White Wedding

by Jean Barrett

  She looked up as Jack and Dorothy arrived on the scene. Dorothy hovered in the background and let Jack deal with the situation. He hunkered down on the floor directly in front of Lane and Stuart. She knew by the unyielding expression on his face that he intended to confront the teenager.

  “Do you have to?”

  “It’s become critical, Lane. We need answers, and we can’t wait for them.”

  She knew what he was telling her. If Stuart was going to join them, as Dorothy had joined them, then they had to be sure of him. She tried to convey a message to Jack with her eyes. All right, but go easy on him.

  He understood her plea. His voice was firm but kind as he addressed the teenager. “Stuart, look at me.”

  Stuart lifted his head and met his direct gaze. “We’re all going to die, aren’t we?” he whispered hoarsely. “He’s going to get every one of us.”

  “Not if we stick together. Your mother and Hale didn’t use their heads. So what about you? Are you going to use yours?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Let’s start with the truth. Like why you’ve been so fascinated with the weapons collection in the library, just why your mother and brother were so worried about that and why you took the dagger out with you last night.”

  “Had my reasons,” he mumbled.

  “Let’s hear them. Let’s get all the secrets on the table.”

  Lane could feel Stuart stiffening again as he drew away from her. She sensed his internal struggle, his deep reluctance to confess what he perceived as an unacceptable weakness. But Jack was still there in front of him, waiting, refusing to go away.

  “I wasn’t all that interested in the collection,” he admitted. “I just pretended to be to make them nervous.”

  Because it was the only time Ronnie and Hale paid any real attention to you, Lane thought.

  “Why should that make them nervous?” Jack wanted to know.

  Stuart shrugged. “I’m on probation. I got in trouble with a gun.”

  “Let’s hear about it.”

  “I took a pistol to school with me.”

  “Your mother’s Beretta?”

  He shook his head. “Never knew she had it until you picked it up in the chapel. This was a pistol I found at my dad’s on one of my weekend visits. I think it belonged to his girlfriend. She never missed it.”

  “What happened at school?”

  “One of the guys took it out of my locker. There was an accident, and it went off. Nobody got hurt, but they made a big deal out of it. I had to go to the counselor for all these sessions. I guess I sort of left her with the impression that I had a thing about weapons.”

  “Only there was another reason altogether why you took the gun to school, wasn’t there?” Jack guessed.

  “Yeah,” Stuart whispered uneasily.

  “The same reason that made you take the dagger last night. You hoped the pistol and the knife would give you a sense of courage.”

  “So what if I took the gun to school. There were these guys, really bad guys, hassling me. I—I had to protect myself. Same as last night.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Stuart. Weapons don’t make you tough. And it isn’t wrong to be afraid and admit it. Your counselor would have told you all that if you’d been honest with her.”

  Stuart was a coward. That’s how he thought of himself, Lane thought. That was his secret shame. This was no time to try to convince him otherwise. His defiance was a sign that he was already too close to the edge over this terror he hated in himself.

  Jack, too, recognized the wisdom of backing off. “All right, Stuart. One more thing.”

  “What is it?” the teenager asked suspiciously.

  “You’ve made yourself familiar with the collection in the library, and now that might be useful to us. Is there any weapon in there that still fires?”

  Stuart shook his head. “They’ve all been neutralized. Only thing that still works is a bow. There’s a quiver goes with it, but no arrows.”

  Jack got to his feet. “We’ll take it with us, anyway, along with the Beretta. Maybe we can invent some arrows.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Away from the lodge. It’s no longer safe. We stop being easy targets for him. We stay together in the guesthouse, and if we have to, we turn the place into a fortress. One way or another, we’re going to lick this bastard.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The tension inside the guesthouse was so palpable that Lane could almost smell it in the air. None of them talked about it. None of them, except for a visibly nervous Stuart, displayed it in their faces. Nevertheless, the strain was there as the four of them sat munching on cheese and crackers.

