Page 33

33

“What do you think that means?” Bear asked Lila when she relayed her conversation with Paulina to him, word for word, blow by blow.

“To me, it sounds like Nancy found out something when she was working at the Snow River retreat. She wanted to tell someone, but she was afraid because she was pregnant. So Allison offered to take care of it—maybe she was planning to put something in the mail on the plane that day. Maybe it was even Nancy’s journal. But she never got the chance because she was murdered.”

Bear frowned as he added some kibble to Jack’s dish. “That does fit with your theory that they were trying to kill Nancy instead of Allison.”

“I think she and Nancy had similar or identical dresses that they’d ordered from the same catalogue. That’s what she was wearing to the airstrip, along with her winter gear. She was probably hard to identify. That scary assassin was supposed to kill Nancy because she’d witnessed something. Instead, he shot Allison. Then he made it look like a rage shooting and pinned it all on Bowman. Look.”

Kneeling on the carpet next to his coffee table, she sorted through the pile of documents that Molly had brought from the FBI office. “Here’s Bowman’s confession. It’s all very rote, like he’s just repeating something he was told to say. Also, it doesn’t totally line up.”

“What do you mean?”

“He says he shot Allison Casey three times in the back. But there are only two holes in her dress.”

“Maybe he didn’t remember exactly how many times he hit her. He was spraying bullets all over the place. And he was shooting from the tree line. He could have easily gotten that part wrong. The police didn’t make a big deal of it.” He winced as he heard his own rationalization. He, of all people, should know that you couldn’t always count on the police being completely accurate or even well-intentioned. “Okay, I admit that doesn’t mean much.”

“Especially if it was a coverup.” Lila scanned through the notes on his confession again. “They don’t push him at all on anything he said. Like when they asked him why he opened fire, he said, ‘I was angry at everyone. Why should they get to be happy?’ And that was it! Not a single follow-up question.”

“People don’t always have coherent reasons for heinous actions. Usually they don’t.”

“But he did . He said what his reason was, and they accepted it and moved on. If he was taking the fall for someone else—for Donald Jenner, that assassin—he would want to show he had a reason. Otherwise, they might have to keep investigating. It’s the whole plausible deniability thing. The police could say they interviewed him, his story checked out, he confessed, boom, case closed.”

Which could have been completely true. The police had such a backlog of cases that when one solved itself so easily, it was tempting to take the win.

If it was out and out corruption—someone nefarious working hand in hand with the police to frame someone—it would have to be someone very powerful. As in, a wealthy senate candidate fighting for even more powerful economic interests.

“So Adam Hardwell pulled some strings with the local police.”

“That’s my theory.”

But there was a problem with this scenario. “According to the Internet, Billy Hardwell was already known to be a fuckup. What worse thing could he do that would require this degree of a coverup?”

He sat down next to Lila and drew her into his lap. As she settled her butt against his thigh, he felt his constant desire for her surge. All he had to do was touch her and he wanted to be naked in bed with her.

“Something tells me this is bigger than Billy Hardwell.”

She nodded as she cuddled deeper into his lap. “I agree. It must have been something more, something much bigger. We have to find out what it was.”

“We do?” He nuzzled his nose into the soft skin of her neck. “Why do we?”

“Because…” She squirmed in his lap, which made matters even more dire for his state of arousal, then leaned back against his arm and fixed him with a serious gaze. “Because I think that’s why I came here.”

“Hm?” He stopped his teasing. “What do you mean?”

“I knew I had to come to Firelight Ridge as soon as I saw it mentioned in an article I was reading. It was one of those intuition moments. When I feel something like that, I really have no choice. I have to go. It drives my employers crazy, but it has nothing to do with them, or with a man, or a roommate, or anything like that. It’s just a very strong instinct telling me I have to leave, and sometimes, where I have to go.”

He knew that much already, though he didn’t like to think about it. When the time came, she would leave here too.

“At first I thought my intuition brought me here for a break, because I don’t sense things as strongly here.” She rested her hand on his chest with a tender smile. “And then I thought it was because of you.”

He caught her hand and pressed it against his heart. “I like that theory.”

“Me too. But it’s not the whole story. When I tried to leave, Rita Casey’s body stopped me. Allison Casey has been talking to me. There’s something going on that I need to figure out. That’s why I came here and that’s why I can’t leave yet.”

Maybe he didn’t want this mystery to be solved, if that meant Lila would leave. Then he dismissed that selfish thought. Once a detective, always a detective. If there was a case to be solved, he would make sure to do his part.

And then a puzzle piece clicked into place. “Rita,” he said thoughtfully. “She was sketching around Snow River, we know that much. Maybe she happened to stumble across those old cabins and saw something. Maybe that’s why she was killed.”

“Or maybe she came here to follow up on something her podcaster fiancé discovered,” said Lila.

“Yes. Could be. For all we know, he came here to investigate in the first place because Rita was related to Allison Casey and knew about the story.”

