Death in Smoke Read online

  Neither statement really won Leila over. She wasn’t looking forward to another day of Crystal and creativity.

  Out in the woods, she scoured the deep snow for stacks of stone markers that may have been buried by the storm. It had been a while since she’d seen one. She wondered if she taken a wrong turn, missing the priest meant to keep her on the path?

  “Every now and then I get a little bit terrified / and then I see the look in your eyes / Turnaround bright eyes/

  / Once upon a time I was falling in love / but now I'm only falling apart…”

  Who had written this song, and why couldn’t she get it out of her head? It was annoying as a splinter in the finger.

  It was getting tougher slogging through the fresh, deep snow in woods. Leila spied a clearing up ahead and why not to take a detour? The worst that could happen is she’d stumble on one of the private properties scattered about the perimeter of the island—but would anyone be home?

  The snow became higher than knee deep now, and her heart beat harder as she pushed on, determined to not let this walk get the better of her.

  Then there was the boy, always the boy. He drifted into her consciousness.

  Why now? His mocking laugh. The curl of his hair. There was no reason to think of the boy. It was a shadow of a pain, a phantom toothache that left as quickly as it came.

  She turned her attention willfully back to the walk, the feeling of her furry boots sinking into the snow. Then the boy drifted away.

  Which way to go now? Where in the wilderness of the island would the priests lead her?

  In the clearing beyond the trees up ahead was the pond, roughly the shape of a kidney bean. The fresh snowfall must have frozen as it fell on the wintry body of water, causing the light to fracture on the icy surface.

  Hadn’t Beverly warned her not to venture to the pond? So, of course, Leila had to go there.

  She traipsed across a few yards on a sloping incline, towards the edge of the pond.

  The surface was rough and uneven, though at its center, the ice was flat and smooth as a skin stretched across a drum. The sign, WARNING: THIN ICE. NO SKATING was sort of an obvious observation, but tragically, accidents happen.

  Leila decided to tramp around to the far end of the kidney bean, unzipping her jacket. This was much more exertion than she’d expected on this walk.

  Just about now she wished she’d taken Beverly up on her offer of a little something to eat before setting out on this trek. Those home-baked biscuits and a steaming cup of coffee would have sustained her, but breakfast would have to wait.

  As Leila walked the perimeter of the pond, she spied a burbling brook flowing beneath thin ice. Possibly, it was the underground water source for the pond.

  An industrious beaver had been hard at work building a dam across the mouth of the brook, roughly laying sticks in the shallow depths and then reinforcing the structure with mud.

  Leila bent down to get a closer look at its handiwork. The artist in her was tempted to touch the rough surfaces, like putting her hands on clay, but she didn’t want to contaminate the construction site with her human scent. The beaver might abandon his handiwork.

  She surveyed the translucent edge of the thin ice, where tiny fishes slept in suspended animation. If you looked closely enough, winter rewarded you with its secrets.

  Leila crossed the stream, heading down an incline towards the far side of the pond. Often, she painted landscapes from nature, what was called en Plein, but this morning’s trek wasn’t about contemplating composition or color or the angle of the light on the snow. It was about the simple pleasure of being alone. It was about escaping the relentless chatter back at the creative retreat. She’d promised herself not to think about the end of a marriage, or what came next.

  Or about Detective Grace. Quent as she called him now.

  The snow was deeper at far end of the pond. Leila looked skyward into a gray morning sky. She had an idea which way was north or south. If she could have seen the North Star in the Little Dipper it wouldn’t have helped. She wasn’t much of a navigator. In fact, she had a lousy sense of direction.

  As she sank deeper into the snow, it reached the top of her woolly boots. It was getting into her boots, the wetness seeping inexorably down her ankles towards her toes. Her feet were cold, getting colder. Soon she wouldn’t feel them at all.

  Leila rounded the bend at the far end of the kidney bean, sinking almost mid-thigh high into a valley of snow. This nothing walk was more than nothing. She should have retraced her steps, gone back sooner. Now she’d have to go entirely around the pond’s perimeter to get back to the woods. From a distance, the pond appeared small, but this wasn’t a stroll in the park.

