The Ice Storm Murders Read online

  The Ice Storm Murders

  with Homicide in Haliburton

  Virginia Winters

  Copyright © 2019 by Virginia Winters

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Karen Phillips

  For my mother, who survived the Ontario ice storm of 1998, alone and isolated by fallen electrical wires, with no power and no heat for three days. She was seventy-seven years old.

  Foreword

  This volume includes a prequel to The Ice Storm Murders, titled Homicide in Haliburton, a short story that was previously published in A Superior Crime and other stories, as well as on Wattpad.

  I note that Canadian English is used throughout.

  Introduction

  The Ice Storm Murders

  In this, the sixth of the Dangerous Journeys series, Anne McPhail and Thomas Beauchamp return to Inverness, a back-country lodge, for a wedding. But an ice storm destroys communication and isolates the guests. Then, murder robs host David McKnight of his bride.

  The storm rages for days, fuel and power run out and tempers flare.

  An attempt on David's life pulls a reluctant Anne McPhail and Thomas Beauchamp into the investigation. Thomas finds another body, and then the killer's attention turns to Anne.

  A bonus short story, Homicide in Haliburton, the prequel to The Ice Storm Murders is included.

  Who murders multimillionaire Cooper Thwaite in his remote country lodge? Anne and Thomas investigate when a winter storm cuts off any hope of escape.

  Homicide in Haliburton

  The bright-yellow plane circled lazily upwards into the darkening sky, leaving Thomas and me standing beside our luggage on the shore of the frozen lake. I was glad to be out of the plane and on the ground. The snow was moving in fast.

  "I hear snowmobiles, I think," Thomas said.

  He had a business meeting at this remote lake on the edge of Haliburton County. We hadn't much chance to spend time together since we met across the border in the small Vermont town of Culver's Mills. Thomas still called it home, although he spent more time in places like New York and Paris and Toronto. I hoped this weekend would help me see where our relationship was going.

  The luggage loaded into the trailer behind one of the snowmobiles and helmets lodged on our heads, we began our sedate trip up the hill. A wide veranda wrapped around three sides of the two-story log cabin. Ten bedrooms at least, I thought.

  "Have the other guests arrived?" I said to Ted, one of the drivers.

  He opened the massive oak front door and waved me through. "Yes, ma'am. You're the last, and just in time too. Weather's coming in."

  The first few flakes of the approaching storm swirled through the doorway with us. Inside, the room opened to a vast living area, easily thirty by fifty feet, with walls constructed of massive old logs rising at least ten feet. Brightly-coloured rugs and shabby, overstuffed furniture warmed up all that exposed wood. Fires burned at each end of the room.

  David McKnight, the manager of the lodge, held out his hand in greeting. Long hair that hung free to his shoulders distorted his butler image, though. "Mr. Beauchamp, Dr. McPhail, welcome to Inverness. We've taken your luggage up to your rooms. Would you like to meet everyone, or go ahead upstairs?"

  "Let's say hello before we go up," Thomas said.

  Of the other guests at the lodge, one of them, Royce Barrington, was a business rival. Their host, Cooper Thwaite, headed an international conglomerate and wanted to involve either Thomas or Barrington or perhaps both, in a new enterprise. Barrington's son and daughter and their spouses had come for the weekend as well but were out cross-country skiing.

  Cooper Thwaite was the quintessential Marlboro man: tall, weather-beaten (likely due to time spent on expensive golf courses, I thought unkindly, and it turned out unfairly), chiselled, handsome features and beautifully styled white hair. Only long fleshy ears and a gap between his front teeth marred the overall effect. His attractive wife, Melinda was wife number two or three, judging by her age.

  Royce Barrington, on the other hand, wouldn't have been out of place in a small-town Rotary meeting. He was short, a bit heavy, and smiled all over his round face.

  Andrea Barrington was and would remain wife number one, I thought. She seemed the sort of content, comfortable woman a man like Barrington would prefer.

  "Thomas," Thwaite said, "I am so glad you could bring Dr. McPhail. Welcome to Inverness, my dear," he went on turning to me. He held my hand a few seconds longer than custom demanded, although as I am short, and on the wrong side of forty, I suspected the handholding of being his habit with women.

  The Barrington children were all in their mid-thirties or so, cheerful and rosy from their adventures in the snow. The males in the room, including Thomas, circled around Melinda Thwaite. Andrea Barrington walked over and sat down beside me on a long sofa. "Have you ever met Melinda and Cooper before, Anne?"

  "No, I haven't," I said.

  "Do you live in New York?"

  "No, I live part of the time in Toronto and also in a country home in Ontario."

  I could see her interest fading. I supposed she thought she would never meet me after this weekend.

  "Darling Melinda, surrounded by men as usual," she said. Her upper lip curled. "Don't be upset by Thomas, dear; he can't help it. None of them can."

  She raised her glass of scotch and drained it. Comfortable Mrs. Barrington had more to drink than was good for her. Her daughter and daughter-in-law, Beth and Karen huddled near the closest fireplace, ignoring their husbands who formed part of the admiring group by Melinda.

