Veiled Threats (24 page)

I
REACHED THE FAR EDGE OF THE PARKING LOT IN SECONDS
. Once I hit the trees I tried to keep sprinting, but the steepness of the slope and the uneven ground made it impossible. Holt's footsteps, echoing mine, changed from distinct raps against the asphalt to a muffled crackling as he reached the carpet of fir needles. Then came a crashing and a string of curses. He had slipped, on those shiny new shoe soles, and yielded me a few vital moments. I didn't even glance back, but scrambled my way through the barely visible tree trunks at a long slant toward the top of the ridge.

My lungs began to heave and burn. Branches like scrabbling hands snagged at my hair and my dress, and one of them, invisible against the dim background, cut painfully across my eyes. Blind and weeping, I pressed on, the noise of Holt's progress drowned out by my own, as the lodge fell farther behind and below us and the crest of the ridge loomed above.

I had no rational plan, no plan at all. The cat was in pursuit, and all the mouse could do was run in terror. Suddenly I came to a break in the trees. A brushy meadow spread out ahead of me, fireweed and dwarf willow and huckleberry dissolving into a single blurred surface in the dying light. The meadow was an old avalanche chute, slicing down from the
ridge crest high to my right to the ravine to my left, far below. The top of the chute made a clear gap in the trees silhouetted on the skyline. All the colors of the day were gone, everything was gray on black. But there was just enough light for Holt to see me, if I crossed the meadow.

I moved uphill as quietly as I could, staying in the shadow of the trees. The sweat was cold on my face and down my spine and I knew, with a sickening certainty, that I'd made the wrong decision. I should have stayed in the lodge, confronted Holt in Casey's presence, made a fuss and called the police myself and somehow, somehow, prevented Holt from contacting Andreas. Instead, I'd put myself completely in his power. I couldn't run forever, and once he caught up with me I wouldn't have a hope. The police, when they came, would hear a plausible story: Holt's suspicions, my confession and guilty flight, and then an accident, an ugly fall. No witnesses, except the grave and respectable Mr. Walker.

I halted, breathless and dizzy. The wind had picked up, hissing through the trees and rustling the underbrush, but I could still hear Holt. He had almost reached the meadow's edge. I had to lengthen my lead somehow. The question of Nickie's safety had grown distant and abstract, compared to my own primitive desire to survive. I shoved both shaking hands into my pockets, and had an idea.

Just up the slope from my resting place, a line of firs extended into the meadow like a peninsula into a lake. I crept out along it, using the trees as a screen and peering down between them toward the sound of Holt's advance. Suddenly he appeared, his shirt a soft white shape against the dim wall of the forest, his face turned away from me to scan the lower stretch of meadow.

I pulled my change purse from my pocket and heaved it,
with a wild windmilling motion, across the meadow and uphill. It made just the right noise, like the inadvertent slip of someone hiding in silence, and Holt spun around and took off toward it, climbing the open slope with the effortless speed of a born athlete. I waited until he had passed my peninsula and entered the woods across the meadow. Then I launched myself downhill, sliding and stumbling through the low, hummocky foliage, making no attempt at quiet or concealment, betting everything on gravity and speed.

I was less than halfway down when Holt stepped out of the trees some ten yards ahead of me. He must have found an easier path downhill, just inside the opposite line of woods. Or perhaps he was a demon, springing out of the ground at will, pursuing me implacably through an endless night. I could never run fast enough to escape him. The nightmare would never end until he caught me, and ended everything.

I fled uphill once more, moving slower and slower with each searing breath, and coldly aware that behind me Holt was keeping his distance, not even trying to close the gap, simply herding his prey up and over the ridge. Farther from witnesses, farther from Eddie and Aaron and Lily, from any lights except this dying twilight and any voices but his own.

Once I stumbled and was still for a moment, crouched against the silvery trunk of a long-dead fir. He called softly to me.

“Carnegie? Come down, darling, I won't hurt you.”

I shook my head and continued upward in a trance of exhaustion and despair. The meadow growth gave way to patches of gravel, and then to larger rocks and boulders, pale as bones. The wind moaned fitfully around them, lifting and flapping my skirt, tugging at my sweat-soaked hair. A few
more steps, another stumble, a few more, and then I was standing on the ridge top, gasping, staring at the sky. Giving up.

