“Yes. If I don’t make it, I want you to know… I can…

  what?”

  “It’s shallower here. We can wade the rest of the way.”

  Stanley stood to demonstrate.

  “Oh.” Tom stood too. The bottom was mucky and weedy, but solid enough to support them. They sloshed through the thigh deep water without swimming, Stanley in the lead. He waded slowly for a minute, getting his breath back. Then he thought of those piranhas. For sure, that was a joke they liked to pull on the tourists. Nevertheless, he waded faster.

  218 Victor Banis

  He reached the shore first, here a cluster of enormous rocks, and scrambled up onto the nearest of them. Someone pulled his hair and for a horrible minute he thought Hannah had somehow gotten there before him, but it was only a bush he’d gotten tangled in. He freed his hair, pushed his way through branches and leaves, and reached a hand back for Tom, already climbing out of the water.

  Tom took Stanley’s hand, pulling himself up the rest of the way, and grabbed Stanley in a fierce bear hug. “Baby, you had me scared there for a while.”

  “I had me scared there for a while.” Baby?

  And Tom, standing in the gloom, dripping water and smiling down at Stanley, felt something kick and start in his chest. He felt as if he had somehow been adrift in some distant, alien land, and had just this moment come home—to a home that he seemed to have forgotten, but that in an instant, and utterly, he recognized as his own and rightful place. How could he have been such a fool, not to have known it at once?

  Nearby, a masculine voice coughed discreetly and a familiar voice said, “Officer Danzel?”

  “And Officer Korski,” Stanley called back, “All present and accounted for.”

  Tom looked at him and laughed.

  “What? I must look a sight, I know, but you look a bit bedraggled yourself…”

  “You’ve got leaves in your hair, looks like you’re all made up for a toga party, or something.” He reached and plucked a twig, no bigger than piece of wire, with a pair of leaves still attached to it. “Must have come from those bushes.” He went to toss it, but, impetuously, Stanley grabbed his hand.

  “No, I want to keep it.”

  “A twig and some leaves? What for?”

  “For, oh, I don’t know, a souvenir, I guess.”

  They looked at one another for a long moment. Stanley wanted to kiss him, but he thought probably Tom wouldn’t appreciate that—not with an audience, a trio of Bear Mountain’s finest clambering now over the rocks towards them.

  DEADLY WRONG 219

  “Everybody okay?” Sergeant Wooster asked, jumping the final boulder to where they stood.

  “We’re fine,” Tom said. “The woman?”

  “Lake Patrol lost her, but my boys are waiting for her.” He looked out over the surface of the lake. “Guess we’ll get her boat in the morning.”

  “But, how did you find me out there?” Stanley asked.

  “Just another night’s work for the Bear Mountain P. D.,”

  Wooster said, grinning and looking altogether pleased with himself. He took the Skoal tin from his pocket and stuffed a plug of tobacco in his left cheek—a man preparing to tell a story. “See, this is how it was. There’s this woman here in town, folks call her Crazy Mary…”

  “Crazy Mary. I know her,” Stanley said. “I owe her a big favor, actually.”

  “Well, you owe her two now,” Wooster said.

  § § § § §

  “So,” Wooster wound up his tale, “just on a notion, I swings back this way, and I sees you walking alongside the road, and I wonders, where’s he goin’, anyhow? So I kind of followed, and waited outside when you went into Miss Hannah’s.”

  “I thought I heard a car,” Stanley said.

  “Yeah? Guess I need to brush up on my surveillance techniques. Anyway, after a bit, her lights went out. Which struck me as funny. I mean, the two of you, and all. Not likely, I says to myself.”

  “What makes you so sure it’s not possible?” Stanley asked dryly.

  Wooster chuckled at that. “Oh, I know Hannah Hunter, all right,” he said. “I didn’t figure there was much chance of the two of you shacking up.”

  Something in the tone of his voice made Stanley take a quick sideways glance at him. In his own weather-beaten way, Wooster wasn’t a bad looking man—lean, and rangy, and brimming with mountain machismo. And just now, he had one of those “man looks” on his face that told a whole story in a single unconscious lift of one corner of his mouth.

