Death of a Russian Doll Read online

  “I think the hills interfere with the signal,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t get a connection even at the road.”

  “Dad’s going to worry. I need to get back.” I turned to Ken. “Will you come, too? It’ll look better than if he has to come get you.”

  He smirked and gestured to his meager surroundings. “As lovely as this place is, I guess I can’t stay here forever. Let me just do the dishes and douse the fire.”

  Doing dishes proved complicated with no running water, but after he’d heated a pan and I helped him wash the sticky plates and utensils, he doused the fire. In moments the deep chill seeped into the cabin. We donned our winter things and he pulled open the door.

  The sky loomed dark, as dark as if it were night, and snow had drifted up against the door, maybe as high as my waist.

  “Did you happen to listen to the weather forecast before you came up here?” he asked.

  “It said something about lake effect, but you know they always over blow those things.”

  Thunder crashed nearby and Ken pushed the door shut. “I have playing cards.”

  “Sure we can’t make it?” I pulled open the door again. The knob had left a visible imprint in the compacted snow. This time it took both of us to shut the door against the wind, and not until it blew a little of that drift inside.

  “This is bad,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Ken said. “I’ll bet Jim Cantore is out there somewhere, dancing in the thunder snow.”

  “I’d meant being stranded. Dad’s going to be …” I trailed off because I wasn’t sure what he was going to be. Angry? And if so, at whom? Me, for coming out here? Ken, for laying low?

  Ken relit the fire then started to shuffle his cards.

  I walked my phone around the cabin. Once I thought I saw a single bar light up, but I couldn’t get it to repeat. I began to wonder if it might have been a trick of the light.

  So we whiled away the hours playing cards. Every game I could think of, ending with cribbage. I made a makeshift cribbage board on an envelope I had in my purse.

  “What’s that?” Ken said, pointing to the names I had written on the other.

  “That,” I said, “is a list of some of the customers who saw Marya in the days leading up to her death.”

  He took it and read down the list.

  “Mean anything to you?” I asked.

  “I know a few of them,” he said. “I’ve seen their names in her appointment books.”

  “The barber thinks she pursued the wrong clientele and gave too many discounts to turn a profit.”

  “I’ve thought as much myself.” He continued to shuffle.

  I swallowed hard. “You said something once, or rather started to say, you were worried she’d gone back to her old habits.”

  He said nothing, just dealt the cards.

  “What did you mean by ‘old habits’? You never explained it.”

  “That’s because I don’t know,” he said. “She told me there were a few things in her past that it might be better I didn’t know. I gathered she had been involved in something sketchy, maybe downright illegal. She assured me that was all over. That she only did what it took to survive her situation.”

  “What did you think she was involved in?”

  “She was busted for drug possession back in high school.” He rearranged the cards in his hand. “At the time she said they weren’t for her, that they were her sister’s. She told me later she was trying to help wean her sister off the drugs. I know it’s near impossible to quit a lot of those things cold turkey, so I guess I believed her. Now I’m not sure. Maybe Marya was using. Maybe selling. Maybe buying. Who knows?”

  “Anything lead you to think she herself had a drug problem?”

  He shook his head. “She kept going to the twelve-step programs, even after the court order expired. I wasn’t sure what to make of that since she claimed she never used. Maybe she found support there. But I never found anything in the house.” He sighed. “Not for lack of checking. The more lies she told and secretive she seemed, the more tyrannical I became. I started searching her purse whenever she took a shower.” He winced. “I never thought I’d become that husband. Not sure why I did it.”

  “Because you still cared about her.”

  “Or maybe I just cared about me.”

  I rubbed his hand. “Now you’re just being hard on yourself. If that were true, you never would have taken her back.”

  The creaking and groaning of the old place grew more incessant. He glanced up. “This isn’t letting up anytime soon. I’m afraid you’re stuck here for a while.”

  I closed my eyes. Being stranded during a snowstorm was a real, albeit infrequent threat when you grew up in what was known as the “Snow Belt” south of Buffalo. I’d been snowed in for an extra day at Jenny Hill’s slumber party. That was fun at first, but when we ran out of ice cream and new questions for truth or dare, the party became a little boring. We were all glad—and that went double for her haggard parents—when the plows finally made it down her street.

  But that was better than the time we got snowed in at home when I was eight. Dad had to work, as usual, and Mom sneaked off to “pay a few bills.” Of course, she went on a bender, and Parker and I survived the whole weekend on Pop-Tarts, peanut butter sandwiches, and unheated cans of SpaghettiOs.

  But this was a first, being stuck in a wilderness cabin with a man I once dated. On some level it could be considered romantic. I glanced at the bucket in the corner with the toilet seat attached and sighed. So not romantic.

  When I looked back up at Ken, he was staring into my eyes. “Have you considered that this might be providential? That maybe the weather is luring you and me back together?”

  I set my cards back down on the table and folded my hands in front of me. “What would you like me to say?”

  “I’d like to hear you say that you know I didn’t kill Marya, that people can change and a relationship can be restored.”

  “I know you didn’t kill Marya,” I said then stopped.

  “And?”

