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Struggling for self-control as the interminable meal progressed, Lane focused on the conversation.
“The taxes and upkeep have become horrendous,” Allison was telling them. “Properties like this one are just no longer practical. And that, dear hearts, is exactly why I insisted on this weekend. My wedding here will be the last Whitney house party on the island. A week from Monday I sign the papers that transfer Thunder Island over to the new owners.”
There were exclamations of surprise around the table, Ronnie’s the most vocal. “You’re actually selling the place?”
“With regret but, yes, I am. It was the state of Wisconsin that made the right offer. They’ll preserve the island as a wilderness park. I’m glad about that and pleased that Dan, who already knows, will receive all the proceeds of the sale. The island would have eventually gone back to his side of the family anyway, according to Dad’s instructions and my will, so why should he have to wait for the results?”
Dan saluted her approvingly with his water glass. “Bless you for your generous foresight, because, while I’m as sentimental as the next man, I would never have survived the expenses of the place.”
“Oh, but the surprises don’t stop there,” Allison informed them mysteriously. “The state has several solid reasons for wanting the island, but one of them is positively extraordinary. An exciting discovery that was made just last fall when I was having repairs done to get the property ready for sale. And if you’re all good little girls and boys and clean your plates, Auntie Allison will show you before coffee and dessert.”
Dan leaned toward her. “Allison, do you think you should? The state did caution against any disturbance until they can bring in their team of experts.”
“The state doesn’t own the place yet. Anyway, we’re only going to look, not touch.”
“But there’s Chris and Dorothy,” he reminded her softly. “You know how they feel about—”
“I don’t see why they should be offended,” she interrupted him, her voice brittle. “After all, the thing will go public after the sale.”
Lane could see that Allison, after her earlier frustrations, was in one of her contrary moods. Dan, too, recognized her defiance, perhaps even realized that Chris Beaver was responsible for it. In any case, he surrendered the argument.
“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” Ronnie declared, “but I can’t stand the suspense.”
“Let’s do it, then,” Allison said, throwing down her napkin and coming decisively to her feet.
Lane, as perplexed as the others, followed Allison, who led the group through the swing door and into the roomy kitchen. Chris and the Askers, drinking coffee at the table and not expecting an invasion, stared at them in surprise.
“Sorry for the intrusion,” Allison apologized with a single-minded liveliness. “We just need to help ourselves to a few of the oil lamps from the shelves here. Here, everyone, help me to light these.”
Lane noticed that Chris, who must have understood her intention, had a mutinous expression in his dark eyes. He and his sister exchanged a rapid dialogue in Menominee. He started to get to his feet then, but Nils laid a restraining hand on his arm and shook his head. Dorothy, too, looked as if she wanted to object, but she lapsed into a stolid silence.
Jack, close beside Lane, shared her puzzlement when he muttered, “Just what are we getting into?”
“This way, children,” Allison instructed them blithely, opening a door in the corner of the room. “And watch your heads. There’s a low beam at the bottom.”
Ronnie peered suspiciously through the opening at a stairway that angled steeply to a cellar beneath the service portion of the house. “Lovely,” she complained. “Spiders and cobwebs. This had better be good.”
“It’s worth it,” Allison promised. “Jack, you will positively drool when you see.”
“Must be a chained brontosaurus, then,” Stuart said gleefully.
Allison led the way. They filed after her down into the shadowy cavity of the cellar that had been hewn out of the solid rock of the bluff. Lane was immediately aware of a mustiness in the air. Her eyes, adjusting to the dimness, made out the shape of the furnace crouching under the rafters like a squat beast. From somewhere overhead came the soft ping of a heating duct emitting air.
Jack, still provocatively at her side, murmured an intimate aside. “Reminds me of those nights when we’d rent a fright movie and snuggle. Remember?”
She didn’t answer him. It was too risky.
“Over here,” Allison called, gathering them at one end of the cellar where a temporary plywood barrier had been erected against the rock wall.
“The stones were crumbling here,” she explained, “and when the masons started to dig away all the rubble to set up a new, deeper wall, they found...well, you’ll see.”
Lane could now recognize a door in the plywood barrier. It had been fitted with a hasp and a padlock. Allison produced a key and started to free the padlock. Then she stopped, her face wearing a frown of annoyance.
“It’s already unlocked,” she said. “Not supposed to be. I wonder who forgot—”
“Allison,” Hale urged, “let’s get on with it.”
“All right, here we go. Hang on to your lamps, people.”
Spreading the door wide, she revealed a gaping black hole in the rock. The fissure, merely a crack when discovered, she explained, had been widened by the masons to permit a narrow passage. Allison, head low, squeezed through the opening, the others trailing after her in anticipation tempered by apprehension.
