“You’re being prejudiced because of where she’s from.”
Ian shook his head. “I’m being rational. And of course, we have more evidence, too.”
“No, you don’t,” Roman said, his words dripping venom.
“Don’t we?” Ian asked him.
“No, you don’t,” Roman repeated.
Midori stood up, and as she did so she pulled Roman’s hand indicating for him to sit. He did so.
Midori stood, chin held high, gaze confident. Midori was not Yumi. Her voice rang loud and clear.
“Actually,” she said, raising her eyebrows and pushing her head forward, “we did come here to kill Beryl.”
Joe gasped. Jini nodded. Roman leaned back on the sofa, eyes closed, shaking his head.
This Midori sure knew how to get everyone’s attention.
She put her hands on her hips. She let her words sink in to make sure everyone really knew what she had just said.
And then she began.
Chapter Twenty
Midori stood tall, her green eyes flashing in the firelight. Joe’s granddaughter was a person transformed. No, I thought. A person revealed.
“We did come here to kill Beryl. We both had our reasons. And of course, I expected my mother to inherit the house.”
“Midori!” Roman hissed. “Don’t.”
“Shush,” she said to him. “We did nothing wrong, in the end.”
“We’ve watched a lot of movies,” Midori said. “Seen a lot of television shows. Read a lot of books. We figured, how hard could a murder be? And she had it coming. She really did. She was an awful old woman, as you all know.”
Midori leaned forward. “But we couldn’t go through with it. Roman and I went for a walk—some of you will remember—and on that walk we had another discussion. Another talk. It was after we’d met most of you, and I’d spent a night in the house. After Roman had the chance to imagine how everyone would react if the old woman died. It’s different when there are other people around. When it was just him and Beryl in the house—and Maeve—it seemed much simpler, much more possible. Much less real. But with the arrival of everyone, reality set in.
“For me, too. I hated her before I met her. And I still hated her after I did meet her. But it was different. Having a face to the name, a personality, a scent, a character, it brought it all to life. Could I really poison her? Kill her? Even if she did deserve it?”
Midori shook her head in answer to her own question. “I couldn’t. We couldn’t. We’d planned it for months. But when it came down to it? We couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it.”
“Knew it,” Uncle Joe said.
“And we can prove it,” Midori said. “At least partially.”
“How can you prove you didn’t kill her?” Marcus asked.
“We planned to poison her. She took a whole heap of pills every day. Our plan was to swap out the pills for some opioids so she would overdose. As ways to die go, it must be among the most pleasant. We didn’t want to be cruel. But we abandoned the plan, and I threw the pills away in the big dumpster out front. We could go out there now and find them.”
“Actually,” Ian said. He undid the button on one of the pockets of his cargo pants, and then withdrew the big turquoise pill box from Beryl’s room, along with the pack of pills Marcus had retrieved from the dumpster and handed to us. “We’re way ahead of you there.”
“There! Exactly, that proves we didn’t do it.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Jini said. “She was killed with a knife.”
“But we didn’t plan to kill her with a knife.” Midori spoke slowly, her voice low. Almost threatening.
“And yet, she did die by a knife.” Jini shrugged. “Maybe she woke up when you tried to mess with her pills.”
“No!” Midori shouted. “We didn’t do that. We didn’t try! I told you, we changed our minds. We couldn’t do it. We’re not killers! We’re not.”
Jini looked at me, eyebrows arched.
This was all going a bit pear-shaped.
Ian nudged me.
“Did we get it wrong?” he asked in a low voice.
Joe heard, and when he replied, his normal cheeriness was noticeable in its stark absence, “I think you did.”
Midori put her hands back on her hips, eyes flicking around the room, daring anyone else to challenge her.
No one got a chance to.
Thud, thud, thud.
“Sounds like someone’s at the door,” Maeve said.
It simply wasn’t possible. The house was snowed in.
And yet.
She was right.
Thud, thud, thud.
Someone was at the door, and they wanted to be let in now.
I glanced at Ian, and Midori and Roman.
Ian gave me a shrug. I gave him a nod.
We had the wrong two suspects.
Thud, thud, thud.
“Ian, come with me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ian unlocked the drawing room door, and the two of us warily made our way to the big main doors.
Had Norman spent the last few days living in an igloo that his concussed brain had decided to build?
Ian pulled out his bear mace from the pockets of his cargo pants.
“You think it’s the local wildlife?”
“Could be.”
Bears didn’t knock on doors as far as I knew, but considering the week we’d been having so far, a can of mace didn’t seem like a bad precaution.
“Ready?” Ian asked me, right hand on the door, the can of mace trembling in his left hand.
“Do it.”
Ian swung open the door. I stared and took a step back in shock.
A man in a woolen beanie hat, olive green pants, an olive jacket, and black combat boots was standing in the door, a heavy backpack over his shoulders.
He lifted his chin up in greeting. His voice was low and gravelly. “Tiffany.”
“Stone?” I said.
“Stone!” Ian shouted.