  Leila looked back at the woods. The bright sun bounced off the surface of the snow, obscuring her tracks. Where exactly had she come in? By the pines? She wasn’t sure anymore. She reassured herself she’d find her tracks when she turned back.

  Walking in fresh snow should be no big deal. Sweat was running down her back, and her feet were freezing. She’d find her way; find the priests who would lead her back to civilization. She had to keep going.

  The song’s chorus interruptus popped back into her head. …

  “Once upon a time there was light in my life /

  / But now there's only love in the dark /

  / Nothing I can say / A total eclipse of the heart.”

  What does a “total eclipse of the heart” mean, Leila wondered?

  Which was when Leila’s frozen foot struck something hard. The force of the impact threw her forward as if someone shoved her forcefully from behind.

  Her arms flew out instinctively to break her fall, at first in slow motion but time sped up, the snow rushing towards her. It happened too fast to resist her forward momentum.

  She landed flat on her face, the wind knocked out of her, too afraid to move. But the snow was not a warm blanket. It was cold and wet, and she had to get back to the inn in one piece.

  Leila decided to try to move her arms first. Her arms moved. She tried to move her legs. No excruciating pain. Probably nothing was broken. She struggled to her knees, attempting to brush aside the heavy snow caked on her parka as her eyes fought to focus. She flinched, fearful she wasn’t alone. She was alone. It was her stupid clumsiness. No one else was to blame.

  It was then that the impact of her fall was overcome by a wave of fear. It was the snow.

  She was buried up to her knees in snow, but the snow wasn’t white.

  She panicked. The snow wasn’t white.

  The snow was stained red, red like cherry syrup dripped on a snow cone. Crimson snow. Crimson snow? Leila recoiled.

  Something dark and dank had been unearthed. What was that smell?

  This time Leila screamed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Not a Walk in the Woods

  We can never sell the bones of our ancestors; they must rest in the valleys.

  A man who would not love his father’s grave is worse than a wild animal.

  Waves of nausea overcame her. She struggled to get vertical; pushing herself away from the stain so fast she fell backwards. Her head was swimming. She was alone. She was terrified.

  Leila fought the instinct that told her run, run. She didn’t run. She stared at the crimson stain unearthed by in her fall. It was spreading in the snow. It was blood.

  But it wasn’t her blood.

  She tried to make sense of it. Was it the blood of an animal that had succumbed to the cold, or hunger, or old age, and became a meal for scavengers? Maybe it was a fresh kill. Thoughts rushed through her brain, but she was immobilized by her fear. She wanted to run, but her body wouldn’t cooperate.

  She pushed backwards, struggling to her feet, taking in the blood spreading in series images as if captured by the lens of a camera. The indistinct outline of something buried beneath the snow took shape. The shape buried in the snow was like a sculptor’s first attack on a slab of white marble. Her stomach sank.
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  Did something move? Did something cry out? Leila’s heart flopped in her chest.

  The sound was shifting shards of ice and snow, sliding like ice down a roof in an early spring thaw. Something was buried beneath this shroud of snow. She shuddered. There was no way to know if that thing was alive or dead. But she had to know.

  Leila fell back to her knees, attacking the snow with her dingy white ski mittens.

  Time was the enemy. She didn’t think, she just did, moving through the motion as if painting, in a fugue state, oblivious to her surroundings, only aware of her paints and her subject.

  A terrible thought forced its unwanted way into her brain.

  If this were a body, this wouldn’t be Leila’s first body. There had been Iris McNeil Thornton. Leila had found Iris lying in her studio six months ago. She’d known immediately Iris was dead. Her eyes told the story.

  She kept digging.

  There was bare flesh. Then more flesh. She knew she should run. She didn’t. It was human. Leila excavated the upper part of a limb, a bulge of deltoid muscle, though clearly a female arm. She traced the articulated junction of an arm to a shoulder, a bare shoulder. More blood, more blood. Leila was sickened.

