Allison Brennan - Love Is Murder

“Sorry,” Kyle said. “I dropped my glass.”

Grace rushed in. “What happened?”

“I’m fine. Really.” The guy looked embarrassed. “Just slipped.”

Grace stared at the mess on the floor.

“I’ll clean it up,” Lucy offered.

“No,” Grace snapped, “I’ll do it.” She strode over to a cabinet and grabbed some rags and a broom and dustpan.

Lucy and Patrick exchanged glances. She was wound tight. Maybe they all were tonight, with a dead body in the root cellar.

“You fainted ,” Patrick said. “You didn’t just slip.”

Grace said, “We’re at a seventy-five-hundred-foot elevation. The air is thinner up here.” She knelt to pick up the biggest pieces of glass.

Lucy said, “Grace is right. The thin air could affect you, especially if you overexert yourself. Usually symptoms of high-altitude sickness don’t occur until eight thousand feet-”

Grace cut her off. “That’s arbitrary. People are affected differently.”

“True,” Lucy said, though she didn’t completely agree. The human body processed oxygen at different ranges comfortably; it was when the atmosphere started to thin at eight thousand feet that the oxygen level sharply declined. Kyle was a grown man, physically fit, and he shouldn’t have a problem here. But she wasn’t going to quibble over five hundred feet. “Do you have a headache?” Lucy asked.

“No, I just felt light-headed and dizzy. I didn’t really faint.”

Patrick helped Kyle to his feet. “I think we’re all tired and under stress. You should go to bed. We all should.”

“Good idea,” Grace said.

Angie walked in. “What’s wrong?” She looked at the bump on Kyle’s head. “My God, Kyle! What happened?”

“I slipped. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing!”

Lucy handed Angie the makeshift ice compress she was holding. Angie put it on his head. “Ouch, that’s cold!”

“Let’s go to bed,” Angie said. “I need to keep my eye on you.”

He kissed her, then pulled her into a hug. “I’m fine, babe, really. You can have your way with me.”

Angie hugged her husband back tightly, her voice filled with emotion. “You’d better be.”

“Hon, I am. Really.”

Kyle kept his arm around his wife, and they said good night to the others as they walked out together.

Lucy watched them leave the kitchen. She reflected that even after two years with Cody, she’d never felt that comfortable with him, where she could joke about their sex life or show public displays of affection. With Kyle and Angie it was entirely natural, not in any way forced. Their affection showed in their expression, how they looked at each other, how they touched each other. It was the subtle hints that showed Lucy that Kyle and Angie truly cared for each other, the little things that Lucy had worked hard to remember when she and Cody were still together, but usually forgot.

She wondered if she would ever find someone where she didn’t forget those small touches that said I love you .

Lucy couldn’t sleep.

Her first night here, it had been the silence that kept her awake. Tonight, it was the howling wind as the snow continued to fall. That, coupled with the disturbing thought that someone in this lodge had murdered Vanessa Russell-Marsh.

She tried a hot shower, and while that eased her sore muscles, it did nothing to help her sleep. Finally, she put on her robe and left her room just after midnight. There was no light under Patrick’s door, but she knocked anyway. “Patrick?” she said quietly.

She heard a moan and movement. Patrick opened his door, alert. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I-” She felt stupid. “I can’t sleep.”

He groaned. “Warm some milk in the microwave.”

“Never mind. I’ll go find a book to read.”

She half-expected Patrick to go downstairs with her, but he closed his door and went back to bed. She wasn’t surprised, she supposed. They’d had a busy and strenuous day, physically and emotionally.

The hall lights were left on low throughout the lodge. Lucy padded silently in her slippers down the staircase, across the foyer, and slowly opened the double doors to the library. They’d left Trevor to sleep on the couch; Grace had made up the last available room for him, but he was too drunk to walk upstairs and had ended up back on the couch.

Angie DeWitt gasped. “Oh, you startled me!”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “I didn’t know anyone was up.”

Angie was curled in a chair wearing a fluffy robe, a stack of books next to her. Trevor was snoring on the couch, all blankets on the floor. “I couldn’t sleep and thought reading would do it, but Kyle can’t sleep with the light on. And I wanted to check on Trevor. He was so upset. Justifiable, but-I didn’t want him to do anything stupid.”

“You have a kind heart.”

She shrugged. “Kyle says I have a bleeding heart, but I just laugh at him. He can act like a hard-ass sometimes, but he’s the sweetest guy on the planet, especially when he doesn’t think anyone is looking.”

“That’s when it’s most important,” Lucy said. “I won’t stay long. I just wanted to grab a book since I couldn’t sleep.”

Lucy perused the bookshelves, but nothing jumped out at her. She realized that she was worried about Steve Delarosa, and Grace, and Trevor Marsh. She couldn’t get Vanessa out of her mind, or the cryptic postcard she’d had the Larsons send her brother. Lucy didn’t want any of them to be guilty of murder, and just maybe there was another explanation for Vanessa’s death. Maybe the puncture wound in her neck indicated that something she’d yet to figure out.

She found it doubly odd that Kyle DeWitt had fainted-or nearly fainted-and complained of being dizzy. Very similar to Steve. Had the two of them been somewhere that no one else had? Could Vanessa have been exposed to the same thing and it killed her?

There was no place for any of them to go now. And with Grace and Beth both living here, it didn’t seem likely that whatever was causing the dizziness was airborne.

Lucy understood Steve’s deep desire to keep his family lodge running. Businesses were hurting everywhere, and it couldn’t be cheap to keep this place running, especially with only six guest rooms in the winter, and a few extra cabins open in warmer weather. The food, the heating, the generator for electricity, routine maintenance. And losing Leo to a heart attack had been doubly tragic because being this isolated had delayed getting him quick help. And then for Steve to find out that his father’s nest egg was gone.

Lucy liked the family, and wished she could help. That was one of her greatest assets, Patrick had always told her, as well as one of her greatest weaknesses.

“You want to save the world, Lucy. But sometimes the world doesn’t want to be saved.”

How many times had she heard that! She wanted to scream, “I don’t care!” But she did care. About the world, and the people in it. And she could never seem to sit idly by and watch good people suffer.

But what could she do? She wasn’t a doctor; she couldn’t examine Steve. She wasn’t a businesswoman; she wouldn’t tell the Delarosas how to run their resort. She wasn’t even a cop. She shouldn’t even like any of these people personally, knowing that most likely one of them killed Vanessa Marsh.

Logic reasoned that the person who had killed Vanessa knew her. The only person fitting the bill was Trevor Marsh, her childhood sweetheart and new husband.

Unless …

What if someone else at the lodge also knew Vanessa? Trevor said that Vanessa’s ex-husband had been an asshole. What if he was lurking around?