He replied with a curt nod, then tilted his head toward the inside of the house, asking for permission to enter. He wasn’t a big talker at the best of times.
“Come in, come in!” I said, my words tumbling out one after the other. “We’ve got coffee, and hot chocolate, and port in the drawing room.” I grabbed his mittened hands. “What are you doing here?”
“Power’s out. Phones are down. Your Nanna called me.” He spoke in simple words and phrases, concise but clear. You always knew what you were getting with Stone: usually very little. I often found myself trying to make up for his own terseness by being more verbose myself. Babbling, Nanna would call it.
“Yeah, we’ve been totally cut off.”
“Your Nanna was worried because she couldn’t get in touch. I know you can handle yourself, but figured you could use some help.” He looked behind us at the various faces peeking out from the drawing room. The corner of his lips twitched. “Maybe not. But it put Nanna’s mind at ease.”
“We could definitely do with the company, couldn’t we Ian?”
“Another pair of hands couldn’t hurt. We’ve got a bit of a situation here…”
Stone looked at me for confirmation or explanation. I nodded back at him. “Someone here is a killer. We’re just not sure who it is yet.”
“You never take a day off, do you, Tiff?”
“I did try to,” I complained. “This was meant to be a vacation.”
“Some of us weren’t built for vacations. This is mine.”
“Sorry for ruining it.”
The corners of his mouth twitched again. “It was a nice evening for a stroll.”
“Yeah, right. Come on, let’s get you by the fire and get you a drink.”
* * *
“I told you it was possible to walk to Mount Washington,” Roman said in exasperation after Stone had been introduced.
For now, Roman and Midori’s position was one of limbo. They vehemently denied killing Beryl, and I was in
clined to believe them. As were Uncle Joe and Amber. The others were largely neutral. Only Maeve was still giving them harsh, suspicious glances and accusatory stares.
“What’s in the bag?” Ian asked Stone.
“Satellite phone, radio. Supplies in case you were running low.”
“We could have done with that a few days ago,” I said to him. “We need to call someone to get that avalanche cleared.”
Stone shook his head.
“Nope. Your Nanna’s husband has a friend with a backhoe. It’s on its way up from the city tonight. It’ll be there to clear the road tomorrow. You’re all set.”
“We also need someone to collect the body. And the police will want to come.”
“I’ll radio through in a minute. They’ll all come tomorrow when the road is clear. Not worth sending a helo for a corpse.” Stone’s eyes ran across the room. “Sorry if that sounds cold.”
“Everything’s cold around here,” Roman complained. “But you’re right about that. Wouldn’t do her any good now.”
“In the morning, I’ll help direct clearing the road. You should all get some rest. You might need to help out.”
“We’ve done quite enough manual labor,” Roman said.
“You’ll do what needs to be done,” Stone said to him, his tone as cold as the packed snow and ice outside. Roman didn’t reply. He stared down at his knees instead—clearly Stone had made him weak at them.
“Maeve? Do we have a spare room for Stone?”
“Not one that’s ready. Unless he wants Beryl’s.”
“I’ll camp in here. Looks cozy. Better than disturbing a crime scene.”
“It’s already been disturbed,” Ian told him with a frown. “Some people don’t respect crime scenes.”
“Are you still going on about that?” Roman asked again. “Get over it. So we don’t like sleeping with dead bodies. Big whoop.”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said to Stone.
Slowly, our numbers dwindled as people went off to bed. At Stone’s request, Maeve brought in a bottle of whiskey before she also turned in for the night.
“I’m going to prepare for the morning,” Ian said. “If you don’t mind me leaving you?”
We didn’t mind.
“Good night, Ian,” I said to my partner.
Stone sent his goodnight wishes in the form of a half-nod.
“Join me for a glass?” He lifted the whiskey bottle Maeve had left.
“Just a tiny one.”
He poured them for us. We sat on the sofa, in front of the warm fire. It had burned down to a heap of embers and a single large log, and the walls of the drawing room danced with flickering light and shadows.
We sipped our drinks.
“How’s Ryan?” He asked, inquiring about my police detective boyfriend. The one I’d seen very little of the last few months. He spent an extended period working undercover, and since then had been busy being an LVMPD detective when he returned.
“Fine. I guess.” I shrugged. “Of course we haven’t heard anything from the outside world for a few days now.”
“Must be nice.” It sounded like he meant it.
“If it wasn’t for the whole, you know, hostess being brutally slain in her bed upstairs, it would have been pretty relaxing.”
Stone smiled. A bloody murder was the kind of thing that made him do that. Or maybe it was just my unique way with words.
“I’m glad you’re all right.”
“And I’m glad you came. Your radio is just what we’ve been needing.”
“That’s all?” He was teasing me.
I poked him in the side. “It’s good to see you, too, Stone. It always is.”
That got another little smile from him. This was positively clownlike behavior for someone as stoic as him. The hike in the cold to arrive at a cut-off, snowed-in murder house must have cheered him up.
Either that or it was—
He waggled the bottle at me again.
