Chapter Twenty

 

When I finally marshaled my scattered forces, we had caught our breaths again and were dozing side by side, arms brushing but otherwise not touching. I turned my head on the pillow and studied J.X.’s face. His eyes were closed, although I knew he wasn’t sleeping.

He had disarmingly long eyelashes.

As though feeling my gaze, he opened his eyes, slanted me a look. I waited for another comment about how this had been a mistake, but maybe he thought that went without saying.

With my usual flair for pillow talk, I said, “So why don’t you wear your wedding ring?”

He didn’t blink, didn’t move a muscle. I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me, although given the fact that our noses were inches apart, I didn’t see how he could have failed to. At last, he said evenly, “Would it have mattered to you?”

“Not if it didn’t matter to you. Why should it?” Nobody was faithful, right? No such thing as fidelity anyway. Wasn’t even a realistic expectation, and only fools let themselves get hurt.

He said as a statement, not question, “Because this is just sex.”

“Right.” I said it, but I can’t say I felt any great confidence as the word left my mouth. Sometimes I wonder if anything is “just” sex. There are ramifications for everything we do, and I didn’t like that particular glint in his eyes. Maybe it was the uncertain light…but I didn’t think so.

I was disconcerted to hear myself add, “Isn’t it?”

“It is for me.”

That was blunt enough, and it’s not like I was asking for it to be anything else, so I’m not sure why I felt that barb working its way up through my guts toward my heart.

“So…what’s the deal with you? You’re bisexual? You were going through one of those heterosexual phases?”

He said calmly, “I don’t feel a need to explain myself to you. I’m not asking you any questions, am I?” He sat up and reached for his boxers which were lying beside the bed. I felt taking time to don underwear showed a certain level of maturity, and I accepted that the ardent boy I had once known was truly gone.

All the same, I pushed up on my elbows, watching him dress. “You can if you want to.”

He gave me another of those brief gleaming looks. “It doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“Ouch.”

“Hey, you asked.”

Watching him fasten the fly of his jeans, I observed, “The fact that you still seem resentful of something that happened over a decade ago might lead someone to think that you still have feelings for me.”

“I have feelings for you,” J.X. said. “I feel that you’re an egotistical and self-centered prick. But you’re a good fuck. I feel it would be a shame not to take advantage of that.” He shrugged into his shirt, his eyes meeting mine steadily, unselfconsciously.

I was the one coloring. To my astonishment, I heard myself confess, “I was scared.”

He raised his brows politely. The Grand Inquisitor allowing the convicted a last word.

I said, “The weekend of the conference I’d come home from a book tour to find my lover in bed with a neighbor. I thought it was over between us, and I…was in a lot of pain. It was not my intention to hurt you.” I grimaced. “You probably kept me from chucking myself out of a hotel window that weekend.”

He did the buttons of his shirt swiftly, eyeing me without interruption.

“But when I went back home, David apologized. He begged for another chance.”

“And you didn’t have the balls to explain that to me? You couldn’t take a couple of minutes to answer my emails or phone calls and tell me the truth?”

I put my face in my hands and groaned. “I know. I know. I’m sorry. I know I treated you badly. I was a shit.”

“Past tense? You still are a shit, Christopher.” He even smiled, though it was rather derisive. He picked his jacket up from the floor near the door and pulled it on. “Only this time around it’s David you’re treating badly, not me. Because I don’t give a damn.”

He zipped his jacket, opened the door, and said, “Lock this behind me.”

With that he was gone, and I leaped across the chilly boards to slide the bolt and sprint back to the warmth of the bed. I huddled into the bedclothes and listened to the beat of the rain—and the echo of J.X.’s words.

It sank in on me that I still hadn’t really managed to tell him the full truth—that I had been too gutless to allow myself further contact with him because I wasn’t sure I could end it. I’d liked him a lot. So much so that I’d been in danger of falling hard for him that weekend. For a kid five years younger than me. An ambitious newbie. A cop. He’d scared me in so many ways it wasn’t funny. Meanwhile there was the devil I knew. David. David, who was so sincerely sorry, and so determined to make it up to me, and so safe, and so familiar. And we’d already paid for the commitment ceremony.

I had never been very adventurous. Hell, admit it. I was a fucking coward. Which is why I wrote mysteries about a geriatric gumshoe and her furball feline.

I watched the firelight flickering across the open beams of the ceiling. Did I owe J.X. that truth? He’d pretty much made it clear he didn’t give a damn one way or the other, and me still harping on it might, in fact, lead someone to think that it was I who had feelings for him.

Did I?

I mean, surely I had enough wrong in my life without looking for more trouble?

But…it had been extraordinarily pleasant to be held, to be kissed and made love to—because that’s what it had felt like. Like J.X. was making love to me.

On that strangely soothing thought, I fell asleep.

My dreams were not soothing, though. I found myself trying to explain my bad decisions to Steven Krass, who ridiculed them—and me—while he stood at a potbellied stove cooking flapjacks for everyone at the lodge. Even Peaches was there, looking disturbingly dead in her plum-colored pajamas as she sat at a long picnic table with the other guests. I looked down the row of familiar—and unfamiliar—faces. Even Edgar, Rita, and Debbie were seated, scarfing down flapjacks like there was no tomorrow. One of these people is a murderer, I thought in my dream. And then, in that way dreams can seem suddenly portentous, I thought…where’s J.X.?

I jerked awake. It took me a few seconds to place where I was, my first impression being that I had fallen into a Very Special episode of Little House on the Prairie. The room was cold and smelled of old wood fires and recent sex. The rain continued its unceasing drum on the roof. I rolled over to look at the clock, but there was only blackness where the face of the clock should have been. I remembered that the power was out.

