To Darkness and to Death (7 page)

Russ smiled good-naturedly. “No use letting the meat sit around getting old. Gotta get it home and butcher it.”

“It’s just as well.” Eugene looked toward the woods visible from his front door with an expression of resignation. “The search and rescue team is out there searching for my sister. Any game in the area is gone to ground today.”

“Your sister?” Russ spoke more sharply than he had intended to.

Eugene looked at him for a moment, then stepped back from the door. “Why don’t you two come in?”

Ed made some noise about their smell—dressing out a buck wasn’t a clean process—but Russ followed van der Hoeven in without comment. He didn’t think a little fresh blood from a healthy deer made them offensive. He had seen and smelled far, far worse in twenty-seven years as a cop.

The interior of the great camp should have felt welcoming. The wood and rugs made patches of quilt-warm color, and the spindly antiques were balanced by genuinely comfortable chairs and sofas, but there was something off-putting about it. Cold. Maybe it was the sheer size of the place; the living room–dining room was almost as big as the footprint of Russ’s house.

“I set some coffee and pastries out for the searchers. May I offer you anything?” Van der Hoeven waved toward a sideboard that would have filled up half the Van Alstynes’ kitchen.

“No. Thanks.”

Ed wasn’t as reticent, grabbing a muffin out of a basket made of looping silver wire set next to a coffeemaker.

“So what’s this about your sister?” Russ asked.

“Maybe I should have rung up your people instead of John Huggins.” Eugene’s gaze was unfocused, as if he were looking into the misty past. “But I reasoned the only thing the police could do would be calling out the search and rescue team.”

“Are you sure she’s lost?”

“It’s the only thing I can think of.” Van der Hoeven ran a hand over the back of his head, smoothing his overgrown hair, bunching it into a little ponytail in his fist. “Millie and I were having dinner last night—”

“Millie is your sister?”

“My younger sister, yes. Our older sister, Louisa, lives in San Francisco. Anyway, after dinner, she said she was going to take a walk. I was tired, and planning on getting up early to hunt, so I said good night. When I arose this morning, she wasn’t in her room. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. I took a quick turn around the paths and buildings nearest to the house, and as soon as it was obvious she wasn’t anywhere nearby, I phoned search and rescue.”

“What time did your sister go out on her walk?”

“We dined at eight, so it must have been close to nine.”

Russ looked at the dining table, a shining mahogany plain dominating the room. Hell of an overkill for two people. “Kind of late to be taking a stroll in the woods, wasn’t it?”

“The lady on the search team said the same thing.”

Russ raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t heard of Huggins adding any new members to the team. Let alone a woman.

“I’ll tell you what I told her,” van der Hoeven went on. “Millie knows this land. It’s been in our family since the time of the Civil War. She and I have roamed these woods and hills since we were first able to walk. It wouldn’t intimidate her any more than an after-dinner stroll around the block would scare you.” He bunched his hair in his hand again. “However, that’s not to say she couldn’t get lost. I’ve done it myself on more than one occasion, and thank God it’s always been in daytime and I’ve managed to run across a familiar marker to lead me home.” He looked toward the door, as if expecting his sister to burst in at the next moment. “I have confidence in her woodsmanship. As soon as she realized she was lost, Millie would hunker down and make a shelter.”

She’d have had to. It must have been in the midtwenties last night. The temperature was probably just breaking freezing right now. Still, if she had the sense to pull some pine branches over her as a windbreak and bury herself in dead leaves, there was no reason to suspect she wouldn’t come through okay. Scared and cold, but okay. Unless…

“There’s no chance she might have taken off by herself? Driven into town to meet someone?”

Van der Hoeven shook his head. “Her car’s in the garage.” He pronounced it oddly, accenting the first syllable.

“Could someone have come up here to meet her? After you were in bed?”

“No. Well…” Van der Hoeven paused. “It’s not impossible, but it’s damned unlikely. I don’t have many guests.” His head twitched to the left. “And my sister doesn’t live here. She’s just visiting.”

“No old friends looking her up?”

“None that have made themselves known to me.”

Russ thought that was a damn funny way to answer the question. Then again, van der Hoeven was clearly ill at ease with other human beings. Russ was framing a polite way to pry further into Millie’s personal life when the front doorbell rang. Eugene gave him a pained look before excusing himself. Poor bastard. He was probably seeing more people today than he normally would in the course of a year.

