THE CASCADE DINNER Chapter 1
The Guest List
The snow began at four-seventeen in the afternoon, which would have been unremarkable anywhere else but was, at Timberline Lodge, the first stitch in a shroud.
Leo Maeda knew this because he had been standing at the floor-to-ceiling window of the Great Room for exactly forty-seven minutes, watching the white line creep up the glass. His whiskey—a twenty-one-year-old single malt that the lodge charged seventy-eight dollars for and that cost them maybe twelve—had gone warm in his hand. He didn’t care. The view was better than the drink.
Below him, the switchback road that connected Timberline to the nearest town—Cascade Springs, population 2,100, two hours away on a clear day—had already disappeared. Not gradually, the way snow usually takes a road, but hungrily, as if the sky had decided to swallow the earth one inch at a time. The last set of tire tracks belonged to the lodge’s supply van, which had made it up at two o’clock with the final delivery of champagne, caviar, and a custom cake that Leo had personally watched three kitchen staff carry through the main doors like they were transporting a bomb.
The cake was for no one’s birthday. It was for the anniversary.
He turned away from the window and surveyed the Great Room. Eighty feet long, forty feet wide, with a ceiling that vaulted upward into exposed wooden beams salvaged from an 1890s railway bridge. A stone fireplace large enough to roast a wild boar dominated the north wall; at the moment, it was doing nothing more dramatic than warming the hands of a former hedge fund manager named Harold Pender, who stood too close to the flames and whose silk tie was going to melt if he didn’t step back soon. Leo didn’t warn him. Harold Pender had made his fortune foreclosing on hospitals. A melted tie was the universe’s smallest correction.
To Harold’s left, near the baby grand piano that no one had played in three years, stood four more guests. Leo had memorized their names, their net worths, and the particular shape of their secrets before they’d even checked their luggage. That was his job. He was not a guest at Timberline Lodge. He was the manager.
He had been the manager for eleven years, ever since his career as a corporate litigator ended the way corporate litigator careers often ended: with a bottle of sleeping pills, a divorce he hadn’t seen coming, and a partner who stole his clients while he was in the hospital. The lodge had been his second act. His mother, who had cleaned rooms at a Holiday Inn for thirty years, used to say that luxury hotels were just prisons with better sheets. She had never been wrong about anything.
Tonight, however, Leo felt less like a manager and more like a warden.
Because tonight was the ten-year anniversary of the Cascade Peak Retreat.
Ten years ago, a tech billionaire named Julian Cross had gathered nine other titans of industry—finance, real estate, biotech, media—for a three-day “strategy summit” at a remote resort that no longer existed (it had burned down in a wildfire, which everyone agreed was metaphorical but no one could explain how). Those three days had produced a document called the Cascade Accord, which no one had ever seen but which had quietly reshaped the economy of three Western states. Rail lines, water rights, zoning laws, pharmaceutical patents—the Accord had touched all of it. And the ten people in that room had gotten unimaginably richer as a result.
Julian Cross had died eighteen months ago. Pancreatic cancer. He had spent his last weeks in a Swiss clinic, refusing visitors, and had taken whatever secrets the Accord contained with him to the grave.
Or so everyone thought.
Then the invitations arrived. Embossed black card stock, silver lettering, no return address. Each invitation bore a single line:
The Cascade dinner. Ten years. Do not miss this.
And below that, in smaller type:
Come prepared to answer for what you did.
Leo had seen the invitation only once, because the guest who had shown it to him—a venture capitalist named Mira Vance, who had once been on the cover of Forbes under the headline “THE SHARK IN SILK”—had immediately taken it back and locked it in her room safe. She had been pale when she handed it to him. Mira Vance was never pale.
“There’s no host listed,” Leo had said.
“That’s the problem,” she had replied. “Someone knows.”
She hadn’t elaborated, and Leo hadn’t asked. His job was not to solve mysteries. His job was to ensure that the wine arrived at the correct temperature, that the heated floors in the bathrooms did not fail, and that no guest ever had to see an employee who wasn’t already smiling.
But he had been doing this job long enough to know when something was wrong. And everything about this weekend was wrong.
The guest list, for starters.
Ten years ago, the Cascade summit had included exactly ten people. Tonight’s dinner had been intended for the same ten—but two were dead. Julian Cross, as mentioned, had succumbed to his cancer. And a woman named Dr. Sonali Mehta, a geneticist who had later been disgraced in a stem-cell fraud scandal, had died in a car accident three years ago. Drunk driving, no other vehicles involved, her Mercedes wrapped around a pine tree at two in the morning. The police called it suicide by carelessness. Her family called it murder, but her family had no proof and, more importantly, no money to hire anyone who might find it.
That left eight living summit attendees. All eight were in the Great Room at this very moment.
Leo did a silent head count as he made his way toward the bar.
