by M. K. Wren
Our center is gone….
So Lise had said of Carla King’s death, and now she had lost almost all of the rest of her family—her father and two brothers, including the twin she loved so intensely and forgivingly.
Conan turned his flashlight on the unfinished painting on the drafting table with its bold washes of sienna, raw umber, and cerulean. Then, the muscles in his jaw rigid, he crossed to the bedside table, and opened the drawer, found the .38 revolver. It, too, was painfully icy in his hand, but he opened it, saw that all the chambers were loaded, then snapped it closed and handed it to Will. “You’d better keep this.”
Will took it with only a momentary pause and put it in his pocket. “So what do we do now?”
“Go back to square one.” Conan gingerly pulled his mitten on. “And for now, go back to the lodge.”
“What do we do about Tuttle and his friend at the lodge—whoever that might be?”
“Wait for them to make the next move.”
Will headed for the door. “Maybe we should just wait till the snowplows come through, and we can get out and talk to the police.”
“And tell them what?” Conan asked bitterly. “That’s the irony of this thing. I really don’t have a shred of solid evidence. I’m not even sure I can prove that the murders occurred.”
They stepped out onto the porch, where the cold waited in ambush, going for the jugular. Rather, for Conan’s hands and feet. Will led the way down the path, his flashlight guiding him. He asked, “What about the missing Nitrostat? And the bullet from Heather’s leg?”
“If an analysis shows Nitrostat in the toddy, it proves that someone was trying to poison me, but there’s no way of knowing who, since I didn’t find an empty bottle of Nitrostat anywhere. Nor did I find the gun that fired the bullet you extracted from Heather’s leg.”
Will tramped on for a while then turned, inadvertently shining his flashlight in Conan’s eyes before pointing it downward. “Sorry. Damn it, Conan, you heard an explosion. You know that rock slide wasn’t an accident. If the police start looking around the slide, they’ll find the proof—wire or pieces of wrapping from the dynamite or whatever.”
“Not necessarily. The technology of explosives is rather sophisticated these days. On the other hand, someone is obviously worried about the fact that I witnessed something at Loblolly Creek. Maybe because a police investigation will tie up the probation of A. C.’s will indefinitely, or maybe because the killer thinks I know more than I do, but for whatever reason, that person is worried enough to try to kill me. And that is, perversely, my only hope.”
“You mean all you can do is wait for Tuttle and the killer to tip their hand? By trying to kill you again?” Will sounded annoyed, as if Conan were being unreasonably recalcitrant.
“If we can catch Tuttle tipping his hand in an incontrovertibly criminal manner, then maybe he’ll be willing to plea bargain with the identity of his accomplice. He doesn’t strike me as a man capable of great loyalty.”
Will sighed and turned away, continuing down the path. Conan didn’t try to renew the conversation, but followed in silence as they moved into the alders and finally to the edge of the open plain of the lawn. There Conan stopped, a groan escaping him.
“My God, Will, it’s snowing again.”
The air was full of fine, pale flakes, whirling in a reviving wind. Already the plowed furrows of the tracks that Conan and Will had made no less than half an hour ago were filling, blurring.
Will swore in a furious monotone, employing a vocabulary undoubtedly learned in the seamy shadows of Burnside, while Conan looked at the back of the lodge and saw a glow of light in one of the windows.
His window.
Chapter 23
When Conan and Will reached the lodge, they found Lise wrapped in a satin comforter on the couch, facing the fireplace. All the lights were off, and she looked up at Conan with firelight reflected in her pale, questioning eyes.
But he made his excuses and left it to Will to tell her what they had found—or not found—at the studio. He went upstairs, treading as quietly as possible on the stairway.
There were no lights in the hall or under the closed doors. He paused outside his door, listening, but heard nothing except the creak of timbers in the wind and the distant hum of the generator. Finally he took his gun out of his pocket and opened the door onto darkness. He flipped the ceiling light switch. The room was empty. He checked the bath and closet, went to the window and turned on his flashlight to check the lock. It was closed, the bright circles of screw heads glinting.
