I struggled to my feet and disentangled myself from whatever had been trapping me. A quilted moving blanket. There had been a small stack of them in the corner of the antechamber. I wrapped it around me for warmth.
I tried the door, but it was locked, of course. My key card would have opened it, but my assailant had taken that. Odds were that I couldn’t have texted for help even if I had my phone—the wireless didn’t seem to extend to the storage area. But if I’d clipped the walkie-talkie or the satellite phone to my jeans, instead of leaving them both in the tote bag—
“Enough,” I said aloud. Never mind how I got here. I had to get inside before frostbite set in. Or worse, before I froze to death.
“People rarely freeze to death.” I could hear Dad’s voice, in one of his wide-ranging dinner table conversations. “They’re much more apt to die of hypothermia. And it doesn’t even need to be freezing to cause that—just colder than 98.6.”
“But how long does it take when it’s this cold?” I wanted to ask. How long did I have? I remembered Sami saying that in weather like this it could take as little as ten minutes to get frostbite. Wasn’t that bad enough? I had no desire to lose fingers or toes.
I could take off walking along the edge of the hotel. Of course, it wouldn’t exactly be walking—it would be floundering through drifts four, sometimes five feet high. I wasn’t at all sure I could make it in time.
Maybe staying near the door was smart. Grandfather would probably send someone to fetch Percival if I hadn’t yet shown up by the time his panel drew near. I could keep banging on the door and hope they came in time. Not an optimal plan. It could be an hour before anyone got here, and what if they were so focused on fetching Percival that they ignored the banging?
Just then I noticed something. There were only a couple of inches of snow right outside the door. Someone had cleared the area. And I saw a small depression in the snow near the edge of the cleared area.
I waded over to the depression and started scooping snow out.
“Yes!” I exclaimed.
I’d found the start of Josh and Jamie’s tunnel.
I wriggled my way in, sternly repressing my claustrophobia, which kept urging me to wriggle out again and run away. It was a tight squeeze—I had to take off the quilted blanket to do it—but at least I fit. A few years ago, before the boys’ growth spurt had sent them shooting up to nearly my height, I wouldn’t have.
I began crawling along the tunnel, pushing the blanket ahead of me, in case I needed it for warmth later.
I hoped they’d found a pretty direct route from our cottage to the wing the storage room was in.
And what if they’d started a new tunnel at the door I’d been locked out of, a tunnel that hadn’t yet met up with the one that led away from the cottage? What if I came to a dead end that marked the limit of their excavations before they’d gone off to shovel snow at the front of the hotel?
“Then I’ll stand up and get my bearings,” I muttered. There couldn’t be more than a foot or two of snow overhead. I could dig through that, couldn’t I?
I noticed that it seemed warmer inside the tunnel than it had outside. Was that possible? Or was I just getting used to the cold? That wasn’t a comforting thought. Wasn’t getting used to the cold a step along the journey to frostbite?
And what if whoever had shoved me outside came back to look for me. To check on me, or more likely finish me off?
“Then you’re no worse off here than you would be back there,” I told myself. I crawled on.
I realized that the tunnel had been sloping up for some time. Well, that made sense. The short route from the cottage to the storage room led down a flight of stairs at the end of the terraced gardens that surrounded the cottages and overlooked the golf course. The long way was to make a detour into the golf course where the land sloped down more gently. I’d been rather hoping the boys’ tunnel had led to the stairs. Okay, evidently we were going through the golf course. I just needed to keep crawling.
I had to choke back tears of relief when I spotted a literal light at the end of the tunnel. I started crawling faster, and in another couple of minutes I found myself in the cave right outside the French doors of the Madison Cottage.
I tried the door handle with trembling hands and breathed a sigh of relief. It was open.
I stepped inside, closed the door behind me, and shut my eyes for just a moment, savoring the warmth. Then my eyes flew open again.
“No time for that,” I muttered. I raced out the front door, across the courtyard, and through the lobby. When I burst through the door of the Command Post, the chief and Horace looked up in surprise.
“I think someone just tried to kill me,” I blurted out.
“What?” The chief rose to his feet.
Michael appeared in the Command Post doorway, with the boys pressing in behind him.
“Meg, are you all right?” he asked. “We saw you running through the lobby.”
