The Conan Flagg Mysteries: Bundle #3

by M. K. Wren

  She squirmed down until her head was below the top of the ridge. The last thing she needed was for the driver to look her way as he passed and see a face looking out over the snowbank. The rumble of the snowplow’s motor was so close, her skull seemed to rattle, and she could smell the greasy odor of diesel. Come on, get on past. Damn it, hurry!

  But the rumble changed, snorting and chugging, a spasmodic spurt. Shifting gears, that’s all. Revving up again now. Jesus, those things were noisy up close.

  And getting noisier and—

  Closer.

  The rumble was a voracious roar, and white-hot terror shot through her, paralyzing her.

  Demara Wilder King looked up, and all she could see was the vast blade six feet away and a chromed grill like the gates of hell. And riding high above it, a tiny, shining silver bulldog.

  Chapter 29

  The concrete floor was awash in water: snow that had melted into slush a few yards from the fire and had turned to ice outside the garage doors. Conan filled his shovel, nearly lost his footing on the ice, and did lose his load. Grimly, he pushed the shovel into the snow again. He’d scooped away a scallop at least ten feet into the drift. He turned and made his way cautiously over the track-pocked ice until his feet slapped through water, and smoke enveloped him. The yellow glow led him. He threw the shovelful of snow, heard a hiss of steam, but didn’t stay to see if it had any effect. Back for another load.

  He was aware of the other occupants of this Dantean nightmare only as vague shapes coughing and gasping as they ran in and out of the smoke. Sometimes he wondered if he was dreaming. Or hallucinating. He wasn’t sure when he began to realize that the smoke was thinning, when he could no longer see the yellow glow behind it. His eyes were so inflamed, he couldn’t see much, anyway.

  Another load. Once more into the breach…and back again.

  Sometimes he thought he was laughing, but he was only coughing.

  And another load flung into the smoke. Back across the water and slush and ice. Damn! Nearly went down. Shouting. Someone was shouting. Too many shouting at once. Couldn’t understand a word. He plunged the shovel into the snow.

  All that kept him from falling flat on his face was the handle of the shovel driven into the snowdrift. He leaned against it precariously, hearing the shouted words in his head, as if his mind had needed a moment to sort them out and play them back.

  It’s out. We did it. It’s out. Thank God, it’s out.

  Conan turned, saw the wraiths emerging from the smoke, clothes and faces dark with soot, like miners abandoning a coal shaft.

  It’s out.

  The fire was out.

  He was suddenly shaking, quivering; a strange darkness that wasn’t smoke moved in on him. Knees were going out from under him.

  Might as well sit down.

  He collapsed into the snow, sat with his knees drawn up, left arm folded against his body. The pain he hadn’t felt since the moment he saw Demara ready to ignite a pyre of death hit all at once. His hands, his feet, his left shoulder, all a torment that stopped his breath.

  He looked around, seeking a focus outside his pain. Sky pale with dawn. His watch read 6:30. The survivors all in various states of physical and mental exhaustion. Lise washing her face in snow. Tiff and Loanh leaning on each other, Tiff still coughing. Dramatically. Mark with his robe flapping about him as he stared numbly at the garage. Will, his red hair turned gray with smoke, on one knee, head down, and he might have been praying. Or only too weary to stand.

  A brave company, and Conan wondered if Demara could understand or even imagine the courage that had defeated her.

  Lise straightened and stood swaying as if she were poised on the edge of a chasm, then she reached out to her brother, touched his hand as it came up to meet hers, until finally they embraced in anguished tears. The others moved toward them and the solace of their shared grief, and Lise stretched a hand out to Kim, Mark reached for Tiff, and she for Loanh, and Loanh for Will, and they wept. Together, huddled together in the gray light of an icy dawn.

  Conan, watching in the shell of his aching body, thought about Demara, about her defeat. Sooner or later she would be found, and she would pay the only price that could be exacted of her. Was that justice? He didn’t know. Certainly it wouldn’t lessen by a single tear the price of grief still to be paid by these survivors.