Frowning, he looked around the room. There was no evidence that anyone had been in here, yet he had seen a light in this window, and it seemed he could all but smell an unknown presence.
His breath shivered out in a sigh as he returned the gun to his pocket and sat down in the armchair by the fireplace, where ashes swirled in the wind moaning in the chimney. He considered removing his boots to rid his toes of their painful constriction, but refrained finally. Tonight he wanted the assurance of solid footing.
He rose and crossed to the bathroom for a dose of ibuprofen before he turned out the lights and left the room. On his way downstairs, he detoured into Will’s room. The medical case was still in the closet, the combination lock intact.
When he reached the living room, he found Lise and Will sitting close together on the couch. Will was holding her hand, and she had been crying, but she had herself under control now, her steel-hued eyes dry and fevered, as if she were in thrall of a pernicious illness.
She said, “I finished the portrait, Conan. It’s over on the card table at the bottom of the pile.”
Conan went to the table, found the drawing of Tuttle, and took it to the hearth to examine it in the light of the fire, wondering how she had captured, in nothing more than lines and shadows, the arrogance and the underlying indifference in Jerry Tuttle’s face. The chin and jaw were educated guesses, since she had, as requested, deleted the beard and mustache. The chin was slightly receding, emphasizing the tendency to an overbite that Conan hadn’t consciously noticed before.
“This is perfect, Lise.” She only nodded, and he returned the drawing to the bottom of the stack on the card table, then sat down on the hearth ledge by Heather’s bed, leaning forward to run his hand along her head. He asked, “Lise, did Will tell you it’s snowing again?”
“Yes. God, I hope it doesn’t mean another blizzard coming in.”
Will said, “We should try the radio for a weather report at nine.”
Conan checked his watch. It was only 8:45, but it felt like midnight. “I’d be grateful if you’d leave the generator on tonight, Lise. If Kim objects, I’ll take the blame.”
Lise managed a smile. “Good. I don’t want to get into an argument with her. Just remind me, I’ll have to fill the tank again.” Then her tenuous smile faded. “Conan, what are you going to do?”
He glanced toward the atrium, and even though he had kept his voice down to this point, he lowered it further to reply, “I’m going to bed. But not to sleep. And Will is going to wait behind his door, keeping it open a crack so he can see my door.”
Will nodded. “Right. That way I’ll be at the killer’s back—with Lise’s trusty thirty-eight.”
Lise winced at that, then said soberly, “By the way, I have something to report. About twenty minutes ago, I went up to my room to get some fixative for the drawings, and just before I reached my door, I heard voices from Tuttle’s room.”
Conan’s mouth felt dry as he asked, “Did you recognize them?”
“No. Well, I’m sure one was Tuttle, but maybe that’s just because I expected it to be him. The other—I couldn’t guess. All I could hear was a sort of muttering.”
“Could you guess whether the second voice was male or female?”
She shook her head. “It was low-pitched, but not so much that I could be sure either way. Besides, the voices stopped after a few seconds. I went into my room and took my time findin
g the fixative. I even waited at the door a while. Nothing. But I know what I heard wasn’t just the wind, Conan. I did hear someone talking.”
“I believe you.” And he believed beyond a doubt that Tuttle had at that time been speaking to the lodge accomplice, the person who had tried last night to dispose of that inconvenient witness, Conan Flagg.
And at the time of this perhaps fateful meeting, that witness had been absent from the lodge in pursuit of a chimera. Even now, that witness was absent from the room that had been the scene of one attempted murder and tonight might be the scene of a second attempt.
Conan came to his feet, trying to maintain a casual attitude. “Will, why don’t you stay here till nine and see if you can get a weather report? I’m going up to my room. Don’t worry, I won’t be asleep.”
“No, I don’t figure you will.” His red thatch of eyebrows lowered in a frown. “I’ll let you know what we hear on the radio.”
Conan nodded. “Good night, Lise.”
