Veiled Threats

by Deborah Donnelly

  I tried to focus outward on our surroundings. As we slowed to a decorous, legal speed through Black Diamond, Mount Rainier rose vastly into view. Rainier is an extinct volcano, a massive cone of rock and ice with a rounded top where the original summit blew off eons ago. At fourteen thousand feet, it's an arctic island in an alpine sea, surrounded by other mountains but a mile or more higher, and far more immense.

  Lily was right about the possibility of rain. There were long, feathery plumes of cloud sweeping up from the southwest, moving high and fast. A sky like that could portend a storm, but it could just as easily blow itself clear. For now, the mountain glistened snowy-white against the luminous blue, its attendant foothills dark green with forest or checkered earthy brown with clearcuts. It would take us another hour to pass through those hills and the higher ridges beyond, and then miles of twisting road up the flanks of Rainier itself before we reached the lodge. Maybe Anita would luck out with her sunrise ceremony, and we'd really see the sun rise. That was something normal to think about: orchestrating her reception this evening, and making alternate bad-weather plans for the morning. In between the two, through the hours of this summer night, I'd find a way to deal with Holt.

  “There's a sign for the bakery!” I said, trying for gaiety.

  Stay in character.

  Holt drove past. “Let's make some time first.” “Sure.” Was it really in character to be so compliant? How would I be acting if I hadn't heard him on the deck last night? No, wrong question. How would Holt expect me to act? The man hardly knew me, after all, and I hardly knew him. I'd awarded him Prince Charming's crown on first acquaintance, just as starry-eyed little Cinderella had. I wondered what my role was, in his private drama. Comic relief, perhaps, or a convenient plot device. “Sure, anyplace will be fine.”

  We drove on without speaking, through the main street of Enumclaw and out along Highway 410. The road followed the valley of the White River, whose tumbling waters, milky with the fine-ground dust of ancient rocks, originated high up on the glaciers of Rainier. The silence began to stretch thin. Enjoy the view, I prompted myself. It's a beautiful day. You're in love. Say something happy.

  I stretched luxuriously, lifting my fluttering hair from my neck and letting it fall. “It's so good to be out on the road in the sunshine.”

  “I thought you'd be tired of it by now.” I replied without thinking. “What do you mean?” “ After your drive from Ellensburg this morning.” My heart tripped over, but I recovered. “Oh, this is much nicer, almost like a vacation. Thanks so much for coming with me today, Holt.” “I wouldn't miss it.”

  His smile was relaxed, complacent. I decided to lay it on thicker, and change the subject as well. “I'll be so glad to have you there tonight, for moral support in case anyone's gossiping about me. In fact, if you don't mind, I'll mention that you're the Parrys’ attorney, and it'll look like a vote of confidence from them. There were some nasty rumors about Made in Heaven after Grace fired me.”

  “She should never have done that,” he said, with surprising force. The smile was gone. “It was completely uncalled-for. She should have consulted me first.”

  Why? I wondered. Had Grace inadvertently spoked the wheel of Holt's kidnapping scheme when she replaced me with Dorothy Fenner? But what difference would the replacement make? What would I have done that Dorothy wouldn't? What did I have that she didn't—

  The pearls. Before I was fired, I had Nickie's imitation pearls, and even after the kidnapping I still had them. Did Holt go back to St. Anne's that night and look for them in the wastebasket among the shards of my broken mirror? Did he discover, days later, who had taken them away? Could he and Andreas possibly have been searching my houseboat just for the sake of a fake pearl necklace? If so, they didn't find it, because it hadn't been there. The necklace had spent the night safely tucked away in the back of the van, parked over at Lily's house. I'd left it all this time in my tote bag, the one I sometimes used to pack my overnight things.

  The one that was now in my suitcase, in the trunk of Holt's car.

  “Well, it doesn't matter anymore,” I said finally. I had almost lost the thread of the conversation. “Grace did think I was cheating her, after all, and she was angry about it. I just wish she hadn't accused me out of the blue that way, with no chance to investigate and defend myself.”

  “That's what I mean,” said Holt, calmer now. “She should have handled it differently, and not involved the corporate attorneys. But you're right, it doesn't matter anymore.”

