Though the pines seemed to close in on her now and then, as if they were alive and seeking her, she did not lose the moderately rosy glow which his kiss had left with her, and she reached the top of the run fifteen minutes later, weary but safe.
She had just enough time to change, brush her hair and freshen her makeup, arriving in the small dining room only five minutes late for dinner. The conversation was pleasant, lighter than usual, especially since Alex seemed happy to let everything remain trivial. He did not once mention Michael Harrison. Indeed, the only sour note in the evening was when Lydia said the locksmith would not be in for a few days.
“But surely—” Katherine began.
“He doesn't live in Roxburgh,” Alex explained. For some reason or other, she thought that his dark eyes were watching her more intently than usual. If he didn't have that air of brooding anger about him, she thought, he would be decidedly attractive — overwhelmingly attractive in fact. “He's a carpenter who works on locks as a sideline, lives about fifteen miles away in another village. If it weren't for this snow, he'd have come. But it has been coming down steadily — and now the radio weather reports call for a greater accumulation than we got a few days ago.”
“I see.”
“Don't worry,” Lydia said. “No one's going to come around bothering us in the middle of a blizzard. The winds are supposed to intensify tonight. It's going to be a real mess. I love it, all of it.” She went on to describe some of the record storms of her childhood and enchanted them with a number of anecdotes about life in the mountains before the advent of the auto and the snowplow.
Katherine went to bed early, without seeing Yuri, and was asleep by eleven, exhausted from the skiing, the conversation with Michael's friends in the cafe, the ride up the slope in the cold and wind, the long and delightful chatter over dinner and, later, over cordials in the main drawing room.
The day seemed to have slipped past as if it were greased, a good day all-in-all, one that made her glad she had not opted to leave Owlsden the previous day.
She did not dream but slept so deeply that she might never have awakened — except for the scream of agony that echoed through the house at shortly past two in the morning. It woke everyone and caused the owls to begin hooting in panic above her head…
She was out of the bed and into her slippers and robe before half a minute had passed, though she made no move to unbolt the door.
A moment later, someone rattled the knob, then knocked.
“Who is it?” she asked, having a distinct feeling of
“Katherine?” Lydia asked.
She went quickly to the door, threw the bolt back and opened it. Lydia was standing in the well-lighted corridor, wearing a flowing yellow bedgown, her face weary and lined more than it appeared to be in daylight. Alex stood behind her in a lounging robe and pajamas, his dark eyes swiftly assessing her condition and the state of the room beyond.
“What was the scream?” Katherine asked.
“I thought perhaps it was you,” Lydia said. She took Katherine's hand and squeezed it. “After that warning on your door last night…”
Alex interrupted, speaking in a clipped, nervous tone. “I told you, Mother, that it was a man's scream.”
To the left, Patricia Keene and her husband appeared, blinking sleepily, attired in nightclothes. “Is everyone all right?” she asked.
“Fine here,” Lydia said. “What was the noise?”
“Someone screamed,” Patricia Keene said. Her husband nodded.
Alex said, “Where is Yuri?”
“In his room?” Lydia suggested.
As a group, they went down the corridor and knocked at his door. When he did not answer, they opened it and looked in. He was not there or, as Alex reported, in his private bath either.
“I think the scream was downstairs,” Mason Keene said. His voice sounded thick, as if he had been drinking and was still a little tight, despite his sleep. Was that something else about Owlsden that had been hidden from her?
“I'll go look,” Alex said.
“No,” Lydia said. “We'll all go look.”
In a close train, they went down the grand staircase and found, almost immediately, that the front door was standing open, a furious whirl of snow pouring in on the foyer carpet. Alex went and closed it, came back and said, “There are footprints in the snow, leading away from the house.”
No one said anything until Katherine finally asked, “What next?”
“We check the rooms down here,” Alex said, leading the way.
They all knew what they were going to find. It was not any special extra-sensory perception, Katherine thought, not something you could call pre-cognition or “fey,” just a deep, animal dread that went even beyond the level of instinct.
In the main drawing room, the furniture had been pushed back to make a circle for the ceremony. The wine- colored carpet was now marked with a number of chalk designs, and several thick, black candles burned on endtables all around. Yuri lay at the edge of the markings, sprawled on his face, his hands outstretched in front of him as if he were desperately reaching for something. He was clearly dead.
Patricia Keene began to scream…
CHAPTER 11
“And then you found the body?” Cartier asked.
Alex said, “Yes.”
“Where it lies now?”
“Yes.”
“You didn't move it at all?”
“I didn't even touch it.”
Constable Cartier consulted a small, black notebook which he had been glancing at throughout his interrogations of the people gathered in the library. Once, when he passed Katherine's chair and was holding the book lower than usual, she saw that it did not contain any writing at all, that his long and thoughtful glances at the supposedly incriminating list of facts it contained were nothing but staged expressions, phony. Ordinarily, she would have been amused by this, but she could not find a smile as long as Yuri was lying dead in the drawing room, currently guarded over by one of the two deputies that Cartier had brought with him.
“Have you ever seen the knife before?” Cartier asked.
“No.”
“It is an antique knife, as you could have told from the handle, very ornate and lovely,” Cartier said. He looked in his notebook again, looked up when he adjudged a proper amount of time had passed. “It is just the sort of thing one might expect to find in the older rooms of Owlsden, the unremodeled rooms.”
“What are you suggesting?” Alex asked. He was clearly angry at Cartier's smugness.
“I am not suggesting anything,” the constable said, staring at the blank pages of the book. “All that I am doing is making an observation.”
Alex snorted and shook his head. “And it's a muddle-headed observation,” he said. Patiently, as if he were talking to a child, he said, “That knife did not come from Owlsden.”
“Alex, please see to it that you are more courteous to the constable,” Lydia said. She was sitting at her large desk, holding a cup of hot tea in both hands, though she had not, so far as Katherine had noticed, taken a single sip of the stuff.
Alex flashed her an obvious look of exasperation, but he did not say anything further to Constable Cartier.
The policeman turned to Katherine and said, “Miss Sellers, don't you find it odd that the devil's dances, the
