In the Dark

by Loreth Anne White

  “I . . . Christ, I don’t know,” Katie said. “I interviewed a lot of VPD officers during my tenure at CRTV. Whitlock might’ve been one of them.”

  “Kitsilano, the suburb in which Nathan and Monica McNeill lived, is in VPD jurisdiction,” Bart said. “There’s connections here.”

  “Six degrees of separation and all that,” Steven said. He looked drained suddenly, like he had no more energy for this day, or for this line of questioning. “It’s hardly startling that those of us who lived in the Lower Mainland can find some vague crossover.”

  “When did you leave policing, Jackie, and why?” Stella asked.

  “I’d had enough.” The woman stared into the fire for a while. Bart regarded her profile. Hard features. Tough woman. Yet something vulnerable about her, too, he thought. If he were a gambling man, he’d bet something on the job had messed her up. He’d also bet she’d probably made a good cop.

  “And you went straight from the West Van PD into security?” Stella pushed.

  Jackie sucked in a deep breath, wavered, then said, “I had an old friend who was in the OPP—Ontario Provincial Police. She’d left and was starting a security company, and she called to offer me a job.”

  “So you went directly from policing into the security field?” Stella asked, rephrasing the same question.

  Jackie faced Stella. Her eyes narrowed. Tension swelled. Wood cracked in the hearth and fire leaped. “There was a gap of two years,” Jackie said, finally, her voice flat.

  “During which you did what?”

  “Jesus, Stella,” Steven said, “what is wrong with you? Can’t you see it must be personal?”

  “What’s wrong with me?” Stella surged to her feet. “This—all of this—is what’s wrong with me. I want to know why I was contracted to bring you all here. People I don’t know. To this fake location. What do you guys all have to do with me? Finding out who you all actually are might help me figure it out.” Anger flashed in her gray eyes. “And that, Dr. Steven Bodine, is what’s wrong with me.”

  Silence shimmered. The clock went tock, tock, tock. Then a boom exploded through the house.

  Deborah gasped and Monica squealed as they all jumped in fright.

  The boom sounded again. Echoing, reverberating through the dark lodge. And again. And again. Eleven times.

  “Fucking clock! Why did you have to wind the damn thing up, Bart?” Jackie snapped.

  “I had no idea some chime was going to go off at eleven.”

  They all looked at their watches. Spooked and off-kilter now, they regarded each other uneasily. The fire was dying to a cooler glow, and the darkness and cold seemed to press inward toward their little circle as the flames retreated. Bart could feel the cold creeping in from under the door, snaking around his ankles.

  Jackie broke the awkward silence, as if she’d been knocked into revealing her answer by the judgmental boom of the old grandfather clock. “In the period between working for the West Van police department and leaving for Ontario, I handled cash-only work for a shitty, lowlife PI, who in turn took dirty jobs for bigger PI companies, who in turn contracted to top law firms in the city who didn’t want to get their own manicured hands soiled. And that shitty little PI was Dan Whitlock. Okay, Stella? Satisfied now?” She got to her feet and set the piece of paper with the murderous verse on the table next to the figurines.

  Bart’s heart beat faster at this revelation. This was a very specific connection.

  Jackie faced them all square. “I was asked to resign from the West Van PD. It was either that or face disciplinary action for my drinking habit, which had gotten to be a problem on the job. I hit rock bottom, okay? I sank as low as I could fucking go. I did what I could to survive. And then I got a call from a friend, and that call helped me crawl up out of my barrel, and it gave me a reason to put my life back on track. I moved east. I cleaned up.” She held their shocked gazes.

  “And I’m damn good at what I do now. My trouble”—she jabbed her fingers into her chest—“is I cared too much. I’ve learned to care a bit less. Now I’m going to bed. I’ve had enough.” She got up, went to the nearby dining table, grabbed a flashlight that had been placed there, and thumped her way up the stairs.

  Surprise, unease, rippled in Jackie’s wake.

  “You can’t just walk away after that bombshell, Jackie,” Bart called after her. “You knew who Dan Whitlock was!”

