Authors: Ted Wood
But I was confident now that I was heading north, away from the cut. I thought ahead as I drove, remembering which cottages lay on this course and what I knew about their owners. I drew the map of the lake in my mind, marking out any places that were winterized. I had checked them all a week ago, making sure none had been broken into. Some were still in use—a group of four or five on the east side of the lake, just south of the narrows, and another one on Frog Island. And that was the recollection that made me reach forward and switch off the headlights.
There was one cottage on the island, a big rambling clapboard place like a beach house on Cape Cod. It stood on a rock at the southeast corner of the island. What made it important was the owner, someone I had met once last September on a morning I had paddled my canoe up there along the reed beds. The owner had been out in a solid flat-bottomed little boat with a Remington pump-action shotgun and a limit of mallards. Duck season was open, the sight was not surprising except for one detail. The owner was a woman and she fit the description both C.L.A.W. members had given me of their society's matriarch.
I swung my snowmobile half left on a course that would take me three hundred yards downwind of the island, far enough from it that they would never hear my motor above the roaring of the wind. I reached forward and switched off the headlight so nobody would see me coming and dropped my speed. Now that I no longer had to follow tracks it was easy to drive. I watched ahead for bumps or holes and steered by the pressure of the wind coming at me from my right. My eyes soon adjusted to the darkness. The dark was almost worth being free of the hypnotic corkscrewing of the snow coming into the headlight. And suddenly the black whale-bulk of trees loomed on my right front quarter.
I coasted to a stop, put the key to the engine in my pocket, and unclipped my snowshoes from their brackets. I didn't need them on the hard surface of the ice so I tucked them under my arm until I came to the first long drifts in the lee of the trees. The snow had gathered into tapered piles that would have been pretty in bright sunlight if I'd been carrying a camera instead of a Colt .38 in my gloved hand.
I went around the island into the teeth of the wind until I reached the edge of the marsh that gave the place its name. All the frogs were four feet under the ice right now, oblivious to the cold. I almost envied them as I pushed my gun back in my pocket and crouched to slip my boots into the snowshoe bindings. I use Indian-style attachments, loops cut from an old truck inner tube. They don't look as fancy as the leather buckles you get when you buy new snowshoes from Canadian Tire, but you can slip them over your boots without taking your gloves off, and that's worth any esthetics you have to sacrifice. Besides, you can slip them on or off in seconds.
The drifts were up to eight feet high behind the rocks on the edge of the marsh, but I stamped up over the top of them, sinking in less than knee deep. By the time I reached the old snow on top of the rocks I was sinking only a couple of inches. The snow was thinner there and my snowshoes snagged every few steps in the blueberry bushes underneath. I lifted my feet higher and placed them more carefully, but still stumbled. I swore as I fell, but in the same instant I saw the wicked orange eye of a muzzle flash wink at me from a window of the cottage.
I hit the snow rolling, all my soldier's instincts taking over automatically. It was harder in my parka than it had been in my combat fatigues in Nam and the snowshoes were almost impossible to turn, but I shucked them quickly and tossed them against a tree where I would be able to find them again if I had to.
All this took about ten seconds. I jumped up and ran four steps before pitching myself down and rolling again. A bullet sang off a rock behind me and scythed its way through the branches of the pine trees.
I was below the ridge of the rock now, too low for anyone at the window to aim at me. But whoever was there fired again. I listened to the sound and assessed the weapon. It sounded like a heavy rifle, possibly a .308, big enough to kill a bear, plenty big enough to finish me. I crawled monkey fashion along to the left, toward the back of the cabin. The snow yielded under my hands and I was nose down in the coldness of it. I snorted quickly, blasting it away from my eyes and mouth. I was cold enough already, I didn't need any more problems.
The crawl brought me to a point in line with the corner of the cottage. It would have been impossible for anyone to hit me from the first position from which I'd been fired on. There was only a small window beside the back door and it looked as if there was not much room inside to maneuver a long gun.
