The Grave Soul (20 page)

“You're durn tootin' I do.”

“Cordelia?”

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Can you talk normally?”

“You are one boring filly, you know that?”

“
Cordelia
?”

“Oh, all right.” She removed her hat, which allowed her long, curly auburn tresses to fall to her shoulders. Shaking them out, she said, “You never called me back last night. You can't do that, just leave me hanging.”

“As I told you, it's hard to get a cell phone connection around here. Tell me, you do have other clothes with you, right?”

“My parka's in the car.”

The mention of a parka gave Jane an idea. “As I think about it, I do have something you could help me with.” Hearing a knock on the door, she turned to find Laurie poking her head inside.

“You've got some customers out here who need help.”

“Would you mind taking over for me? I won't be long.”

“Sure thing,” said Laurie. “Happy to. Only thing is, I need to get over to the family farmhouse by five—”

“This will only take a couple of minutes.”

“Great. No problem then.”

Once she'd gone, Jane returned to Cordelia. “Here's the deal: Take the rest of the afternoon and go find yourself some dark-colored cold-weather gear. Fleece jacket. Thermal underwear. Maybe some Polartec bib overalls. Thinsulate gloves. A balaclava—or ski mask. Hand warmers. Anything and everything you think you'll need so you can stay out in the cold for several hours.”

“Heavens, Jane. Why would I do that?”

“I need eyes on the Adler farmhouse tonight. I can't be there myself because I'm working here. I may be wrong, but I get the sense that something's going on out there—something the family doesn't want anyone to know about.”

“Such as?”

“That's your assignment. You'll need to park your … um, horse … a distance from the house and then find a place, as close to the farmhouse as possible, where you can hide and watch who comes and goes. I've got binoculars and a digital thirty-five-millimeter camera out in my car. And night-vision goggles. You'll need all of that. Buy yourself a gym bag to carry it in.” Looking around, she grabbed a napkin and a pen and began drawing Cordelia a map.

“What time should I get there?”

“By nine. Stay at least through midnight. Don't approach anyone. Just stay out of sight and observe.”

“Got it.”

“Do you? It's imperative that you don't get caught. On that one-in-a-million chance that you do, you better have a good cover story. I trust you can come up with that yourself. But whatever you say, don't mention me. Where are you spending the night?”

“The Timber Lodge, same place we stayed before.”

“Good. We won't be able use our cell phones to communicate with each other.” A fact that made Jane more than a little nervous. “When I'm done with work, which should be between twelve and one, I'll meet you at the motel and we can debrief.”

“Bring a blowtorch.”

“Why?”

“Because you'll need to melt the ice block around me before I'll be able to speak.”

“I'll bring a bottle of bourbon.”

“That's your preferred form of heat. Mine is a gallon of hot chocolate and a spray can of whipped cream.”

“Be careful.”

“Not to worry, dearheart. The game's afoot and Cordelia M. Thorn and her amazing gray cells are
on the case
.”

 

28

That night, Cordelia quickly concluded that there was a major flaw in Jane's advice to buy dark clothing for the evening's surveillance. While dark clothing might work in most nighttime environments, when surrounded by a landscape of snow, that choice became the equivalent of Jane's charming little quip about neon-sign research.

Standing by her car, which she'd parked off the highway next to a stand of pine a good hundred yards from the farmhouse, Cordelia began to wonder if she—or Jane—had ever actually surveilled in the snow before. She couldn't come up with one instance in which they had. As long as she stayed in the center of the county highway—which, lucky for her, appeared to be as devoid of traffic as the planet Mars—she would probably be fairly inconspicuous.

Before creeping away from her car, Cordelia tried on the night-vision goggles. In an instant, the world around her turned vivid, although monochromatically green. As she began to walk down the center of the highway, she realized that the thermal underwear she'd bought at a Ben Franklin store in Willow River tugged in all the wrong places. The wool socks itched. The gloves, the only really warm ones she could find, were too large. The boots might afford her reasonable purchase in the snow, but because they were stiff and uncomfortably heavy, they slid much too easily on patches of ice.

