The Burnt Orange Sunrise (18 page)

“Hey, Master Sergeant,” Mitch exclaimed, his frigid hands held out toward the flames.

“Back at you, Mr. Bunyan.”

Teddy wandered in as well, furrows etching his long thin face. He seemed lost in his grief, very far away.

“I think I’ll go upstairs for a minute, too,” Hannah decided. “Try and do something about my face.”

“Good,” barked Ada, who was gliding toward the stairs. “Without your makeup on, you look as if you belong behind the counter of the Burger King.”

Hannah immediately rolled her eyes at Jory.

“I saw that, Hannah,” Ada snapped at her.

“Aha, so you
do
know my name,” Hannah said, pursuing Ada to the stairs.

“Of course I do. What I don’t know is why the hell you were hired. Pick up your feet when you walk, girl. You tromp around the house like an army of Huns.”

“Yes, Ada.”

“And stop crowding me, will you? I cannot abide hoverers.”

“Think I’ll clean up myself,” said Spence, following them up the stairs.

“You
I don’t like, period, Mr. New York Office,” Ada growled at him.

“What on earth did I do?” wondered Spence, bewildered.

“You smile too much,” she told him as they disappeared upstairs. “Every studio man who ever stole money from me just smiled and smiled.”

Aaron stood there in the dining hall doorway, shaking his large head. “I would not have thought this possible, but I swear she’s getting nastier.”

“That’s just her grief talking,” Teddy said quietly. “The old girl doesn’t mean one word of it. Just give her some space.”

“Fine by me,” Aaron said. “She can have as much space as she wants.”

Jase moved over next to Jory and spoke to her, his voice a faint murmur, his eyes cast shyly down at the floor.

Jory listened to him intently before she turned to Les and said, “Do you mind if I serve Jase, too? Our stove out in the cottage is electric, and the poor thing’s famished. He can eat out in the kitchen with me.”

“Nonsense,” Les said. “He’ll eat with us in the dining room. You both will. You’re family.”

“That’s very kind of you, Les,” she said. “Sweetie, could you maybe wash up a bit? There are some Handi Wipes out in the mudroom. I’ll show you, okay?”

Jase nodded and started for the kitchen, rolling up his sleeves. Jory followed him.

“Do you suppose he eats with his hands or with his feet?” Carly wondered aloud, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

Des wasn’t sure if Jase heard the nasty little crack, but Jory sure as hell did—she shot a poisonous look at Carly as she passed through the kitchen door.

“Cut him some slack,” Mitch spoke up in Jase’s defense. “He’s a good guy.”

“He smells like an animal at the zoo,” Carly pointed out. “Believe me, when I was growing up in Virginia we had a name for people like that.”

“And believe me, we really don’t want to hear what it was,” Les said coldly. “So kindly spare us.”

Carly went ballistic in response: “You were right last night, Acky,” she hissed, seething. “We shouldn’t have come here. No one wants us here. They hate us. They all hate us!” She turned on her heel and stormed off in the direction of the main stairs.

“Carly, where are you going?” Aaron called after her.
“Carly
… !”

“No, let her go.” Les took Aaron by the arm, holding him there. “It’s a stressful time for all of us.”

“Carly happens to be
my
wife, Les. I’ll thank you to stay out of my marriage.”

“You could use some help, my boy,” Teddy advised. “You’ve pretty much made a mess of it.”

“And how would
you
know? Have you ever even been in a relationship that’s lasted for longer than seven minutes in the front seat of a car?”

Teddy stiffened but didn’t respond. Which made him a true gentleman in Des’s book.

Les turned to Mitch and said, “I’m sorry I’ve been of no help to you guys out there. I feel pretty darned useless.”

“As do I,” Teddy said. “Mind you, I haven’t done any serious physical work in ages. You’d probably have to carry me inside on a stretcher within a half hour.”

“Not to worry,” Mitch assured them both. “The three of us are making excellent progress. At the rate we’re going, we should have those sycamores completely cleared away by the end of March.”

Les let out a halfhearted chuckle. “The power crews will dig us out before you know it.”

“The sooner the better,” Aaron grumbled. “All I want is to get Mother in the ground and me and Carly the hell out of here.”

“Believe me, we all want that,” Teddy concurred.

