Snowbound (16 page)

Devlin huddled under the table for forty minutes, her legs cramping, listening to the six oilmen devour what sounded like an all-out feast, based on the intermittent stretches of blissful silence as they chewed, and the ferocity of their consumption.

Though little was said, she committed every detail to memory. They were executives from a company called Presidian Oil, and all spoke with great familiarity and affinity of Houston. An older-sounding gentleman named Reynolds gave a heartfelt, if drunken, toast to the “astronomical third quarter.” Sean was apparently the son of Ken, and there was frequent lamentation that a “first-rate son of a bitch” named Bobby couldn’t be with them to partake.

Then, as quickly as they’d come, the chairs scooted back from the table, and the oilmen departed en masse with Ethan.

Devlin crawled between two chairs and struggled to her feet, staring at the table, which resembled the aftermath of some epic battle—dishes and silverware strewn with haphazard abandon, plentiful portions of meat, eggs, and fruit still occupying china.

Her stomach ached with hunger, and she was reaching for a strip of bacon when voices erupted from the kitchen.

She rushed out of the dining room, up the passage, and, upon nearing the lobby, remembered leaving her parka and snow pants in the library, her gut telling her it would be a disaster if they were found.

The lobby stood empty.

She crossed the stone floor.

The door to the library was closed, and she put her ear to it, detecting the noise of the fire, nothing else.

It was empty inside, and her clothes lay exactly where she’d left them on the floor beside the cellar door.

As she picked them up, fast-approaching footsteps drove an electric shock of adrenaline down her spine.

She spun around, taking stock of available exits, anyplace she might hide, but there was just the furniture and the French doors, straining against all the snow that had piled up on the veranda.

With the footsteps seconds from the library, she lunged for the cellar door, palming the doorknob, turning it, praying the hinges wouldn’t squeak.

She slipped through into darkness, had it almost closed when two men strolled into the library, the door slamming after them. They stopped before the fireplace, just five feet away, Devlin watching through the four-millimeter crack between the door and the door frame.

“Goddamn it, Sean,” said the older of the two, a silver-haired man, tall, wide-shouldered, dressed in exquisite navy slacks and a plaid shirt rolled up to his elbows.

“Dad, I feel sick—”

“Lighten up.”

“This isn’t right. You know it.” Sean looked very much like his father facially, subtracting the wrinkles and the gray, adding some baby fat, though he wasn’t as tall, or as powerfully built.

The older man put both of his hands on his son’s shoulders.

“
Don’t
embarrass me, Sean.”

“Dad, there are women—”

“Lower your fucking voice. Nobody’s
making
you do anything. Go sit in your room the whole time, for all I—”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Me?” Devlin remembered the older man’s name—Ken. “I don’t know.” Ken walked out of Devlin’s line of site and Sean followed, the two just voices now, operating at scarcely more than a whisper. “Listen to me. You heard what Ethan said at breakfast, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“So deal with it.”

“I can’t be here for five days, Dad.”

“Hey, I twisted some major arms to get you on this trip. You know how many of my guys would kill—”

“Yeah, thanks so much for that.”

“Now wait just a doggone minute. I didn’t know it was gonna be, you know… .”

“What’d you think when they loaded us into floatplanes with blacked-out windows? Wouldn’t tell us where we were going?”

“Look, Sean, you’re here. You aren’t leaving early. So make the best of it.”

“How?”

“I don’t care, just … don’t embarrass me.”

“Fuck you.”

Footsteps tracked across the library, and Devlin heard the door open.

“Sean, come back. Sean!”

His father went after him, the library quiet again, just the fire crackling.

Devlin waited two minutes, straining to pick out the slightest patter of returning footsteps, but the men were gone.

She eased the cellar door open, moving carefully through the library, then into the lobby, where she stood holding her parka and snow pants, listening to distant voices, the clatter of door slams traveling up and down the corridors above.

She wandered into the south wing, quiet here and empty, just the ceiling lights humming above her.

There were peepholes in these doors as well, and she stopped at each to look inside, saw women behind three of the doors, sitting up in bed in skimpy lingerie, waiting.

At the end of the corridor, she turned the doorknob of an empty room, 119.

The door opened. She stepped inside, shut it.

She stashed her pants and parka in a chest of drawers across from the bed, then, taking out the .357, crouched under the peephole for five long minutes, willing back the fear, the tears.

She slipped back into the corridor, then into the alcove and up the stairwell to the second floor. She hadn’t gone five steps before she heard voices up ahead. Devlin slowed, inching her way into the alcove, glancing around the corner. The corridor was empty.

She looked back through the alcove window, saw that it was still snowing, spruce trees loaded with powder. Even from inside, she could hear branches creaking, snapping under the weight.

She eased out into the corridor, stopping at each door she passed to glance through the peephole—more women, half-naked, lying in bed and staring absently into space.

Ten steps into the corridor, someone groaned behind the door of 215.

Devlin stopped, felt a knot in her stomach, thought she might be sick.

She stepped forward, put her ear to the door.

Zig’s voice: “You like that, don’t you, you naughty girl?”

“Yes.”

“Convince me.”

Through the door, Devlin heard the woman moan.

Zig: “Yeah, that’s … oh … that’s better, oh God.”

Footsteps were ascending the stairs at the lobby end of the corridor.

She turned back, hurried into the alcove, ducked around the corner, and glanced back in time to see someone emerge into the corridor.

As the person drew closer, she saw it was a man—short, wide, pit-bull jaw, cropped blond hair, shotgun hanging from a strap around his neck.

Every few doors, he’d stop to look through a peephole, lingering a little longer at 215.

Devlin turned and started up the steps.

The fifth cracked under her weight, footsteps audible now in the corridor below, the man definitely coming.