“Someone threw this blanket over my head, stole my phone and my key card, and shoved me out in the snow when I was fetching Percival,” I said. “I might have frozen to death if I hadn’t been able to use the boys’ tunnels to get back to the cottage.”
“Awesome!” “Go, Mom!” the boys exclaimed.
“Who is Percival, and what are these tunnels?” the chief demanded.
“Percival is an owl that we’ve been keeping in a storage room at the far end of the hotel,” I said. “Grandfather needs him for his panel in—yikes! Fifteen minutes. I should go get him.”
“I’ll get Percival.” Michael gently pushed me back into a nearby chair. “Josh, can you fetch your grandfather so he can make sure Mom is okay? And Jamie, please tell Great that Percival might be a little late.”
“Michael, while you’re fetching Percival, you can show Horace where all this occurred,” the chief said. “And meanwhile Meg can give me a more complete account of what happened.”
Everyone but the chief and I dashed out.
“Okay, tell me about it,” the chief said.
I gave him the blow-by-blow account. When I’d finished, he looked thoughtful.
“You seriously think the person who did this was trying to kill you?”
I took a deep breath and considered the question.
“Good point,” I said. “If their goal was to kill me, they could have just hit me over the head. More accurate to say that whoever did it didn’t care if I lived or died. So what was their goal? Not birdnapping, I expect. Percival’s an interesting specimen, but I can’t imagine why anyone would steal him.”
Actually, I could imagine a scenario in which someone wanted to steal Percival—what if they’d needed to hide something small and valuable? They could get Percival to swallow it—maybe by taping it to a mouse they were feeding him—and then retrieve it when Percival puked it up in a pellet that would also contain the indigestible parts of the mouse. In which case, seeing me about to haul Percival away and not knowing where I was taking him, they might well want to stop me and preserve their access to Percival, at least until the sought-after pellet appeared.
But just because I could imagine such a scenario didn’t mean I believed in it. I suspected even Dad, if faced with such a sequence of events in one of his beloved mystery books, would—well, not toss it across the room. Not his style. But he would gently suggest to anyone who asked him what he thought of the book in question that he’d found the plot a trifle far-fetched.
“We’ll find out in a few minutes if the owl is safe,” the chief said.
“And it’s more likely they were after something I was carrying,” I said. “Maybe my phone. More likely my key card. Ekaterina gave me one with pretty broad access privileges.”
“That seems more likely,” the chief said. “It’s also possible that whoever did this wanted to prevent you from seeing him there in the storage area. It would be interesting to find out why—when Horace calls in, I’ll tell him to start a search. Did you notice anything about your assailant?”
“Not really.” I closed my eyes and replayed the incident in my mind—what there was of it. It had happened so fast. “Except that whoever did it wasn’t tiny. He wasn’t reaching up to throw the blanket over me. He was more or less my height. And strong enough that he didn’t have too much trouble shoving me out the door. I was too surprised to fight much but still, I’m no lightweight. And I’m saying he, but I can’t remember anything to disprove the idea that it was a tall woman.”
“We should go and check to see who’s been safely ensconced in a panel for the last hour.” The chief glanced at his watch, and then at a copy of the conference program that I’d given Horace. “And then—”
“Chief?” Horace opened the door and peered in.
“What’s up?”
“The owl’s fine. Dr. Blake has him now. And I have Meg’s phone and her tote bag.” He stepped into the Command Post and handed them to me. “I came back to get my kit—I figured I should process the scene. Could be attempted murder.”
“Assault and battery, at the very least,” the chief said. “And reckless endangerment. So yes; process the scene, and then I’ll come help you search the area. What if Meg interrupted something the perpetrator didn’t want anyone to see?”
Horace nodded and went to pick up his kit.
Someone else knocked on the door.
“It never rains,” the chief murmured. “Come in!” he called, more loudly.
Dr. Craine opened the door and stood in the doorway for a moment. Then she strode in and took the vacant chair that I’d come to think of as the hot seat, since it was where Horace and the chief tended to put the people they were interviewing.
“Chief Burke.” She fixed a steely gaze on him.
“You remember Dr. Vera Craine,” I said. Apart from their brief meeting when the chief was notifying his persons of interest, all their interaction had been over the phone, so I wasn’t positive he’d remember who she was.
“Of course,” the chief said. “What can we do for you?”
“I came to face the music,” Dr. Craine said.