To Darkness and to Death (6 page)

The phone barely had time to ring. “Hello?”

Becky blinked at the unfamiliar female voice. “Hi. I’m trying to reach Millie van der Hoeven?”

“I’m afraid she’s not here.” The voice on the other end seemed to deflate.

“Have I reached Haudenosaunee?”

“Sorry. I mean, yes, you have. I’m sorry, I should have said. I’m Lisa. I’m Mr. van der Hoeven’s… I clean house for him.”

“Okay. Can I leave a message for Millie?”

There was a long pause. Becky wondered if Millie’s brother, Eugene, had hired some sort of mentally disabled woman to work for him.

“Look, when I said she wasn’t here, I didn’t mean she’s gone out shopping or anything,” Lisa said. “I mean she’s missing. Supposedly she went out for a walk last night and never came back. There’s a search and rescue team out looking for her right now.”

The Northway stretched out ahead of her, long and gray and undulating over rise and hollow. “Missing?”

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“Yeah. I’m…” What was she? Were there special categories of friends that got information? And others who would have to wait to read about what happened to her? Becky went for the easiest, the longest-running, choice. “I’m her college roommate.”

“If you leave me your number, I can make sure someone calls you. When we know something.”

Becky shook her head. “I’m going to be at Haudenosaunee later this morning.”

“She’ll probably be back by then.” Lisa’s voice was hearty and hollow. “You can talk to her yourself.”

“Right.” The sign for the Millers Kill exit flashed by. Her heart thumped. She braked too fast, and a station wagon swerved past her, horn blaring. Becky signaled, swiveled to look behind her, and veered into the right-hand lane. “Thanks,” she managed to say into the phone. “Talk to you later.”

“Can I say who—” But she had cut off the signal and dropped the phone into the passenger seat before the housekeeper could finish her sentence.

She took the exit and turned northwest, to the road that would lead her to Fort Henry and Cossayuharie and Millers Kill. Missing. Millie. The woman who had hiked the Appalachian Trail through New York and New England. Who ice-climbed in British Columbia. Who had summitted the Grand Teton from her adopted home out west.

Something has happened to her
. With that thought came another, one she was ashamed of.
The deal. The deal will fall apart without her. And then where will I be
?

The questions hung in the stale air around her. She lowered her window, letting the icy air whip through her car. She wanted to concentrate on her friend, on the edge of worry coiling low in her stomach, but she was picturing herself standing on a platform with the president and CEO of GWP, Inc., and her bosses from the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. They were all waiting… waiting… waiting.

She stopped for a red light. Early shoppers trickled into the Super Kmart parking lot. Through the windshield, she could see the road to Bonnie’s house, just past a nursery shuttered down against the coming winter. She flicked on her turn signal. She needed comfort, and encouragement, and reassurance. That meant she needed her big sister.

Bonnie was almost twelve years older than Becky, the long gap between them punctuated by several miscarriages their mother didn’t like to talk about. When Becky was a little girl, her sister had been like another mother to her, a young, fun version who painted Becky’s nails and taught her to dance to Adam Ant’s
Strip
. In her teens, thrashing against the confines of their small town and their parents’ overburdening protectiveness, Becky would escape to Bonnie and James’s house, to play with their little boys and complain endlessly to her sister. Becky was long past that stage, and long gone from Millers Kill, but her career as an environmental advocate was a touchy subject with her parents, and she still looked to Bonnie as the conduit, the place where the family’s lines of communication crossed.

The Liddles lived in a small ranch, flanked by houses that had been identical when they were built in the 1950s. A half century of tinkering by owners had personalized them, although their tightly controlled lawns and greenery still gave them a certain sameness. Becky parked behind Bonnie’s Taurus, walked up the drive, and let herself in.

Her younger nephew, Patrick, sprawled pajama-clad on the couch, gazing slack-jawed at a hyperkinetic Japanese anime on the tube. “Hey,” Becky said.

His eyes snapped into focus. “Aunt Becky!” He jumped up and hugged her.

“How are you, Squirtle?” The nickname wasn’t going to fit him much longer. It looked like he had shot up at least three inches since she last saw him.

He wrinkled his nose in scorn. “Nobody’s into Pokémon anymore, Aunt Becky.”

