Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  Judy Tribucci: “How can a thing like this happen, how can it happen to us… ”

  Minnie Beckman: “A spawn of the devil, did you see his eyes, those terrible eyes…”

  Harry Chilton: “Why are they doing it? Why, for God’s sake, why, why…”

  Verne Mullins: “Who are they, they’re not businessmen, where did the third one come from…”

  Maude Fredericks: “Matt can’t be dead, he can’t be…”

  June Novak: “Oh my Lord please don’t let Greg be harmed, please…”

  Sharon Nedlick: “Dave, Mother’s heart won’t stand any kind of shock, if they break into the house and try to bring her here even after what we told them…”

  Agnes Tyler: “Peggy has to be all right, they haven’t hurt her, they haven’t hurt her… ”

  Edwards’ nurse, Sally Chilton, had joined him at the minister’s side. She took one of the coats from Coopersmith, folded it, and carefully pillowed Keyes’ head; Edwards covered him with the second and then began unwrapping the blood-soaked handkerchief from his torn right hand, telling Sally to find a clean scarf or something to use as another makeshift bandage.

  Coopersmith pivoted away-and Ellen was there, coming into his arms, pressing her wet face against his shoulder. He held her clumsily, felt the tremors fluttering through her body, and had no words to comfort her. Acrimony, helplessness formed an acidulated knot in his chest.

  After a moment he lifted her chin with gentle fingers, brushed his lips across her forehead, took her slowly back to where they had been located in the right front pew. Opposite, on the left forward bench, Ann Tribucci was still sitting in the graceless, spread-legged, flat-footed posture of the pregnant woman in her final month; her abdomen, moving with the quickened tempo of her breathing, seemed enormous. Tie pulled loose, shirt unbuttoned at the throat, John Tribucci squatted in front of her.

  He was saying, “You’re sure you’re okay, honey?”

  “A little queasy, that’s all.”

  “It’s not the baby…”

  “No. No.”

  “Do you want to lie down?”

  “Not just yet. Johnny-”

  “What, honey?”

  “If… Matt has been killed, do you think Becky-”

  Inadequately he said, “Shh, now, try not to worry about Becky or anything else.”

  “How can I help it? I’m so frightened-for all of us, for the baby.

  … ”

  Tribucci took her hands in his and held them tightly. “I know,” he said, “I know, I know. But nothing will happen to any more of us; we’re all going to come out of this just fine.”

  There’s no conviction in his voice, Coopersmith thought — and I don’t think I believe it either, not after the things that homicidal lunatic said and has done already. He looked at Ellen and then swiftly averted his gaze again; he did not want her to see on his face what was in his mind. Spontaneously, he went up onto the pulpit and stared at the wooden crucifix on the wall above the prayer cloth-draped altar. The constriction in his chest had tightened, and he realized that he was short of breath. A new apprehension tugged at him. He had had a physical checkup three months before, and Webb Edwards had pronounced his heart as strong as ever; but he was sixty-six years old- old, not young — and an old man’s heart could give out at any time under stress, wasn’t that a medical fact?

  Knock it off, he told himself sharply. You’re not going to have a stroke. Whatever else will happen today, you’re not going to have a stroke.

  He kept on standing there, staring at the crucifix. A minute or two passed, and John Tribucci came up beside him. Some of the younger man’s control had clearly begun to slip; his normally amiable face was dark-flecked with an admixture of anxiety and savage fury. “Lew,” he said in a voice liquid with feeling. “ God, Lew.”

  “Easy, son.”

  Tribucci closed his eyes, released a heavy shuddering breath and opened them again. “I’ve never hated anybody or anything in my life, but those three men, that maniac…”

  Coopersmith knew what he was thinking: exactly the same thing he himself had thought when the dark gunman ordered him to reveal which valley residents were not present inside the church. He did not speak.

  “It’s so senseless, ” Tribucci said. “Reverend Keyes wounded and Matt Hughes murdered and maybe others dying, maybe all our lives in jeopardy-for what? For what, Lew? There isn’t any money or valuables in Hidden Valley worth stealing.”

  “Johnny, don’t try to find reason in the actions of a madman.”

  “All three of them can’t be crazy.”

