The Winter Lodge (37 page)

“You might find some bats,” Zach called to her.

“Some what?”

“Bats.”

“Sure,” she said. “Good one, moron.”

“Swear to God, this is a bat habitat,” Zach insisted. “They hibernate in the caves. If you disturb one, it could bite you and then you’d get rabies.”

“I’m so scared.” Sonnet was on a deep ledge about fifteen feet above them, exploring the series of indentations in the rock. “Hello,” she said. “What’s this?”

Daisy aimed the camera. Maybe Sonnet had found something.

“This might be an ice cave,” Sonnet said, standing on tip toe. “I can’t quite see.” She jumped up a little.

“Hey, take it easy,” Zach said, looking genuinely worried.

“Why, Zachary.” Sonnet put on a phony Scarlett O’Hara accent. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“I just don’t want to have to carry your fat ass down the mountain.”

“Ha,” she said, reaching into the cave again. “I’ll have you to know I—”

Her words dissolved into a yell. By sheer reflex, Daisy pressed the shutter of her camera.

At the same instant, something—a bat? A bird? An angry demon from another realm?—burst from the cave on a whir of wings and rose to the sky.

Sonnet fell, seeming to float backward, almost suspended in a mist of flying snow. A half a second later, she landed, hitting the soft drifts and sinking out of sight. Her scream disappeared along with the rest of her.

“Sonnet!” Zach yelled her name with hoarse desperation. His speed, given the fact that he was wearing snowshoes, was amazing. He all but flew to the spot where she had landed, calling for her.

Daisy came nearly as quickly, her camera bouncing forgotten against her chest.

Zach was on his knees, reaching down into the snowy well into which Sonnet had fallen.

“Say something,” he yelled. “Please, Sonnet, I’m begging—”

“I love hearing a moron beg,” came an annoyed, slightly muffled voice.

Daisy felt sick with relief as she took off her snowshoes and joined Zach in digging Sonnet out. They were idiots, all of them. They had no business up here in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of winter, messing around where no one could find them if they got in trouble. When it came to doing stupid things, Daisy was the champ, but even she could tell this was a bad idea.

“Thank God for all this snow,” Sonnet was saying as Zach grabbed both her hands and tugged her forward. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks glowing. “It was my soft place to fall.” She swam through the soft, powdery snow. “Thanks, you guys,” she said.

“Let’s go back,” Zach said. “I’m freezing. Here, I’ll help you with your snowshoes.”

“Hold on,” Sonnet said. “Hand me one of those ski poles.”

“What is it?” Zach asked, passing her one.

“I think I found something.”

“Probably the mother of that hibernating thing you woke up,” Zach said.

“No, look.” She pushed at the snow, and instead of running into the side of the rock face, the end of the pole kept going.

“Another cave,” Sonnet said.

“Big deal,” Zach said. “It’s probably—”

“Check it out.” The snow collapsed and Daisy found herself looking at an opening in the rock face, this one big enough for all of them to fit inside if they went on their knees.

“Now this is a cave.” Zach switched on his flashlight and shone it around. Once they knelt to squeeze in, there was enough headroom to stand.

All right, so it wasn’t as impressive as the one Sonnet had described. There was no glittering blue crystal lining the walls, like Merlin’s cave. It was hard to distinguish the ice from the rock because it was coated with a fine layer of dust. Beneath their knees, the floor was uneven and covered with grainy dirt like the kind left behind in the snow banks after a long winter. She took a few pictures. As the flash swept through the space, it illuminated places that looked as though they had lain undisturbed in darkness forever. “Maybe we’re the first people ever to come here,” she suggested.

“Yeah, except for whoever left that gum wrapper behind.” Zach shone the flashlight beam on it. “Juicy Fruit,” he said.

“You guys.” Daisy was reviewing her pictures on the camera. “Check this out.” She turned the small screen toward them.

“Not your best work,” Sonnet said.

“No, look at the back of the cave.” It showed up clearly in the photo. What appeared to be a random pile of rubble was actually a stack of rocks in different shapes and sizes.

Sonnet grabbed the flashlight. “So how crazy is that?”

