Nine Man's Murder (5 page)

18

J
onas hid the
silver revolver in the dresser drawer. Strange: In his younger days he had never liked guns; his greatest weapon had always been his wits. He had never even held a firearm before becoming partners with Bryan.

For it was not violence, but childhood stories, that had first lured Jonas to the field of private investigation. Knights in armor, to begin with, then hardboiled detectives living exciting lives—but more important, living by their wits. Much more appealing than languishing on a farm, a skinny (thinner than brother Pedro), weak (weaker even than Raul) laborer, as impressed with rhinestones as with real diamonds, Papa had always charged.

Jonas felt the need for fresh air. Down the stairs, through the entry hall, past the sound of someone playing billiards.

The air outside was crisp as chilled lettuce. Jonas was not alone. The final flakes of a recent snowfall were frosting Bryan’s hair.

Despite the breakup of their partnership, Jonas bore Bryan no ill will. Even during their stormiest phase, he had never told Bryan what he had done eight years ago.

“Prissy would love it up here,” Bryan said without turning to face Jonas. “I saw her yesterday. Twice a week, like clockwork. She can never forgive me. She doesn’t even know I did anything wrong.”

“Did you ever consider the possibility that she might be right?”

Bryan turned around, his expression blank as the snow. “I vowed I’d avenge my family. Paul Templar and I cannot both stay in business. It’s him or me.” Bryan’s body seemed to wilt. “Yet the more I try to untangle everything, the more tangled things become.”

Jonas decided to risk an argument. “Which is exactly what will happen if you go through with your plan.”

“Damien violated his oath to uphold justice when he started cooperating with Antonio Capaldi.”

“And if you turn him in, you’re condemning his brother, too. Carter works for him, and could very well go down with Damien as an accomplice. Even though he knows nothing about Damien’s connection to Capaldi.”

“Look, we’ve been through this all before. There’s no point in refighting old battles.”

“You know I have to tell Carter about his brother. I have to warn him about what you plan to do. It’s only fair.”

Bryan shrugged but said nothing. Bryan was right. There was no point in discussing it. Jonas breathed in the bracing air, savoring the dismal beauty. The sky was dark and overcast; the sun had not shown itself all day.

“Lovely out here,” Jonas observed.

“Actually,” Bryan said, “I was thinking about how isolated it is. In a way, we are not so much Damien’s guests, as his prisoners.”

* * *

T
hat went well,
Amanda thought dryly.

She understood Reeve’s anger. He would be angrier yet if he knew the full story. It wasn’t easy working for District Attorney Peyton. How he demanded that all your energies be channeled to your job. Particularly if you were a woman. And if you were a woman hampered by the “distractions” of a husband or family, you could kiss goodbye any chance of grasping the ladder’s top rung. Her only chance of achieving her ambitions was to provide herself with her own break, by cracking a high-profile case. Hence her investigation of Antonio Capaldi.

For nearly eight years she had been accumulating evidence against the mob chieftain with the patience of a bird storing seeds for the winter, one grain at a time, sacrificing countless off-duty hours to the career-making crusade. And when, two years into the investigation, she discovered that Reeve Argyle—her former detective-school classmate—was Capaldi’s most trusted bodyguard, she crossed a line that had separated enthusiasm from ethics.

Getting close to Reeve had not been simply a backstage pass to Capaldi’s secrets. It had been a tool, to be sure, but a tool wielded by a vulnerable hand to repair a splintered heart. Jonas had never been aware of her feelings for him, blinded by eyes that could see only Jill. There had been as much consolation as cunning in Amanda’s seduction of Reeve.

Reeve had seemed to have genuine feelings for her. If he had realized the type of information he was letting slip, or what Amanda would do with it over the next six years, what would he have done? What would he do now? A wounded animal will behave unpredictably, and some arrows can pierce two targets at once, ego and heart. A double wound like that would be fatal to any hope she might have of enlisting Reeve’s aid now.

She emerged from her room to find Aaron standing in front of Reeve’s room, poised, as if having just come from it. What would he be doing in there? Even if Aaron’s presence would not make a visit to Reeve’s room awkward, the timing was probably not the best. There would be time enough, after things settled down, to confront Reeve. Plenty of time.

* * *

T
hings were working
out just as he had known they would. Hatter was not disappointed with his decision to come to Moon’s End. He had known that something was going to happen, and the mysterious absence of Damien was a good start.

Hatter lifted his eyes to find Bryan and Jonas entering the parlor room. They must have come from outside, for he had heard the front door close.

“Keeping busy?” Jonas asked.

“Working on my new novel,” Hatter replied.

“Are you the writer,” Bryan asked, “or the ghost writer?”

Ghosts. Supernatural. Ha ha.

“I don’t understand,” Jonas said. “If you’re so interested in the supernatural, why did you train as a detective?”

“I didn’t always know what I wanted to do,” Hatter replied.

Yet the seeds of his destiny had been planted in his youth, in the form of strange notions about the otherworldly and supernatural, the residue of bizarre science fiction stories by Hatter and his outcast teenage friends. These concepts earned their creators an unprecedented, if derisive, recognition by those schoolmates who had formerly paid them no heed whatever. But negative attention was better than none at all. Gradually time hardened controversial notions into a set of beliefs.

By the time Hatter graduated from Damien Anderson’s detective training program, he had become so deeply rooted in the complex network of unorthodox beliefs he had helped to popularize, that to disentangle himself became decreasingly feasible. Their growth set the course of his life. Destiny deflected his path from private investigation toward a new goal: to champion, in fiction and on the lecture circuit, the cause of which he had suddenly found himself spokesman.

