But she wasn’t entirely gone. When I said, “Lead me to the kid’s room. Richie,” she did, a room identical to the other bedrooms in the place, and it was empty: the rumpled sheets showed the bed had been used, for something, if not sleeping. But no Richie.
Something else, though.
“Blood,” I said, and pointed at a puddle of it near the doorway, sogging up the yellow shag.
“It’s out here, too,” Janet said, her anger with me making her more coherent, less prone to vomiting and weeping and such. “We’ve been… walking through it…” And she shivered again.
“Harry got his throat cut here,” I said, following the trail of blood Janet had indicated, which led back to where we’d just been. “He staggered down the hall to…”
And I cut that short, because I didn’t want to mention that the room Janet and I’d been in had originally been Castile’s, as that would mean explaining why we had been in that particular room to both Janet and Mrs. Castile.
Downstairs, a door opened and shut. Noisily. An outside door.
“Who’s down there?” I called. Yelled, my voice echoing.
“Me,” Castile’s voice echoed back, and in a minute he was with us.
He was in the DIRECTOR sweatshirt and jeans, still, and his cheeks were red and his breath heavy.
I told him about Harry and he said, “God, no… I was afraid of something like that,” and he asked to have a private word with me, and we moved away from the two women for a moment, and Janet watched us with suspicion. Mrs. Castile looked at the wall.
“I saw him,” he said.
“Who?”
“Turner.”
“What did you do, go after him?”
“Yes. I heard some noise in the hall, and when I stepped outside the room, I practically bumped into him. Then he ran. Saw my gun, I guess. I went after him, but stumbled on the stairs, and he was outside before I’d even got a real look at him… it was dark in here, no lights on at all… I looked around for him outside, and didn’t see him, and finally got a little scared… I mean, I got to thinking that even with a gun, I was out of my league… so I came back in.”
“That was very wise. Are you sure it was Turner? Could it have been Richie?”
“It didn’t look like Richie.”
“Bigger than Richie?”
“I think so. Not Richie. But I didn’t really see him. He was just a blur, a shape moving in the hall, running. He’d… just done that to Harry, hadn’t he…”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t do it.”
“What?”
“Maybe he was just in here to check out the situation, talk to his partner a second. Harry was his partner, you know.”
“Harry?”
“I’m pretty sure he was. I think Richie killed Harry. I think it’s a case of Harry pushing Waddsworth, and Richie knowing about it, and reacting to it. It’s the only way it makes sense to me.”
“What do we do now?”
“Richie isn’t in his room, so we better see if he’s anywhere in the lodge. Fuck. This is getting out of hand. I don’t like this at all.”
“What do we do when we find Richie?”
“We’ll worry about that when we find him. Here. Give me that gun.”
He did. It was a nickel-plated snub-nose. 38.
“Ladies,” I said, going over to where they were standing. “We’re about to have a tour of the premises. Stem to stern. Stay close together at all times.”
Janet had a look of anger on her face, mixed in with confusion, and both reactions were justified; but she went along on the search without a word of complaint.
Which was also true of Mrs. Castile, who allowed her husband to guide her by the arm, but she was going deeper and deeper into herself, into an almost catatonic state.
The search of the lodge took twenty minutes. Nobody home but us.
No Richie. No Turner.
Just Castile and his wife, Janet and me, and of course Waddsworth and Harry.
And then, later than I should’ve, I noticed something about the gun: it seemed light. I’d never used a nickel-plated gun in my life, and rarely used a revolver of any kind, so it took me a while to pick up on it, but just as we’d finished searching the basement, the last and most unsettling stop on our tour, I noticed the gun being light and examined it and said, with some irritation, “Castile… there aren’t any bullets in this fucking thing.”
“What?”
“Bullets. Those little lead things that come flying out when you squeeze the trigger, remember?”
“Let me see it.”
I broke the gun open and showed him.
“It was loaded,” he said. With a little desperation. “There’s a box of ammunition upstairs, in one of my suitcases.”
“Let’s get it.”
We went up to the room he and his wife had recently moved to, and the box of slugs was not there: not in his suitcase, not anywhere.
“Gone,” he said: “Someone… got in here and unloaded the gun, and took the bullets. Jesus!”
Enough of this bullshit. Time to go out to the shed and get the nine-millimeter.
“Castile,” I said, “you and your wife stay here. Janet and I are going outside for a while.”
Castile nodded.
“No,” Janet said.
“We’re safer paired off,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”
“I… I’ll need my jacket… and my glasses…”
“Okay.”
“My jacket’s in the front closet, but…”
“But what?”
“My glasses are… are… in with Harry.”
“I’ll get them for you.”
And I did, and we got our jackets from the front closet and went outside.
27
It was still cold, but the wind had died. Now, instead of pushing you around, the cold air was settling for cutting through you. Still, it was not an entirely unpleasant sensation, not unlike a splash of water in the face in the morning, waking you up, getting you alert; giving clarity to things.
The sky was clear, now, and stars were out, and the moon, illuminating the white landscape, making the snow glitter in places where the light reflected, giving the grounds of the lodge an aura of peaceful unreality, which was a little disconcerting, at the moment.
Janet huddled close to me, hanging onto my arm like she expected the law of gravity to be revoked any time now. She’d apparently forgotten about being pissed off at me and was concentrating on being scared. She’d glance up at me every few seconds, her eyes somewhat vague behind fogged-up glasses, but there was affection and something resembling trust in the looks she gave me, and I found that oddly reassuring. I liked her. Everybody else around here was weird or dead or both. She was just a little crazy, and pleasantly so. She didn’t belong here.
Me either, but that was beside the point. I was here, and Janet too, and so, it would seem, was Turner. I could only think of two possible scenarios for what had been going on here. First, as I’d suggested to Castile, Turner might’ve come in to talk to Harry, his partner, about the final details of the coming hit, and instead had found Waddsworth dead and possibly his partner the same way, and Turner, like any pro who wandered into a situation like that, would have turned tail and run, which is precisely what he seemed to have done, according to Castile. Or second, perhaps Turner had in fact killed Harry, out of displeasure over Harry getting involved in that Gay Lib love triangle and killing Waddsworth and messing up the contracted-for job; and this made a kind of sense, because once Waddsworth had died, a sheriff’s investigation was a foregone conclusion, and Turner might not have wanted to leave a live partner behind, to talk to the authorities and play plea-bargaining games and eventually involve Turner himself.
While the latter explanation was marginally possible, I just couldn’t see Turner using a knife or razor or whatever and cutting somebody’s throat. Too messy. Just not professional at all. I’d seen the tool of Turner’s trade back in his room at Wilma’s: that Browning automatic with the silencer built in by a gunsmith. And I was not entirely satisfied with the first scenario, either, as it seemed unlikely to me Turner would come into the house prior to actually making the hit. His telephone communications cut off, Turner would signal his partner somehow and then meet him outside for a talk… but inside the lodge? Didn’t make sense.