Blood Is the Sky: An Alex McKnight Mystery by Steve Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

“I’m fine.”
    Just a little blood, I thought. No problem.
    “I take it that woman in the shed wasn’t Helen,” he said. “You suppose she’s in the main cabin?”
    “Let’s go see,” I said. “I thought they’d never stop talking.”
    We went up the path to the front door of the cabin, climbing a set of wooden stairs that desperately needed a new coat of paint. The whole place had a run-down look about it, from the cracked foundation to the porch ceiling overrun with spider webs. We knocked on the front door. Nobody answered.
    Vinnie looked at me, knocked on the door again, and then opened it. The room we stepped into was a lot nicer than what I expected, based on how the place looked from the outside. A big wooden table stood in the center of the room, with eight hand-carved chairs. There was a stone fireplace on the back wall that my old man would have approved of, and a great moose head looking down at us, its rack of antlers as wide as a piano.
    “Hello!” Vinnie said. “Anybody here?”
    “Back here!” a voice said. “Come on in!”
    There was a door in the far wall of the room. As we stepped around the table, I looked up at the moose head. He seemed to stare right back at me.
    Vinnie pushed the door open slowly and peeked inside. It was an office, with a rolltop desk and a big window overlooking the lake. The woman inside was fiddling around with the antenna on a small television. Where she expected to get a signal from, I couldn’t even guess. Maybe a CBC station out of Timmins.
    “We’re sorry to bother you,” Vinnie said.
    The woman turned around and looked at us. “Oh!” she
said. “I thought you were the men back from town.”
    “We’re sorry to bother you, ma’am,” I said.
    “It’s all right,” she said. “You just surprised me.” She had brown eyes, that was the first thing I noticed. She was about my age, maybe a couple years older, with brown hair just starting toward gray, and she was wearing a red flannel shirt a couple sizes too big. My overall impression was a nice lady who was a little tough, too. I suppose that’s what it took way the hell up here.
    “The couple outside told us to come see you,” I said. “They said you owned the place. We tried calling you, but I think you have a problem with your phone.”
    “I’m Helen St. Jean,” she said, standing up. She shook Vinnie’s hand and then mine. “Yeah, that phone’s been out for a week. If it wasn’t so late in the season, I’d get it fixed so it could go out again.”
    Vinnie spoke up. “My name is Tom LeBlanc,” he said. The old switcheroo was apparently alive and well. “This is my friend Alex McKnight.”
    “That was Ron and Millie you met outside,” she said. “He was probably still working on that moose.”
    “He seemed to be up to his elbows in it,” Vinnie said.
    She frowned at that. “I don’t know how many mooseburgers those men are gonna take home,” she said. “They didn’t seem too happy, is all I know. I don’t imagine they’ll be coming back next year. Not that we’ll even be here next year.”
    “Who are we talking about?” Vinnie said. “You see, we’re sort of trying to track down my brother. We know he came up here.”
    “I think I hear them now,” she said. “Hank took them over to Calstock when they got back from the lake. You know how it is. Seven days in the woods and you need pizza.”
    Vinnie went to the window and craned his neck, trying
to see who was outside. “I don’t see him,” he said. “Which party is this, ma’am?”
    Before she could answer, a man came stomping into the office. “Son of a freaking—Helen, do you have the sheet for these clowns, eh? The sooner we can get rid of them—” He stopped when he saw us standing there. “Let me guess,” he said. “The truck that some idiot ran off the road back there.”
    “That would be me,” I said. “There was a moose.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I’ve got the bill all made up,” Helen said,