  It was Will who concluded this intense, fragile encounter with a brisk, “It’s cold out here, in case you hadn’t noticed. Everybody inside and get warmed up, or I’ll be treating all of you for hypothermia.”

  The circle dissolved, and the sooty refugees drifted toward the lodge through the garage, where smoke lurked in a smoggy haze. All but Will and Lise. Arm in arm, they walked over to Conan. Will studied him clinically, then offered his diagnosis: “Conan, you look like hell.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Conan…” Lise gently touched his swollen, reddened hand. Then abruptly her eyes widened in alarm. “Heather! Oh, God, she’ll be terrified!” And with that she ran for the lodge, sprinting heedlessly through the ice and water on the garage floor.

  Will watched her with a bemused smile. “Now we both know who comes first with her.” Then he sobered. “You can’t stay out here and freeze your butt. You figure you can walk?”

  “Probably.” Conan extended his right hand, keeping his left arm tight against his body. “I just need some help getting my frozen butt out of the snow.”

  Immobility had eased the pain in the last few minutes. It returned with a wave of dizziness when Will helped him to his feet, and he didn’t balk at accepting Will’s support as they crossed the ice to the garage.

  Will said, “As soon as I get you inside, I’m heading for the highway to see if the snowplows—” He stopped, frowning up at the garage doors. “Conan, how’d you get those doors open?”

  “I didn’t. Lise hit the switch….” Then he laughed, which was inadvisable at the moment. Lise had turned on the switch that activated the automatic doors—and the doors had risen, a miracle he hadn’t even noticed in the panic of the fire. “Will, the power’s back on!”

  “I’ll be damned. Could’ve been on for hours. We wouldn’t have known, sitting up in your room with all the lights off.”

  Conan heard a faint rumbling, and as he traced the furrows of Demara’s tracks to the curve in the snow-buried road, he saw what at first seemed a figment of his harried imagination—a moving drift of snow propelled by a truck spouting diesel clouds. He found himself shaking again, but this time it was with relief. “You won’t have to hike out to the highway to find a snowplow, Will. Here comes one now.”

  Will stared at it, openmouthed. “Art must’ve told somebody we were up here. And the driver’ll have a CB. Damn, I think we’re saved!”

  Conan managed to keep up as Will hurried him past the XK-E—where he noted ruefully that he should have put the top up before leaving the car in a burning building—and past the wrecked generator. The wall behind it looked as if it had been eaten away by a voracious, black rot in a swath twenty feet wide and extending to the smoke-dark ceiling. The stench of wet charcoal and even an overtone of gasoline made the remaining smoke seem denser, more toxic.

  Inside the atrium, Will shouted to Mark, who was on his way upstairs. “There’s a snowplow outside! It’ll be here in a minute or so.”

  Mark produced a singularly un-Republican whoop, then called down the hall to Tiff. There were further shouted exchanges as Tiff conveyed the news to Loanh and Kim. In the ensuing rush down the stairs and to the front door, Conan said to Will, “I can make it into the living room. Tell the driver to radio the county sheriff and—”

  “Yeah, Conan, I already had that figured out.”

  “And ask him if he saw a Bronco driving out. Or if he saw Demara on the highway. Oh—and tell the sheriff’s department to call the nearest Medical Examiner.” When Will gave that a questioning look, Conan added, “For your patient upstairs.”

  “Hell, I
forgot about him. Okay.” Will headed for the door. The others were already wading into the snow on the deck, and as Will joined them, closing the door behind him, Conan wondered what the driver would think when he saw this unkempt, sooty troupe.

  Lise wasn’t among the greeting party. He found her sitting cross-legged with her back to the cold hearth, hugging Heather to her, her disheveled hair shadowing her downcast face. She was weeping.

  He crossed to the north windows and opened the drapes, a slow process with only one good arm and two miserably inadequate hands, but the wan light of the new day dissipated the cavelike darkness. The snowplow had reached the front of the lodge, and the cheering refugees were greeting its driver like a liberator entering a concentration camp. In the distance, Mount Hood, clad in new snow, hung in misted space, and except for the edging of pink on its eastern flanks, it was almost the same delicate blue as the sky, and that vast mass of snow-garbed rock seemed as translucent as blown glass.

