“The suicides had nothing to do with it.” She took a deep breath. “When I was in school, going to the Adirondacks for Christmas vacation was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do. The aunt and uncle I mentioned weren’t really my aunt and uncle, just distant cousins of my mother. They were isolated, ignorant people. George was depressive. Maureen was manic.”
“Why would your parents send you to people like that?”
“Sending me to the Adirondacks in the winter and to music camp in the summer was their strategy for getting closer to each other. One-on-one. Simplify. Communicate. Solve their marriage problems. Of course, it never worked. Like most people, they secretly liked their problems. And liked getting rid of me.”
“Are your aunt and uncle, or whatever they are, still alive?”
“George eventually shot himself.”
“Jesus.”
“Maureen moved to Florida. I have no idea whether she’s dead or alive.”
“Where up here did they live?”
“In the middle of nowhere. Devil’s Fang was actually visible from the end of their road. The nearest real town was Dannemora.”
“The town with the prison.”
“Yes.”
“I still don’t think I’m understanding why—”
“Why I wanted to come here? Maybe to see these mountains in a different way . . . in a different period of my life . . . make the memories go away.”
“What memories?”
“There was something wrong with George. He’d sit on the porch for hours, staring out into the woods, like he was already dead. Maureen was as sick as George, in the other direction. Always dancing around. She was wild for collecting rocks—triangular rocks. She insisted they were Iroquois arrowheads. Ear-a-kwah arrowheads. She loved the French pronunciation. She said a lot things with a French accent. Other times she’d pretend that she and I were Indian princesses lost in the forest, waiting to be rescued by Hiawatha. When he’d come for us we’d give him our collection of Ear-a-kwah arrowheads, and he’d give us furs to keep us warm, and we’d live happily ever after.”
“How old was she?”
“Maureen? Maybe fifty. She seemed ancient to me when I was fifteen. She might as well have been ninety.”
“Were there any other kids around?”
She blinked and stared at him. “You never answered my question.”
“What question?”
“What time are you going to Plattsburgh?”
CHAPTER 20
Gurney placed certain restrictions on his tentative plan to meet Rebecca at the Cold Brook Inn.
If the power failure continued, he wouldn’t go.
If the lodge’s cell reception wasn’t restored, he wouldn’t go.
If the sleet storm started again, he wouldn’t go.
But none of those conditions prevailed. The power was restored at 6:22 AM. Cell reception was restored at 6:24 AM. The predawn sky was spectacularly clear. The air was crisp and still and full of a piney fragrance. The lodge heating system had come back to life. All in all, everything was the opposite of the way it had been a few hours earlier.
By 6:55 AM Gurney had washed, shaved, dressed, and was ready to leave. He entered the still-dark bedroom. He could sense that Madeleine was awake.
“Be careful,” she said.
“I will.”
What being careful meant in his own mind was keeping a safe emotional distance from Rebecca, with whom there always seemed to be possibilities. He wondered if that might have been what Madeleine meant by it as well.
“When will you be back?”
“I should get to the inn by eight. If I leave there an hour or so later, I should be back before ten.”
“Don’t rush. Not on these roads. With the sleet last night, they’ll be slippery.”
“You’re sure you’ll be all right here by yourself?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, then. I’m off.” He bent down and kissed her.
The crimson-carpeted corridor was now brightly lit, a startling transformation from the previous night’s creepy backdrop for Barlow Tarr’s lamplit face. As he descended the broad staircase to the reception floor, an aroma of fresh coffee mingled with a woodsy evergreen scent.
Austen Steckle was standing in the doorway of an office behind the reception counter, speaking with some intensity on the phone. He was wearing the kind of chinos that cost five times as much as the Walmart variety. His woodsman’s plaid shirt fit his barrel physique so faultlessly Gurney guessed it had been custom tailored.
When Steckle caught Gurney’s eye, he ended his call with a statement plainly loud enough for Gurney to hear. “I’ll get back to you later. I have an important guest here.”
He came out from behind the counter with a toothy smile. “Hey, Detective, beautiful morning, eh? Smell that? That’s balsam. From the balsam fir. Aroma of the Adirondacks.”
“Very nice.”
“So, everything okay with you folks? Suite to your liking?”
“It’s fine. Got a bit chilly last night with the power outage.”
“Ah, yeah. Part of the wilderness experience.”
“We did have a midnight visit from Barlow Tarr.”
Steckle’s grin faded. “What could he want that time of night?”
“He warned us about the evil here at the lodge.”
“What evil?”
“‘The evil that killed them all.’”
Steckle’s mouth twisted into an expression between disgust and fury. “What else did he say?”
“More of the same. Is this all news to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is what I’m telling you new information—this kind of thing with Tarr?”
Steckle rubbed the stubble on his shaved head. “You better come into my office.”
Gurney followed him around the reception counter into a room furnished in the same “Adirondack” style as every other space in the lodge. Steckle’s desk was a varnished pine slab standing on four upright logs, bark intact. His chair was a rustic bentwood affair with trimmed branches for legs. He motioned Gurney to a similar chair on the opposite side of the desk. When they were both seated, he leaned his thick forearms on the pine slab.
“Hope you don’t mind a little privacy, but we may get into some areas here that are not for general consumption. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“We got a difficult situation here. You asked me about Barlow. Between you and me? Barlow is a crazy pain in the ass. Delusional. Scares the shit out of people. Talking all the time about wolves, evil, death, all kinds of crap. Delusional crap.” He paused. “So you’re maybe thinking, why the hell do we put up with crap like that? Why not just kick the fucker out and be done? Or maybe you’re thinking the bigger question, why was this crazy fucker Barlow ever allowed to be here to begin with?”
“I was told that someone or other from the Tarr family has been working at the lodge ever since it was built a century ago by Dalton Gall.”
“Well, it’s true. But that’s still no reason to put up with crap. The real problem was Ethan. A great man, Ethan, don’t get me wrong. But that greatness—and the determination that came along with it? That could be a problem.”
“His determination to turn every loser into a productive citizen?”
If that characterization hit a sore spot with Steckle due to his own past, he concealed it well. “Like the Good Book says, every virtue has its vice. But, hey, how can I complain, right? Maybe you heard what Ethan did for me?”
“Tell me.”
“I was a thief. An embezzler. I did some time. Luck of the draw, I got chosen for Ethan’s rehabilitation program. Suffice it to say, the program worked. Turned me into a new person. I even changed my name. My name for most of my fucked-up life was Alfonz Volk. That was the name of the guy my mother married when she got pregnant. But I found out later he wasn’t really my father. My mother had got pregnant by another guy who got killed in a car accident. Guy by the name of Austen Steckle. So she lied to Alfonz Volk so he’d marry her. A very fucked-up situation. My name should’ve always been Steckle. That was my genes. So to change my name to Steckle was the perfect new beginning. When I graduated from Ethan’s program, he hired me to work on the books up here. Incredible, right? I’ll have gratitude to that man till the day I die.”