It was a can of mace. Kells stood and sprayed the prisoner in the face, and the prisoner coughed and seethed.
Kells moved on to the kitchen doors as the man in the hangman’s coat approached. Rebecca recognized him now. Tom Duggan, the undertaker from the town ceremony the day before.
Rebecca heard weeping behind the bar. She circled it, wide around the agonized prisoner.
Dr. Rosen was sitting there with his head in his hands.
Tom Duggan had followed Kells into the kitchen and Rebecca went too. Kells was kneeling next to Fern. She was dead and Terry was dead and Robert was dead. Shy, goofy Robert looked bewildered as Mia screamed over him.
The doors opened behind her and Coe appeared with a short, round-bellied old man wearing furry boots. The mountain man, Polk. He limped forward a step or two, then stopped.
Kells was on his feet again. “Get the kid out of here,” he told her. “Take the girl.”
Rebecca reached for Coe’s shoulder, but he shrugged her off. “Fern,” he said. It was Kells who stepped up and pushed Coe out the swinging doors. Rebecca needed help with Mia too, tearing her away from Robert’s body. The undertaker just stood in the middle of it all and watched.
Rebecca led them down the long hallway to the lounge, past Darla and the dead prisoner. Rebecca left them there to go back for Dr. Rosen, helping him to his feet. The maced prisoner sputtered something in Spanish as they left.
She had to walk Dr. Rosen past Darla. His gaze stayed on her fallen body as they passed.
There was glass on the floor of the lounge and wind and snow blowing through the broken window. Rebecca sat with Mia on the couch, Coe across from them crying into his fists. Rebecca laid one hand on Mia’s shivering shoulder, the other on her thigh. The old man wandered in and took a chair in the corner without saying anything.
Rebecca’s despair was too general for tears. For a while her mind went black, a deep, lightless place. She tried to will herself back by focusing on the physical, staring at the hearth fire that had cooled. She noticed a bloodstain on one wall, perhaps where Darla had been shot, the spatter like an augury portending a terrible future.
Luggage lay about the lounge like bodies. Terry’s designer suitcase. Darla’s thick American Tourister. Robert’s hockey duffel. Fern’s carpetbag.
Bert-and-Rita’s backpacks were there but their skis and poles were gone.
At one point the undertaker appeared in the hallway to drag the third prisoner back to the function room, then to carry Darla.
The old man had fallen asleep. Mia’s heaving slowed, her eyes settled into a deep stare. Coe emerged from the stones of his fists every now and then to look around the four corners of the room, searching for something, like a way out.
Finally Rebecca had to leave Mia and walk about. She was leaping with nervous energy and it took all her concentration to move slowly and not alarm the others. She went to the cracked window, feeling the cold. The light was fading. The short, terrible day was ending, the snow turning luminescent, and the flakes draping them in silence.
Staring into the snowfall made her light-headed. Before turning away, she thought she saw a form disengage from one of a cluster of tree trunks to stand on two legs. Bert-and-Rita again came to mind and Rebecca blinked and squinted into the darkness but saw nothing.
She waited awhile longer for it to return, until she doubted her own vision. A thread in the bullet-cracked glass had tampered with the fading light, she decided, deceiving her. She turned from the window and her nerves compelled her to the hallway.
She could hear whimpering coming from the function room. It was doglike, a kind of dry crying. Maybe she was hearing things too. What was taking them so long? Still light-headed, she reached out for the glazed stones of the wall, making her way past the bloodstains toward the end.
She turned the corner and onto the royal blue rug of the function room. The prisoner was still alive. He was seated in a chair set against the great wall of windows overlooking the dark eighteenth hole. He was a broken man, shirtless and bloody, with tears and all manner of mucus and saliva running down his pulpy face, the small hole in his stomach clogged with blood. He would have collapsed to the floor were he not bound to the chair with the gold cord from the curtain. He had been tortured, and he had talked. She could tell this just by looking at him. The corpses of the two dead prisoners were arranged against the window, sitting, heads to the side, empty hands in their laps. Their faces and palms had been mutilated. Arched over their heads were two words painted onto the glass, the drippy green letters reading like a comic book scream:
The scene was arranged for maximum impact, like a macabre piece of performance art.
Kells walked out of the kitchen then. He was wearing a police radio copped from one of the prisoners. His hands glistened clean though there were specks of blood on the lap of his pants.
He walked past the chair and picked up the prisoner’s black North Face jacket, lighter and warmer than his own. He examined it for bullet holes before putting it on.
Tom Duggan pushed through the kitchen doors in his slender, stiff way; and Rebecca could see behind him that the others’ bodies were gone.
The prisoner groaned and the room reeked of chemical mace and Rebecca’s head continued to swim.
Kells gathered the prisoners’ rifles and revolvers and mace and started past her without a word. She did not attempt to question him. She had seen too much that day. The prisoner groaned as she followed Tom Duggan back down the hall to the lounge.
Kells scavenged the others’ bags, emptying Robert’s hockey duffel of his clothes and toiletries and filling it with the prisoners’ weapons, including a guard’s taser. Mia watched him with a hard, blank stare.
“Where’s the older couple?” asked Kells.
“Bert and Rita?” said Rebecca. “They’re gone. Their skis are gone.”
“Then we have enough sleds to transport everyone in one trip. Coe and I passed a farmhouse a few miles out, backed up into trees off the road, good approach views.”
They were leaving. That was something everyone wanted. “What about the others?” asked Rebecca.
Tom Duggan spoke. “The freezer. It will preserve them.”
Rebecca picked up her cargo bag and laptop case and found her gloves among the others lining the hearth. As she pulled them on, she noticed Kells saying something to a downcast Coe, standing near Fern’s old paisley carpetbag. Coe nodded reluctantly and went to find his knapsack.
Kells turned to the reception desk telephone. He pushed only three buttons.
Rebecca turned to Dr. Rosen. He had stopped in the middle of putting on his long coat, one arm halfway in the sleeve, watching Kells.
“I have a message for Enrol Inkman,” Kells said into the phone. “Tell him his friends from the inn were looking for him. You have the address.”
Kells replaced the receiver and picked up his own bag and the weapon-filled duffel.
“What did you just do?” said Dr. Rosen, pointing. “You called nine one one?”
“It’ll take them hours to get here in the dark.” Kells was moving to the hallway. “The snow will have swallowed our sled tracks by then.”
“What happened to the element of surprise?” Dr. Rosen cried.
“Things are moving more quickly than I expected.”
“Than you expected?”
“The next wave will be prepared. Better to take the upper hand now. Intimidation can be just as effective as surprise.”
“Intimidation? You’re baiting them? A challenge?”
But he was talking to the hall. Kells had gone out the front doors. They could see him through the front window now, carrying his bags to the prisoners’ sleds.
Dr. Rosen looked at Rebecca and the others. “He’s crazy. We’re following a killer.”
Rebecca nodded in agreement. Then she and the rest of them took their bags and made their way to the door.