  It was past noon, and there had been no meal since last night. Though their appetites were indifferent ones, they acknowledged the wisdom of maintaining their energy levels. They had brought a food supply from the lodge, along with other hastily gathered essentials, including a mysterious cloth bag that Dorothy had yet to explain.

  So here they were, Lane thought, barricaded inside their stone-walled sanctuary, the door locked, the heavy shutters drawn. And now the waiting began. But waiting for what? Until the killer made his next move? She couldn’t see Jack settling for a vigil like that.

  She knew she was right when he left his chair and wandered restlessly toward the window that faced the bay. He unbarred the shutter there and peeled it back. She watched him as he gazed out into the clearing that separated the guesthouse from the sharp edge of the bluff. Above the soft whirring of the generator down below, she could hear his familiar tuneless whistle signifying that his mind was at work analyzing their dilemma.

  She waited a moment. Stuart, head lowered, hands between his knees, was lost in his own pain. Dorothy was busy now checking on Allison and Chris in the trundle bed. Neither Dorothy nor Stuart paid any attention to her when she crossed the room and joined Jack at the window.

  “Just how safe are we in here?” she asked him in an undertone.

  He didn’t answer her for a moment. He went on examining the clearing. “He’ll try something, all right,” he said, referring to the killer. “If he wants to finish us off, he has almost twenty-four hours to do it between now and when the sleighs are scheduled to collect us at noon tomorrow. And that’s only if the weather clears. But I don’t think he’s going to be in any hurry about it.”

  “Why do we keep saying he, like we don’t know who it is, when it must be Nils? He’s the only one left.” Jack didn’t react to that. She wondered why, and then let it go for later. Right now nothing mattered but their defense. “Why should he suddenly be in no hurry?”

  “Because he must know by now that Chris is missing and that we must have him. He needs his scapegoat back, and he can’t destroy us until he learns from us just where we’re hiding him.”

  “Is that enough to hold him off?”

  “Until he can figure out some way to get at us in here, try to separate us if he can, because he can’t pick us off one by one anymore. He knows we’re ready for him this time, and that’s to his disadvantage.”

  “But a pistol and a bow without arrows isn’t a lot of defense against the weapons he must have.”

  “No,” Jack agreed, “and that’s why we have to come up with a little strategy of our own.”

  His gaze was still directed toward the clearing. Lane, glancing at him, could see the purposeful little smile on his wide mouth. “Which you already have,” she observed dryly.

  He turned his head toward her, still wearing his smile. “Eastman, I consider the way you climb into my mind and read me every time an encouraging sign in our relationship.”

  “And I consider it downright scary, Donovan. So let’s hear this strategy.”

  He nodded toward the clearing. “Notice the way the bluff here juts out into a point.”

  “Which means?”

  “That the clearing out there and the woods surrounding it are less accessible from either side. Both app
roaches into the area are narrow and open. No real chance of a surprise from those directions, not if you’re guarding them with a pistol.”

  “Why would we want to guard them?”

  “Because there’s a lot of dead brush in those woods. It would take some real work to gather it and haul it into the clearing at the edge of the bluff, but I think we’d have quite a mountain of dry wood out there by the time we were finished.”

  “To be used how?”

  “A signal fire. A blaze enormous enough that when we light it as soon as it’s dark, it can’t be missed on the mainland. The clearing is large enough that a fire shouldn’t endanger the buildings. Also, the bluff here is high enough that the whiteout conditions down there on the ice shouldn’t block it.”

  “And, hopefully,” she said, following his plan, “the right people over there will realize we’re in trouble here and somehow get immediate help to us.”

  “That’s the idea. All right, it’s a long shot, and a risky one at that, but anything is better than just sitting here being useless. Besides—” he glanced over his shoulder, lowering his voice to a whisper “—there’s Stuart. If we don’t do something to occupy the kid, he’s going to blow on us.”