  “And you're right. I'll just think about us.” I leaned against his shoulder again. I was thinking, all right, but about pearls, trying to fit this new piece into the puzzle. What if they weren't the fakes? What if they were the real ones? Simple enough to switch a gold clasp for a platinum one. But why bother to steal jewelry when—

  “Holt, look out!” There was a dead cat ahead of us on the asphalt. At least I hoped it was dead, mangled as it was. “Don't hit it—!”

  Holt ran straight over the animal with his left front tire. I cried out, distressed and angry, and looked away from the road. Looked up, in fact, into his face.

  “I didn't see it in time,” he said, and pulled me to him, as if in consolation. “Sorry.”

  “It wasn't your fault,” I replied automatically. But I had seen, in that upward glimpse, his quick, tight smile as the cat's body made its insignificant thump under the speeding tire, and sent the slightest of tremors through the car to his hands on the steering wheel. It was a smile of satisfaction. Now I knew what Holt Walker enjoyed.

  I BREATHED SLOWLY, FEIGNING SLEEP. THE MILES WENT BY. HOLT left his arm curved protectively around my shoulders, shifting only once to free my hair and let it stream up and back in the wind. We entered a stretch of forest, and the tree trunks whipping past sliced the white-yellow sunlight into strobing flashes against my eyelids. A strobe light, or a flickering slide show. Mentally I watched the bright images blink to life and disappear: the dead cat on the road, Gus dead in the roses, Michelle dead behind the wheel of the Mustang. Mary crumpled in the street, Nickie's shorn hair in the moonlight, the pearls in her father's hands. The pearls …

  The car slowed suddenly, leaving the smooth highway for rattling gravel. I sat up with a start.

  “Sorry to wake you.” Holt looked at me fondly, with a trace of smugness, a perfectly normal way for a wide-awake man to look at his sleepyhead lover. “I think this is our last chance for a snack till we get to Paradise. If you're still hungry?”

  “Yes!” I said fervently. “Calories and caffeine are just what I need.” And a telephone, and five minutes alone.

  I got the food and the coffee, but that was all. The Trout Pond Café and Gifts was a shabby café with its more cumbersome merchandise—chain-saw carvings of grizzly bears and lawn-ornament ducks with revolving wings—displayed on a sagging front porch. In the shade to one side of the building was a fetid pool of dispirited fish, watched over by a fat teenage boy reading a comic book at a plywood table. A sign stapled to the plywood proclaimed “You Catch 'em We Cook 'em, Our Pole's Or Your's,” followed by a list of prices per ounce for a trout dinner.

  “Let's skip the seafood,” Holt murmured as he opened the holey screen door for me. “I'm allergic to apostrophes.”

  Inside, flies droned in circles near the ceiling and settled from time to time on the sticky plastic surface of the booth where we sat. A few fishermen nursed beers at the counter, and a pair of exasperated parents sat with four quarreling children at the solitary table. The other booths were empty. A tired overhead fan circulated the heavy smell of French fries and fish. More than a few steps down the culinary ladder from Les Oiseux Blancs.

  “Would you order me iced tea?” asked Holt. “Nothing to eat. I see a men's room back there.”

  He disappeared past the shelves of “gifts,” which leaned heavily toward Mount Rainier ashtrays and wall plaques with humorous comments about the habits of fishermen. The waitress appeared, a hefty, breathless
woman with a family resemblance to the trout-guarding teenager. I ordered two iced teas and a burger and fries, thinking as I did that Aaron's bagel seemed far in the past. I didn't know what to think about Aaron himself.

  “Oh, and is there a pay phone?” I asked as she turned away.

  She jerked her head toward the gifts. “Back there by the men's room.”

  I hesitated, then took my purse and hurried back past the plaques. If I was quick enough … There was a pay phone, all right, just past the door labeled “Gents” in the narrow back hallway. Holt was hunched over it, talking in a rapid undertone. To Theo? To Andreas? To someone shady, or he would have used his car phone. I tried to backtrack quietly, but he looked up and saw me. There was a spark of anger in his eyes, then the familiar warm, photogenic smile as he put his hand over the mouthpiece.