  “And yes, I believe that relationships can be restored. That is, if they were ever healthy in the first place. If you’re talking about you and me … You and I were just getting to know each other when I learned that everything you told me, everything our friendship was built upon, was a lie.”

  “I regret how things turned out. I meant to tell you. I was about to tell you when Marya showed up.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “And I am sorry.” He placed his hand over mine. “Is there no hope of redemption?”

  I pulled back my hand, took off my glasses, and rubbed my eyes. Playing cards in the low light was beginning to trouble them. I kept my eyes closed when I continued, in part because it was easier not to see his face.

  “Ken,” I said, my voice wavering just slightly. “There’s always hope of redemption. I wish you well and I hope you find it. But you and me? I don’t know.”

  When I opened my eyes, Ken was nodding. “Give it some thought and time,” he said. “I don’t mean we start right now and try to pick up where we left off. But maybe, after a reasonable period … Meanwhile, I think we need to get some rest.”

  I looked around to figure out how that might be possible.

  Ken stood and put another log in the fire. “I suppose I could take the mattress and you could take the loft.”

  “There’s a loft?” I looked up. I had thought that someone just hadn’t bothered to finish putting in the plywood ceiling.

  “There’s another twin mattress up there, already made up. And another pot, if you need one. There’s instructions on the side, if you’re unfamiliar.”

  “Thanks,” I said, as he propped a ladder that I’d mistaken for empty shelving up against the side of the loft.

  When I reached to the top, he handed me up another battery-powered lamp, then stood on the steps like a rejected Romeo.

  “Good night,” I said.

  He climb
ed back down the steps, and I inspected the space. I found the pot and managed to read through the directions in the dim light. Seemed easy in theory, but still not private enough to suit me. I glanced around to see how I might improve upon the situation.

  The loft, I decided, must have served as the main sleeping area for the original resident, who could have been an outlaw, a revenuer, or perhaps Laura Ingalls, who used the creaking and groaning space as an inspiration for writing the book The Long Winter, which I’d found heartily depressing when I’d read it in the fifth grade. But the loft was a little better furnished than the lower level. There was even a roughly framed-in closet which I thought might make for an excellent place to put the pot, so that I could take care of my most pressing needs more privately.

  The door stuck when I tried to open it, but there was no visible lock, so I pulled harder. Every time I made headway, it pulled back shut, like it was held by elastic. Too tired to process the physics of this, I left off applying pressure, then all of a sudden gave the door a quick yank.

  And stared into the surprised, frightened face of Marya Young.

  Chapter 16

  I screamed.

  Marya screamed, and when she did, I realized her face appeared a little older and more haggard than I’d ever seen it. But considering she’d just been murdered, how could she be in the closet? Or screaming, for that matter?

  I screamed again.

  Ken raced up the ladder, and I positioned myself behind him.

  “Anechka!” he said.

  “Anechka?” I repeated, peeking out from behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” Ken approached the closet.

  Anechka stumbled out. The resemblance to Marya was still striking, but Ken’s lantern illuminated the differences: a harder jaw, paler skin, and deep fatigue underscoring her eyes. I caught just a glimpse of her hands. Marya’s were always dainty and well manicured. Anechka’s were disfigured and scarred. But a glimpse was all I got. She jammed her hands into the pocket of her boxy sweater.

  “Why are you hiding in the closet?” Ken asked.

  “You didn’t know?” I asked Ken.

  He shook his head but never let his gaze veer from Anechka.

  “I was sleeping when you first arrived,” she said. “I could tell it was not Marya down there, but I did not know who it was. Marya told me to stay hidden.”

  “You saw Marya?” Ken asked. “How long have you been here?”

  “Is hard to say. One day runs into another. But she has not been here in days, and then you come. I did not know what to think.”

  “So you haven’t heard what happened,” I said.

  “What?” She shifted an uneasy gaze between Ken and me.

  “Maybe you’d better come downstairs and sit down,” Ken said, offering her his hand.

  * * *

  A rough night followed. Not only did the storm beat incessantly on the little cabin, but Anechka didn’t take the news of the death of her sister particularly well. She went from wailing to self-recrimination, then back to wailing, then to questioning Ken’s involvement and making awkward suggestions about what I was doing there alone with him so soon after her sister’s death.

  Ken used his skills in interrogation to get her to recount her story. She hesitantly related how she had called her sister for help and Marya had sent her a bus ticket, picked her up at the station, and took her straight to the cabin. Anechka couldn’t place the exact day she arrived, but it was long before the snow fell.

  “What happens now?” she asked, her face turning even more ashen. “Will you have to tell anyone I’m here?” Her eyes widened and she scanned the room wildly, as if plotting a course to escape.

  “Now,” Ken said, “we have breakfast.”

  In the middle of our grilled cheese—since we’d finished the pancakes—a snowmobile engine revved outside.

  Ken pulled the door open and was met with a wall of white that had packed up against it. He grabbed a shovel and started putting snow into his dishpan, since he had no other place to put it.

  But he wasn’t the only one clearing. Soon light appeared through the snow, then a porthole opened, revealing a blue sky on the other side. Moments later my father stuck his head in the hole.