I crouched there for a moment, running over my alternatives. I tried the first one and it failed. "Police. Chief Bennett. Stop firing!" I shouted. In return I got a high angry shout that I couldn't understand and two more shots, which I could. I stayed low and thought some more.
It seemed to me that the person inside was alone. Otherwise someone else would have moved to the back window and taken a shot at me from there. Of course, there was a chance that the second person was there but didn't have a gun. Then I remembered the Remington pump the woman had used. I wasn't anxious to take any chances against a cloud of shot, even bird shot.
I checked my surroundings as my night vision improved, the way it does under stress. There was a stack of firewood under a tarpaulin against the back door. I thought for a moment about tossing a log through a window, then racing to a different one while the rifleman followed his reflexes. It didn't make sense. I couldn't just dive through the window. I might go headlong into the stove or down the cellar steps or break my head against a table. I had to bring the people inside the cottage out. And I had to do it now. I couldn't run for help. That would take hours. The gunman would be gone, possibly forever. And another thing. Ever since Nam I have had a hatred of being shot at without returning fire. In combat, it would have been simpler. I would have rolled up alongside the window and tossed in a couple of grenades. After the explosion I would step in and hose down anything that still moved. Then consolidate, a few meters beyond the house.
I lay and pondered what I could use instead of grenades and the M16s of the other guys in the team. And as I lifted my head for a cautious glance, a sudden downshift in the wind filled my nostrils with the smell of burning hardwood. Of course! The place was heated by a stove.
Keeping low, I ducked behind the woodpile. Like most cottage woodpiles up here it was made up of neat birch logs cut from trees thin enough that the logs did not even need splitting. Each was about eighteen inches long. I eased three of them out of the back of the pile and stuffed them into the front of my parka, flinching as the wind struck through the open front. Then I ducked past the pile to take a look alongside the west side of the cottage. I was in luck. There was a maple, rare this far north, against the house. No doubt it had been left there because it added to the charm of the place. There was even a bird feeder hanging close to the house.
I thought for a moment. The feeder meant there was a window there, which could mean another gun. I knelt and drew out one of my birch logs. I threw it with all my force against the back door. It clattered there like a clumsy attempt to break in. Without waiting, I stumbled through the snow to the maple and swarmed up the trunk on the side opposite the cottage. The thickness of the tree might just save me from a first shot. I clenched my stomach muscles instinctively against the possible deadly crash of a bullet from the hunting rifle. None came. Within seconds I was above eye level from the window and swarming out on a branch that overhung the roof. Snow flopped off the branch onto the roof and I kept going, hoping nobody inside would hear it above the wind and guess what it meant.
The branch bent under my weight, bowing down within three feet of the roof, about ten feet below the crest. I let myself down gently onto the roof, praying that my weight would not start an avalanche and warn those inside that an ex-Marine was trying to take the high ground. As I touched the roof I began to slide but kept hold of the branch and used it as a lever to inch my way up to the peak. The chimney came out through the center and I made for it. The round, insulated metal pipe warmed my face with glorious heat as I sat there straddling the peak.
The chimney was covered with coarse chicken wire to discourage birds or raccoons from exploring while the owner was away. It was a problem for me but I pulled out my clasp knife, holding my right glove in my teeth as I sawed through a few strands until I could fold the wire back out of the way. The heat was intense but I managed the job without dropping knife or glove. I snapped my knife shut and slipped it into my tunic breast pocket and pulled the gloves on quickly. My hand was blistered but I didn't care. I knew now that I could win.
The birch logs in my parka were not quite big enough for my purpose. I thought for a few seconds, debating what to do, then tugged off my fur hat and held it in my teeth while I flapped up the hood of my parka and snapped it as tightly as it would go around my face. This was no time for frostbite. I slipped my log into the hat and quietly forced it into the chimney. The heat and smoke stopped at once and I eased myself backward until I was straddling the roof at the back of the house. So far I was lucky. Nobody had heard me. But when they realized what was happening they might try to loosen things up by blazing a few rounds through the roof, hoping to pierce the chimney and put themselves out of the misery I was causing. I didn't want to be in the way. I wanted to be Br'er Rabbit, sitting in the clear, waiting for things to develop my way.
