started. I parked in the lot by the boat launch again, got out of the truck, and grabbed the flashlight from my toolbox. I started walking back up toward the cottage. I figured it was probably a quarter mile.
I had a shot of adrenaline now. My heart was racing. For the first time in hours, I felt fully awake.
As I got closer, I slowed down and tried to stay as quiet as possible. I kept my flashlight off. It was going on five in the morning, late enough now that it was actually early. If there was somebody in that cottage, he could be out of bed in the predawn hours and getting ready for another day of God knows what.
I left the road and started going from tree to tree. There were still traces of snow that reflected the dull ambient light. When I had worked my way around the cottage, I went to the Corvette and ducked behind it. Now that I was close enough, I could see the color. Mint-green. But where was the black Subaru?
Okay, no matter, I told myself. You’ve found the house. Now it’s time to call in the cavalry. I pulled out my cell phone and looked at it. It didn’t even try to find a signal. If it could have laughed in my face, it would have. I put it back in my pocket.
A smart man would go right back out to the road, I thought. Drive south until you get a signal. But you don’t see RJ’s car here. So what if Sean’s in the house by himself right now? Are you going to leave him here?
I stood up and made my way around to the back of the cottage. I just had to see for myself. The place looked dark and deserted, like nobody had been there in months. The furniture and the gas grill on the back patio were all covered with tarps. There was a boat on a trailer, but that was covered, too. Then I saw the second trailer. This one had a snowmobile on it.
That’s one more question possibly answered, I thought. If he planned the apparent suicide at Misery Bay carefully enough, he might have brought down the snowmobile during the day and left it nearby. Then he could have gone out drinking with Charlie, somehow convinced him to come down to Misery Bay, left Charlie’s car there in the lot, then taken the snowmobile back to wherever he had parked his car.
I inched my way to the back of the cottage and bent down beneath one of the windows. As I came up to peer in the window, I saw a blue glow and ducked back down again. I came back up and saw that I was looking into an empty kitchen. The blue glow was from the digital clock on the oven.
The only other option on the back of the cottage was the sliding glass door leading to the patio. I kept my back against the siding and slid over to the edge of the door. I paused there for a moment to catch my breath and looked down the backyard, toward the water. There was a boathouse. For all I knew, there could have been a black Subaru sitting in there, meaning maybe RJ was in the house after all, but now I didn’t want to walk right past the glass door to go down and check. Instead I put one hand to the ground and leaned over to take a look through the door. I saw a desk with a small lamp on it, casting a narrow cone of light. Then I saw a bulletin board, just like the one I had seen in the basement of Wiley’s lake house. This one had a single strip of film hanging from it.
I leaned a little farther to see more of the room. I saw the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along the back wall, an open doorway leading into darkness, and then a face staring right at me.
I threw myself back against the siding. I caught my breath for a few seconds, thinking about what to do next. Finally, I realized who I had just seen.
I bent down and took another peek through the glass door. That same face was there. It hadn’t moved. I ducked back, switched on my flashlight, covered most of the beam with my hand and bent over one more time.
It was Sean Wiley. He was sitting on the floor, his back against an easy chair. He was staring straight ahead. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. I could see the little ring in his left eyebrow. His chest was covered in blood.
I stood up and cast the full beam across the room. Everything else in the cottage was dark. I tested the handle. The door slid smoothly open and the smell of fresh blood came drifting out.
I stepped inside and looked at him more closely. He’d been dead for a couple of hours, at least. Maybe longer. It didn’t matter. He was long gone and I could only think of his girlfriend sitting home in the apartment, waiting to hear from him.
“You stupid bastard,” I said, my heart in my throat. “What the hell were you thinking?”
I took slow, careful steps through the rest of the cottage. There were no other lights on. There was one bedroom, with a bed that had been slept in but was now empty. Another bedroom with a bed still made. The kitchen, then back to the sitting room or office or library or whatever you wanted to call it. Now it was just the room where Sean Wiley had gotten himself murdered for no good reason.
I went back to the kitchen and shined the flashlight along the wall until I saw the phone. I picked it up and heard a dial tone. Before I dialed 911, another odor came to me. I recognized it. A strong chemical smell… where was it coming from? The closet?
I opened the closet door and aimed my flashlight inside, expecting to see brooms and cleaning supplies all wedged into a tight space. Instead I was surprised to see a little room going back at least six feet. Somebody was standing there in what had just been utter darkness until I had opened the door. He was bent over a large metal drum and I realized at that moment exactly where I had smelled this odor before-in Wiley’s basement, in the developing room under the stairs. As the man in the darkness stood up straight and looked at me, I realized I had seen him before, too.
It was RJ, Charlie’s apartment-mate, otherwise known as Bobby Bergman.
He dropped the jerrycan he was holding and came at me, knocking me backward. The flashlight went off as it clattered across the kitchen floor.
He kicked me in the ribs, knocking the wind out of me. I swept my leg out, trying to trip him, felt the contact of ankle against ankle. He fell sideways. I rolled over and felt around for the flashlight, finally grabbing it and knocking it against my thigh until the lightbulb finally flickered on again.
I got to my feet just in time to see Bergman pointing the pipe at me. A white PVC pipe, the most unlikely thing in the world until I remembered what it was and where he had used it before. The homemade suppressor.
“What are you trying to do?” he said. “Ruin the film?”
Then he aimed the gun right at my chest and shot me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I know this place. I’ve been here before. I am lying on my back and I’m looking up at the ceiling. Just like the last time… yes, I was in an apartment building then, in the middle of a city, people above and below me, down the hall and all around me in every direction. My partner was on the floor next to me, the light slowly going out in his eyes. There were sirens on the street below. It was hot.
Now I am alone on the floor, in a cottage next to a lake, in one of the most remote places I’ve ever seen. The man standing over me may be the only other person within miles. It is silent here and it is cold. Everything is different. Yet exactly the same.
There was a single shot. It made a strange alien sound as it came out of the white tube. I know in my mind, in that high place above everything else where I’m looking down and seeing it as it happens, that the slug was slowed by the wipe barrier, that the gases were trapped inside the tube, and that this is why the sound was so foreign to me. My ears are not ringing.
He has put the gun down on the counter. I am lying on the floor and I am looking up at him. He flips a switch and a light goes on. It hurts my eyes. Then he leaves the room and I reach toward the gun. I can see the black handle extending over the edge of the counter. It is four feet from my hand. I cannot reach it. I am bleeding.
He comes back into the room and now he has a black movie camera in his hands. There are knobs and dials and a lens that he points at me now. Around his chest he has slung another machine. A wire leads to a microphone and this he extends toward me. Both machines are smoothly humming, so softly I can barely hear the gears turning.
“Tell me who you are,” he says to me.
I cannot speak. I am bleeding.
“Did you bring the film?”