  Conan made his way to the armchair at the east end of the fireplace and collapsed into it, his breath rushing out in a long sigh. Lise watched him with concern evident in her reddened eyes, but she made no move to rise, not with Heather panting and trembling in her arms, pressing her exquisite head into the curve under Lise’s chin. The bandage on the sheltie’s leg was frayed and stained with blood.

  “Sweet lady,” Conan said softly, “it’s been a hard weekend.”

  Lise nodded, stroking Heather’s head. Outside, the truck’s motor idled under a shouted exchange. Lise listened a moment, then her eyes closed. “Oh, God, how am I going to make it through this day?” She began weeping again, containing the sobs in terrible silence.

  Conan could think of no answer to that question; he knew no words capable of assuaging her pain. He watched with a degree of awe as she reclaimed her steel control, putting aside the pain. For now.

  She said, “I had a strange dream last night. Well, early this morning. I dreamed it was spring, and I was in a mountain meadow full of bright blue wild camas, and Dad and Al and Mark and Lucas were there. But they were all children, maybe eight or ten years old, even Dad, and they were laughing and running in a circle through the grass. The odd thing about it was that I was old. When I looked down at my hands, they were wrinkled and thick with arthritis. Yet it wasn’t a bad dream. There was something…peaceful about it.” She looked up at Conan. “Before the others come back in, I have some questions.”

  “I’ll answer any I can, Lise.”

  “You knew it was Demara. When I came up to your room, you said it was Demara who had outflanked you again. How did you know?”

  Conan caught himself before he shrugged. “When we gathered here after my shoot-out with Clemens, I showed everyone the money I found in his parka. I said those were hundred-dollar bills, but I didn’t say how many there were, nor did I mention a total. But later, Demara pointed out that all of you only had my word for it that Clemens didn’t have the twenty thousand dollars with him when he arrived. So how did she know the exact amount if she didn’t give it to him?”

  “Elementary,” Lise said with a brief, bitter laugh. “But why the fire? Why try to kill all of us?”

  “Probably because she thought all of us knew too much. That was my doing, I’m afraid. The rock slide would’ve been chalked up as an accident, except for my survival. That and the fact that I shared the results of my rather primitive investigation forced her to change her plans. She knew if any of us survived, there’d be a police investigation. But if our deaths could also be attributed to a tragic accident—like a malfunctioning generator causing a fire that ignited the gas tanks in the cars and brought the lodge down on our heads in a flaming mass—then she’d be free and clear, probably with an alibi to establish that she was never here at all. No one outside the family saw her here. The Rasmussens left before she arrived.”

  Lise nodded, murmuring to Heather, “You’re safe, love, don’t shake so, please.” Then she fixed Conan with a direct gaze. “Demara said the murders—Dad’s and Al’s—were Lucas’s idea. Is that true?”

  Conan wanted more than anything to invent a comfortable fiction that she could believe. But she was asking for the truth.

  “Yes, Lise, I think it’s true. I also think Al’s death was incidental to Lucas’s plans, as mine would’ve been. A. C. was the intended victim.”

  “Why? For Dad’s estate? For the money?”

  “With Lucas, it was probably more complicated, but essentially…yes. For the money.”

  She didn’t move for a long time, and there was in her eyes no light or life. Finally she asked, “Who do I grieve? Someone I never knew, someone I created in my mind, the mirror self that was me under the skin? With Dad and Al, there’s no doubt who I’ve lost. I knew them, my father and my brother, and I loved them. Warts and all. But Lucas…I thought I knew him best, I thought we were so close. Maybe that’s what I’ll have to grieve, that what I lost never existed.” She shivered, looking down at Heather. “It’s so cold in here. So hellishly cold.”

  Outside, the truck’s motor revved out of idle, and the rumbling surged, then gradually diminished. The front door opened, and the family came into the atrium, talking among themselves, yet oddly subdued. All of them headed upstairs.

  Conan closed his eyes, waiting, and a few minutes later Will appeared with a blanket and his medical case, his hands and face scrubbed clean. “I guess I need to do a little doctoring here,” he said as he knelt to look at Heather’s bandage. “Heather, you’re the only patient I’ve ever had who tried to eat my dressings.”

