“I’ll take a rum and Coke,” I said, then looked at Marie.
She opened her mouth to speak, and Josh interrupted, in the whiniest voice I’d ever heard him use. “I just want to go to the water park! Why can’t we do that now?”
“’Cause it’s closed,” the giggly waitress said, just like that, silencing the impending and unwinnable argument. Maybe I wouldn’t have to strangle her after all. “It’s open every day, noon to eight p.m. at night, and that’s it. Sorry.”
8 p.m. at night? The brownie points she’d gained were fading fast.
Josh sighed dramatically and put his elbows on the table, head in his hands, like she’d just told him he had six months to live.
“I’ll take a hot toddy,” Marie said.
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, two more cocoas.” I looked at Marie and shrugged. “In case Mason and Angela want some.”
“Angela won’t,” Marie replied. “She’s too worried about her figure. Get her a martini, two olives.”
“Shaken, not stirred,” I threw in.
The waitress blinked like a doe in headlights, and I thought I heard crickets chirping. Josh laughed out loud, slapping a hand on the table. “Double-oh-seven!” he said. “I have that game for my Xbox.”
Marie and I chatted while we waited. Was my holiday shopping done? No. I’d bought a ton of stuff for Myrtle, but no one else. I routinely bought for only a handful of people. My sister, Sandra, her perfect hubby, Jim, the twins, my assistant, Amy, and my agent, Barracuda Woman. Marie said she’d been done for a month now. It wasn’t all that much fun anymore. Used to be all magic and mystery, but now the boys just basically placed their orders and she filled them.
The poor woman was so sad. I was going to find a gift for her this year for sure.
And there it is. The music, the pine scent, the twinkly lights, all empowered with the post-hypnotic suggestion to buy, buy, buy.
I rolled my eyes. Even I thought that was a little too bah, humbug.
“Can we at least go look at the water park, Mom?” Josh asked.
Marie sent a look at the waitress—Tammy, her nametag said. Of course it did. She’d just returned with our order. She was quick. Tammy nodded, set our drinks on the table and bent low to feed Myrtle a little doggy treat. “Sure, you can. It’s kind of dark, because most of the lights are off, but you can see well enough.”
I got a chill when she mentioned the darkness and remembered we had a killer after us. Maybe I should say something. They got up, Josh carrying his cocoa and Marie her toddy, and off they went while I debated.
“Let’s go check out the tree,” Misty said, and when I turned to reply I realized she was talking to Jeremy, not me. And then they were gone, as well, cocoa and all.
I downed my rum and Coke in about three swallows, picked up the martini and hot cocoa, and headed over to the registration desk with Myrt’s leash looped around my wrist.
Marlayna and Rosie were on their way to the elevators, behind a guy with a rack full of luggage. Angela was with them, so I skirted the desk to catch them before the elevator doors opened.
They looked at me, Marlayna and Rosie smiling widely. “This place is incredible,” Marlayna said.
“It is.” I handed the martini to Angela. “Thought you might want a nightcap.”
Her perfectly plucked—well, a little too thin, to be honest—brows rose in twin arches. “Thank you.” It almost had a question mark at the end. I could see her rethinking her initial opinion of me, which hadn’t been good, probably because I’d called her firstborn grandson an asshole during our first conversation. Don’t judge me. He was acting like one.
“De nada,” I said. “Are you guys on the same floor?”
“Yeah,” Rosie said. “Angela’s room is right next door to ours.”
“Good. That’s good.”
He nodded. I didn’t know how much his wife knew about our real reasons for being here—or Angela herself, for that matter—so I didn’t say more. The elevator doors opened right then, anyway, so the awkward moment ended.
I turned to look toward the giant Christmas tree. Jeremy and Misty were still in view. Then I craned my neck to see around the corner to the right, where the water park signs were pointing, but Marie and Josh were out of sight.
Damn, this was going to be harder than I had imagined.