  Thomas came over to us and suggested we go up to our room and change for dinner.

  "What's going on?" I said when we were alone. "Quite a bit of tension down there."

  "Tension? I didn't notice. Cooper wanted to talk to me his plans for our discussions this weekend. Who's tense?"

  "All the ladies. I do believe they are all a little annoyed with our lovely hostess."

  "Melinda? Beautiful as an angel and as thick as she is beautiful."

  "Is there always tension when she's around?"

  "All the time, honey, all the time," Thomas laughed.

  Dinner went quite well—the food was excellent, the wine plentiful, and Mrs. Barrington abstained. I enjoyed talking to her daughter, Beth, a historian who worked for the city of New York, and Beth's husband, Kevin Argyle, a city planner. Her son, Brad, was in business with his father. His wife, Karen, worked for a large charity before her marriage but was "too busy with her social commitments" to continue. Also a few months pregnant she struggled with the no-drinking rule. She sat next to the host, every move scrutinized by her mother-in-law across from her.

  Melinda's companions were Brad Barrington and Kevin Argyle. If I were Andrea Barrington, I'd watch my son. He drank heavily and steadily and monopolized Melinda. I wondered if her elderly husband noticed. Karen certainly did.

  After dinner, Cooper, Thomas, Royce and Brad moved to the other end of the long room and sat around a low table spread with file folders and laptop computers. Cooper suggested bridge to the rest of us.

  I played, but not very well, so left the table to the others, including Melinda who, to my surprise, wanted to play for stakes. I wondered if she was as thick as Thomas joked. After watching for a while, I wandered off to look at the paintings and other objects around the room. Karen disappeared at the first mention of cards.

  The evening ended early, for me at least. Thomas' business meeti
ng went on past midnight. When he came to bed, he curled up against me, snuggling his face into my hair. "Sorry about this evening, dear heart. Cooper insisted."

  "That's okay. I looked at Cooper's lovely pictures and then came upstairs to read."

  Moments later, his breathing smoothed out, and he slept, but I was wide awake again. Knowing from long experience that sleep wouldn't come, I slid out of my side of the bed, put on a robe and started out to find the kitchen.

  Wind, not gale force, but strong gusts that swirled snow around the kitchen, piling it into corners, struck me when I forced my way into the kitchen.

  Double doors led from the kitchen onto a patio. I could see in the glow from the automatic light in the refrigerator's ice dispenser that something substantial held one of the doors wide open.

  Cooper, half-covered with snow, lay in a pool of red, still warm to touch, but dead. Another body. Every time I went on vacation, I stumbled across a corpse.

  I pulled myself up from where I had squatted next to Cooper. The cold raced through me, and I shook, a leftover from mild PTSD. What to do now? I wondered where that manager went at night. He would be the logical person to take charge; I didn't want to be the one to tell Melinda.

  I pulled open the heavy door, slipped through and let the wind slam it shut again. Better to keep that room as cold as possible for now.

  Thomas was snoring when I came in, little flutters of breath that sounded like a tiny car revving up. Too bad to wake him, I thought. "Thomas.”

  He was instantly awake, one of those people who have no transition between sleep and awareness. "What is it? What's the matter," he said.

  He sat up and took my hands.

  "I found Cooper's body in the kitchen."

  I don't usually blurt out tragic news—bad form for a doctor—but it was the only way.

  "Heart?"

  "No, a blow to the head. I made sure he was gone and came up to get you. Where is that McKnight fellow?"

  "I think he has rooms in the other wing."

  Thomas was up and dressed in sweatshirt and pants by the time I finished giving him all the details of what I'll seen. He thought perhaps I wanted to stay in the room, but there was no way I was spending any time alone anywhere in the house except the bathroom until the cops got there. I was sure Cooper had been murdered.

  No bright dawn this morning, just a gradual increase in the light outside. The snow had fallen all night and didn't look to be easing. The wind continued to howl around the eaves, and an occasional loud explosion from the bush marked the death of a tree as a branch gave in to the snow.

  David McKnight and Thomas carried Cooper's body to an unheated shed behind the house. Yes, we knew the rule about not moving the body, but we all had to eat, and that kitchen was filling up with snow. McKnight seemed to understand what he was doing because he took picture after picture with his digital camera before he and Thomas carried Cooper's body away.

  The rest of us clustered at one end of the living room, drinking coffee while we waited for the kitchen to warm up enough to cook in. McKnight had told us that most of the staff lived out, at a village about ten miles away and were not expected in because of the storm. He would try to organize some breakfast when he had finished contacting the police.

  Royce Barrington turned from where he stared out the window at a landscape obscured by blowing snow.

  "McKnight didn't say what kind of accident Cooper had. What was it?"

  “I’ll wait until David and Thomas come back to talk about it."

  "Why?"

  "Because I think we should all hear it together."

  I snuggled further under a warm blanket that Beth Barrington had given me when she found me shivering on the sofa, and tried to ignore the glares from everyone else.

  "Come off it, lady," snarled Brad. He and his father loomed over me. It must have looked as menacing as it felt because Thomas shouted at them as he came in with David.