“Look at the rocks,” Daisy said. When someone built a wall, she knew, it was for a purpose, either keeping something in or keeping something out.

She held the light while Zach and Sonnet pulled some of the rocks away. “It was probably some bored kids from Camp Kioga,” Sonnet said.

“How bored would I need to be to put a stack of rocks inside an ice cave?”

Daisy grabbed the light and peered over the top of the rock pile. An eddy of cold air—

colder even than the air of the outer cave—wafted over her face. It reminded her of the walk-in freezer at the bakery—a freezing blast with a faint aroma of something that didn’t belong. A mustiness.

“Give me a boost,” she said to Zach. “I think I see something.”

He laced his gloved hands together. She stepped in and immediately conked her head on the ceiling of the cave.

“Hey,” she yelled, blinking away stars of pain. She aimed the flashlight beam and gasped.

Here, the walls of the cave were definitely rimed with ice, the crystals winking in the beam of light. And there was something on the floor of the cave, another pile of rocks, or maybe—It wasn’t, thought Daisy. It couldn’t be. But…

“You all right?” Zach asked. “You’re shaking.”

She looked down at him. “You have to see this.”

“What is it?”

She didn’t want to say. She wanted so badly to be wrong. Moving carefully, she stepped down and motioned for Zach to check it out.

“Hey, are you all right?” Sonnet asked her. “You’re white as a sheet. You look as if you’

ve seen a ghost.”

“I think I just did,” Zach said.

Daisy could tell from his voice that she hadn’t been mistaken. “Help me up again, will you?” she asked. “I need to take some pictures.”

Twenty-Seven

R
ourke got up early and went for a run on the trail by the river, with the dogs loping along with him. There was a gym shared by the fire station and PD, but he preferred getting out in the air and pushing himself until his lungs screamed from the cold. Then he showered and dressed for the day, straightened his house and fed the animals.

Having had Jenny there, even for a brief time, drove home a truth he’d been avoiding for many years. He lived a lonely, emotionally sterile life and he longed for something more. There. It was out, something he didn’t want to admit but couldn’t escape. Before this latest thing with Jenny, he’d convinced himself to be content with his pets and his one-night stands; now he couldn’t pretend any longer. There were things he wanted that he probably didn’t deserve, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it.

He’d spent a long time—his whole career, really—studying the baser aspects of humanity.

Police work opened people’s lives to him, but by its very nature the job offered glimpses of people at their worst. Here in this small town, the chief of police didn’t sit in a glass-enclosed office issuing orders. More often than not, he found himself out in the field, where inevitably he came up against the seamy side of life. Avalon had corruption and violence, not like a big city, but the elements were there. Even though this was a small town, it was still a place where men got drunk and beat their wives and hit their kids, where punks cooked up crystal meth in their grandmothers’ basements, where schoolgirls shoplifted and football players dared each other to dangle from the train-trestle bridge and spray paint Knights Rule in bright orange on the water tower. There was plenty of drama to keep Rourke busy—but all that drama, all the things he saw on the job, tended to make him jaded. It made him wonder why people bothered to give their hearts to one another, because most of the time, they ended up breaking them.

Now that Jenny was back, though, he understood.

Just as she’d promised, she phoned him every day to check in. And just as he’d anticipated, it wasn’t enough. He didn’t know if she was calling him out of a sense of duty, or if it was simply to keep him from carrying out his threat to show up every day to make sure she was all right.

He paged through several pink slips with messages on his desk. Things were slow because it was a snow day. Department offices were manned by a reduced staff. One of his father’s assistants had called to invite him to the senator’s annual Presidents’ Day luncheon—euphemism for $500-a-plate fund-raiser. This was followed by a message from his mother, dutifully reiterating the invitation. Rourke saw his parents only on rare occasions; the wounds of childhood had never completely healed. He crumpled both messages and slam-dunked them into the circular file. There were also messages from two women—Mindy and Sierra—both of whom he’

d dated a while back.

No—not dated. Each woman he’d encountered in a bar, hooked up with them over the course of a weekend and then put them on a train back to the city. Technically, that was probably a date. He didn’t recall giving either woman his phone number, but the persistent ones always managed to track him down. He added the pink slips to the circular file. He didn’t do second dates.