  “The Ladies’ is that way,” he said, pointing back the way I came. He added a shrug of apology. “It's business. I'll be done in a minute. Yo u know how it is.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “I know how it is.”

  I trudged across to the ladies’ room, waited a reasonable amount of time, then came out to find Holt square in the path between me and the phone. He was examining a shelf of toys and trinkets with exaggerated interest, and I had a sudden sense that he, too, was tired of the charade. Did he have nightmares, too, of police in the night and the public shame of a trial and the horrors of a prison cell? Or just dreams of wealth, piled atop his own wealth by a grateful Keith Guthridge?

  “Look at this dollhouse stuff,” he was saying. I recognized this as well, the brisk, forced chatter to cover the true intention, which in his case was to keep me from that telephone. He held up a tiny teakettle. “This would fit on your little stove.”

  Then his sea-green eyes widened, ever so slightly, in alarm at what he'd said, and I felt a hot, bright flare of triumph. This time it was Holt who had blundered, for how could he possibly know about my miniature cast iron stove? According to the premise of our charade, he had never been inside my houseboat to see it.

  We grasped the awful truth at the same instant, I was certain, but on the instant my triumph turned to ashes. In this game within the game, Holt's blunder was a hazard to me, not to him. I had to convince him that he had convinced me of his role, I had to act gullible without seeming to act, or Nickie might never emerge from whatever hole they'd hidden her in.

  “Oh, did Nickie tell you about that?” I said brightly. To o brightly, I was talking too fast, smiling too much, but I couldn't stop myself. “She just loved that stove, in fact I almost gave it to her for a wedding present, but I couldn't part with it. I've been keeping an eye out for little pots and things, but I don't think that one is the right scale; it's too small … ”

  I continued to chatter as we returned to our booth. A fly crawled across my hamburger bun, and another squatted on the rim of my iced tea. But I was in no mood to be fastidious. I waved them away and began to eat, filling my mouth with food as a welcome change from lies. Holt kept up his side of the small talk, but there was a sheen of sweat on his face.

  “Do you want to wait for me outside?” I asked, without much hope. “It's so hot in here.”

  “You're almost done.”

  He took the check up to the cash register, but glanced back at me often as he paid, and I didn't dare try for the phone again. What was there to tell, anyway? Even when we reached the Glacier View, as surely we would, my only reason for calling Aaron would be to reassure him of my safety, or to ask for reassurance. Hardly worth the risk of alarming Holt and, in turn, the men holding Nickie. Holt might already have seen through my chatter; he might be trying to convince me that I had convinced him that he had convinced me … The deceptions mirrored each other into infinity. One rash move on my part could smash them all. I'd be left with the truth, and the prospect of being Nickie's executioner.

  Resigned and defeated, a prisoner of my own deceit, I followed Holt to the car and he drove me up the mountain.

  “HOLT, LET ME GO OR I’LL SCREAM.”

  I smiled as I said it. Holt was embracing me with every appearance of tender passion, and I was trying to keep up appearances myself until I escaped. The charade was still on. We were in my room at the Glacier View, with its calico curtains and its braided rugs and its little fieldstone fireplace. The lodge went in for rustic luxuries like these, and eschewed modern ones such as telephones and TV sets which might intrude on the atmosphere of romantic seclusion. Seclusion was very much to Holt's taste. We had been apart for hours, and now he was making up for lost time.

  The moment we had arrived at the sprawling, log-sided Glacier View, I had dispatched Holt to admire the view of Rainier, from outside on the meadow paths or inside the picture-windowed lounge. I, meanwhile, had plunged gratefully into the business of Anita's wedding. So determined was I to act normally that I didn't even call Aaron—there was nothing to report, anyway. To my relief, there really were dozens of wedding details demanding my attention, including a complicated dispute between the Glacier View's surly kitchen staff and the haughty chef from Solveto's, and a wonderfully time-consuming hunt for the bride's heirloom lace garter, both borrowed and blue, which she planned to wear under her hiking gear in the morning. These feuds and fusses triggered my wedding-day autopilot mode, energetic and efficient, while keeping me safely away from Holt.

