Читать книгу Kiss the Moon - Carla Neggers - Страница 8

Five hours after she’d headed onto Sinclair land to check out sugar maples for tapping, Penelope Chestnut sank onto a granite boulder and admitted she was lost. The sun had sunk low in the sky, the temperature had already started to drop, she was down to the last of her water, and she didn’t have the vaguest idea where she was. New Hampshire, in the woods above Lake Winnipesaukee, probably still on Sinclair land. More specifically than that, who knew?

Her parents were expecting her for Sunday dinner at six. If she didn’t show up, they’d worry. Given her history, they’d worry all of ten minutes before calling out a search party. Dogs, snowmobiles, helicopters, men on snowshoes with flashlights. They’d all join in the hunt. Not one would be a stranger. And not one wouldn’t be just a little pissed at her for taking them out on a chilly March night.

It was galling. She’d rather spend the night in the woods. She could make a little fire, boil snow if she couldn’t find a stream, survive quite nicely until daylight. With the clouds pushing out, the temperature would drop overnight. Not that she minded—the cold nights and above-freezing days of early March made the sap run. Her current predicament notwithstanding, Penelope was an accomplished hiker. She wouldn’t freeze.

Maple-sugaring season was what had ostensibly brought her onto Sinclair land in the first place. A tiny corner of their vast tract of central New Hampshire wilderness abutted the ten acres she’d inherited from her grandfather, and she’d wanted a few more maples to tap. So she’d set off for an hour survey, with anorak, gloves, a hip pack of water, a Granny Smith apple and two Nutri-Grain bars. One thing had led to another—through a clearing, up a hill, over a stone wall, across a stream—and pretty soon she was sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere.

All because she didn’t pay attention. She’d spotted a woodpecker fluttering among the hemlock, an osprey nest high in a tall half-dead pine, followed the sound of a waterfall newly formed by the melting snow, thought about tea and warm scones with her cousin Harriet tomorrow afternoon, when she would return from ferrying two businessmen to Portland, Maine. Provided her father let her carry passengers. He didn’t like the way she’d been flying lately. A wandering mind was a dangerous thing on foot in the wilds of northern New England, but in the air, it could be fatal.

Which, Penelope decided, didn’t bear thinking about while she was lost in the woods with dusk encroaching.

She had hoped to find something on top of the hill to orient her. A view of the lake, a stream, a stone wall, smoke curling from the chimney of a nearby house, something. But below her was just another steep, narrow, dry ravine. There were no landmarks. No promise of a way out. She had to go down this hill and up the next and just keep hoping for the best.

“I need another Nutri-Grain bar,” she said aloud in the stillness and silence that seemed to envelope her. But she’d consumed her last one an hour and several over-hill-and-over-dales ago.

She blinked back fatigue and the eye strain that came with hours on snow-covered hills without sunglasses. She hadn’t brought a compass, either. Or her wilderness medical kit. If she tripped and fell, she’d just have to lie there until someone found her. She’d tried following her trail in the snow, but it wasn’t good snow for tracks, and the two times she did pick up her trail, she found herself back where she’d started. So she’d given up, figuring that even if she could follow her tracks, there were five hours worth of them. They wouldn’t exactly provide the shortest, most straightforward route home. And she figured she had no more than ninety minutes of daylight left.

She was doomed. A search party was inevitable.

The sun poked through gray clouds that had been hanging over the lakes region for three days and were due to move out tonight. Everyone’s mood seemed to have suffered because of them, including her own. Heading into the woods by herself had seemed like a damned good idea five hours ago.

She scooted to the edge of her boulder and looked at the steep, tree-covered, rock-strewn hill. The going certainly wasn’t getting any easier. It was a north-facing hill, still encased in snow and ice, with small patches of wet, slippery leaves where the snow and ice had melted in circles around trees and rocks. She was sweating from temperatures in the upper forties, exertion, frustration. She’d worn none of her specially designed hiking clothes, just jeans and an anorak over a red plaid flannel shirt she’d been maple sugaring in since she was seventeen.

“Might as well get on with it,” she muttered, the silence and stillness almost eerie.

She lowered herself off her boulder, and her foot slipped on a patch of wet, brown leaves. She caught herself before going down on her butt, her heart rate jumping at the close call. A broken ankle and hypothermia were just what she needed. She scooped up a handful of snow and stuffed it down her back. It melted instantly on her overheated skin, cooling her, soothing her. There were worse things than having her parents call out another search party on her. She just needed to stay focused and make their job as short and simple as possible.

