Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

The hinge pin was cold and heavy between her fingers. She let it go. It rang and rang again against the stone floor before coming to rest next to her boot.

“One down, one to go,” she said, and that was when it hit her. She whirled, staggered to catch her balance, and stared at the door. Stared at the top hinge, the uppermost hinge, the curlicued, black-iron, hand-forged hinge whose pin sat at the same level as her head. Her hands, taped behind her back, twitched. The pin might just as well have been on the ceiling for all that she could reach it.

The disappointment, the unfairness of it, pressed against the back of her eyes like knuckled fists. Tears of rage spilled down her cheeks, scalding her skin. She keened in her throat, a strapped-down, inexpressible sound that made her even more angry-she couldn’t even shriek and howl, goddammit!

She kicked one hobbled leg in fury. The duct tape yanked against her ankles, and the lower hinge pin rolled across the floor with an old, hollow sound of iron on wide wooden planks. She blinked. Sniffed hard. Stopped crying. Looked at the pin, six or seven inches long, slender enough to conceal in her sleeve. But heavy. One end flat, circular. The other-pointed. She looked again at the door with its unreachable hinge. Okay. She didn’t have way out.

She had a weapon.

Clare was finally seeing a look of admiration on John Huggins’s face. Unfortunately, it was for her cooking.

“This is great,” he said around a mouthful of French toast. “You have to do this for our annual firehouse breakfast fund-raiser.”

Clare made a noncommittal noise that was swallowed up in the clink and clatter of forks hitting plates and spoons stirring coffee. She cleared away an empty jam jar and the denuded butter plate and headed back to the kitchen. Maybe if she rooted way in the back of the fridge, she could find another stick of butter. She was head-down, checking out the produce bin, when she heard the door open and close. Whoever it was simply stood there. Saying nothing.

It struck her what she must look like, presenting rump-out like a primate in a National Geographic special. She jerked her head from the refrigerator and whirled around.

Russ lifted his eyes to meet hers. “Hi.”

“Hi.” She gestured toward the Frigidaire humming behind her. “I was looking for more jam.”

He grinned suddenly, wiping ten years off his face. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Huh.” She cocked her head. “What, exactly, did you come in for?”

He stepped toward her, and she could swear that she felt the air moving, giving way. He stopped before he got too close. He was good about that. They both were. “I thought you might need some help.”

She wiped her hands on her pants. “I think that’s my line.” She pointed toward the pantry. “Take a look in there, will you?”

He nodded, ambling to the pantry and clicking on the light. “So what do you think of Haudenosaunee? I bet you love this kitchen.”

Cooking was one of her passions. He knew that, of course. “It beats the pants off of mine, that’s for sure.” Hers had been installed in the rectory during the reign of the last rector of St. Alban’s, an elderly celibate who had, Clare suspected, lived on TV dinners and casseroles donated by the ladies of the parish. “I’m a little disappointed, though. I expected something grander from a great camp. You know, an Adirondack Victorian extravaganza.”

“The style you’re thinking of’s called haut rustic,” Russ said, emerging from the pantry clutching a jar of blackberry jam. “The old Haudenosaunee had Victorian extravaganza in spades. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a firetrap.”

She leaned on the granite-topped work island. “How do you know?”

“Everybody in Millers Kill knows at least the bare bones of the story. The van der Hoevens were downstaters who made a bundle in the Civil War, and the head of the family liked to hunt. But he liked to do it in comfort. So he dragged his wife and kids and the servants and the dog up here-in those days it was by private rail and boats and portage-pitched a dozen tents, and oversaw the building of Haudenosaunee.” Russ put the jam on the island top and hitched up onto a stool. “At first it was a big, plain log building, styled like the communal hunters’ lodges that were popping up throughout the mountains.”

“Sort of like this building,” Clare said.

“Sort of. Anyway, twenty years later, it was rebuilt in the grand Adirondack style by a van der Hoeven trying to please his pretty young wife. There are pictures in the historical society-I guess the best way to describe it was Swiss chalet meets twig Gothic.”

“Did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“Did he please his young wife?”

“She couldn’t have been that impressed, because she took off for Europe with their son and stayed there for the next few decades.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“Well, the son returned from Europe right before the First World War broke out.”

“Good timing.”

“This would have been Eugene’s… let me see… greatgrandfather. Can’t remember his name.”

“You’re really good with all this local history.”

He smiled like a shyly pleased schoolboy. “I did a report on it in high school. Even then, I was into old houses.” Russ had extensively rebuilt his Greek Revival farmhouse. The house where he and his wife live , she reminded herself.

“That van der Hoeven thought what the place needed was Old World elegance, so he added on turrets and towers and battlements and the like, trying to turn a Swiss-Gothic chalet into a castle. Even in his day, when rich people were building privies shaped like Versailles and carriage houses that looked like the Tower of London, it was considered a great big ugly heap.”

Clare looked around her at the clean lines of the current Haudenosaunee. “Is that when the family built this house?”

“No, that came when Eugene’s grandfather tried to modernize the old building. Evidently the older van der Hoeven wasn’t content to merely build castles. He wanted to live in the Middle Ages.” Russ tapped his temple meaningfully.

“You mean…?”

“No running water, no electricity, no central heating. He actually disconnected the bathrooms that had been state-of-the-art in 1880 and installed drop toilets.”

Clare made a face.

“Yeah. So when his son inherited the place, he decided making the fourteenth century fit for human habitation wasn’t worth the trouble, and he had this house built.”

“What happened to the old camp?”

Russ’s blue eyes clouded over. “It burned down.”

Comprehension dawned. “Is that what happened to Eugene?”

He nodded. “Whoever says money solves all your problems never met the van der Hoevens.”

She was climbing onto the stool kitty-corner from Russ when the letter and pamphlet crinkled inside her pocket. Speaking of problems. She pulled them out. “Take a look at this.” She held them out to him. “Have you ever heard of this organization?”

He scanned the letter and unfolded the brochure. “One of the radical environmentalist groups, right? Like Earth First? Volunteers living in trees, that sort of thing?”

She shook her head. “More like spiking the trees and then blowing up the loggers’ equipment. The Planetary Liberation Army believes in direct action.”

“That’d be pretty direct, yeah.” He read the back of the pamphlet. “I don’t see anything here about the Adirondacks. And I’ve never heard of them operating in our area.” He looked up at her. “Where’d you get these?”

She had thought out her answer when she persuaded Lisa to let her keep the documents. “They were here in the kitchen.” She opened the drawer and tossed the remainder of the pamphlets on the stack of wine crates, just as Lisa had done. “I was opening up drawers, looking for utensils and stuff.” There. Absolute truth. “These are more in the same vein.”