“We’re all set,” Mason said from behind me—and way closer than I’d expected. I jumped and spun so fast I slopped cocoa on my sleeve. Fortunately it had cooled off by then.
“Great. Here. Cocoa.” I handed it to him, aware I’d suddenly turned into Cave-Rachel. “Um, Marie and Josh went to look at the water park, even though it’s closed and there’s no one down there and the lights are off.”
He frowned. “I’ll go get them. Where are Jer and Misty?”
“Tree,” I said with a nod.
“Okay, you wrangle them, I’ll get the other two. Meet you by the back doors. Don’t go anywhere else, okay? The lobby’s still crowded—you should be okay.”
I nodded once and we split up, and it hit me how much easier it was going to be keeping track of everyone with him here to help. And how much easier my presence was going to make it on him. Alone, neither of us would have stood a chance.
Besides, what were the odds the big bad organ thief had followed us up here, or even knew where we’d gone? We’d all taken separate vehicles, left at separate times from separate locations. Mason had gone all out to ensure our safety. He’d even brought a gun and was wearing it. I’d seen it under his jacket when we’d stopped for dinner.
I went into the lobby, right up to the towering Christmas tree. Silent Night was wafting from the unseen speakers now, and the scent of pine, tinged with cinnamon I noticed now, was even heavier in the air. Brightly colored prop gifts with giant bows and sparkly ribbons were stacked strategically beneath the tree. Super-sized candy canes hung from its branches, and the blonde angel on top gazed down with her arms and wings open wide, apparently pouring blessings down on us all.
Yeah, sap. This place was brimming with it. And not just from all the pine trees.
When I rounded the tree, Jeremy and Misty jumped apart almost guiltily, and I wondered if they’d been holding hands just before they’d heard my approach. Or just standing close, like shoulder to shoulder or something.
Interesting.
* * *
“They always have lifeguards on duty,” said a male voice, and it echoed in the giant room that housed the indoor water park. “And the kids get unlimited juice and healthy snacks while they play. All included in the park pass.”
Mason tensed as he stepped into the dimly lit room, scanning the perimeter. There were three full-sized pools, two of which had water slides emptying into them, and five additional towering slides of various shapes, heights and bright colors. One was an open spiral, one an enclosed tube, one dropped straight down from a dizzying height, another two were obviously designed for younger riders. The water was turned off, none of them running, but the pools glistened and gleamed from interior lighting. Floating alarms bobbed in each pool, ready to scream if the water was disturbed during off hours.
And then he spotted Marie, Josh and a strange man standing at the far end of the park, where another set of glass doors faced a snowy wonderland outside.
“It’s going to be so much fun for you, isn’t it, Josh?” Marie asked.
“Yeah, if I ever get a chance to do it. Why can’t we stay here in the lodge, instead of out in some stupid cabin?”
“I promise, you’ll get plenty of time in the water park, Josh.”
“The cabins aren’t far. Which one are you in?” the man asked.
Marie looked up at him. “I don’t actually know yet.”
Mason cleared his throat, and Marie jumped and turned. “Oh, God, Mason, you scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry, Marie.” He faced the stranger. Tall, very lean, fit the body type of Marie’s attacker perfectly. Rachel ha
dn’t been able to guess at his size, though, since they’d both been sitting in her car.
Mason thrust out a hand. “Mason Brown. And you are?”
The man blinked, as if he was wondering about the slightly challenging tone. “Scott Douglas,” he said. His grip was strong. A little too strong, like he had something to prove.
“Scott’s another guest here, Mason. He was just telling us about the water park.”
“Really? How long have you been here, Scott?”
“Arrived earlier today.”
Interesting.
“Mason is my brother-in-law,” Marie said, as if she felt a need to explain his presence. Then she hurried on. “Thanks so much for the information...Scott. It was nice meeting you.”
“You, too, Marie. Um, maybe I’ll see you around the lodge.”