Harold Pender, 67, hedge fund, the one who stood too close to the fire. Divorced twice, sued three times for sexual harassment, never convicted. His current girlfriend was twenty-three years old and a former Instagram fitness model. She was not here tonight, which Harold had complained about at check-in. “She’s my emotional support animal,” he had said, and laughed at his own joke. No one else had laughed.
Mira Vance, 52, venture capital. The Shark in Silk. She stood near the piano, speaking in low tones to a man Leo didn’t recognize at first—and then he did, and his stomach tightened. The man was her husband, Daniel Vance, who was not a summit attendee and who had not been invited. Daniel had arrived with Mira two hours ago, claiming a misunderstanding. “The invitation said ‘plus one,'” he had told Leo at the front desk, with a smile that did not reach his eyes. Leo had checked the original invitation. It had not said “plus one.” But he had given Daniel a key anyway, because refusing a guest’s spouse was not a battle worth fighting, especially when that spouse had once been investigated for money laundering and had walked away with no charges and a very expensive lawyer.
Near the bar, nursing a glass of sparkling water that Leo was ninety percent certain contained vodka, stood the youngest attendee: Kaelen Wu, 38. Tech founder. His company, Aether, had built the facial recognition software used by every major airport in North America. He had sold it to the Department of Homeland Security for a sum that was technically classified but that Leo had heard whispered as “nine figures, cash.” Kaelen had not spoken a word to anyone since arriving. He sat alone, scrolled through his phone, and periodically looked up at the other guests with the expression of a man who was memorizing faces for a future identification.
On the leather sofa near the east wall, pretending to read a biography of Winston Churchill, was the oldest attendee: Reginald “Reggie” Foss, 81. Real estate. He had built half the strip malls in Arizona and owned a third of downtown Seattle. He was also, according to a confidential memo Leo had once found in a locked drawer (long story involving a broken keycard and an overly curious maintenance worker), the secret landlord of seventeen federal judges. Reggie’s hands trembled as he held the book. Leo didn’t know if it was Parkinson’s or fear. Either way, Reggie Foss had not turned a page in forty minutes.
In the corner, with her back literally against the wall, stood Dr. Priya Chandrasekhar, 44. Biotech. She had been Sonali Mehta’s research partner before the scandal, and had emerged from the wreckage with her reputation intact but her soul, by all appearances, hollowed out. She spoke to no one. She ate nothing. She simply stood, arms crossed, watching the door as if expecting someone to burst through it with a gun. Leo had offered her champagne twice. Both times, she had shaken her head without looking at him.
At the window—the same window Leo had just abandoned—stood the two remaining guests, speaking in whispers that were too low for him to hear. One was Marcus Thorne, 59, media mogul. He owned six newspapers, three cable networks, and a social media platform that had been blamed for at least two political coups and one actual war. He was tall, silver-haired, and dressed in a cashmere blazer that cost more than Leo’s first car. The other was his daughter, Celeste Thorne, 28, who was not a summit attendee but who had arrived with her father and had not left his side since. Celeste had no obvious role in the weekend’s events, but she had something her father lacked: a notebook, which she wrote in constantly, and a gaze that moved from face to face like a scalpel.
Leo completed his circuit of the room and arrived at the bar, where his head bartender, a wiry fifty-three-year-old named Elena Flores, was polishing a glass that was already clean.
“Well?” she asked, not looking up.
“Well what?”
“Are they going to kill each other before dinner, or after?”
Leo sighed. “After. Definitely after. The beef Wellington would go to waste otherwise.”
Elena set down the glass and looked at him. She had worked at Timberline for fifteen years—longer than Leo, longer than anyone. She had seen hedge fund managers cry, politicians proposition waitresses, and a professional athlete try to tip her with a Super Bowl ring. Nothing surprised her. But tonight, even Elena looked tired.
“The roads are gone,” she said quietly. “I just checked with the kitchen. The delivery van tried to go back down at three-thirty. They made it maybe two miles before they turned around. The plows won’t come until the snow stops, and the snow won’t stop until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.”
“So we’re sealed.”
“We’re sealed.” Elena poured herself a finger of bourbon, which she never did during shifts. “Seventy-two hours, minimum. Maybe longer if the temperature drops and the plows can’t get traction.”
Leo nodded slowly. Seventy-two hours. Eight summit attendees, two uninvited spouses, and one adult daughter. Plus himself, Elena, and the rest of the staff: three kitchen workers, two housekeepers, a maintenance man who was legally deaf and didn’t care about anything except his crossword puzzles, and a night security guard named Otis who had been born in this lodge when it was still a private residence and who knew every crawl space, service tunnel, and unlocked window in the building.
Twenty people, total. Trapped.
And somewhere among them—possibly at the dinner table, possibly in the kitchen, possibly standing right next to Leo at this very moment—was the person who had sent those invitations.
Come prepared to answer for what you did.
