Death Takes a Honeymoon (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

THE CAKE-CUTTING STRUCK JUST THE RIGHT NOTE, AND IT gave Tracy some lovely photographs for her album, no matter what happened later. All the cameras flashed and all the guests applauded as Tracy sliced deftly into the towering orange tiramisu confection. Then Jack made an amusing show of attacking the chocolate-chestnut groom’s cake, and got a big laugh.

Both cakes were decadently rich, but most of the smoke jumpers—who still planned to eat dinner—managed a slice of each. The Quartetto Polizia accounted for eight more pieces, and Cissy showed up late but devoured three.

All in all, and just as I’d hoped, the cake made a festive finale for any guests who had decided on an early departure. That turned out to be almost everyone, but when they began to leave White Pine they did so in an orderly manner, and in an upbeat mood.

The few who were left loaded up their dinner plates and settled down to eat, savoring the spice of adrenaline along with their meal. I wanted to find Aaron, but first I had to stop in the kitchen to tell Food Bob the plan, and then go across to the meadow to discuss the dismantling of the dance floor and sound system with Joan.

After that I stood at the steps of the inn near Tracy and Jack, as they bid farewell to their guests. Sam came out to join them at one point, but Cissy was still on the veranda drinking. I kept notes on a clipboard about who left, just in case we needed to know later. Somehow taking all the precautions for an emergency made it seem quite certain that no emergency would occur.

B.J. and Matt were among those who left early, not so much worried about fire as on fire for each other.

“You know how it is,” smirked B.J. as Matt brought their car up. “You’ve got to make every minute count. Where’s Aaron, by the way?”

“Around. Listen, I got Chief Larabee to listen to me about Brian.”

“Wonderful!” she said. Matt honked his horn. “Oops, gotta go. Call me tomorrow?”

“Definitely,” I said. “You two have a good night.”

Various families left as well, to get the kids to bed, and seeing them go seemed to stir the television people into leaving. And after that Mom came out of the inn with Owen Winter. They congratulated the bridal pair and then came over to me.

“Wonderful party, Carrie,” said Owen, pumping my hand. At some point I’d have to make him stop calling me that. “Can you join us for brunch in the morning? You and I need to get to know each other.”

Do we really?
I thought, as my mother blushed.
I suppose
we do.
I waved good-bye as they drove off, then went back inside, wondering where the hell Beau was.

I was still wondering almost an hour later. I did have a suspicion, but I was dismissing it as unworthy when lo and behold, my suspicion was confirmed. I was coming out of the kitchen with more ice for the guests on the veranda— having sent Bob and his staff back to Ketchum—when Olivia slipped hurriedly downstairs and across the great room. She was zipping her dress as she went.

I strolled over to the foot of the stairs. “Beau? Are you up there?”

The fabulous Frenchman descended with a masterful air of nonchalance. “You need to speak with me?”

“I’ve been needing for quite a while,” I said sweetly.

As I filled him in about the fire situation, his beautiful face paled. “We are in danger?”

“No, of course not. Sam’s just being extra prudent, that’s all. I’ve been taking notes for you...” I offered him the clipboard. “Want to take over from here?”

“Mais...non,” Beau said slowly. He consulted his Rolex with lowered eyes, and moved toward the front door as he spoke. “You will continue. I did not realize how late it has become, and I have many important calls to make. To New York. As there is no telephone here, I shall have to go.”

“Go?” said Olivia’s voice behind me. She’d come back into the great room for some reason, and she’d heard his every word. “Were you going to tell
me
you were going?”

“But of course,” he crooned. The man was a master, all right. He barely missed a beat. “And you shall come with me,
ma chere.
But let us hurry,
non
?”

“No,” she said flatly. “I don’t think so. I think I’ll go back out there where the men are.”

Olivia was an actress, and she knew a terrific exit line when she had one. She stalked off to the veranda without another word. Beau said something under his breath in French, and made his own exit out the front door.