It took almost ten minutes. I sat patiently, my head bowed so the wind struck the top of my hood and was deflected from the bare skin of my face, my hands tucked under my armpits for warmth. I was cold in the legs and feet, but it was bearable.
The break came as I had expected, with two quick shots up through the roof. One of them caught the edge of the chimney and weanngggged away harmlessly. And then I heard a commotion at the front door. I pulled out my last piece of birch and threw it just past the edge of the roof so it fell on the verandah in front of the door. It clattered down on some bare spot where the snow had not settled. The commotion stopped. Then came the sound I had been waiting for, glass breaking at the side of the house next to the maple I had climbed. I strained my ears in the wind and heard the gasping and coughing of a person starved for air. I guessed that he thought he would try to fool me by staying away from the doors, but when the window hadn't opened, he had panicked and smashed it.
I cocked my leg over the roof and made myself into a toboggan, sliding down the roof to the edge where I caught my heel in the eaves trough, stopped, turned over onto my stomach, and dropped the rest of the way to the ground. I saw the head sticking out of the window and grabbed it, pulling the person out until he was rocking over the sill on his stomach.
"Try anything and you're dead," I said in a low voice. He squirmed helplessly and I hoisted him the rest of the way over the sill, out of the thick smoke that poured out around him, choking me even outside in the air. It was not until I had finished blinking away the tears that I realized who I was holding.
I
t was Irv Whiteside, his face blackened with smoke, the lapels torn away from his natty suit where I had hauled him out over the glass shards in the bottom of the window frame. I gave him thirty seconds to grab some air, then asked him, "What the hell gives?"
He held up both hands, still coughing as the words glugged out of him. "I didn't know, Reid. I didn't know it was you, honestagod. I thought it was them bastards back to get me."
I wanted more but he was shuddering with cold. I had to get him inside. "Is there anybody else in there?"
"No. Just me."
"Good. Stay here." I shinned back up the tree and out over the roof, leaving him collapsed against the wall, spitting soot and smoke. It was easier on the roof now I did not have to worry about making a noise, and within thirty seconds I had my plug out of the chimney. The hat was scorched and the burnt fur lining smelled like hell, but I kept it in my hands as I slid back down the roof and dropped beside Whiteside. I wasn't thinking of him as Irv right then. This was no friend. Not after shooting at me.
He was twitching uncontrollably with cold and I had to lead him to the back door. It was locked, but I booted it once at lock level and we were inside. Irv stayed by the door as I crouched low to the floor and followed the dull beam of my flashlight through the brown cloud to the stove, holding my breath all the way. I opened the stove door wide and I could see the smoke pulling in and up the chimney, like bath water going down a drain. There was a pile of pine kindling wood next to the stove and I threw a handful in. It burst into a bright cleansing flame that pulled more and more smoky air away. Within a minute or so the air was breathable again and I was able to shut the back door and move Whiteside in where it was properly warm. There was an oil lamp on the table and I lit it. In the dull light with its smoke haze Whiteside looked like some character from an old Dutch painting. But he was able to breathe again and I started asking my questions.
"Why are you here?"
"I was hired as a bodyguard for the kid."
"Which kid?"
"Nancy Carmichael."
"Who hired you and what did she need a bodyguard for, anyway?"
It came out slowly, the way most stories do under interrogation. He forgot, and backtracked, but finally I got the facts. I was sure they were the facts.
It all boiled down to Nancy Carmichael's sense of the dramatic. She knew the C.L.A.W. people were going to bring her to this cottage. She was certain she would get away with the gag and planned to stay here until Monday while I searched the motels on the highway and put the OPP and the rest of the outside world on the lookout for her.