“Oh.” She lifted her sweater and jacket as far as the underside of her breasts and turned around slowly, so he could see there wasn’t anything snaking down her back. It was by far the weirdest thing she had done in a day full of weird things. It didn’t feel real—more like she was acting in a TV show. The unreality emboldened her. “Here’s the deal,” she said, lowering her sweater. “You confess to having beaten up Becky Castle, and we’ll make sure Millie van der Hoeven never has the chance to testify that you killed her brother.”
Reid’s eyes narrowed. He stepped toward her, and for a moment she was afraid. Then a crash from the kitchen reminded her that they were in a relatively public place. If he tried anything, she could bring the house down with her screams.
“It was you who put that dress and the makeup in my office, wasn’t it? You little bitch.” He hissed the last phrase so quietly she wasn’t sure he had said it at all.
She forced her voice to remain strong and confident. “I’m sure you’d rather be arrested for assault than for murder.”
“It was an accident,” he snapped.
“So you want us to take Millie to the cops?”
“No!” He crossed one arm over his chest and propped the other against it. He covered his mouth and chin with one hand. Finally he said, “How do I know you won’t let her testify to the police after I’ve pled guilty to the assault?”
“It’s a balance. Like a seesaw. If you deny you beat up Becky Castle, we’ll be in trouble. If we let Millie tell the cops, you’ll be in trouble.”
“Getting arrested for assault and battery is trouble, you idiot.”
“You’re a rich guy. You can afford a good lawyer. Tell him it was a lovers’ fight, he’ll probably get you off with a few years suspended and some domestic violence classes.”
He looked at her closely. “Your friend is the person who really assaulted the Castle girl, isn’t he?” He stared at her hand. She looked down and saw her wedding ring. “He’s your husband,” Reid said.
She folded her hand and pressed it against her leg. “Do we have a deal?”
“I have to finish the dinner,” he said, tilting his head toward the kitchen. “I’m conducting some important business there. And I need a chance to call my attorney, to arrange to turn myself in.”
“You have until midnight tonight.”
“Just like Cinderella,” he said. “All right.”
She stood for a moment, not knowing what to do now. He had just . . . given in. She hadn’t been expecting that. Finally she shook herself and walked off. He said nothing, so neither did she.
It wasn’t until she had rounded the corner and was facing the stairs up to the lobby that she let herself smile, a wide, glorious, split-seamed smile. She did it. She was going to save her husband.
8:30 P.M.
Shaun waited until the young woman was out of sight before shouldering his way through the swinging kitchen door. He barged straight through the middle of the freewheeling choreography of chefs and line cooks and waiters, his face pricking even foul-tempered kitchen workers to jump out of his way.
The hushed roar of the banquet hall neither slowed him nor soothed his expression. He pistoned along the edge of the room until he spotted the sommelier, pulling bottles from the bottom of a well-loaded cart. He moved into her space, crowding her until she clinked against the cart. “Jeremy Reid,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Um,” she said.
“Where?”
She pointed toward the ballroom exit. “He’s . . . he’s . . .”
“Where?”
“The lobby bar,” she squeaked.
Shaun sped toward the exit, moving as fast as he could without drawing undue attention to himself. He pushed through the doors into the lobby.
The lobby of the Algonquin Waters resort, for all its gleaming wood and arching spaces, was essentially a triangle whose point was truncated by a wide rectangle. The ballroom and smaller meeting rooms ranged along the bottom of the rectangle. One corner of the triangle hosted massive leather furniture in front of a riverstone fireplace that could have accommodated a whole deer on a spit. The other corner was the lounge bar. At the intersection of the triangle and the rectangle, the Oriental-carpet-covered floor opened to allow visitors to descend to the lower spa level via a polished cherry stairway. The same stairway where, if his guess was correct, his little friend was going to come out and cross the lobby to the parking lot.
He knew, from listening to Jeremy, that the hourly employees’ entrance in the back was locked, day and night, accessible only to those who could punch in the pass code. To get in to see him, his blackmailer must have come in through the public entrance, a bank of double doors opposite the top of the staircase.