She wished she’d brought her cell phone. Flares. Even a book of matches would be welcome.

The sun glinted off something down the steep hillside, drawing her eye to her right. Her heart skipped. Now what? She edged down a few steps, trying to get a better view through the pine, hemlock and naked birches and oak. She squinted, wondering if the sun had just caught a rock with a lot of mica at the right angle.

No, there was something there.

Penelope took another couple of steps to her right. The snow was wet and slippery on the steep hillside, and getting a good purchase in her day hikers wasn’t that easy. She grabbed the thin trunk of a birch for balance and leaned over as far as she could for a better look.

Metal for sure, a lot of it, in a compact heap amidst the tumble of rocks and half a dozen pine trees. In summer, ferns and brush would leaf out and make the pile even harder to spot. If not for the sun striking a bit of metal at just the right moment, Penelope would have gone past it even at the end of winter with the landscape at its starkest.

And for the sun to glint off it, it wasn’t completely rusted, and that meant it was aluminum.

She held her breath. No.

The frame of Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair’s Piper Cub J-3 was aluminum tubing. Its fabric covering would have rotted away by now, forty-five years after it had disappeared in the skies above Cold Spring, New Hampshire, last seen by a half-dozen locals out on the clear, chilly night. Penelope wouldn’t expect to find much more than a crumpled heap of struts and trusses, rusted engine, bits of wing and tail assembly, whatever hadn’t succumbed to the crash and decades of exposure to the harsh weather of northern New England.

But she hadn’t expected to find Colt and Frannie’s plane here. According to her own pet theory, they’d faked a crash in New Hampshire and made it to Canada. Whether they’d crashed there or were living happily ever after was open to question.

Except it wasn’t anymore. This had to be Colt and Frannie’s long-missing Piper Cub. Penelope suddenly shivered as she stared at the wreckage. What else could it be?

A leap of the imagination, brought on by fatigue, low blood sugar, her own fascination with the ill-fated flight of the two lovers. Even as a kid, she would wander the woods with one eye searching for a downed Piper Cub. Later, she’d started collecting information—newspaper and magazine articles on the weeks-long search, headed by Willard Sinclair himself, then articles on the Sinclair Collection and Frannie’s role in pulling it together, turning it into a magnificent, coherent whole instead of a mishmash of stuff generations of Sinclairs had picked up on their various expeditions. In the past year, Penelope had started interviewing local residents who remembered Frannie Beaudine as a little girl and a young woman, who had known the Sinclairs from their years of mountain climbing, fishing, hunting and boating in the lakes region. The men were all Dartmouth alumni. Colt was barely a year out of Dartmouth when he disappeared.

The intensive, exhaustive search for the missing plane had turned up nothing, not one clue beyond the separate, positive sightings of it in the sky over Cold Spring. It was possible it wasn’t Colt’s Piper Cub J-3—but who else’s could it have been? When the news came out of New York that he, his plane and Frannie Beaudine were missing, the search was mounted, focusing on the New Hampshire lakes region.

After a while, people stopped looking. If the plane turned up, it turned up. Most believed if it was in New Hampshire at all, it was at the bottom of a deep part of one of its many lakes. Sections of Winnipesaukee, a clear, glacial lake, were ninety feet deep—nobody could see that far down. If the plane was ever to be found, whether in water or on land, it would have to be by accident.

In the forty-five years since Colt and Frannie had disappeared, not one Sinclair had set foot in Cold Spring.

Except for Harriet, of course. Penelope grimaced in anticipation of her cousin’s reaction to what she’d just found. But Harriet was another matter. Penelope couldn’t concentrate on scoping out plane wreckage, finding her way out of the wilderness and the oddities of Harriet Chestnut.

She squinted at the heap of metal. It was unquestionably a plane. Anyone in New Hampshire would be thinking just what she was thinking—this was the spot where Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine had gone down.

From her position, Penelope couldn’t make an educated guess about what had happened to the plane, why or how it had crashed into the steep hillside. She imagined the Piper Cub coming in low on that dark night, in trouble, possibly clipping trees before slamming into the hill. Colt and Frannie saying their goodbyes, guessing their fate. Penelope wasn’t a romantic, but the image of the two young lovers plunging to their deaths brought tears to her eyes.

Her pulse pounded in her ears, and she didn’t move as she absorbed the impact of what she had stumbled upon. To get to the wreckage, she would have to climb over icy rocks and big boulders, fallen trees and limbs, patches of slippery leaves covered in thin, clear ice and rough, snow-covered, nearly vertical ground. It would take time she didn’t have, and it would involve risks she didn’t need to take. Given that Frannie and Colt’s plane had lain here for forty-five years without being discovered, Penelope didn’t like the odds of what would happen to her if she fell and couldn’t get up again.