She moved quickly into the third-floor corridor, passing the brass-numbered doors: 314, 312, 310. She tried 308, but it was locked.

The man with the shotgun must have hit the noisy step, because a loud crack resounded through the corridor.

The doorknob to 306 turned. She slipped inside, her heart pounding in her chest. Out of instinct, she peered through the peephole, realized instantly that she was staring through it backward, the view long and distorted, like looking through the strong prescription lenses of her father’s reading glasses. She could hear the man’s footsteps coming down the corridor, wondered if he’d actually seen or heard her. She turned away from the door, squatted down out of sight in a corner beside the bed, the gun quivering in her hands as the footsteps passed by the door.

• • •

She stayed in the room for a long time. When she finally built up the nerve to leave, she got to her feet and moved over to the door, listened. Silence. She glanced through the peephole, and what she could see of the corridor was empty.

She pulled the door open, poked her head outside. It took her a moment to remember where she was. Third floor, south wing. She crept out into the corridor, the lodge momentarily quiet.

When she reached the stairs, she glanced down into the lobby, saw a kimonoed man thirty feet below disappearing into the first-floor corridor.

Devlin took the stairs up to the only corridor she’d yet to search—the south wing’s fourth floor. As she climbed, she spotted that longhaired man in the cowboy hat, strolling the third floor of the north wing with his shotgun, his back to her, walking away.

The fourth floor was empty.

She crept up to each door, peered through the peephole, taking note of which rooms were occupied, which vacant and unlocked.

At the end of the corridor, she came to 429, the last room on the left-hand side before the alcove and the stairwell. She stood on her tiptoes, leaned in to look through the peephole. Inside, a woman was sitting in bed. She was wearing a yellow chemise, her hair long and dark, the color indistinguishable in the poor light. Her face was turned toward the window and she was watching the snow fall. Devlin could tell by looking through the thin fabric of her nightgown that the woman was with child, perhaps half term, her face a little swollen from the pregnancy, and pale, with dark bags under her eyes.

By the light from the lamp on the table, Devlin saw that the woman’s hair was a deep black, and then she drew in a sharp breath and her eyes welled up and ran over and her throat closed.

She was looking at her mother.

At first, she didn’t believe it, thinking,
This must be some kind of nightmare or hallucination. No way she could still be alive. That’s what Dad said
. But it was her. As she stood there breathless, watching Rachael Innis in bed, Devlin recognized the big-black eyes, the shape of the mouth. Her mother didn’t look angry or sad or anything like what Devlin might have expected. Just older, tired, worn-out.

Devlin wiped her eyes, looked up and down the corridor, then back through the peephole as she knocked at the door.

Her mother glanced up but didn’t move, sat motionless in bed, as if waiting.

Devlin knocked again, then cupped her mouth and spoke through the door, “Mom.”

Rachael showed no sign she’d heard a thing.

Devlin knocked once more, and finally, Rachael stepped tentatively down onto the floor and moved slowly toward the door.

Devlin tapped the peephole and stepped back several feet into the corridor, praying her mother would look.

Ten seconds elapsed, and then she heard a sound come through the door like a gasp for breath or a stifled sob, followed by something hitting the floor.

Devlin ran to the peephole, peered through, saw her mother crumpled down into a pile, her back heaving, weeping.

She ran up the corridor, trying doors until she found an unlocked, unoccupied room, tore through the drawers, the bedside table, saw at last what she was after. Ripping a page from the notebook, she had to wait for her hand to stop trembling so she could write.

Devlin ran back into the corridor, dropped to the floor at room 429, and slid the sheet of notebook paper under the door. Through the peephole, she watched her mother take the paper over to a desk.

Rachael kept wiping her eyes, shoulders bobbing. She sat down, spent thirty seconds scribbling on the sheet of paper. Then she got up, hurried back to the door, knelt down, and shoved the paper underneath.

Devlin had to stand under a light to read what her mother had scrawled, the handwriting wobbly, as if she hadn’t held a pen in years.

Devlin set the paper on the floor and scribbled under her mother’s handwriting:

Devlin slid the paper through. Rachael picked it up, holding it flat against the door while she wrote.

It came back quickly, and as Devlin grabbed it, she heard footsteps.

The footsteps were coming up from the lobby stairs. Devlin took the sheet of paper, wrote “I love you,” and held the message up to the peep-hole, then moved quickly into the alcove and down three steps before stopping.

Now there were footsteps climbing this stairwell, too, these faster, with a kind of clicking, like a dog’s toenails on a hardwood floor.

She backtracked to the fourth floor, glanced around the corner from the stairwell, the footsteps getting louder on the lobby staircase, at the other end, the faster ones rushing up beneath her.

She ran into the fourth-floor corridor, searching for that unlocked door, finally finding it four down and across the hall from her mother’s room. She slipped inside just as someone’s head emerged into view from the lobby stairs.

She eased the door shut, stared through the peephole.

A long black shape loped by.

Five seconds later, it returned, stood staring at the door, whining and sniffing the floor.

A man walked into view—the tall, cowboy-hatted guard with long hair. He patted the wolf’s head, knelt down, let the animal nuzzle into his neck.

Another man drew everyone’s attention—short and round, wearing a green kimono, sandals, with a red bandanna tied onto his left arm, pursuant to Ethan’s instructions.

The great black wolf sat at attention beside the guard, hackles raised, eyeing the guest.

“Hey, Reynolds,” the guard said. “Good to see you again.”

“Likewise, Gerald, likewise. Say, would you be so kind as to point me in the direction of the pregnant woman Ethan mentioned this morning?”

“Sure, right this way.”

The men and the wolf started back toward the alcove, and just before their voices diminished entirely, Devlin heard the guard say, “She’s in four twenty-nine. I think you’re going to enjoy yourself, my friend.”