Opperman. He smiles at you and he talks real smooth, and all the time he’s got the knife out, waiting to stick it in.”
“You haven’t dealt with him. You’ve investigated him. Of course you think he’s the bogeyman.” She shook out a plastic bag and slid several tissue-stiffened swags inside. “One of his business partners was murdered. His other partner tried to kill him. I’m sorry if the case didn’t turn out like you thought it would, but honey, it’s been over a year. The trial has come and gone, and Mr. Opperman wasn’t implicated in any way. Don’t you think it’s time to let it go already?”
He stomped through the kitchen with unnecessary force.
“He could have taken the insurance money and run,” Linda went on. “Instead, he built the resort. He gave a lot of local people jobs, including yours truly.” She trailed him through the open mudroom door into the unheated summer kitchen. “Let’s face it, honey, you divide the world into two categories, criminals and potential criminals.” Her words made vapor puffs in the cold air. “I’ve worked with him. Believe me. He has a clear conscience.”
In the barn, Russ lifted the back gate of her boxy old Volvo wagon and slid the quilted shades in. “Careful of those sheers,” she said.
“Jeffrey Dahmer had a clear conscience, too, you know.”
She dropped her swags in the back and slammed the tailgate. “You. Are. Impossible.” She stomped up the barn steps, strode through the summer kitchen, and let the mudroom door swing in his face.
“Honey,” he started, but she held up her hand.
“I don’t know why you’ve been such a grouchy old bastard lately, but it’s going to stop.” She threw open the refrigerator and pulled out an insulated lunchbox. “Here. I made you a lunch. Take your pretty new gun and go shoot something.”
“Honey…” He tried again.
She paused in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “And don’t think all this talk about how terrible Mr. Opperman is will get you out of going to the grand-opening party tonight. I expect you to be here, wearing your tux, car keys in hand, by seven-thirty tonight. Do us both a favor and work out your aggressions on the deer, okay?” She leaned against the doorjamb, crossing her arms over her chest. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
He was rewarded with the dimples again. “You’re impossible, but I love you.”
“I am impossible,” he agreed.
“And…”
“And I love you, too.”
She disappeared into the living room. God, she was still so beautiful. When he had married her twenty-five years ago, he had wanted nothing else than to grow old with her. And now, that had happened. He was fifty years old today. Fifty years old, and in love with another woman.
Clare pulled over to the side of the dirt road and fished her flashlight out of the glove compartment. Her sweet little Shelby Cobra, which had been such a bargain because it was rebuilt, didn’t have a working dome light. She thumbed the light on and studied the directions John Huggins had given her. She kept her right foot tromped down hard, because her car also didn’t have a functioning parking brake. The timing chain had broken twice since she bought it, and the muffler was about to fall off in a shower of rust flakes, but the Shelby went like she had a 455 rocket, and the heater was a regular blast furnace, a fact she was grateful for on this below-freezing morning.
Okay, she had gone off the paved road and had already passed two dirt roads to her left. Huggins had warned her that the multiple access roads to the Haudenosaunee land would be confusing. According to her directions, she had another half mile to go, and then a right turn into a dirt road marked with stone pillars should bring her to the main camp.
Sure enough, in a matter of minutes she was turning past two riverstone obelisks and wending her way even higher into the mountains over a switchback road drifted deep with dead leaves. She was just starting to worry that she had taken a wrong turn despite the directions when the trees crowding in on both sides of the road opened up and her tires crunched onto gravel.
Her first glimpse of Haudenosaunee surprised her. She was expecting something grand, an Adirondack-themed fantasia with peeled-birch Gothic trim and a rack of antlers over the door. Instead, she faced a simple, two-story log building with a deep-eaved roof and a broad porch that looked more like Wyoming than New York State to her. The house-camp?-fronted a gravel drive almost as wide as it was long. On the far side of the drive, opposite the porch, the trees had been thinned rigorously, leaving a dramatic view of the mountains rolling away to the north. Meant as a summer house, then. One thing Clare had learned in her almost two years in Millers Kill was that no one built a house facing north if he could help it. The view was bracketed by a three-bay garage on one end, also constructed from logs. Its doors, like the house’s door and shutters, were trimmed in Adirondack green.
Huggins’s black Dodge Ram was parked out front among several other pickups and SUVs. Clare pulled in beside them, a midget in the Land of the Four Wheel Drive.
The clammy chill of the predawn air seized her as soon as she got out of the car. She ducked back in to get her parka and gloves from the passenger seat and nearly cracked her head when someone called, “Reverend Fergusson?” from the camp house’s shadowy front porch.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she said.
“Glad you could make it.” He stepped off the porch into the gray light, a compactly built man in a blaze-orange jacket. “Don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Duane.” He shook her hand.
“Sure,” she said. “You’re one of Russ’s-one of Chief Van Alstyne’s part-time officers, aren’t you?”
His teeth gleamed in the half-light. “Part-time police, part-time rescue, part-time EMT, full-time pain in the neck, my wife tells me. You got something orange or reflective in there?”
She pulled her Day-Glo green running vest out of the backseat. “I thought this would do.”
“Good enough. We don’t want you getting shot up by somebody mistaking you for a buck.”
She shrugged the vest over her parka while following Duane back to the house. “Is that a real problem?”
He glanced up at the lightening sky. “A beautiful Saturday in November? These woods’ll be full of hunters by daybreak. Which could work to our advantage in finding the missing girl. Provided nobody shoots her or us first, of course.” Duane led her up the porch steps and opened the door. “We’re meeting in here.”
Clare tried not to goggle as they entered the house. The outside may have been spartan, but the interior was everything she had hoped for. Turkish carpets covered polished floorboards, twig rocking chairs sat before a crackling fire in a massive stone fireplace, and the walls were hung with Hudson School landscapes and animal heads. She expected Teddy Roosevelt to stride into the room and welcome her at any moment.
Instead, she got John Huggins. “Fergusson! Come on over here. You’d been any later, we would have had to leave without you.”
Huggins and the five other members of the search and rescue team were clustered around a dining room table whose shining mahogany surface was cluttered with topographical maps and grease pencils.
Huggins slid a map toward her and continued from where he had apparently left off. “Okay, I want regular check-ins on the radio. We’ve notified the Fish and Game folks; they’ll be telling anyone they come into contact with. If you run across any hunters or hikers, give them the girl’s description and remind them of the emergency signal-two shots into the air. But tell ’em to get close and make sure it’s the girl-otherwise we’ll have excitable fools blasting an alarm every time they spot an old log. We’ll regroup and take a break in about three hours.” He waved a hand at the men. “You may as well get started. I’ll brief Fergusson here.” He turned to her. “You bring a GPS unit?”
“Nope,” she said.
He made a noise indicating that this lapse didn’t surprise him. “Duane, give her a unit and a radio. You do know how these things work, right?”
“The global positioning system enables the carrier of a unit to position him-or herself on an exact latitudinal and longitudinal coordinate by receiving and relaying information through the global satellite system,”