Not that anyone in Cold Spring would appreciate her reining herself in. Being lost in the woods at dusk was enough for them to assume she was back to her old tricks, taking unnecessary risks, not thinking, not considering who might have to strap on snowshoes to come fetch her on a cold, dark night.

She frowned, preferring not to think about past transgressions. She was thirty, after all, not twelve. She hadn’t been this lost in years.

Naked deciduous trees stood outlined in sharp relief against the gray sky, every twig sharp and clear and black. Soon pinks and lavenders would streak across the horizon, and they’d seem so bright and vibrant against the grays and whites of the late winter landscape.

Darkness would fall rapidly, and the temperature would plummet.

She had to get back. Tearing her gaze from the wreckage, she crawled over another boulder, then carefully made her way through young trees and stick-like brush, through more wet, dense sugar snow—not the light and fluffy snow of January—to the bottom of the steep, narrow ravine. There was no stream, there were no trails, no stone walls, no hunter’s lookouts—there was no reason for anyone to have stumbled on the wreckage in the past forty or so years.

Colt and Frannie’s bodies.

Penelope came to a sudden halt, imagining the skeletal remains of the two lovers above her on the hill. This wasn’t merely the solution to a forty-five-year-old mystery. It was a tragedy. Two people had died up there.

She shook off the morbid thought and started up the opposite hill, her legs aching, her stomach begging for a Nutri-Grain bar. She needed home, food, water and rest. Then she’d figure out what to do about Colt and Frannie and their Piper Cub.

A twig—something—snapped, and she stopped. Went still. Listened.

Had she heard anything? A squirrel, birds prancing in the branches of a nearby tree? She couldn’t be sure.

“You’re tired.”

Her voice seemed to go nowhere in the quiet, still, late afternoon air. Maybe she’d heard a deer or a moose, even a bear venturing out of hibernation.

Yep. Best to get on home.

Her water-soaked socks squished inside her day hikers. No blisters yet. She was lucky. She hadn’t bothered with boots or snowshoes, never imagining she’d end up lost. A little lost was one thing. That she could manage. But she was a lot lost.

Then, there in front of her, at her feet, was a melting trail of footprints. Not moose or deer or even bear, but human prints. And not her own. They were big. Probably male. She pivoted and stared toward the opposite hill, unable to make out the wreckage from her position. The snow, the gray rocks, the gray trees, the gray sky. The heap of plane tubing was gone, as if it had been a mirage.

The footprints ran down the hill to the left of the way she’d come, weaving among maple and oak and hemlock, even, unhurried. They had to be relatively fresh prints. The warm temperatures had barely melted them, and the last snow had been just two days ago, four inches that freshened the landscape and heartened the skiers who loved to see March stay a lion for as long as possible.

But who could have ventured out here, possibly have seen the wreckage and not mentioned it?

“Bubba Johns.”

Of course. He would have no interest in a lost plane.

Penelope could feel some of the tension ease out of her. She wasn’t afraid of Bubba. He was the town hermit, a recluse who had a shanty on the edge of Sinclair land—technically on Sinclair land, but no one had made an issue of it in the twenty years since he’d set up housekeeping there.

“Bubba!” she called, her voice dying in the ravine. There was no echo. “Bubba, it’s me, Penelope Chestnut!”

She could almost feel his ancient, some said crazy, eyes on her, a frosty gray that went with his unkempt white beard and scraggly white hair, his tall, rangy body. Sinclairs or no Sinclairs, it was Bubba who owned these hills and had for years. Penelope’s parents had warned her as a child to stay off Sinclair land, not because she was trespassing, but because she might run into Bubba Johns. But at ten years of age, she’d found herself out in the hills, exploring on her own, pretending, fantasizing, not realizing until it was nearly dark that she was lost. Bubba had materialized out of nowhere and silently led her home. She had been terrified, and her active imagination had conjured up images of Little Red Riding Hood meeting up with the big bad wolf. She half expected Bubba to drop her over a cliff or toss her onto a fire even as she’d followed him home, chattering at him as if she’d known him all her life. Without ever speaking, he’d left her at the end of her parents’ driveway and disappeared, not waiting for thanks or an invitation for coffee and cake. Her parents hadn’t seemed too sure they should believe their only daughter’s story about the silent hermit who’d seen her home.