  220 Victor Banis

  Well, some men did like strong women.

  “So, then,” Wooster went on with hardly a pause, as if he’d revealed nothing about himself, “I sort of snuck around the house to see what was what, and there you were with a shotgun in your back and her escorting you down to the boat.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot her then and get it over with?”

  Stanley asked. “You’d have saved me a nervous half an hour or so.”

  “Not much inclined to shoot women in the back,” Wooster said. “That’s not the way we do things here. ‘Sides, she had a shotgun on you. Mostly likely if I’d shot her, she’d’ve shot you.”

  “Good point,” Stanley conceded.

  “Anyway, thinking about what Mary had said, I slipped inside. First thing I saw was the dog with its head bashed in, and then the old lady in the bedroom. Wasn’t hard to piece things together, didn’t reckon it to be a natural death, not with Hannah shipping you out at the end of a shotgun. So, I called the chief, who called Officer Danzel here at the motel, and meanwhile I roused the Lake Patrol, and by the time they were ready to head out, Officer Danzel was already there, in record time.”

  “I probably broke some speed limits,” Tom said.

  “I expect so. Since I wasn’t there to clock you, however, I’ll let them go,” Wooster said good naturedly. “Mountain men kind of drive fast anyways, least when they’ve got somewhere important to go.”

  “I did,” Tom said, and beamed at Stanley.

  Wooster, seeing the look, only said, his face carefully blank,

  “I reckon,” and spit tobacco juice into the lake.

  Now that they had wrapped up their case, and caught their murderer, Wooster seemed to have forgotten all his earlier resentment. Probably, Stanley thought, he’d be the hero of the hour, not because of Donnie McIntosh’s murder, which would require that the locals admit they had screwed up on, but Penelope Hunter’s murder, which obviously Wooster felt he had solved, with full bragging rights, and which was sure to eclipse the other.

  DEADLY WRONG 221

  Just at the moment, though, Stanley was too grateful that they had prevented his murder to object to Wooster’s preening.

  If he hadn’t been spying, things would have worked out far differently.

  “Well, looky there,” Wooster said, glancing skyward.

  “Appears it’s clearing up after all.”

  Stanley looked too. The storm had blown itself out, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, starlight and shadow breaking after one another like waves. The solid mass of clouds above had reshaped themselves into celestial tumbleweeds, scudding rather swiftly past an alabaster moon that had in an instant turned everything as bright as day.

  “Yes,” Stanley said, “it’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”

  The beam of a flashlight splashed across them. Pebbles scattered as someone scrambled down the rocks and a uniformed officer appeared just above their heads.

  “We lost her,” he said. “She got away.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Libby was at the stove, just stirring eggs in a big skillet. The door from the deck crashed open, and Hannah was there—

  only, a Hannah such as her sister had never seen, water dripping from her clothes and her hair, a shotgun in her hand.

  “I need your car,” Hannah said without greeting. She was breathing hard, her eyes flashing like onyx.

  “Hannah, what on earth is going on?” Libby demanded.

  “The police called me. They said Mom was dead. They said you…”

  “The car.” Hannah’s voice was an insistent snarl, like an angry mountain cat. “Where are the keys? Quick.”

  “Stanley has them. Where is Stanley?”

  “He’s at the bottom of the lake. You have another set.

  Where is it?”

  Her glance darted around the room, at the keys hanging on a nail by the door. She moved toward them, just as the bathroom door opened, and Carl said, “What the hell…?”

  Hannah whirled, raised the shotgun, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a dull click, and nothing else. She swore and flung the gun aside, and took two giant steps in the direction of the keys.

  Libby hit her a powerful blow with the skillet, scattering bits of scrambled eggs and peppers across the floor. For a second or two, Hannah swayed, her eyes wide, surprised. Then her knees buckled, and she sank to the floor.

  Libby was standing astride her when Sergeant Wooster burst through the front door, Tom and Stanley close at his heels.