“I hope so.”
She turned and headed back toward the lobby, snagging Josh’s hand on the way and tugging him along beside her.
Mason caught up with her in the main hall. “Marie, we agreed to stick together.” He looked behind them to be sure the attentive Scott hadn’t followed.
“I was just showing Josh the water park.”
“Yeah, after hours, alone, in the dark.”
She snapped her head toward him, a hint of anger in her eyes, but then she seemed to bank it. “I know. I...I forgot.”
“I don’t know how you can forget what happened to you yesterday, Marie.”
“I know. It’s—”
“And striking up conversations with strange men isn’t exactly part of the game plan, either.”
This time she let her anger flash at him. “I’m a big girl, Mason. And he was just being nice.”
“Yeah, and did you ask yourself why?”
“Duh, Uncle Mason,” Josh said.
He looked down at Josh, having forgotten he was there, and could have kicked himself. The kid just rolled his eyes and ran ahead.
Marie said, “Yeah, duh, Uncle Mason. Do you really think the only reason a good-looking single man would strike up a conversation with me is because he wants to kill me?”
“Of course I don’t think that. You’re a beautiful woman, Marie. I just—”
“Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten your brother. I might never get over him, if that’s what you’re thinking about.”
“It’s not.” Hell, his brother had been a freaking psychopath who’d left his widow and two sons because he’d been twisted and sick. He didn’t deserve Marie’s mourning, much less her loyalty.
“It’s not,” he repeated. “I actually think it would be good for you to...you know, start dating or...whatever, when you’re ready.”
“Right. Sure you do.”
They picked up the pace to keep up with Josh, who was already rounding the corner up ahead and racing into the lobby.
“He was the right height, the right build, and he’s only been here since today. We can’t be too careful. Okay?”
She nodded. “I appreciate you being so protective of us, Mason. I do. I’m sorry I snapped at you, I’m just...not used to having to answer to anyone. It’s been months now. And even then, Eric never...he wasn’t...jealous. You know?”
“I know.” His brother had had his own obsession going on. He’d been way too busy sating his sick appetite for murder to worry much about what his wife was doing.
“I’m not complaining,” she added quickly. “I’ve always liked...my space.”
“I’ll try not to act too much like an overprotective big brother, then.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
* * *
Our “cabin” was a chalet with two stories, eight bedrooms, a huge living room with a cathedral ceiling, four bathrooms and a kitchen equipped to feed a small army. Beyond our initial unpacking, our curious exploring and the choosing up of the bedrooms, I hadn’t heard or seen a soul since we’d come in.
I had taken a huge bedroom in a corner of the second floor. It had its own bathroom and a balcony—not that I’d be likely to spend too much time out there, being that it was twenty degrees outside. But the view was beautiful. Way more snow up here than at home, and pine trees and mountains everywhere.
The bedrooms were arranged around a square balcony open down to the great room and protected by what amounted to a split rail fence. Misty had the room around the corner to the right, and Mason’s was to the left. His bedroom put him right between me and Marie, who had the other corner. Joshua had the room to the left of hers, but Jeremy had taken the middle bedroom on the fourth side, across from Mason’s room and with no one to his left or right. The kid liked his privacy. The other two second-floor bathrooms were strategically placed, one at each end.
I loved the place, in spite of my initial misgivings. It was absolutely perfect. I’d expected it to be rustic to the point of primitive, but it wasn’t at all. Even the roomy kitchen was fully stocked. They would just tally up what we used at the end and add it to the bill.
I was unpacking my new coat and pants, and remembering the needle that I’d yanked out of my shoulder and dropped into the shopping bag with them what seemed like a lifetime ago, when Mason tapped on my door. Yes, I knew it was Mason. No, I don’t know how I knew. My sightless senses had sharpened to where I could identify most people by smell, by the sound of their movements, by their energy, but usually not from beyond a closed door. “It’s open,” I called.