“Be careful, Conan.”
As he made his way to his room, he wondered how he could be more careful than he was being now.
He turned on the lamp by the bed, crossed to the fireplace, and after donning his mittens to protect his fingers, built as big a blaze as the small hearth would safely accommodate. Then he sat down in the armchair and watched the flames while he contemplated the error of his ways.
Rather, the error of his assumption that Al or Lucas would be in the studio. Was it possible that both were simply victims, intended or incidental, that neither of them had been the mastermind?
No. Jerry Tuttle made that premise untenable. He had been waiting at the King’s Creek bridge for someone. But whoever he was waiting for hadn’t even reached the studio, much less the Bronco.
Conan took off his mittens and lit a cigarette, blew out a web of smoke, bitter frustration coiling within him. He didn’t even know who Tuttle was or what his relationship with any of the victims—or with any of the beneficiaries of the murders—might be, and he had no way of finding out.
Not in this white hole.
He looked around the room, intensely aware of the walls, the low, sloping ceiling. He had always suffered a tendency to claustrophobia, yet at the same time always felt a need for privacy that induced him to close curtains and doors. He generally balanced the waning inclinations by responding to them alternately. When he had a choice.
He had no choice now. And the wind was still rising. The lodge, this frail fortress, might again be under siege by a storm beast.
And the beast within?
It wasn’t Jerry Tuttle. Conan closed his eyes, savoring a long pull on his cigarette. Tuttle was only a tool. Dangerous, yes, but only a tool. The beast within this besieged keep was capable of subtle deceit and ruthlessness entirely beyond Tuttle’s scope.
Still, for the moment, Tuttle was the key.
A light knock at the door, and Conan surged to his feet, muscles knotting. Then he sank back into his chair as Will Stewart came in, closing the door behind him.
“Will. Any luck with the radio?”
With a sigh, Will sat down in the straight chair. “I got a short weather report. There’s a new cold front coming in, but the weather people aren’t committing themselves yet about how bad it’ll be. And it’s still snowing. I looked out the front door before I came up. Not as bad as Saturday night. Not yet, anyway.”
“Any reports on the highways?”
“Hell, it’s a Portland station. They figure one minute every hour for the weather is plenty. They’ve got their thermostats set at seventy, so it’s on to Billy Ray Cyrus.” He slumped in his chair, frowning. “I’ve got some friends out on the streets in Portland, guys who can’t go into the shelters. They’ve been locked up one place or another too long, and they can’t stand walls.”
Conan could sympathize with an antipathy for walls, but he made no comment. He asked, “How’s Lise?”
“Okay, I guess. Damn, I just want to—I don’t know. Make it all go away, all the pain. But it won’t go away for a long time. All I can do is be handy.” Then he added, with a trace of bitterness, “Like a big brother. Somebody to make up for the brothers she’s lost.” He cast an almost accusing glance at Conan.
Conan took a puff on his cigarette, turning to face the fire. “You’re lucky, Will, to have Lise as a surrogate sister. I consider myself lucky just to have her as a friend, to be an awestruck fan.”
Will squinted at him suspiciously, then his eyebrows went up, and he started to respond, but apparently changed his mind, instead pushing his sleeve back to check the time before he rose and crossed to the door. “I guess the vigil starts now. I’ll be at my post, ready and waiting.”
“Thanks, Will.”
“We’re going to finish this thing tonight—one way or another.”
Conan nodded, hoping there was more prophecy than bravado in that.
After Will’s departure, Conan finished his cigarette, then removed the gun from his pocket, took off his parka, and prepared for his own vigil. He propped pillows against the headboard and lay down, pulled a comforter over himself, turned off the light, and cradled the bitingly cold metal of the gun in his right hand. The fire cast its amber light on the ceiling and walls, yet they still seemed too close, compressing the air. He looked at the window then at the door with an irrational sense that both were as solid as the walls and would never again open.
