so my prints can’t be identified, like the marks we found near the lodge. I’m still wondering if that’s giving Getz some of his own medicine or the person watching the lodge was someone else.”
“Be careful!” she insisted, as he leaned over to quickly kiss her cheek.
“My motto, always—and evidently never,” he said with a low laugh as he got out, closed the door and moved slowly away, dragging his feet.
She used to emotionally do that after Ryan’s death, she thought, dragging her feet about facing life, living only for Chip. But no more.
When Bryce crossed the barrier of the frozen stream and turned to wave, she backed the truck away and headed for town.
* * *
Although Bryce had never really been an undercover agent—only an underwater one—he’d had some schooling by an NTSB official who was former CIA. The lessons had not included B and E—that is, not exactly. But he knew a few tricks of that trade.
As he scuffed along through the snow and studied the patched-together house ahead of him, he fingered the small paint-scraping tool in his pocket. He knew his best bet was not to break anything, but rather to find an entry or window that was not locked. And out here, with that long, patched-together building with so many windows, there must be a way in. If not, this tool would be step two—slide it along a door lock to see if he could spring it.
He didn’t even try the front door, but shuffled right past it around the building to partway back. He even skipped an old-looking second entry door and started lifting windows. When the dogs at the lodge had gotten underfoot, Bryce had heard Getz tell Suze that he collected anything but animals. Besides, a watchdog would be starved to death by now unless Getz had left food in every one of the damned add-on rooms—seven additions, it looked like to him.
He shook his head in amazement. It seemed Getz hoarded pieces of other buildings too.
The fourth window he tried stuck a bit but lifted. He left tracks far beyond it, then came back and climbed in. The dusty, stale odor of stacks and piles of whatever hit him hard and reminded him of the smell of that scrap of white blanket he found outside the lodge. Maybe not proof the lake and lodge stalker was Getz but a vote in his favor. What if he stumbled on that blanket in here?
“Whew!” he said and sneezed as he moved quickly away from the now closed window into canyons of—of whatever. As he walked through the crooked canyon path past small rooms and cubbyholes, he noted that things seemed to be somewhat sorted by area. Stacked old chairs. Magazines. Plastic containers like frozen food came in. Calendars of all sorts studded the walls. One room was a jumble of Christmas decorations, ornaments, strings of lights. On and on. He felt oppressed and overwhelmed. In a way it was like diving underwater and finding an alien landscape with things that didn’t quite come into focus.
Damn. Where to look in this utter chaos? And look for what? He didn’t want to endanger Meg more than he already had, but he wished he had her with him.
* * *
Meg quickly hit the four stores she had candy for and was pleased with the tidy sum she’d made in return. With a son to support, every little bit counted and as she hurried back to her truck, she realized that Melissa McKee had been right. Even though she saved money here and there, it would help to have a chunk of it from selling her grandmother’s jewelry, yet she just couldn’t. Not now at least. She felt great sympathy for those poor women who had donated or sold their keepsakes and heirlooms for such a terrible cause in the Civil War, only to have their jewelry stolen from Jefferson and Varina Davis as they fled the destruction of the war.
She turned off onto Getz’s back road again and parked behind a clump of bushes not far from where she’d let Bryce out. Hiding her purse under the passenger seat, she kept only her keys with her. She carefully slid her feet along in the snow just as Bryce had, which made for more slow and strenuous going, but she didn’t want him to be angry—angrier than he might be when he saw she was back already.
Now where and however had he gotten in? She didn’t see him, and his tracks glided past a lot of windows and even two doors. Darn. Maybe she should not have tried this.
Shading her eyes, she peered in a window and gasped. A room with hanging masks and costumes—Halloween in December! Biting her lower lip, she moved to another window. Should she knock to be let in? Go back to the truck to wait?
The next window had a shade partway down, so she nearly kneeled in the snow to look in. Oh! Flags and posters from Wasilla High School where not only Getz but Rina Witlow Galsworth had attended. They couldn’t be too far apart in age—had they known each other?
She jolted when she saw a man walk by. She’d found him. Bry
ce!
She knocked on the window. He ducked, hid, then looked back. She was sure that she could hear him swear through the glass.
He came close, then unbolted and pulled up the window.
