Star of the East
Chapter 1
Until he saw the body in the middle of the road, Conor had been thinking he was having an excellent night.
Considering it involved food, music, and a stretch of dedicated time with the woman he loved, he ordinarily would assume excellence was guaranteed, but tonight was different. He and Kate had gone nowhere together in months. That wasn’t unusual, since it was the inn’s busiest season, but this particular evening—a “date night” she’d called it—had an aura of anxiety that felt unfamiliar. For many reasons, they’d badly needed it to go well, and to his great relief, it had.
They’d started with an exquisite fireside dinner at the Rabbit Hill Inn, followed by a holiday concert in St. Johnsbury, and now the drive home over the back roads of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom was offering its own touch of magic. A snowstorm in slow motion had formed in front of the headlights; its lazy cascade fell like icing sugar on the surrounding evergreens.
“It feels like we’re inside a snow globe,” Kate said.
Her voice had a breathy quality he recognized; it usually meant she was drifting off to sleep. Conor briefly shifted his attention from the road to look at her. Her face, turned to the side window, was obscured by a long curl of auburn hair. As if feeling his glance, she turned, meeting his eyes with the sort of smile he also recognized, and Conor relaxed.
As a man of thirty-three engaged to be married, the words “date night” had conjured the kind of experience he preferred to leave in his youthful past—angst-filled events fueled by liquor, nerves, and confounding mood swings. He hoped they need never use the term again, but her smile, with its implied promise, gave him a greater respect for the underlying concept.
As the truck rolled in silence through deepening powder, leaving a chevron pattern of tire treads behind it, Kate lifted his hand from the gearshift, guiding it to her leg. Trying to keep his focus on the road, Conor felt the stir of something a bit more than Christmas spirit, but then—
“What the bloody hell?”
The snow-covered lump appeared in his headlights like an apparition. Conor stepped hard on the brake, an instinctive reaction but a mistake.
His shout, and the sudden lurch against her seat belt, brought Kate fully awake. She clutched the grab handle above her head.
“My God, what is that?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Conor said, which was a lie. He’d already assumed the worst.
The truck swerved from the body-shaped thing ahead of them, only to slide toward the edge of the road and the culvert below it. Careful not to overcorrect the first error, he steered out of the skid with only inches to spare. The truck fishtailed away from the culvert and stopped at last, its lights trained on the large, half-obscured mound a few feet away.
“Thanks be to God. It’s only a deer.” Conor laughed, relaxing his grip on the wheel.
“Only a deer?” Kate exclaimed. “The poor thing. How is this funny?”
“It’s not, unless you consider what I’d been thinking it was.”
“Oh.” Kate looked at him, startled. “Wouldn’t that have been just our luck.”
“Indeed.” He flipped on the high beams and popped the door handle.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to pull it off the road before it kills someone—a few more minutes and no one will see it under the snow.”
With the engine still running, they both exited the truck. Although the deer was almost certainly dead, Conor approached it cautiously, and Kate remained at a distance as he squatted next to the animal.
“It’s a two-point buck,” he called to her. “Maybe three or four years old.”
“How do you know that?” Kate sounded surprised.
“Longchamp’s.”
She laughed, and he swiveled to grin back at her. “I’ve learned more than I realized.”
In fact, his education in Vermont’s rural traditions had been quite thorough, and always entertaining. The regulars at Longchamp’s general store thought there were many things a transplanted Irishman ought to know, including more facts about wild game than he ever expected to need.
He ran a hand over the deer, working his fingers into the stiff, wiry fur, dislodging the encrusted snow. As it fell away, a flash of neon appeared. Taking hold of an antler, he shook it and raised the buck’s head from the ground. Surprised by what he saw, Conor dropped it again and sat back on his heels.
“He’s been tagged.”
Kate came forward and huddled next to him, shivering. “Tagged. What does that mean?”
“It means this deer didn’t die in a car accident.” He lifted the antler again, revealing a waterproofed orange card threaded through a slit in the buck’s ear. Moisture had smeared the name on the tag, but the Conservation ID number was still legible.
“He’s been hunted, shot, and tagged. And I’m guessing . . .” Standing and nudging Kate back a few feet, Conor rolled the carcass onto its back, exposing a surgically eviscerated cavity. “Right. Field dressed.”
Kate took in a sharp breath. “Isn’t deer season over?”
“This is the last weekend. So, some hunter is going to be pretty disappointed. Must have fallen off whatever he was using to haul it.”
“Or whatever she was using,” Kate said, leaning in for a closer look.
“Fair enough. Whichever it is, I’m guessing he or she will come looking for it and would be happy not to find it spread all over the road.”
He took a foreleg in one hand, a hind leg in the other, and began pulling. The antlers were small, but the buck was large, and heavy. Conor gave it a powerful tug to get it moving. The deer came off the ground and settled again with a thump. After the third pull, something flew from the hollowed-out carcass. Sweating now, he ignored it and dragged the deer far enough to be safe from any passing traffic. Walking back, he saw Kate had plucked the thing from a patch of bloody snow and was holding it up to the headlights. A flip-top Marlboro box.
Conor eyed it hungrily, pricked by a familiar twinge. He hadn’t had a cigarette in over a year, which wasn’t long enough to kill the craving for one.
“Don’t even think about it,” Kate teased. The pack rattled as she held it away from him.
“Doesn’t sound much like cigarettes,” he said. “What’s in it?”
She opened the lid, angling it to the headlights, and peered inside. Eyes widening, Kate tilted the box a bit more, and spilled into her outstretched hand the biggest diamond Conor had ever seen.
He stared at the gem, cupped in her palm like a small, sparkling pear. With a tentative stroke, as if touching something wild and alive, he ran a finger over it.
“Sure it can’t be genuine. It must be glass, or—”
“I’m pretty sure it’s real,” Kate said.
Confident she knew far more about precious jewels than he did, Conor accepted the verdict without argument and drew the obvious conclusion.
“I imagine it’s stolen?” Kate said, echoing his thoughts.
He snorted and slapped at his coat, searching for his mobile phone. “A huge diamond in a Marlboro box shoved inside a deer? I can’t imagine it’s not stolen. We’ll ring the police and let them decide.” He checked the phone’s screen and sighed. “When we get home. No signal here.”
Kate slipped the gem back into the box and tucked it in her pocket. “What?” She shrugged at Conor’s worried frown. “We can’t leave it here.”
“I suppose not. We shouldn’t leave the deer, either, and risk it disappearing. The tag identifies the hunter.”
“Couldn’t you just pull off the tag?”
“I’d rather not touch it. It’s a better surface for fingerprints than the cigarette box, and we’ve probably already ruined whatever prints might have been on the diamond. Anyway, the deer is evidence, as well.”
Conor lifted his head to stare up at a swirling kaleidoscope of flakes. He’d envisioned something different for the grand finale of date night. Shaking the snow from his hair, he started back toward the side of the road.
“You’re going to get blood all over your suit,” Kate called after him. He shot a rueful glance over his shoulder.
“Won’t be the first time.”