  The longitudinal sinews of a neck had been distorted like the metal frame of some fallen structure, razed and deformed by a hard fall.

  Or had some counter-force twisted it? Fear washed over Leila’s body in waves. Feeling was gone in her fingers. Leila didn’t want to feel at all. She forced herself to dig towards the head, moving faster now to dig down layer, after layer, after layer.

  Leila rocked back on her heels. The blood turned a deeper red, burnt Sienna. What did this mean? She glanced way as a new wave of nausea washed over her. She gagged. Bile rose in her throat. She should run.

  But six months before Leila had heard Iris fall in her studio upstairs. It haunted her, the sound of Iris falling. At the time, Leila had been annoyed that Iris had disturbed her; Iris was always making noise. So Leila went back to her painting.

  How many times had Leila thought, if she had only gone upstairs, maybe Iris would still be alive? She had thought that thought over and over again. It did no good. But she wouldn’t wait this time. She spat out a mouthful of bile in the snow.

  She had to get to the head, but her stupid, ski mittens were too thick and clumsy caked with snow. She threw them aside, where they lay like a pair of boxing gloves that had been bloodied by the force of blows hitting the intended target.

  There was no time.

  The snow gave way. Her fingers ached.

  Her fingers bled as she dug, the blood spread like a stain, but she couldn’t know now whether it was her blood, or the blood seeping up from beneath the surface.

  She knew what she’d find now. There was no urgency. Not anymore. Not with this spreading stain. She slowed down. She brushed aside the snow carefully, like an archeologist at a dig; she had to see the eyes. The eyes would tell whether there was life, or death. It was silent, except for the pounding of blood in her ears.

  The blood, coagulated into a fibrous mesh-like flesh, was more like a birth than a death. It was a woman. The crown of the skull had been split, maybe cracked along a fissure? The features were contorted. Had there been time to beg, no, no, don’t? Had there been time to scream?

  She brushed the bloody flecks away. Horrified. There was no question now. The eyes were open. The woman was dead.

  It was a queer, horrible irony that suddenly struck Leila: she had found another dead body. Iris. Now, there was this poor woman. This was supposed to be a walk in the woods.

  Although the violence of death had distorted the features of its victim, there was something familiar in the angular chin, the cheekbones, and the mannish set of the jaw. It was a face she never expected to see again.

  Damn. It was Susie.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Sob Sisters

  When they gave us our own lands, the white men called it our reservations.

  In our language, the word means leftovers. We must not accept our losses.

  Acting mindlessly and completely on instinct—Leila was not at all sure why—but she had the presence of mind to retrace her route, down the incline at far end of the pond, around the corner, past the beaver dam, crossing the short distance to the trail marked by piles of rocks, those priests, trying as much as she could, as unsteady as she was, to walk in her own footprints, the only footprints in the snow.

  The inn was up ahead. She wasn’t sure what she’d say, just that she had to say it.

  The back door to the kitchen was open. The heat hit her in the face. She heard the rise and fall of voices. Coming in from the freezing cold, her head was suddenly spinning. Breakfast was being served in the dining room. That didn’t change anything. Susie was dead. Who would have killed Susie? This had been a brutal murder, no question about it.

  What came next? She had to call Quent.

  The guests were seated around the long, dining room table. They reluctantly turned their attention from the homemade scones and coffee to Leila.

  “How was your walk?” Beverly asked cheerily.

  Leila had started to wheeze asthmatically from the exposure to the cold, the exertion, and the fear. She had trouble catching her breath. She’d rushed back across the trees and across the meadow. Sweat was dripping in a river down her back. Her heart raced so fast she thought she might be having a heart attack.

  Crystal’s acolytes, three insistently cheerful, interchangeable women with the unlikely names of Shala, Bobbie, and Onyx, which she was at pains to explain was her chosen legal name, all wore tie-dye, cotton dresses in the dead of winter.

