Snowball in Hell

by Josh Lanyon

  Twenty minutes later he was on his way to Little Fawn Lake in a battered pickup truck driven by Mrs. Svensson’s grandson, a big blond man with a hook in place of his left hand.

  “Where’d you stop that packet?” Doyle asked as they left the silent streets of Indian Falls behind, winding slowly up through the mountain roads. Giant pines and incense cedars blocked the waning moon.

  Svensson didn’t look at him, pushing the car into first gear with the hook as the car began to climb. “What’s that?”

  “Where’d you lose the arm?”

  “Bombing run over Wilhelmshaven.” Svensson looked at him.

  If you were of eligible age and not in the service, there had to be a damn good explanation, and Doyle made his excuses. “Reporter. I was in Tunisia with the Brits. The Eighth Army.” He wasn’t ashamed of being a journalist, but by the end of his stint he’d begun to feel strange about recording and observing the free world’s struggle for survival without taking part in it himself.

  “Where’d you get hit?” Svensson asked, and Doyle shot him a surprised look.

  “Medenine,” he said, and the other man laughed.

  “Mina,” he explained. “My grandmother. She can always tell. She nursed a lot of boys in the other one. The first one.”

  “The War to End All Wars,” Doyle murmured.

  “Yeah. When you think this one’s ending?”

  Doyle thought it would be another two or three years, but Svensson believed it would be winding up pretty quick now that the Americans were in, and they passed the rest of the trip talking it over.

  The highway grew narrower and steeper, seeming to wind up into the stars. One side of the road was thick forest, and the other a sheer drop into darkness. And then they pulled around an S-curve and the lodge was before them—just waiting for Heidi and the goats to show up.

  “That’s it,” Svensson said. “Little Fawn Lake Lodge.”

  It must have been modeled on one of those Swiss chalets that populated snow globes everywhere. All that was missing was the snow.

  A narrow gravel drive lined with foot-high Christmas trees curved under a trellised porte-cochere, and beneath the dead vines and bare bones of the carport was a door bedecked in a giant holly wreath. The drive itself snaked back to the pine-lined highway and disappeared in darkness.

  There was no sign of the woody station wagon, but that was no surprise. Pearl had had quite a start on him.

  He paid Svensson and thanked him, and went into the lodge thinking of possible explanations for his missing luggage. He’d picked up a toothbrush and a couple of essentials at the drugstore, but it was going to be hard convincing anyone he’d actually planned this excursion.

  The front door jangled cheerfully thanks to a bunch of silver bells. Nathan found himself in a warm, cozy lobby with a high ceiling beamed with rough logs. Colorful woven rugs lay on the wooden floor, and cheerful chintz framed the big bay windows. A twelve-feet blue spruce trimmed in old-fashioned handmade ornaments towered next to a fieldstone fireplace at one end of the long room. At the other end were two arched doorways. A sign over one doorway indicated the bar, and the second doorway led to the dining room. A staircase wrapped in evergreen started at the back of the room, climbed six steps and veered off into two separate branches.

  There was no one at the reception desk. Copper lamps cast mellow light over vases filled with bayberries and holly. Out-of-date magazines littered tables.

  Nathan walked over to the front desk and examined the leather-bound register lying there.

  The most recently arrived guest was Doris Brown of San Diego.

  It crossed his mind briefly that it was possible she’d given him the slip. She had gotten cagey on the train—what if she had hired a car and gone somewhere else? But according to old Mrs. Svensson, there wasn’t anywhere else to go—unless she had stayed at the town’s only hotel. Doris Brown sounded made up, and Pearl Jarvis was originally from San Diego.

  He relaxed for the first time since losing Pearl at the station. She was here. He just needed to find a way to talk to her.

  Wandering over to the dining room, he glanced in. A waitress came out of the kitchen and began setting the empty tables; apparently they were done serving nobody for the night and preparing for the next day’s nonexistent rush.

  “Good evening,” a voice said from behind Nathan.