Leo had read those words a dozen times since Mira Vance had shown him the card. He had turned them over in his mind, examined them for hidden meanings, tried to fit them into a pattern he couldn’t yet see. The phrase was deliberate. What you did. Not “what happened.” Not “what went wrong.” What you did. As if every person in this room had committed a specific, knowing act—and as if someone intended to make them pay for it.
Dinner was scheduled for seven o’clock. That gave him two hours.
He walked away from the bar, past Harold Pender (whose tie was indeed beginning to curl at the edges from the heat), past Kaelen Wu (who looked up from his phone with those cold, face-recognizing eyes), past Reggie Foss (still on the same page of Churchill), past Priya Chandrasekhar (still watching the door), and past the Thorne father-daughter duo (still whispering, still writing).
He stopped at the window where Mira and Daniel Vance stood.
Mira saw him approaching and straightened her spine—a reflexive gesture, like a soldier hearing a command. “Leo. Is there news about the weather?”
“The roads are closed,” he said. “You’re all here for the duration.”
Daniel Vance made a sound that was half laugh, half grunt. “Here? In this mausoleum? For how long?”
“At least until tomorrow night. Possibly longer.”
Mira’s face didn’t change, but her hand found her husband’s wrist and squeezed. Hard. Daniel didn’t seem to notice.
“Well then,” Mira said, and her voice was steady, practiced, the voice of a woman who had negotiated billion-dollar deals in boardrooms full of men who wanted her to fail. “I suppose we should make the best of it. Is there anything you need from us, Leo?”
Yes, he thought. Tell me who sent those invitations. Tell me what you did ten years ago. Tell me why you’re all so afraid.
But what he said was: “Just enjoy your evening, Ms. Vance. Dinner at seven. The menu is tasting portions, so pace yourselves. And if anyone needs anything, my office is off the main hallway. I’ll be there most of the night.”
He turned and walked away.
Behind him, he heard Daniel Vance say, “Tasting portions? We’re trapped in a blizzard and they’re giving us tasting portions?”
And Mira’s reply, so quiet that Leo almost missed it: “Daniel. Shut up.”
Leo’s office was small, windowless, and smelled like old coffee and newer anxiety. He closed the door, sat behind his desk, and pulled out the leather-bound guest book that every Timberline manager had kept since 1962.
He opened it to tonight’s date and began to write.
December 17. Snow total: 14 inches and rising. Guests all present. Tensions high. No sign of the invitation’s sender, but I believe the sender is here, among them. The phrase “what you did” suggests collective guilt. The question is whether someone wants revenge, or something else entirely.
He paused, tapping his pen against the page.
Three possibilities:
1. A survivor. Someone who was harmed by the Cascade Accord and has infiltrated the group, possibly disguised as staff or an uninvited guest.
2. A conspirator. One of the original ten (or a representative of the two deceased) has turned against the others and is using this weekend to expose them.
3. A journalist. Someone like Celeste Thorne, who arrived with a notebook and a purpose, pretending to be a daughter but documenting everything.
He set down the pen.
None of those felt exactly right. But one of them, he knew, was dangerously close to the truth.
A knock at the door.
Leo closed the guest book. “Come in.”
Elena Flores entered, her face pale. She was holding a silver tray with a single folded note on it.
“This was just left at the bar,” she said. “No one saw who put it there.”
Leo took the note. The paper was heavy, cream-colored, expensive. The handwriting was elegant, old-fashioned, as if written with a fountain pen.
He unfolded it and read:
Mr. Maeda—
At seven o’clock, one of your guests will die. You will not be able to stop it. You will not be able to explain it. And before the night is over, you will understand exactly what kind of monster you’ve been serving dinner to for the past eleven years.
Do not call the police. There is no signal, and you know it.
Do not try to warn them. It will only make things worse.
Do not trust anyone.
— A Friend
Leo read the note three times.
Then he looked up at Elena.
“What time is it?” he asked.
She glanced at her watch. “Six-twenty-three.”
Thirty-seven minutes until dinner.
Thirty-seven minutes until someone died.
Leo folded the note carefully, slid it into his breast pocket, and stood up.
“Elena,” he said. “I need you to do exactly as I say. And I need you to tell no one.”
She nodded, her dark eyes wide but steady.
“Go to the kitchen,” Leo said. “Tell the staff that dinner is delayed until eight. Tell them there’s a problem with the wine delivery. Tell them anything. But do not let anyone sit down at that table until I’ve had a chance to look at every single place setting, every piece of silverware, every glass.”
“And then?”
Leo walked to the door, then paused.
“And then,” he said quietly, “we find out which one of them is lying.”
He opened the door and stepped back into the Great Room.
The fire was still burning. The snow was still falling. And somewhere among the eight wealthy, terrified, guilty people who had gathered to celebrate an anniversary they should have been running from, a killer was setting the table.