“And I’m to do what?”
“Start looking for him.”
“He’s free to do what he wants, Judge, as long as he doesn’t leave town.”
“McCain, listen. I told Irene I’d get back to her. I want to tell her that you’re looking around town for him and I want that to be true.”
“I thought Irene was going up to that hospital for a while.”
“She was. It’s sort of a retreat for her. She just goes up there when things get too much for her. But she refused to leave until she heard that bail had been arranged. She wanted to be there when Ross got home. That’s when she got scared.”
“Well, I’ll look around. But don’t hold out much hope. If he wanted to disappear for a few hours, I’m sure he can find someplace where I’ll never find him.” Then I remembered something Scotty McBain had said. “Doesn’t he have a summer house?”
“Oh, a little one. Nothing fancy. They bought it when they first got married. I don’t think any of them has spent much time there since Deirdre was a little girl.”
I asked her for directions and she told me.
“Call me in a couple of hours and let me know if you found anything,” she said.
I went to the john and freshened up. I needed more coffee and I was nearly out of cigarettes. I kept a sweater folded neatly in the bottom drawer of my desk. A black crew neck that clashed with very little. I was sick of the necktie and suitcoat. I slipped on the sweater and was headed for the door when the phone rang again.
Janice Wilson was on the line, “I talked to the other waitress. She remembers Karen Hastings coming in that night. She was with another woman. She can’t remember anything about her. She said that one of the busboys actually served the meal and wrote up the check, they were so busy. She said that all she did was initial it so Karen could get the discount. That isn’t very helpful, I’m afraid.”
“Another woman. Well, at least we know it wasn’t with one of the four men.”
“Sorry, Sam. I’ve got to run. I’d like to see you again sometime, if you’re ever interested.”
“Very interested. Thanks for the call.”
Other woman, other woman, other woman. You know how the echo machine plays the same phrase over and over again in a movie character’s mind? Mine was sort of doing that on the drive to Ross Murdoch’s summer home.
The problem was that the woman could easily have been just an acquaintance who had nothing to do with Karen’s eventual murder at all. I’d half-suspected her dinner guest was her brother. I’d thought maybe they were making last minute preparations for their final blackmail payment. The big one.
The wind was hard enough to make my ragtop sway side to side on the deserted blacktop road that led to the woods commonly called Peer’s Peak after the man who’d had a huge apple orchard out here for decades. The land behind his was thorny forest that dropped down to the river.
In the headlights, the black night looked bleak, the cold ebon river was touched by cold golden moonlight, and on the other side of the road steep timber rose to form one wall of a canyon. The river people lived out here year-round in shanties and shacks and tiny trailers. Every couple years, they got flooded out but they always came back. It was a hardscrabble life, their TV antennas and silver propane tanks and junker cars being their most valuable inanimate assets. It was one of those nights so dark you nearly suspected that dawn would never come again, that the dark forces at play in the cosmos had finally banished daylight forever. At the moment it was even impossible to remember what sunlight looked like.
I found the off-trail road the judge had described. I got out and took down the wooden crossbar and drove through the gate. I got out again, put the crossbar back in place and began the narrow, winding, strange trip into forest so deep it seemed to absorb the beams of my headlights. This time of year, autumn leaves covered everything. I kept the driver’s window down, my .45 right on the seat next to me. There was still enough wary kid in me to know that I was in the heart of an evil land. A cop I knew once told me that any time you found deep forest you’d find a human body or two that had been buried years ago and was now little more than dusty bone. If you were so inclined to spend your free hours digging. Not a pastime I’d care to indulge in.
Wooden shingled one-story house with a screened-in front porch and a steeply pitched roof. The grass was a couple of inches tall and the forest was starting to reclaim the backyard area. Ross Murdoch’s black Cadillac sedan was parked in front. My headlights gave the house a lurid bleached look, the way those photos look in true crime magazines.
I switched off the ignition, grabbed my .38 and flashlight and got out of the car. The wind off the river, which was behind a screen of birches, was hard cold. The stench was of fish.
I went to the side window and poked my flashlight right up against the glass. Murdoch hadn’t even tried to make it resemble any kind of hunting or sport cabin. It was furnished in solid middle-class New England furniture. Ethan Allen from the looks of it.
I saw nothing out of place. But I also saw no evidence of Ross. Had he gone for a walk? Was he maybe asleep in the bedroom?
I went back to the front door. Took out my handkerchief and proceeded to make my way inside without leaving any fingerprints. I stood in the living room and flipped on the wall light. Everything was dusty, including the 21-inch Admiral table model TV. The screen was opaque with dust. I called out his name several times. My voice sounded alien to me in the gloom.
A door opened on a spring that needed oiling. Then slammed shut.
The kitchen. I ran through the alcove at the other end of the dining room, straight into the dark kitchen. I flipped on the overhead light. Standard issue, like the rest of the house. Newish but dusty stove-refrigerator-counter-cupboards. The kitchen had an empty feeling to it, like a stage kitchen in a TV commercial. Open the cupboards and you’d find nothing more than mice droppings. Open the refrigerator and you’d see nothing but empty metal racks.
All this—the run through the dining room, my assessment of the kitchen—took less than half a minute. I hurried out the back door that somebody had just let slam.
The warm sweat from inside turned to frozen sweat in the cold night. Maybe ten yards separated back yard from woods. I shone my flashbeam at the dusty wall of hardwoods. There were three narrow paths between four widely separated trees. Each seemed to angle off in a sharply different direction.
I heard something, or thought I heard something. But by then it was already too late.
I was struck from behind with more violence than had ever been visited upon my head before. I’d been punched hard, struck glancingly with a piece of sturdy wood, even kicked just above the temple. But never anything like this. This was the sky falling on me.
I doubt I remained conscious for more than two seconds. There was this spike of pain that obliterated all other senses, a spike that tore through my head front to back like a bullet. And yet I somehow knew I hadn’t been shot. Something else…
And then there was just the darkness. I’m sure I didn’t help myself any by slamming my head against the frosty ground. But at least I didn’t feel it for longer than a millisecond…
Pain. Stabbing pain, numbing pain, blinding pain, pain from which there was not a moment’s escape. My senses seemed to switch on one by one. A car in the distance trying to pull away, slamming into gear, scraping a tree—hearing. The hardwood wall I’d seen before being knocked out—seeing. The cold ground, dead grass scratching my cheek—feeling. But they were all faint senses and impressions. Nothing could be as strong as the unyielding, throbbing pain.