Hatter’s entire adult career had been devoted to legitimizing all forms of superstition, but over the years his true passion gravitated toward the existence of deceased spirits lingering in the material plane to resolve unresolved issues.

“I read about that psychic fair in L.A. two weeks ago,” Jonas was saying. “You were one of the speakers.”

“Yes,” Hatter replied cautiously. “I spoke about the influence of earthbound spirits on material existence. You’re well informed.”

“It’s my job to know things. The article dwelt at some length on the tragedy that transpired outside the convention center. Apparently police were chasing an escaped criminal in front of the convention center. They believed he was drawing a weapon. A hot-headed young officer fired on him, accidently killing an innocent bystander in the crowd. The suspect got away.”

Hatter shivered. He had heard about the shooting. He knew that the victim’s spirit would not leave the earthly realm. It would haunt the material plane, seeking vengeance against all it held responsible for its death. But Hatter had been inside when the victim was shot. The spirit would probably go after the police officer who had fired the shot, perhaps the escaped criminal, and anyone else it felt had brought together the elements of its fate. Hatter had been only one of many speakers, although admittedly the keynote speaker. But surely he would not be singled out as the one who had drawn the victim to his destiny.

If he were, even the distance of hundreds of miles would not protect him from the ghostly hand of vengeance. But there was nothing to connect Hatter to a victim whose name he did not even know. He was safe.

19

H
atter had seemed
eager to leave the parlor room. Not long afterwards, Bryan and Jonas noticed Aaron furtively stalking the downstairs corridor, retreating from the cluster of bedroom doors and entering the parlor room. Though previously his custom to avert his eyes, this time he glanced briefly into theirs as he passed, challenging them with the riddle of an enigmatic smile; and, right hand opening the front door of the inn, he stepped outside, the second time he had done so since their arrival. Bryan and Jonas exchanged quizzical glances.

“I think I’ll go to my room,” Bryan said, stifling a yawn. “And rest.”

But as Bryan disappeared into the downstairs corridor, Jonas, barely registering the clinking of billiard balls as he stood near the entry hall, was unconvinced. He could tell from his ex-partner’s restlessness that though Bryan was heading in the direction of his bedroom, he was not going there to sleep.

* * *

J
ill lay on
the bed face down, to stop the room from spinning. She had come here to sort out her feelings. Just looking at Bryan rekindled the heat, but was it the heat she had felt fifteen years ago, or the kind that consumes all affection?

With Bryan she had felt safe, protected. Even now she could still feel the beat of a heart swollen by desperate love, like waters swelling behind a dam, deep and enduring. If you love someone, you can never stop. But what if you can’t forgive someone you can’t stop loving?

What was she doing, wiping her tears on the pillowcase? If she had to go through with this, she would do so with dignity. With the aid of her compact mirror, she applied makeup below eyes that were sometimes warm lavender, sometimes cold cobalt, but always intense. She dragged a comb through her blonde hair, parted in the middle, recalling against her will Bryan’s hand ruffling through it, with the encouraging praise of “Good girl.”

On the end table beside the bed sat her bottle of clonazepam. She swallowed a pill, to calm her nerves. Slowly she unpacked. The walk-in clothes closet, thankfully, was spacious.

After Bryan, her love had drifted lost through the dark forest of her heart. Of course there had been no choice but to break up with him. His intentions may have been noble, but even the best intentions sometimes sprout toxic leaves. Perhaps she would tell Bryan about Jonas, to wound Bryan as he had wounded her. But once you set foot on the road to vengeance, she knew, there’s no turning back. Was she really prepared to make that journey?

One thing she knew for sure. She wanted Imogen back. She wanted her daughter back.

W
hen Gideon invited
the knocker to enter the room, Bryan crept inside like a man entering a confession box. Clean-shaven boyish face, brown hair in bangs like a medieval monk’s. His soft-spoken voice lacked its usual ironic edge.

“Gideon,” Bryan began as he sat in the chair before the writing desk, “you’re a priest … ” Gideon didn’t correct him. “How does one find redemption?”

“Well, Bryan,” Gideon said, “first you have to sin.”

Gideon knew what Bryan was referring to. Fifteen years ago, training at Anderson’s, Bryan had shared his motives for becoming a detective: the kidnapping of his kid sister, the deaths of his parents.

“Sometimes redemption is seeing that you’re not guilty,” Gideon continued. “I think what you’ve been chasing all these years may not be redemption, but forgiveness.”

“You’re saying I should forgive myself?”

“No,” Gideon said. “You should know there’s nothing to forgive yourself for.”

* * *

A
manda stepped out
of the shower and dried herself off. She slipped on a new dress and reached for her—

Where was her room key? She had placed it on the dresser. At least, she thought she had. She searched the room. Where could she have put it? Could someone—

She checked her bedroom door. Still locked. The window lock was pressed in, as well.

She must have set the key down somewhere without thinking. This reunion had her so preoccupied. How could she have—

The thought was lost to the shrill pierce of a chilling scream.

20

B
ryan was out
of his room and down the corridor before Jonas could leave the parlor room.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know. It came from outside.”

Without further talk, the two men left the parlor room to investigate. In the entry hall they encountered Reeve emerging from the billiard room, followed by Carter.

Outside the front door, not even a ghost stirred in the barren plateau of snow and trees. A fresh snow had covered all but one set of footprints. Jonas tracked them, followed by his companions, around Moon’s End to the door of a stand-alone wooden shed several yards from the side of the inn. The men entered.

They took quick inventory of the shed’s contents. Propped against the wall to their left was a shovel; on the opposite wall hung an extension ladder. Crates and tools cluttered the shed. Behind a workbench stood Aaron, dissecting a wooden board with a saw in his right hand.