The Winter Lodge (38 page)

“Three kids to see you, Chief,” said his assistant.

Rourke looked at Alger. “We’re done here for the moment.” He shifted his attention to the intercom. “Send them in.” A visit from three kids was not unusual. Thanks to his youth group, a lot of local kids considered him approachable, a problem solver.

He got up and opened the door. To his surprise, in walked Zach Alger, Sonnet Romano and Daisy Bellamy. They were dressed for outdoors, backpacks clanking with snowshoes, their cheeks stained red from the cold. Alger was clearly taken by surprise, too. He glared at Zach.

“You in some kind of trouble?” he asked.

Rourke could see Nina biting her tongue. He knew she wouldn’t accuse Alger in front of his kid—for the kid’s sake.

“No, sir,” Zach said, managing to make the “sir” sound like an insult. An uncomfortable silence stretched the moment out. Finally, Matthew Alger stepped toward the door. “I’ll be in my office.”

“Bye, Mr. Alger,” Sonnet said, all politeness.

She nudged Zach, and he said, “See you, Dad.”

The three of them watched him go. Rourke checked out his visitors, a habit with him. One quick perusal could tell him if a kid had been fighting, or was the victim of an assault, if he was on something or in shock. Rourke even knew, without any high-tech device, when a kid was lying.

At the moment, the only message he was getting from these three involved disquiet and…fear, probably. Daisy Bellamy, whom he barely knew, looked particularly pale and troubled. She wore a camera on a strap around her neck, and seemed to be cradling it unconsciously with her hand.

“Been out hiking, I see,” he said, hoping to prod them into talking to him.

“We have,” Sonnet said, stepping forward.

“You don’t look too happy about that. I thought you guys loved snow days.”

“We went snowshoeing today,” Daisy said.

“On the trail above Meerskill Falls,” Zach added.

“We had permission,” Sonnet said. “It’s on Camp Kioga property and Daisy’s dad said it would be okay.”

The hike up to Meerskill Falls and beyond was not exactly well marked, but by traveling in a group of three, they had probably been safe enough. Around here, kids got in trouble the same as they did anywhere. There were just more scenic places to do it.

“We wanted to check out the ice caves,” Daisy said. There was an odd tremor in her voice as she turned on her digital camera and angled the preview screen toward him. “We found one, too. Actually, Sonnet found it. I took a bunch of shots.”

Strange that these kids weren’t all talking at once. Kids usually couldn’t wait to blurt things out. Rourke studied the thumbnail photo, his skepticism firmly in place. People brought a lot of things to police stations, items they mistook—in all innocence or ignorance—for other things. A bit of antler shed in the woods was mistaken for human bone. A tuft of animal fur stuck in the bark of a tree was deemed the hair of a missing child. Buried treasure turned out to be fool’s gold. In ninety-nine percent of cases, the discovery had a perfectly logical—and non-criminal—

explanation.

Not this time, though. This time, there could be no mistaking what he was looking at.

“You took these today?” he said.

The kids nodded in unison.

“Did you touch anything?”

Sonnet shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“I’m going to need the memory card out of this camera,” he said. “Is that all right, Daisy?”

“Sure.” She slipped it out of the camera, her eyes large and frightened.

“You did the right thing, you guys,” he said, and reached for the intercom to buzz his assistant.

Twenty-Eight

J
enny was trying to re-create a scene she barely remembered. Like she’d told Rourke on the phone, it was a perfect day for working on her project. She’d awakened to a light-drenched world of new-fallen snow and had duly called everyone she promised to call each day—Nina, Laura, Olivia and Rourke. She called them because she knew that if she didn’t they would call her.

She set the scene perfectly for a day of work. She made a fire in the potbellied wood-burning stove and set the iron teakettle on top to boil. She parted the curtains to view the lake out the window, a vast unbroken expanse of white, with the tiny snow-clad island in the middle. She fixed a pot of white snowbud tea and dressed in jeans and a cloud-soft cashmere sweater. She settled on the overstuffed sofa in front of the fire, booted up her laptop computer and…

Nothing.

It was awful. Here she was in the ideal situation, alone with her thoughts and memories, and she couldn’t seem to write. The words wouldn’t come or when she forced them out, they sounded trite, like the text of a greeting card or radio ad.

