For breakfast, Morgan nibbled on dry toast and water, despite the smorgasbord of eggs, sausages, and fresh fruit.
“Wine get you, too?”
“Huh?” She looked up and saw Cora tilt her chin toward her plate.
“Oh, yeah.” Just thinking about seeing her own handiwork on Christopher’s neck was enough to make her stomach turn.
“It’s all downhill after thirty,” Blake quipped, scooping two sausage links onto his own plate.
Morgan forced a smile as, warily, she let her gaze slide over to Eleanor, who sat at the table next to Don and across from Christopher. But he wasn’t looking at Morgan. Instead, his eyes drilled into the center of the table where Don held Eleanor’s hand. Morgan watched him watching them. As though he could sense her stare, he refocused, like a camera lens, onto her. They locked eyes. Now that she’d seen it—the ruined patch of skin peeking out of his turtleneck—she couldn’t miss it.
His mouth twisted as he opened it to speak. “Say, Morgan.”
Her blood froze. Hearing his voice for the first time since knowing where she’d heard it before felt like a knife in her ear. She leaned forward just a little, inviting him to go on.
“How did your little darkroom experiment go?”
Eleanor looked from Morgan to Christopher, back to Morgan. “Darkroom experiment?”
“Yes.” Christopher chuckled. “Quite ingenious, really. She stopped by the lab to pick up some chemicals to develop a lost roll of film she’d found. It was in your collection, I think, didn’t you say, Morgan?”
Eleanor tilted her head. “Oh, well that’s exciting! How did they turn out, Morgan?”
The weight of all the Reynoldses’ eyes on her was crushing. “They didn’t,” she lied, and summoned an appropriate frown. “The film was corroded, unfortunately.”
Eleanor nodded, but there was a darkness to her tone when she said: “Well, sounds like you gave it a college try.”
“I did,” Morgan assured, and then she felt the light pressure of someone’s hands on her waist, gingerly pushing her aside.
Bennett tugged on the silverware drawer and grabbed a fork. He was freshly showered and smelled of his signature cologne. “You all thawed out from your morning walk?” he asked.
Her cheeks were hot, suddenly, as Cora’s and Blake’s attention turned to her. Even Carlisle stopped kicking her feet and stared.
“You went for a walk?” Cora asked. “Where?”
“The driveway.” Bennett laughed to himself as he scooped some scrambled eggs onto his plate.
Morgan shrugged. “I sleepwalk sometimes.”
“Oh dear,” Morgan heard Eleanor breathe. “Are you all right, Morgan? No frostbite, no…?”
“I wasn’t out there long,” Morgan promised. “Probably only thirty seconds before Bennett found me.”
“I heard the door shut,” said Bennett, and Morgan remembered he’d pointed out his bedroom was the first one down the hall when he’d given her the grand tour yesterday.
“Thank goodness,” said Eleanor. She pressed her hand over her heart.
“Sounds like someone’s getting locked in her room tonight.”
Morgan didn’t have to look to know who’d spoken. She’d know Christopher’s voice anywhere.
“Miss Mori, your chariot.” Bennett gestured to a two-toned blue Yamaha Sidewinder. For all her years spent in snowy Wisconsin, Morgan had never seen a snowmobile up close, let alone ridden one. It looked like a guard dog with its chest puffed out, and yet its skis lighted atop the snow as though it weighed as much as a dragonfly.
“Damn, why didn’t you get the big one?” Morgan said as she straddled the behemoth. She put on a bulbous blue helmet and for a second, indulged her imagination in pretending she was an astronaut, exploring the planet Neptune, where the lakes are cold enough to shatter bones.
Bennett climbed on and sat in the space in front of her. He flipped the switch and the machine purred.
Morgan looked around. The Reynoldses were a caravan of matching snowmobiles. She wasn’t the only one riding doubles; Eleanor hugged Don from behind, her cheeks already rosy from the cold.
Could he really be a cold-blooded killer, this man whom Eleanor cozied up to, she contemplated, thinking back to two days ago, mapping out possible scenarios in Hudson’s living room. Could he have done away with Clive all those years ago?
