KILLER MOUNTAIN
PETER PINKHAM
While I bear the burden of any mistakes or errors in this novel, there were many who did their best to help me prevent them: Ava Honan, whose computer expertise got
February 10
After locking the rental Cadillac, Preston Sturgis rolled the felt collar of his overcoat up against the cold night breeze off the Charles River. Nothing all day. Perhaps he’d gotten away with it. After all, why not? They were identical. But he couldn’t get around the fact that the importance of the note made it almost certain it would be missed. Had it been a mistake to return it at all? If it had, wouldn’t something have happened by now?
He could argue on either side and had been doing so all day. He unlocked the gate and entered the small garden area onto which his Beacon Street apartment opened. Something landed on him with such force that his stout, middle-aged body was thrown back against the fence. Excited little squeals. Alfie, his wire-haired terrier. Sturgis’ heart settled back into normal rhythm. Of course it was Alfie, though what he was doing outside on such a cold night...His nerves had started to go when they blew up his car. It was only a warning; he’d have been in it otherwise. Okay, the message had gotten through. He was making good money and there were things he didn’t need to know. Night before last wasn’t his fault, just a mix-up. Surely they could see that.
He unwrapped the steak bone from his dinner and held it out for Alfie, who took it in his sharp teeth and bounded for the dog door to the apartment. Garden apartments they called them, which sometimes meant they were underground. Not this one though, and the yard pleasant to sit in come Boston’s summer, though that was the last thing he was thinking of this bleak February evening.
In the faint glow of a distant streetlight he could see the dog door swing back into place. Foolish mutt. Why venture outside on such a frigid night. Perhaps something had scared him; he always hid from the cleaning woman...The force of the explosion threw Sturgis to the ground, where he was pelted by chunks of wood and stone. The thought crossed his mind before he lost consciousness: they knew he’d seen it.
E. Wallace Carver lifted his head from the neat piles of paper he had been arranging on his mahogany desk. The house creaked and groaned as the furnace came on. Perhaps that was it. The flow of hot water through the cast-iron baseboard system sometimes gave a feeling the house was alive, stretching itself as it prepared to battle the cold of a New Hampshire winter’s night.
No, there it was again. A tapping, as though a chickadee on the roof working on a sunflower seed. He turned to look out the French doors behind him to where a cylindrical birdfeeder hung. It was dark; seed birds had sought shelter for the night. He rose from his carved chair and crossed to the bookcases that covered one wall of the heavy curtained, dark paneled living room. An open space in a row of precisely placed books - each coming exactly to the edge of the shelf - revealed a breaker box. A flip of a switch and suddenly it was day outside, as floodlights illuminated the woods around the two-floor-plus-finished-basement contemporary. He peered out the French doors, then the window next to it. In the small area he had whittled from dense northern New England woods, wind-hurled branches protruded from blank white snow like gnarled sailboat masts frozen in a plastic sea. The snow-encrusted raised deck revealed only the crosshatching of tiny bird feet.
He walked across the room and through the entryway to the front door. The sidelight told him a Cadillac Seville was parked in the driveway. Its interior lighting was on, and the driver’s door hung open, but there was no sign of driver. The heavy oak front door protested a winter opening; a line of footprints ran from the car up to it. He stood on the snow-covered front step - unshoveled, as in winter he himself used the back door leading directly to the garage. On his left was a clump of juniper bushes. And a body. In city topcoat and dress shoes, the man had obviously not come prepared for the snow and cold of Mt. Washington Valley, New Hampshire.
“Slipped,” gasped the body struggling to get up.
“Preston Sturgis!” exclaimed Carver. “What are you...oh hell, let’s get you inside.”
Carver, a firm grip for his seventy-five years, pulled Sturgis to his feet and soon had him lying on the brown leather couch perpendicular to the huge fieldstone fireplace, a brandy at his elbow. Carver, adding a log, could see the man’s dark blue topcoat with velvet collar was torn, and there was blood and exhaustion on his graying face.
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No! Please no.”
“You know you’re bleeding?”
“Yes...Banged my head.”
The eyes closed. Carver watched for a moment, then went to the door.
Sturgis raised on an elbow. “Where are you going?”
“To shut your car door.”
Sturgis fell back on the couch. Carver slipped on a heavy overcoat and went out. The night was still and cold, and the brittle snow crunched under feet encased in fur-lined boots. The car was empty, the keys in the Cadillac’s ignition. He took the keys, closed the door and returned to the house. He studied the man on the couch, then went to the telephone.
“Who are you calling?” Sturgis was up again.
“My son-in-law.”
“No!...Who?”
“Hudson Rogers. Actually he’s a son-in-law by his former wife. He lives next door.”
“Why? I don’t want anyone else.”
“