What was the matter with her?

She didn’t even feel like the same person who had whipped out her newspaper column just hours before deadline, the words flying from her fingers as she captured a scene with the instant clarity of a snapshot, followed by a recipe to illustrate her point. Often she had no time to spare when she dashed off her column with a feeling of confidence and satisfaction.

And now she had all the time in the world, yet she was dithering. At first, she used the excuse that all her grandmother’s precious handwritten recipes had been lost in the fire. Without them to pore over, how could she bring the past to life?

Just an excuse, she admitted. Especially after the
Troubadour
had covered the fire and Nina had issued a call for photos and memorabilia from anyone who might have such a thing. To Jenny’s astonishment, she returned from New York to discover that Nina had collected a box of various items—a photograph here, a page from a book there, an ancient rate sheet from the bakery, a set of high-school yearbooks from Jenny’s years, and from Mariska’s as well—in the 1970s. Most of the items also came with a brief heartfelt note—
so sorry for your loss
—and a few came with monetary donations, which she promptly turned over to Gram’s church. All this from the people of a town Jenny had longed to leave, that she considered constricting and provincial. Maybe Rourke was right after all. She was in the place she belonged.

Still, Martin Greer had set her a task that was completely different from anything she’d ever done before. It wasn’t enough to offer recipes and vignettes. She needed to examine the workings of the family bakery on a deeper level. He wanted detail and emotion the column didn’t require. He wanted pathos—her mother’s abandonment, her father’s absence and dramatic reappearance. And although Mr. Greer had only seen Joey mentioned in passing, he had sniffed out the tragedy there. Jenny wasn’t sure she could find the words to write about that.

Frustrated, she got up and paced the floor, her thumbs hooked into the back pockets of her jeans. She snapped on the radio. Only one station came in clearly up here, and the music selections were old and tired, but sometimes the murmur of background noise was preferable to silence. She paced some more, paced through “My Sharona,” and wasn’t even tempted to dance. The song was followed by an amateurish-sounding ad spot—“Palmquist—your family jeweler since 1975,” the announcement concluded.

In 1975, her mother had been an attractive teenager, and after school worked at the jewelry store as counter help. She was ambitious, Gram and Grandpa had told Jenny, taking on the counter job in addition to the bakery in the morning. Even Jane Bellamy remembered that about her—always trying to get ahead.

Jenny flipped open one of the donated yearbooks to a shot of her mother. There was a bright recklessness to Mariska that, according to Laura, drew people to her. Jenny didn’t have that quality. Maybe if her mother had stuck around, she would have learned it.

But did she want to be like Mariska? Did she want to be so enamored of adventure that she’d eventually leave her home behind for good?

“I hope you’re happy, wherever you are,” she said to the girl in the photo.

She became aware of a hot, metallic smell and realized the water had boiled away in the iron kettle on the wood-burning stove. She put on an oven mitt and carried the kettle to the sink to refill it, the loud hiss startling Rufus from his nap on the hearth rug. “Sorry, boy,” she said.

The reek of dry iron and hot steam teased at her, awakening a distant glimmer of memory.

Something came to attention inside her, and she shut her eyes, picturing a scene from the past in minute detail. The kitchen smelled of iron and steam, and a familiar song played on the radio—

“867-5309/Jenny.”

She rejoined the past, her imagination stepping into the scene she’d been struggling to describe. It was winter, and she was very small, sitting at the round Formica table with a cup of hot chocolate. The cup was in the shape of an elephant’s head, its two ears forming the handles.

Her mother stood at the stove, swaying to the music. Every time “Jenny, Jenny” came from the radio, Momma would turn and sing along, pointing to Jenny and making her giggle.

“What you making?” Jenny asked, eyeing the pan on the stove.

“A fortune,” Momma said with a laugh.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll find out when you’re older.”

“Can I help?” Jenny slipped down from her chair and crossed the room, her Winnie-the-Pooh slippers scuffing on the linoleum.

“No,” Momma said in a voice that said she really meant it. “It’s hot. Don’t touch. These are sinkers for fishing.”

