by Jean Barrett
“Not individually,” Jack said. “That’s too risky. We need to watch out for each other. What about dividing into two teams? McGuire and I for one, Chris and Stuart for the other. Each team is responsible for his half of the island.”
“That’s dumb,” Stuart said. “This guy could be armed to his teeth. Probably is. And what have we got? Swords and muskets from the library?”
“It’s either try to find him,” Jack said, “or cower here inside the house and wait.”
Stuart offered no further argument, but Lane had a sudden suspicion about the teenager. Under the toughness was a boyish nervousness. Stuart didn’t want to be out there hunting a killer.
“I’ll go with Chris,” she said impulsively, “if he doesn’t object to me as a partner.” Then, to save the teenager’s pride, she added quickly, “Stuart can stay here in the lodge. There should be at least one man with the women.”
Allison, who had been silent until now, raised a frantic objection to her friend’s plan. “No! Let the men go. Stay here with me, Lane. I need you!”
Jack decided the matter. “Allison’s right. The women can take control of the house, make sure it stays secure.”
Baloney, Lane thought, glowering at him. This was just one more example of his failure to treat her as an equal capable of looking out for herself. She considered opposing his judgment, but she let it go for Allison’s sake. Her friend was clutching at her arm with a genuine desperation.
“Okay.” Lane relented. “But before the men go out there, I think we all need to spread out and check the house again.”
“And make sure every door and window is locked,” Ronnie added emphatically.
The essentials were accomplished within minutes, the four men ready to depart. Lane stopped Jack in the foyer as he was fastening his coat. The others were already outside waiting for him, but she wanted a quick moment alone with him.
“This thing Stuart brought up about the killer being one of us,” she confided to him in an undertone.
“I’m not ready to buy that.”
“Me, either. Not seriously, anyway. But it has reminded me of something.”
“Like?”
“Last night when we were all in the lounge after discovering Teddy, Dan apologized to me about the weather. He said Allison had made him responsible for checking the forecast to make sure we wouldn’t get stranded here. Only he trusted someone else to do it for him, and the freak winds somehow never got mentioned. I shared all that with you at the time, remember?”
Jack nodded, a thoughtful frown crossing his face. “Except he never named that someone, right?”
“No, but when he told me about him, or her, he was looking directly at the rest of you gathered down at the other end of the room.”
“Meaning he meant this someone was one of us and that they might have lied about the forecast.”
“Yes, and if it was deliberate...”
“Okay, it’s a possibility. But any of us could have checked out the forecast and missed the implication of the winds. Doesn’t mean this someone planned to trap us here.” His frown deepened. “You have any idea at all just who Dan was looking at?”
She shook her head. “None.”
“Who was there in the group? If we could eliminate—”
“That’s no good, either,” she interrupted him. “As far as I can remember, everyone in the house was present.”
There was a sharp rap on the foyer window. The three men outside were impatient for Jack to join them.
“Gotta go,” he said.
She delayed him with a hand on his arm. “I wish you were taking Stuart with you.”
“I considered it, but that would put McGuire and Beaver together, and they’d be at each other’s throats. And Stuart with Hale wouldn’t be much better. Don’t worry. Chris will look out for the boy.”
“Don’t worry, he says. You know what you’re doing is insane, don’t you?”
“I’ve survived dinosaurs, remember?” His grin was aggravatingly brash. “Lock the door behind me, Eastman. I’m counting on you to keep the women together and calm.”
“Stop bossing me, Donovan. And be careful out there.”
* * *
THE WIND CONTINUED to bluster around the house, adding to the tension in the lounge as the four women waited for the return of the men.
None of them had much to say to one another. Allison, returning to her spot on the window seat, continued to grieve for Dan. Lane, checking on her periodically, was thankful to see that her shock was beginning to ease. Ronnie spent the time nervously buffing her nails and doing her best to ignore all of them, especially Lane. Dorothy insisted on making and serving coffee, which none of them wanted.
Lane understood Dorothy’s need to keep busy. She herself kept the fire blazing, adding fresh logs from time to time. The activity wasn’t enough. She found herself aimlessly wandering through the spacious room, her frustration mounting.
What was happening with the men outside? Were they having any luck? More important, were they safe? It all seemed so reckless and impossible.
It was on one of her restless tours of the lounge that Lane noticed the dagger was missing. She remembered glimpsing Stuart placing it on the table near the foyer doorway before he joined the meeting in front of the fire. Now the ceremonial dagger was gone. Had someone returned it to the collection?
Lane slipped into the library, searching the wall where it had been displayed. The mounting for the dagger was there, but not the instrument itself. The rest of the collection was still in place. The men had decided that none of the antique weapons was of any use and would only be a hindrance to them. So where was the dagger? Was its disappearance something to worry about? She thought about asking the other women, but she didn’t want to alarm them. Anyway, Allison had claimed last night that nothing in the collection was dangerous, that every weapon had been neutralized in some manner. So it probably wasn’t important.
The light of a short winter afternoon was rapidly fading when someone banged on the front door. Relieved, Lane hurried into the foyer to answer it. She checked through the small window before unlocking the door. Stuart was alone on the stoop.
