At the cafe on the square, where she intended to have a cup of coffee and talk again with Bertha, she found Michael Harrison and a group of his friends dawdling over what they called a “late lunch” but which was obviously a good, long, mid-afternoon gab-fest. Eight of them sat at the long table, three girls and five men, laughing as they worked at pastries and steaming mugs of coffee.
“You've got to join us,” Michael said, fetching an extra chair to the already crowded table by the window and jamming it in next to his own, patting it as an invitation.
“I don't want to interrupt anything,” Katherine said, though she did sit down beside him.
“You won't be interrupting at all!” he assured her. He motioned to his friends. “These loose-lipped wonders wouldn't stop chattering for the end of the world.”
“Especially not then,” a tall, blond boy said. His name, she learned later, was Kerry Markwood. “If it was the end of the world, we'd have to talk twice as fast to be sure that we got everything in!”
As simply as that, she was included in the group and made to feel perfectly at home. Indeed, in one minute, these people did more by their attitudes to make her comfortable than Alex's friends had done in several hours. Introductions were hurriedly made as Michael described each friend in turn with some good-humored insult that brought laughter from all present. Katherine learned their names slowly, however, as the afternoon wore on and the conversation got better and better. There was no unrelieved pessimism here — indeed, hardly a single note of glum-ness. As an antidote to Alex's crowd, these people could hardly be equaled.
Too, she was unaccountably pleased to see that, though there were girls present, they seemed to be with other men, not with Michael. He was as solicitous of her as he might have been of a wife, anxious that she have coffee when she wanted it and that there was always a plate of pastries near her. More than the others even, he was careful to include her in all conversations, and in time he put his arm over the back of her chair, giving the illusion of protection.
The restaurant clock read 6:15 when someone suggested they break it up for the day. Surprised that darkness had crept in without her noticing, Katherine realized that she would be hard-pressed to reach the top of the mountain again and have sufficient time to clean up and make it to dinner with the Bolands.
“Let me take you up in the Rover.”
“I don't think Alex would like it.”
“You mean you care what he thinks that much?” he asked, his voice suddenly brittle.
“Only as concerns my job,” she said.
“He can't object to me driving you home.”
She said, “Oh, Michael, you don't know how he can go on about you when the subject comes up. And I have to sit there and listen to it.”
He softened perceptibly. “I'm sorry,” he said.
They were standing outside the restaurant now, the snow still falling slowly but steadily, a new three inches of powdery stuff on the straight, narrow streets.
“It isn't your fault,” she said. “There's no reason for you to be sorry. It's just that he has this obsession, this crazy need to make you look bad. His mother usually calms him down, but I don't think I should get into an argument with him. It's not my place, not in his own house. I almost had a fight with him this morning, and I don't want another near-argument.”
“What was it about?”
“I'll tell you in the Rover on the way out to the bottom of the Roxburgh ski slope. If you'll take me there, that is.”
The Rover was parked by the grass in the center of the square. In five minutes, they had reached the bottom of the slope, and she had been able to complete the story of the post-midnight intruder who had painted the Satanic symbols on her door.
“I don't think you should go back up there,” Michael said, holding her hand as they stood by the pylon where her skis were racked.
“What else can I do?”
“I'd see about getting you someplace to stay here tonight.”
“But I work up there.”
He was silent a moment, looking up the dark ski run. “I suppose that's reason enough to go back. But do you have to go this way, up that damned run in the middle of the night?”
“It isn't the middle of the night,” she said. “It's just dark. And if I want to get there in time for supper, I'd better get going now.”
She sat down and put on her skis, then stood up and grabbed her poles, flipped the switch that started the ski-lift cables moving.
“You aren't frightened of the dark, going up there through the trees at night?” he asked, making one last effort to dissuade her.
“Not at all,” she said. And she realized that, though she had not completely regained her normal mood of optimism, the few hours with Michael's friends had alleviated the worst of the gloom that had settled over her after the previous night's activities. She truly was not frightened.
He slid her to the cable, her skis making a shishing noise in the new snow, and kissed her before she started upwards. It was a languorous kiss that seemed to last forever. “Be careful,” he said. Then he stepped back as she grasped the steel line and was whisked up the gentle bottom slopes.
Though the pines seemed to close in on her now and then, as if they were alive and seeking her, she did not lose the moderately rosy glow which his kiss had left with her, and she reached the top of the run fifteen minutes later, weary but safe.
She had just enough time to change, brush her hair and freshen her makeup, arriving in the small dining room only five minutes late for dinner. The conversation was pleasant, lighter than usual, especially since Alex seemed happy to let everything remain trivial. He did not once mention Michael Harrison. Indeed, the only sour note in the evening was when Lydia said the locksmith would not be in for a few days.
“But surely—” Katherine began.
“He doesn't live in Roxburgh,” Alex explained. For some reason or other, she thought that his dark eyes were watching her more intently than usual. If he didn't have that air of brooding anger about him, she thought, he would be decidedly attractive — overwhelmingly attractive in fact. “He's a carpenter who works on locks as a sideline, lives about fifteen miles away in another village. If it weren't for this snow, he'd have come. But it has been coming down steadily — and now the radio weather reports call for a greater accumulation than we got a few days ago.”
“I see.”
“Don't worry,” Lydia said. “No one's going to come around bothering us in the middle of a blizzard. The winds are supposed to intensify tonight. It's going to be a real mess. I love it, all of it.” She went on to describe some of the record storms of her childhood and enchanted them with a number of anecdotes about life in the mountains before the advent of the auto and the snowplow.
Katherine went to bed early, without seeing Yuri, and was asleep by eleven, exhausted from the skiing, the conversation with Michael's friends in the cafe, the ride up the slope in the cold and wind, the long and delightful chatter over dinner and, later, over cordials in the main drawing room.
The day seemed to have slipped past as if it were greased, a good day all-in-all, one that made her glad she had not opted to leave Owlsden the previous day.
She did not dream but slept so deeply that she might never have awakened — except for the scream of agony that echoed through the house at shortly past two in the morning. It woke everyone and caused the owls to begin hooting in panic above her head…
She was out of the bed and into her slippers and robe before half a minute had passed, though she made no move to unbolt the door.
A moment later, someone rattled the knob, then knocked.
“Who is it?” she asked, having a distinct feeling of deja vu.