  Yes, Lane thought, she was worried about Stuart, too. “You’re right, Jack. We need to do something to help ourselves. So who’s going to convince Stuart to join us out there, you or me?”

  “Whoa, who said anything about you being out there? We means Stuart and I.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be out there, too, working? And Dorothy, as well, if she chooses.”

  “Lane, be reasonable. A single small pistol can’t adequately cover the activity of more than one individual at a time. Which means Stuart and I trade off at intervals, one of us on guard and the other hauling wood.”

  He didn’t fool her. The truth was, he was protecting her again. “And what am I supposed to do in here while you’re out there risking yourself?”

  “Help me to make arrows,” a low voice said behind them.

  Lane and Jack turned from the window. Dorothy was there and must have heard most of their exchange. She had the cloth bag in her hand.

  “Is that what that’s all about?” Lane asked, pointing to the bag.

  “It is, and I hope I brought everything we’ll need.”

  She moved to a table and emptied the bag, disclosing its contents. There were several tools, a quick-drying cement, fishing line, and from the collection in the library were a box of ancient points and an Indian headdress. Lane presumed that Dorothy intended the feathers of the headdress to be cut into vanes.

  “Not bad,” Jack observed.

  Even Stuart was interested enough in the plan to forget his fears and join them around the table. “No shafts,” he noted. “How can you make arrows when you don’t have the shafts?”

  “We have those, too,” Dorothy said, indicating a pair of high-backed Windsor armchairs facing the fireplace. “We’ll saw out the spokes. They should be thin enough and long enough.”

  Lane admired her resourcefulness, but she expressed her own uncertainty. “I’m willing to help, if you show me how. But it can’t be as easy as it looks. Have you made arrows before?”

  Dorothy displayed one of her rare smiles. “I’ve never manufactured an arrow in my life. But I’m Menominee, aren’t I? I figure there must be something in my genes that’s ready to rise to the challenge.”

  * * *

  LANE WONDERED if the long afternoon would ever end. She and Dorothy worked side by side, saying little as the hours crawled by. The process of creating arrows was a slow, tricky one. She hoped that their efforts would prove worthwhile, that the finished arrows they placed in the quiver would be strong enough to meet the test when and if they were needed.

  From time to time they checked on their patients in the trundle bed. Neither Allison nor Chris ever stirred. But they seemed no worse, and that was one small comfort.

  When Lane got tired of fitting vanes and cutting nocks, she wandered to the window facing the bay. Cautiously folding back the shutter, she spent several moments observing the progress of the brush pile in the clearing. It was growing into a sizable mound and would make an effective blaze when it was lit.

  The wind continued to blow without letup, lifting the powdery snow into clouds of fine particles. The low December sun burned strangely through the haze.

  Each time she went to the window, Lane sought reassurance by locating Jack’s rangy figure laboring under the nearby trees as an uneasy Stuart guarded him with the pistol. The sight of him never failed to produce a soft yearning deep inside her. She had yet to permit herself to really examine this growing, insistent feeling.

  Just as powerful was the dread that accompanied it. The unbearable fear that a rifle would suddenly bark and that Jack’s tall, vital figure would drop in the snow.

  The alarming possibility never left her. She knew that Dorothy shared it as they worked at the table. Both of them listened, straining to hear any sound that would warn them the killer was on the move. But there was only the wind outside and the humming generator below. It was unnerving.

  Jack was experiencing a similar stress. He confided as much to her when he and Stuart took a break inside the guesthouse.

  “No sign of him,” he murmured, drawing Lane across the room to the privacy of one corner as he cradled the mug of hot tea Dorothy had handed him. “But he’s out there somewhere. I swear I can feel him watching us, probably worried about what we’re up to. Anyway, he’s not trying to attack us, maybe because he can see we’re armed now and alert. Or...”

  “Or what?” she pressed him.