The teenager was shivering when she admitted him into the house. “Real polar bear weather,” he complained, stomping the snow from his boots.
“Where are the others?” she asked.
“Still looking under bushes, I guess. Gettin’ dark, so they’ll have to give up real soon.”
“Stuart, you had a partner. You weren’t supposed to leave him.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault. Chris insisted I come back to the house.”
“Why?”
“I was cold,” he defended himself hastily. “Real cold. Okay, so I didn’t bring a warmer coat with me. How’d I know I’d be out chasing a lunatic this weekend? It’s no crime, you know.”
He refused to meet her eyes. She suspected he wasn’t telling her the truth. “Chris shouldn’t be alone out there.”
“He’s all right.” Stuart started to edge away from her toward the stairs. “He knows every corner of the place. Look, I’m going up to my room. Gotta change into dry pants.”
Lane stopped him as he was heading up the staircase. “Did any of you find anything out there?”
“Not a sign. Not even suspicious tracks, though the wind’s so bad it’s covering up everything.” He turned and raced on up the stairs, plainly anxious to escape her.
Lane didn’t go back to the lounge to report Stuart’s return. Dorothy had taken Ronnie into the kitchen to get her aspirin for a headache, and Allison had finally drifted into an exhausted sleep on the window seat. Allison would be frantic if she learned Chris was out there on his own. Dorothy, too. No point in alarming them prematurely. Chris would probably turn up in a few minutes along with Jack and Hale. But Lane was frankly worried.
She took up a vigil at the foyer window, but the angle was a poor one for observing the approach to the lodge, especially in the failing
light. There was a much better view of the clearing, and the woods embracing it, from the wide windows in the Viking hall.
Lane went along the passage and into the dim, cavernous room. She still had no idea where the lights were. It didn’t matter. They would only interfere with her view of the gathering dusk outside. She was feeling her way through the heavy gloom of the hall when she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Turning her head, she found herself gazing through the grilled hatch into the library on the other side.
The framed scene disclosed a furtive activity, just as it had for Jack and her the night before. Only this time the figure stealing across the library wasn’t Chris Beaver. It was Stuart. She watched him as he cast a quick, guilty glance over one shoulder. Then he whipped the ceremonial dagger from under his loose sweatshirt where he had concealed it, returned it to its mounting on the wall and fled from the room.
So, Lane thought, it had been Stuart, after all, who had taken the dagger with him. She thought she understood why and hoped that she wasn’t wrong.
Hugging herself against the sharp chill in the banquet hall, she moved to the bank of French doors overlooking the garden and the woods beyond. The prospect here wasn’t much better. It wasn’t just the murkiness of twilight, either. There was a haze in the air out there, like a thin mist. Only it wasn’t mist. It was fine particles of falling snow.
Lane prayed that the snow, driven against the glass by the wind, wouldn’t thicken. The steady gale was bad enough. She went on peering into the deepening shadows. Where were the men? Why weren’t they back by now?
The snow created a strange, luminous quality to the scene. Through this nimbus she spotted a sudden movement. There! Off near the chapel. Something, or someone, all in white gliding through the trees.
She had only a glimpse of the specter before it vanished into the woods. She hadn’t imagined it. Something had been there.
Lane was shaking by this time, and when another figure appeared out of nowhere on the terrace and rapped against the glass, she started in alarm.
“Hey, let me in!”
Sweet relief! The face near the pane was Jack’s. Fumbling with the lock, she released the door, almost dragging him into the hall.
“Did you see it?”
“What are you talking about?”
Obviously he hadn’t glimpsed the figure. She described it for him. “I can’t be sure. It was too fast. Maybe it was just an animal. Is there such a thing as an albino deer?”
“I don’t know. Could be it was our killer. If it was, he’s an elusive devil. We covered every square foot of this island and found nothing. But that’s not saying much. The conditions out there are getting brutal.”
“Where’s Hale?”
“He went around to the front door. I came this way when I spotted you at the window. Are Stuart and Chris back?”
Before she could answer him, the banquet hall suddenly bloomed with light. Startled, they swung away from the window. Dorothy stood just inside the doorway from the foyer, her hand resting on the switch that had illuminated the enormous iron chandelier suspended by a chain from the rafters.
“I heard your voices,” she said. “What are you doing in here?”
When they had no immediate answer for her, Dorothy hurried across the room to join them by the windows. She must have seen by their faces that something had happened.
“What is it?” she insisted. “What’s wrong now?”
Jack turned to Lane. “Better tell her what you just saw out there.”
Once again, Lane described her sighting of the all-white form that had melted into the woods.
Dorothy’s expression, usually so dispassionate, this time registered a clear shock. “Manabus,” she whispered.
Jack and Lane exchanged bewildered glances.
Making an effort to recover her composure, Dorothy repeated the word for them. “Manabus.” She went on to explain. “It’s the Menominee name for a spirit who appears at strange times in the shape of a great white rabbit. Some of the people believe Manabus is a harmless practical joker. Others are convinced he’s evil. But all agree that he’s powerful.”
