by Mark McNease
“Do you believe her?” Danny asked. “That Pride Lodge is cursed?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Kyle said, immediately regretting his use of a word Danny hated. Danny was not stupid by any definition, but somewhere in his life, probably his childhood, the word had been used to great effect against him. He glared at Kyle.
“I’m sorry,” Kyle said. “I just meant it’s preposterous. The Lodge has been a going concern for almost thirty years, and suddenly it’s cursed?”
“Stu died from a heart attack on those steps right there,” Danny said, nodding toward the stairs that led down the hill. “Not to mention the first owner’s wife and children. Curses have to start somewhere.”
“In our fevered imaginations, that’s where.”
Their conversation was interrupted as Bo Sweetzer came walking through the dining room and approached their table. They’d formed their own small group the last two days and it seemed natural to her to invite herself to join them. Kyle looked behind her, noticing she was alone.
“Looking for someone?” she said, smiling. She knew her departure the night before with the beautifully sturdy detective had not gone unnoticed.
Kyle blushed at his own transparency. “I thought you might be dining with someone else this morning.”
“Dining,” she said. “I like that. You don’t usually think of people dining at breakfast.”
Bo was in very good spirits. She either hadn’t heard the news about poor Happy, or, more likely, she had no idea who he was. Most people relegated the deaths of strangers to the general news feed of their day.
“We only had coffee and dessert,” she said, quelling Kyle’s curiosity.
Danny hadn’t been all that interested to begin with and was hoping their food would arrive soon. He reached for his water glass.
“She’s questioning,” Bo continued.
“And a sucker for a California girl, I’m guessing,” Kyle said.
Danny nearly choked on his water.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kyle corrected himself. “You’re from Minnesota. St. Paul. My mistake.”
The smile on Bo’s face remained, but took on a rigid quality, as if it wanted to fall but she was keeping it in place by force of will. “It must have been the accent,” she said, knowing there was no such thing as a California accent. “I did live there for a few years, when I was a child.”
Danny carefully watched the two of them, worried Kyle had tipped his hand too readily.
“We’ve been there a few times, haven’t we, Danny?”
Danny nodded, hoping the subject would change.
“We stayed with friends in the Los Feliz area. Did you live anywhere near there?”
And now she knew. Kyle had all but told her who he thought she was. Unfortunately for him, she was close to her endgame and losing her need for concealment with each passing hour. She had come to believe, since her time with Detective Sikorsky the night before, that while she would see an end to her mission, her mission would also be the end of her. If she made it away from Pride Lodge, having fulfilled the promise she had repeated to her parents’ ghosts for thirty years, she would have to abandon Bo Sweetzer as completely and easily as she had abandoned Emily Lapinsky. Sid Stanhope was not the last person she would kill after all.
“Oddly enough,” she said, the smile now gone, “that’s one of the few neighborhoods I never saw. We were on the west side, not far from Century City. I was just a kid, I don’t even remember the name of where we lived.”
“Have you gone back?” Kyle asked.
“No, I’ve never had the interest,” she said, and Kyle could see a sadness come over her. She suddenly struck him as very old, and very tired, a woman coming to the end of her journey, whatever that journey might be.
“Does anybody care that Happy’s gone?” Elzbetta said, coming up to their table carrying plates with their breakfast. “It doesn’t seem to me anybody gives a shit.”
“Who’s Happy?” Bo asked. “What happened?”
While Elzbetta gave a quick rundown on who Happy was and that he’d been found dead in a creek the night before, Kyle looked over to see Dylan signaling him, nodding toward the kitchen.
“Excuse me,” Kyle said, standing and putting his napkin on his chair. “I need to wash my hands.”
Kyle left the table and headed toward the restrooms. When he got to the hallway that led back to them, he veered left into the kitchen and saw Dylan standing there with an apron on.
“Cece called in sick. She’s our morning cook,” he said. “When you run a place like this you have to know how to do everything.”