“Oh my gosh.” Lila put a hand over her mouth. “I bet that’s exactly what happened. Everyone had forgotten the story until Jim Sutcliff came here. How did he even know about it, if not through a family member? But do you think whatever is going on at those Snow River cabins is the same thing from forty years ago? And what about the man who picked her up from the hotel?”

“Shit.” Her mention of the man who had picked up Rita triggered a reminder. “I got a message from Cromwell that he was going to send me an image from the bank video feed, a clear one they’ve enhanced. He wants to know if the man has been seen around Firelight Ridge. But I couldn’t get it to load.”

“Do you think Kathy still has the Wi-Fi on at the store?”

“It’s worth checking. Want to go for a little ski?”

Even though it was after midnight, they were both too caught up in their speculations and theories to even think about sleeping. They pulled on their layers of winter gear, which made them both look roughly double their actual size.

Lila wore a black down vest over a bright red sweater, and a waterproof parka with a dramatic faux-fur collar that framed her face so she looked like a Russian princess. Martha had knitted her a multicolored pointed elf’s cap with perfectly sized ear flaps and a leather tie under her chin.

When she had troubled tying it, he did it for her, such tenderness welling in his heart that he thought it might pour out of him and spill all over the floor. “There,” he said gruffly when he was done. “Not a speck of snow will get through this.”

“And if I get lost and wind up at the North Pole, they’ll welcome me right in.” A moment later, she took her turn to help him by fastening the top snap of his parka, always difficult when he’d already put his gloves on.

“Gotta love winter, when it takes an extra half hour to go anywhere.” That burr in his voice just wouldn’t go away.

“People keep telling me I’ll get sick of it, but I’m not sure I believe it.” She pulled on her gloves and he swung the door open for her. “So far, I love everything about the winter here. The snow, the alpenglow, the light, the dark. It speaks to me.”

Did she mean that the winter literally spoke to her? With Lila, anything was possible.

Outside—sheer splendor in the form of a deep dark sky filled with scintillating crystals of light. They turned off their headlamps and gazed up at it, speechless. He took Lila’s hand and they stood for a timeless moment just soaking in the beauty. Even though it was a still night, the twinkling of the stars and the gentle light waves of Aurora Borealis just starting up made the sky seem endlessly dynamic.

“How could I ever get tired of this?” Lila whispered.

He squeezed her hand. His heart wanted to believe she wouldn’t, hoped desperately that she wouldn’t. But he’d seen so many people start out with stars in their eyes, only to flee for the lower forty-eight—or Hawaii—after their umpteenth blizzard of the season.

The main road through town was always kept plowed, although the town had lost their best plow truck driver when Daniel had been killed in an avalanche this past spring. Murph McGee had that contract now, and he was so far doing a good job, though he had a bad habit of dinging people’s cars.

It was only a short ski to the general store, but with Lila it took longer because she kept stopping to watch the aurora shimmer into being, then disappear.

“You’ll see plenty Northern Lights this winter,” he told her as he tugged her onwards. “You might even get sick of those too.”

“That will never happen. Shh.” She held up a finger. A great horned owl gave a deep hoot somewhere in the nearby woods. Lila hooted back, the sound so similar to the real thing that he was nearly fooled.

“Have you been practicing that?”

“Yes. I love owls. I could carry on this convo all night.”

But she allowed him to hurry her along the icy, empty road, lit only by the starlight reflecting off the snow. They’d never turned their headlamps back on, and by now their eyes had adjusted to the dark. They skied quietly, not wanting to disturb anyone fast asleep in their homes.

Unlike in a city, most people here didn’t leave any lights on at night. Electricity was always something to be considered. A light required either a generator or precious battery power from a solar array. Bear knew some people who relied on kerosene or oil lamps in the winter, with candles as a backup in case fuel ran low. But no one would leave such a light burning after they went to sleep.

Kathy was the exception, but only because she sometimes forgot to turn her WiFi off at night. It used only a small amount of wattage, easy for her solar system to handle, so she only cursed a bit when she realized it the next morning.

They got lucky. Once again, she’d left it on. Bear leaned against the wall, getting as close to the router inside as he could, while he logged in. “Any chance you remember the last password?”

“No, but I know all the passwords she’s used. She recycles them.” She rattled off passwords until one finally worked and he was online. He went to his email and found the one from Cromwell. As the photo loaded—even Kathy’s Wi-Fi was on the slow side—they watched a soft green veil emerge over the treetops and glow like a beacon.

“Do you hear it sing?” Lila asked softly. “It makes a sound.”

“That’s—” He was going to say “impossible,” but then he remembered that with Lila, nothing was impossible.

The photo popped onto his phone. As he glanced down at it, a chill shot through him. “Lila.”

His tense tone caught her attention. She looked at the phone and gasped. “Is that…?”

“Our new cook? I think it is.”