Aaron arched his brow at him. “I know you think you’re being terribly amusing, Uncle Teddy, but I will not take this crap from you. I’ll have you know that there are plenty of people—influential, powerful people—who actually respect me.”

“Only because they don’t know you as well as we do,” Teddy said. “But give them time, my boy. They’ll come around.”

“Where
did
Carly go?” Aaron wondered, ignoring him now. Or at least pretending to. “I’ll bet she’s sneaking a cigarette.” He started toward the stairs after her.
“Carly
… ?”

“I’m going to help Jory with the serving, if you’ll excuse me,” Les said. “Would you folks care to listen to the news or some music? The batteries on the sound system are good and charged.”

“I’d rather listen to the wind,” responded Teddy.

“Sure, whatever you want.” Les headed off to the kitchen.

Teddy lingered there before the fire with Des and Mitch. “Seriously, what kind of progress are you boys making out there?”

“Seriously? We might be here for a couple of days.”

“Damn.”

“Somewhere you need to be?” Des asked Teddy.

“Sig Klein’s,” he replied glumly. “I don’t get paid if I don’t sell clothes. And this weekend is a total washout as far as my Jazzmen gig is concerned. Not that I mean to sound petty. It’s just that we all have our lives to lead, and mine isn’t particularly well-funded right now, sad to say. I have to think about these things. I have to…” Teddy trailed off mid-sentence and went over toward the windows to look out at the darkening clouds.

Mitch and Des were alone now before the fire. He immediately put his arms around her and hugged her tightly, his unshaven cheek rough and cold against hers.

“Are you happy to see me or are you just looking for a warm-up?” she wondered, hugging him back.

“Does it matter?” he murmured, his mouth finding hers, kissing hers.

“Not one bit.”

“Des, you’re putting me on another diet when we get out of here. I don’t ever want to end up like Norma—wheezing, laboring,
dead.”

“That’s good, baby. I don’t want you to either.”

“But is there any way we can work just a single glass of chocolate
milk per day into this one? Along with the skinless chicken breasts and all of that leafy stuff, I mean.”

“I’ll do some research and get back to you,” she said, unable to keep a silly smile off her face.

“It’s snowing again,” Teddy declared from the windows.

They joined him, gazing out at the wet snowflakes that were beginning to fall on top of the hard coating of ice.

“Ain’t it lovely?” Teddy cracked.

“Yeah, it’s a winter wonderland, all right,” Mitch responded.

Their table was all set for breakfast. Jory emerged from the kitchen lugging the oatmeal in a big serving tureen. Les followed her a few seconds later with covered platters of eggs and bacon.

“Don’t wait for the others,” Les urged them as Jory bustled back into the kitchen. “Dig right in. This stuff’s no good cold.”

“You got that right,” Mitch concurred, taking the same seat he’d had at dinner. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it is cold scrambled eggs. In my opinion, if they aren’t piping hot they taste exactly like yellow rubber that’s been vulcanized and then subjected to high-level centrifugal—”

Unfortunately, Mitch never got to finish sharing his strongly held personal philosophy on non-hot scrambled eggs with Les and Teddy.

Because now was when they heard the scream.

A
DA
G
EIGER’S KILLER USED
her bedside telephone.

The phone cord was wrapped so tightly around the old lady’s throat that it had become embedded deep in her flesh. The receiver on the floor next to her was bloodied. So was the back of her head. The Queen of the B’s lay on her side next to the bed, half-dressed. She wore a long-sleeved undershirt and unbuttoned wool trousers. A heavy wool cardigan was strewn across the bed, as if she’d been about to put it on when she’d been rudely interrupted.

Very rudely interrupted, Mitch thought as he stood watching Des examine her.

The others were gathered outside the open door in the hallway in horrified silence. They were all out there. Hannah, whose screams had brought them running. Aaron and Carly, Les, Teddy, Spence, Jory and Jase. The scene was almost an exact replay of earlier that morning, when they’d been gathered outside of the room right next door. No one was saying a word. Partly out of shock. Partly because Des had asked them not to until she’d taken their individual statements—each was a potential witness to Ada’s killing and she did not want them coloring each other’s recollections. But mostly, they were hushed by the reality of what they all knew:

One of them had murdered Ada Geiger in cold blood within the past five minutes.