“I told you to come later.”
“I did what I needed to in town. I came to tell you that Suze has not called me, so Getz is still at the lodge.”
“Damn, Meg. All right, sit on the ledge and lift your legs in.”
“I’ve been scuffing tracks, just like you.”
“You’re not staying,” he said, closing the window once she was in. “This place gives me the creeps. I did find some old books on the American Civil War, but books on everything else too. One room is like a chaotic lending library. I’m going to look in a room that has jewelry hanging on pegs and on things like little metal trees. But you are going back to town or the lodge until the time and place I told you to come pick me up.”
“Bryce, now that I’m here, I—”
“Now that you’re here, I’ll worry about both of us, so you’re heading back, however much you could help. It’s overwhelming in here for two people. I read that hoarding—”
“Which Getz calls collecting.”
“—is actually a disorder that can be a symptom of mental illness. A form of insecurity, and you’re making me really insecure right now, as much help as you’ve been, sweetheart.”
“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me if you’re tossing me out.”
“Meg. For your own good—and my sanity. Please. Just wait a sec, and I’ll be back to let you out that window. And call my cell if you see any sign of Getz outside of the lodge. Give me a little more time here than I originally wanted.”
Disappointed, she waited for Bryce to come back. Imagine—pom-poms, old notebooks, the Wasilla High School newspapers stacked here. And yearbooks. Yes, it’s very possible Getz was in school about when Rina was. Maybe a senior when she was a freshman or a sophomore and if so, there could be some kind of information about her in one of these yearbooks. Could she borrow it? Smuggle it into the lodge to look through it, then be sure he got it back somehow? Mail it to him anonymously?
She heard Bryce coming back. She’d helped him before with her hunches and research. If she could learn more about Rina’s past...
She jammed it up under her thick jacket as he came back into the room, went straight to the window and opened it for her. He thrust something into her hand. “He threw this away in the wastebasket—yeah, a wastebasket in this place—by his cluttered desk. It was wadded up as you can see, a list of how much the mayor’s been paying him for a while. Keep it safe. Now, get going.”
He opened the window and helped her out. At least, she thought, since he took something from here too, even though it was from the wastebasket, if she had to tell him about the old high school yearbook, it might go easier for her.
“Be careful!” he told her and closed the window.
Same to you! she thought, but she quickly scuffed her way back toward the truck.
* * *
At the lodge, she smuggled in both the yearbook and the wrinkled paper to her room to examine later. So much was going on without her, all of it good, normal, happy. Getz was hunched over on a couch, going through what Suze told her were old magazines she’d said he could have. Meg could just picture another room at his place dedicated to them.
Rafe and Chip were building a pair of “snow people” out in back, and Meg waved at them through the back window. All three dogs were watching on the patio Rafe or Josh must have partly shoveled off. Both Bryce and Rafe were so kind to Chip and filled an obvious male-companionship gap in his life. And Bryce had filled one in hers.
Josh had just left after doing some repairs, Suze said, “And he was humming! That new girl is changing his life.”
Meg sighed, wishing she could share everything going on with Suze. “I need to pick up Bryce in a little while after he does some errands. Let me fix an afternoon snack for Chip and Rafe—our guest Getz too, if he wants.”
When she got some things together on the table and went to rap on the window for them—the Mr. and Mrs. Snowmen looked nearly done—she didn’t see either of them, so they must be heading in.
Yes, she heard Chip’s voice inside the front door, but had he and Rafe closed the dogs outside? Their wild barks seemed muted. Both Suze and Meg hurried past the reception desk to see what was going on.
Two men in horrid monster masks stood there, one holding a gun to Chip’s head and the other pointing a pistol at them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Suze gasped, and Meg screamed. The man in the skull mask held Chip hard to his body with the boy’s booted feet nearly off the floor.
Where was Rafe? This was a home invasion!
Getz came over to see what was going on and immediately thrust his hands in the air. He should have heard her scream and run to his room to call for help. Or had he walked out here to feign surprise?
“What—what do you want?” Meg cried. “Let him go. You have all of us here.”
“So I see,” the man in the second grotesque mask said in a gruff voice that might be faked. She could see his eyes clearly above the mask’s smile with broken teeth. He held his gun on them. “What we want is instant and silent cooperation. Hands in sight, back up, all of you. We’ve been watching long enough to know you’re the only ones here now. Cooperate and we’ll be in and out soon.”