I snuggled into the blankets and wished that J.X. had stayed the night. It would have been warmer with him. Oh hell, it would have been better all around with him.

By the way, where the hell did he get off giving me attitude about David when he was married himself?

Only this time around it’s David you’re treating badly.

My eyes flew open. J.X. thought David and I were still together. I lay perfectly motionless absorbing this. No wonder he didn’t have the highest opinion of me. Not that he was in any position to be making moral judgments, but…

Yeah, that made a difference. A big difference. To both of us. I threw the covers back and rolled out of bed, feeling around for my clothes. I dragged a heavy sweater over my nakedness. Finding my wristwatch on the night table, I pressed for the luminous dial. One o’clock in the a.m.; J.X. had said he was going up to the lodge, but he would be back in his cabin by now.

I stumbled around, nearly falling over my suitcase, and then rifling through its contents for a dry pair of jeans. I found the jeans—and clean socks—dressing unsteadily in the darkness. Feeling my way back to the night table, I groped for the key J.X. had tossed to me. I inadvertently swiped it off the table surface and then spent several minutes feeling for it under the bed.

At last I had the key, and I clambered to my feet and found my coat, which was still damp from my last sojourn hours earlier. I pulled it on and let myself out. The door about tore out of my grasp in the gale.

The irony was it was lighter outside my cabin than it was inside. I could see J.X.’s cabin a few yards down. Smoke wafted gently from the chimney, white against the stormy sky. I locked my cabin and sloshed my way down to J.X.’s.

I knocked on his door.

Nothing.

I turned my collar up and knocked harder.

The eternal silence of the grave…

Now why the hell did I have to think of that now? I cast an uneasy look over my shoulder and slammed my palm against the rough door a few times.

Nothing. This was getting monotonous.

I tried the door, and to my surprise, it swung open. Not sure why I was surprised since doors always swing open in mystery novels…it’s simply that real life is rarely as accommodating.

I called, “J.X.?”

There was a fire burning in the fireplace, sending shadows licking across the floor. I could make out the outline of the bed. It was empty. There was a suitcase sitting open on the desk. I stepped inside the cabin. I could discern the outline of the bathroom door standing wide open. He wasn’t in here. The bed was rumpled but still made.

Okay. Well, he hadn’t been home when I called last night either. Maybe he was checking on the icehouse guests again.

Or maybe not.

Why the hell would he leave his cabin unlocked?

By the dying firelight I could see there was something black and shiny lying on the floor. For one lightheaded moment I feared it was a puddle of blood. Then I realized it was a large black trash bag.

Now why did that trigger an easy recollection?

Where had I last seen a trash bag?

Edgar handing J.X. a black trash bag in which to wrap the sawed-off oak limb that had been used to hit Peaches.

I crossed to the fireplace and looked in, but all burning wood looks pretty much the same once it hits the point of turning into a bed of orange coals.

Looking around, I made out the glint of a flashlight on the bed table. I picked the flashlight up and examined the interior of the trash bag. There were bits of pine needle and tree bark. J.X. was burning the murder weapon.

My legs seemed to give out, and I dropped down on the foot of the bed. Mystery writer though I was, I couldn’t come up with a single innocent reason for such a thing.

Unless…

Unless J.X. wasn’t burning the murder weapon. Unless someone else was burning it…

Where was J.X.? Why hadn’t he taken the flashlight with him? Why would he leave his cabin unlocked?

I shone the flashlight around the empty room and noticed something I had missed before. J.X.’s jacket was hanging on the back of the chair tucked in the desk.

I crossed over to the desk and touched the jacket. The leather felt cool and mysteriously, strangely alive. It also felt slightly damp because he had been wearing it earlier, and I couldn’t think of a single good reason for him not to be wearing it now since he clearly was not in this cabin.

Too much imagination is part of the mystery writer’ job description, but this time my brain was presenting me with a series of facts that I could not—refused—to make sense of.

Because it did not make sense. No murderer would be crazy enough to tackle J.X. What would be the point of doing such a thing?

Or was the point turning to cinders in the fireplace right now?

I stared unseeingly at the red ribs of the wood in the grate. Attacking J.X. did not make sense, but neither did it make sense that he had gone off without his jacket and flashlight—leaving his cabin unlocked.

Well, but maybe he had another jacket and another flashlight. And maybe he had only stepped away.

Stepped away where?

But if someone had attacked J.X.… Say it. If someone had killed J.X., where was the body? Why hide his body when the killer hadn’t hidden anyone else’s? Why hide evidence of this crime?

Because there was no crime. Because J.X. had gone out voluntarily.

After destroying evidence in a murder investigation?

Who was in better position to do so? He had argued with Peaches the night before she was killed, and he declined to say why. He was clearly leading a sexual double life. Krass had taunted him in the bar.

Well, maybe he hadn’t specifically taunted J.X., but he had been taunting the murderer, hadn’t he? And then he’d wound up dead too. And J.X. certainly had the insider’s track on the Murderer’s Things to Do List. And he’d been quick to shut me up every time I tried to defend myself—he’d got me isolated out here—

Now I was scaring myself. If J.X. was the killer, I did not want to be discovered standing here watching the evidence against him going up in smoke.

I headed for the door, checking on the stoop and making sure the coast was clear. The row of cabins stood silver gray in the night, and the world smelled of mud and rain and woodsmoke. The rain had dwindled to a misty drizzle. I squelched hastily back to my own cabin and let myself inside. I locked the door behind me and went to the window where I stood watching the darkness, wondering what I was waiting for.

I was still waiting when morning came.