Cold River - Carla Neggers [57]
Hearing Poe barking, and the voice at the crypt.
“Hannah.”
Had Bowie been playing games with her—protecting himself, trying to scare her off, distract her? He could compartmentalize—he’d learned to as a boy, as a way to cope with his father’s drunken rages.
Had he managed to compartmentalize having let himself be used by Melanie Kendall and Kyle Rigby? Had he fallen in with them to indulge his resentments against the Camerons?
Hannah couldn’t stop the flood of questions and possibilities. Bowie could have spotted her crossing the road to the cemetery to check on Poe. Had he dislodged the debris pile in order to cover up the retreat of someone he’d met there?
Even if he wouldn’t have hurt her, it didn’t mean he wasn’t involved in the network responsible for the murders of Drew Cameron, Alex Bruni and possibly others.
It didn’t mean he wasn’t a danger to himself and others.
She turned over again. She didn’t believe Bowie was capable of being involved with killers. And that was what Sean had been trying to tell her was the problem.
She heard snoring down the hall and sighed, satisfied that at least her brothers were sleeping tonight.
Fourteen
December 29—Black Falls, Vermont
Ryan “Grit” Taylor was cold under the blankets on the lumpy twin bed in one of the dozen small, falling-down cabins Jo Harper owned on the frozen Vermont lake below Black Falls Lodge. He’d stoked up the woodstove before going to sleep, but the fire had died down by dawn. There was no insulation in the cabin and it was the dead of winter. The last forecast he saw had the temperature dropping into single digits overnight, and he had no doubt it had. An offense to his Southern soul. He could have stayed at the lodge, but he hadn’t wanted to. Too many people.
Not being a coward, having faced bullets, blood and death, he figured he might as well get up. He donned his prosthesis, following a procedure that wasn’t quite routine but wasn’t new, either. He sat up on the side of the bed and put a prosthetic sock over the stump, made sure there were no wrinkles or folds, and grabbed the PTB—patella tendon bearing—socket that stood upright on the floor. Quickly but carefully, he inserted the stump into the socket and secured it with an elastic cuff.
“Done,” he said, part of his ritual.
Life sucked, but whatever.
He added kindling to the hot coals in the woodstove and shut the door, hoping he wouldn’t have to baby the fire to get it going. He looked out the picture window and saw Myrtle Smith coming up the path, which he’d cleared of snow himself, using a shovel that had to be a hundred years old. Jo had found it in another cabin. He’d discovered she was a waste-not-want-not type.
Myrtle wasn’t, but if she ever needed any shoveling to be done, she’d get someone else to do it.
Grit opened the door. “Myrtle, what are you doing?”
“Trying not to fall,” she said without looking up from the narrow path. “If you were dead in there, no one would find me until fishing season.”
Myrtle, too, had a Southern soul. She hated cold weather. She hated snow and ice.
“Hurry up,” Grit said. “I don’t want to let the heat out.”
“What heat? You’re in a cabin in the boonies.”
“I’ve got the woodstove going.”
“Ah. I’m reassured,” she said, picking her way across an icy patch directly in front of the cabin door. “It’s Vermont. My car thermometer reads four degrees below zero. A woodstove isn’t going to get me to forget that.”
Grit had met Myrtle in mid-November at the spot in front of the Washington, D.C., hotel where Ambassador Alex Bruni was killed in a hit-and-run masterminded and executed by the two killers who’d then headed to Vermont to kill more people. In the weeks he’d known her, Grit had concluded that Myrtle was a drama queen who wasn’t happy unless she was bitching.
“I’m not hurrying,” she said. “I almost went ass-over-teakettle on the ice by the lake. I spend half my time up here trying not to fall and break something, I swear.”
Grit grinned at her. “Think of it, though. I could rescue you. Throw you over my