And—this was where he got really pathetic—ever since Jenny had broken open his heart, he didn’t even do first dates. He was as celibate as a monk these days, a painful state of being.

But not as painful as meaningless sex. He used to imagine that it satisfied him, but these days, he couldn’t even pretend anymore.

Just ask her out,
he told himself.

He’d already tried that, and she’d said no.

Ask her again.

That was damn humiliating. Did he care about that? Was he willing to face rejection again?

Before he answered his own question, he picked up the phone. She answered by the third ring. “Hello,” she said in a warble of good cheer.

“It’s me,” he said, turning his back so the people in the outer office couldn’t see his face through the glass. He liked to think he had a poker face, but when it came to Jenny, he wasn’t so sure. Then he held his breath, wondering if it was presumptuous to assume she knew who “me”

was.

“Oh…hi, Rourke.”

Okay, so it wasn’t presumptuous. Yet her voice changed from its eager chirp to a note of caution. “Sorry to rain on your parade,” he said.

She laughed. “I’m expecting a call from Mr. Greer. My agent. God, can you believe I have a literary agent? Or will, if I can get this book together.”

“Sure, I can believe it.”

“Really? You’re not just saying that?”

“I don’t know what the big deal is. You’re going to write a great book and it’ll be a bestseller. You told me so when you were, what, eleven years old?”

“And you still believe that?” Her voice softened. “Oh, Rourke.”

Her
oh, Rourke
made him physically unfit for mixed company. He sat down behind his desk and swiveled his chair toward the wall. “Listen, I was just wondering…” Damn, why was this so hard?
Would you like to have dinner at the Apple Tree Inn?
One stupid little question.

“Wondering what?” she prompted.

“If, uh, everything’s okay up there.”

“Sure,” she said. “Everything’s perfect. I can’t imagine a better day to work on my project.”

His heart managed to skip a beat and sink at the same time. She seemed genuinely happy to be away from him. It must’ve been torture for her staying at his place. “It’s a snow day,” he told her. “I wanted to make sure you’ve got everything you need.”

“Every day is a snow day up here,” she said. “That’s what’s so great about this place.”

She sighed into the phone, and her voice turned wistful. “I’m alone with myself, and I find myself remembering things about the past…”

About us? he wondered, but didn’t ask.

There was a knock at the door, and Rourke swiveled around in his chair. Nina Romano came in without waiting for an invitation. He took one look at her face—taut, edged by panic—

and said to Jenny, “I need to go. I’ll call you back.”

Thank you, Nina, he thought. He’d managed to get off the phone before making a total idiot of himself.

She spared him only a quick glance. “Jenny?” she inquired, nodding toward the phone.

Damn, was he that obvious? “What’s up?” he asked, ignoring her question.

“I know where the money’s going. It’s being stolen by Matthew Alger.”

It took Rourke for a moment to catch up with her thinking. “The city finances,” he said.

She nodded and slapped a printed spreadsheet on the desk. “He was pretty clever about it, making transfers from special and restricted funds into the general fund, and then helping himself. Oh, and he took cash from traffic citations and then indicated in records that the tickets had been dismissed as community service. And he didn’t even have authority to do that.” Nina was sputtering now. “The bastard. I can’t wait to—”

“Don’t say anything to Alger yet.”

“Too late.” Nina stood aside and motioned Matthew Alger into the office. She pinned him with a fiery glare. “So Rourke tells me I shouldn’t have said anything to you,” she snapped. “I’m sure he’s right, but I have to confess, I don’t have any experience dealing with city officials who steal. You’re the first.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Classic, thought Rourke. This was something he heard every day on the job and most of the time it was bullshit. Alger was lying. It was there in the flick and shift of his eyes, in the posture of one hand covering the other.

“So are you going to arrest him?” Nina demanded.

God save him from people who tried to “help” him with his job. “We’ll call the state auditor,” Rourke said, scribbling a note. “Right away.”

Nina grabbed the spreadsheet. “But what about—”

His buzzer sounded. He craned his neck to see the front desk. “Yeah?”