Dead Silver

39

I eased myself out of bed next morning, leaving Renee to sleep in after her long drive from Seattle. I quietly stoked the fire, boiled water, and made myself a cup of strong black coffee. Then I wrapped up in a down coat and sat outside on the cabin steps.

The early morning air was still crisp, but the real bite of winter was gone. The patchwork of bare earth and snow spread out before me turned darker every day; the trees were greening, with fattening buds. I was starting to hear songbirds, instead of just the occasional croak of a crow or screech of a magpie. In general, the land and sky felt softer. We'd still get hammered again a couple of times, but it was like a receding tide; each time a wave withdrew, spring had gained more ground.

It seemed that my own world might be changing, too, although I couldn't yet gauge how much.

Renee had taken a leave of absence from her research job. Her employers hadn't been happy about the short notice, but they had agreed, and the door was open for her to return. Whether she'd do so was up in the air, along with more.

She hadn't yet said anything about Ian. I decided I'd let her bring that up when she was ready to. But the engagement ring was gone from her finger, and we both understood that her staying here was, in part, a trial to see how things might work out.

But the main reason that had brought her back here, which she'd mentioned on arriving last night, was harder-edged and more compelling-the memory of an argument she'd overheard between her father and Astrid. It had happened during Renee's last visit with them, only a few months before Astrid's death.

Renee had been aware that the tension between the two was rising, and by that time, the bloom was definitely off the rose. Professor Callister, mild and good-humored by nature, seemed prickly and even angry. Astrid's treatment of him was aloof, disdainful, and sharp. She was gone by herself a lot, sometimes until late at night, and she made no attempt to explain her absences. Infidelity wasn't mentioned outright in their exchanges, but the atmosphere was charged with that possibility.

On the evening of the argument, Renee had been out with friends and got home around eleven. Her father was alone, reading in the living room. He said good night to her with his usual affection, but she sensed that something had happened; he was almost grim, and later she heard him pacing around restlessly and even muttering to himself, a habit he'd never had. That kept her restless, too.

She dozed, but woke up around three in the morning to the strident voice of her father challenging Astrid. He seemed to be confronting her with an object-something that she had hidden and he had found.

"What the hell are you doing with this?" he demanded. He sounded more upset than Renee had ever heard him.

"What are you doing with it?" Astrid retorted, shrilly, without her usual cool. "How dare you go through my things."

"That's a brat's answer. You're acting like a little girl; you think you're playing a game."

"Oh, I know it's real-you're the one who does nothing but talk."

Then they lowered their voices and moved farther into the house; maybe they'd realized they might wake Renee. She only caught a few more words at the brief argument's end. As the Professor's footsteps stomped across the floor, Astrid called bitingly after him:

"Go ahead! I'll just get another set."

Renee heard the back door close, and went to a window. Her father was striding across the yard to his study in the carriage house, carrying a scroll or tube that looked like a rolled-up poster. A minute later, sparks rose from the woodstove chimney; at a guess, he was burning it. She watched for some time longer, but he didn't come out again.

Renee had thought hard about the incident, trying to reconstruct it in detail, and had connected some dots. First, she was almost certain that in Astrid's final taunt to Callister-that she would "just get another"-she had used the word "set." That was a term commonly used for blueprints, site maps, and general construction plans-which were usually carried in longish rolled-up scrolls.

Second, Astrid's lover, the one who had been murdered with her, was a manager in the Dodd Company-the backers of the silver mine that she had fought.

Third, Astrid had been involved with a group of radical environmentalists, and she had talked seriously about blowing up the mine.

Not much had ever been done with this aspect of the crime. While it was conceivable that her lover was the intended target rather than Astrid, nobody gave that much credence. There was a ton of hostility toward her but none toward him, at least that had ever surfaced. He'd just been unlucky enough to be there. The affair itself didn't seem to have any particular significance; it was assumed to be a case of sleeping with the enemy, with attraction prevailing over antagonism-if not exactly time-honored, certainly not unknown. He was close to Astrid's age, was more appealing physically than her twenty-years-older husband, and the forbidden-fruit aspect would have added spice.

But maybe lust and kicks hadn't been the only impetus for the affair. What if she had really seduced him to get information-such as a set of construction plans-to help her pinpoint sabotage targets? That was the kind of intrigue she had delighted in, and he wouldn't necessarily have known her real object.

Callister's fury at finding the blueprint-like scroll, and the fierce words that Renee had overheard, did lend credence to that scenario. And that opened up yet another labyrinth of possibilities, one even murkier than what we'd encountered so far.

Needless to say, Renee was determined to explore it.

I went back into the cabin to make breakfast-bacon, eggs scrambled with cheddar cheese in a little of the bacon grease, sourdough bread toasted in an iron skillet, and more of that rich coffee.

My gaze kept straying to the sight of the sleeping woman in my bed-her cloud of dark mussed-up hair, a glimpse of bare nape, the sweet curve of her hips under the quilt. It had taken some maneuvering last night to keep my ribs comfortable, but we'd managed quite well. My condition was definitely improving.

The tomcat had settled in behind her knees and was purring quietly, waiting for me to serve the meal. I was happy to oblige.