Dance with the Devil

here again and cause trouble.”
        “But they'll also know there isn't anyone here protecting the place. Can't you go ahead with the investigation until-”
        Obviously embarrassed, Cartier interrupted her. “Neither I nor any of my men could handle it properly. We haven't been trained for things like this, because we aren't accustomed to anything more troublesome in Roxburgh than drunks and marital quarrels. I'm afraid that we'd only mess up the trail if we started stomping around after clues, and then we'd be in hot water with the state boys. I've chalked the outline of the body in the den, to show where it fell, and I'd be pleased if none of you touched anything in that room until the state police can go over it with all their machines. Other than that, we all have to sit and wait out the storm.”
        “Couldn't they send someone in by helicopter?” Katherine asked.
        “Perhaps they could, but they won't. It isn't that much of a crime to them, one murder. Like I said, a couple of days or a week. Then they'll be here to handle it.”
        He nodded to Lydia and left the room.
        “With this snow,” Katherine said, “the carpenter won't be able to come and change the locks tomorrow, will he?”
        “No,” Alex said.
        Lydia said, “Don't worry, dear. I'm sure that Constable Cartier is right. Those terrible people, whoever they were, aren't going to risk returning to Owlsden in the near future.”
        “I hope you're right,” Katherine said.
        “I know I am.”
        The police trundled Yuri's blanket-wrapped corpse past the library door. The sight of it, like a bundle of weeds, caused Patricia Keene to break into low, mournful sobs.
        “There now, there now,” her husband said, patting her shoulder and awkwardly trying to cradle her against his chest. He was not a man easily able to offer consolation or comfort. “It's going to be perfectly all right, Pat. Everything is going to be fine.”
        Katherine wished that he were right. But she knew that he was wrong…

CHAPTER 12
        
        The following day, Owlsden was suffused with a morbid air of death, a deep mood of brooding expectancy that ruled out any quick resumption of the routines of daily life. Outside, the snow still fell hard, with nearly twelve inches of new snow draped across the old, softening the land and the house like a burial shroud softens the harsh realities beneath it. Inside, Lydia remained in her room, uninterested in conversation or in going about the details of correspondence. She seemed to have been stricken more brutally by Yuri's sudden death than she had evidenced the night before. Patricia and Mason Keene kept to the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking in low voices-conversations which they ceased immediately when anyone entered their private domain. They were not bothering to produce any culinary masterpieces, for everyone had made it clear that food was not of much interest after the bloody events of the last several hours. Alex Boland went into town, using the ski slope, around ten o'clock and looked to be gone until evening, though Katherine had no idea what he was doing down there. It seemed to her that his time might be better spent in finding some way to secure the doors to Owlsden before nightfall brought a new period of anxiety to all of them.
        Katherine remained in her room, like Lydia, and tried to read. When she grew hungry enough to force food into her stomach and keep it there, she nibbled at the things in the refrigerator in her closet. She spent long periods of time at the window, staring out at the clean landscape, the sharp, relentless, white glare of the untouched snow. She found herself methodically adding up the credits and the debits of life at Owlsden, as she had done once before, but she had different results than the first time. The list of debits now far outweighed the credits. It seemed wiser to pack and leave, to go through the unsettling process of locating a new job, than to stay here.
        Of course, she would have to stay a while yet. The hard, snapping wind and the huge snowfall dictated a period of isolation before she could make her break for freedom. Even if she could somehow get her luggage down the ski slope, tote it to her Ford where it was still parked in that picnic area and get the car started after it had set several days in the snow, she could not drive out of the valley. She remembered the perilous