Dylan wiped his hands on his apron and began to pace. “Happy’s dead, before Teddy, from what they said on the news. Do you think Teddy knew?”
“I think Teddy knew too many things,” Kyle said. “That’s why I need to get into his room.”
“Do you think he did it?” Dylan asked.
“What, kill Happy?”
“No!”
And with that Kyle knew he meant Sid. It struck him how quickly Dylan had allowed himself to believe Sid could be a thief, and now a murderer.
“I wouldn’t read too much into the timing of this,” Kyle said, trying to calm the situation. “Happy left days ago.”
“Yes, and he didn’t say anything to anyone about it, and he turned up dead in a creek. Before or after Teddy died at the bottom of the pool, we won’t know until they announce it. Maybe Happy died last night, maybe he died the day he disappeared! Can you imagine being dead in the woods for three days? Oh my God, the animals. Unless his body was moved!”
“Listen, Dylan,” Kyle said, “I need to get into Teddy’s room. It’s not sealed off. There isn’t any crime scene at this point, as far as the police are concerned. You can be there with me, I’ll be very respectful, but I have to have something solid to show the detective. So far it’s all just crazy imaginings, however un-crazy they are to you and me.”
“I want to wait until Sid’s not around,” Dylan said, nodding. “He’ll know something’s up if we go into Teddy’s room.”
“Just tell him I want something to remember Teddy by.”
“He’s a very smart man, he’ll know better. No, let’s wait.”
Kyle would normally not go looking through someone’s belongings, let alone a dead man’s, but he was convinced a significant piece of the puzzle might well be in Teddy’s room.
“Sid’s going into New Hope this afternoon,” Dylan said. “For more party supplies. We’ll have plenty of locals coming tonight, we always run out of something. That’s the time for this, when he’s safely away for a few hours.”
“Perfect,” Kyle said. “Text me when it’s time, we’ll be in the cabin. And now I think I’ll get back out there. You wait a minute so it’s not too obvious we’re having an affair.”
Dylan smiled for the first time that day and watched as Kyle went back to the table.
Chapter 23
A Late Start
Detective Linda Sikorsky. Even after fifteen years on the force, six of them as the only active homicide detective in New Hope (a job she performed for other towns in the area when needed, so seldom did murders occur in this bucolic stretch of Pennsylvania), Linda still felt uncomfortable with the title. As if she’d come to it by accident, or been given the position when someone else had displayed more merit for it. But there was no one else, and she had worked long and hard to get where she was. It just seemed like such a dream come true, regardless of how few people dream of being homicide detectives. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d hear from little girls asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A nurse, maybe, or a teacher, or a pop star, but not someone whose job it was to investigate the killing of one human being by another. Still, it had been her dream ever since she’d been a child in Cincinnati and her father, a cop on the Cincinnati Police Department, was gunned down in the most absurd way: as a bystander when shots broke out during a fight outside a grocery store. A grocery store! Not a bar
, not a craps game he was breaking up, not anything that said “hero” when the papers covered the story the next day. Oh, they called him a hero. Every person in uniform was instantly transformed into a hero when they died, even if it was from a heart attack in a church parking lot. But try as she did, she was never able to think of her father’s death as the death of a hero. It was a cruel, capricious, meaningless death, when he had stopped at the store to pick up a short list of groceries her mother had given him over the phone, and as he was walking to his car in the parking lot, two thugs started shouting at each other outside the main entrance as a nearby police cruiser screeched to a halt. By the time Peter Sikorsky was even aware that trouble was happening, a bullet had entered his neck on the right side, leaving a hole on its exit from which he quickly bled to death.