Uh-oh. Better rethink her Christmas gift. “Where are your folks?”

Patrick collapsed back onto the couch. “Dad’s taking Alex to a meet. Mom’s sewing.”

Just then, her sister bellowed, “Patrick! You had better be in your clothes, young man. You’re going to Grandma’s in five minutes!”

“Okay, Mom!” Patrick didn’t move.

Becky crossed through the kitchen to the sun-splashed addition James had built four years back. It was a dining room–family room–sewing room ell, and she could hear Bonnie before she could see her, the sewing machine whirring, her sister muttering under her breath.

“Don’t let me startle you,” Becky said.

Bonnie whipped around in her chair. “Good grief, what are you doing here?”

“I’m on my way to Mom and Dad’s.” Becky slid a pile of folded fabric to one side and made herself at home on the built-in bench. The bright fabric, the sunshine, the hominess of the room lifted her spirits again. She smiled smugly. “I’m going to be at the signing of the Haudenosaunee land transfer to the conservancy tonight.”

“Believe me, I know. Mom hasn’t stopped talking about it. Neither has Dad.”

“Is he still pissed at me?”

“Who knows. He’s tearing what hair he has left out over selling the lumbering company. But he’s also bragging about ‘our college girl.’” Bonnie turned back to her machine. “While you’re wining and dining with the upper crust, be sure to check out these curtains. Made by yours truly.”

“You’re making curtains for the new hotel?”

“Linda Van Alstyne got the contract. There are two other seamstresses besides me on the job.”

“Shouldn’t they be done already? I mean, the grand opening is tonight.”

Bonnie looked at her sideways. “Thanks for the reminder. Yes, they should already be done. I’ve got at least two carloads to run up to the spa, and I still have to take Pat to Mom’s.”

“He can come with me.”

“Really? That would save me a half hour.”

“Sure. I don’t have anything to do until later this morning.” She opened her mouth to tell her sister about her other responsibilities for the Haudenosaunee land transfer, then closed her trap. Her sister got the brunt of their parents’ opinions on Becky’s life. Bragging about how great she was would be uncool. She needed to be sensitive to her sister’s position. Like Millie, who had always been careful not to draw attention to the fact that her family was richer than Croesus. Millie.

“I tried to call Millie this morning, and she’s gone missing.”

Bonnie raised her eyebrows without taking her eyes off the raw silk gliding beneath her needle.

“According to the housekeeper, she went out for a walk last night and got lost. The search and rescue team is looking for her.”

“What’s the big deal?” Bonnie stopped the machine. “She’s probably out there somewhere with a knapsack on her back. Val-de-ree, val-de-rah.” She pulled the curtain forward and snipped the trailing threads with her scissors.

“She wouldn’t just go wandering off. Not on the most important day—” Becky broke off before she could complete the sentence.
Of my career
.

“That sounds exactly like something she would do. That girl’s got all the dependability of a mountain goat.” Bonnie stood, shaking the curtain out. “Help me fold this.”

“That’s not true. She’s taking responsibility for her brother Eugene. She wants him to come live with her in Montana.” Becky took the end of the drapery and brought it up to meet her sister’s hands. “Why do you dislike Millie?”

“I don’t dislike her. I think she’s a spoiled little rich girl, and I think she’s been a bad influence on you.”

“On me?” She and Bonnie each took an end and brought it up. They met in the middle.

“She can afford to spend her life living in trees to save old-growth forests and traveling the country to every eco-protest meeting there is. She doesn’t have to work for a living. But you do.”

“I have a job! A good one. I have a health plan!”

Bonnie folded the curtain over her arm and laid it on a pile of similarly colored chintz. “You spent two years living hand to mouth after college, following Greenpeace ships around. Stuffing envelopes for fund-raisers and writing grants for crackpot back-to-the-land groups. Is that why Mom and Dad sacrificed to send you to school? They wanted you to have a better life.”

“I like my life. I’m doing work that’s important to me and to the world around me. It pays enough for me to live the way I want to. I don’t need a lot of money or things.”

“Oh, grow up.” Bonnie twisted around. “Patrick! If you aren’t dressed with your bed made now, you’re never watching TV again!” She turned back to Becky. “Someday you’re going to be married and have children. Believe me, when you have to tell your kid that he can’t go to the college of his choice because you can’t afford it, you’ll feel differently.”