  She stopped halfway up the stairs. “Yeah, and you can see why I wasn’t exactly skipping through the daisies with glee to come tell you all how I knew him.”

  “But you confronted him? At the buffet?” Bart said. “I saw you two talking.”

  “Confronted? Christ, no. He recognized me, too. We just mutually agreed over dinner to not mention the past.”

  A movement sounded outside the window, followed by a hard knock. They all looked toward the door.

  “It’s just the wind in the trees,” said Stella. “It’s blowing debris loose. We should bolt the doors and go to bed.” She reached for a lantern. “There are enough of these kerosene lanterns to go around. There’s some more flashlights on the dining table, and there’s the hunting spotlight from the plane.” She hesitated. “Lock your bedroom doors. I sure as hell am locking mine.”

  She climbed the stairs after Jackie, her lantern light flickering against the ugly masks that seemed to come alive in the interplay of shivering shadow and light in her wake.

  Bart felt for the knife he’d taken from the shed and secured to his belt. The sensation of the leather-covered hilt under his fingers comforted him. He eyed the rifle on the wall again. It had looked clean when he’d peered down the barrel earlier. He knew where the bullets were.

  “I’ll lock the front door,” he said as he went to ram the big, tarnished bolt home. “And I’ll take the first room at the top of the stairs.” The room was closest to the gun.

  If this was a sick game, he had every intention of winning it. And surviving.

  The others moved quickly behind him. Nathan went to lock the back door that led out to the shed. Monica and Katie helped Deborah limp up the stairs. Steven waited for Nathan to finish locking up in the kitchen—no one trusting anyone to be left alone.

  THE LODGE PARTY

  NATHAN

  Nathan exited the en suite bathroom in his pajamas to find Monica standing at the window with her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

  “Turn the lantern off,” she said quietly. “I want to see outside.”

  He turned the lantern knob, almost dousing the flame, but not completely. Then he went to stand beside her in the gloom. He put his arm around her shoulders. She was shivering. The wind outside was howling from the north, coming from the back of the lodge and blowing toward the lake. Fog swirled around the ghostly totem poles, and trees bowed and thrashed. The rain had turned to snow, and everything was going white. Whitecaps glowed silver on the black water. Through gaps in the swirling curtains of mist, Nathan caught glimpses of the little plane bobbing on the water.

  An alternate reality. A nightmare dimension. A horror movie. That’s what we’re in.

  “It’s like it’s emanating from us,” she whispered. “From inside us. Like that verse said.”

  “What is?”

  “Darkness. Blackness. ‘For a Monster will rise within.’” She looked up into Nathan’s eyes. His heart tightened at what he read in her expression.

  “I love you, Monica,” he said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. As he moved, he heard Steven’s voice in his head.

  “You know what your problem is, Professor Fungus? The trouble with you is you actually love her.”

  Nathan’s stomach fisted into a ball as he felt another surge of rage. He really did want to kill that smug bastard.

  “You don’t have the balls.”

  He shoved the echo of the surgeon’s words aside and drew his wife closer. Her curves felt warm against his body despite her shivering, and his heart did that thing—that weird squiggle thing. He�
�d loved Monica from the moment he’d laid eyes on her in the campus cafeteria all those years ago, when they were both freshmen. To him Monica had been a golden creature, anointed. A beautiful heiress, a special one among all the women there. It always amazed Nathan that she’d picked him in the end.

  There’s a reason your wife cheated on you.

  Rage flashed through him. Again he quickly pressed it down. One thing Nathan could do that Steven couldn’t was control his emotions. Nathan could be a closed book when he chose.

  “I don’t know what this is, Monica,” he said gently. “I have no idea what’s really going on here, but we both need to be strong, because when we do get home—and we will—we can’t have let out what happened all those years ago with you, me, Steven.” He felt her shudder at the mention. He held her tighter. “We cannot say anything here that will follow us back home, because it will destroy us, you, me, our kids, everything we have built—your company, my tenure.”

  “And Steven, what if he talks?”

  “He won’t. He stands to lose even more than us.”

  “He’s a loose cannon, Nathan.”

