what laws did they break — aside from illegal entry? They didn't harm anyone or take anything. And what damage they did to the door of Katherine's bedroom was taken care of with a rag and water. The police wouldn't have much interest in expending a lot of man-hours to come up with the culprits.”
“The locks really ought to be changed,” Katherine said.
“Only if they came in with a key, and we've already decided that—”
She interrupted him, somewhat frustrated with both of them. Her good humor had not returned with the sun, and she was as agitated about circumstances in Owlsden as she had been the previous night. She had never liked people who were gloomy, who faced the future with negative expectations, and she had always felt that only disaster could result from that attitude. Yet, since finding the bloody circle on her door, she had adopted that very outlook. She supposed she would not like herself now, if she were someone else meeting her. She could somehow sense approach of disaster, like a cold wind or the fall of rocks from a clifftop. She had to regain her optimism or become a victim of the swamps she was helping to create. She said, “We only decided that none of your friends could be involved. But suppose one of them left his key somewhere, on a dresser at home or a desk at the office, perhaps on a restaurant table or in a store. It is conceivable, don't you think, that someone could have lifted the keys long enough to duplicate them before returning them to their rightful owner?”
“That's a thought,” Alex agreed.
Lydia was enthusiastic about such an explanation, and she agreed to authorize Yuri to phone a locksmith and have the doors changed that very afternoon. New keys would be made, and their friends would be given copies — with a special warning about the care to be taken with the key.
It all sounded very positive and efficient. Somehow, though, Katherine felt that it wouldn't do any good at all, because she was increasingly certain that the intruder had not gotten his key by accident or theft. When she considered the scene in the recreation room the night before, she was certain one of Alex's friends was involved.
The remainder of the morning, the lunch hour and the early part of the afternoon, she spent with Lydia, answering some correspondence for her and for Alex, who dealt with the family's financial management, buying and selling stocks and securities with a finesse and canniness that indicated he was a most clever investor. Too, they discussed a number of books and writers, all of which they agreed upon, though offering each other new insights and points of view. Normally, Katherine would have enjoyed the discussion. But these were not normal times.
At 2:30, Lydia dismissed her for the afternoon. By three, she had changed into her ski clothes and made the trek out to the slope, through the curtain of cold, dry snow. She knew that she needed to get away from the house for a while, meet some people from the town and get a bit of fresh mountain air. Then she'd be her old self again, jolted out of her mood by the change of scenery. At least, that's what she hoped.
She descended the brisk, winding trail at top speed, the wind hard, the snow like a spray of ice in her face, frosting her lashes and brows. At the bottom, she carefully stacked the skis in the racks, stabbed the poles into a snow mound by the pylon, and went for a walk into town.
At the cafe on the square, where she intended to have a cup of coffee and talk again with Bertha, she found Michael Harrison and a group of his friends dawdling over what they called a “late lunch” but which was obviously a good, long, mid-afternoon gab-fest. Eight of them sat at the long table, three girls and five men, laughing as they worked at pastries and steaming mugs of coffee.
“You've got to join us,” Michael said, fetching an extra chair to the already crowded table by the window and jamming it in next to his own, patting it as an invitation.
“I don't want to interrupt anything,” Katherine said, though she did sit down beside him.
“You won't be interrupting at all!” he assured her. He motioned to his friends. “These loose-lipped wonders wouldn't stop chattering for the end of the world.”
“Especially not then,” a tall, blond boy said. His name, she learned later, was Kerry Markwood. “If it was the end of the world, we'd have to talk twice as fast to be sure that we got everything in!”
As simply as that, she was included in the group and made to feel perfectly at home. Indeed, in one minute, these people did more by their attitudes to make her comfortable than Alex's friends had done in several hours. Introductions were hurriedly made as Michael described each friend in turn with some good-humored insult that brought laughter from all present. Katherine learned their names slowly, however, as the afternoon wore on and the conversation got better and better. There was no unrelieved pessimism here — indeed, hardly a single note of glum-ness. As an antidote to Alex's crowd, these people could hardly be equaled.
Too, she was unaccountably pleased to see that, though there were girls present, they seemed to be with other men, not with Michael. He was as solicitous of her as he might have been of a wife, anxious that she have coffee when she wanted it and that there was always a plate of pastries near her. More than the others even, he was careful to include her in all conversations, and in time he put his arm over the back of her chair, giving the illusion of protection.
The restaurant clock read 6:15 when someone suggested they break it up for the day. Surprised that darkness had crept in without her noticing, Katherine realized that she would be hard-pressed to reach the top of the mountain again and have sufficient time to clean up and make it to dinner with the Bolands.
“Let me take you up in the Rover.”
“I don't think Alex would like it.”
“You mean you care what he thinks that much?” he asked, his voice suddenly brittle.
“Only as concerns my job,” she said.
“He can't object to me driving you home.”
She said, “Oh, Michael, you don't know how he can go on about you when the subject comes up. And I have to sit there and listen to it.”
He softened perceptibly. “I'm sorry,” he said.
They were standing outside the restaurant now, the snow still falling slowly but steadily, a new three inches of powdery stuff on the straight, narrow streets.
“It isn't your fault,” she said. “There's no reason for you to be sorry. It's just that he has this obsession, this crazy need to make you look bad. His mother usually calms him down, but I don't think I should get into an argument with him. It's not my place, not in his own house. I almost had a fight with him this morning, and I don't want another near-argument.”
“What was it about?”
“I'll tell you in the Rover on the way out to the bottom of the Roxburgh ski slope. If you'll take me there, that is.”
The Rover was parked by the grass in the center of the square. In five minutes, they had reached the bottom of the slope, and she had been able to complete the story of the post-midnight intruder who had painted the Satanic symbols on her door.
“I don't think you should go back up there,” Michael said, holding her hand as they stood by the pylon where her skis were racked.
“What else can I do?”
“I'd see about getting you someplace to stay here tonight.”
“But I
He was silent a moment, looking up the dark ski run. “I suppose that's reason enough to go back. But do you have to go this way, up that damned run in the middle of the night?”
“It isn't the middle of the night,” she said. “It's just dark. And if I want to get there in time for supper, I'd better get going now.”
She sat down and put on her skis, then stood up and grabbed her poles, flipped the switch that started the ski-lift cables moving.
“You aren't frightened of the dark, going up there through the trees at night?” he asked, making one last effort to dissuade her.
“Not at all,” she said. And she realized that, though she had not completely regained her normal mood of optimism, the few hours with Michael's friends had alleviated the worst of the gloom that had settled over her after the previous night's activities. She truly was not frightened.
He slid her to the cable, her skis making a
