“Yeah. Good to meet you,” Ghaliya replied.

  I started the car and she wound up the window quickly. “Damn, it’s so freaking cold here.” She already had all the buttons of the jean jacket closed, and she hugged herself and put her boots right under the heater vent under the dash.

  I handed her the chips. “We’re just not used to it.” I got the car going and checked the road in either direction—no cars to be seen at all—then pulled out in the direction we’d come into town from. The Ford gave a little shimmy in the back, a slight wiggle, as it had done from time to time on really well-packed snow. But the road out of town was well plowed.

  Nevertheless, I drove slowly, because I didn’t want to miss the unmarked turn off that was “unmissable.”

  “We passed the turn off?” Ghaliya guessed, and tore open the chip packet.

  “Apparently, you can’t miss it.”

  “We did.”

  “Yep.” I kept my eyes on the verge on the other side of the road, looking for signs of a turn off.

  I nearly missed it again.

  I braked, and checked in the mirror. Nothing on my ass, which was good. I wouldn’t have to pull off into the soft snow on the side of the road. I put the car into reverse and backed up a hundred yards, and studied the parallel, packed tracks heading off westward-ish.

  “That’s it?” Ghaliya said. “That’s what we can’t miss?”

  “It’s the only westward turn-off this close to town,” I pointed out. “I guess you just get used to turn-offs that look like this if you live here.” I put on the indicator—pure habit, for there was no one around to care that I was turning—and put the car back into gear. I steered onto the twin tracks and wondered if the hump of untouched snow between them would scrape the bottom of the car. The Ford Focus didn’t have a very high clearance.

  For a moment or two, as the car wiggled and the tires fought the steering wheel, I gritted my teeth and wished I had rented the four-wheel drive. A big truck with four feet of clearance. That would take a couple hundred dollars to fill, and would go through gas at a gallon a mile or something stupid like that.

  Then the wheels settled into the tracks and the car straightened out and my heart calmed a little. “That’s better,” I murmured, carefully steering along the twin tracks.

  “Look at all the snow,” Ghaliya said, her head turned to look out her side window. “It goes for miles and miles and it’s all flat and…pretty. It’s actually sparkling in the sun.”

  I didn’t dare look away from the track. “Take a photo for me,” I said. “I’ll look at it later.”

  I had to assume there was an official road under my tires. Otherwise, we could have been cutting across a farmer’s field, for all I knew. The flat white snow Ghaliya was admiring did spread out in front of us, the white perfection ruined by the track snaking across it. Ahead, a line of trees began. The track headed directly for them and as I got closer, I could see the track bend to pass between the trees that grew close to either side.

  As the car moved between the trees, the light instantly dimmed. The cloudless blue sky disappeared. The trees grew very close to the track. Road, I corrected myself mentally. It wasn’t a track, it was a road. Most of the trees edging it were pine trees of some sort, and they all looked identical.

  I realized I was leaning away from my door, as if I was afraid that the trees would scrape it, or punch right through it. As if leaning away from the door would stop that from happening.

  “Bit crowded in here…” Ghaliya muttered. She’d stopped munching on the chips.

  “But the snow in the middle has dropped down. There doesn’t seem to be as much among the trees, either.” I’d stopped worrying about scraping the snow with the bottom of the car. But my heart was thundering along, anyway.

  We sat in tense silence as I carefully steered the car. The track wound and bent. I guessed that the tight curves and bends were to dodge clumps of trees. Which was odd, because most road crews, these days, tended to chop down anything in the way, tear stumps out, cut right through hills, fill up gulleys, and build their roads as straight as possible.

  How old was this road? Everything in New York was a lot older than anything in L.A. At least, it felt that way. Was this one of the original trader tracks? Was this a route that someone like Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans had travelled? A road that old would bend around trees and other obstructions.

  I glanced in the mirror. The open field we’d crossed was long out of view. The winding track also meant that all I could see behind us was more trees.

  “You doing okay?” I asked Ghaliya, just to hear the sound of my voice. From the corner of my eye, I saw Ghaliya jump.

  She gave a shaky laugh and rolled down the top of the chip bag, in a temporary seal, put it on the back seat and brushed off her fingers. “Looking forward to getting there,” she confessed.

  “Me, too.”

  I was strongly tempted to turn on the radio, for the normal sound it would create, but didn’t want to take a hand off the steering wheel.

  The car rolled on, the back end giving the little wiggles that meant the tires were losing traction. What would happen if they lost all grip? Would we spin out?

  I slowed down even further. We were travelling well under the speed limit now. “My soul for a big truck with fat tires with deep treads,” I breathed. “Screw the gas consumption.”

  “You’re doing way better than I would on this stuff, Mom.”

  I gave her a quick smile. “Thank you.”

  A few minutes later, the trees ended. And just ahead were houses, all crowded up along the road we were on.

  Next to the closest house was a green road sign.

  Haigton Crossing. Population 133.

  The sign matched every other road sign we’d seen announcing a town since leaving Syracuse, but here it looked odd and out of place.

  Yet I took comfort, seeing it. Someone in authority had put that sign there. We were on an official road. And we were in the right place.