A full moon glittered far and cold in the darkness, like a dropped dime on a tar-black road. Its light rimmed the racing clouds with silver, and illumined my little clouds of breath against the freezing air. Across the valley behind me, Mount Rainier was a brooding shadow. Holt was close behind, but I didn't look at him. Instead I dropped my gaze to the rocky, almost treeless landscape before me. Just below was a steeply tilted snowfield, a quarter-mile arc gleaming white in the moonlight, with jagged black outcrops rearing up like fangs at the bottom. The wind came howling up the snow, shaking me where I stood, and the clouds covered and uncovered the moon.

But the moon wasn't a dime. It was a pearl. I turned my back to it. Glaring down the west slope at Holt, I reached in my pocket once more, and drew out Nickie's necklace.

“Here it is!” I said. It came out as a shout. “Stop right there, or I'll throw it down the snowbank and you'll never find it!”

“Find what?” Holt was breathing deeply, not in distress, but as if he'd had a brisk, pleasant walk. Even in the faltering moonlight I could see that he was smiling, and I had the sudden thought that he was in a dream of his own, a reverie of pursuit and power that would climax in death. Then he laughed up at me, at the thing I was holding out to him like a talisman to ward off evil. “Costume jewelry? Just what am I supposed to do with that, Carnegie?”

“You were searching for it,” I said. “They're the real ones, aren't they?”

He laughed again, smugly, hatefully, and he mimicked my
quavering tone. “No, they aren't ‘the real ones.’ The real ones are hidden in a flour canister in your kitchen. Or at least they were, until the police found them there and decided to arrest you. You did mention the police on the telephone, didn't you?”

I nodded. I was shivering now, not just with cold. “Mariana called them—”

“I see.” He took a step uphill toward me, and I sidled away. “Well, she's a little premature, but we'll handle it. We'll have the ransom soon, anyway.”

“The ransom!”

“Signed, sealed, and delivered at midnight tonight. So you and I have to get moving.” He took another step, almost up to my level on the crest. One quick leap and he'd have me. I sidled farther, moving gingerly as the rock beneath my feet gave way to hard-packed snow.

“What about Nickie?” I demanded. My voice was shrill, out of control. “What have they done to her?”

“Nobody's done anything,” he said. “They're waiting for me to show up with
you
—”

He leaped, but I whipped the necklace across his face, making him flinch away. He recovered at once and grabbed at the necklace with outstretched fingers. An unreasoning determination to yield nothing to Holt, not even this worthless bauble, made me hang on instead of letting go. For one endless moment the double loop of pearls linked us together in a crazy tug of war, our hands separated only by the fragile strands that glowed like living silver in a freakish ray of moonlight. Holt laughed again, his eyes wide with triumph.

The necklace burst.

Knotted fragments sprang into the air, pearls scattered onto the gravel, and we each fell back a step. But while my
rubber-soled flats held fast, Holt's feet in his new loafers skidded on the snow and flew out from under him. He pitched backward and sideways, grabbing at the air, a shout rising into a scream as he teetered and went over.

If he had fallen to his left, westward, a brief slide down the gravel would have brought him up against a fallen tree with no harm done. But Holt fell to the right. He plummeted down the icy eastern slope, and there was nothing to break his fall, nothing beneath his flailing arms except the steep, unyielding snow. He skidded and tumbled, faster and yet faster, until he hit bottom with sickening force and fetched up against the grinning black fangs of rock like a scrap of meat and rags.

In the silence, it began to snow.

“H
OLT
? H
OLT
!” I
BRUSHED THE SNOWFLAKES FROM HIS CHEEK
. My fingers, numb to the bone, came away with blood on them, and there was blood in moonlit red-black streaks on the cold white surface all around. There had been just enough moonlight to light my way down to him. The wind threw snow at us in gritty, stinging fistfuls, but Holt didn't move. I leaned over him, hesitating and fearful, as I would lean over a dog, hit by a car, that might still jump up to snarl and snap. He moaned, a less than human sound.

“Holt, can you hear me?”

“Carnegie … help me.”

His eyelids fluttered closed. One hand clawed at the snow, seeking the comfort of a human touch. I took it, and tried to summon up the lessons from a first-aid class years before. Breathing, bleeding, what else was I supposed to look for? Holt's chest rose and fell with a feeble motion, like waves on an ebbing tide. I searched for a major wound but found none, only dozens of shallow gashes from his plunge down the slope. His left leg was clearly broken, and beyond the help of my empty hands. I thought vaguely about shock, and hypothermia, and cradled his head in my bloody palm.

