To Darkness and to Death (21 page)

“You are? Excellent.” Van der Hoeven leaned into the backseat and tugged out a crate. Shaun could hear bottles clinking inside. “I’m trying to make sure this gets to the hotel in time for the ceremony tonight. If you’d deliver it, I’d be grateful.”

I’d be grateful
. Shaun put on his best smile. “Be happy to help.” He accepted the crate from van der Hoeven’s hands and turned toward his Mercedes. He was surprised to hear more clinking. He swung around. Van der Hoeven had another crate of wine out of the Land Cruiser. The younger man nodded at Shaun to lead the way.

Now this is surreal
. The dazzle of sunshine, after the darkness of the garage, made his eyes water. He had left his keys in the ignition, so rather than retrieving them to pop the trunk, Shaun opened the rear passenger door and slid his crate onto the backseat. Van der Hoeven nestled the second crate next to the first.

“So you’re supplying Château van der Hoeven for the party, but you say there’s not going to be a deal.”

The younger man flushed, on one side of his face only, and twitched his head to the right. “They’re getting our wine. They’re not getting our land.” He stepped backward. “I thank you. And now, I have to bid you good day.” He turned and strode toward the garage, leaving Shaun standing there like a delivery boy who’s just gotten his order form signed.

“But—” Shaun said.

“Thank you,” van der Hoeven tossed over his shoulder.

Shaun shut the rear door, crossed around the back of the car, and opened the driver’s door like a man in a dream. He keyed the ignition and looked one more time toward the cold darkness of the garage. He couldn’t see van der Hoeven. He shifted and looped around the drive, heading for the private road. What the hell had just happened? Could van der Hoeven have been telling the truth? Was that it, all his worries about losing their source of pulpwood, gone in an instant? It didn’t seem believable. And why would the van der Hoevens just pass up the millions they stood to gain on the deal? It sure as hell wasn’t because the stock market’s performance had wiped away all their money worries.

Unless… his foot eased off the gas as the thought formed itself. Unless the van der Hoevens and GWP had decided to cut the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation out of the deal. The price to be paid to the family was based on the value of the land, but that value must have been adjusted downward to compensate GWP for turning all the easements over to the ACC. GWP would be the landholder in name only. All the potential economic value from the property—money from natural resources, money from development—would belong to the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. And the ACC wasn’t going to use it. They would never realize one red cent from Haudenosaunee. But what if GWP had decided to keep all the property rights? With their money and lobbying power down in Albany, they could buy approval of any number of “ecologically sensitive” developments around the lakes and mountains encompassed in Haudenosaunee’s vast acreage.

Christ. The money from timber was nothing. Hell, a year’s—
five
years’ profits at Reid-Gruyn were change from a lemonade stand compared to the money that could be made developing real estate at that scale.

Shaun had reached the county highway. He looked left, then right. The coast was clear. Was he going to slink back home with nothing more to show for his efforts than a few bottles of wine?

He rammed the Mercedes forward, backward, forward, in a tight three-point turn that put him nose up on the Haudenosaunee road again. He stomped on the gas. He considered the chance he might crunch into van der Hoeven’s Land Cruiser, heading down the drive, Eugene hurrying to his sister’s side.
Bring it on
. A collision would hang up the bastard for as long as it took a tow truck to come up from town and clear the narrow road. And if Shaun couldn’t get the whole story out of him by then, he’d follow van der Hoeven to the hospital and hang around the waiting room.

12:40 P.M.

Randy had walked out of the Reid-Gruyn parking lot without running into another soul. He headed down the side of the road toward Glens Falls, but when, after fifteen minutes, he came to a Stewart’s convenience store, he figured he’d give it a shot and see if Mike was already home.

Mike picked up on the third ring. “Hey, man,” Randy said. “Can I ask you a favor? Can you meet me at the gas station just down from the mill?”

“What are you doing there?”

“Long story. I’ll tell you later. Can you come get me?”

“Sure. You got good timing—I just got back from hunting. I got my buck this morning, isn’t that cool?”

Mike was at the Stewart’s in ten minutes. Everything was humming along, right like it ought to. Randy thought of all those times he had heard somebody say,
He’s getting away with murder
. And now he was.

