Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 11

“And then you found the body?” Cartier asked.

Alex said, “Yes.”

“Where it lies now?”

“Yes.”

“You didn't move it at all?”

“I didn't even touch it.”

Constable Cartier consulted a small, black notebook which he had been glancing at throughout his interrogations of the people gathered in the library. Once, when he passed Katherine's chair and was holding the book lower than usual, she saw that it did not contain any writing at all, that his long and thoughtful glances at the supposedly incriminating list of facts it contained were nothing but staged expressions, phony. Ordinarily, she would have been amused by this, but she could not find a smile as long as Yuri was lying dead in the drawing room, currently guarded over by one of the two deputies that Cartier had brought with him.

“Have you ever seen the knife before?” Cartier asked.

“No.”

“It is an antique knife, as you could have told from the handle, very ornate and lovely,” Cartier said. He looked in his notebook again, looked up when he adjudged a proper amount of time had passed. “It is just the sort of thing one might expect to find in the older rooms of Owlsden, the unremodeled rooms.”

“What are you suggesting?” Alex asked. He was clearly angry at Cartier's smugness.

“I am not suggesting anything,” the constable said, staring at the blank pages of the book. “All that I am doing is making an observation.”

Alex snorted and shook his head. “And it's a muddle-headed observation,” he said. Patiently, as if he were talking to a child, he said, “That knife did not come from Owlsden.”

“Alex, please see to it that you are more courteous to the constable,” Lydia said. She was sitting at her large desk, holding a cup of hot tea in both hands, though she had not, so far as Katherine had noticed, taken a single sip of the stuff.

Alex flashed her an obvious look of exasperation, but he did not say anything further to Constable Cartier.

The policeman turned to Katherine and said, “Miss Sellers, don't you find it odd that the devil's dances, the Satanic markings on your door, and now the murder of Yuri Selenov should all transpire in or around Owlsden?”

“I don't understand what you mean?” She shifted in her chair, uncomfortable.

He said, “Wouldn't it seem to you that there is more to this than a simple coincidence.”

“Of course,” she said. Anyone could see it wasn't a coincidence that someone had been in the drawing room making Satanic ceremonial patterns on the carpet when Yuri surprised them.

“Then, perhaps, someone in this house is a member of the cult that has, for eighteen months, been a nuisance around these parts.”

“Now just a damn minute—” Alex began, rising swiftly from his chair.

“Sit down, please,” Cartier said, suddenly embarrassed, jolted out of his previous delight in this abrupt switch of roles between the once-rich and once-powerful, and himself. He seemed to realize that he was not being entirely fair to them and that his bluntness had over-stepped some invisible boundary or other.

“You cannot—” Alex began.

“Alex, sit down, please,” Lydia said.

He looked at his mother, still furiously angry, then shrugged his shoulders and returned to his seat.

“Do you think anyone in Owlsden might be connected with this cult?” Cartier asked Katherine.

She barely managed to avoid looking at Alex as she said, “Perhaps not anyone here — but someone else who has a key.”

“Oh, for Christsake, we went through all of that before, Katherine!” Alex said.

“Go through it again, for me,” Cartier said. She did, and when she was finished, the constable turned to Alex and Lydia and said, “I would like to have a list of names, everyone who has a key to Owlsden.”

“That can be arranged,” Lydia said.

“To no purpose,” Alex mumbled.

When the constable had gotten the list and had taken time to look it over carefully, he said, “It would seem unlikely, but if we have any lead so far, it is one of the names on this list.” He tucked the list neatly in the notebook and put the notebook in his hip pocket. “I suppose we ought to be going now.”

“Mr. Cartier?” Katherine asked.

He turned, looking infinitely wearier than he had looked only a moment ago, no longer getting much enjoyment out of interrogating the wealthy. “Yes?”

“What will be done with — with the body?”

“We'll take it along with us,” he said. “We'll have to put it on ice until the state police have a chance to get into town and take the case from us.”

“Tomorrow?”

He shook his head. “Eight inches of new snow down already and as much as twenty more predicted, all dry as powder and blown by a good wind. In another couple of hours, no one could get up to Owlsden — and in another six hours, no one will be driving in or out of Roxburgh itself, not even the state police.”

“When will they get here?” she asked.

“Depends on the wind once the snow has stopped. Could be as much as a week if the weather's as bad as it sometimes gets.”

“A week! But what if the same people who killed Yuri are—”

“They won't come back here,” Cartier said.

“You can't be sure.”

He smiled. “I can be sure. They'll know how hot the place is, how dangerous it would be to come here again and cause trouble.”

“But they'll also know there isn't anyone here protecting the place. Can't you go ahead with the investigation until—”

Obviously embarrassed, Cartier interrupted her. “Neither I nor any of my men could handle it properly. We haven't been trained for things like this, because we aren't accustomed to anything more troublesome in Roxburgh than drunks and marital quarrels. I'm afraid that we'd only mess up the trail if we started stomping around after clues, and then we'd be in hot water with the state boys. I've chalked the outline of the body in the den, to show where it fell, and I'd be pleased if none of you touched anything in that room until the state police can go over it with all their machines. Other than that, we all have to sit and wait out the storm.”

“Couldn't they send someone in by helicopter?” Katherine asked.

“Perhaps they could, but they won't. It isn't that much of a crime to them, one murder. Like I said, a couple of days or a week. Then they'll be here to handle it.”

He nodded to Lydia and left the room.

“With this snow,” Katherine said, “the carpenter won't be able to come and change the locks tomorrow, will he?”

“No,” Alex said.

Lydia said, “Don't worry, dear. I'm sure that Constable Cartier is right. Those terrible people, whoever they were, aren't going to risk returning to Owlsden in the near future.”

“I hope you're right,” Katherine said.

“I know I am.”

The police trundled Yuri's blanket-wrapped corpse past the library door. The sight of it, like a bundle of weeds, caused Patricia Keene to break into low, mournful sobs.

“There now, there now,” her husband said, patting her shoulder and awkwardly trying to cradle her against his chest. He was not a man easily able to offer consolation or comfort. “It's going to be perfectly all right, Pat. Everything is going to be fine.”

Katherine wished that he were right. But she knew that he was wrong…