Bubba Johns was as much a part of the landscape as the moose, deer, hawks and chipmunks, and like everyone else in Cold Spring, Penelope left him to his chosen life of isolation and solitude.

She turned and continued on her way, feeling the sun sinking in the west even as the sky melted into a pink so deep and dark and beautiful it made her want to lie on the snow and stare at it. But she kept walking, her head spinning, her legs leaden, her mind full of thoughts of Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine buried in their twisted metal grave and Bubba Johns out there in the gathering darkness, waiting, perhaps, to see if once again he needed to lead her home.

Wyatt Sinclair gave up on sleep and kicked off his blanket sometime before dawn. He didn’t know the exact time because Madge, his ex-lover, had insisted on removing the clock radio from his nightstand. It was bad chi, she’d said. Apparently he was a walking time bomb of bad chi. That was spooky enough, but then she did his astrological charts using some computer program. She’d plugged in the date, time and place of his birth, and out popped stuff that had compelled her to pack up.

“I have to move out,” she’d told him, whipping things into her suitcase. “There’s just too much negative energy around you. You’re—well, to be very straightforward with you, Wyatt, you’re one scary son of a bitch.”

He’d grinned. “You needed a computer to tell you that?”

Ten minutes later, she was out the door. She’d left the cat. Allergies.

He stumbled out to his living room, tripping over the cat en route. It got up and did its cat-stretching thing. It wasn’t much of a cat. Short gray hair, yellow eyes, lean. Bad tempered. Madge called him Sarsaparilla, but Wyatt thought that was a hell of a name for a cat and just called him Pill.

A New York apartment, a cat, an ex-lover like Madge. No wonder he had sleepless nights.

He flipped on lights, put on coffee, poured some orange juice and clicked the remote. “Headline News” came on. He flopped on his couch, noticing on the TV clock that it was four-eighteen. Early, especially for New York. The city was strangely silent at this time of day, at least from the vantage point of his fourth-floor upper east side apartment.

He liked New York on and off. His mother, the first of Brandon Sinclair’s three wives, had raised him there through eighth grade. Then the Sinclairs had taken over, and it was off to prep school, Dartmouth and Wharton. He’d endured, struck off on his own for a while and returned to the city of his childhood eighteen months ago. Who’d have ever thought.

If Hal hadn’t died, Wyatt supposed he might still be tallying new bird and plant species in remote parts of Australia and South America. But Hal had died, and Wyatt had come home.

He stared at the reporter on the screen and yawned, not out of fatigue, he realized, but boredom. Stress was not a factor in his intermittent insomnia. He had money, food, lodging and—dear God, it was true—a good job. He would be at his desk on Wall Street in another five hours.

His office had a view of the harbor. It was something.

He watched a commercial pushing laxatives, then a report about the latest scandal in Washington, and he was about to flip to “Nick at Nite” when the anchorwoman started in on her next news item.

“The solution to one of the more tantalizing mysteries of the past half-century may be at hand. A New Hampshire woman claims she’s found the small plane adventurers Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair were flying the night they disappeared.”

Wyatt sat straight and turned up the volume.

The woman was named Penelope Chestnut, she lived in Cold Spring, and she had stumbled on the wreckage while she was out hiking on Sunday, the report continued. She would be leading local authorities to the crash site today, Tuesday, for verification.

Contacted at his vacation home in St. Croix, Brandon Sinclair had declined comment.

Wyatt wasn’t surprised. His uncle’s disappearance was the most enduring and mysterious scandal involving a Sinclair, if hardly the only one. Or the most recent. Hal’s death and Wyatt’s near death—and presumed culpability—in Tasmania had garnered their share of headlines. His father maintained his only son was a throwback to previous generations of Sinclairs, who had been adventurers and daredevils since Roger Sinclair had taken on the English as a privateer in the American Revolution. Naturally, he’d made a fortune, pissed off friend and foe alike and died young.

“Headline News” put up the famous picture of Frannie and Colt taken the night of their ill-fated flight. Wyatt was struck by how young they looked. Frannie was from Cold Spring, a captivating mix of daring pilot and self-taught art historian whose exploits, intelligence and beauty had drawn her rich lover’s eye. They’d cut out of a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took off in Colt’s Piper Cub and were never seen again. No trace of them or their plane was ever found.

Until Sunday, Wyatt thought, wishing they’d put up a picture of Penelope Chestnut instead of his uncle and Frannie Beaudine. He was generally an excellent judge of character, and if he could see what she looked like, he would be better able to assess if this was a hoax. But there was no picture, no footage, even, of Cold Spring, New Hampshire.