“Just a little more. I’m pretty beat.”
He uncapped the bottle.
We clinked our glasses together.
To stay close to the remains of the fire we were forced by circumstances to sit close together on the sofa. Legs touching. And shoulders.
For the first time since Beryl’s death, I was at peace.
* * *
I didn’t expect Stone to wake me in the night.
But he did.
A gentle knock on my door. “Tiffany? Come look at this.”
The air was chilly, and I pulled on a hoodie before opening the door. I was holding my lantern, and was about to switch it on, when his hand closed over mine.
“No lights.” His hand lingered on until I lowered the lantern. “Come. Take a look at this.” He gently took my arm and guided me down the upstairs hallway.
There was a single large window that looked out the back of the house. Of course, being night, and cloudy there was very little to be seen.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“Couldn’t sleep. Took a look around. Saw something out the window.”
He lifted my hand and pointed my finger for me. It took me a moment to focus my gaze.
“What’s that?”
In the dark of the night, toward where the horizon might be in daylight, there was an orange glow. It looked like the glow of city lights from a great distance.
“There’s not supposed to be anything in that direction. No town, nothing marked on the map,” Stone said. “It’s a fire. Has to be.”
“A fire? Out there? At this time of night?”
“Yes. Any idea who?”
“No.”
“I want to check it out.”
I did not want him to check it out. “It’s dark and it’s late, and you only just got here,” I said. “Wait until the morning.”
Stone was silent. Thinking. Or perhaps brooding, that was more his style. “Okay. The morning. We’ll go together.”
“That’s a date!” I said with a laugh and a gentle punch to his arm.
Why did I say that!?
“Sounds like a plan,” said another familiar voice.
Stone and I both spun around. Ian was looming behind us.
“When did you get there?”
“Just now. You’re pretty loud, Tiff.”
“Am not.”
“‘Til morning,” Stone said.
Like a ghost in the night, he faded into the shadows down the hall as he left.
“See you in the morning, Tiff.”
Ian headed back to his room with a yawn. He was a lot noisier going than he had been coming.
I looked out the window again at the distant orange glow.
Where had the fire come from?
* * *
Stone, Ian, and I left early enough that no one other than Maeve was downstairs. We told her we were going out to use Stone’s radio and check the lay of the land.
“Lovely morning, isn’t it?” Ian said as we headed around the back of the house. The air was bracing but clear, and for once it didn’t look like it was going to snow again.
We passed my car, and beside it the woodshed. I pointed it out to Stone—showing him the local sites: And on the left, you can see where we keep our dead bodies!
We walked across trailless, open ground, weaving between bushes, cacti, and the occasional tree. After fifteen minutes, we hit some pine trees and began to approach the side of one of the nameless peaks that dotted the area.
“Smell that?” Stone asked.
“Snow?” Ian said.
“Smoke. Smoldering embers.”
“Oh that, yeah, I smell that,” Ian said confidently.
“We’re close,” I said. “What do you expect to find?”
“I don’t expect anything. We’ll see.”
There was something about the way Stone said it that made me think there was something more than he was telling us. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it could be. Had he seen something more in tha
t dim, orange glow the night before? It didn’t seem possible.
We found the site of the fire the night before all right. Smoke was still drifting up in small, vertical columns, gray wisps marking the sites of the largest fuel sources.
“There was a building here,” Ian said.
“Good sleuthing.”
There was half a door lying unburned, and the rest of the site was a rectangular shape with the steel springs of a bed still visible. It wasn’t exactly advanced-level detective work.
“This was a hunting cabin,” Stone said as he began a careful circumference of the site.
“Or a miners’ cabin.” Ian trailed just behind Stone, peering into what used to be the interior of the building.
“Miners? Here?”
“He’s right,” I said. I remained at what had been the front door of the cabin taking in the whole scene. “The ancestors of the owner of the house owned a mine around here. We heard there used to be cabins out here. The mine shut down a long time ago, but it looks like at least one of the old cabins survived.”
“Until last night,” Ian said.
“Yeah.” The sun appeared from behind a mountain peak, its rays making everything much brighter. Something gleamed in the dirt near me. I took a couple of sidesteps, and then crouched down. Stone and Ian were approaching me now as they finished up their circumference. “Look at this.”
Stone crouched beside me. “.44 shell casings.” He stood up again and kicked at the ashes in front of us. Bits and pieces of broken glass clicked and tinkled against each other. “There was a window here.”
“And someone emptied a gun right through it.”
We both stepped inside, heading for the bed. If someone had been lying in it, then their remains would still be visible. Even if it was mainly bones. But the only skeleton we could see was that of the metal bed frame.
I crouched down and looked underneath, hoping there wouldn’t be the curled remains of a burned body. There wasn’t.
There was a loud crack nearby.
I stood with a start.
Stone surged from his crouching position to his feet, and an automatic seemed to materialize into his hands. He moved like a well-greased mountain, gun grasped in both arms stretched in front of him, in a half-crouch position, turning and scanning. I stepped back to give him room.
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