Ed Castle sidled up to Russ, brushing muffin crumbs off his face. “What’s with the third degree?”

Russ shrugged. “There’s a woman missing. It’s my job to ask questions.”

“I thought you were off today?”

Like Linda. Like anyone with a normal job; you’re either working or not working. “I’m off in the sense that I don’t have to be at my desk or on patrol. I’m on duty in the sense that I’m always on duty. Crime never sleeps and all that.”

Ed grunted.

At the door, visible from their slice of the living/dining room, a pair of men were stamping their boots and brushing off their jackets before entering the great camp. Russ heard Huggins’s voice booming off the rafters. “Mr. van der Hoeven! Hope you don’t mind us showing back up. ’Fraid we’re empty-handed. Mind if we use the facilities and help ourselves to some more coffee?”

Eugene was murmuring something about his housekeeper making them breakfast while the guys on the rescue squad walked warily through the door: Russ’s part-time officer Duane; Dan Hunter, who worked at AllBanc; Huggins’s cousin Mike; and at the tail end, the “lady searcher” Eugene had mentioned. She tugged a knit toque off, and her hair, the color of sunshine through whiskey, fell to her shoulders in a messy tangle. Her oversharp nose and blunt cheekbones were red from the cold, her lips were colorless and chapped, and her parka and stained twill trousers hid any suggestion of her figure.

When he had first seen her, he had thought her plain. He could remember the thought, remember his sober assessment of her face and form. When had she become beautiful to him? She laughed at something Duane said and, laughing, turned, and that was when he met her eyes.

Oh, love.

8:45 A.M.

The radio hanging from her shoulder crackled. “Fergusson?”

“Fergusson here.”

“See anything?”

“A lot of trees. No sign of Millie van der Hoeven, though.”

“Okay, come on back. We’re gonna debrief and take a break.”

“I’ll be there.” She thumbed off the radio. She was glad she had her GPS unit and her map. From where she stood, the forest stretched out vast and quiet, seemingly unbroken and eternal. She knew she walked on Haudenosaunee land, that lumbermen and hunters and hikers all came here, shaping it and leaving their marks, but slipping between the grave gray alders and the massive toad-colored oaks, the idea that humans could own this land, that anyone had ever set foot where she was stepping now, seemed unreal.

She hiked over a rotting log, crushing coffee-brown pulp and meaty fungus beneath her boots. The smell, rich and wet, mingled with the odor of pine sap. A flash of movement caught her eye, and she whirled, just in time to see a gray fox vanish like smoke into the earth.

With no slow and careful searching to delay her, the walk back was much faster than the walk out. The trail became more and more pronounced. She passed one trailhead to a waterfall—marked on her map—and one to the tumbledown 1860s camp house, ditto. She thought about taking a detour to get a look at either of the sights, but her stomach growled in protest. If her conscience wouldn’t keep her on the straight and narrow, evidently her appetite would.

The trees thinned, and she saw the rest of them, hurrying along the trail toward the low rock wall that encircled Haudenosaunee’s back garden. Duane, straggling behind the others, waved. “Hey, Reverend.”

He waited while she passed through the gate, crossed the still-thick grass, and skirted a flagstone patio running almost the length of the house. Tarp-covered shapes marked the outdoor table and chairs, and empty chains hung loose from a wooden frame. She imagined a wicker swing, too delicate to last outside through the long Adirondack winter.

“Pretty nice, huh?” Duane thumbed toward the French doors. “How’d you like to come out here for a barbecue?”

“Right now, I’m more interested in checking out the bathroom,” she said, heading around the corner toward the thrum of voices at the front of the house. She and Duane strode past the brown stalks and seed pods marking the graves of perennial borders. They crunched across part of the gravel drive, mounted the steps, and came to a halt, stymied by a logjam of searchers, all trying to squeeze through the front door at the same time. She turned for a look at the long mountain view and saw Russ Van Alstyne’s pickup parked at the edge of the drive.

Her heart made a ridiculous, giddy ger-thump. She breathed in deeply. Okay, there was a missing person. Eugene van der Hoeven must have called the police. Although, come to think of it, Russ had told her he wasn’t going to be on duty Saturday. Maybe the department was overwhelmed and had to call him in? Logical thoughts, none of which wiped the foolish smile off her face.