  He turned. A thin, pale woman with red hair in a painfully tight bun had materialized in the doorway. He knew her hair was painfully tight from the pinched look on her face. Or maybe it was her shoes. Or maybe she’d gotten a glimpse of herself in the mirror—the red hair clashed horribly with the purple polka-dot dress she wore.

  “May I help you?” she asked. “I’m the hotel manageress.”

  “Hello,” Nathan said. “I was hoping to find a room.”

  “In the dining area?”

  “Well, no,” he admitted. He gave her his best smile, but she wasn’t having any.

  “Do you have a reservation?”

  Since she would almost certainly know if he did, this seemed unnecessary, but perhaps she was short on amusement up here in the snowless mountains. “I made this trip on impulse,” he said.

  “You must have. You don’t appear to have any luggage.”

  “There was a mix-up at Union Station.”

  “I see.” She smiled a frigid smile that indicated she saw only too well. “If you’ll just follow me.”

  She turned smartly on heel, and goose-stepped back to the lobby, Nathan trailing.

  Planting herself behind the garland-decked desk, she examined the key rack behind her, glanced through the register, peered out at the dark night. If a nail file had been present, she’d have probably done her nails. At last she seemed to recollect Nathan.

  “May I ask how long you plan on staying? Or will that depend on impulse as well?”

  Nathan wondered if the dearth of hotel guests was totally due to the war.

  “Just overnight.”

  She nodded as though she sincerely doubted it, but pushed the register toward him.

  Nathan signed his name.

  “I see Doris has already arrived,” he said with pleasure. “What room is she in?”

  Her eyes rested on him for a long moment. “I’ll let the young lady know you’ve asked after her.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “I’ll see you to your room,” the manageress said, in the tone of one planning to lock him in for the night.

  “I hate to trouble you—” Nathan began.

  “No trouble,” she said, not bothering to try and make it convincing. She took a key from the rack behind her.

  She escorted Nathan upstairs to a pretty little room with pink-flowered wallpaper and two big windows frothed in dotted Swiss. There was a double bed, two white chests of drawers, a little table and a white rocker with pink satin pillows.

  “You share a bath with room number seven. However, there is no guest in room number seven tonight.”

  “Ah,” Nathan said.

  The key was handed over with the air of one who had serious misgivings, and the manageress departed with the news that someone would eventually be up to make the bed.

  Nathan moved to the nearest window. His room was in the center of the hotel. Two dark, apparently uninhabited wings stretched away to the left and right. The night was cold and crisp and clear. A gray Plymouth sat idling under the porte-cochere, exhaust smoking in the frosty air.

  There was a knock on the door and the waitress from the dining room entered to make the bed, which she did quickly.

  “Not many guests, I suppose,” Nathan remarked.

  “It’s shaping up all right,” she said cheerfully. “We just got two more in for the night. Decided they couldn’t drive all the way to Santa Rosa tonight.”

  Santa Rosa by way of Indian Falls? That was a new one for the mapmakers.

  “I forgot to ask downstairs, you don’t happen to know which room Doris is in, do you?”

&
nbsp; “The blonde lady who arrived this evening?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Number fourteen. Right down the hall.”

  Nathan tipped her and she went out.

  He waited a few minutes, poked his head out of his room and made certain the coast was clear. He stepped out into the hall and walked quietly down to number fourteen. The light shone beneath the door. He put his ear against the white wood and listened. Floorboards creaked beneath soft footsteps. Doris/Pearl appeared to be pacing the floor.

  He considered trying to talk to her again, but decided to postpone it for now. She appeared to be unsettled, and she was already wary of him. He would have a better chance if she ran into him casually downstairs. And if that didn’t work, he’d just have to risk knocking on her bedroom door. Not that Pearl struck him as a girl unused to gentlemen knocking on her boudoir door.

  Nathan went downstairs to the bar. There were three empty high-backed booths, a row of tiny tables with checked cloths in front of a long built-in—and also empty—wooden bench, and a bar angled across the rear corner of the room. A boy too young to drink stood behind it.