As I knelt there on the mountainside, I thought about making love to this man, and sleeping nestled against his
back, and the way he held me as if I were something new and precious. Then I thought about Nickie Parry, brutalized and humiliated, and her frantic parents, and Ray Ishigura's tears.

“Holt,” I said loudly, “listen to me. I'll get you a doctor, but only if you tell me where Nickie is.”

“Help me!” he croaked.

“Where's Nickie?”

His eyes were wide open now, their sea-green bleached to silver in the half-light. “I'll tell you everything, but first get me back to the lodge….”

He licked his lips. There was calculation in those silvery eyes. Someone I didn't recognize began to speak with my voice, and then to shout.

“I'm going back to the lodge, all right. And if you tell me where Nickie is, Holt, I'll send the Mountain Rescue people up here to get you. If you don't, I promise you I won't say a word to anyone. Not one word. Nobody knows where you are, and if I don't tell them, then you're going to stay right here all night, and you're going to bleed to death or freeze to death or both, right here on this spot, and they won't even find your fucking
corpse
!”

He stared at me, his mouth agape, and when he spoke again he was whimpering. “We didn't hurt Nickie … I wouldn't hurt you. Believe me. Yo u won't be convicted—”

“Never mind that. Is Nickie still alive?”

“Yes,” he said fervently, “yes, believe me.”

“And what happens after what's-his-name, Andreas, gets the ransom?”

His eyelids drooped. “Andreas … Andreas will let her go.” He looked up again, and I knew that this time he was lying. “Believe me.”

“Sure, I believe you. But
where is she?
”

He groaned again, and his voice choked and dwindled to a thread of sound, hardly louder than the scratch of snowflakes against the rocks. “Cabin … dirt road …”

“What dirt road, Holt? Where?”

“Café …”

“What café?” I shook him by the shoulder, desperate not to lose him. The wayward clouds had parted again, and his face was waxen in the sudden clear beams of the moon. “Tell me the name!”

“Trout Pond. Three miles to—”

His eyes rolled back. I could do nothing for him. Holt would have to take his chances, which were still better than Nickie's, and the faster I got going the better everyone's chances would be. Feeling like a grave robber, I fingered each of Holt's pockets until I discovered a smooth snakeskin key case.

“Only one solution,” I said out loud, as I began to trudge uphill through the snow. “I'll take the Alfa.”

By the time I reached the ridge crest, my world had narrowed to the moonlight, the keening wind, and the knives of pain that were stabbing upward through my sodden feet. When at last I stood panting at the crest, hugging myself in my thin, torn dress, the luminous face of my watch read nine forty-five.

Midnight.
I sucked at the wintry air, regaining my strength for the downhill journey.
Signed, sealed, and delivered at midnight … Andreas will let her go
, I didn't believe that for a minute. But I did believe that Andreas was waiting for Holt, and that Holt was supposed to bring me along. Why?

“ To prove me guilty!” I murmured. What a perfect patsy I'd been. Holt had conned me into bringing him to Mount
Rainier, conveniently close to the scene of my supposed crime. If Nickie had been kept in isolation all this time, how was she—or anyone else—to know that it wasn't her dear friend Carnegie who'd kidnapped her? Especially if her dear friend was there on the scene when she was released.

But that was beside the point. Andreas was expecting Holt and me tonight, and I had to arrive before the ransom did. I almost laughed, as I plunged down the slope in the moonlight. All this effort, this mad scramble to escape in the night, and in the end I was going to keep the rendezvous that Holt intended for me all along. But like a Cinderella reversed through the looking glass, I had to arrive before midnight.

The meadow was easy going, compared to the woods. By the time I reached the moonshadows of the fir trees, I was falling more than running, swinging from one rough, rasping trunk to the next, barely able to keep upright. Again and again I peered at the greenish glow of my watch face. Ten o'clock, ten-fifteen … I could make out the lights of the lodge, like clouded stars between the trees, always so far away. Ten-twenty … the angle of the slope relented, I ran faster, and at half past ten I was pounding across the parking lot. I came out of the woods near the front entrance with its semicircle drive and its grand, cross-beamed doors. Holt's car was parked here somewhere. As I searched for it I heard music pouring from the lodge along with the lamplight and I realized, with a kind of nightmare logic, that while one bride was dying, another would be dancing….

Someone stepped out from between the cars and grabbed me, a small, wiry man who smelled of cigarettes. I twisted and fought, until I heard him speak.

“Hey, it's me—”

“Aaron!”