He debated calling his father. Colt’s disappearance was still a raw wound that infected everything Brandon Sinclair did, including raise his only son. He seldom talked about his brother, brushed off questions Wyatt would ask. Wyatt wasn’t sure whether his father’s reticence stemmed from the lingering pain and grief of losing his only brother or from embarrassment. Even after forty-five years, Colt could still attract national headlines.

To his credit, Brandon had worked hard to change the Sinclair way of doing things. He wanted to preserve their spirit of scholarship, exploration and adventure but without the penchant for scandal and premature death. He was determined his brother’s example would not extend to another generation. Colt would be the last Sinclair whose recklessness and zest for adventure would leave behind mourning parents, wives, children—and younger brothers.

Not that Brandon had ever told Wyatt he’d loved his older brother, missed him, felt hurt and betrayed because he’d abandoned him for Frannie Beaudine. But if he knew nothing else about his family, Wyatt knew that love was never enough for a Sinclair. That was their abyss. It was impossible to fill with money or adventures. No matter how many lions they shot or mountains they climbed or discoveries they made, the abyss remained unfilled.

He wondered when his father had realized his only son was that way, too. Another Sinclair destined for notoriety and adventure.

But no more. After the disaster in Tasmania, Wyatt had opted for the safe path. A desk, a suit, a job putting his MBA to use. He’d already thrown his trust fund in his father’s face, so there wasn’t that. But there was plenty of money. Even a disinherited Sinclair was good at making money.

The cat jumped up on his lap and started pawing, and Wyatt shut off the television and listened to Manhattan awaken on a dreary March morning. Garbage trucks, cabs, dog walkers, hospital workers, a siren off in the distance. He patted Pill, although he didn’t much like cats, and he told himself that Penelope Chestnut and her discovery in the woods above Lake Winnipesaukee weren’t his problem. His only problem was scrounging up enough energy and interest to get to work for nine o’clock.

By nine-fifteen Jack Dunning was standing in front of Wyatt’s office window high above New York harbor. Jack was a tall, rangy, sandy-haired man dressed in cowboy boots and jeans. Wyatt regarded him without comment. A Brooklyn native gone Texan. He’d worked as a private investigator in Dallas for years, apparently wore out his welcome and was back in New York. His chief client was Brandon Sinclair, a man not only very rich but also very suspicious, determined to protect himself, his wife, his two ex-wives, his son and his two young daughters from scoundrels, kidnappers, con men and lunatics. Jack seemed perfectly willing to oblige. As soon as he made enough money, he always said, he planned to buy a ranch in west Texas and retire. New York made him itch, and the women wore too damned much black.

He glanced at Wyatt. “Nice view.”

Wyatt smiled. “The Statue of Liberty reminds me of the virtues of tolerance.”

“Reminds me of the dangers of being a sucker.”

Wyatt couldn’t tell if he was serious. In his eighteen months back in New York, he’d come to believe Jack Dunning was a man not nearly as uncomplicated as he liked to pretend. His angular features and dead gray eyes made him difficult to read. He could be fifty—he could be sixty. It was impossible to tell. And Wyatt had no real desire to know. Jack worked for his father. If he was here, it was because Brandon Sinclair wanted him to be here.

“You heard about your uncle’s plane?” Jack asked.

“I caught it on the morning news.” Wyatt didn’t say how early that morning. Dunning would regard a sleepless night as a weakness and file it away as something he had on his employer’s eldest child.

“Then you haven’t heard the latest. The woman who said she found the plane—this Penelope Chestnut—she’s changed her mind. Says it was a mistake. She was hypoglycemic and on edge because she was lost.”

“Lost?”

“That’s how she found the site in the first place—she was out hiking on Sunday afternoon and got lost. Her folks were organizing a search party when she found her way out on her own. Claims she went back yesterday afternoon and saw it wasn’t a plane but just an old dump site, probably from the turn of the century.”

Wyatt rolled that one around in his mind. A mistake. Not what he’d expected from Penelope Chestnut, although he had no reason to expect anything. “So no Colt and Frannie, after all.”

“That’s what she says. Here’s the thing.” Jack turned from the window. There was no indication he felt out of place in the elegant wood-paneled Wall Street office, which Wyatt had leased furnished, down to the brass lamps and slate blotter. If he were to play the venture capitalist, he needed a robber baron office.

Dunning stayed focused on his reason for being there—Penelope Chestnut. “Now she’s also claiming she can’t find the dump site again,” he said.