Walking into a home where there’s been a tragedy grinning your head off is just plain tacky
, her grandmother Fergusson chided. Everyone would think she knew something, had seen something. She swallowed her smile and pressed forward behind Duane with as much sobriety as she could muster.

A petite, dark-haired woman, clad in jeans and a sweatshirt, held the door wide. She looked at the trail of leaf rot and dirt accumulating on the floor with dismay.

Eugene van der Hoeven stood apart from the search team clustered around the table, conversing with two men in leaf-print camouflage and hunter-orange vests. The taller of the hunters was half-turned toward her. Russ’s eyes widened a fraction, then eased. The corners of his mouth crooked up in what might have been a smile.
Happy Birthday
, Clare mouthed. She ambled toward the men.

“Chief Van Alstyne.”

He nodded his head. “Reverend Fergusson. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I volunteered for the search and rescue team last year. John Huggins finally got down to the bottom of the list and called me in.” She glanced at the older man next to him: gray-haired, what was left of it, and close to her height, but broad, with powerful shoulders and a chest like a tree stump.

“This is Ed Castle. Ed, Reverend Clare Fergusson.”

Clare’s hand was enveloped in a calloused grip. “Pleased to meet you,” Castle said. “Sorry it had to be under such circumstances.”

“Are you”—she looked back and forth between them—“here to help the search?”

“We’ve just found out about the missing girl.” Russ glanced at Eugene. “Ed and I were hunting on van der Hoeven land. We stopped in to pay our respects.”

“Mr. van der Hoeven,” Huggins called from the dining room table. “If I can have a minute of your time?”

Van der Hoeven ducked his head toward Clare, paused, as if he were about to make a remark, then slipped away.

“Poor guy,” Ed Castle said. “This must be real hard on him.”

“His sister missing?”

“Yep. But I was thinking more along the lines of him having to put up with all these people. He’s a real private guy. Likes to keep to himself.”

“How do you know him?” Clare said.

“I’ve had the license to harvest timber offa Haudenosaunee for twenty, thirty years now. Had it from old Jan van der Hoeven, and now from his kids. ’Course, it’ll all be smoked once the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation gets their hands on the property.”

“How’s that?”

Ed Castle told Clare the details of the impending land sale. She glanced back at Eugene van der Hoeven, bent over a topo map. “He’s going to stay in this house, right? I mean, he didn’t talk like a man whose home is being sold out from underneath him.”

“Dunno,” Castle said. “Alls I know is, no timbering licenses from the new owners. Buncha tree huggers. Don’t realize how important harvesting is to the health of the forest. Think it all happens naturally.”

“Fergusson!” Huggins’s head popped up from the huddle. “Bring that map of yours over here.”

Clare complied, squeezing in between Duane and a slim redheaded man, spreading her map next to the others. She pointed out the ground she had covered.

“We need to rethink our strategy,” Huggins began, only to be interrupted by a low rumbling from Duane’s midsection.

“Sorry.” He grinned. “No breakfast.”

“You all need some food,” Eugene said. He sounded embarrassed, as if he had invited them there for a cocktail party and had forgotten the drinks and nibbles. He stood up, looking around the room. “Lisa? Lisa!”

The dark-haired young woman appeared in a far doorway. “Let’s get these people breakfast. Can you rustle up eggs and bacon and toast, whatever we have?”

“Me?”

The entire male contingent stared at the housekeeper expectantly. Clare rolled her eyes. They looked like a pack of hounds with their ears pricked, waiting for the sound of the can opener. “I’ll help you,” she said loudly. No one else leaped in to volunteer.

Snorting, she strode toward the door. Lisa jumped out of her way and fell in behind her. “Thanks,” she whispered. “It’s not that I’m not willing. I’m just not much of a cook. Especially not for a gang like this.”

The doorway led though what had probably been called a butler’s pantry into the kitchen. It was roomy, meant for serious cooking for large numbers, but its vintage fifties decor had outlived the institutional look and was now funky. Clare prised open the refrigerator. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She pulled out eggs, milk, and bread. “Let’s make French toast. It’ll go farther and fill people up more.” She emptied the vegetable bin of a few oranges, an apple, and a single bunch of grapes. “See if there’s any canned fruit in the pantry. We can mix up a big macédoine.”