  “No, but it was obvious who’s running the whole show. I can’t figure why the other two are in it. Maybe for some other cause than what little the valley can be looted for.”

  “Well alone or not, that psycho has been planning it for days. He came into the Sport Shop on Thursday and asked me a lot of questions about snowmobiles and ways to get out of the valley. I believed the excuse he gave, told him everything he wanted to know. He looked all right then, I didn’t suspect anything to be wrong…”

  “How could you? How could any of us? We-”

  “ Stand back in there, you’ve got company! ”

  The shouted command from outside sliced off conversation, jerked heads around, turned Tribucci and Coopersmith and brought them down off the pulpit. There was the sound of the key in the lock, and then one of the door halves swung open and the Donnelly and Markham families, and Peggy Tyler, filed inside. The door banged shut, and the key scraped again.

  Agnes Tyler cried, “Peggy!” and rushed down the center aisle. The blond-haired girl had stopped just inside the entrance and was standing as immobile and expressionless as a mannequin. When her mother reached her and flung arms around her, moaning her name, she blinked several times but did not otherwise move; she seemed only vaguely aware of where she was. Coopersmith saw, as he and Tribucci approached, that the others seemed in better condition and apparently unharmed, although the adults were all haggard and eviscerated and shaking with cold or fear or both. The two Donnelly children clung to each other like waifs lost in the night.

  Webb Edwards pushed his way forward and swept each of them with a clinical glance that concluded only Peggy Tyler was in immediate need of medical attention. He stepped to her, disengaged Mrs. Tyler’s enfolding arms, and probed the damp ivory face, the vacuous eyes. His mouth thinned; he took one of her lax hands.

  “What is it, what’s the matter with her?” Agnes Tyler said frantically. “God in heaven, what did they do to you, baby, what did they do to you!”

  Taking Peggy’s other arm, Sally Chilton helped Edwards steer her to one of the rear pews; her mother hovered nearby, hands clenched together at her breast, teeth biting deeply into a tremulous lower lip. The Markhams and Donnellys found benches near the south-side wall heater, and Coopersmith and Tribucci and Harry Chilton brought extra coats for the women and children.

  Minutes later, in subdued and exhausted tones, Sid Markham and Martin Donnelly related some of the grim details of their ordeal. When they were finished, Coopersmith said, “So it was just the lunatic at first.”

  Markham nodded. “I don’t think the other two knew anything about it. He didn’t bring them around until he had us all tied up in Martin’s living room, and they were shook when they saw us-plenty angry.”

  “Why did they join in with him, then?”

  “They didn’t have much choice. For one thing, the crazy had his gun out and they didn’t seem to be armed, and he looked like he’d use it on them if they gave him any trouble. For another, he’d told us everything about the three of them except their names-and I guess told them that he had. He sat there grinning after he had us tied and said how he planned to take over the valley and that they’re professional thieves and that they tried to rob some place called Greenfront in Sacramento last Monday and killed a security guard and didn’t get any money. He said that lake cabin where they’ve been staying is what he called a safe h
ouse.” Markham’s foxlike face remained desolate, but his words took on a sardonic edge. “We’ve had criminals hiding out in Hidden Valley off and on for years, seems like. Right under our noses the whole time.”

  Coopersmith was not surprised that the three men were professionals; despite the madman’s actions, they had taken over the church in a phlegmatic, businesslike manner with which he was all too familiar after forty years of law enforcement. But the fact that the Mule Deer Lake cabin had been an established hideout for the criminal element was an unexpected and galling revelation. Right under our noses, he thought. Right under the nose of a retired old fool of a county sheriff named Lew Coopersmith, who kept bemoaning a severed involvement in his profession while God knew how many wanted felons camped with impunity in his backyard and maybe drank Saturday afternoon beer with him m the Valley Inn bar. The knot in his chest tightened again, and he felt now every one of his sixty-six years; he felt incredibly tired and used-up and incompetent.

  Tribucci asked, “Do you know about Matt Hughes?”

  “He’s… dead,” Donnelly answered, purse-lipped.

  “We were hit with that much, but not where or how or why.”

  Markham and Donnelly exchanged silent glances.

  “Have you got any idea how it happened?”

  “I guess we do,” Donnelly said.

  “How, then?”

  “Better if we don’t talk about it,” Markham said.

