Out Cold (20 page)

“Satellite TV, no phone.”

“Perfect.” She hesitated. “Learn anything?”

“I learned that Dr. Judson McKibben lives here in Churchill,” I said. “He's some sort of recluse, mourning his daughter's death. I had a nice dinner at the local café, talked with the owner, who's very nice, and the chief of police, who's not so nice.”

“Wow,” said Evie. “You've been busy.”

“I haven't actually learned much,” I said.

“But you will.”

“I'm going to try.”

“And to hell with the bad guys.”

“I don't know if there are any bad guys.”

“There are always bad guys.”

I paused. “Honey?”

“Yes?”

“Do I detect a note of…cynicism in your voice?”

“No,” she said. “It's a note of loneliness, spiced with a soupçon of resentment and a pinch of apprehension. Don't worry about it. I'm fine. I love you. Oh. Roger Horowitz called.”

“What'd he want?”

“He wanted you.”

“Did you tell him—?”

“Of course I did. I told him you were off on a quest.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I wish you hadn't. What'd he say?”

“What do you think? He's pissed at you, which I take to mean he's worried, which I understand. He said he tried your cell. I told him I was positive I'd be talking to you, did he want me to give you a message or have you call him. He said I should tell you to turn around and come home.”

“If he calls again,” I said, “tell him that Dr. McKibben does, in fact, live here in Churchill. The local police chief is named Nate Harrigan. He knows about McKibben. Roger might want to talk to Harrigan.”

Evie paused, then said, “Okay. I wrote it down. Harrigan. Anything else for him?”

“Can't think of anything.”

She hesitated. “So you gonna do what Roger says? You gonna turn around and come home?”

“Sure.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I will not consider that a promise.”

“I'll see you tomorrow,” I said. “I miss you.”

“That's nice.”

“However,” I said, “I'm freezing my ass out here. Gotta go. I love you.”

“Me, too.”

“Pat Henry for me.”

“You bet. Sleep tight.”

Back in my room, I lay down on my motel bed with the TV muted and the basketball game still going on. I clasped my hands behind my neck and stared up at the ceiling. I didn't know exactly what I'd been expecting from Evie, but whatever it was, I didn't get it.

Maybe something more effusive than “Me, too,” when I told her I loved her.

I closed my eyes. It had been a long day, and my shoulders and neck were stiff from white-knuckle driving over narrow mountain roads in the snow.

A pounding noise came at me through the fog of sleep. I blinked and pushed myself into a sitting position. The basketball game was still going on.

More pounding. “Mr. Coyne.” A man's voice at the door.

“Hang on,” I called.

I swiveled around, sat on the edge of the bed, stretched, took a couple of deep breaths, then pushed myself to my feet.

“Mr. Coyne,” came the voice from outside again. “I need to speak to you, sir.”

I went to my duffel, unzipped it, fished around inside, found the handle of my Chiefs Special, pulled it out, and peeled the sock off it.

I went to the door and opened it a crack, leaving the chain hooked. I kept the gun behind my leg.

“Who are you?” I said.

“My name is Albert Cranston.” He moved so I could see his face through the crack in the door. He looked to be in his forties, clean shaven, glasses, brown hair cut short. A pleasant, nondescript face, neither smiling nor frowning. He was wearing a dark ski parka, no hat. The snow was white on his shoulders. “Dr. McKibben would like to talk with you, sir.”

“When?” I said.

“Now, if you wouldn't mind,” he said. “I've come to drive you there.”

“I'll be with you in a minute,” I said to Albert Cranston.

I shut the door and went over to where my duffel was sitting on the chest of drawers. I stuck my gun in its sock and started to shove it down among my underwear.

Then I had a second thought. I went over to the bed, lifted up the mattress, and slid the gun in between the mattress and the box spring. An unnecessary precaution, no doubt, and futile, probably. If somebody really wanted to toss my room, under the mattress was the second or third place even an amateur would look.

On the other hand, if I left the camera and the tape recorder and the binoculars there in the duffel, maybe they'd think they'd found everything there was to find.

On the third hand, if they did find my gun under the mattress, they'd not only know that I'd brought a gun, but they'd also know that I was a cautious and suspicious person with something I thought I needed to hide.

On the fourth hand, they'd also conclude that, cautious and suspicious as I might be, I was also too inept to be taken seriously, hiding my weapon in such an obvious place.

I have a tendency to overanalyze things sometimes. Most likely, nobody would search my room in the first place. If they did, they could think whatever they wanted to think, as long as they didn't steal anything.

I pulled on my boots and parka, patted my pants pocket to be sure the room key was there, and went outside.

Albert Cranston was standing under the overhang with his arms folded across his chest.

I held out my hand to him. “Brady Coyne,” I said.

He looked at my hand, then gave it a quick shake. “This way, please,” he said, and he walked over to a big Lincoln SUV that was parked beside my little BMW. The SUV's motor was running. The wipers were keeping the windshield clear. Snow swirled in the headlights.

I went over to the passenger side and climbed in beside Cranston. “What's this all about?” I said.