“I'm getting too old for this crap,” she grumbled. That saying about age being nothing more than a state of mind must have been conceived in the brain of an ignorant twenty-year-old with empathy issues.

Trudging along, carrying the sack containing the camera, the binoculars, a package of Oreos and two cans of black-cherry soda, Cordelia kept her eyes peeled for movement of any kind, something that would alert her that her presence had been detected. If the Adlers had something to hide, they might have posted a sentry. She had to be careful.

Approaching the farmhouse, she ducked behind one of the many trees on the property and counted three cars in the drive directly outside an old two-stall garage. Across an expanse of yard was a large barn with a high gambrel roof. It looked newer than the other two buildings. Lights were on in what appeared to be a living quarters on the second floor. Cordelia figured that if she could creep over to it, she could crouch down and hide next to the side that faced away from the house. She wanted to get as close to the action as possible without being observed. What she really wanted was total invisibility. That way, she could go inside, take off the wretched clothing that might be keeping her from freezing to death but had failed miserably to keep her warm, find a cozy, overstuffed chair, break open the cookies and the soda, and listen in comfort to the conversation.

Mumbling that imagination was a curse, she scuttled as fast as her legs, clad in tight, knit thermal underwear, would carry her across the open ground, flinging herself at last against the dark, stained-wood barn wall. As she stood there, catching her breath, she thought to herself, “In these clothes, I am a true vision of loveliness.” With all the layers, she figured she looked like she weighed four hundred pounds. “Polar explorer,” she muttered. “Sign. Me. Up.”

Adrenaline flooded every synapse as she hunkered down. She'd made it. Of course she had. She was Cordelia M. Thorn. Thankful now that the man behind the counter at the Ben Franklin had urged her to buy a watch with a lighted dial, she pressed the side button to check the time. Ten after nine. Perfect. She settled in to wait for something significant to happen. Five minutes. Fifteen. At the twenty-minute mark, she opened the package of cookies, congratulating herself on her restraint. She allowed herself five, but upped it to eight when she thought about how cold it was. An hour later, with fifteen cookies missing in action and her fingers mere inches from another, the back door opened. Using the binoculars to enlarge the faces of two people who came out, she first zeroed in on the taller of the two. She went through a mental list of the photos Guthrie had supplied.

“Kevin,” she whispered. “Check.” The shorter, stockier, bald guy was Doug Adler, Kevin's older brother.

They walked quickly away from the house. Kevin glanced over his shoulder, back at the door, but Doug charged ahead, heedless of whoever might be watching. Cordelia was more than a little alarmed when they stopped mere feet from where she was hiding. Her body went rigid as she eased her fingers out of the cookie package, trying not to rattle the cellophane.

“Who was on the phone?” demanded Kevin.

“Katie Olsen.”

“Crap, man. Your breath. You smell like a still.”

“You smell like you stepped in dog shit. Makes us even.”

“So what did Katie want?”

“It's Walt. He apparently had a stroke a few days ago.”

“You're kidding,” said Kevin. “Why didn't she call us before this?”

“She said the docs thought there was a good chance he'd recover. She didn't want to worry us for no reason. But he took a turn for the worse tonight.”

“Jeez. With everything else happening right now, this is going to hit Mom hard.”

“But we have to tell her,” said Doug. “I mean, don't we?”

“I suppose we could ask Father Mike to do it.”

“Not tonight. In the morning.”

“What if Walt doesn't make it that long?”

“I refuse to drop this on her tonight. We wait, Kevin. If he dies, he dies.”

“I need to see him. Right now. I'm not waiting.”

“Katie said he's at the community hospital over in Henderson.”

“Is she there right now?”

“No idea. Look, I'll ask Mike to come by after Mass in the morning. I can take Mom over to the hospital, if that's what she wants.”

As they walked back to the house, Kevin put his arm around Doug's shoulder. A few minutes after they'd reentered the house, Kevin came back out, got in his van, and took off.

A heartwarming little piece of theater, thought Cordelia. Feeling that her little gray cells needed more sustenance, she reached for another cookie. She pulled a wooden crate over to sit on. It was going to be a long night.