It had to be one of them. No one else was around, not unless somebody was hiding there in the castle’s deepest recesses, unbeknownst to all of them. Actually, this nutty notion did trigger a fleeting recollection of something that had happened to Mitch in the night. But the memory vanished before he could fully summon it, shoved aside by the overwhelming revulsion and sorrow he felt as he
gazed down upon this gifted, indomitable woman lying there dead on the carpet.

Des crouched over Ada, studying the phone cord around her throat, the bloody wound to her head. She opened an eyelid and examined the pupil. “We have hemorrhaging in the eyes,” she told Mitch, keeping her voice very low.

“What does that tell you?” he croaked. He had a hot, bilious taste in the back of his throat.

“It points to strangulation, not the head wound, as cause of death. The small blood vessels in the eyes tend to burst under extreme pressure. Plus her head’s still bleeding. She was struck with that receiver before she died.”

“How do you know that?”

“The heart’s no longer pumping blood after someone’s gone. So there’s little or no blood. If it bleeds it leads—that’s our old crime scene saying.”

“I thought journalists owned that expression, vis-à-vis our news priorities, or total lack thereof. We tend to be drawn to the gory, as you may have noticed if you’ve ever picked up a newspaper, turned on a television or …” He was starting to blather. He knew this. He was shaken.

Not Des. She seemed cool, alert and focused. She had, after all, spent years working violent deaths for a living. But on the inside she wasn’t calm at all, and Mitch knew that. Because it was precisely this kind of hideous, gut-wrenching violence that had driven her to the drawing pad.

“Most likely,” she concluded, “the killer dazed her with the phone receiver, then used the cord to finish the job. Quick and quiet. See those scratches there under the cord?”

Mitch forced himself to look. There were bloody scratch marks on Ada’s neck. Many bloody scratch marks. “What do those tell you?”

“That she was still conscious.” Des studied Ada’s hands. “See this blood and tissue under her nails? I’m guessing it’s her own. She made those scratches herself, Mitch. The old girl put up a fight.” Now Des stood back up and moved away from Ada over to the window. Outside,
the snow was falling heavier, the wind gusting hard enough to rattle the glass.

Mitch joined her there, keeping his voice low. “Let’s say she did struggle—could a woman have done this to her? Or are we strictly looking at a man?”

“I don’t see why it couldn’t have been a woman, provided she’s reasonably strong. Ada may have been full of piss and vinegar, but she was still ninety-four years old. Straight up, I don’t believe we can rule out anyone yet,” she said, letting out a sigh.

Mitch looked at her. “Are you okay, Des?”

“Good. I’m good. But I can’t say a whole lot for our situation. We’ve got us two murders, and until this damned weather eases off I can’t dial up any backup. We’re strictly on our own here.”

“Okay, I have to ask you to hit your rewind button.”

“Why?”

“You just said we have
two
murders.”

“Well, yeah. A mother and daughter dying within hours of each other this way—you don’t think it’s a coincidence, do you? The very first thing I learned on the job, boyfriend, is that there’s no such as thing as coincidences. Someone wanted both Ada and Norma dead.”

“But I thought Norma died of a heart attack.”

“An
apparent
heart attack. That’s what it was meant to look like. But I guarantee you she was murdered.”

“How?”

“Can’t answer that yet. We may not know until we get the results of her autopsy. We know very little right now, I’m sorry to say. Except we do know this: We know that no one can get in or out of this place. And we know that one of the people who we’re trapped with up here is a murderer.”

Mitch puffed out his cheeks, exhaling slowly. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’ve seen this movie before,” he said grimly. “Except it took place on a remote island instead of a mountaintop. And everyone, not just Norma, had a British accent.”

“Mitch…?”

“And there was no such thing as cell phones back then, which changes the dynamics rather dramatically, don’t you think? Because they couldn’t call out and you can. You
can
call out, can’t you?”

“For as long as my charge lasts. So far, so good.”

“Plus you have the two-way radio in your cruiser.”

“True again,” she acknowledged patiently. “Only, Mitch …?”

“Yes, Des?”

“This is not a freakin’ movie!”

“Hey, I’m totally aware of that.”

“Good, because there’s no one else I can count on. There’s you and, well, there’s you.”