“Darth Sidious, I’ll hold the boy while you tie everyone except her,” Skull Mask said, nodding toward Meg.
She had broken out into an instant sweat. Her pulse pounded. The barrels of those guns looked as big as rain barrels. Chip, at least, kept quiet, though he was trembling.
“Please let him go and just turn your gun on me,” she said to the man holding Chip. Her voice was steadier now. “I’ll get you money or whatever you want.”
The men, pushing Chip, came closer into the room while Meg walked backwards, hands in sight. “Mom,” Chip said, “that’s Darth Sidious and this is Supreme Leader Snoke. They’re characters from Star Wars—bad ones. Better do what they say.”
Suze spoke up. “Chip, where’s Rafe?”
“They put the gun on me, so he let them tie him up outside. But he’s got a choke kind of rope around his neck.”
“Didn’t shoot anybody yet,” Snoke said, his voice cold and hard. His rubber mask of sunken skin quivered when he shook his head. “Everybody just shut up and do what we say. Now!”
The one Chip had called Darth Sidious had a mask not only with broken teeth but huge shadows under his eyes, streaks on his face and a cowl headpiece. It would be difficult to identify either of them by much other than their voices.
The next minutes were a terrible blur. Snoke’s gun against Chip’s head stayed there while Darth Sidious produced loops of rope and tied Suze and Getz sitting back-to-back on the floor, and then to the leg of the dining table. Meg was hoping they would tie Chip up and leave him behind too, but Snoke kept a gun on him as Darth Sidious shoved her ahead of him and Chip.
“Two things real quick,” Snoke said. “We want to search Bryce Saylor’s room, then your office here—the safe.”
“What are you looking for?” she dared as she took the master key off the desk and walked ahead of them down the hall.
She had to work fast. Someone had to get to Rafe, and she had to get that gun away from Chip’s head. Perhaps these were the men who had sabotaged the sunken plane, so at the very least they were would-be killers. Were they looking for the lost jewelry or were they aware there had even been gold ingots and precious papers onboard?
Her hands trembled as she unlocked Bryce’s door. This time his duffel bag was still out. Darth Sidious ransacked it, then tipped it upside down on the floor. He checked both pillowcases on the bed, rifled through the drawers and peered into the closet, skimming his hands along the empty top shelves.
Meg assumed Bryce’s laptop was under the bed where the man looked, but he came up with nothing. He stood again. He looked behind the curtains, then rummaged around in the bathroom while she and Chip barely breathed until Chip blurted, “Don’t steal his diving stuff, ’cause that’s his job.”
“Chip, shhh,” she said.
“But they hurt Rafe’s neck and his hands.”
“I don’t want them to hurt you.”
“All right, let’s go,” Snoke said, yanking her arm toward the door. “The office, the safe.”
“Will you leave us alone then?”
“Shut up and do it!”
She had to hurry. Rafe could be injured, something about a rope around his neck. Were these the same men who had injured Bryce’s first partner, Steve, given him a terrible head injury? And were they the would-be murderers who had blown up the unmarked plane and meant to blow up Bryce and his dive team?
Meg rushed past Suze and Getz, both still tied. She had not noticed until now they had been gagged. Was Getz in on things—had he told these men that Bryce was gone and Rafe was distracted? Or was he just an ignorant, innocent bystander?
Meg blocked their view when she dialed the combination for the safe. Her hands were still shaking, slippery with sweat so that she messed up her first attempt and started over.
“You stall like that again, you’ll regret it,” Snoke said. “We don’t have all day.”
Several sharp retorts came to mind, but she said nothing, just opened the safe and stood back, putting her hand on Chip’s shoulder. Darth Sidious swung the door to the safe wide, leaned close and rifled through it. Meg racked her brain to place their voices, their mannerisms, anything, but nothing clicked. They must have been watching the lodge, seen Bryce was gone, and to them, Rafe would just be another visitor since he hadn’t been in on things earlier. She had to get that gun away from Chip’s head, get these men out of here, help Rafe and go for Bryce. If she didn’t show up, what would he think or do?