Shaun speedwalked across the lobby to the bar. Jeremy was behind the faux-distressed bar counter, going over a list with one of the bartenders while the other one watched a football game on the television.
“Jeremy, I need to speak with you right away,” Shaun said in a low voice.
His son looked at him, clearly startled. “Dad? What’s up?”
“Please,” Shaun said, beckoning Jeremy with fingers flapping “urgent.” Jeremy excused himself and stepped away from the counter. Shaun grabbed him by the shoulders and moved them into a position where he was partially concealed by an overgrown ficus. “Can you see the lobby?”
Jeremy looked past the green fronds. “Yeah.”
“Okay.” Shaun let out a breath. “In a moment, you’re going to see a young woman come up those stairs. She’s wearing jeans and a jacket that has NORTH COUNTRY HARLEY-DAVIDSON on it. I want you to trail her, discreetly, to the parking lot.”
“What?”
“When she gets into her car, I want you to follow her. See where she goes. Then call me and let me know.”
His son searched his face. “Dad? Are you drunk?”
“Listen to me. This is an emergency. That woman is blackmailing me. She’s . . . she going to set up an accident at the mill and claim we’re responsible. Somebody could get hurt.”
“Are you kidding?” Jeremy looked toward the lobby, the bar, and the lounge before settling his gaze on Shaun’s face again. “Dad, if that’s so, call the police. Right now.”
Shaun squeezed his son’s shoulders tightly. “I can’t.” He cut off the start of Jeremy’s protest. “I know it doesn’t make sense to you. I know you’re working right now, and I’m asking you to abandon your job.”
“It’s not that. Things are humming along. I’m practically redundant.”
“Never.” He stared into Jeremy’s eyes, so like his own and his father’s before him. “Please. I need you to do this for me now. Please.” He saw Jeremy’s gaze flick away from him. “Is that her? Do you see her?”
Jeremy nodded.
“Will you do it? For me?”
Shaun felt his son’s shoulders relax beneath his hands. “Sure, Dad. If that’s what you need.”
“Go. Do you have your cell phone?”
Jeremy was already weaving his way between the tables, headed for the open lobby. He slapped his jacket in response. “Right here.”
“Don’t get too close to her. Don’t lose her.” Jeremy was moving out of earshot. “Thank you,” Shaun said. But he didn’t think the boy heard.
8:40 P.M.
Clare was watching when Shaun Reid made his return to the ballroom. He paused in the entryway for a moment and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. Her grandmother Fergusson would have approved. Never trust a man who uses tissues, she would say. He will prove flimsy and unreliable.
“Shaun Reid’s back,” she said, pitching her voice to slip under the lively conversations on either side of her.
Russ, across the table, nodded. He twisted his head slightly, as if getting the kinks out, and followed Reid’s progress back to his table. “Shame,” he said. “He’s missed most of the dinner.” Servers were circulating throughout the ballroom, collecting dirty plates and laying out dessert ware.
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“You almost missed the dinner,” Linda said, mock-elbowing him in the ribs. “I swear, you’d stop your own funeral for police business.” She leaned on the table and spoke confidingly to Clare. “Listen to a woman who knows. Never marry a cop.”
Clare felt hot color flooding her cheeks. She was saved from coming up with a response by Hugh, who took her hand in his and said, “I’ll do my best to see she takes your advice.” He kissed the back of her hand. Robert Corlew made an awkward harrumphing sound, and Lena and her mayor “aaaahhhhed” as if they were sinking into a vat of marshmallow goo.
Russ looked like one of the great stone faces of Easter Island.
Clare had never been entirely convinced of the doctrine of bodily assumption, but she found herself wishing it were true and that God would see fit in His wisdom to whisk her, dress, hand, flaming cheeks, and all, into His heavenly kingdom. Now. Right now. Any time now.
She gently withdrew her hand and smiled almost convincingly at Hugh. Apparently she still had work to do on earth. To escape the massed gaze of the entire table, she twisted away, looking to where waiters were rolling out a podium next to the head table. “What’s on the schedule?” she asked no one in particular.