  “Well, now,” Wooster said, holstering his gun and staring down at the unconscious Hannah, a puddle of lake water quickly forming around her.

  Stanley looked at Hannah, and at Libby, and at the skillet still in her hand. “Diamond cuts diamond,” he said, grinning.

  224 Victor Banis

  The skillet slipped from Libby’s fingers and clattered to the floor.

  “She tried to shoot Carl,” was all she said.

  § § § § §

  “Hannah,” Libby said, shaking her head wearily. “I guess I ought to have known. Her bitterness, her obvious resentment.

  Building up in her, all those years. But it’s hard to think of your own sister that way, isn’t it? Who suspects someone you know, your flesh and blood, of murder?” She sighed, and said, in a voice still filled with disbelief, “But, her own mother.” In the light from the fire they’d lit in the fireplace, she looked years older than she had days before. “Poor Hannah.”

  “It’s kind of hard for me to feel sorry for her,” Carl said. “If the shotgun hadn’t been wet…”

  “I think that was just a panic reflex,” Libby said. “She didn’t really hate you. She just…” But her voice lacked conviction.

  She rubbed a hand over her eyes. “It was all just too much for her, I think.”

  Sitting with Hannah in the boat, in the darkness of the lake, knowing that he was facing death, Stanley had formed a different opinion about her wickedness. It wasn’t the weight of her family that had turned Hannah to murder, it was the barrenness of her own soul; but he thought it best if he kept that to himself. Her sister and brother had enough to cope with as it was. Better to leave them to find whatever solace they could in their own memories.

  At the moment, however, Carl was finding anger rather than solace. “And before that, she was going to let me fry, wasn’t she?” he insisted.

  “Not exactly,” Stanley said. “She’d worked that out. In her mind at least the worst that could happen to you was a brief prison sentence. She knew you wouldn’t be executed, or get life, anything like that.”

  Carl fixed a cold eye on him. “A couple of years in prison?

  What kind of picnic do you think that would have been for me?

  I might have been better off dead.”

  DEADLY WRONG 225

  To which Stanley could only nod. If Carl wasn’t the stuff of a gay man’s dreams, he was cute enough. He would certainly have looked like fresh—and appealingly young—meat in a prison milieu.

  It was not far from dawn. Hannah had been taken away and, interviews over for the moment, the police had gone. Tom and Stanley had wrapped themselves in blankets, their clothes drying on kitchen chairs before the fire, a draft making the flames tilt sideways and casting dancing shadows on the still dark windows. Tom sipped at a beer and Stanley was just finishing a second cup of coffee. He was finally feeling warm again after the dip in the icy water. “The last time,” he promised everybody, “I go swimming in a mountain lake.”

  “I’m going to have to get some shut-eye,” Tom said, yawning. “We’ve got to drive back to San Francisco tomorrow.”

  He directed this last at Stanley. This was the first time Stanley had heard that he’d be riding back in the truck with him. Their first trip together. Almost like a honeymoon. He wondered if they could take a detour by Niagara Falls. How far could it be: two, three thousand miles? The way he felt at the moment, he could probably jump that far.

  “I guess we ought to all of us turn in,” Libby said, collecting her keys. “I’ll see you before you go?”

  “I’m going back to my own place,” Carl announced.

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t,” Libby said. “We’ll straighten out the bond thing tomorrow, but I’d guess they’ll be dropping all charges against you.” She gave her brother a look of affectionate concern. “Are you okay?”

  He had to think for a minute. “Yeah, I guess,” he said, and added after a moment, “But, you know, I was really hoping it was that Rack. He’s a real bastard.”

  “There’s lots of them around,” Stanley said. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them murderers.”

  “To be honest, I’d have liked it better if it was him, too,”

  Libby said dispiritedly. She gave Stanley a rueful smile, and looked at Tom.

