Dance with the Devil

wetly across her shoulders and no longer dry enough to be blown about by the wind, she put the lug wrench in the trunk again and got back into the Ford. She sat behind the wheel for a long moment, wondering about the grisly scene she had just encountered and letting the cold seep out of her like syrup from a tree. If this were New York State, if this kind of thing was common in these Adirondack wildernesses, then she was crazy for going any further. Sure, this was the chance of a lifetime, but…
        Snap out of it, she told herself. Think of what this job means to you in terms of your future, think of the interesting people you'll be working with.
        Five days before her graduation, just after Christmas vacation and during the final burst of studying for end-of-semester exams, Katherine was called into the office of the Dean of Student Personnel, a small and cheery man named Syverson who wore a mustache and a chin beard and looked, she thought, like a leprechaun. She did not know what to expect, but she automatically expected something good. That was her way.
        As it turned out, her optimism had been well-founded, for Syverson had gotten her the job she was now traveling to take. Companion and secretary to Lydia Roxburgh Boland, one of the dozen wealthiest women in the country. Her duties would consist of traveling with the old woman in the spring and fall, reading to her, discussing books with her and, in general, making her feel less lonely than she otherwise might. According to Syverson, the woman was sixty-four but quick, lively and a joy to be around.
        “But why me?” she asked.
        Syverson turned a bright smile on her and said, “Mrs. Boland is an alumnus of our school. She and I have known each other for a long time, before she met and married Roy Boland, when she was a graduate student and I was a sophomore.” He sighed at the passage of the years, then continued: “Later, when I joined the administration, I handled many of Mrs. Boland's endowments to the school, set up the trusts as she wished them and established a system of auditing to be certain that her wishes were carried out even after her death. She trusts me and, as she says, respects my judgment. When she called and asked for a companion from the graduating class this first semester, she left it up to me to choose a girl who would most suit her temperament. Someone attractive, someone with a pleasant disposition and an interest in meeting other people, someone intelligent enough to like books and understand them. Someone, in short, like you.”
        The salary was excellent, the fringe benefits fine as well. It was a dream job.
        She asked Syverson: “What's the catch? Is there one?”
        He smiled again. “Yes, but just a little one. Lydia insists on spending summers and winters in the family house not far from Long Lake in the Adirondacks. It's a somewhat isolated place to want to live, especially for a young and pretty girl. She says the summers are mild enough for her with a great deal of greenery and that she would be lost without living through the normal whiter blizzards she has known since her childhood. Unless you would find the atmosphere too rural, too lacking in diversions for-”
        But she had assured him it would be just fine. And here she was with a degree in literature, a broken-down old Ford, four suitcases of clothes and belongings and a very bright future.
        No number of devil worshippers were going to dissuade her from what she saw as a predestined future full of nothing but good.
        Besides, she asked herself, where else would I go but to the Roxburgh House, to Owlsden?
        She had no close relatives, and her parents had died long ago, longer than seemed possible. The only stable reference point she had was her life in the orphanage, but she knew that would have changed, her friends gone into the adult world. She had no place to return to, and it was partly out of this personal isolation that her optimism grew.
        She started the car and drove back onto the roadway. The storm was now more furious than ever and had added an extra inch of powdery snow to the macadam. The wipers thumped at their top speed but were barely able to keep up with the whirling snow. As the light seeped from the sky and visibility grew even less conducive to travel, she tried to maintain her speed to cover the last miles to the village of Roxburgh-which had been named for Lydia's