Jim Cameron answered. “The president of the ACC is going to give a little speech, introduce a few people, and make a plug for donations. Then the GWP folks and the van der Hoevens—” He tilted his head back, apparently just noticing the dearth of van der Hoevens at the head of the room. “Well, whoever else has to sign the deed of sale will do so. Then the dancing starts.” Beyond the head table, Clare could see where a bandstand had been set up next to the glass wall.
As she watched, the sommelier and her assistant rolled a heavy wine cart to the head table and began unloading some familiar wooden crates. “Oh, no,” she said. She couldn’t remember the damn wine for more than five minutes. She turned back to the table in time to see Linda twine her arm around Russ’s. On the other hand, perhaps she had good reason for her lack of focus.
“Excuse me.” She pushed back from the table and stood. Hugh, Russ, and Jim Cameron all rose.
Robert Corlew looked at them. “What?” he said. “What? Guys still do that?”
Lena Erlander looked sympathetically at the nonentical Mrs. Corlew.
Clare wove her way through the tables, careful to control her skirts. She crossed the dance floor and caught up with the sommelier just as she was unlocking the cart and preparing to roll it away. The crates, with their van der Hoeven Vineyards labels proudly displayed, were stacked in a staggered pyramid in front of the head table. Clare thought she had never seen a sadder sight. “Excuse me.” She touched the sommelier’s arm to get her attention. “Mr. van der Hoeven gave me two crates of his family’s wine to deliver to the banquet tonight. I’m afraid I forgot and left them in my car. Is it too late to bring them in?”
The sommelier frowned thoughtfully. “Mr. van der Hoeven’s instructions—” She caught herself, and Clare guessed that the news about Eugene van der Hoeven had already made the rounds at the Algonquin Waters. “His wishes,” she amended, “were that all the principals get a case as a gift and that the remainder be uncrated and uncorked for the dancing.” She tapped the side of her mouth with a white-gloved hand. “Yours will be awfully cold, but I suppose if we hold them back until the end of the evening . . . sure, go ahead. Bring them in. Do you need any help?”
“No. I’m right out front. My date and I will get them.” She turned back to her table, paused, then turned again. She crossed to where the slim woman in gray was seated, staring listlessly into nowhere. “Ms. van der Hoeven?”
The woman blinked and looked up at Clare. “Actually, it’s Tuchman. Well, no, I suppose it isn’t anymore. Maybe this time I’ll go back to being Louisa van der Hoeven. That sounds better than Louisa Tuchman, doesn’t it? Or Louisa de Parrada. I always thought that sounded like a flamenco dancer’s name. Who are you again?”
Eugene and Millie’s sister was apparently drowning her sorrows the old-fashioned way. “I’m Clare Fergusson,” she said. “I just wanted to say how very sorry I am about your brother.”
Louisa van der Hoeven de Parrada Tuchman blinked slowly. “I think Gene is one of those people about whom you can say, ‘His sufferings are over.’ ”
“Perhaps so.” Clare chose her words carefully. “I only knew him briefly, but he struck me in that time as a man who cared deeply about many things. Including your family and its history.” She waved a hand at the rough wooden crates framed by snowy linen. “I think it’s lovely that his last gesture will enable everyone to celebrate the van der Hoeven name with the van der Hoevens’ wine.”
Louisa looked down at the crates with a jaundiced eye. “No,” she said. “That’s just another example of how fake we are. Trying to impress everyone with money that was lost two generations ago.”
“I’m sorry?”
Louisa flopped one bony wrist over the edge of the table. “This is that stuff you buy in California and get stamped with whatever label you choose. The van der Hoevens don’t have a vineyard.”
8:45 P.M.
Millie heard the door open. She hunched over her ankles, franticially jabbing the point of the door hinge into the stretched expanse of her duct-tape shackles. She had already punched ten, twelve, fifteen holes in the thing, but it still wouldn’t tear apart.
