Линкольн Чайлд - Verses for the Dead

He pulled the car they’d rented at the airport into the parking lot of the lodge. It had been plowed halfheartedly, and a large signpost announcing the resort was half obscured by windblown snow. A total of three cars sat in the lot. One was a police cruiser.

Agent Pendergast, sitting in the passenger seat, unbuckled his seat belt. “Shall we?”

Coldmoon eased out into the frigid air: five below, not counting the windchill.

They had spoken little on the flight up that morning, and even less in the drive from the airport. Coldmoon got Pendergast up to speed on his movements of the night before — a subject he didn’t particularly care to dwell on. In turn, Pendergast briefly described tracking down an additional half a dozen of Elise Baxter’s acquaintances and co-workers in the Miami area. All of the people he’d phoned remembered Elise Baxter as a quiet young woman whose suicide had come as a total surprise.

The two walked down the treacherous sidewalk toward the entrance. Pendergast was encased in a gigantic parka that made him look like the Michelin Man. Coldmoon recognized it as a Canada Goose Snow Mantra, stuffed with down and sporting a tunnel hood lined in coyote fur. It was billed as the warmest coat on earth and sold for upward of fifteen hundred dollars. Coldmoon wondered where in Miami Pendergast had managed to acquire one so quickly. For his part, Coldmoon was comfortable in a twenty-year-old Walmart down jacket, shiny and faded with use, patched in places with duct tape.

As if reading his thoughts, Pendergast turned back, face invisible within the snorkel-like hood. “You’re a man of cold climes, I assume?”

Coldmoon shrugged.

“You really should invest in one of these.” Pendergast patted his reflectorized chest. “A favorite of South Pole scientists. And even I couldn’t ask for more pockets.”

He stepped forward and pulled the main door open, and a blast of warmth blew out from the interior. They entered a dark lobby in which every piece of furniture — even the front desk — was covered with drop cloths. The air was redolent of sawdust and mothballs. The lobby was expansive, Coldmoon noticed, but — judging by the scuffed frames of the landscapes on the walls and the slightly shabby carpet — the lodge had seen better days. A low drone of conversation could be heard from an open door behind the front desk.

At the sound of the front door closing, the conversation abruptly ceased. A moment later, three people came out of the back room. The first was an overweight man in his late fifties, wearing a red button-front sweater and worn corduroys. The next was a woman about the same age, as bony as the man was fat, with wiry forearms. She wore a dress cut like a maid’s. The last to emerge was a uniformed policeman, bald and very short, with a manila folder in one hand.

The man and woman smiled at the new arrivals a little uncertainly. The policeman simply nodded.

“Horace Young?” Pendergast said, his voice muffled by the parka. “Carol Young?” He stepped forward, drawing off a massive mitten, hand extended. “I’m Special Agent Pendergast and this is my associate, Special Agent Coldmoon.”

They shook the proffered hand. Then Pendergast unzipped his hood, pushed it back, and turned to the police officer. “And you are—?”

“Sergeant Waintree,” the cop said. He glanced in Coldmoon’s direction. “I spoke with Agent, ah, Coldmoon on the phone yesterday afternoon.”

“Thank you all for being so accommodating on short notice.” Pendergast glanced around the lobby. “I see you aren’t anticipating guests.”

“We’re taking advantage of the winter to spruce up the lodge,” Horace explained.

Despite the warmth of the lobby, Coldmoon noticed that Pendergast had not unzipped his parka.

“Well, let us not waste more of your time than necessary. If you wouldn’t mind getting the others, we’ll get started right away.”

“There are no others,” Horace said.

Pendergast glanced toward Coldmoon.

Sergeant Waintree answered the implied question. “Your partner here asked me to assemble everybody who was working at the lodge when the Baxter woman took her life.”

“Just the Youngs?” Pendergast asked. “And the staff? The cooks and waiters?”

The woman answered. “Bolton — he was our cook at the time — got a new job in a North Carolina resort years ago. Donna and Mattie — the waitresses, that is — they’re both retired. Moved in with their children somewhere, best I know.”

“Maintenance?”

Mr. Young shifted his girth from one foot to the other. “Willy died year before last. Cancer got him.”

“Maids?”

“I was the head maid,” the woman said. “Before I married Mr. Young.” She smiled coquettishly.

Coldmoon found himself staring at her ropy neck. Somehow, it made him think of a seagull.

“Our primary business is in the summer and fall,” Young told Pendergast. “Hikers, bird-watchers, nature lovers, leaf-peepers. We shut down for the winter and spring. Hard to keep full-time folk on a part-time job. We usually make do with students. They’re not bad once you train them up. Some stay just one summer, others for a couple.”

“Business has slacked off a bit, too,” the woman said. “Flights to Europe are so cheap these days.”

If Pendergast was disappointed by the meager showing, it was not obvious. “I understand,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “If it’s all right with you, then, may we start with your records?”

The Youngs exchanged glances. “Be our guest,” Mr. Young said. “Unfortunately, the registration ledgers and books were lost in a fire a few years ago. We’ve very little left but old computer files.” He tapped a pile of printouts.

Pendergast raised his eyebrows. “What sort of fire?”

“Grease fire that started in the kitchen. We quickly got it under control, but the old files were stored in a shed next to the kitchen vents and burned down.”

“And you?” Pendergast turned to the police officer.

He held out the folder. “Here’s the case file. Interviews, photographs, and the rest.”

Over the next half hour, Pendergast and Coldmoon looked through the hotel’s records, such as they were, for the two-month period surrounding Elise Baxter’s suicide. Pendergast used his phone camera to document every page. The Youngs waited nearby, answering questions when necessary. Their faces had expressions of curiosity mixed with a kind of embarrassment. Sergeant Waintree watched from a distance, arms folded, offering nothing. He seemed to Coldmoon a typical Mainer, insular by nature, independent, taciturn. On top of that, he was suspicious and a little defensive — as well he should be, given how thin the police file looked. Coldmoon knew that suicides often got scant attention, but even by that metric it seemed the bare minimum had been done here, even for a small, understaffed department.

Pendergast began asking questions of the owners themselves. Both remembered the night Elise Baxter died, but only vaguely, and only because of the suicide. The Sun and Shore real estate agents had gathered for a dinner party in the lodge’s small banquet room, at the tail end of the season. To the best of the Youngs’ recollection, they’d had an excellent time. Neither remembered anything out of the ordinary — no arguments, no voices raised except in laughter. Nobody seemed to get intoxicated. Neither remembered seeing Elise Baxter; but then, there was no reason for them to have noticed.

Carol Young, on the other hand, had a very clear recollection of the following morning. She had been the maid who discovered the body, hanging from the shower curtain rod in her bathroom. The woman was clearly dead, eyes open, tongue protruding. Carol uttered a shriek, then fainted. The shriek alerted nearby guests. Horace Young had sense enough — after seeing that Elise Baxter was deceased — to close the door and leave everything alone until police arrived.