  “We’ve got to know, Sid.”

  “There’s enough on everybody’s mind as it is.”

  Doris Markham-a thin, shrewish woman whose hands jumped and fluttered as if wired to invisible electrodes-swung around to look at her husband. She said stridulously, “Oh for Lord’s sake, Sid, what’s the use of trying to hide the truth? They’ll find it out anyway, sooner or later. Tell them and have done with it.”

  “Doris-”

  “All right then, I will. Matt was killed at the Taggart cabin. He was with Peggy and the crazy found them together and shot Matt and then brought her to Martin’s and tied her up with the rest of us. She saw Matt killed; that’s why she’s the way she is now. There-it’s all out in the open.”

  Audible intakes of breath, murmurs. A gaseous sourness bubbled in Coopersmith’s stomach.

  Maude Fredericks said, “You can’t mean they were-I don’t believe it! Matt… Matt wouldn’t have…”

  “Well I couldn’t believe it either at first, but it’s true. The crazy told us how he found them”-her mouth twisted-“and told us exactly what they’d been doing. He laughed about it. He stood there and laughed-”

  “He was lying!” Agnes Tyler, on her feet now, stared at the other woman saucer-eyed. “Not Peggy… Peggy’s a good girl, Matt was a good man… no!”

  Doris looked away. Markham started to say something to her, changed his mind, and spread his hands toward Agnes in a gesture of mute deprecation.

  “No, no, no, no,” she said and began to sob, one hand fisted against her mouth. The sound of her weeping and the susurration of voices grated corrosively at Coopersmith’s nerves; he turned on legs that, always strong, now felt enervated and frail-boned, and returned to the forward pew and sank onto it and stared at his liver-spotted hands.

  Matt Hughes: paragon of virtue, energetic and benevolent community leader, the man everyone looked up to and wanted their sons to emulate. Matt Hughes: unfaithful husband, hypocrite-and dead because of it. The Reverend Mr. Keyes was still unconscious, but he would learn the harsh truth about the murdered head of his flock eventually. And so would poor Rebecca. Everything seemed to be crumbling around them on this cataclysmic day-secrets revealed, illusions shattered, beliefs shaken, and no one spared in the least. All for the Greater Good? Could they still believe in that now and in their collective salvation?

  Coopersmith looked up again at the crucifix above the altar. And a passage from Proverbs in the Old Testament flickered into his mind: Be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it cometh. For the LORD shall be thy confidence, and shall keep thy foot from being taken.

  “All right,” he murmured aloud. “All right.”

  Peggy Tyler lay quiescent on the hard wooden pew bench, tangled blond hair swept away from her face. A small part of her was aware that she was inside the church, that her mother and Dr. Edwards were beside her, but a much larger part was still in the Taggart cabin at Mule Deer Lake. It was as if she were coexisting in two separate realities, two separate time streams. Jumbled voices from both seemed to whisper distantly, hollowly in her ears, images from both were strangely superimposed on one another.

  Shivering, she said, “I’m cold, I’m cold.”

  Mrs. Tyler tucked the heavy fur coat tighter beneath Peggy’s chin; then, tears still trickling along her cheeks, she leaned down and said imploringly, “It’s not true, is it, baby? You weren’t sinning with Matt Hughes, tell me you weren’t…”

  “Stop it, Agnes,” Edwards said. “I told you, she doesn’t seem to be able to comprehend anything we say to her. You’re not doing either of you any good.”

  Matt? Peggy thought. Matt-Matt? You killed him! You shot him in the face, his face is gone, oh the blood the blood

  … no, don’t touch me! Don’t touch me, don’t you touch me!

  “Mother?” she said.

  “I’m here, baby, I’m here.” Mrs. Tyler lifted her entreating gaze to Edwards. “Can’t you do something for her?”

  “If they bring me my bag, I’ll give her a sedative. There’s nothing else I can do, Agnes, I’m only a village doctor. She needs hospitalization. And, the way it looks, psychiatric care.”

  “ Psychiatric care?”

  Edwards said gently, “What she saw last night seems to have had an unbalancing effect on her mind. It may only be temporary, but-”

  “I won’t listen to that kind of talk. There’s nothing wrong with her mind, she didn’t see Matt Hughes killed, she wasn’t with him at the Taggart cabin or anywhere else.”