Becky bit her lip. “Alex?”

Bonnie scooped up a stack of curtains. “He got accepted at Cornell. But the aid package wasn’t enough.” She nodded toward another pile of cloth. “Grab those, will you?”

“So where is he going?”

“State University at Plattsburgh. Between the loans and the track-and-field scholarship, we can manage it. I hope. If the car lasts another four years and we don’t have any medical bills.”

Becky followed her sister. She was amazed to find Patrick fully dressed in the living room. He had even remembered to brush his hair. “Get your Game Boy if you want to bring it to Grandma’s,” she said. “I’m driving you.”

“All right,” he said. “Can we stop at Kmart? There’s this game cartridge I want to look at.”

“Maybe,” she said. She carried the curtains out to Bonnie’s car and shoved them in alongside the rest of the piles and boxes.

“It’s game cartridges and braces and shoes and class trips.” Bonnie leaned, on one hip, against her aging Taurus. “It never ends, Beck. And then when the kids are gone, you have to think about yourself, about whether you can retire, whether you can afford to move to a place where you can walk around outside in the winter without worrying about breaking your hip.”

“You mean like Mom and Dad.”

“God only knows, I understand the lure of those woods. It’s kept them scraping by for forty years. But it’s sucked so much life out of them. Dad may be cussing and kicking about selling out, but I think it’s the best thing to happen to them in a long time. If he can get a decent price for the business.” There was an edge to Bonnie’s voice. In the cold sunlight, Becky could see the lines around her eyes.

She shifted from foot to foot. The deal she was so proud of, the deal that was going to make her a player in the conservancy and in the national arena of land preservation, was the reason her dad was selling Castle Logging. She wanted everything she was going to get from this deal, but she also wanted her parents to be healthy and solvent and living in the same house they had always lived in, not forced into retirement. “I’m sorry,” she said, not really sure what she was sorry for.

Patrick bounded out of the house. “Go back and get a coat on!” his mother yelled. Bonnie let out an impatient breath. “Don’t worry. It’s me. It’s been—things have been tense with them lately. Everything will be okay.”

Because Becky wanted to, she tried to believe.

8:45 A.M.

Russ had been prepared for the sight of Haudenosaunee. He knew the history of the camp, and although he had never been a visitor before, he had seen black-and-white photos of the World War II–era construction, deliberately simple in a time when both men and materials were hard to come by. He had been prepared for the glorious view of the mountains, where the trees and brush had been cut away to expose range after range fading into the northwestern sky. What he hadn’t been prepared for was the number of vehicles parked in the drive.

“What the hell’s going on?” Ed Castle asked, descending from his SUV. They had pulled in along one side of the drive, closest to the road out, intending to thank Eugene van der Hoeven for opening his land and to let him know about the fine six-point buck dangling off an old bike carrier bolted to the back of Ed’s Explorer.

Russ walked past his hunting partner toward the row of trucks. He pointed toward the nearest, a wide-bed pickup with double rear wheels supporting metal gear lockers. “This is John Huggins’s.” He glanced at the next truck. “Uhhuh. And here’s a search and rescue sticker.” He turned toward the log house. “Let’s see what the search and rescue team is doing here, shall we?”

Russ let Ed lead the way. The older man rang the doorbell. The wait for someone to answer was long enough for Ed to turn to Russ with a worried frown, but then the door opened, cutting off whatever it was he might have said.

“Ed Castle. Hello.”

“Eugene.” Ed shook hands with the man in the doorway. “Good to see you again. I’ve been hunting on your property today, brought a friend of mine. I don’t know if you’ve met him. Russ Van Alstyne. Police chief down in town.”

Russ had heard the stories, of course, so the face that turned to him wasn’t too much of a shock. “Mr. van der Ho-even.” He extended his hand. “You’ve got good hunting land up here.”

Van der Hoeven’s grip was cool and dry. “I like to think so. Did you take anything?”

Russ shook his head. “Afraid not. But Ed here harvested a beauty.”

“Six points.” Ed rocked back and forth on his heels, every orange-and-camo-clad line of him radiating satisfaction. “We field-dressed the old boy and hung him up, and after having to do some work, Russ decided he’d had enough.”