by Maddie Day
“Maybe she made up with her.” Abe shrugged.
The ramblings about daily life no longer appeared. I flipped the page.
She’s not getting away with this was written in black letters surrounded by a black box. Below it was a newsprint picture of a diminutive girl with long blond hair walking hand in hand with a tall, dark-haired boy down a hallway lined with tall lockers. The heading read A LICK OF GOSSIP and the caption on the picture was Junior Lovey Rogers gets lovey-dovey with senior Joey Beaton. Can marriage be far behind?
Abe made a tsking sound. “They still had that ridiculous gossip column in the South Lick High student newspaper when I went there.”
“So presumably Maude is also a junior. And can drive.” I watched the stove glowing with embers. “I’m not so sure I want to turn the page.”
Abe laid his arm across my shoulders and squeezed. “You don’t have to, you know. We can just close it and go to bed. Which sounds like a pretty good option to me.” He nuzzled my neck, sending a delicious shiver up my scalp and down to my toes.
“Me, too. But I think I have to know.”
I turned the page to see December 4, a picture of a stick figure of a girl with long hair, and the words Will it work? A thin line extended from the figure’s neck.
On the next page she’d written December 18. Apparently not.
Pasted on the following page was a faded short piece from the Brown County Democrat about the record cold and how the ice on Crooked Lake was already a foot thick on January 8. Someone was quoted declaring the ice officially safe for skating and ice fishing, and that conditions were prime because of the lack of snow.
I swore softly and twisted to look at Abe. “Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?”
“What? Why?”
“Abe, Crooked Lake is where we found Charles dead. In an ice fishing hole.”
“Hey, it’s the closest lake.”
“Why is a high school girl tracking the thickness of the ice?”
“Who knows, maybe she liked to ice skate outdoors.”
“Maybe.” Or maybe not.
I turned the page again.
I have a new plan.
Preparing was the only word on the following page.
Getting ready the entry on the facing sheet.
She’ll never suspect on the next page.
Then we saw the word Done.
I swallowed hard and slowly turned to the next page. A newspaper article was pasted on the right-hand page but folded in half. I glanced at Abe and sighed, then opened it.
FISHERMAN FINDS BODY IN CROOKED LAKE was the Brown County Democrat leading headline in an extra-large font.
I read the first paragraph aloud. “‘A fisherman found the body of a local teenage girl yesterday in an ice hole on Crooked Lake. Authorities appear to suspect suicide after a note was retrieved from her coat pocket. Identification is being withheld pending notification of the parents, who are currently out of town.’”
I closed my eyes for a moment then opened them, shivering but not from a caress. Abe glanced at me and hurried to add more wood to the stove, but I wasn’t shivering from cold, either. He poked until they lit, then latched the stove’s door and joined me as I turned to the next page.
Maude was back to her girlish blue pen. She thought I was getting friendly with her when I asked her to go for a moonlight walk on the lake and when I brought her a mug of hot chocolate to drink. She thought I was sharing a secret with her when I gave her the note in that plastic bag and told her to put it in her pocket and read it later. She was as pathetic as always when I suggested closing our eyes and holding our breath and making a wish. I just helped her hold her breath long enough for me to get my wish.
Chapter 57
Abe and I stared at each other. A log popped in the stove and a flurry of sparks went up.
I wrenched my attention back to the diary and finished reading the entry in a whisper. “‘Then down the hole she went. Now I’ll get my love back without her interfering.’”
On the last page another red heart decorated with MS + JB stared up at us.
“Abe, Maude killed that girl. The same way she killed Charles.” I brought my hand to my mouth.
He closed the book and set it on the end table next to the doll. “It looks that way, doesn’t it?” He rubbed my shoulders. “Why would she murder her own husband, though? Maybe it’s all coincidence.”
The irregular tapping of the frozen rain had not let up. Despite the heat from the stove, I was chilled at my core. “Jo said Charles was psychologically abusive to her and Ron. I don’t know why she didn’t divorce him, if that was the case.”
“Certain people stay in dysfunctional relationships for years,” Abe said. “Hard to know why. Myself, I made the choice to get out of my marriage when trying to fix it wasn’t working. But killing your husband to get rid of him?” He whistled. “Extreme measures.”
“I can’t believe it. She must have killed Charles, and then come into the restaurant for breakfast with her mother like nothing had happened.”
“That’s a chilling thought.”
I thought for a moment. “I heard a noise upstairs earlier in the week. It must have been her in my passageway, hoping to get the diary out of the wall so I didn’t discover it. I went up to look and must have scared her off.”
“When was that?”
“Monday, I think. She never got it out earlier, when the store was for sale.” I thought for a moment. “Now I remember. She said she and Charles were away for the year when Jo sold the store. Maybe she didn’t feel the need to retrieve the diary until she killed Charles the same way.”
“And until you started ripping out walls. Then after you secured the place, she wasn’t able to get in,” Abe pointed out. “If the police learn about the death of the high school girl and they put that together with Charles’s death, they would want to watch her pretty closely.”