  “Agnes…”

  “No. She was captured by those murderers and had a terrible experience and she’s in shock, that’s all, just simple shock. She’ll be fine in a little while-won’t you, baby? Won’t you?”

  He took my money, Peggy thought, he took my thousand dollars. Give it back, it’s mine. I earned it, I need it, I almost have enough to leave now. Leave these mountains forever, go to Europe, lie under a hot sun by a bright blue ocean. Warm places, snowless places. Soon. Matt? Soon.

  “I’m so cold,” she said.

  The next two and a half hours passed in grim cycle.

  “Stand back in there!” the voice outside would shout, and talk would instantly fade, and eyes would fasten on the entrance; the lock would click, the door would open Frank McNeil, sweating, shaking, face and eyes like those of a woman on the brink of hysteria; in sharp contrast, Sandy and Larry McNeil following as if narcotized.

  — and the door would close, the lock would click; vocalization and constrained activity would commence again, questions would be asked, questions would be answered; the waiting tension would mount; and then it would all begin anew:

  “Stand back in there!”

  Walt Halliday, rubber-legged, sniffling and coughing into a mucus-spotted handkerchief; Lil Halliday, lower jaw paroxysmic, hands clasped in front of her as if in prayer.

  “Stand back!”

  Joe Garvey, face bloody, clothing bloody, staggering slightly but waving away the proffered assistance and attention of Webb Edwards; Pat Garvey, lachrymose and looking as if she were near collapse.

  “All right, stand back in there!”

  The Stallings family.

  “Stand back!”

  Bert Younger, Enid Styles, Jerry Cornelius.

  “You people stand back in there!”

  Greg Novak, more dazed than frightened, immediately enfolded in the tearful embrace of his father and mother.

  Through it all John Tribucci was in constant prowling motion, like a panther in a zoo ca
ge. He paced from back to front, from side to side, pausing only to make sure Ann was still all right or to exchange brief dialogue with his brother or Lew Coopersmith or one of the new arrivals. Veins pulsed along his forehead, on one temple; impotent frustration was toxic within him. Trapped, trapped, no way out, nothing any of them could do, no way out Abruptly, near the lectern on the left side of the pulpit, he came to a standstill. His head snapped up, and he stared at and mentally beyond the high, wood-raftered ceiling.

  The belfry, he thought; the belfry.

  And the voice outside shouted, “Stand back in there!”

  Six

  Waiting beside the Ford half-ton, Brodie watched Kubion lock the last two valley residents-Hughes’ wife and the big bearded man-inside the church. His mind was still sharply alert, but physically he had begun to feel the effects of the long sleepless night, the constant tension; his eyes were sandy and his neck ached and fatigue leadened his arms and legs. The chill mountain weather made it worse. The wind was up now, and it kept getting colder, and snow fell in turbulent swirls of fat, dry flakes. Night shadows, thickened by the density of the bloated gray clouds overhead, crept rapidly through the village and across the valley.

  Brodie turned his head to look toward the car parked sixty yards distant, and through the snow and the rimed windows Loxner was a blackish outline behind the wheel. He’d been visible there each of the times they’d brought prisoners back here to the church, probably hadn’t even got out of the car in all that time; no guts and no brains, Brodie couldn’t have asked for any worse an ally. Well, he hadn’t expected Loxner to try to take Kubion, had thought that if Duff did anything at all, it would be to run his ass into the woods somewhere and hide. The only way Brodie was going to get out of Hidden Valley alive was to handle Kubion himself.

  He’d been in tight situations before, been under the gun before, but making a move against an armed man and making a move against an armed supercrazy and superdeadly psycho were two different things entirely. You just didn’t want to gamble, because when you got desperate around a maniac, you got dead-period. So you hung on grimly to your cool, and you waited for a mistake or some other clear-cut opportunity. Only Kubion hadn’t made any mistakes-his whip hand had been unbreakable so far-and there just hadn’t been any openings. What had seemed like one when Kubion pistol-whipped the pockmarked guy had turned out to be a blind corner instead, and he’d been within a half step, a half second of taking a bullet for his effort. Since then he’d been able to do nothing except to wait and keep on waiting.