The Tyke passed him on the way, coming in from the grill stations with a plate heaped high with food. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” I said. It would be easier to work without him, anyway. “Beau had to leave, but I’ll be here till the party’s over.”

She snorted. “I get the picture. You still looking for Aaron?”

“Yes!” Beau vanished from my mind. “I mean, I was just wondering where he was.”

She grinned. “Yeah, like you hardly care. I asked around for you. He went down toward the hot spring a while ago.”

“Thanks,” I told her. “Thanks a lot.”

I followed her out to the veranda to look for Sam or Jack, but when I couldn’t find them I reported in to Larabee. I didn’t bother to tell him about Beau.

“So far all the families with children have left,” I said, running down the list on my clipboard. “Also the quartet and the dance band, and Boris Nevsky’s flower crew. Bob will send his food servers down as soon as everyone’s eaten, and most of the tent and dance-floor guys are on the road already.”

“Good work,” he said. “You seen Duarte anywhere?”

“No, haven’t you found him yet? His car is still out there.”

“I’ll keep looking. Where will you be?”

“The hot spring,” I told him. “I’ve got some business there.”

Aaron wasn’t all the way down at the spring. I found him just inside the aspen grove, seated on a low gray boulder in the dappled shade. He was gazing uphill through the screen of shivering branches, as if contemplating the inn and its inhabitants, and sipping from a highball glass.

“Room for one more?” I asked. He scooted over but didn’t speak, so I sat beside him with my plate of wedding cake. I’d brought two pieces and a couple of forks. “Here, you can have either one, or half of both.”

I could only see his unmarred profile, but his smile was still lopsided because of the swelling, and his voice was still a bit mumbly. “No, thanks. Not too hungry today.”

“I guess it takes a lot out of you,” I said, as I licked a smudge of chocolate-chestnut frosting off my thumb. “Starting fights and all.”

He swirled the ice cubes around in his glass. They were small and rounded off, melting fast in the heat. “Who told you that?”

“Some people who were on the rink.”

“Some people talk too much.”

I took a big bite of orange tiramisu cake, for courage, and said, “Aaron, can we sort this out? We’ve been... We haven’t been... Dammit, things have been weird ever since Miami, and I can’t stand it anymore.”

“Stand what?”

“The
confusion.
I mean, last night you tore into Domaso, which was very gallant but very dumb, so thank you kindly but please don’t do things like that anymore. And then today—”

“Kharrnegie!” called a jaunty voice. We looked up to see Boris clomping heavily toward us along the path from the veranda with a pretty, giggly blonde close behind him. “Kharnegie, does anyone use the hot spring?”

The blonde giggled some more as the breeze whipped her hair around her face, and I remembered her as Ramona, the script girl who struck out at the baseball game. From the look she gave Boris, she wasn’t going to strike out tonight.

“Dunno,” said Aaron. “We haven’t been there. But have fun.”

“Don’t go any farther than the spring, though,” I cautioned. “And don’t stay too long.”

“Not too long, Kharnegie.”

Boris dropped me a wink as they passed, and I waited for their footsteps to fade into the rustle of the leaves before speaking again. I kept my voice down, and I hurried. The breeze was becoming a wind.

“And then today you’re telling people we’re just dating, it’s nothing serious. Could you please define ‘serious’ for me?”

The ice cubes stopped swirling. “You were eavesdropping?”

“I don’t
eavesdrop.
” I stabbed at my cake again, and the second fork bounced from the plate and pinged onto the stony ground. “I just hear things. And I heard you saying—”

“I said what guys say, that’s all.” Aaron slid off the boulder to retrieve the fork, then drained his glass and clattered the fork into it. He sniffed the air. “Does it seem smokier to you?”

“No. Maybe. But what do you mean, that’s all? How could you—”

“Well, what did you want me to do?” he said plaintively. “Bare my soul to somebody I just met a couple of days ago, and tell him that I’m madly in love?”

“Is that what you’d tell someone?” I set down the cake plate. The surface of the rock was warm and smooth against my fingers. “I mean, if you bared your soul?”