  He looked at Ken, then at me, then did a double take at Anechka.

  “Ken Young?” he said. “Would you please come with us? I’d like to ask you some questions regarding the death of your wife.”

  * * *

  My trip to the station was on the back of a snowmobile driven by a rookie cop I knew only as Jenkins. At first I clutched the folds of his jacket loosely, but by the time he got up to speed, rocking the snowmobile precariously on the uneven trail and even going airborne over a few dips, I had my arms crossed around his chest, holding on for dear life.

  A couple of hours later my adrenaline levels returned to normal as I paced in the office of the chief of police. I wasn’t sure who that title belonged to: my father or the man my father was currently letting sweat it out in the interrogation room.

  “You know, the waiting game isn’t going to be very effective on him,” I told my dad. “He’s wise to those tricks.”

  “It gives me time to cool down, though.” Dad plopped into his chair and leaned back. “What were you thinking?”

  “That Ken was missing, maybe dead, and I got a lead to where he might be. I just followed it.”

  “You should have—”

  “Let you know? I texted you that I was going to try to find Ken’s hunting lodge.”

  “But not where it was, or that you were holed up with him there all night!”

  “I tried. What would you have me do, MacGyver a homemade cell tower out of a ladder, three spatulas, aluminum foil, and a roll of duct tape?”

  Dad held his tongue for a moment. “You know I just want you safe, right?”

  I put my arm around him and gave him a hug. “I was safe. Ken’s not a killer. That rookie Jenkins on the other hand …”

  “What did he do?”

  “Gave me quite a wild ride on the way back. I think he was doing it on purpose.”

  Dad’s jaw took on a serious grimace. “Sorry about that. I should have figured something like that would happen.”

  “What’s his beef with me?”

  “You gotta remember, he joined the force under Ken’s administration, and it’s natural that his loyalty is to him. He’s pretty sure his boss isn’t a killer.”

  “But why take it out on me?”

  Dad just sent me a painful smile.

  “Because he thinks I might have killed Marya.” That revelation nearly knocked the wind out of me.

  “You make a convenient scapegoat. And not only that, I’m also a threat, trying to usurp his boss’s authority. It’s been tense around here.” Dad scratched the back of his head and exhaled a lungful of frustration. “To be honest,” he said in a measured tone tinged with sheepishness, “I didn’t see your first message until late last night. Between the murder investigation and the stress in the department, I didn’t know you were gone until Cathy started calling every five minutes.” He leaned his elbows on his desk and buried his face in his hands. “Do you know how many men, how many man-hours, how much special equipment, it took to find you in that little love shack of his?”

  “Love shack?” I folded my arms, perhaps a little petulantly. “Well, sorry for the inconvenience. I guess it doesn’t matter that I found the man your whole department was looking for?” I jabbed a finger at him. “And Anechka!” I looked around. “Where did she go, anyway?”

  “We sent her straight to the hospital to get checked out.”

  “She must have been hidden in that loft, without much food or water, for days.”

  He threw his hands up. “And now there’s immigration to deal with. What a mess.”

  “Sounds like someone wouldn’t mind getting out of the cop business and back into the toy business.”

  “There’s a big difference between chasing a few lea
ds and allocating the resources of the whole department. I’d forgotten what a headache it could be.” He looked around to make sure nobody was listening in. “Not to mention every man that came on board under Ken’s administration thinks I’m out to railroad their boss and steal his job.”

  I hugged him. “You’re doing a good job, but maybe you see now why I didn’t want you involved so much?”

  He finished the hug with a hearty clap to my back and pushed away. “Do you see now why I didn’t want you chasing down leads on your own? Your involvement in this case doesn’t exactly earn me any respect in the department. And you. You were stuck in that cabin all night with a suspect.”

  “With Ken. He’s a friend. At least he was once.”

  He winced. “And you also might want to check in with Mark Baker.”

  “Mark?”

  “He was here when we started the search. In fact, he was the one who found the deed to that property tucked away in the couple’s financial records.”

  “So he knows …”

  Dad treated me to a particularly awful toothy grin. “Just that you were off looking for Ken Young, and that you were gone all night.”

  “Swell,” I said. I’d plugged my phone in to recharge when I reached the station, and I picked it up now to find multiple texts from Mark, Dad, and Cathy. “Apparently my social life just blew up in my face.”

  Dad placed his hand on my upper arm. “Welcome to law enforcement.”

  * * *

  Cathy, of course, was relieved to hear from me and assured me she had the store covered if I needed to get some sleep. I texted Mark, then sent another text explaining the first text, then stared at my phone hoping it would buzz. When it still hadn’t ten minutes later, I broke down and called him, but it went to voice mail, so I left a message that sounded confusing even to me. And I knew the whole story.

  On zero sleep and a boatload of caffeine, I finally left the police station and walked, no, marched between the walls of plowed snow directly to the pharmacy. One, I needed pain relievers for a headache that threatened to burst my skull apart, and two, if Lionel Kelley was going to continue being cagey, I was going straight to the horse’s mouth.