Lane didn’t want to offend Dorothy by questioning her explanation, but did the woman seriously believe that this so-called phantom figure was a Menominee spirit and not a flesh-and-blood enemy? Not that there would have been an opportunity to ask her, anyway. At that second an overexcited Allison burst into the hall, the others close behind her.
“Chris isn’t back! He’s still out there!”
Jack’s gaze went to Stuart. “The two of you separated?”
“I was freezing,” the teenager muttered. “I wanted him to come back to the house with me. He wouldn’t. Said he’d go on looking while the light held.”
“How long ago was this?”
Stuart shrugged. “Less than an hour, I guess.”
“It’s been dark for a while.” Jack’s expression was grim. “He should have returned by now.”
“Why are we talking about it?” Allison demanded, her voice close to shrill. “We can’t leave him out there! We have to find him!”
“Hale and I will go after him,” Jack volunteered. “The rest of you stay put. We don’t want to risk losing someone else in that mess out there.”
Hale didn’t look pleased by the necessity of another search, particularly when it was for Chris Beaver, but he didn’t object. Stuart, Lane noticed, looked relieved that no one expected him to join the hunt this time.
“You’ll need flashlights,” Dorothy said. “I’ll get them.”
Minutes later, back in the warmth of the lounge, Lane resumed her frustrated vigil by the French door. She strained her senses, but all she could see through the glass was an unwelcome blackness, and all she could hear was the endless wind. But she imagined Jack and Hale struggling through the dark gale with their wavering flashlights, shouting for Chris. She found herself praying for the safety of all three men and tried to deny to herself that her concern was more centered on Jack’s welfare.
She knew that Allison, nervously pacing the room behind her, was making no pretense of her own feelings. Her agitation was all for Chris Beaver. Ronnie and her younger son huddled miserably near the fire. Dorothy perched quietly on her straight-backed chair, refusing comfort. But Lane thought that she was looking sick now that her brother, as well as her husband, was missing.
Lane had lost all track of time. It could have been an hour later, maybe longer than that, when Jack and Hale stumbled back into the lounge. They were wet, exhausted and their gloomy expressions spoke for them.
“Nothing,” Jack reported to the gathering in the lounge. “There was no sign or sound of Chris.”
“But you can’t give up!” Allison cried. “You have to go on looking!”
“Allison, it’s no good,” Jack tried to tell her. “You don’t know what it’s like out there. You can hardly see your hand in front of your face. All we can do is wait for morning and go out again when it’s light.”
“And just leave him out there all night? He might be injured, or he could die of exposure!”
“Chris is a survivor,” Jack insisted. “If he can help himself, he’ll crawl in somewhere and take cover. The temperature isn’t so bad once you get out of the wind.”
“Why are we fooling ourselves?” Ronnie said wildly. “We all know what happened to him! The killer got to him, just as he got to Dan and probably Nils, too! He’s out there somewhere waiting to pick us off one by one!”
Allison looked as though she could have slapped her. “Chris is alive!” she insisted. “I won’t believe he isn’t alive! But if something did happen to him...” In her desperation, she rounded on Stuart. “You were the last one to see him. How do we know it isn’t you we have to worry about?”
“Me?” the teenager squealed. “What have I got to do with it?”
“Maybe everything. You’ve been fascinated with the weapons collection from the minute we got here. It’s abnormal. You coul
d be—”
“Allison, no.” Lane slid a supportive arm around her friend’s waist, afraid that she was close to losing all self-control.
“But he could have done something to Chris!”
“Allison, he’s just a boy,” Lane reminded her softly.
But there was the dagger, Lane remembered. Stuart had had the dagger with him. Not to harm Chris, though. Surely not that. The teenager had wanted the dagger for another reason. But she couldn’t be certain of that, and if she was wrong...
Lane searched Stuart’s face. Feeling her gaze on him, he stared back at her, defiant and embarrassed. She realized that he knew what she suspected about him. She tried to tell him with her eyes that she understood and had no intention of revealing his shame.
She never knew whether he received her silent message. Hale interrupted her thought with an accusation of his own.
“Maybe friend Chris isn’t missing at all,” he muttered with jealous resentment.
Allison, seething now with unchecked emotion, directed her anger this time at Hale. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “The guy’s militant as hell about all this Indian stuff, isn’t he? So maybe he’s turned into a real savage over it. Maybe he wanted Stuart to go back to the house without him for a reason of his own. This way he’s out there alone, free to hunt us down like he hunted the others.”
Lane’s arm tightened around Allison. She knew that, without that restraint, her friend would have physically attacked the man she was supposed to have married today. She could feel Allison shaking with rage.
“Enough,” Jack said. Lane blessed him for his quiet authority. “When are you people going to realize that all these reckless accusations just end up making us easier targets, and that’s probably exactly what our stalker is counting on?”
“What are we supposed to do?” Ronnie implored.
“Stick together,” Jack advised. “Stick together and work to catch this bastard before he catches us. It also wouldn’t hurt to be as cautious as hell while we did it.”
Chapter Eight
Shrimp bisque heating on the stove. Fruit salad chilling in the refrigerator. Now just the sandwiches to be made and arranged on the tray. Lane had everything under control. She hoped.