It had never made sense to her, and she had long ago stopped trying to make it. Ideas like “closure” and making sense of random tragedy were for people more desperate to believe everything happened for a reason. She knew better. She knew people were felled by stray bullets and children were raped and very few people were heroes. But while she would not humor others by calling her father’s death anything but senseless, she would honor him by becoming a police officer and seeking out a career he had been deprived of. That was thirty-five years ago, in a world and life so removed from the one she now lived that she only believed it had ever happened because it had happened to her. Her mother, Estelle Sikorsky, had met another man two years after her father’s death, and the three of them had moved to Philadelphia. Her stepfather, too, had died, but from a stroke, something less dramatic but no less sudden or pointless, and her mother now lived alone six blocks from Independence Hall. She recently retired from her job teaching fifth and sixth graders, and Linda visited her once a month, making the hour’s drive to sit and talk about this and that, never anything too deep, including the men who had died on Estelle and left her sitting alone in her kitchen on Sunday afternoons.
That they never spoke of anything too sensitive was a big reason Linda had never told her mother, or anyone else, that she was—all things being considered—a lesbian. Linda didn’t like calling herself anything. And, at the same time, she was very honest and always had been. Someone who could not kid herself about the brutal and meaningless nature of her father’s death could not kid herself about her own nature. She had known she was attracted to women long before she was one herself. Back when she was a child, in middle school, probably earlier. But she had chosen, for reasons she still did not fully understand, to never label it, to never call herself anything other than Linda. She had chosen as well not to act on it. Not because she was ashamed, or wanted to be something other than who she was, but because she feared the loss it could bring. That, she had finally come to realize, was the real reason: not any perceived hostility, not some sad self-rejection, but because a bullet had taken away the one man she had loved in her life, and she feared, in a way words could not express and consciousness could not quite define, that acting on her desires would open the door to love, and love would open the door to loss.
Even last night, when she had asked Bo out and they’d had coffee at the diner, she felt herself as much repelled as attracted, as if something were in front of her that she both wanted and feared. Something that simultaneously promised pleasure and threatened pain—comfort with a caveat. It had been her way of testing waters whose shore she had stood gazing from for twenty years. It had not been a particular attraction to Bo Sweetzer, but a way of finally saying, yes, this is me, this is who I am and who I want to be. She was grateful to have made this initial foray into her truest identity with someone as nice, patient and free from expectation as the woman from St. Paul. That this woman, Linda now knew, was not who she pretended to be complicated things but did not take away the simple joy she’d had the night before, sitting in a diner with another woman, for all to see (most of whom, she knew, had assumed she was gay all this time anyway). It had given her a sense of freedom she had always hoped was available but was never really sure, until then, until that moment when she went from questioning to certainty. That was hers to keep, despite what came of the things she’d learned after going home and, instead of sleeping, doing what an obsessive detective does: investigating. Bo Sweetzer, jewelry maker, website, history, dead end. And if there was one thing Linda Sikorksy did not like, it was a dead end. There were already too many at Pride Lodge for comfort.
In this day of social networks, data mining and seemingly endless public access to anyone who has ever typed their name online, it’s a major accomplishment to have nothing about yourself available to anyone with a keyboard. The jewelry site was easy enough to find, its whole purpose was to sell jewelry and Bo gave the URL to everyone she met. But when Linda tried to dig a little deeper, find a college record, a past, it stopped. Bo Sweetzer had told her in their initial interview she was from St. Paul. Apparently that was truer than Linda could imagine: there was no Bo Sweetzer before St. Paul. Bo had managed to emerge fully formed from the world’s womb, if not her mother’s. And while it wasn’t all that miraculous for her to remain off Facebook and Twitter and the other hubs of virtual friendship, followers and fanatics, it was nearly astonishing to simply arrive online as a twenty year old.
Linda had not spent the entire night trying to solve a puzzle she had created for herself. She was too tired, and, to be honest, not that concerned with what she had found—or not found—about a woman she would never see again after this weekend. But she made a note to herself to ask Bo about this at the Halloween party that night. She had decided to go, even though it meant pulling together some kind of costume at the last minute. All the years she’d been in New Hope and she had never spent an hour at Pride Lodge. Maybe she’d been avoiding it, maybe it offered answers to questions she had not been fully prepared to ask until last night. But here she was, planning to spend yet more of her weekend there. And not all for fun . . . the questions had changed, and the answers could be fatal. She would need to be prepared.