  "What the hell do you guys think you're doing? Back off."

  "What the fuck happened to Cooper? The doctor here won't tell us. We have a right to know."

  Rage twisted Brad's face into an ugly mask.

  I turned to Thomas, who sat down beside me and took my hand. "Only Melinda has a "right to know", I said, "and I've already told her, and I'll tell the police. I've been in this situation before."

  David interrupted before Brad started again. "I can't reach the police at the moment, folks. The C.B. radio only has a range of five miles, and I can't raise anyone. The phones are down. Our generator will last about 10 hours with the fuel on hand, so I'm going to cut back on the rooms I put the power into—especially this one—and bring in some oil lamps. We'll keep the power for cooking and heating."

  He left for the kitchen, lucky guy. I wanted to leave the room too.

  "You mean we're stuck in this hole with a murderer!"

  Melinda's high-pitched, whining voice came from the stairs.

  "Murderer!"

  "Who said anything about a murder?"

  "I want to get out of here. Kevin, let's get a snowmobile and go." Beth's voice rose above the others as she pulled at her husband's arms.

  Melinda glided into the room, fully dressed, entirely made up with every hair in place, looking every inch a merry widow except for the fear in her beautiful eyes.

  "Anne and Thomas said he was murdered. One of you killed him."

  "You are the one who benefits from his death."

  Andrea's comfortable voice had taken on quite a nasty edge.

  "You're wrong. I got a settlement when we married, and he put everything else out of my reach. And I loved Cooper, no matter what you might think."

  I muttered to Thomas that we were going to need to feed the beasts and left to help David in the kitchen.

  While I buttered toast and stirred scrambled eggs, David and Thomas blocked off the end of the kitchen. I supposed they hoped to keep some evidence for the police.

  "Have you worked for the Thwaites very long?" I said to David.

  "I've worked for Mr. Thwaite for five years. I don't work for her at all, except for when we are up here. Usually, I'm a personal assistant at the office."

  Our cooking was interrupted by a sharp rap at the patio door. A tall man in a snowmobile outfit and helmet stood peering in at us. David went over and spoke briefly to him. The man turned and trudged away in the direction of the side door.

  "Who was that?" I asked when he came back.

  "Guy's name is Mike Lawrence. He got lost in the storm and hunkered down in one of our cabins. When it got to be morning, he realized he was at the lodge and rode up here. I told him to come in through the side door."

  "Did you believe him?"

  "No reason not to."

  "You don't think that he could have killed Cooper?"

  "Cooper didn't have problems with Mike."

  The food was ready, and we carried it into the living room. Lawrence was just walking in from the hall when we came through the door.

  "Folks, this is Mike Lawrence. He stayed in one of our cabins last night, and is joining us for breakfast," McKnight said.

  The conversation had turned to business when I went back to the breakfast table.

  "Thomas, did you and Cooper agree last night?" Melinda said.

  "Does that matter right now?"

  "I think so. Cooper told me that if he chose your company, Barrington would go under. There are a lot of Barringtons here. Maybe one of them thought that I would be more likely to choose their company if he were dead."

  "I doubt that anyone here believed you would be running the company if Cooper died," Andrea said.

  "No one knew about the prenup, except David, so any one of you could have thought that," Melinda insisted.

  "Frankly, dear, no one would have thought Cooper dumb enough to leave you in charge of breakfast, let alone a multi-million dollar company," Andrea said.

  "Leave it alone, Andrea," her husband ordered. "I would like to know the answer
to that question, though. What would be the effect on your company if he chose mine," he asked Thomas.

  Thomas's hand tensed in mine, and the colour rose in his face. "We did come to a tentative agreement after you left us, but it included both of us. I'll show you the outline if you like. It's a waste of time now that he's dead. We'll have to wait for the executor and the board now."

  "Wait? I can't wait too long, Tom."

  "We'll have to find out how Cooper left the company. Perhaps it's in trust for Melinda."

  "No," said Melinda. "He told me that what he gave me when we married is all I would get and even that's all in a trust."

  "So you say," Brad Barrington said.

  Melinda turned her lovely and not so vacant eyes on Brad.

  "If you think that I inherited the company, maybe you killed him. You've always had a thing for me. Maybe you thought you could leave your little wife to her society affairs and marry me, and take the company after he was dead."

  "You bitch," screamed Karen, "as if Brad would leave me for a brainless idiot like you. Tell her, Brad, tell her what you think of her."

  The Barrington seniors and Beth interrupted, trying to calm the situation. Melinda sat back in her chair, with a Cheshire cat smile on her face as the arguments raged around her.

  "Did Cooper have any children?"

  The question came out louder than I intended in a lull in the conversation. A deadly little silence ended when Thomas answered no.

  "Not any legitimate ones anyway," said Andrea

  "What's that supposed to mean," Melinda said.

  "He did have a life before you, dear, and he didn't marry all his ladies."

  "What would be the position of an illegitimate child," I said.

  "Depends on a lot of things, I think," Thomas replied, "especially how the will was written, but I think all children have rights."