“Dr. McKibben wants to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“He's under the impression that you want to talk to him,” he said. “Please fasten your seat belt.”

I did, and he did, too, and then the door lock beside me clicked. I wondered if I tried the handle I'd be able to open the door. I didn't bother trying.

Cranston backed out of his parking slot, eased down the motel driveway, and turned right onto the highway, heading north. The illuminated clock on the dashboard read 9:58.

The road was surrounded by blackness. No streetlights, no lighted buildings, no road signs along the way. No moon. No starry night sky. No other traffic moving in either direction. Just our headlights boring a tunnel of light straight ahead through the dark and the swirling snow between the high white snowbanks.

Once he was on the road and up to speed, Cranston kept the odometer on forty MPH.

He drove with both hands on the wheel at ten and two. He leaned slightly forward and kept his eyes on the road. He didn't seem inclined to talk, which was all right by me.

At 10:09, he took a right turn onto a narrower secondary road and eased back to thirty MPH. At 10:12 he took another right. Both were ninety-degree rights, which, if I visualized it accurately, meant that we'd doubled back and were now moving due south, parallel to the highway we'd started on.

It occurred to me that Cranston was driving in circles to confuse me.

If so, it wasn't working.

From where I sat, I couldn't read the small numbers on the odometer, but I was doing the math in my head. Forty miles per hour was two-thirds of a mile per minute. He'd taken that first right eleven minutes north of the motel. A little under eight miles.

Thirty MPH translated to a mile every two minutes. The second right came three minutes later. A mile and a half.

At 10:16—four minutes and two miles later—he slowed down and took an oblique left onto a narrow sloping driveway. It curved up a hill through a thick stand of dark evergreens and stopped about half a mile later in a turnaround in front of a big rambling farmhouse.

A wide stairway led up to an open wraparound porch. The house had three stories and two dormers and a big fieldstone chimney at each end. A pale light was flickering behind one of the dormer windows. A candle, maybe.

Floodlights up in the eaves bathed the turnaround out front in yellow light and left the surrounding area in absolute darkness.

“Here we are,” said Cranston. He shut off the ignition, and then the door locks clicked. “Follow me, please.”

I climbed out of the car and looked around. One branch of the driveway curled around the side of the house to the back, where I could make out a couple of rooflines silhouetted against the dark sky. An attached barn, I guessed, and beyond it a lower building with a less steeply pitched roof. A stable, perhaps.

A dog yipped a couple of times. The sound seemed to come from the direction of the barn. It could have been a coyote.

Cranston moved behind me and kind of herded me up the steps onto the porch. He rang the doorbell, and a minute later it opened and a woman wearing a baggy UNH sweatshirt and blue jeans was standing there. She smiled and said, “Come on in, Mr. Coyne. The doctor is expecting you.” She held out her hand. “I'm Jeanette Perkins.”

I shook her hand. She had large brown eyes and olive skin and shiny black hair, cut short. Up close I saw the crinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth and the flecks of gray in her hair, and I guessed she, like Cranston, was somewhere in her early forties.

She turned and led me through the front living room to a smaller room toward the back corner of the house. This room was lined with bookshelves and furnished with a big leather sofa, several upholstered soft chairs, and a couple of sturdy wooden rocking chairs. A few braided rugs were scattered on the pine-plank floor. A fire crackled in the fieldstone fireplace, and a black-and-white cat was curled up in one of the soft chairs.

“Please make yourself comfortable,” said Jeanette Perkins. She held out her hand. “Let me take your coat.”

I took off my parka and handed it to her.

“What can I get you?” she said. “Wine? Beer? Soft drink?”

I waved my hand. “I'm fine, thanks.”

“You sure? How about a nice cup of tea?”

“Actually,” I said, “I guess I could use a mug of coffee, if you have it. Albert, there, he woke me up.” I looked around, suddenly aware that Albert Cranston had not followed us into this little parlor. “Where is Albert?”

“Mr. Cranston's waiting to take you back,” she said. “I'll get your coffee. The doctor will be right with you.”

She left through a doorway in the back of the room. I went to the fireplace to look at some framed photos on the mantel. One showed a young couple sitting on a bench on a porch that might have been this very house I was in. The woman was blond and pale and thin. The man had a long angular face, with a crooked nose and a small mouth. Neither of them was smiling in the photo. The doctor and his wife, I guessed. Greta, I remembered her name was. She died soon after their daughter was born.

There were three other photos in cheap metal frames. All pictured the same blond girl. The girl as a toddler, her hair a helmet of blond curls, sitting on some steps licking an orange Popsicle, with orange stains covering the front of her white T-shirt and a big yellow teddy bear sitting beside her. The girl was older in the next photo, six or seven, I guessed, wearing a little plaid skirt and white blouse, her blond hair longer and less curly and pulled back in a ponytail. She was standing beside a mailbox with a pink backpack over one shoulder. First day of school, maybe. And the same blond girl—Ursula, I assumed, Judson McKibben's daughter—on the cusp of womanhood, wearing jeans and a sleeveless jersey and a backward baseball cap, sitting bareback on a horse and looking fearlessly into the camera. This photo must have been taken close to the time she died. She was twelve when she drowned. She looked comfortable on the horse.

