LITMIR.BIZ

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to realize it belongs to us. Not our finest business investment, by a long shot. He probably wants to save face if the whole thing folds or falls off the cliff or something.”

      She walked over to a small desk, where a computer sat next to a stack of unopened mail. Insects buzzed from outside the half-open windows.

      “So, what’s up? Do you need a room?”

      “No,” said Julian.

      “Yes,” said Emma at the same time.

      “We just wanted to see the place,” he said. “We don’t need a room. Probably stay at the Adelaide.”

      It was a foolish thing to say, with two suitcases at his feet and this fluffy blonde hotel accessory clinging to his elbow. But seeing Kate here unnerved him, gave his anger a point around which to coalesce.

      “It looks good,” he said, glancing around. “Very...tasteful.”

      A deep flush rose up her neck. “Yes, well, I’m not sure the whole bohemian thing would have worked out that well in the long run.”

      “I think it would have worked fine.”

      “Do you? Would you have me leave it as a shrine?”

      “I would have had you leave it alone.”

      “Ah. And is that what you’re doing? Leaving it alone?”

      Julian pressed his lips together.

      “They were going to tear it down,” Kate said. “I’m trying to save it. I would have thought you’d approve. They were your friends, too.”

      “What friends?” Emma said.

      “You didn’t tell her about the murders?” Kate said.

      “She doesn’t need to hear about that,” Julian said.

      “Murders!” Emma said. “Of course I need to hear about it. When was this?”

      “What’s it been now, Julian?” Kate said. “Five years?”

      A slow prickle crept up Julian’s back, under the collar of his cotton shirt. His ears seemed to fill with sound, a low, almost electrical hum that muffled the sound of her voice.

      Five years. An anniversary, a number that meant something, that indicated something might happen again. Five. Dangerous, sharp-sounding, like a blade or the edge of a stony cliff.

      “Five,” he said, carefully.

      “Wait, you were here?” Emma said.

      “We were both here,” Kate said. “Staying in the hotel, that is. We didn’t witness the crime or anything.”

      A sour taste convulsed Julian’s mouth. No, he wanted to say, I didn’t see a thing; it’s nothing to do with me. But the words were swimming in water and he couldn’t get them out.

      “Oh,” Emma said. “So who was murdered?”

      Kate slid behind the desk and switched on the computer. “My friends. My three best friends.”

      Emma was taken aback. “Oh. I’m sorry, I thought...if you don’t want to talk about it...”

      “Celia Dark. Celia’s stepbrother, Rory McFarland, and her boyfriend, Eric Dillon.”

      The computer chattered to life, an alien presence in the gothic gloom.

      “We don’t need to go into it.” Julian’s temple ached from gritting his teeth.

      “I don’t mind.” Kate smiled and gave Emma a little half shrug. “It was a long time ago. And anyway, there’s no escaping the topic here on the Ridge. It was all anybody talked about for months. You couldn’t get away from it, not if you lived here.”

      Julian walked to the other end of the room, where the boxy new furniture was arranged around the fireplace. It looked nothing like it had five years before, nothing like the way he remembered it.

      After the murders, Kate had sent snapshots of the common room and kitchen, along with a bundle of newspaper clippings she’d carefully packed and mailed to his mother’s address in New York. Block headlines at first with thick chunks of text, then smaller, sketchier pieces, featuring standard-issue high school pictures of the three victims and a bigger photo of the Blackbird Hotel. The news petered out at last to a single column of newsprint from the obituaries page: Eric Dillon, Rory McFarland. Their faces grinned out at him, blurred as if by smoke, the ink like soot on his hands.

      There was no obituary for Celia. Julian never knew whether the paper hadn’t run one or whether Kate had simply forgotten to include it with the others.

      “So did they catch the murderer?”

      “There was no one to catch.”

      “You mean, one of them killed the others?”

      “Maybe. It’s hard to tell for sure. We know that Celia’s stepbrother, Rory, was killed first. He was in the kitchen, shot once in the chest. The room was in a shambles—broken dishes everywhere, chairs overturned. Apparently he and Eric had been fighting. There was a broken bone in Rory’s hand and two in Eric’s face, blood everywhere. Which was exactly what you’d expect from any fight Rory was involved in. The police assumed at first that Eric had left the fight and came back with a gun to finish it. But that didn’t seem to make sense when they looked at everything else.”

      “Why’s that?” Emma asked.

      “Because Celia was the one left holding the gun.”

      It occurred to Julian that Kate must have told this story a hundred times. It had the rhythm of a recitation, a prayer-like cadence. He wondered what it was like here on the Ridge, afterward, what the locals made of it. He had almost no memory of the town itself. Its residents were part of the peripheral setting in his mind rather than personalities in their own right. Reddened, snow-scrubbed faces, thick hands, everyone booted and stomping in doorways, swallowed up by their winter clothes. No one outside the Blackbird had penetrated his consciousness far enough to leave more than a faint impression.

      He went to the window. From the sun-dried slopes, crossed with lift lines and dotted with dusty snowplows, the mountains stretched north for hundreds of miles. Though the hills and valleys were covered with trees, they felt barren to Julian, motionless and devoid of life. He wished he’d come back in the wintertime, to see the mountains caked with snow and everyone outside enjoying it.

      Kate went on.

      “So they thought maybe she was trying to stop the fight and shot Rory by accident, then blamed Eric for what happened and killed him, too.”

      “And where was she?” Emma said. “Your friend?”

      “Upstairs, in her bed. Shot through the heart. The gun was still in her hand.” Kate’s gaze fixed on him. “Julian’s gun, actually.”

      Emma looked at Julian doubtfully, and Kate laughed.

      “He was with me at the time,” she said. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

      “So it was all an accident, in a way,” Emma said. “Why do people always fight when they go on vacation?”

      “Oh, they weren’t on vacation.” The computer had booted up, and Kate sat down in front of it. “They owned this place, the three of them together. They were in the process of renovating to turn it into a B&B. There was a little tray of spackling paste in the kitchen, still wet. Celia had been prepping the walls for a coat of paint when the trouble started.”

      “What were they fighting about? Money?” Emma looked disappointed, as if the ghost story had let her down.

      “That’s a good question. The only question that matters, really. But it wasn’t money. They weren’t like that. No one could understand what had changed, why they suddenly imploded that way. It didn’t make sense.”

      A

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