Aaron looked at me with narrowed eyes, as if I had the sun behind me. He turned his free hand palm up, and drew a deep breath.

“Carnegie—”

A woman screamed. It was a high penetrating shriek, and she kept on shrieking as Aaron dropped his glass and I leapt from the boulder and we both raced down the path to the hot spring.

Boris was kneeling by the edge of the oval pool, reaching out his huge hand. Ramona was backing away from the water, her eyes round with horror. Her screams were unbearable, so I ran to take her by her shoulders.

The instant I touched her she fell silent, her mouth still wide. Behind me there were splashing sounds.

“This way,” I heard Aaron telling Boris. “Here, I’ve got the...Jesus.”

Ramona screwed her eyes shut and averted her face, but I turned to look. Boris and Aaron were hauling a large, dark, sodden shape from the water. They manhandled it across the stones that ringed the pool, and laid it faceup on the ground.

The air was definitely smokier now, though I smelled something sweet, as well, like flowers. The sky above the wind-whipped aspens had darkened to the color of a bruise. But even in this dim and shifting light we could see that the face was Domaso Duarte’s, and that he had a gaping wound in the center of his forehead.

Chapter Thirty

“HEY, WAIT!” I HURRIED AFTER LARABEE TO THE UNPAVED parking lot, wincing as the gusty wind flung a spray of grit into my eyes. “Wait up!”

The chief had given his orders with grim efficiency. Aaron and Boris were to stay with the body and prevent anyone else from approaching it. No one but Sam and Jack was to be told what had happened, until he said otherwise. And I was to convey Ramona back to the inn and “keep her from telling anybody anything, for God’s sake,” while Larabee radioed to Ketchum for reinforcements, an ambulance, and a status report on the fire.

But I had no intention of cooling my heels inside. If Domaso had been murdered, and he wasn’t Brian’s killer—I couldn’t believe we had a second murderer on the scene— then maybe Danny Kane was right, and either Todd or the Tyke, or both, were involved in Brian’s death. And now Domaso’s, as well.

I’d stashed the now-tearful Ramona in an upstairs bedroom with Julie Nothstine, transferring my assignment to her, and then gone racing after Larabee. I caught him halfway to his squad car and trotted along beside him. I was winded, and it was hard to keep up.

“It was murder, wasn’t it?” I demanded. “The rest of Domaso’s forehead didn’t have a scratch on it. You don’t believe he hit his head and drowned accidentally, do you?”

“Medical examiner decides that,” he said curtly. “Not you and not me.”

I grabbed his arm to halt him. “Then give me your opinion, Chief. Because I’ve got about thirty people up here who are my responsibility now, and—”

“Yours?” Larabee made an indignant sound in his throat, like the one Eddie Breen makes sometimes when we argue. “Seems to me this is Sam Kane’s property.”

“Well, it’s my wedding, and I want to know if you think my guests and my staff are in danger.”

“The answer’s yes.” Jack, coming up behind us, had misinterpreted my remark. He spoke calmly but urgently. “That fire’s hooking. Get on the radio, Chief, and tell them we’re evacuating. I’d like all the numbers and especially the weather data, but I can see enough now to want everybody out of here.”

I was so focused on Domaso’s death that my brain stalled. “Hooking?”

“Changing direction,” he said, as the chief shook me off and continued to his car. “The wind’s getting fluky, and now the fire’s moving uphill toward us.”

I looked at the sky to the west, into the wind, and saw instantly what he meant. No longer a plume or even a column, a broad wall of gray-brown smoke rose from the ridges below us. Near the top it blossomed and spread like the canopy of a jellyfish, making visible the invisible gradations in the movement and temperature of the upper air. It was actually quite beautiful, a vast sculpture forming itself before our eyes.

“Domaso’s dead,” I heard myself saying. “I think someone killed him.”