  At the moment, however, Tom was staring fixedly at Stanley, almost as if he had never seen him before. It seemed to 226 Victor Banis

  Libby, watching him briefly, that, from who knew what depths, some fierce yearning was struggling to reach the surface of Tom’s emotions. He was still, but the way a clearing in the woods can be still even while the tops of the pines shake in the wind and the tree feels the storm clear down into its roots. She had a feeling that Stanley’s “aloneness” was close to an end, but what would that mean for his future? For a man of Stanley’s nature, to tether himself to one of Tom’s—this would not be an easy mating, surely. There would be storms, of that she was certain, more than a few, and some of them would indeed invade the peaceful clearing.

  The pop of a log in the fireplace brought her back to the moment. “Good night,” she said, and let herself out.

  “Poor Lib,” Carl said. He looked after her, and at Tom and Stanley. “I always knew Hannah hated me,” he said. “I wasn’t surprised at all when she tried to shoot me. If I’d had any clue she was on the beach that night, I think I’d have known right off the bat it was her who killed Donnie.”

  He went into his room to collect his things. For the first time since they’d climbed out of the lake, Tom and Stanley were left alone.

  “Tough on them,” Stanley said.

  “Totally.”

  “Their own sister.”

  After a minute, Tom asked, “Do you ever go fishing?”

  Which was surely, wasn’t it, a non sequitur, but Stanley made another mental note in that diary he was assembling: Fishing.

  But, hip high wading boots? Not even Rock Hudson had looked good in those, in that old movie with Paula Prentiss.

  On the other hand, there were those impressionist paintings, picnics by the river, the women naked in the grass, readying their special goodies for the hungry looking men. Now, he could see himself in that role. He had this wonderful faux fur blanket… and pancakes, he could fix pancakes.

  “I never have, but I would love to,” he said aloud.

  “Stanley, you are the world’s worst liar.”

  DEADLY WRONG 227

  “No, it sounds great. You’re thinking trout, right, those sparkling mountain streams. I’ll bet there’s one around here somewhere. We could do a picnic. I can see it in my mind’s eye…”

  “Actually, I was thinking salmon, and a trip I took to Nova Scotia a couple of years ago. I hooked this eel, enormous bastard, looked like a barracuda. He swallowed my best hand tied fly. No way to get it back unless you dragged him into the boat and slit his belly open, and I’d have needed somebody else to hold him down, stand on the sucker while I did that. I was all alone, though.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I cut the line and let him go. All I could do. He’s shredding salmon in his belly to this day with my best fly. The only good thing is, he’s got to be cutting himself with it too, every time he eats.”

  Stanley thought about that. “Hannah, you mean. Do you think it would it have been better if she got away? Like your eel?”

  He had to consider that. “No. Not for justice. You start murdering people, you’ve got to be stopped. You’ve got to pay.

  It wasn’t only the murders, though. She betrayed her own family. That might be worse for them than the actual murders, if you think about it. Like a big old fly in your belly, cutting at you all the time.”

  Which Stanley thought was unusually perceptive of him.

  Sensitivity to the feelings of others wasn’t necessarily one of Tom’s strong suits. Still, he’d always said Tom had possibilities.

  “At least she’ll go to prison,” he pointed out. “She’ll pay.”

  “So will they, unfortunately. Every day she’s behind bars.

  That was my point. If she dies, a part of them’ll die with her.

  When you betray people, you don’t just pay for the crime yourself. Lot of other people pay with you.”

  Stanley thought about that for a moment. “There’s a, well, a kind of a poem, in Italian. The Inferno by Dante,” he said, “it’s all about this journey the writer takes, all the way down into hell.

  There’s all these different levels in this hell, the further down you go, the worse things get. And, Dante put traitors in the 228 Victor Banis

  ninth level, the very lowest level. Froze them in ice, as cold as their hearts had been in life.” He paused. “That’s Hannah, isn’t it? Whatever had been decent in her had long ago frozen solid.”

  Tom grinned at him. “Stanley, when did you learn all this shit, anyway? You must have been born with a book up your ass.”

  Stanley smiled back at him. “Something like that.” They surveyed one another across the room.