Jenny stood back and watched. The windows were open, Momma said to get rid of the fumes. She poured dark liquid from the pan into a tray. Then she danced all the way to the end of the song. She was so pretty and happy. “I think I’ll go out and celebrate.”

“No, Momma,” Jenny protested. “You always go away.”

“And I always come back. Now, let’s wait until these cool. Then we can put them in Grandpa’s tackle box. Be careful you don’t lose a single one.”

A popping sound came from the woodstove and Jenny opened her eyes, blinking at the harsh light on the snow outside. That was probably her clearest memory of her mother, and she realized the scene had repeated itself more than once. Yet there was something missing, something she didn’t get. Despite all her big dreams and ambitions about getting rich and seeing the world, Mariska still went fishing with her father in winter when they had to make a hole in the ice.

Jenny wondered what had become of the homemade sinkers, if they were still around somewhere and if they looked the same as they did in her memory. Maybe they were still in the tackle box, undisturbed by time. Putting on her jacket, gloves and boots, Jenny headed out to the shed where the salvage from the fire was stored. It was still snowing, and she had to lift her legs high through the drifts. Rufus bounded along with her, plowing a swath through the snow. A snow emergency had been declared for both today and tomorrow, perhaps longer. Only essential vehicles were supposed to be out.

She had to dig a trench with her hands in front of the rolling wooden door of the shed.

Once inside, she sorted through the stacked boxes until she found the one that contained her grandfather’s fishing gear, which had been salvaged from under a sink in the utility room. She brought it over to the door where the light streamed in, diffused by the thick falling snow. She set the box down and opened it, the action raising hinged trays filled with the expected rusty fishhooks and melted objects that might have once been plastic bobbers and lures. A few misshapen weights had survived but most had melted, spread over the bottom of the box and rehardened. A handful of sharp-edged pebbles lay strewn in the bottom of the box. Tugging a mitten off with her teeth, she picked up one of the pebbles. Except it wasn’t a pebble. It was too round and symmetrical. Jenny frowned. Rubbed it on her jeans. Took off her glove and dug at it with her thumbnail. Found a fillet knife and scraped the soft alloy away.

Her gasp sounded loud and desperate in the snow-cushioned silence. She shut the box and hurried as fast as she could to the lodge. This was crazy, she thought. Completely crazy. She had to be wrong, she just had to be. Except a little kernel of knowledge inside her knew the truth.

Jenny hurried back to the lodge. She let the dog in and took off her parka and boots.

Then she sat at the table and cleaned some of the stones as best she could, trying to imagine what on earth had been her mother’s purpose, praying there was some innocent explanation. But as the seconds ticked by, she felt only suspicion. She tried to figure out a way not to sound demented when she told Rourke what she’d found. Her hand shook as she dialed his number at work. His assistant said he was unavailable except in case of emergency.

“It’s not an emergency,” Jenny said. “Not like that, anyway. Please ask him to call me when he gets a chance.” She hung up and then dialed Nina, who wasn’t available either. On a snow day, Jenny reminded herself, public servants were busy keeping people safe. She tried the bakery. Earlier, Laura had said she’d probably open late and close early.

Laura herself picked up. “Sky River Bakery.”

“It’s Jenny. Is everything all right?”

“Sure,” Laura replied with a smile in her voice. “We’re busy, in fact. Only Mariel Gale and I made it in, and we’re swamped because so many places are closed. How about you?”

“I’m getting plenty of snow but I’m fine. Listen, is Rourke around?”

“Haven’t seen him.”

“Nina?”

“Not her, either. What do you need, hon?”

Jenny swallowed hard, struggled to keep her voice matter-of-fact. “I was going through some of the things salvaged from the fire and I found something my, um…I think it’s something my mother did, a long time ago. Laura, I don’t quite know how to say this. I think I found a fortune in diamonds in my grandfather’s old tackle box.” She paused. “Tell me that’s not as crazy as it sounds.”

There was a silence so long that Jenny feared the line had gone dead. Then she heard faint sounds from the bakery—the jangle of the bell over the door, the beep of the register, a murmur of voices. “Laura? Did you hear what I said?”

“I heard.”

She knew something. Jenny could hear it in her voice.

“You have to tell me,” she said. “Was my mother stealing from the jewelry store where she worked?”