He closed his eyes and composed his thoughts for patience. He had kept long vigils before. They required a particular mind-set and a high degree of confidence. Patience would not survive a failure of hope.
Yet as he counted his slowing heartbeats, he realized that the worst problem he faced now was something as simple—and as potentially dangerous—as sleepiness. After the exhausting trek down from the camp and the resultant hypothermia and frostbite, after a night of alarms and anxiety and little rest, after a day of more alarms and anxiety and constant chill, his body claimed the right, even at the risk of his life, to the recuperative hiatus of sleep.
He fought that claim with mental exercises, silently reciting poems and limericks; calling up historical dates; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers—many derived from the sum of minutes and seconds revealed by the glowing numbers on his watch—and again and again reviewing the murders and everything he knew about them, everything he didn’t know.
Still he found himself repeatedly sinking into sleep.
Never a deep sleep. The smallest sound jarred him awake, adrenaline sending his pulse rate soaring. The room grew constantly colder and darker as the fire burned down. The seconds ticked tediously into minutes, the minutes into hours, and he was surprised at how much light filtered through the curtains. Moonlight, snowlight…first light I see….
Again. He had slipped over the edge into sleep.
He wasn’t sure what wakened him this time. He heard nothing. The fire had burned out, and the only light was the diffuse glimmer from the window. From his watch glowed the numbers 11:42.
There. A soft scraping. He held his breath, mouth open to keep his teeth apart so they wouldn’t chatter with the chill. The steel of the gun burned cold as he flipped off the safety and slowly moved his hand out from under the comforter. Otherwise he didn’t move a muscle, but lay waiting, half turned toward the door.
The scraping sound again, louder; a small metallic rattling, and his eyes registered a subtle brightening of the light that struck the door. Yet it hadn’t opened.
The window.
Conan threw the comforter aside as he twisted around to face the window.
Open. The window was open, the curtain pushed back, and against the fey snowlight, a black shape moved toward him in a silence crystalized out of the icy wind, a shadow shape fixed in the crystalized moment, so close it blocked out the strange light. Conan felt himself engulfed, frozen in the black shadow.
The icy silence exploded.
Two shots, and a bullet thudded into the headboard. Too l
ow, the flashes were too low, but he didn’t have time to make sense of that, not before reflex closed his finger on the trigger. The silence again exploded, and he felt the surging recoil of three shots, flinched at the glare of the flashes, kneeling upright on the bed, and he had no memory of even moving, no memory of gripping the weapon in both hands, arms straight before him.
A single hoarse shout, and the shadow vanished, the snowlight poured in. The thud sounded like a falling boulder.
No, something still—again—blocked the snowlight. Two more flashes that seemed strangely separate from the crashing detonations. Conan reeled backward, staggered by the hammer blow that tumbled him off the bed, dragging the comforter with him. He crashed to the floor in a tangle of soft, swishing material, tried to crawl to the foot of the bed so he could see around it to the window.
Too late. A pounding crash, a blinding burst of light, a shout of chagrin.
“What the hell’s going on?”
Chapter 24
On his knees, crouched against the bed, Conan began shaking, overwhelmed with relief, and at the same time—and only now that he recognized the voice, understood that the crash was the door flying back against the wall under the impetus of Will Stewart’s dramatic entrance, that the blinding light came from the ceiling fixture—now he was overwhelmed with pain that clamped his left shoulder in an invisible and unforgiving vise.
“Conan! You okay?”
Overwhelmed, too, with frustration as he focused on the window. Empty, the snowlight lost in blackness, errant flakes whirling in on the frigid wind.
He got to his feet, right hand still clenched on the gun, and swayed toward the window, passed the sprawled shape on the floor. He leaned out into the wind and snow. In the light fanning from the window he saw indentations of tracks striking east along the wall, but the falling snow obliterated them as he watched, and there was nothing, no one moving against the pale drifts. He winced at the burning ache in his fingers as he relaxed his hold on the gun and thrust it into his belt, then he pushed the sash down, cutting off the icy wind.