Lane felt a little like Alice in Wonderland when she stood erect on the other side, gazing in amazement around the natural cavern in which they found themselves. The oil lamps flung shadows over the limestone formations, intensifying the bizarre spell of the cave.
Stuart whistled in the hollow stillness. “Man, where are the vampires?”
The air was raw, and Ronnie shivered. “This is creepy. Let’s go back.”
“Wait,” Allison insisted. “You haven’t seen the good stuff in the next chamber. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Just how many chambers are there?” Jack wondered.
“Could be a whole labyrinth of them,” Dan said. “The place has yet to be explored. Or there might be only the two chambers. Workers must have just missed discovering the whole thing when the cellar was first excavated.”
“Now, if the tour will just step this way, please.” Allison directed them playfully as she led the way through another opening into a second, larger cavern.
When they had collected down at one end of the chamber, the oil lamps casting flickering pools of light, she pointed with delight. “There! Didn’t I tell you it was something special?”
Lane, along with the others, found herself gazing at a series of oblong depressions hacked out of the floor of the cave. Occupying each of the shallow, open pits was a skeleton curled on its side. The areas on either side of the human remains were rich with grave offerings. They could see implements of bone, copper beads, pots of assorted sizes and shapes, crumbling birch-bark baskets decorated with quill work and a variety of shell adornments.
“Oh, my God,” Ronnie cried, “it’s a cemetery!”
“An ancient one,” Allison said. “The state archaeologists can’t wait to get their hands on it.”
Jack was impressed. “I don’t blame them. It’s not my field, but this looks to me like the Archaic Indian period, and that makes it a real treasure. Even better, it hasn’t been disturbed through the centuries.”
“Probably,” Dan explained, “because the original way in was through the bluff face in the first chamber, and that was sealed off by a rock fall ages ago.”
“And all this time,” Hale mumbled darkly, staring at the skeletons, “they were waiting here in the blackness.”
Lane shuddered at his morbid observation.
“The petroglyphs!” Allison exclaimed, remembering. “You have to see the petroglyphs on the walls! They’re wonderful! Bring the lamps over to this side.”
The lights were carried to the other end of the chamber. And there they revealed something else waiting for them in the darkness. Something huddled down in the farthest corner that, once illuminated, brought them all to a horrified standstill.
It was Ronnie’s strangled cry that echoed in the cave. A sick, croaking sound. The rest of them were silent with shock.
“Teddy!” Allison whispered at last in disbelief. “Dear God, it’s Teddy Brewster!”
The body had been propped against the wall, knees drawn up. An arrow protruded from the thin chest. Grisly enough. But what Lane found even more appalling was the sight of the young florist’s bared head. He had been scalped.
Chapter Three
The fir tree standing in the corner captured Lane’s attention as they gathered again in the lounge. The tall, symmetrical evergreen seemed to mock the stunned party. Lane knew that the tree would never be decorated now, just as she realized that there could be no wedding in the chapel tomorrow. She felt numb, unable to accept what they had discovered in the cave below.
The rest of the group dealt with the horror in their own individual ways. Most of them were still silent with shock. Not surprisingly, Ronnie was the exception. She was near hysteria as she collapsed into the nearest easy chair.
“Tell me it’s a joke!” she pleaded shrilly. “Someone tell me it’s all nothing but a hideous joke!”
No one did, or could.
“Stuie,” she wailed, “be an angel and get Mama a brandy. I know I saw a decanter in the library next door.”
“Get your own booze,” he growled.
“Little beast! How could you when I feel positively ill?”
“I’ll get the brandy for you,” Lane offered quietly. Anything to escape the cruel irony of that Christmas tree. Besides, wasn’t she supposed to be able to satisfy difficult people and their demands in situations of crisis? It was a necessary skill she had developed in her hotel work.
As she slipped into the adjoining library she hoped that ability wouldn’t fail her. Her hands were none too steady, however, as she poured a generous measure of brandy from the crystal decanter on the burnished tray. It was the sight of the weapons collection covering the walls of the library that unnerved her. She couldn’t help associating those gruesome artifacts with the obscenity in the cave.
When she turned with the glass, she saw that Stuart had trailed her into the library. There was a sulky, defiant expression on his young mouth. He, too, gazed at the weapons. But with a difference. There was a gleam, almost of satisfaction, in his eyes. Lane shivered when she realized that his attention was fixed on a tomahawk.
She passed him without a word and returned to the lounge. The brandy in her shaking hand was in danger of slopping over on the geometric patterns of the Scandinavian rug when Jack rescued the glass.
“Here, I’ll take it,” he murmured.
This was one time when she didn’t object to his assertiveness. She gladly surrendered the glass.
“Sure you don’t need some of this yourself?”
Lane shook her head. “What about the Askers and Chris Beaver?” she asked.
