Bad News

33

No more Tea Cosy. Gregory was very sorry, but the skiers had arrived, so the Tea Cosy was full. No more comfortable living room, no more huge breakfasts put out by the cheery Gregory and Tom, no more Odille singing “Frère Jacques” while she changed the beds.

Dortmunder hadn’t realized he’d miss the Tea Cosy, hadn’t realized he’d miss anything in the North Country, but there you are. Stay at the Four Winds motel in December, on the icy shores of Lake Champlain, and you, too, will miss the Tea Cosy.

The Four Winds was also full of skiers, or at least people dressed for the part. Every time Dortmunder opened his motel room door, somebody was going by through the snowy wind with skis on their shoulder and great clomping boots on their feet and huge goggles on their faces and thick wool caps on their heads. Their bodies were dressed mostly in what looked like shiny vinyl duffel bags. Probably some of them were men and some were women, but from anything Dortmunder could tell they might all have been kodiak bears.

Since either someone had stolen the Grand Cherokee Jeep Laredo or some police person had spotted its potential for a good career mark, Kelp had found them instead a Subaru Outback, which, in addition to the standard M.D. plates, also had four-wheel drive, a good thing in the frozen wastes north of New York City. Kelp was happy with it, but apparently the official owner of this vehicle was a woman doctor, with children; Tiny kept complaining that the backseat was sticky.

The only thing about the Subaru that bothered Dortmunder was the fact that it was the only vehicle within a hundred miles without a ski rack on the roof, which made it very recognizable. “We oughta steal a ski rack from one of these people,” he suggested. “Blend in, like.”

Kelp said, “Nah, we won’t be here that long. Besides, next you’ll want skis.”

“No, I won’t,” Dortmunder said.

They’d driven up here this morning, the day after Fitzroy’s call about the Indians getting caught in the cemetery, to see what they could do, even though everybody knew they couldn’t do anything. The wrong body was being guarded, and the wrong body would be tested against Little Feather, who had about one chance in a billion to turn out to be related to Burwick Moody, so that was that, right?

Except apparently not. After his first call to Kelp, Guilderpost had decided he and Irwin would not go down to New York. Since then, he and Kelp had been E-mailing back and forth enough to get carpal tu

“Why can’t those three come down here?” Dortmunder had complained, and Kelp had said, “Because Little Feather can’t leave until the game is over.”

“The game is over,” Dortmunder had a

The Four Winds motel was also full. Guilderpost had made their reservations and managed to find all three of them rooms, but they weren’t together. They didn’t feel they should hold conversations on motel room phones, which went through the motel office, so every time one of them thought of something to say to another one, he had to get completely dressed for the wintry outdoors and tramp over through the wind and the snow to the other one’s room, and then tramp back again. Dortmunder really missed the living room at the Tea Cosy.

What they were waiting for was Guilderpost and Irwin, who were supposedly off finding some safe, quiet, u

A little before three, his phone rang in his room, where he was alone at the moment, looking out the window at the ski-haulers. He crossed to the phone and demanded, “Hello.”

It was Guilderpost, who said, “Hello, John. Does your room face the front of the motel?”

Dortmunder frowned at the window. “I got wind with snow in it, and cars with ski racks, and a road, and way over there is a frozen lake. Everything is gray.”

“That’s the front,” Guilderpost said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll have Andy come wait with you in your room, because his is at the back.”

“Wait for what?”

“Little Feather. She’s coming over, in the motor home.”

“That sounds real secure,” Dortmunder said.

“Apparently,” Guilderpost said, “the situation has changed. We can all come out of hiding now.”

“Because it’s all over,” Dortmunder said.

“I don’t think that’s why,” Guilderpost said. “She should be here in fifteen minutes or so.”

She was. The motor home made a big sweep around the parking lot, so everybody in the group would get a chance to see it, and then it parked way over in the far corner of the lot, away from the other vehicles and as close as possible to the frozen lake.

Dortmunder and Kelp put on a lot of outdoor clothes and headed out over the parking lot, the wind with the snow in it rushing at them from across the lake, trying to push them back into the room, and Dortmunder was almost ready to go along with that idea. But from the right, here came Guilderpost and Irwin, and from the left, here came Tiny, so Dortmunder, too, kept slogging forward.

The motor home was rocking slightly in the wind. It didn’t like being out here in all this weather any more than Dortmunder did. As they all arrived, Little Feather opened the door and stood hugging her arms, saying, “Come on in. Come in, come in, it’s freezing out there.”

“You’re right,” Dortmunder said.

As they all climbed into the motor home, Little Feather said, low voiced, to each of them, “We got a guest. Follow my lead.”

A guest? They trooped into the living room, peeling off their coats, dropping them on the floor, and a woman stood there, tension in her face as though she’d agreed to sit in a poker game with a bunch of people she’d just met and only now remembered she didn’t know how to play poker. She stared at each of them in turn but didn’t say anything, nor did any of them. Dortmunder didn’t know about the others, but the reason he kept quiet was, he figured that if anybody said anything to this woman right now, she was likely to explode all over the room, like Tiny’s hand grenade.

Little Feather followed them into the living room, which was more crowded than ever, and with a bright smile she said, “This is Marjorie Dawson. My lawyer. My first lawyer.”

Her lawyer? Dortmunder tried very hard not to stare at Little Feather, but what was going on here? She was showing her coconspirators, every last one of them, to a local lawyer?

This lawyer looked to be in her thirties, but just as Little Feather embraced a kind of flashy beauty, this woman obviously recoiled from any concept of beauty at all. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun, her face was pale and plain, and her clothing was all bulky and shapeless, sort of the indoor version of what the ski-carriers wore outside.

“Everybody sit,” Little Feather said, “and I’ll tell you what happened.”

The way to make it possible for everybody to sit, this time around, was that the two women got the sofa, while Tiny perched like a performing elephant on the chair Little Feather had used last time. Once they were all uncomfortable, Little Feather dealt out a round of her bright, perky, untrustworthy smile, and said, “When Judge Higbee said yesterday we should go right ahead with the DNA test, no more delays, I just didn’t know what to do, so finally I told Marjorie the whole story.”