  “He’s also a top surgeon who values his lifestyle and status. He’s a survivor that way.”

  “But someone already knows. That’s why we’re here. I’m certain of it now.” She looked up at him again. “Bart was the mechanic, wasn’t he? That’s how you knew him. You said you went to someone out in Burnaby who took cash under the table. It was Bart Kundera, wasn’t it?”

  He sucked air deep into his chest, blew it out slowly. He nodded. He’d figured that much out when Bart mentioned his work. All the pieces started snapping together.

  “And Dan Whitlock—he could’ve been the cop who investigated the incident. He was a VPD officer.”

  “I don’t think so, Monica. You heard Jackie. Dan Whitlock was a seedy PI.”

  “He could have become a PI after the incident. We don’t know the timing. And Katie—she covered the incident. You know it, I know it, and Steven has to remember her covering it, too. It’s only a matter of time before Katie sees the links. Already she’s recalled that we lived in Kitsilano, and now everyone also knows you taught at SFU in Burnaby, where Bart had his chop shop. Can’t you see, Nathan? This is all about us, and what happened fourteen years ago.”

  He couldn’t tell her about the groceries in the kitchen, the fact they’d been bought at the Kits Corner Store. Not now. It would crush her. But he couldn’t keep it from her, could he?

  “So how are the others connected, then?” he asked instead. “Stella and Jackie and Deborah?”

  She put her face into her hands for a moment, still shaking like a leaf. “I don’t know about Jackie and Deborah. But Stella . . . I . . . I think it’s her.”

  “Who?”

  She glanced up at him. “I think she was the mother of that little boy.”

  The blood drained from Nathan’s head. “No,” he whispered. “No, no way. No way in hell. That’s not her.”

  “It’s in her eyes. She looks different, so different, but not her eyes.”

  “No, you’re wrong.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  Nathan looked out the dark window at the blowing snow, thinking.

  “The mother was a brunette,” he said quietly. “Thick, long, brown hair.”

  “She could’ve dyed her hair. Stella’s hair could have gone naturally silver gray, or she could have helped it chemically, and cut it.”

  “And plumpish. The mother had a full face. Softer.”

  “She’s lost weight. Tons of it. She’s gone gaunt. And gotten tanned, her skin lined from spending time outdoors or something. Like some sunbrowned, wiry vegetarian. But she was so much younger, Nathan. It’s been fourteen years. That kind of tragedy can age and wreck a person so much they’re barely recognizable in the end.” She fell silent.

  Tiny bits of ice blowing in the wind ticked against the window.

  “I’m scared,” Monica whispered. “Really scared.”

  Nathan stared out the window for a long time after his wife had climbed into bed.

  He drew to mind the image he’d seen on the TV news. The mother. He thought of pictures he’d seen of homeless street people—befores and afters—what they’d looked like before life broke them, and before they became addicted to drugs and suffered from bad nutrition and poor hygiene. Unrecognizable, unless you knew to look for similarities. Unrecognizable, especially out of context.

  But now they had context.

  Maybe it was her. It was her and the survival part of his brain was refusing to see it.

  A sick taste of bile rose up the back of his throat.

  Are we finally going to go down for murder—manslaughter? Obstruction of justice? One way or the other?

  Sweat bloomed on his skin. He felt dizzy. He dragged his hand down hard over his mouth.

  It’s going to be fine. The weather will clear, and we’ll all fly out. We will wake from this terrible nightmare and realize it was all a fiction that was given life by our own guilt. Because who hasn’t lied? Everyone tells lies. White ones, little ones, good ones, bad ones. Big ones. This could be anything—maybe Monica is wrong, and Stella is not the mother. Maybe guilt is messing with their heads, shaping people into things they are not—

  Something outside caught his eye and stopped his train of thought.

  Nathan killed the tiny bit of lantern light in their room and leaned closer to the windowpane. He rubbed a hole in the fog that had formed on the inside of the glass. He peered through the hole.

  A tiny prick of light darted between the trees. Mist swept in suddenly and the light was gone. His heart beat faster. Had he imagined it? That someone was out there?

  Cold crawled up the back of his neck.