“Millie?” It was Randy, of course. “Still back there?”
“I told you I’d wait right here,” she called back, her voice as lighthearted and reassuring as she could make it. It wasn’t as if she could go anywhere else. Still, if she could just separate the tape before he walked back and discovered what she’d been doing while he was away. . . . “Hey, when Shaun Reid brought me here, he said something about a box of wine near the door. Why don’t you find it, and we’ll have a drink? I don’t know about you, but I could use one.”
“Okay.” The thin beam of the flashlight appeared. It bounced around near the narrow door Randy had used to leave and enter. In the light’s backsplash, she could make out his silhouette. He had shoulders like a freaking gorilla. She thought of herself as a strong woman, but she didn’t have any illusions. He could do just about anything he wanted to her. If she didn’t get to him first. She redoubled her efforts, poking and tugging at the holes in the duct tape.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Try by the big door, the one that has the loading dock outside,” she called.
“Are you okay? You sound kind of winded.”
She took a deep breath. “Just feeling a little stressed. The wine will help.”
The flashlight beam tilted toward the front of the building. Millie poked another hole into the tape. She thrust her fingers through and pulled, her arms shaking, her thighs cramping from the strain of keeping her ankles as far apart as possible. She felt something yield. She pulled harder. There was a moment’s catch, and then a tearing sound, and her fetters fell into two pieces of tape, the ragged ends fluttering between her ankles.
She bit her lip to keep from howling. Then, for the first time all day, she stretched her legs wide, wide apart. The painful stretch was the most wonderful thing she had ever felt.
“Hey, I found it. Lemme see if I can get the lid off the box.”
Millie slowly rose from the floor. She straddled a crate, rolling her pelvis forward and back, cracking her spine and flexing her arms. From near the flashlight’s glow, she heard the distinctive sound of nails screeching out of wood.
“Phew! I hate to tell you, but this wine smells way bad. Like somebody stuffed old garage rags inside.”
“Nevermind, then.” Now she was free, she was anxious. She wanted to do what she had to do and get out. “Would you come back here, please? I’m feeling a little scared, all by myself in the dark.”
“You want me to find some water or something? I got a couple bottles in my backpack.”
“No. Please, I don’t want to sit here alone.”
“Okay.” His v
oice had the resigned tone of every man baffled by a woman’s changeable mind. “If that’s what you want.”
She wiped her palms against her pants. She wanted them to be hard and dry for this. “What did you and your wife decide to do?”
His voice, and the light, came closer. “Uh . . . she thinks you’d be better off coming home with us. In case Mr. Reid, you know, comes after you.”
She thinks we need to keep you under lock and key, Millie translated. She brought her ankles together and hunched over so that her hands, folded in her lap, weren’t visible.
The light played over her. “You okay? You look like you might be sick.”
She nodded her head. “I think I might.” She tightened her grip around the iron hinge pin. Its point, sharp and hard, pricked against her thigh. “Would you help me to the washroom?”
“Sure,” he said. He was close enough so she could smell him, gasoline and sweat and the strong, cheap detergent his clothes were washed in. He opened his arms to lift her, and she sprang forward, her thighs, her back, her arms all working together, and she drove the iron spike into his gut.
For a moment, they stood like lovers, his arms half embracing her, his face inches from hers, staring into each others eyes. Then, afraid she had only lightly wounded him, she shoved against his chest. He let out a noise like a chainsaw caught in a tree bole and fell to the floor.
The flashlight bounced off the uneven wooden boards at an angle and smashed against the metal footing of an ancient pulping machine. Instantly, the unrelenting darkness swallowed them.
“You . . . stabbed me.” Randy’s voice held more amazement than pain.
Millie was shaking so hard she could barely move. She backed away from the voice below her. She tried to think of something to say to him, something to justify what she had done, but in the end, her justification was that she was free to leave, whether he or his wife or Shaun Reid wanted her to or not. She backed away another step.
Randy groaned. “Holy crap.” He breathed shallowly, as if the movement of his lungs was painful. “Hurts.”