Randy hadn’t realized that “just back from hunting” translated to a freaking big bloody deer corpse tied to the hood of Mike’s car. He couldn’t stop staring at the thing, its head lolling and bouncing with every pothole they hit, its big brown eyes staring sightlessly at him through the windshield.

“So my brothers were totally whipped when I bagged him,” Mike was saying, the glow from his victory in the sibling wars still shining from his face. “Two years in a row, I got my buck first. Two years! Yeah!” He raised a clenched fist in salute.

“That’s great, man.” They bumped over a frost heave in the road, and the deer nodded in agreement.
You bet
! “They still out there looking to get theirs?”

“Nah. By this time of day, the deer are all bedded down. They’ll be back out there tomorrow at dawn, I bet. While I’m sleeping in, dreaming of venison steak.”

Randy wondered if anyone had found Becky Castle yet. Should he drive by later to see? What if somebody saw him? He glanced out the side window at the clear sky. No cloud cover. Cold tonight. Below freezing and then some. He and Lisa would roll tight together under their quilts, keeping each other warm. And Becky Castle?

It might be better if nobody finds her
. The idea scared him. The idea of going back there scared him. But it wouldn’t go away, the dark thought, like a long afternoon shadow seen out of the corner of his eye. If she wasn’t found, there would be no need for him to sweat and worry and wait to see cops at his door, looking for him.

After all, he hadn’t meant to kill her. He hadn’t even meant to hurt her, just to get the damn camera back. If she… disappeared… there wouldn’t be anything pointing to murder. Just another person who went into the mountains unprepared and never came out again. It happened every year.

A bad pothole jolted them down and up. The deer’s head thumped and nodded on the hood, its dry eyes on Randy.
Life’s hard out in the mountains. It’s easy to die
.

He didn’t have to make up his mind. He could just go over there. See if she’d been found. He’d just check. He turned to Mike. “I gotta go pick up Lisa from her cleaning gig. You mind if I don’t help you get the deer off when we get back to your place?”

Mike shrugged. “I can handle it.”

“Look, would you do me a favor? If it comes up, I been with you the last hour and a half.”

Mike took his eyes off the road to glance at Randy. “An hour and a half ago I was humping the deer outta the woods.”

“There wasn’t anybody with you, was there?”

“No.”

“Did you stop to register the deer at a station?”

“Nah. I figured I’d call it in.”

“Well, there you go. Nobody can say that we weren’t together.”

Mike looked suspicious. “What’s up?”

Randy hesitated. “I don’t want to tell you. But it’s nothing that’ll come back and bite you in the ass, if you’re worried.”

“You ain’t screwing around on Lisa, are you?”

Randy’s jaw dropped. “No! I’d never do that.” He shook his head and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s got nothing to do with her.”

“Okay, then.” Mike nodded, satisfied. “You were with me.”

This would be perfect. On his way to pick up Lisa, he would cruise past the logging road where he’d left Becky Castle. See what was going on. If anyone was there—he had a vague image of a scene from
CSI
, with a fire truck and an ambulance and cops—he’d just keep on going. If she was still there… no one would be surprised at the sight of a hunter coming back out of the woods empty-handed.

They pulled into Mike’s driveway and stopped. The stiffening deer sagged in its ropes, as if relieved to have reached its final destination at last.

“Hey. Can I borrow that extra orange vest you got? And your orange gloves?”

Mike looked surprised. “You going into the woods?”

“Lisa’s working way up in the mountains. I figure it can’t hurt to be careful.”

Mike opened his door and unfolded himself from the tiny seat. He stretched and thumped the buck’s rump affectionately. “You got that right. Some of the guys wandering around up there? You can’t be too careful.”

12:50 P.M.

To his surprise, Shaun didn’t meet Eugene van der Hoeven on his precarious ride back up the Haudenosaunee road. He roared onto the gravel drive and parked. Getting out of his car, he could see that the garage door was now shut. What the hell? There was no way the man could have left without passing Shaun.

