Dance with the Devil

CHAPTER 15

When she had gone only twenty steps from the kitchen door, her eyes watering from the fierce assault of the wind, her face numb with cold, Katherine began to wonder if the loss of power had, after all, been due to the storm. Inside Owlsden, she had become accustomed to the continuous growl of the elements without really understanding how furious they really were. The first snow had been a spring shower compared to this thunderstorm of a buzzard. She could not see more than another step in front of her, and she guided herself as much by instinct as by anything she came across in the way of landmarks. The snow was well over her knees except where the wind had scoured it away to drift it elsewhere, and she was required to expand an enormous amount of energy to make any headway at all. Why hadn't Michael told her how rough it would be? The heavy insulation of her ski-suit did not keep her as toasty warm as usual; chills ran up her spine as the most severe blasts seemed somehow to cut right through the quilted fabric and dry the thin sheen of perspiration on her body.

Twice, she turned and looked back toward the house to see if anyone were following her, but the first time she knew she wouldn't have seen him even if he was — and the second time, she could not make out the lines of Owlsden, though it must have been fairly close still.

She doubted even Michael's driving ability to force the Rover up the mountain in this — and then she stopped thinking along those lines. She could not afford to doubt Michael. He might be her only chance.

She had been counting her steps in the event she had to attempt to retrace her path, and for this reason she knew that it was the fifty-seventh step on which she floundered and went down in the cold, soft snow. Her foot slipped on something beneath the snow and twisted under her just as the wind shifted slightly and pounded down on her in a brutal gust. She threw her arms out in a vain effort to break her fall, and she sprawled full-length in the snow.

For a moment, all sound ceased.

Everything was deadly silent.

She lay still, wondering what had happened, whether she was conscious and even, for a second, if she might be dead. But she could hear her heart thumping rapidly; she could hear that much, and that much was enough. She realized that she could not hear the wind because her head was cushioned in deep snow that filtered the keening wail above her.

She lay there for a moment, sucking in wet, cold breaths, recovering the strength to get up again.

This was only the second time she had faced a major battle with the elements, and her mind was suddenly drawn back to that other time, when she was seven years old… the water rising slowly across the farmyard and moving relentlessly in on the house… her father wading through it toward the barn, carrying the buckets with which he hoped to bail out the machinery pit where the tractor lay. At all costs, the machinery must remain dry, all thirty thousand dollars worth of it… everything in the house already moved to the second floor… her mother going after her father to help… Katherine alone at the second floor bedroom window, watching them… then the water… not just rising slowly any longer… a sudden wall of it, as if something had burst farther up the valley… her father looking up in horror… throwing the buckets down… yelling at her mother… her mother frozen there, watching it as her father ran toward her… then the water, everywhere the water, sweeping over the both of them… Windows shattering downstairs as it blasted into the house and gushed almost to the top of the stairs in one sudden explosion of terrifying noise…

In the snow outside Owlsden, Katherine got to her feet. It had occurred to her that she might find lying in the snow much too pleasant and, when the critical moment came, be as unwilling or as unable to move out of the path of death as her mother had been.

She started out again, colder than before, cold clear through to her bones. She was shivering so badly that her teeth chattered together, and there was nothing she could do to stop them.

Suddenly, ahead, a flashlight flickered in the darkness.

She stopped, squinted, lost sight of it.

“Hey!” she shouted.

She thought, for a moment, she might have circled back to Owlsden without being aware of it and might now be calling to those who were out searching for her from that end.

It didn't matter; she had to find help.

“Hey!”

She stumbled forward, went down to her knees again, struggled up and went on. “Michael!”

The light flicked again, closer.

“Hey!”

This tune, it stayed on.

A moment later, she nearly crashed into them and knocked them down as they loomed out of the snowstorm directly in front of her: Michael Harrison and the tall, blond friend of his whose name was Kerry Markwood. She went forward, into his arms, and leaned against him as she recovered her breath.

“It's worse up here than in the valley,” he said, talking loudly so she could hear him above the storm. “When we got here and saw how awful it was, I began to worry.”

Her mouth was dry. She wanted to scoop up a handful of snow and eat it, but she knew that was the wrong thing to do. She needed something hot, coffee or tea. She hoped it wouldn't take them long to get into town.

“Are you all right?” Kerry Markwood asked.

“Fine,” she said.

Michael smiled. “I was afraid they might not let you go.”

“I was followed,” she said.

The two men looked at each other, obviously concerned by that.

“If s all right,” she explained. “I lost him.” She described, rapidly, how the stalker had followed her through the house and how she had foiled him at the kitchen door.

“Great girl!” Michael said. “You really are something!”

“Now,” she said, “where's the Rover? I'm freezing to death out here.” She shuddered to make her point.

Even with most of his face hidden by the red toboggan hat he had drawn firmly down around his ears, and even with the neck scarf that hid his entire chin, he managed to look embarrassed. “I'm afraid I am less of a driver than I thought,” he said.

“You couldn't make it?”

“Only a third of the way.”

“But how did you get here, then?”

“We picked up skis and used the lift.”

“We can't ski down, though,” Katharine said. “Not in this weather.”

“We'll walk it.”

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“It won't be hard,” Kerry Markwood assured her. “I know these woods as well as my own back yard. We'll cut into the trees over there, until the pines are so thick that the snow isn't very deep under them. Then it ought to be a cinch to follow the mountain to its base and strike back to where the Rover is parked.”

“Well…” she said, trying to express all of her doubts in the single word.

“Would you rather stay here?” Michael asked.

“I guess not.”

“Come on, then,” he said. “You follow Kerry, and I'll be right behind you.”

The blond boy lead them across the brink of the mountain to the other side of the ski run, then into the trees. The sound of the wind changed, became a distant soughing high overhead, no longer a biting force on all sides.

Soon, they turned and struck down the slope, guided expertly around the worst briar patches and through the most confusing thrusts of limestone by the Markwood boy who moved as surely as if he were leading them across someone's living room. When the way grew treacherous, the two men helped Katherine forward, and she did not fall once under their careful ministrations.

In a few minutes, they came to a large circle in the trees where the snow seemed to have been beaten down by a number of booted feet, though Markwood kept the flashlight beam too high for her to be certain of that. Here, in the middle of nowhere, for no reason that she could readily discern, they stopped.

“I'm not tired,” she said.

“Nor I,” Markwood said cheerfully enough.

“Me either,” Michael said, and laughed.

“Then why—”

Michael pulled off his scarf and pushed his toboggan hat slightly off his forehead now that the cold was not so fierce. He said, “This is as far as we go. For now, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Somehow, she wished that the wind were not so distant, that it was still all around them and that it could drown out his words. She knew she was not going to appreciate what he had to say.

“This is where we meant to bring you,” Markwood said. “Here and no farther.”

“Is this where the evidence against Alex can be found?”

Abruptly, other people began to appear around them, stepping out from behind trees and rounded teeth of milestone. None of them spoke or made any noise as they came forth. She recognized many of them from the long afternoon of conversation in the cafe.

“Michael?” she asked, turning to him for an explanation.

“Meet the family,” he said. “We don't go any farther, Katherine, because this is where the family is— and this is where the dance is soon going to take place.”