  Liz nicknamed them the Sob sisters, three middle-aged, big-busted women, blessed with a surfeit of generosity and caring for everyone and everything in the universe, were nothing like their namesakes.

  “Why don’t you join us? You look like you had quite a vigorous walk,” Bob the innkeeper said with what seemed like phony innkeeper joviality. “Breakfast isn’t getting any warmer.”

  And Susie wasn’t getting any deader.

  “Babe, you look like crap.” Liz twisted around in her chair.

  Motes of dust hung in the air backlit by bright sunlight like floaters in her eyes. Time felt suspended in a space carved out by death, like life-on-a-pause button. Was the stabbing pain in her left shoulder a heart attack? Get a grip, she thought. A dead body didn’t quite fit into this enforced hospitality. That couldn’t be helped.

  Words flew from all directions, telling her what she should do, and what she shouldn’t do, like the buzzing of flies, which was an unpleasant image, under the circumstances. But nothing about this morning was pleasant. It was awful. And it felt like the worst was yet to come. She knew she looked as out of place as an Eskimo returning from a seal hunt. Snow was melting from the heat from her big boots in puddles on the ugly carpet, soaked from her encounter with a dead body in a snow bank.

  “Now that you’re back from your walk, maybe you’d care to leave your boots in the back hall,” Beverly pointed out.

  The overpowering sweet smell of coffee was gag inducing. The pain in her left arm shot down into her hand. The dragon squeezed her chest. All faces were turned towards her, some of them obviously annoyed that their hearty breakfast was getting cold. She dug in her left pocket. Where was her inhaler?

  “I was wondering when you’d get back,” Crystal growled, glancing up from the far end of the table. This interruption wasn’t on the program. Neither, Leila thought, was a dead body.

  “Since you’re up, Leila, can you pass me a thingee?” Gretchen asked, curled like a kitten in the high backed wooden chair.

  “It’s really too cold out for a walk,” one of the Sob sisters noted. Leila couldn’t tell—and didn’t care—which one.

  Hidden in the depths of her jacket, Leila felt for her inhaler, but the warm air was already loosening the dragon’s grip on her chest. Rather than sucking on its metal mouth, inhaling a metallic burst o
f meds, she let it fall back to its resting place. She knew the warm air would release the grip on her breathing, in a moment or two, as long as she didn't panic. Don't panic.

  “She’s having trouble breathing, can’t you see that?” Philomena jumped up, rushing to Leila, nearly knocking her over with the force of her caring. “Leila, are you okay?” Phil wore her concerned Phil face, sincere, caring, and obtuse.

  Okay was not the word Leila would have used. A body was buried in the snow. The grip of fear and cold loosened their grasp. Air snuck back into her lungs, and she could choke out words, but when they finally came out in painful, frog croaks, it wasn’t what she meant to say.

  “Could you all shut up?”

  Leila hadn’t meant to shout. It just came out that way. The room stared in shock at her stunned, as if she’d struck each of them, across the face, with her words.

  “Excuse me?” Crystal demanded, her voice as loud as a nail driven into metal.

  “Well, if you don’t say,” one of Sob sisters said in a voice brimming with hurt.

  “She’s right. Could you all just shut up?” Philomena stared the lot of them down, always her defender. “Lie, what happened?”

  “Who’s lying?” one of the triplets asked alarmed.

  “No one’s lying,” Gretchen said, rolling her dark eyes. “It’s what we call her. It’s a nickname.”

  “That’s so weird.”

  “You’re weird,” Gretchen retorted.

  The woman’s mouth hung open—this scene was getting out of hand—but nothing compared to what would happen next.

  “Lie what happened?” Philomena said, reaching for her hand.

  “I…I…” Leila stammered. She struggled to find words, any words. Death had come knocking at her door a second time. The police had to be called. She had to call Grace. Her eyes flickered from face to face. Which was when it hit her, who was missing. A sickening sense of panic hit her. “Where’s Steve?”