  Now it was after eight, the summer light growing liquid and dim under gathering clouds, and I'd only just gotten a chance to come up to the third floor to unpack and change. The banquet would begin at nine, to allow for the arrival of far-flung guests. I planned to meet Holt at our table near the kitchen, poised, relaxed, and very much in command of the situation and myself. Instead, just as I had stripped down to bra and underpants en route to a shower, Holt had unlocked my door and walked in. He'd laughed off my feminine indignation at this trespass, and lifted me off my feet to kiss me. As I kissed back, I silently cursed the desk clerk for giving him a key, and wondered if Holt had come to ambush me, or to search my room as he had the houseboat.

  “I mean it, Holt. I have to visit Anita one last time before the banquet starts. Put me down!”

  He put me down, flat on the bed, and put himself on top of me. We wrestled, laughing, with him using a fraction of his strength and me using all of mine. The hell of it was, I was aroused by the struggle, feeling a lust for the fray and an unwilling, heated response to his hands on my skin and the passion in his eyes. We had fought this way before, and surrendered together, each of us vanquished by desire for the other. After all the righteous fury and creeping fear and simple disgust I'd felt for Holt Walker today, we were suddenly just bodies tumbling on a bed. I wanted to surrender, and to conquer, again.

  This insanity lasted only a moment. I dropped the laughter from my voice and put both hands on his chest. We were lying on our sides, and his heart was going like a single, huge piston.

  “Seriously, I have to get downstairs. You promised you wouldn't interfere with my work tonight.”

  “Promises … promises.” In the split second between the words, he rolled atop me and pinned my wrists to the mattress above my head. I tried to slip them free but he simply tightened the fingers of each hand like manacles, pinching the flesh cruelly. The full weight of his body flattened mine to the bed.

  “Holt, stop it.”

  His eyes were unfocused, his mouth loose. He brought my hands toward each other along the bedspread, twisting my wrists to lock them together under his left hand. He was appallingly strong. His right hand moved to my breasts. The charade was hanging in the balance; the mirrors were about to shatter. I gasped for air enough to scream.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Ms. Kincaid? Ms. Kincaid, you have a phone call. You can take it in the library.”

  The gasp came out in words. “Wait right there, please, I'll be right out! I—I don't know where the library is!”

  “OK, no problem.”

  Holt had freed my hands at the sound of the knock,
and now he swung his weight off me and stood up. We gazed at each other, panting and uncertain. And then, to my own surprise, I took command of the scene.

  “Come here,” I murmured.

  Holt came, his eyes locked to mine, and I knew that he could see nothing in them but desire, nothing but what I wanted him to see. No more amateur actress hiding her face, no more faltering lines. I was fueled by lust, and by cold, cold anger. My performance was brief, but it was brilliant. I slid my arms around Holt's neck, and gave him a kiss that promised, that guaranteed, unimaginable delights to follow.

  “Get in that bed, mister,” I whispered against his lips. I could feel him shudder. “I'll be back in ten minutes, and then I'm going to tear you apart.”

  Then I pushed him roughly away, and locked myself in the bathroom. First the jade silk dress, pulled on with hands that trembled just a little, then a comb through my tangled hair. No time to correct my makeup, no time for anything except to scrabble through my bulging nylon tote bag until my fingers closed over something cool and coiled and heavy, lying hidden at the bottom like buried treasure. Nickie's “imitation” pearls. I stared at them, at their satiny moonlight glow, then thrust them into the pocket of my dress. No time to think.

  I opened the door. Holt was stretched out on the bed, grinning wolfishly, already out of his creamy shirt and his shiny new loafers. His chest and arms were brown against the sheets.

  “Ten minutes,” he said.

  I blew him a kiss, and went flying down the wide wooden stairway to the lobby, my faithful messenger at my heels. The bellboy was a short, bespectacled kid with an air about him that said he knew exactly what had been going on behind Ms. Kincaid's door. What he didn't know, and what Holt didn't know, was that I was on my way to call in the Seventh Cavalry. He might not be John Wayne, but right now I wanted nothing more in this world than a reassuring phone conversation with Aaron Gold.