And what about David? Although he didn’t fit the description of the man who had killed Officer Garrison, Eleanor had made it apparent in her conversation with Hudson and Nik that there was no love lost between David and his father. Perhaps he had murdered Clive in a fit of rage.
Christopher wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities, either. She remembered the old photographs of him. He’d been larger than Clive, back in the day. Making up for what he lacked in looks with muscles. She wondered if his jealousy of Clive stealing Eleanor had finally reared its ugly, homicidal head.
“Morgan?”
She shook herself back to now.
Bennett laughed. “You ready?”
She gave him a thumbs-up and they took off.
Could you outrun the cold? It was a legitimate question she grappled with as she and Bennett flew through the trees faster than the speed of sound. Although perhaps her retained warmth had something to do with the many layers she was wearing, including a pair of Bennett’s sweatpants over her leggings. She wondered how long they would be out here. With all its ice and snow-laden boughs and sticks thrusting upward from the banks, this place was a hazard. She didn’t know much about nature, but she knew its golden rule: the more beautiful something is, the more deadly.
Up ahead, she saw Carlisle’s toboggan hat whipping behind her like a flag. Cora and Blake were too far ahead, blue dots in the distance. Eleanor and Don brought up the rear.
“Come on,” Bennett yelled into the air, as though she had any choice but to move with him. “I know a shortcut.”
He dove down a short but steep slope. Above them, Morgan heard Eleanor and Don whiz by. She mimicked Bennett’s movements as he leaned left and then right, dodging brambles and branches. Adrenaline surged through her body. She held on tight, probably squeezing the air from his lungs, to keep from being flung off.
“You okay?” Bennett called.
She nodded, though she didn’t know if he could see it. “What’s that?” she asked, suddenly pointing up ahead to a small building that looked like it was made of Lincoln Logs.
“An old post office,” Bennett explained. “This was all a little town once.”
“What happened to it?”
She didn’t have to see him to know his face was split into a wolfish grin. “People like me.”
“Private equity guys?”
“Businesspeople who saw an opportunity for profit. The county makes more off the taxes on these lake houses than they ever did with the whole town.”
“So money really can buy everything?”
“What do you think, Morgan Mori?”
“I think I’m in the wrong line of work.”
Bennett laughed. “After the holidays, I’ll take you on as my apprentice, how about that?”
She forced a grin and for a moment, the wind froze her face that way. They sped on through the graveyard of a town where he pointed out an old, dilapidated bait shop, a hardware store, and a library. Then, something appeared that felt like an unsettling brand of déjà vu to Morgan. She knew this place. A frozen pond with a dock and a little lean-to shed. It looked smaller in real life than it had in the photographs. A pile of logs was stacked along one wall, a long-handled ax splitting the top-most one, as though whoever had last swung it, called it a day and simply never came back.
“This is your pond,” she said, remembering scanning old photos of Clive and Bennett, holding up fishing lines of bluegill and perch.
Bennett laughed. “Sure is. Man, we used to spend a lot of time out here.”
“You and your dad?”
“Yeah.”
A canoe that might once have been fire-engine red was beached on the shore. It looked cut in half, its tail end stuck under the ice. Who knew how long ago the little boat had been abandoned, left to the weather and the elements and the solitude. Morgan felt sorry for the thing, and then, as they continued to careen through the woods, she was struck by a memory so vivid, so real, that she almost fell off the machine, for all by its lonesome, amidst the birch trees, stood a blue box.
It looked like a vintage parking meter, and yet, she remembered being lifted up as a child, someone’s hand guiding hers as she dialed a number on the keypad. The memory was immortalized in a negative, even. Clive had taken her there.
“What is that?” she asked Bennett, pointing to the thing that was now behind them.
“What?” He turned to look over his shoulder.
“That blue box back there.”
“Oh. I think it’s a call box or something. For police, back in the day.”
“There’s a phone in there?”
“Probably not anymore.” He laughed as they blasted through a mound of powder. “Why, you wanna call in to report a crime? Perhaps someone’s stolen your heart, Miss Mori?”
Something like that.
Morgan brushed the joke aside with another forced smile and took note of her surroundings. Her wrist itched where the key was kept. She would come back later. Alone.