Then I dropped my gaze and observed Jack’s reaction very carefully. Because if Jack Packard somehow found out what his fiancée had been doing with Domaso Duarte among the flowers just a few days ago, then I might be having a conversation with a murderer. Domaso was a big man, a powerful man, and it wouldn’t be easy to fell him with a single blow. But Jack had a smoke jumper’s strength. He would be up to the task.

“What?”
Jack’s face showed astonishment and then dismay. “Oh, shit, does Tracy know? Is she all right?”

I was astonished myself. “Tracy?”

“Yeah, they’re . . . close. They were close.” He looked at me quizzically. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew they were lovers.”

“I...”

“Never mind. She told me it was over, and I believe her.” A trace of the famous Jack the Knack smile showed briefly in his eyes. “Not like I’ve been a saint, right? But that was then, this is—”

A shout from the squad car stopped him. As we looked, Larabee stood up from the driver’s seat in a spasm of anger, and clouted the roof of the car with his fist. We reached him in seconds. He was staring into the car, at the smashed-in wreckage that had been its radio.

I looked closer. Shards of plastic lay across the car seat, and among them rested a softball-sized stone. The stone had blood on it.

Larabee’s struggle to compose himself was brief and effective, but his left eye was vibrating so fast I thought he must have trouble seeing. “Miss Kincaid, you have a list of everyone who’s here?”

“Not exactly. But I’ve got the guest list, and I asked the vendors for their staff names and—”

“Get it together for me while we get these people in their vehicles, all right? I’ll need interviews with all of them, and I can’t do it here”—he glanced up at the smoke—“but I’ll want to start with you and your list. You drive straight to the police station when you get down there, no stops, understand? Packard, she tell you what happened?” When Jack nodded, he went on, “Get your jumpers together, would you? I’ll deputize the bunch of you to help me secure the area around the spring.”

“Is that where he died?”

“Looks like it.” Larabee sighed heavily, a man with a lot of factors to prioritize. “Any of those photographers still around?”

“I think so,” I said. “Why?”

“I need photos of the scene, the body, this mess here, everything.” He spoke without looking at me, thinking aloud. “I’ll have to leave the body where it is, and come back when the fire’s contained. Packard, you organize the evacuation. How much time have we got?”

“I wish I could tell you,” said Jack. “Depends on the wind. If the main fire reaches that slope below the inn, it’s going to make an uphill run and we’ve got to be long gone by then. It might not get that far, of course, but—who the hell is that?”

A car was racing up the road toward us, the engine whining, a cloud of dust rising behind it only to be snatched away by gusts of acrid wind. It was a luxury sedan, a rental, and one front fender was newly crushed, its headlight gone. The car slewed to a stop and Beau Paliere scrambled out. His face was slack with terror.

“The road...” he said, and coughed harshly. “The road is
en feu,
the road burns. Smoke, everywhere smoke and fire!”

People were coming out of the inn now, voices were rising in alarm. Beau turned toward them and threw up his arms. He began to shout something in hysterical French but he didn’t get far because Larabee strode to him, clamped his arms to his sides, and hustled him into the backseat of the squad car, which was screened off from the front seat by a serious-looking metal grille. Then he got in beside him and slammed the door, no doubt for a heart-to-heart talk about not spreading panic before panic was called for. Instinctively, Jack and I moved out of earshot.

“We’ll be rescued, won’t we?” I asked him. “They’ll open the road, or send a helicopter, or—”

“First they’d have to figure out that we’re up here, and that may take a while. The people who left first probably think that we got away, too.” He glanced around. “And I don’t know where you’d land a copter, anyway.”

“They’ll send smoke jumpers, then.”

“Maybe. If resources aren’t spread too thin, and if this is judged to be a defensible position.” He saw the dismay on my face and backpedaled. “Sure they will. They’ll drop jumpers and a mess of equipment. It’ll be all right.”

I didn’t necessarily believe him, but I wanted to so badly that I kept my fears to myself.

“So what do we do in the meantime, Jack?”