  He didn’t answer her for a second. He sipped the reviving tea Dorothy had brewed on a hot plate. “Or,” he said slowly, “he’s playing with us, drawing out the game until he hopes our nerves are so raw it weakens our defenses.”

  “Besides,” she added, “if he waits until nightfall, we’re more vulnerable. He can get close without being seen.”

  “There’s that, too,” he agreed.

  Lane briefly shut her eyes against the menace hiding outside, feeling as daunted suddenly as poor Stuart who huddled on the sofa, ignoring the tea mug Dorothy had thrust into his hand.

  When she opened her eyes, she found Jack gazing at her with such intensity that she longed to put her arms around him and hold on tight. He must have anticipated that desire. He set his mug on the window ledge and slid his arms around her, drawing her close.

  “We’re going to survive this,” he promised in a husky whisper. “And when we do, I’m going to lock us in a room somewhere and make slow, deep love to you, and just maybe we won’t leave that room until the spring thaw.”

  Enthralled by the prospect, she clung to him for a long moment. When he gently disengaged himself from their embrace, she knew that it was time for him to return to his task in the clearing. She hated to see him go back outside. He looked tired and cold.

  “Let me go with you this time,” she begged him. “Let me replace Stuart. He’s in no state to play target again.”

  “No.” He refused her emphatically. “You have your work in here, and I have mine out there. Let’s keep it that way. Stuart, are you ready?”

  * * *

  IT WAS SUNDOWN before the last arrow was completed and placed in the quiver beside the bow. Lane left Dorothy to clear away the tools and went to the window to check on the men outside. To her relief she saw that they, too, had finished and were on their way back to the guesthouse. The dry brush had been stacked in a tight pile out in the clearing. It was higher than the eaves of the guesthouse and would make an impressive bonfire when it was lighted.

  There was something else she immediately noticed. The horizon was no longer obscured by whirling snow clouds. She could clearly see the low mass of the mainland far across the ice. After two uninterrupted days of blowing, the raging wind had finally dropped.

  Stuart was excited when Dorothy unlocked the door and admitted the two men. “Did you see?
The wind’s quit. That means we can leave. We can cross the ice without getting lost.”

  Lane was sorry for the teenager when Jack had to quell his hope. “It’s too late for that. We can’t just abandon Allison and Chris. And even if we could figure out a way to take them with us, it’s going to be dark before long. How far do you think we’d get in the blackness with a killer on our trail?”

  “He’s right, Stuart,” Lane added as gently as possible. “Our best chance is holing up here and using the signal fire.”

  The teenager didn’t argue with that decision, but she could see he was in a mood to rebel as the four of them settled down to wait until it was dark enough to fire the mountain of wood in the clearing. Jack kept busy testing the bow and the arrows and trying the lighter Dorothy had provided him.

  Lane kept an eye on Stuart, worried about his increasing restlessness. The stillness outside the tightly locked and shuttered guesthouse didn’t help. After two days of hearing the furious wind, the complete silence was downright eerie.

  It was this unnatural quiet that finally destroyed Stuart’s last shreds of self-control. Or rather, it was the sharp rending sound that suddenly blasted the silence.

  The teenager leapt to his feet, his eyes wild with panic. Lane, too, was startled, thinking immediately of gunfire.

  “Relax,” Jack said mildly, fingering the taut string on the bow. “It’s just the ice booming out in the bay. In that kind of expanse, it’s probably expanding and contracting all the time. We just never heard it because of the wind.”

  Dorothy offered her own reassurance. “He’s right. Whenever there’s a change in the weather, it makes snapping noises like that. My mother used to say the ice is just settling in for the night. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Stuart looked far from convinced, and Lane couldn’t blame him.

  Jack went off to use the bathroom. The door had scarcely closed behind him when there was another disturbing rumble from the bay. Stuart, still on his feet, didn’t wait. Eyes wide with terror, he snatched up his jacket and struggled into it.