Was there another way to the county road? Shaun studied the open space between the garage and the house. Framed by stalks and stakes from now-dead flower beds, there was enough room to drive a vehicle through, a path leading past the house and gardens into the woods. He glanced back at his Mercedes and amended that to a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

He rattled across the gravel drive and peered through the streaky, cobwebbed window at the side of the garage. The Land Cruiser was still there. He glanced at the porch. There was something about the blankness of the windows that made him think,
There’s no one home
. In an instant, he abandoned the garage and headed up the path. If he were a scientist, he’d examine every location, in order, to determine van der Hoeven’s whereabouts. But Shaun was a businessman and experienced, he could say without bragging, in making decisions based on a handful of facts and a gut feeling. Right now, his gut was telling him that if he wanted to buttonhole Eugene, he was going to have to find him in the woods.

Ten yards or so past Haudenosaunee’s stone-fenced backyard, the trail split. He stood, indecisive, reaching for a spark of intuition, when a faint noise to his right made clairvoyance unnecessary. He went as quickly as he could without kicking up the leaves drifted over the path. He couldn’t have said why, but silence seemed like a good idea.

The way was broad and easy. Shaun wasn’t one for botany—he left the flowers to Courtney—but even he could recognize that this branch of the trail wound through overgrown apple trees and berry bushes run wild. Cultivated land, then, or at least it had been a few decades ago. It wasn’t until he saw gray stone and charred timber through the gnarled branches that he realized where he was headed. The old Haudenosaunee. The first great camp.

He stood stock still and stared. It was like stumbling over the corpse of a dragon, its massive ribs burnt and broken, its stone skin tumbled in or scattered piecemeal on the ground. Holly and boxwood advanced across what must once have been a lawn, their hard-edged, dark green foliage an impenetrable wall. Feral rose vines clawed up the remaining walls, and through the outlines of windows and over the jagged fence of scorched timber, young hemlocks bristled out at him like adolescent giants.

It was a scene out of a fairy tale, complete with a single intact tower rising out of the forest at the far edge of the ruined house. What were buildings like that called? He had seen some on a historic-houses tour in England.

A folly. That’s what it was. This one must have been meant for viewing the scenery; he could see two wide, Roman-arched openings, each tall enough to accommodate a small cluster of sightseers, the lower one facing due west, the next a quarter turn round to the south and a floor higher. The airy effect was spoiled, though, by the blank stones and arrow slits piercing the other parts of the tower. It looked as if the architect and the owner had disagreed about whether they wanted an Italian duomo or a battlement, and each had gotten half his own way.

As he marveled at the architectural oddity, a man passed through the southern gallery and disappeared.

Shaun blinked. Had that been Eugene? He had only glimpsed the figure from the waist up, wearing blaze orange over something dark. Shaun walked a few steps toward the tower, then faltered. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but wrecked mansions and vanishing figures were out of his usual arena. Maybe… maybe coming out here wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe he had better go back down the path, get into his car, and drive away. He could catch van der Hoeven another time. If it was van der Hoeven he had seen.

But who else could it be?

He took another few steps. Then another.

One part of his head was already gone, down the path and in the Mercedes. Picking out a CD. Going home.

The other part of his head was whirling with opportunities, with advantages, with unanswered questions about the GWP deal, about Haudenosaunee, about this place, which everybody knew had been the site of van der Hoeven’s great tragedy.

Then he saw the blanket. Heavy wool, brightly striped, dangling off the upper branches of a birch tree growing hard by the edge of the tower. Clean of bird droppings and dried leaves. Unstreaked by rain, unfaded by sun. That blanket hadn’t been outdoors very long. And it hadn’t gotten into the tree by someone throwing it up from the ground. He glanced up at the dark rectangular openings at the top of the tower. Despite the brilliant sunshine, he felt a shiver go through him.

What the hell was Eugene van der Hoeven doing?

He ran for the tower door.

12:55 P.M.

Clare had wanted to wait until the ambulance arrived. It seemed wrong somehow, driving on while a young woman was bleeding on a dirt road a half mile away. But the hunter had pointed out she would have to move her car anyway, in order for the ambulance to get in, so she and Lisa, who clearly just wanted to get home, took off.