“First thing is, you and Sam get those people back inside and get a head count. We need to keep everyone together.” He looked up toward the veranda and signaled to someone. “I’m going to take Al Soriano and drive down the road, see what the situation is. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

They were back within the hour, and the situation was bad. Jack didn’t have to tell the twenty-nine of us left at the inn that the fire was getting closer, because while he was gone we could see it happening. The column of smoke was a massive wall now, a wall with orange flames along its base that crept toward us along the valley. As we watched, the wall became a living beast. With a deep and constant roar, the beast clawed through the woods, creating gashes of black destruction in the green of the trees.

Jack called a council of war in the great room, standing in his shirtsleeves with his back to the windows, flanked by Chief Larabee and Sam Kane. These were our leaders now, and we looked to them to keep us safe. They remained calm, so we did, too.

“The road’s a no-go,” said Jack. “We have to work fast, but first we’re going to take a minute to make a plan and make sure everyone understands it.”

I looked around as he spoke, examining each face. No one had mentioned Domaso Duarte, but then most of these people either didn’t know him or would assume he had left the party earlier. Larabee had allowed Sam and Jack to tell their wives about the murder, but in private, so that only we few knew that Domaso lay murdered at the hot spring. And only one of us in this room knew how—and why—he had come to die.

Aaron sat next to me in our chairs along the wall, serious and intent, taking notes for some future news story or maybe a book. I tried to imagine myself in Seattle one day in the future, relaxing somewhere safe and cool and reading Aaron’s book about a forest fire.
Oh please, let that day come.

On my other side, Julie Nothstine looked alert and intelligent as always, but tired, deeply tired. She should be lying down, and I made a mental note to get her settled in one of the bedrooms soon. I’d ask Cissy to stay with her, just to steady her and give her something to do. Cissy’s plump pink face was trembling like a baby’s about to bawl, and her eyes darted around the room like tiny creatures seeking safety.

Cissy’s daughter was another matter. Still in her wedding gown, still lovely, Tracy sat on an ottoman with her coral-colored skirts tucked around her and attended to her new husband. Jack had told her about Domaso, overruling Larabee’s objection, and she’d been very quiet and very calm ever since.

Ramona was quiet, too, having cried herself out, and sat limply on a sofa now in the circle of Boris’s massive arm. Beau was beside them, apparently seeing Boris as an ally, and to my surprise he seemed calm and cooperative. Or perhaps he was still in shock. Or perhaps... No, Beau had never even met Domaso, as far as I knew. Why kill someone you’ve never met before?

Jack was explaining that we would create a fire line to protect the inn, and a safety zone at the parking area in case the fire line didn’t hold. He was good at this, I realized, good at shaping a team.

“So I’ll want everyone who thinks they can do some chopping to come with me now out on the veranda,” Jack concluded. “We don’t have a lot of tools, so we’re going to work in shifts, and I want you to sack out in between. That’s what jumpers do, you know. We take more naps than kindergartners.”

That got him a little laugh and he flashed his special smile, nursing us along. “The rest of you stick with Carnegie there. She’s going to organize the food and water situation. Like I said, we need every one of you to help, even if it’s just carrying water bottles out to the people cutting line.”

There were a dozen or so other guests in the room, of various ages and physical condition and stages of alarm, and also a handful of staffers whose job it would have been to clean up the inn after everyone left. Most of Jack’s firefighter buddies had taken off earlier, to go partying elsewhere, but standing in the back of the room, ready for Jack to give the word, were the remaining four: Al Soriano, Danny Kane, the Tyke, and Todd Gibson.

These people are firefighters, not skydivers,
I thought, suddenly seeing the obvious. The parachuting they did got all the attention, but it lasted mere moments. What they did for hour upon backbreaking hour, working through long days and then through the night when they had to, was dig fire line and fell trees and gouge hot embers out of the earth, robbing the fire beast of its food.

It was hard to believe that Todd or the Tyke could have harmed my cousin—and harder still not to be grateful for their presence anyway.

Outside the window, the beast went on roaring.