Satanic markings on your door, and now the murder of Yuri Selenov should all transpire in or around Owlsden?”
“I don't understand what you mean?” She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable.
He said, “Wouldn't it seem to you that there is more to this than a simple coincidence.”
“Of course,” she said. Anyone could see it wasn't a coincidence that someone had been in the drawing room making Satanic ceremonial patterns on the carpet when Yuri surprised them.
“Then, perhaps, someone in this house is a member of the cult that has, for eighteen months, been a nuisance around these parts.”
“Now just a damn minute—” Alex began, rising swiftly from his chair.
“Sit down, please,” Cartier said, suddenly embarrassed, jolted out of his previous delight in this abrupt switch of roles between the once-rich and once-powerful, and himself. He seemed to realize that he was not being entirely fair to them and that his bluntness had over-stepped some invisible boundary or other.
“You cannot—” Alex began.
“Alex, sit down, please,” Lydia said.
He looked at his mother, still furiously angry, then shrugged his shoulders and returned to his seat.
“Do you think anyone in Owlsden might be connected with this cult?” Cartier asked Katherine.
She barely managed to avoid looking at Alex as she said, “Perhaps not anyone here — but someone else who has a key.”
“Oh, for Christsake, we went through all of that before, Katherine!” Alex said.
“Go through it again, for me,” Cartier said. She did, and when she was finished, the constable turned to Alex and Lydia and said, “I would like to have a list of names, everyone who has a key to Owlsden.”
“That can be arranged,” Lydia said.
“To no purpose,” Alex mumbled.
When the constable had gotten the list and had taken time to look it over carefully, he said, “It would seem unlikely, but if we have any lead so far, it is one of the names on this list.” He tucked the list neatly in the notebook and put the notebook in his hip pocket. “I suppose we ought to be going now.”
“Mr. Cartier?” Katherine asked.
He turned, looking infinitely wearier than he had looked only a moment ago, no longer getting much enjoyment out of interrogating the wealthy. “Yes?”
“What will be done with — with the body?”
“We'll take it along with us,” he said. “We'll have to put it on ice until the state police have a chance to get into town and take the case from us.”
“Tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “Eight inches of new snow down already and as much as twenty more predicted, all dry as powder and blown by a good wind. In another couple of hours, no one could get up to Owlsden — and in another six hours, no one will be driving in or out of Roxburgh itself, not even the state police.”
“When will they get here?” she asked.
“Depends on the wind once the snow has stopped. Could be as much as a week if the weather's as bad as it sometimes gets.”
“A week! But what if the same people who killed Yuri are—”
“They won't come back here,” Cartier said.
“You can't be sure.”
He smiled. “I can be sure. They'll know how hot the place is, how dangerous it would be to come here again and cause trouble.”
“But they'll also know there isn't anyone here protecting the place. Can't you go ahead with the investigation until—”
Obviously embarrassed, Cartier interrupted her. “Neither I nor any of my men could handle it properly. We haven't been trained for things like this, because we aren't accustomed to anything more troublesome in Roxburgh than drunks and marital quarrels. I'm afraid that we'd only mess up the trail if we started stomping around after clues, and then we'd be in hot water with the state boys. I've chalked the outline of the body in the den, to show where it fell, and I'd be pleased if none of you touched anything in that room until the state police can go over it with all their machines. Other than that, we all have to sit and wait out the storm.”
“Couldn't they send someone in by helicopter?” Katherine asked.
“Perhaps they could, but they won't. It isn't that much of a crime to them, one murder. Like I said, a couple of days or a week. Then they'll be here to handle it.”
He nodded to Lydia and left the room.
“With this snow,” Katherine said, “the carpenter won't be able to come and change the locks tomorrow, will he?”
“No,” Alex said.
Lydia said, “Don't worry, dear. I'm sure that Constable Cartier is right. Those terrible people, whoever they were, aren't going to risk returning to Owlsden in the near future.”
“I hope you're right,” Katherine said.
“I know I am.”
The police trundled Yuri's blanket-wrapped corpse past the library door. The sight of it, like a bundle of weeds, caused Patricia Keene to break into low, mournful sobs.
“There now, there now,” her husband said, patting her shoulder and awkwardly trying to cradle her against his chest. He was not a man easily able to offer consolation or comfort. “It's going to be perfectly all right, Pat. Everything is going to be fine.”
Katherine wished that he were right. But she knew that he was wrong…
CHAPTER 12
The following day, Owlsden was suffused with a morbid air of death, a deep mood of brooding expectancy that ruled out any quick resumption of the routines of daily life. Outside, the snow still fell hard, with nearly twelve inches of new snow draped across the old, softening the land and the house like a burial shroud softens the harsh realities beneath it. Inside, Lydia remained in her room, uninterested in conversation or in going about the details of correspondence. She seemed to have been stricken more brutally by Yuri's sudden death than she had evidenced the night before. Patricia and Mason Keene kept to the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking in low voices — conversations which they ceased immediately when anyone entered their private domain. They were not bothering to produce any culinary masterpieces, for everyone had made it clear that food was not of much interest after the bloody events of the last several hours. Alex Boland went into town, using the ski slope, around ten o'clock and looked to be gone until evening, though Katherine had no idea what he was doing down there. It seemed to her that his time might be better spent in finding some way to secure the doors to Owlsden before nightfall brought a new period of anxiety to all of them.
Katherine remained in her room, like Lydia, and tried to read. When she grew hungry enough to force food into her stomach and keep it there, she nibbled at the things in the refrigerator in her closet. She spent long periods of time at the window, staring out at the clean landscape, the sharp, relentless, white glare of the untouched snow. She found herself methodically adding up the credits and the debits of life at Owlsden, as she had done once before, but she had different results than the first time. The list of debits now far outweighed the credits. It seemed wiser to pack and leave, to go through the unsettling process of locating a new job, than to stay here.
Of course, she would have to stay a while yet. The hard, snapping wind and the huge snowfall dictated a period of isolation before she could make her break for freedom. Even if she could somehow get her luggage down the ski slope, tote it to her Ford where it was still parked in that picnic area and get the car started after it had set several days in the snow, she could not drive out of the valley. She remembered the perilous descent into the valley her first day on the job, and she had no wish to try to make it back up that insanely steep roadway in even worse weather.
And so the day passed.