  Lise kept stroking the sheltie’s head. “Oh, Will, she was so scared.”

  “She had every right to be,” he replied huskily. Then he touched Lise’s tear-streaked cheek. “You okay, Lise?”

  She took his hand in hers. “Don’t worry about me, Will.” Her gaze shifted to Conan. “But you do have another patient to doctor.”

  “Mm? Oh.” He rose and leaned over Conan to feel for a carotid pulse, then pressed a palm against his forehead. “Well, you’re not shocky. Mark!”

  Conan winced at that bellow, which was aimed over his head. He heard footsteps in the atrium, but it wasn’t Mark’s limping gait.

  “Oh, Kim,” Will said in a quieter tone. “Would you get a fire going in here? I’ve got a couple of patients to tend to.”

  Kim was still in her smoked, plaid wool robe, but like Will, she had washed her face and hands. Still, the soot clung to her pale hair, and her eyes were puffy and achingly red. “A couple of patients?” She knelt by Lise, studying her with frank concern. “Lise?”

  “Not me,” Lise said with a fleeting smile. “Heather.”

  Conan, Will, and Lise all stared as Kim tenderly petted Heather and said in the kind of singsong tone reserved for babies and pets, “Oh, you poor, sweet baby, you’re going to be all right now.” Then she added, “She reminds me of a collie I had when I was a kid. Lassie. What else? The only dog I ever had. Dad didn’t like dogs.” Then she rose and with cool efficiency began gathering kindling and laying a fire.

  Conan caught Lise’s eye and smiled, then looked up at Will. “Did the driver radio the sheriff?”

  “Yes. Talked to the dispatcher. They’ll send a couple of deputies out. Should get here in an hour or so. With all the storm emergencies, they’re shorthanded. Yes, I asked Ed—the snowplow driver—if he’d seen the Bronco or Demara. I want to look at your shoulder, so that means getting some clothes off you.” Conan grimaced at that, and Will added, “Either I get them off, or the medics’ll cut them off later, and since you don’t like cutting up other people’s clothes…”

  Kim frowned as she shook out the match with which she had lit the kindling. “You mean A. C.’s clothes? Go ahead and cut, Will. He wouldn’t mind.”

  Will began cutting, and finally Conan sat naked from the waist up, shivering while Will listened to his heart with an icy stethoscope.

  Conan asked irritably, “Will, what did Ed say?”

  “Abo
ut Demara?” He wrapped Conan’s right arm in a blood-pressure cuff and pumped it up. “Didn’t see her.” Will paused while he released the pressure and studied the falling needle. “Not bad. Your heart’s in good shape. Must be all that smoking. Anyway, Ed said he saw the Bronco parked by the bridge yesterday when he came through the first time. He got out to see if there was anybody in the truck, but there wasn’t, so he went on about his business.” Will put the cuff in his case, then pulled up a corner of the blood-soaked bandage.

  Conan asked, “Did Ed see the Bronco today?”

  “No, but he was coming from the east. Hadn’t got to it yet. But he said he didn’t figure anybody could drive it out without some major excavation, since it got buried in the snow he was shoveling off the highway.” Will pressed the tape down and delved in his case until he came up with a syringe and a small vial. “Demerol, in case you’re wondering, and it’s all I can do for you now.” He plunged the needle into Conan’s right deltoid.

  “Will, that’s strange he didn’t see Demara. I mean, how far could she get on foot in snow a yard deep?”

  Kim stared into the fire. “I hope to hell they find her.”

  “They will,” Conan assured her grimly. “She’s the kind of person who stands out in a crowd. People remember her.”

  “Yes. People remember her.”

  Will unfolded the blanket and draped it over Conan. “You might as well relax. Nothing else to do till the chopper gets here.”

  “What chopper?”

  “The Life Flight chopper. The sheriff’s dispatcher patched me through to Emmanuel. That’s the fastest way to get you to a hospital.”

  “I don’t need anything as dramatic as a helicopter, Will.”