Something about this photo bothered me. I took it down from the mantel and—

“Ah, Mr. Coyne,” came a deep voice from behind me. “There you are.”

I turned. It was the man in the photo with the angular face and crooked nose and small mouth, except now his face was deeply creased, with half-moon glasses perched down toward the tip of that long meandering nose.

He held out his hand. “I'm Jud McKibben.”

I shook it. “Brady Coyne.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.” He took the photograph I was holding from my hand. “Ursula, my daughter.” He touched the glass with his forefinger. “She died two days after that photo was taken. It's the last image of her I have.” He arched his eyebrows at me, as if he expected me to say something.

I didn't.

He gave me a quick smile, then waved at one of the rocking chairs that was facing the fireplace. “Have a seat, please,” he said.

I sat.

“It was a birthday party,” he said. “I didn't want her to go. There were going to be boys there, and they had a swimming pool. Ursula had bought herself a new bathing suit for this party. My daughter was not naïve. On the contrary. She was wise way beyond her years.” He looked at the photo he was holding. “She knew exactly how she looked in that bathing suit, how the boys would react to it. It was a two-piece. You wouldn't call it a bikini, but…” He shook his head. “She was turning into a woman, and she was quite aware of it, and she knew that it…it bothered me, and so when she came prancing into the living room that afternoon in this skimpy little bathing suit and did a couple of pirouettes with one hand on a hip and this smile on her face, I said to her, just as she expected me to, I said, ‘I absolutely forbid you to wear that.'” McKibben looked at me. “She just laughed. She knew she'd end up doing what she wanted to do. And she did. I spoiled her. I couldn't say no to her. So I drove her to the party, and all the way there, and afterwards, after I drove away and went home, I was feeling this horrible dark foreboding. I thought it was about boys seeing her in that skimpy bathing suit, and I felt foolish and overprotective. And then the telephone rang.”

He looked at the photo he was holding for a moment, then put it back on the mantel. He touched the corner, adjusting it, then gave his head a small shake, turned around, and sat on the sofa across from me. “Jeanette will bring your coffee in a minute,” he said. “Me, I can't drink coffee in the evening.”

I smiled and nodded.

“Do you have children, Mr. Coyne?”

“Two boys,” I said. “Both grown.”

“Do you see them often?”

“No. Nowhere near often enough.”

He nodded. “You should correct that.”

“Nothing to correct,” I said. “They are independent, autonomous adults. They're living their lives. It's what I've always wanted for them. I miss them, but that's my problem.”

“And your wife? Their mother?”

“She doesn't see them much, either.” I looked at him. “She's no longer my wife.”

“I'm sorry.”

“We're not.”

At that moment Jeanette came into the room. She was carrying a tray with two mugs on it. She gave one to me and the other to McKibben. “Can I get you something else?” she said to him.

“Thank you, no, my dear.”

She bowed quickly, flashed a quick smile at me, turned, and left the room.

“Jeanette's my cousin,” McKibben said.

I shrugged.

“She's been a comfort,” he said.

I sipped my coffee. I was curious to see how he would proceed.

He dipped his teabag in his mug a few times, then put it on the tray that Jeanette had left on the table beside him. He took a sip, gazed up at the ceiling, put down his mug. He sat back, crossed his ankle over his knee. “I understand you wanted to talk with me,” he said.

“Word travels fast in Churchill.”

He smiled. “So how can I help you?”

“Do you know a girl named Dana Wetherbee?”

He sat still and expressionless for a minute. Then he said, “You were asking about this girl at Nick's.”

“That's right.”

“I don't know her,” he said. “I never heard her name before today. I am very curious to know why you think I might have.”

“Let me explain,” I said, and I proceeded to tell him about finding Dana in the snow in my backyard, and seeing the truck with the Ursula Laboratories logo on the side in the same part of the city where Dana had been seen on the night that she died, and learning that Dana had mailed a Christmas card from Churchill. I told him that Dana died, but I did not tell him that she'd had a miscarriage. I did not mention Sunshine or Misty.

As I talked, McKibben watched me without expression. He had pale, intense eyes. They were the color of ice.

“Dana,” I said, “was sixteen. She looked remarkably like your Ursula.” I pointed at the photo on the mantel. “Ursula would be about sixteen now, is that right?”

He nodded. “She died four years ago last July. You find this to be an important coincidence?”

“I don't know that it
is
a coincidence.”

“You think Ursula and Dana—what?—knew each other?”

“I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out what Dana's story is. She died in my backyard. I need to understand. I thought you might be able to help me.”

He shook his head. “I don't see how, Mr. Coyne. I'm sorry. Truly I am. I think I understand how you feel. You feel responsible. You should have rescued her. What happened to her is your fault. When you analyze it, of course, you know that's not true. But in your heart, you can't help feeling that way. I carry that same guilt, that same burden of responsibility. It's with me every minute of every hour of every day, and I don't think it will ever change.”

“Tell me about your company truck.”

“My truck?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “What do you want to know?”