  He saw it again. A shadow. Carrying a tiny beam of a light that bobbed between tree trunks. Whoever was out there was not using the path straight down to the water. Hiding? From whom?

  And then the small light was gone again in another thick swirl of fog and snowflakes.

  THE LODGE PARTY

  STEVEN

  Steven squinted out the window in his room that looked down toward the lake. Was that someone with a flashlight going through the trees?

  His heart kicked as he saw a second shape following the first. Or had he? He used his sleeve to smear away the fog and grime on his windowpane. But the shapes and light were gone, hidden by heavily falling snow and massive, swaying trees. Mist fingered back over his windowpane.

  He wiped it off again, but still could see nothing more through the curtain of blowing snow in the darkness. Not even the dock, nor the glint of their plane.

  Something was bugging him about that plane.

  And about Bart.

  And Jackie. And that pilot—the more Steven thought about it, the more he began to think he knew her. Those eyes . . .

  He was beginning to see links where he didn’t want to.

  Could he stop this? Nip it in the bud—before it all came out?

  Before he lost everything?

  Hurriedly he left the window and moved carefully over the wooden floor planks so they wouldn’t creak. He pulled on his black wool hat, reached for his jacket and boots and gloves.

  THE LODGE PARTY

  JACKIE

  Jackie cast a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure she hadn’t been followed out the back door. From her vantage point among the trees, she could see no one moving through the shifting mist and blowing flakes. Snow was settling over the bramble bushes, and along the outstretched wings of the totem poles, and on the head of that god-awful toothed raven caricature at the top of the biggest pole. The raven seemed to leer at her through the snow-brightened darkness. Jackie shivered as she listened carefully to the ambient sounds of the woods for a few moments longer. Just groaning branches and swishing leaves, and the sound of little waves lapping along the shore.

  She resumed her movements through the big trees along the edge of the bramble patch, staying in the
shadows and partially covering the bulb of her tiny flashlight with her gloved hand. The ground was soft underfoot.

  A crack sounded.

  She stilled. Held her breath. Listened. A rustle, then came the soft hoot of an owl and a whopping sound of wings. Then another noise, like footfalls on dry snow-covered leaves. Another crack sounded—a breaking twig. She switched off her flashlight and peered carefully into the shadows among the moving branches. But the noise stopped. She swallowed and moved, swiftly now, down to the dock.

  Alongside the dock, the de Havilland Beaver rocked in small swells being kicked up by the wind. Snow was accumulating on the wings, and water chuckled around the pontoons. The dock creaked as she stepped onto it. As Jackie walked, it swayed and surged. She moved with care. She had no desire to end up in the icy lake and stinking reeds, like Deborah Strong had this afternoon.

  She reached the plane and tried the handle of the cockpit door on the pilot’s side. It moved easily. She drew the door open and froze as it gave a metallic groan. She waited, listening again, filled with a strange sense of being watched. She glanced up toward the house. The lanterns had all gone dark upstairs.

  She stepped onto the pontoon, then placed her foot on the ladder crosspiece affixed to the front strut and climbed up into the pilot’s seat. The plane tilted with her weight. She seated herself in the pilot seat, shut the door carefully, and panned her flashlight over the controls, keeping her beam low so as not to allow it to shine out the front windshield and attract attention from the lodge. She found what she was looking for—the radio.

  Jackie leaned in closer. It looked basic. She knew next to nothing about avionics but wanted to see if those radio wires really had been cut, as Stella Daguerre had claimed. Jackie trusted no one, not even their pilot. There was something that was bugging her about Stella. It wasn’t adding up in her mind that some anonymous mastermind could have lured them all out here and been convinced that their group would be immediately stranded by weather.

  Sure, it was late October, right on the cusp of the November monsoons and early-winter snowstorms. And yes, this lodge hunkered in the freaky meteorological shadow of that monolithic mountain of black granite, but you couldn’t take this to the bank and be guaranteed a storm would blow in right as they landed, and lock their group down for days. Jackie harbored a dark suspicion that Stella was lying to them about the radio, that she could call this in if she wanted to.