  Nathan perched himself at the bar, studied the wall of bottles in front of him and ordered the VAT 69.

  “Quiet around here,” he remarked.

  “No snow,” the kid said, which was a refreshing take.

  Nathan drank his drink and waited. No one showed up. He ordered another. He thought how strange it was to be sitting here in warmth and light sipping a liqueur-blended Scotch whisky—one of his favorite Scotch whiskies, at that—while on the other side of the world men were dying by the droves.

  “I should probably be closing up,” the kid said.

  Nathan studied him. In about a year he’d be old enough to draft. “One more for the road?”

  The kid nodded, poured him another drink.

  Nathan sipped reflectively. He didn’t think Pearl Jarvis was the kind of girl who would be very happy sitting by herself in her room all evening, but maybe she was worn out from her trip.

  He wondered if Spain would drive up himself, and how long it might take him—assuming he started right away. No more than six hours surely?

  Abruptly, Nathan was tired. Why not leave it to Spain? He could go up to his room and grab forty winks—which was about all he could sleep these days.

  He paid for his drinks, started to rise and then sat back down as two men entered the taproom. He saw the kid open his mouth to protest, and then give it up. He understood why.

  They looked like Tinseltown’s idea of hoods—or comic relief. One was bald and burly. The other looked sort of like Harpo Marx, blunt featured with lots of light, fuzzy hair. They sat down at one of the high-backed booths. Nathan caught the eye of the bald-headed man. Nathan nodded politely. The man nodded back.

  He seemed vaguely familiar to Nathan. He studied the pair a longer moment; neither man paid any further attention to him, and yet…the hair prickled at the back of his neck, a feeling that had saved his skin more than once.

  The youthful bartender went over to take their drink orders, and Nathan nodded good-night to him, and went upstairs, conscious of two pairs of unfriendly eyes pinned to his shoulder blades.

  At the top of the stairs he waited, leaning back against the wall, safely hidden by the corner.

  And waited.

  No one left the bar in pursuit of him, and feeling a little foolish, he moved on toward his room. Then on impulse he continued on to Doris Brown’s room. The light had vanished from under her door.

  He stood there for a moment, thinking, and then he headed quietly along the corridor to his own room.

  Locking his door, he slipped off his shoes and jacket, removed his tie and lay down on the bed. He lit a cigarette and stared up at the ceiling, thinking.

  After a time he stubbed out the cigarette and got up, stepped back into his shoes, shrugged back into his jacket, put his coat on and let himself out of his room. There was no sign of anyone in the hall. He went to the top of the staircase and looked down. The lobby was empty, but he could hear voices from the bar.

  He considered. If he went down the stairs and out through the lobby, they were liable to spot him, and even if they didn’t, they could hardly miss the cheerful jingle of bells on the front door. He looked down the hallway to where it angled abruptly off into darkness. That hallway had to lead to the closed left wing of the hotel. If there was an outside exit, and there had to be, he could probably get out that way and not be seen.

  He moved quickly, quietly down the hall, rounded the corner and kept walking as the light from the main part of the hotel faded behind him. It was a long, long hallway. At the far end was a staircase, also in darkness. He felt his way down it, moving as quickly as he could, one hand holding to the banister. No pine garland here. It smelled dusty and closed up.

  On the bottom level he found a door. The knob turned and he walked out into moonlight as bright as phosphorus. The cold was like a punch to his lungs, his breath frosted in night air scented with pines and distant snow. It smelled like Christmas, and an odd pang shot through him as he remembered long-ago holidays.

  He stuck close to the building, making his way toward the row of garages about a hundred yards beyond the rear of the hotel. They were arranged in an arc around a cement court, and in the center of the court stood a high pole topped by a blazing light. Apparently there were no worries of attracting enemy aircraft up here.

  The door of the fourth garage from the left was slightly ajar.

  Nathan’s footsteps crunched on gravel as he walked toward the garage, the sound sharp in the night. He dragged open the door. The gray Plymouth gleamed in the artificial light. He tried the car door handle, but it was locked. Suspicious minds, he thought with a faint grin. He cupped his hands funnel-style against the glass window, trying to read the car registration, but it was too dark inside the garage.