Chapter 24
On the Ropes
Sid didn’t know what was happening, only that something terrible was coming his way and leaving dead men in its tracks. First Frank and Sam, then Teddy, and now Happy. It was a trail, he had no doubt about that, and it led to him. Time was not on his side; he would need to make his escape soon. The Halloween party that night seemed like a perfect opportunity, when everyone was distracted, having a good time, drinking too much. No one would notice him driving away, and if they did, they would never dream he would not be back.
At first he’d thought what everyone else did, that Teddy had fallen into the pool. He had claimed to be sober for several months, but Sid had known a drunk or two in his life and as lovable as they may be, they could not be trusted to tell the truth when it came to their drinking. So he had assumed Teddy had relapsed, “slipped” they called it, and had somehow fallen into the empty pool. But the martini glass was odd. Sid had always seen Teddy with a tumbler of whiskey, never something so sophisticated as a martini. But he also knew that an alcoholic wasn’t generally choosy, and it may have been that Teddy took whatever was at hand. Or at least that’s what Sid had believed until Happy turned up in the creek bed. Too many deaths in too short a time, with the real possibility his own would be next.
Sid had spent the last twenty-four hours trying to put the pieces together and only getting more confused with each attempt. If the Bo woman was behind this, which seemed a conclusion impossible not to draw, why would she kill Teddy? Why Happy? She would have had to be here days ago, staying somewhere else. Or, as he had begun to fear, was more than one person involved, perhaps even conspiring to pull the noose ever tighter around his neck? Had Teddy found out that Sid Stanhope had been in the Lapinsky house that night thirty years ago? Was he planning to go to the police? That would certainly throw a wrench into the killer’s plans; taking down the last of them would be impossible if Sid was behind bars. It seemed ever more likely that Teddy had unkno
wingly put himself in harm’s way, directly in the path of someone who had no hesitation leaving dead bodies behind her. But why Happy? And why now?
The now of it was as mysterious as anything to Sid, maybe the most mysterious. They’d gotten away with it for three decades. They had all moved on, two of them leaving Los Angeles, with nothing to tie them together . . . except a watch. Sid had told himself all these years that he was innocent in the scheme of things. He had never hurt anyone, had never even carried a gun. He was expecting the same thing they’d experienced at all the other houses: a quick in and out, no one home, no harm done, but then the Lapinksys had been there, and Frank, oh Frank . . .
Sid felt his eyes watering and immediately took control of his emotions. He would have to leave Dylan, and do it without saying why. No one could know what became of him or why he disappeared. He loved Dylan and had counted on spending his last years with him, years that would require companionship as his body found itself more and more worn down. Their age difference would put Dylan in the position of taking care of Sid, but they both knew that and Dylan even joked about it from time to time. It was not, he had said over and over, something he would consider a burden, but an honor, a continued demonstration of his love for Sid. And for this he would be betrayed, abandoned, left wondering for the rest of his life what had happened.
It was for Dylan’s own good, Sid told himself. Anyone who would murder someone as hapless and accidental as Teddy Pembroke would not hesitate to turn their sights on Dylan if he was seen to be a threat. The sooner and cleaner Sid made his break, the better for them all.
He got up from his computer where he’d been looking at maps and reading about places where a man could disappear easily enough; not all of them were big cities, either. There are many small towns, not much more than bumps in the road, where there are few people to ask questions and vast spaces into which a man can disappear. He erased his search history and tried to focus on a plan. He was heading soon into New Hope for more supplies for that night. He would fill up the gas tank when he was there and buy some supplies of a more personal nature, food stuffs and water, packing for a long journey whose end he would only know when he got there. And then, sometime that night, when everyone was having a good time and looking the other way, Sid Stanhope would simply go away.