He came in with a sheaf of papers in one hand and two steaming mugs in the other. “Coffee?”
I grinned in delight and took one of the mugs from him. “Thanks. You’re a mind reader.”
“I owed you for the cocoa.”
“Yeah, and speaking of owing...”
He held up a hand. “We’ve already had this discussion, Rachel.”
Yes, we had. I had told him that I had plenty of money, that the bullshit I wrote had been good to me and that paying the entire shot for the whole crew would be absolutely no problem for me. But he insisted on paying his own way along with Marie’s and the boys’. How he planned to do that on a cop’s salary was beyond me. We were splitting the full tab for Rosie and Marlayna, though I’d had to twist his arm to get him to agree to even that much. Angela thought of herself as wealthy and was insisting on paying her own way at the lodge, which was fine with me.
“So what have you got there?” I asked, nodding at the stack of papers while taking a nice big sip of the coffee, which was perfect. More than perfect. What kind did they have in that kitchen, anyway? I was going to have to find out.
“Guest registry,” he said, and I almost choked.
“You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not,” he said, making me grin again. “I had a private talk with the head of security while I was killing time at the front desk. You’re gonna love this guy, Rache. Retired cop, so Irish he still has a brogue. Finnegan Smart.”
“I love him already,” I said, trying to picture the man in my mind. Was it bigoted of me to imagine him slugging a pint of Guinness and smoking a pipe? Probably.
“I showed him my ID, told him there was a very slim chance that a suspect I’ve been looking for is up here, and that I needed the guest list. He said he’d email it, and he was as good as his word.”
“This place has a printer?”
“Yeah, there’s an office downstairs.”
He shuffled papers around, separating the freshly printed stack from an older one. “I also brought our lists of which organs went to which hospitals and who the recipients were, at least as many as I was able to piece together before it became unnecessary.”
“We thought.”
“Yeah. I figured we could compare our list to the guest list. Chief Sub’s gotta wait for a warrant to get the list of recipients the regular way. We’ve got a head start.”
“You don’t waste any time, do you?”
He walked to my nightstand, set the papers down and turned. “Actually, I think I’m about to waste a little. Everyone’s clamoring for a snack. Mari
e found brownie mixes in the kitchen and they’ll be done in five. I said I’d see if I could coax you down for some brownies and coffee by the fire.”
My thought bubble had Mason and me curled up on a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace—there was no bearskin rug except in my mind, just so you know—pigging out on brownies. It sounded like heaven, until Misty, Jeremy, Josh and Marie all arrived in my bubble, crowding it until it popped. But I decided to play nice and gave him what I hoped was a convincing smile. “I thought I was catching whiffs of pure temptation while I was unpacking.”
He looked past me at the bed, the shopping bags, the snow pants. “They got the analysis back on that syringe,” he said.
“Don’t tell me. Sucks-in-Aberdeen, right?”
“Succinylcholine.”
“That’s what I said.”
“It’s used in surgery to—”
“Paralyze the muscles. I know. And your lungs get paralyzed, too, and you suffocate if you’re not on a ventilator, and it’s hard to trace because it breaks down and the stuff that remains is also found in most corpses due to decomposition.”
He stared at me and blinked. “How is it you’re so far ahead of me on this?”
“It was my body that had a syringe full of that shit sticking into it. One push of the plunger and we’d be having this conversation over an Ouija board.”
He lowered his head. “You’ve barely had time to process what happened, have you?”
“I don’t want to process it.” Then I shrugged. “Besides, I’m feeling much better now. We’re up here in the middle of nowhere. No one knows where we went, and I have to believe we’re safe while we work all this out.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I hope you’re right.”
“I know I am.” It was a lie. I was pulling a page from my own books and thinking positively. Fake it till you make it and all that bull. Hell, you never know, it could work just this once, right?
I heard voices...singing, and I frowned, cocking my head to one side. “Is that...?”
Wake to Darkness Page 11