  “Look for a hotel,” I told Ghaliya. “It has got to be easy to spot,” I added.

  “It’s right there,” Ghaliya said, pointing.

  There was next to no snow on the road, so I risked a glance ahead, to where she was pointing.

  An intersection was just ahead, and on the far side, on the right-hand corner, was the hotel. It stood out because it was taller and bigger than any other building around the intersection.

  “Please tell me it has a parking lot,” I begged the air. There was no stop sign at the intersection, but I stopped anyway, and looked both ways. That let me see that the road cutting across this one looked disused. Grass grew over the top of what might once have been asphalt. Maybe. Or perhaps it had been simply gravel. It was hard to tell, because the grass—and moss, I realized—grew all over the top of whatever surface had once been there. Patches of snow dotted the road, but there wasn’t enough of it to bury the grass.

  The road stretched southwest and northeast, shaded by the trees towering over it, before curving and disappearing. Nothing moved on it in either direction.

  No wonder there was no stop sign.

  “There’s a place to park on the other side of the hotel, I think,” Ghaliya said.

  “There is?” I drove the car across the intersection, past the front of the hotel, and spotted the turn-in. Ours was the only car on the road, so I didn’t bother indicating. I simply turned the car into the flat area beside the building. There was one other car—which must have been what caught Ghaliya’s attention. It was a very old, faded and rusty truck that looked like it might have rolled off the original Ford assembly line in the 1920s. I wondered if it still ran, or if it was permanently parked here and rusting silently away. There was no snow beneath it, leaving a bald patch of dark brown earth.

  I parked parallel with it and turned the engine off. “Well, we’re here.”

  We both twisted to look around our seats and through the back window at the tall building behind us.

  The side of the building was white rendering of some sort, I thought. But it was not stucco. It didn’t have the knobby surface that stucco usually does. I wondered if it was a type of outdoor plaster. It was white and smooth.

  Black timbers cut across and down the outer wall. And they looked like real timber, too. Not the fake embellishments sometimes added to new buildings. These timbers were old. They looked like they had knots and gouges and splits, the way a very old piece of timber would age.

  There were windows on three levels. The top level windows looked quite small. All the windows were mullioned, which matched the old-fashioned architecture.

  The roof was very steeply pitched, so that it came down lower than the third level windows, creating an upside down “v” from the angle we were looking at. I could see there were several pitches to the roof—lots of planes and angles. Re-shingling the building would be a bitch of a job. And super-expensive.

  On the ground floor, in the middle of the long wall, there was a door. Black timber, with frosty glass panes at the top, that only a very tall man would be able to see through.

  Three wooden steps led up to the door, with a flat, small deck in front of it. Wood railings on either side would help anyone who’d had too much to drink navigate the steps. A light, made to look like an old lamp, would illuminate the steps at night.

  And over the top of the door, carved into a thick, long piece of timber, was the legend: Haigton Inn.

  “Guess that’s an entrance,” Ghaliya said.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and reached for my bag. “I think I’d rather go through the front entrance, and avoid the bar.”

  “You don’t know that door goes straight into the bar,” Ghaliya replied, reaching for her backpack.

  “It’s a good guess,” I told her. “We’re not here to drink, so we’ll use the front door. Coming?”

  “Coming!” Ghaliya sang as we got out of the car.

  She actually sounded eager and for a moment, I envied her. With a sigh, I looked up at the building, drew my cotton jacket in around me and shivered.

  Chapter Four

  We walked around the corner of the building and along the front of it, and I turned my head to study it properly.

  A lot more white walls and a lot more black timbers sectioned the wall. Just ahead, I could see a section of the building jutted ahead of the rest by a few feet. The front door would be in there, I guessed. And the other side would be the same as this one. White walls, black timbers, a roof that came down to just above the second-floor windows. All the ground floor windows were big, with mullions. I couldn’t see anything through the windows we passed, though.

  The second floor jutted over the top of the first floor by a foot or so, and more black timbers edged the projection.

  About six feet of concrete joined the building to the footpath we were on. The footpath was concrete, too, and wasn’t terribly wide.

  We reached the center section and yes, there were big, double doors there, painted black. One side was propped open with an old iron—one of the antique ones that women had once slipped hot bricks into to iron their husbands’ white, billowy shirts.

  Hanging over the door was a black iron frame. A sign hung off it announcing that this was the Haigton Inn. Above the name was a painting of a woman in Colonial costume, standing in the middle of a road, her hands on her hips.

  My heart began to race, again. It had been doing way too much of that since the phone call summoning us here. And I had been doing way too much controlled breathing.

  I adjusted the hang of my bag and jacket and blew out my breath. It fogged the air in front of me and I watched the cloud disperse, startled at the novelty of seeing my own breath. I’d been startled every time it had happened.

  Ghaliya caught my hand. “You’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”

  I nodded and headed for the open door, and stepped inside.

  The light was gloomy, in there, compared to the light outside and I paused to let my eyes adjust.

  We were in a hallway that looked quite normal. Directly in front of us was a wide staircase with a black, wide, gleaming banister. The steps were also painted black. A wide runner, mostly red with flecks of black and white, covered them.