“I’m sure she was the one who cut the padlock and left the threatening note. Something else must have interrupted her that time, though, because she never succeeded.” I thought a bit more. “Yeah, and the thread I found in the passageway was red. Maude wore a bright red coat the day after Charles was killed, but she wore a black one when she came in today, probably because her red one got torn in the tunnel. Why didn’t I put those things together?”
“Because it’s not your job?”
“You’d think I’d be smarter than that. I consider myself as a puzzle solver, Abe. I’m usually better than the average bear at this stuff. I kept seeing people wearing red everywhere, so maybe that’s why I didn’t connect the thread with Maude.” I stood and rubbed my hands together over the stove. I couldn’t seem to get warm.
When I looked back at Abe, he’d picked up the doll. Huh.
I plopped back on the couch next to him. “We shouldn’t even be handling these items, now that they’re evidence against Maude, but it’s too late for that. And that doll just jogged a memory. A teenage babysitter of mine used to bring her old dolls over. I think there was a series of hippie dolls. The Season of Love dolls or something like that. Let me see.” I held my hand out. “They had names like Peace and Flower.” I lifted the doll’s shirt and turned her around. “Yep. I was right.” I showed him the word embossed on her waist in the back.
“‘Love,’” Abe read and shook his head. “So Maude stuck a needle in the neck of the doll with the same name as the girl she wanted to kill.”
“I wonder if she believed in voodoo, thought that would make Lovey get sick and die. And when it didn’t, she killed her herself.”
“The diary backs that up.” He picked it up and flipped through until he found the page with the stick figure on it. “See that line?”
“The pin. And after she says it didn’t work, she writes that she has a new plan.” I narrowed my eyes at the open diary. “We need to call this in.”
“Yes, but—”
I retrieved my phone from my bag and swore. Not a bar to be se
en. “You don’t get reception here?” I heard a note of panic in my voice.
“Not usually. Sorry, Robbie. There’s one carrier that sometimes reaches out here, but it’s not mine. Or yours, I guess.”
“No landline, either?”
He shook his head slowly. “My parents never saw the need. We’re usually out here for a getaway, and they like to be inaccessible. When I come out with Sean, it’s good for him not to be able to text twenty-four hours a day, too. Come sit down.” He patted the couch. “We’ll call the detective as soon as we get into range in the morning.”
I sat, but perched sideways so I could face him. “I guess. She won’t be able to do anything without the diary anyway.”
“Exactly. Do you think Maude’s mother knew anything about what she did?”
I turned and snuggled into his arm. “I doubt it.” I thought about my conversations with Jo. “She did say something about Maude having a rough patch in high school, though. And Maude told me she’d joined the military to . . . how did she put it? To get her act together and serve her country at the same time. Maybe killing Lovey had more repercussions than she’d expected.
“If Jo had known, I can’t believe she would have simply closed her eyes to it.” I remembered Jo had had that brief look of panic when I told her I’d found stuff in the walls. Maybe she did know.
“Imagine Maude living with that, knowing she’d ended a person’s life, and on purpose,” Abe said. “Can you imagine it for yourself?”
“No.”
“When I was in the Navy, some guys returning from Afghanistan certainly had a lot of trouble living with their memories.”
“You didn’t go near there, right? Didn’t you say you were sent to Japan?”
“Yes.” He took my hand. “For some reason they needed a medic in Japan more than in the war zone. Go figure. At least I didn’t have to use my weapon.”
We sat in silence then with our thoughts, holding hands, staring at the glowing logs, listening to the frozen rain. Thinking of a ruthless girl who’d become an equally ruthless woman.
Chapter 58
Good thing for analog clocks. We’d set a small battery-operated alarm clock for five-thirty. When it jangled, Abe reached for the lamp, but it wouldn’t turn on.
He groaned. “Ice must have knocked out the power.”
“Oh, dear.” It was toasty and cozy under the down comforter, but when I poked my nose out, the dark air was frigid. Frigid but quiet. The frozen rain must have stopped. I pulled him back under with me.
“You were the one who wanted to get up and out of here,” he murmured from an inch away.
I sighed. “I know. And I should.” The deliciousness of our melded skin was just too much to part with.
He gave me a long smoldering kiss, and then sat up before things got interesting. “I’ll get the woodstove going. Luckily, the kitchen stove runs on propane, so I can still make coffee.
“Good,” I muttered.
“I’ll bring you a mug when coffee’s ready, okay?”
“I’d rather have you, but okay.”
“Sugar, we might have serious chipping and scraping to do. And I’ll bet I have twenty emergency calls waiting for me. This isn’t going to be our last night together, you know.”
I smiled to myself as I pulled the comforter over my head. I was beginning to think I never wanted to have a final night with Abraham O’Neill.
Half an hour later I was dressed, complete with knit hat and boots. Abe tossed me one of his mother’s down vests to put on over my sweater, since the house was still quite cold. He’d lit three gas hurricane lanterns for light. I stood in front of the woodstove with my fingers wrapped around the most delicious cup of coffee I’d ever tasted.
Abe was suiting up in snow boots, the camouflage jacket, and an orange hat. He pulled on warm gloves and grabbed a flashlight. “I’m going to see how bad it is out there.” He went into the front vestibule and opened the door.