“Keep your voice down! Everybody's looking for you; there's this one park ranger who's built like a sumo wrestler. You're in trouble, Wedding Lady.”

I fell against him like a shipwrecked sailor falling to kiss the dry land. It wasn't so bad after all, leaning down a little into an embrace. He was short, but he felt so warm, and so safe—

I pulled back. “Aaron, you have to go inside and get someone!”

“What? Who?” He frowned at me. He wore his ugly tan windbreaker, and he still hadn't shaved. He looked wonderful. “Sweetheart, you're hurt!”

“It doesn't matter, just get someone from the lodge. Not the ranger. Get a bellboy or the desk clerk. Don't tell him about me, just get him out here.”

“But—”

“Aaron,
please
, just do it.”

John Wayne would have asked for an explanation, but Aaron looked in my eyes, nodded, and loped down the line of cars to the lodge. He was back in two minutes with the evening receptionist, a giggling girl in stretch pants and a ski sweater. The snow had turned to rain, and she carried an umbrella with the Glacier View logo.

“But can't you interview me inside?” she was asking slyly. Then she squeaked in dismay. I must have looked pretty gruesome.

“Just listen to the lady, Charlene,” said Aaron reassuringly.

“There's been an accident, an emergency,” I rapped out. “You've been trained to handle emergencies?”

“Yes, ma'am.” Her eyes were huge.

“All right. There's a long meadow that leads up the ridge behind the lodge. Have you got that?”

“Yes, ma'am. The meadow.”

“ A t the top of the meadow, over the top of the ridge, there's a snowfield with rocks at the bottom. A guest from the lodge fell on the snow, and he's lying injured in the rocks.”

Aaron's head jerked up. “Walker?”

I didn't answer, but took the girl by the shoulders and aimed her toward the front door. “We're going back up there to help him. You go get the rangers and tell them what I just told you. They'll know what to do. Tell them that we're going back up the ridge, so we'll meet them up there. Now, move!”

She ran off without a backward glance. Maybe they'd find Holt in this darkness, and maybe they wouldn't, but at least I'd steered them away from us.

“We're going to
help
Holt Walker?” Aaron demanded.

I was already walking away, looking frantically for the Alfa Romeo.

“Aaron, how did you get here?”

“I borrowed a friend's station wagon.”

“Too slow. We have to hurry—Here it is!” The convertible's top was up, the doors locked. I pulled out the key case and then dropped it, noticing in an abstracted way that while my mind seemed to be working, I couldn't quite control my hands. Aaron picked up the keys and steered me to the passenger's side, wrapping his windbreaker around me as we went.

“I'll drive, you talk. What's going on?”

I told him, about Holt and Andreas and the Trout Pond Café, while he fumbled with the Alfa's gears. The lodge doors opened and a crowd poured out, but they were intent on their rescue plans and didn't notice us creeping away with
our lights out. As he rounded the first bend, out of sight of the lodge, Aaron flicked on the headlights and speeded up. The beams cut a tunnel in the night, flashing past the rocky banks and columns of trees, snaking around the hairpin turns that switchbacked down the mountain. We had miles of highway ahead of us, and then an unfamiliar dirt road. What if we couldn't find the cabin, what if—

“Carnegie, you do understand why Walker needed a scapegoat?” His voice, like Holt's earlier in the day, was raised against the noise of the engine. At least now we were protected from the wind, wrapped in the small dim space under the canvas top.

“So he wouldn't be accused of kidnapping. It's obvious.”

Aaron shook his head. “No, it isn't. If the plan was to release Nickie safely, without her knowing who kidnapped her, there wouldn't be any accusation. She goes home, Douglas doesn't testify, Holt and Andreas get paid off by Guthridge, and nobody calls the police.”

“But then why—”

“I don't think that was the plan, Carnegie. I think they need a scapegoat for murder.”

I sank farther down in my seat and closed my eyes. He was right. The same idea had been hammering at my brain and I'd been trying to shut it out. With Nickie safe, Douglas Parry would do as he was bid. With Nickie dead, Douglas would move heaven and earth to find the woman who had cheated him and then stolen his daughter.

“But why—” My voice faltered, and I tried again. “Why kill her at all?”

His fist thumped softly against the steering wheel. “I don't know. I can't figure that part out.”

“But at least they won't hurt her until they have the money.”

“I hope to God you're right,” he muttered. “You said the ransom is due at midnight? What time is it now?”

“Twelve minutes to eleven.”

Aaron floored it.