  To the right, through an open archway, was a big room filled with a dozen or more square, polished, wood tables, each with four big dining chairs pushed under them. The chairs were also wood, the slatted back frames dark from years of being handled. Cushions adorned each flat seat, tied with bows to the corners of the frames.

  None of the tables were set, but it was only three p.m. Dinner was a few hours off, yet.

  But spotting the dining room oriented me. The kitchen would be behind the dining room, accessed through a door under the stairs in front of us.

  “The bar is that way,” I said, pointing to the left. There was a door just ahead of us, also propped open by another old iron. A curtain hung over the doorway, which would muffle noise from the bar. It was a very old-fashioned treatment, but it matched the building.

  We both stayed where we were, Ghaliya clutching my hand.

  I cleared my throat, untangled my hand from Ghaliya’s and moved over to the doorway. I pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the room beyond. Ghaliya was right behind me, crowding up close.

  It was the bar, just as I had suspected. It was a very big room, running the whole depth of the building, because windows were on all three sides. The long side, opposite the doorway we’d just come through, had a black door with glass panes at the top. The outer door we’d spotted in the parking lot.

  Up against the wall that was common to the corridor we’d just left was the bar itself. I’d never seen any bar look more traditional and quaint. The counter was black wood—and I didn’t think the darkness came from paint, but from years of alcohol spills and the oil from thousands of palms and fingers. It was a rectangle, jutting out about a dozen feet into the room. The front of it was heavily carved wood, showing grape vines and fruit, and barley twists everywhere. A brass railing ran along the floor, for feet to prop themselves upon.

  The same barley twists adorned support beams thrusting up from the bar, holding up more wood façade that reached up to within a foot of the twelve-foot-tall ceiling.

  The rims of glasses peeped beneath the façade. They were hanging from racks behind the wood panels. From the top of the panels hung more lights like the reproduction lamp outside the side door, four of them spread across the length of the bar.

  There were no beer pulls anywhere along the bar.

  Behind the bar, the barman, wearing a green apron, stood drying glasses. He was a very thickset man, with a barrel chest and a belly to match. He had a full beard, well trimmed. His hair was long, but pulled back in a neat pony. He glanced at me and nodded.

  Surprised, I nodded back.

  The floor of the room was unadorned wood. Perhaps it had once been varnished and sealed, but many shoes had scuffed it back to raw wood, which, like the counter, had soaked up dirt, spills and more. Now the wood looked black.

  Small tables and wooden chairs with curved round arms and backs that rose no higher than the tables, dotted the other side of the room, and were grouped in clumps near the windows at either end. Toward the front windows, along the outer wall, was a huge fireplace, which was actually burning an honest to goodness wood fire. The coals were banked to a dull glow, and a single thick log sat on top of them, with small flames licking around the edges. It would soon catch fire and start burning properly, but the room was plenty warm enough already.

  I could feel my skin relaxing at the touch of the heat.

  At one of the tables close to the fire sat three men. They all twisted to look at us, for the rest of the room was empty. They had big metal mugs in front of them, that I presumed held beer. The mugs were different from the usual tall glasses in which beer was served, or the big mug-shaped glasses the barman was drying, but they matched this room and the whole building.

  I moved over to the bar. It seemed sensible to start there. “Hi,” I told the barman.

  “Getcha something?”

  “I’m not here to drink—”

  “Everyone drinks, here,” the barman said. “It’s part of the charm, see?”

  I didn’t see. “I’m really not here to drink,” I repeated. “I’m looking for someone. I’d phone him, but my phone is dead, and so is my daughter’s and the car I rented doesn’t have a charge port and—” I made myself stop, because I was babbling. “Anyway, could you tell me which house across the road is Benedict Marcus’ house?”

  The barman put down his glass. “I’ll have to ask. Meantime, what can I get you?”

  There was an odd tilt to his chin that I read as stubbornness. I sighed. I was going to have to pay for my information. “Hard Lemonade,” I requested.

  “I’ll have straight lemonade,” Ghaliya said, beside me. “Thanks.”

  The barman beamed at her. His smile faded as he turned to me. “How d’you make hard lemonade?”

  I may have gawped at him. “It’s…you serve it in a can, it’s ready made…you don’t have Hard Lemonade?”

  “I have beer, spirit, and pop.” The barman reached up and snagged a glass from the racks overhead and put it on the bar. Then he turned around, took a step toward the back of the bar…and his height reduced by two feet.

  I leaned forward, astonished, and saw that he really was under five feet tall. He bent and opened a fridge and pulled out a can of lemonade, then stepped back up onto what had to be a ledge or platform running along the length of the bar. I glanced along the length of the bar and could see, at the far end, the edge of the platform. It looked like a raw plank, a foot wide, and worn to smoothness.

  The barman pushed the lemonade and the glass toward Ghaliya and winked at her.

  Ghaliya gave him one of her sunny smiles, which could stop anyone in their tracks to bathe in warmth and good feelings.

  The barman turned back to me, with an expectant expression.

  “What spirits do you have?” I asked, for there were no bottles arranged on the shelf behind him.