He hadn’t even closed it when I heard a whoop and a thud. I set down my coffee and hurried over. Abe lay a few feet from the door on his back on a silvery surface.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
The light from inside revealed a world coated in ice. The walkway to the car looked like a skating rink. Every branch, every shrub I could see was covered with a thick layer of ice.
“Yeah,” he grunted as he managed to turn over. “Grab the snow shovel inside the door, would you?” When I did, he said, “Hook yourself around the door jamb and extend the shovel end to me.”
I fit my right hand into the handle, grabbed the door with my left arm, hooking my leg around the frame, and got the end of the shovel to Abe. He pulled himself along until he could grab the doorway himself. A moment later we were both back inside with the door closed.
“That’s worse than I’ve ever seen it.” He smiled wryly at me. “I’m afraid we’re not getting out any time soon.”
“So it didn’t turn back to rain overnight.”
“Sure didn’t.” He shook his head. “I should have brought the jeep.”
“You have another car?”
“Yeah, for weather exactly like this. Four-wheel drive, studded snow tires, the works. But I wasn’t expecting the frozen part. The VW is not famed for traveling anywhere on ice, I’m afraid.”
“You weren’t hurt in the fall, I hope.” I held his face in my hands.
“Nah. I have pretty good falling reflexes. It’s slick out there. Could take a while to melt. Sun won’t come up for another hour, if we even see it.”
“I wish I could get word to Danna. She’s competent, but she’ll be confused about where I am. If she could even make it in to work, with all this ice. And I really, really want to deliver that diary to Octavia.”
Abe squeezed my shoulder. “Sorry, sugar. I can’t get word to my boss, either. Tell you what. Let’s have breakfast. After the sun comes up, I’ll start salting and sanding to at least make a walkable path to the van. The county crew usually gets to the road out there fairly promptly. Then it’s only a matter of getting the van from the house to the road.”
Chapter 59
I watched from the kitchen window as Abe scattered salt and sand on the back steps and the ground below. The sun was up now that it was past seven-thirty, but the light still just filtered through the trees. If anything was going to melt the ice, it was going to be the salt, not the sunshine. Not for a while, anyway.
He came in and headed for the front door carrying two small buckets he’d filled from the larger ones out back.
“Can I help?” I asked.
“Let me do the first pass. We’ll give it a few minutes to start melting, and then, sure, you can help. We have at least two ice chippers around here somewhere, which we’ll need to break the ice enough to walk on.” He opened the door and stood there while tossing out cup after cup of salt, farther and farther down the walk. He repeated that with sand and closed the door.
The house was starting to warm up, finally. The embrace Abe delivered after he shed his outer wrappings made me even warmer.
“What do you want to do while we wait?” he asked in his huskiest voice, the one that made me want to drop whatever else I was doing. “We have board games. We could play cards. Or we could head back to—”
A glint of light flashed through the wide plate-glass window at the front of the house, like a reflection off glass or polished metal.
“What was that?” He whipped his head to the right. “Hang on a second.” He hurried to the edge of the window. “Someone’s here.” He turned toward me, frowning and beckoning.
I joined him. Behind his VW I saw the passenger side of a big dark SUV. The sun angled off its windshield, making it impossible to see the driver. An identical big black SUV had sat in Maude’s driveway.
“A friend of Mom’s sometimes parks here when she goes hunting,” Abe said with furrowed brow. “But it’s only small critter season right now, like rabbits and fox. And she wouldn’t park me i
n like that.”
“Abe, Maude drives a car just like that,” I murmured.
“Why would she be here?”
“Uh-oh.” I pointed. From beyond the van I saw the driver’s door open on the other side of the SUV. A dark hat appeared above it.
With a loud crack the glass in the far side of the cabin’s front window split open. A zing hit the wall beyond. Abe instantly pulled me away and to the floor. Shards splashed onto the area under the break.
“Was that a shot?” I cried. My heart hammered at my rib case.
“Yes. Stay down.”
Another shot cracked over our heads and slammed into the back wall. Abe pulled me with him on hands and knees around behind the couch.
“That’s a big gun. Military issue, I’d say,” he whispered.
“Maude. She was in the Army. She must have trailed us or something.”
He nodded, regarding me intensely.
“Are the doors locked?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” he whispered back. “But with any luck she won’t be able to get up the walk.”
“How did she even get down the drive?”
“Car like that with studded tires can go almost anywhere.”
I gasped when the next shot took out another window. At least it didn’t sound like it was fired from any closer. The cold air was countering the heat of the woodstove at an alarming rate.
“Do you have a hunting rifle?” I asked, my voice shaking. What were we going to do?
“No. We’re gun free around here.” He squared his jaw. “But I’m a crack shot with the bow.”
“I know you’re both in there,” Maude’s voice rang out. “I want the diary.”
My brain raced. She must have broken into the store last night, found the diary missing from the cupboard where she’d left it. “We can’t give it to her,” I whispered. “If we do, she’ll get close enough to kill us. But let’s see what she says.” I cleared my throat. “I’m all alone here,” I called. I hoped she hadn’t seen us clearly through the window.
