Read Online To Darkness and to Death by Julia Spencer-Fleming - Free Book Online Page A

seeing more people today than he normally would in the course of a year.
    Ed Castle sidled up to Russ, brushing muffin crumbs off his face. “What’s with the third degree?”
    Russ shrugged. “There’s a woman missing. It’s my job to ask questions.”
    “I thought you were off today?”
    Like Linda. Like anyone with a normal job; you’re either working or not working. “I’m off in the sense that I don’t have to be at my desk or on patrol. I’m on duty in the sense that I’m always on duty. Crime never sleeps and all that.”
    Ed grunted.
    At the door, visible from their slice of the living/dining room, a pair of men were stamping their boots and brushing off their jackets before entering the great camp. Russ heard Huggins’s voice booming off the rafters. “Mr. van der Hoeven! Hope you don’t mind us showing back up. ’Fraid we’re empty-handed. Mind if we use the facilities and help ourselves to some more coffee?”
    Eugene was murmuring something about his housekeeper making them breakfast while the guys on the rescue squad walked warily through the door: Russ’s part-time officer Duane; Dan Hunter, who worked at AllBanc; Huggins’s cousin Mike; and at the tail end, the “lady searcher” Eugene had mentioned. She tugged a knit toque off, and her hair, the color of sunshine through whiskey, fell to her shoulders in a messy tangle. Her oversharp nose and blunt cheekbones were red from the cold, her lips were colorless and chapped, and her parka and stained twill trousers hid any suggestion of her figure.
    When he had first seen her, he had thought her plain. He could remember the thought, remember his sober assessment of her face and form. When had she become beautiful to him? She laughed at something Duane said and, laughing, turned, and that was when he met her eyes.
    Oh, love.
     
     
    8:45 A.M.
     
    The radio hanging from her shoulder crackled. “Fergusson?”
    “Fergusson here.”
    “See anything?”
    “A lot of trees. No sign of Millie van der Hoeven, though.”
    “Okay, come on back. We’re gonna debrief and take a break.”
    “I’ll be there.” She thumbed off the radio. She was glad she had her GPS unit and her map. From where she stood, the forest stretched out vast and quiet, seemingly unbroken and eternal. She knew she walked on Haudenosaunee land, that lumbermen and hunters and hikers all came here, shaping it and leaving their marks, but slipping between the grave gray alders and the massive toad-colored oaks, the idea that humans could own this land, that anyone had ever set foot where she was stepping now, seemed unreal.
    She hiked over a rotting log, crushing coffee-brown pulp and meaty fungus beneath her boots. The smell, rich and wet, mingled with the odor of pine sap. A flash of movement caught her eye, and she whirled, just in time to see a gray fox vanish like smoke into the earth.
    With no slow and careful searching to delay her, the walk back was much faster than the walk out. The trail became more and more pronounced. She passed one trailhead to a waterfall—marked on her map—and one to the tumbledown 1860s camp house, ditto. She thought about taking a detour to get a look at either of the sights, but her stomach growled in protest. If her conscience wouldn’t keep her on the straight and narrow, evidently her appetite would.
    The trees thinned, and she saw the rest of them, hurrying along the trail toward the low rock wall that encircled Haudenosaunee’s back garden. Duane, straggling behind the others, waved. “Hey, Reverend.”
    He waited while she passed through the gate, crossed the still-thick grass, and skirted a flagstone patio running almost the length of the house. Tarp-covered shapes marked the outdoor table and chairs, and empty chains hung loose from a wooden frame. She imagined a wicker swing, too delicate to last outside through the long Adirondack winter.
    “Pretty nice, huh?” Duane thumbed toward the French doors. “How’d you like to come