That tweaked Wyatt’s interest. “How’s that possible?”

“She says she was able to follow her tracks in the snow yesterday, but it was tough even then because of all the daytime melting. Says she planned to take people up today to prove it, but it snowed last night and covered what was left of her tracks. She got up at the crack of dawn this morning and says she can’t find the site. Says she wandered around and just can’t find her trail or figure out how to get back there. Maybe she can find it in the spring.”

Wyatt tilted in his buttery leather chair and considered this twist. At first blush it sounded like bullshit. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s hogwash. This girl’s lived her whole life in those woods. She can find her way back, snow or no snow. I’d bet my molars on it.”

“What does my father say?”

Jack gave a small grin. He was a striking man, but not handsome. Wyatt sensed he liked his employer, despite the vast difference in their manner and sensibilities. “Your daddy’s more diplomatic than I am. He asked me to go up there and check out this girl’s story. New Hampshire in March. Just where I want to be. But I’ll do it and see what’s what.”

“And why tell me?” Wyatt asked.

The grin turned to a smirk. “Because your daddy asked me to.”

As Wyatt had expected. “Okay. Thanks for the report. If you need my help for anything, let me know. You have my number.”

Jack winked. “I have all your numbers, Sinclair. See you around.”

Thirty minutes later, Wyatt was still staring at the same printout. He’d had his secretary hold his calls. He got up from his desk and walked to the window, the Statue of Liberty shrouded in a sudden fog. He agreed with Jack. Penelope Chestnut’s story didn’t wash.

He called his father, knowing already he was making a futile effort. His father would tell him nothing, possibly less than he’d told his personal private detective. Jack was a professional. He could be controlled.

“Wyatt—good to hear from you. How’s the weather in New York?”

“Foggy. Jack Dunning was just here. He told me you’ve sent him to New Hampshire to check out this woman’s story about Colt’s plane. Anything I need to know?”

“It’s just a precaution. If she made a mistake and is doing what she can to save face, so be it. But if she’s lying, I want to know why. And, of course, if she’s lying, I want to find my brother’s plane.” He paused, no chink in his self-control. They might still have been discussing the weather. “After all these years, I’d like to know what happened to him.”

“You trust Dunning?”

“I’m paying him well enough.”

Wyatt didn’t comment. As far as he was concerned, money and trust had nothing to do with each other. “I guess that’s your call. Anything else?”

His father was silent for half a beat. “What else would there be?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just always had the feeling there’s more to Colt and Frannie’s disappearance than you’ve said.”

“There’s nothing more, Wyatt. If you can, come down this weekend. Ann and I would love to have you, and you know the girls would be thrilled to see you.” Ann was his third wife; they had two daughters together, Ellen, nine, and Beatrix, eleven. “March isn’t my favorite month in New York.”

“Thanks for the invitation. I’ll let you know if I can wiggle loose.”

“It’s best I sent Jack up to Cold Spring, Wyatt. The people there tend to blame Colt for what happened. Frannie Beaudine was one of their own.”

“No problem.”

When they disconnected, Wyatt didn’t hesitate. He told his secretary he needed to go out of town and asked her to keep her finger in the dike for a few days, possibly longer. He caught an elevator to the lobby of the 1920s building and hailed a cab to take him to his apartment. He fed the cat and called Madge. “I’m going to be out of town for a few days. Can you tend to Pill?”

“You know I’m allergic.”

“Wear gloves and a mask.”

“You’re a heartless bastard, Wyatt. Just because you can climb a rock wall with your bare hands doesn’t mean the rest of us are weaklings. My allergies are serious.”

“If you can’t take care of Pill, say so and I’ll get someone else.”

“Can I stay at your place while you’re gone?”

His apartment was bigger and in a better location than hers. “Sure.”

“I’ll take medication for my allergies,” she added quickly.

Within the hour, he was on the Major Deegan Express-way heading toward New England.

No Sinclair had ventured to Cold Spring, New Hampshire, since Colt and Frannie had disappeared—unless his father had lied about that, too. Because something—maybe a lot, maybe not a lot—was missing in Brandon Sinclair’s rendition of the events of forty-five years ago. Wyatt had believed that for years, but hadn’t pushed, hadn’t confronted his father out of respect for the loss he’d suffered. Some things, he’d decided, just weren’t a son’s business.

But as he drove north against a hard wind, he wondered if he and his father could ever make their peace if he didn’t learn, finally, the truth about the night Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine took off into the darkness.