  Walking round to the front of the car, he eased the hood, propped it up and then felt around ’til he found the distributor cap. He unscrewed it, slipping it into his pocket.

  That ought to ensure Pearl didn’t disappear in the night with the two heavies from the taproom.

  He started back for the hotel, walking briskly. He paused long enough to leave the distributor cap in one of the flower boxes beneath the window of a ground-floor room, and then walked on ’til he came to the side entrance.

  He opened the door, stepped quietly inside—and the floor dropped out from under him. He plummeted down into darkness lit with red and white flares, tracers and shell bursts exploding around him.

  Chapter Six

  It was late when the phone call came through. Matt had been leaving for home—or in the process of leaving—for the past three hours. There was no rush to get back to an empty house, and he was not going back to Pershing Square again. He’d had two nights of that insanity. He wouldn’t spend another standing in the darkness, hot and sick and shaking inside with a confused mess of feelings that weren’t worth analyzing. That he shouldn’t have felt anyway.

  With Rachel gone it was like balancing on the edge of a cliff—and all the little wildflowers, the netting of grass and roots that kept the cliff from sliding into the sea below, were gone. It was just Matt standing there looking down, waiting to fall.

  Even Rachel’s memory, the sweet recollection of all they had built, all they had shared, was no longer strong enough to fight gravity. From the moment he had looked across the wet grass and seen Nathan Doyle standing in the shadow of a stone saber-toothed tiger, something had changed inside him. Something battened down had torn free, like a sail taking its first deep breath of sea air.

  It terrified him.

  And at the same time it exhilarated him.

  Which terrified him all the more.

  The phone jangled loudly, and Matt reached for it. He had been thinking about the one thing that tied all the suspects in the Arlen case together—thinking about how far people would go to protect their secrets—thinking�
��because he couldn’t stop thinking about it—about Nathan Doyle’s secret. The voice on the other end of the line was Doyle’s. He sounded a million miles away, like he was calling from the moon.

  “I’ve located Pearl Jarvis. She’s staying at a ski lodge at Little Fawn Lake. Up near Indian Falls.”

  Indian Falls. He and Rachel had honeymooned there. They had gone camping in the mountains there every year until he was sent overseas and Rachel had got sick.

  “You’re kidding,” Matt said. It occurred to him that he might have seriously miscalculated in not having Doyle followed. If he was wrong about Doyle—but if he was wrong about Doyle, Doyle would probably not be calling him to say he had found Pearl Jarvis. He said calmly, “How’d you find that out?”

  “I followed her from Los Angeles.”

  “By car or train?” He found a pen and began to write, listening to Doyle’s voice. It was a quiet voice, level. Doyle kept himself tightly under control; at least, that’s what Matt would have thought if he hadn’t seen him half-naked in the shadows and moonlight of Pershing Square on Tuesday and Wednesday night.

  “By train. I’m in Indian Falls right now, trying to get a ride up to the lodge.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Doyle answered, “Because—” And something changed in his voice; he said simply, “I want you to hurry up and solve this thing.”

  “Any particular reason? Or are you just a concerned citizen, Mr. Doyle?”

  He had to press the phone close to hear that weary “I…think you know my reason.”

  The honesty of it caught him off guard. Shook him even. He wasn’t sure he was ready for it. Wasn’t sure he could ever be ready for it, because to admit that he understood what Doyle was saying was to admit to something within himself. Something he wasn’t sure he was ready to face.

  He said finally, “You’re heading up to the lodge, you said?”

  “If I can hire a car.”

  “Try not to spook her.”

  Doyle snorted. “Tell it to your granny!” And Matt had to laugh at the amused affront.

  But after he rang off, after promising to send help, he began to worry a little. He thought that Doyle might easily underestimate the fairer sex, and he thought Pearl Jarvis would not have run if she didn’t have friends waiting for her—and that those same friends might be waiting for Doyle, as well.