“I know. You had me reading Farewell, My Lovely last week, remember?”
“I remember. Did I really seem pompous?”
“Not at all. You were funny.”
I had gotten a few good one-liners off. Not during the speech itself, which was a fairly serious discussion of the difficulties I’d encountered turning real crimes into fictional ones. In my case, some of my books were derived from my own life — crimes I’d been caught up in; times when I had played detective for real.
But the question-and-answer session had gone especially well, and that’s where I managed to get a few laughs.
“Are you going to turn this weekend into a novel?” one of them had asked.
“Not unless I find a body,” I’d said.
Which got a particularly nice laugh.
Only a part of me didn’t find that so funny — the part that was still trying to figure out whether what I’d seen out my window last night was histrionics or homicide.
And, before my little speech in the big Parlor, where high windows looked out on the lake and pictures of old Smileys (the Mohonk founding family) looked down on me and my audience like the bearded faces on cough-drop packages, I had discovered something disturbing: Kirk Rath had indeed not made it home yet.
From our room I had called the business number at Rath’s house and got one of his coeditors.
“No sign of Kirk here,” he had said, followed by a nervous laugh. Whenever somebody from the Chronicler called me on the phone — which they did from time to time, to acquire publishing information for their news column — they invariably followed whatever they stated or asked with a nervous laugh. I read that as embarrassment out of having to deal face-to-face, even if it were over the phone, with another human being whose work they had inhumanly lambasted in their smug pages (and if you don’t think a page can be smug, you’ve never read the Chronicler — even the ink is smug).
“Do you expect Kirk?” I asked him.
“No. He’s on vacation this week.”
“Well, he was here at Mohonk.”
“Oh, you’re calling from the resort?”
“Yes. And Kirk left here last night. I wondered if he’d gotten home yet.”
“No, but then we don’t expect him. He was going to go into New York City after Mohonk.”
“Business?”
“No. Vacation. We don’t even have a number to reach him.”
“Does he do that often?”
“Now and then, Mallory. But why the questions?”
“I need to talk to him. Personal matter.”
“Oh. Well, he may have told Rick Fahy where he was going.”
“Rick Fahy... isn’t he one of your contributors?”
“Yes. He’s there at Mohonk, playing the mystery. We’re going to do a story on the weekend from the point of view of an attendee.”
“I’ve never met Fahy; I’ll look him up and ask him.”
“Fine. If Kirk does show up, would you like me to have him call you?”
“Yes, immediately. Here at Mohonk. My room number is sixty-four. I’ll be here till Sunday afternoon.”
I’d made one other call, to the guard who’d been on duty at the Gate House last night. Mary Wright had provided his number. He hadn’t seen Rath leave, but that didn’t necessarily mean Rath hadn’t left.
“I log in every car that enters,” he said, a young voice, college kid maybe, “but don’t pay much attention to who leaves.”
It seemed a good number of Mohonk employees were residents of nearby New Paltz, so a rather steady stream of them left during the evening hours. Rath, if he had left, left unnoticed.
Which meant my question about the reality, or lack thereof, of what I’d witnessed out my window remained no closer to being established. All this really nailed down was that Rath did not leave and come back through the Gate House, because if he had, he’d have been logged in.
And now I was in the Great Out-of-Doors, on a rocky, root-veined hard dirt path upon which icy snow was settling, only it was too late to turn back. We were almost there.
And in five minutes, we were. Our path merged with a crushed-rock road, a one-lane affair used by horses and service vehicles (our map called it a carriage road), which had wound its own way to Sky Top, that plateau where on a clear day you could see forever, or anyway New Jersey and four or five other states. This wasn’t a clear day but, from the outcroppings of boulders along the edge, you could see a panorama of winter gray, broken up by evergreens, that did take the breath away, or maybe it was just the climb.
“Oh, Mal,” Jill said, her gloved hand grasping mine. “Isn’t it breathtaking!”
“Maybe it’s just the climb,” I offered, but I smiled at her.
Sky Top was a clearing about half the size of a football field, and in its midst was a tower of rough-cut stone, a fairly squat two stories or so, with a spire that aspired to another story, capped by a gray-green helmet wearing a flagpole. No flag flew today, and when we tried the tower door, it was locked.
The crushed-rock carriage road extended around the tower, and as we strolled, gloved hand-in-hand, around it to try out another view from Sky Top, we noticed something.
A car.
A car parked on the carriage road, behind the tower. It was fairly well covered with snow, a sporty little dark blue Fiat. I tried the doors, but they were locked. I rubbed the frost from a side window and peered in. On the backseat a stack of magazines sat like a forgotten passenger.
The latest issue of The Mystery Chronicler, forty or fifty copies, probably.
“I think I know whose car this is,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Jill asked; her eyes were wide.
“Let’s have a look around.”
We found him in one of the outcroppings of rocks. Like his car, he was fairly well covered with snow. The front of his jacket was slashed and blood was dried there, or frozen, or something. Dark and crusty, whatever it was. His face was slashed several times, and the wounds were not recent; they had snow in them, and were jagged and crusted with black blood, but the features were recognizable.
It was Kirk S. Rath, all right.
And Jill, not being a stereotypical female, did not scream; neither did I. I’d seen dead bodies before. I’d even seen this dead body before. I bent over him, poked at him a bit: no question he was gone. There seemed to be two deep wounds in his chest; those stab wounds, not the facial slashes, had killed him. Rath’s face seemed oddly passive, for having been slashed; peaceful, youthful, though older than this you don’t get. I checked his pockets. His billfold, containing several hundred dollars in cash, was intact in his back pocket. The envelope in which he’d received his mystery weekend instructions was folded in his pocket; in it was the list of the suspects in his — or Roark K. Sloth’s — murder.
Then I backed away from him. Away from the rocks, away from the drop-off, away from the long, cold fall. For all my bitching, I hadn’t noticed the sound of the storm till now; but now the wind seemed to be fairly screaming. The snow was really coming down, now, and there was indeed ice in it. Crystals glistened on the slashed face of the corpse sprawled on Sky Top’s rocks.
Jill and I stood shivering together, not entirely from the cold, and then started down. The map suggested walking the carriage path on the return, for a “gentler” return trip. But our near-panic and the increasing snow and the steepness of the way had us stumbling, sliding. By the time the carriage road intersected with Sky Top Path at the foot of the mountain, we were walking through a blizzard. We were just about to really panic when suddenly the Mountain House loomed before us.