As lights began to go off in the farmhouse, Doug appeared again, this time walking a dark-haired young woman out to the barn. He was smoking a pipe, acting very avuncular. Cordelia had never met Kira, but could see why Guthrie was attracted to her. As more lights went on inside the second floor of the barn, Cordelia began to wonder if Kira was sleeping out there. She'd been on her own for many years. Perhaps living in such close quarters with her grandmother wasn't giving her enough freedom, enough space. Doug returned to the house a while later. Two cars remained in the driveway. Cordelia deduced that one was probably Kira's, and the other Doug's. She was crack hand at deduction.

Bored, cold, and sick of Oreos, Cordelia whiled away the next hour and a half by making a mental list of her favorite plays, dividing them into comedies and dramas. When that was accomplished, she began a list of her favorite foods. But that made her hungry, so she was forced to stop, switching to favorite movies instead. She was determined to leave at midnight, even though she would have little to report to Jane. She wasn't sure what Jane had hoped she'd unearth. Zombies? Werewolves? Vampires looking for a light snack?

As fog began to settle over the farmland, Cordelia took off her night-vision goggles and rubbed her eyes. Okay, so she wasn't, strictly speaking, doing aggressive surveillance, but nothing was happening, unless you counted the owl that kept hooting and giving her the creeps.

She was packing up her cookies a short while later when she heard a door creak open. The sound was so loud it seemed to be right next to her. Hearing the crunch of boots on snow, she picked up the binoculars and trained them on the back of the farmhouse, but saw nothing. Before she could aim them at the front door, a beam of light burst across the snow, then a figure wearing a dark jacket and carrying a flashlight lantern walked right past her. If he'd wanted to, he could have reached out and touched her.

Cordelia flattened herself against the barn wall as he headed straight across the property out to the gravel road. She waited until the man—she was pretty sure it was a man—reached the edge of the highway, far enough away so that he couldn't hear the crunch of her boots, then grabbed her sack and crept silently after him. She wasn't sure why she was following him, it just seemed like the thing to do.

The man wasn't dressed as warmly as she was. As he walked along, with Cordelia following at an appropriately safe distance, he pulled his scarf up over his nose and mouth. The lantern he carried, so bright when he'd come past her by the barn, seemed to be all but swallowed up by the darkness.

Another couple of city blocks—which was the best way she could think of to measure distance—and they would hit the outskirts of New Dresden. Then what? What was the plan? She supposed she wanted to catch a glimpse of the man's face, though she had no desire to walk for miles on such a forbidding night.

And then it happened. The figure stopped. Just stopped and stood there and didn't move.

Cordelia froze.

Turning around, a man's voice called, “Is someone there?” He lifted the flashlight lantern and squinted into the darkness. “Hello?” he called, moving the lantern around until the light fell on Cordelia. “Who are you? Why are you following me?”

She swallowed hard. Time for Plan B.

 

29

Before Cordelia was willing to talk to Jane about her evening of surveillance, she closed the door to the motel's bathroom and turned on the shower. Emerging half an hour later, her hair wrapped in a towel, her skin now flushed a deep pink, she searched out every blanket in the room. After piling them on one of the double beds, she donned her parka and crawled under the covers.

Jane had commandeered the other double bed, biding her time by watching an old movie on TV. “Feel better?” she asked.

“I am now able to communicate. Where's my hot chocolate?”

“This is the best I could do,” said Jane, pulling a quart of chocolate milk out of a sack. “The last room had a microwave. This one doesn't.”

“Did you bring brandy?”

“Bourbon.”

“Think I'd rather have a few fingers of that. It must be ten below out there.”

“It's twenty. Above.”

“Wow. Balmy. Let's go find ourselves a hammock.”

Jane walked over to the table where she'd set the bottle of Maker's Mark. After breaking the red wax seal, she poured the liquid into one of the clear plastic cups provided by the motel. She grabbed the quart of chocolate milk for herself, handed the bourbon to Cordelia, then returned to the bed.