Page 72 of Snow River

“Yes, I know.I’ve noticed that people don’t like to talk about those shootings.You know what I’m afraid of?”Lila waited until she had Paulina’s full attention.“That no one will ever speak up and whatever the truth is, it will die out and never be known.”

Paulina scowled at the muffin she still held in one hand.“Just lost my appetite.Might feed this to the birds.You better go now.”

Lila let out a long sigh.Silence was a hard habit to break.She rose to her feet and gently touched Paulina on the shoulder.“Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?Any chores you’d rather palm off on someone else?”

“You could fix my path before you go.”

“The path from the road?You want me to shovel it?”

“No, I want the snow back where it belongs.”

Lila laughed, and promised she’d do what she could to un-shovel the path.Then she washed the dishes piled up in Paulina’s sink—that got no objections from the woman—and took the compost out to the frozen bin behind her house.

In the snowy yard, she looked up at the piercingly blue sky and pictured Allison waiting on the tarmac for the mail plane to arrive.Was she waiting for an important package?Or did she have something she wanted to send back with the plane?

Which reminded her of something…

She frowned, picturing these pioneer women from forty years ago, sticking together in order to survive.

When she got back inside the house, cheeks tingling from the cold, she asked Paulina, “Did you and your friends share clothes back and forth?”

“Good lord, no.We didn’t have any place to buy clothes here, so we always ordered from a catalogue through the mail.”

And just like that, it clicked.“Did you ever order the same thing?”

“Oh sure.Sometimes we did it on purpose, if they had a two-for-one sale or something.”

Bingo!That other dress, the “prank” dress, must have belonged to one of Allison’s friends.Nancy?

Paulina was yawning as she swirled her paintbrush in a glass of turpentine.Time to go.“One more question before I head out.Do you know where Nancy went after she left here?”

”No, but it was probably somewhere snowy.Nancy was a champion distance skier, a real good one.She went everywhere on skis as soon as there was snow.Hating driving.Terrified of flying.That was one reason she liked Fangtooth because we get so much snow.”

Interesting.That felt like an important detail, but Lila wasn’t quite sure why.“You know what else?”Paulina snapped her fingers.“I just remembered something I overheard at the hardware store a few days before Nancy left.”

Lila held her breath, afraid even one word would send her off course.

“I heard Allison tell her, in a real low voice, ‘I’ll take care of it.You better get away from here while you can.’”

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“What do you think that means?”Bear asked Lila when she relayed her conversation with Paulina to him, word for word, blow by blow.

“To me, it sounds like Nancy found out something when she was working at the Snow River retreat.She wanted to tell someone, but she was afraid because she was pregnant.So Allison offered to take care of it—maybe she was planning to put something in the mail on the plane that day.Maybe it was even Nancy’s journal.But she never got the chance because she was murdered.”

Bear frowned as he added some kibble to Jack’s dish.“That does fit with your theory that they were trying to kill Nancy instead of Allison.”

“I think she and Nancy had similar or identical dresses that they’d ordered from the same catalogue.That’s what she was wearing to the airstrip, along with her winter gear.She was probably hard to identify.That scary assassin was supposed to kill Nancy because she’d witnessed something.Instead, he shot Allison.Then he made it look like a rage shooting and pinned it all on Bowman.Look.”

Kneeling on the carpet next to his coffee table, she sorted through the pile of documents that Molly had brought from the FBI office.“Here’s Bowman’s confession.It’s all very rote, like he’s just repeating something he was told to say.Also, it doesn’t totally line up.”

“What do you mean?”

“He says he shot Allison Casey three times in the back.But there are only two holes in her dress.”

“Maybe he didn’t remember exactly how many times he hit her.He was spraying bullets all over the place.And he was shooting from the tree line.He could have easily gotten that part wrong.The police didn’t make a big deal of it.”He winced as he heard his own rationalization.He, of all people, should know that you couldn’t always count on the police being completely accurate or even well-intentioned.“Okay, I admit that doesn’t mean much.”

“Especially if it was a coverup.”Lila scanned through the notes on his confession again.“They don’t push him at all on anything he said.Like when they asked him why he opened fire, he said, ‘I was angry at everyone.Why should they get to be happy?’And that was it!Not a single follow-up question.”

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