“Nils is still on the phone in the kitchen trying to raise the sheriff. Dorothy is with him. Chris is busy in the cellar making sure that the door this time is securely locked and that nothing on the other side is disturbed. Shouldn’t you sit down?”
“I’m better off on my feet.”
She didn’t feel weak in the legs, but she was suddenly cold. She went to stand near the fireplace, welcoming the heat from the pine logs. Jack delivered the brandy to Ronnie, who accepted it gratefully. For a welcome change, she was silent as she gulped from the glass.
It was the others, grouped on chairs and sofa near the fire, who were no longer quiet now that the initial shock had subsided. They discussed the tragedy in hushed, unbelieving tones.
“How could I have done it?” Allison whispered, hands clenched in her lap. “How could I have blamed poor Teddy for not finishing the flowers when the whole time—” She broke off, shuddering.”Dan,” she appealed to her cousin, “must we leave him down there like that? It seems so inhuman.”
The judge shook his head. “He can’t be moved, Allison. It’s a crime scene. Nothing can be touched until the sheriff’s team investigates it.”
“I keep seeing him in that way,” she moaned. “Like—like he was some kind of awful sacrifice. I suppose there’s no question of it? I suppose it was murder?”
“Had to be,” Hale muttered.
“But why?” Allison demanded angrily. “Who?”
They were questions that haunted each of them, but no one answered her. There were no answers. There was only the dismay.
“I don’t understand,” Allison persisted. “Teddy was supposed to have been alone on the island. Lane, wasn’t that what Dorothy told us this afternoon? That Nils left Teddy here all on his own yesterday and returned to the mainland.”
“Yes,” Lane agreed softly, “that’s what she said.”
No one in the room questioned this claim, but Lane noticed several gazes turning in the direction of the kitchen where Nils Asker was busy with the phone. She knew what they were wondering. She couldn’t help wondering it herself. Just how accurate was Dorothy’s assertion?
“Obviously,” Hale observed, “Teddy wasn’t alone. There was a killer with him. And either that someone was here the whole time or he arrived after Nils left.”
“Please,” Ronnie begged loudly, “will all of you just stop talking about it? Isn’t it bad enough that we had to see him like that?”
“Scalped, you mean,” Stuart reminded them callously, rejoining the group.
Ronnie, clutching her brandy glass, made a face of revulsion. “Only a monster could have performed something so indecent.”
Lane cast a swift glance in Jack’s direction. He was leaning against the other side of the fireplace. He had been quiet during the exchange of speculations, but she was close enough to hear him softly and slowly whistling under his breath. An unconscious habit that she recognized from the days of their marriage. It meant that systematic scientist’s brain of his was dissecting a problem.
“Yeah,” Stuart said, offering his dark warning to Ronnie, “and that monster could be lurking on the island right now. Any of you thought of that?”
The boy plainly enjoyed pressing his mother’s buttons, Lane thought. Ronnie’s reaction, a yelp of alarm, didn’t disappoint him.
It was then that Jack stood away from the fireplace and informed them mildly, “I don’t think so. I think the killer left the island. And his victim wasn’t scalped.”
“Of course he was scalped,” Ronnie insisted, as though he were trying to cheat her out of a perverse pleasure. “We all saw it, didn’t we?”
Jack shook his head. “We only thought we did. It had the illusion of a scalping because we were down there with those native remains, and there was an arrow in his chest. But the head had been shaved, not scalped.”
“Either way,” Dan said, “it was senseless.”
“Not from the killer’s viewpoint,” Jack maintained. “From what you’ve said about Teddy Brewster, I understand he had a mane of flaming hair and a flowered overcoat that was practically a trademark. Both the hair and the coat are missing.”
“Disguise.” Lane suddenly realized what he meant. “The murderer used them as a disguise to get off the island. He left as Teddy.”
“That’s right,” Allison said, remembering. “The Arnolds told us back at the dock that the rented snowmobile had been returned and that Teddy’s car was gone.”
Jack nodded. “All cover for the killer and a way to keep the florist from being missed right away.” His broad shoulders lifted in a slight shrug. “It’s conjecture, of course, but I think it’s the right explanation.”
Ronnie sagged with relief in her chair. “As long as it means there’s no longer a homicidal maniac loose on this island, that’s all I care about.”
But Hale wasn’t ready to let the subject go. “Genuine scalping or not, the guy still died with an arrow in his chest. And all that Indian stuff down there... Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
Allison turned to him, her voice sharp. “What are you saying, Hale?”
His gaze drifted in the direction of the kitchen. “You tell me. Or better still—” his look shifted toward the judge “—let Dan here tell us. You understand the Menominee lingo, Dan. I’ve heard you say so. So what were Chris Beaver and his sister telling each other out there in the kitchen when we started down to the caves?”
“Nothing important,” the judge demurred.
