“Michael?” she said.
He did not respond.
“Michael?”
“I don't think he hears you,” Alex said.
Michael, as if in confirmation of what Alex said, did not even blink his large, blue eyes.
“How awful,” Katherine said, looking away from him.
Alex made his arm tighter about her waist, as if giving her a bit of his own strength. “Let's hope that he hasn't gone completely over the edge. I'd like to hear him explain what he thought he was doing with this whole Satanic thing. I'd like to know why he killed Yuri.”
“We better be going,” Alton Harle suggested.
Alex nodded, then turned to the cultists. “We're going out of the woods, toward the ski run, cut directly across that. It's hardly snowing at all now; we've only got the wind to fight. We'll be back in Owlsden in fifteen or twenty minutes. You will all stay in a group, well ahead of us. I urge you, please, to behave yourselves all the way home.”
CHAPTER 19
Since the telephone wires were on the same poles as the power lines, Owlsden had been cut off from outside communications simultaneously with its loss of light and heat, and it was not possible for them to ring up Constable Carrier and arrange to have him assume responsibility for the prisoners. Leo Franks donned skis and went down the slopes into town to rouse the policeman from his bed and to arrange for a couple of deputies to make the return trip up on the ski lift.
All of the cultists except Michael Harrison were herded into the library where Mason Keene and Alton Harle kept a watch over them with two loaded shotguns. Katherine thought that, from the expressions on their faces, it was clear that neither Keene nor Harle would hesitate in pulling the trigger if that was their last recourse to keep the mob in line. Michael was taken to the dining room downstairs, where the other fireplace was in operation, and he was placed in a chair against the wall where Alex could tram a rifle squarely on his chest.
“Is that necessary?” Lydia asked.
“Yes,” Alex said. The tone of his voice brooked no debate, but she was not the sort of woman to be easily dissuaded.
She said, “But he doesn't even seem to be aware of us.”
“It could be an act,” Alex said.
Lydia said, “You can see that it is no act. It's genuine enough. That poor boy is no longer with us.”
By heating the milk at the fireplace, Patricia Keene had made hot chocolate for those who wanted it. Katherine held a mug of it now and sipped cautiously at the steamy liquid, slowly thawing out as it ran down her throat and warmed her stomach.
“How do you feel?” Lydia asked her.
“Better,” she said.
“What an ordeal!”
“Less than it might have been if Alex hadn't chanced along.”
Alex snorted good-naturedly. “It wasn't chance, believe me. I knew that something could happen tonight, what with a major snow coming, and Yuri dead only a day. I went into town this morning and brought Alton and Leo back with me after dark, hid them both upstairs so that, if the house was being watched, they might pass by unseen.”
“Then it was one of them that followed me upstairs, when I was getting ready to leave Owlsden tonight,” Katherine said.
“Alton, in fact,” Alex said. “He admitted to me that he had been clumsy about it, and he looked like a whipped dog when he reported that you'd fooled him at the kitchen door. God, did we scramble then!”
“How did he know to follow me, though?” she asked.
“It was easy enough to see that Michael had contacted you on the phone, just before the power blackout, and that he had told you something to get you out of Owlsden. I heard enough of the conversation to tell that, and I guessed that he was warning you against me.”
“He was.”
“He's always hated me,” Alex said.
Katherine said, “It seemed to be the other way around, though, as if you hated him for no reason.”
“I disliked him, because I knew that he couldn't be trusted. All through school, I'd been the subject of his scorn and his clever plots to humiliate me. No one ever believed he was purposefully humiliating me, because he was so careful and so cunning about it.”
“Like when he knocked you down during our walk the other day,” she said, holding the warm mug in both hands.
“Like then, yes.”
“I thought you were crazy for thinking it was more than an accident.”
“I know what you thought, and I was angry with you for siding with him, even though I should have realized how bad I was making myself look and how logical his story seemed to be. But you can be sure that he saw us going up that street, circled to another block, went up faster than we did, turned a corner as planned and — boom, down I go in the snowbank.”
Michael appeared not to hear any of it, and he stared at that other world more intently than ever.
“He seemed so positive, so cheerful,” Katherine said. She was still having a battle with herself, trying to come to terms with herself and gain an understanding of why she had so woefully misjudged nearly everyone involved in this affair.
“And you are naturally disposed to like everyone with that sort of attitude,” Alex said. He was not being sarcastic or even scornful, but genuinely sympathetic.
“Isn't everyone?” she asked.
“To some degree.”
“Well, then—”
“But not to the degree you are so disposed,” he added. He looked at her and smiled, his dark eyes flickering with a reflection of the fire in the hearth. “Or to the degree that mother is. You are both chronic optimists, two of a kind.”
“Alex, really! Give us more credit for judgment than that!” Lydia said a bit huffily. “Not chronic optimists.”
“Yes, chronic. Neither of you wants to admit that there could be anything nasty in anyone. You want to see the world as one big rosy playground where everyone loves everyone else and where the evil people are always strangers that you'll never meet.”
Katherine was struck by his concise summation of her entire life-philosophy, but Lydia was less impressed. She said, “Isn't that a nice way to see the world, though?”
“No,” he said. “Because the world really isn't that way, and wishing that it were will not change it one little bit.”
“He's right,” Katherine said. “I disliked him and his friends solely because they were more pessimistic than optimistic. And because of that difference, I immediately categorized them, labeled them, decided they were capable of evil only because they were different than I was. And because Michael was so friendly, so optimistic, I liked him and thought he could do only good. I wasn't using my head, just my heart, and I see now that's no way to get through the world.”
“Because,” Alex elaborated, “not everyone who smiles and is nice to you has decent human motives. A smile can be a front far more easily than a frown can be, a prop to make you think the way the other person wants you to think.”
“You sound positively cynical,” Lydia said.
“No, just realistic,” he said.
Katherine said. “I think it's going to be good for me to be around you, Alex. You'll provide me with an outlook that I obviously need.”
“And it'll be good for me to be around you,” he said, smiling at her. “Sometimes, my pessimism may get just a bit too strong, as you have pointed out.”
She blushed but could not control it and quickly took a sip of her hot chocolate.