Season of Storm (25 page)

"What—?" began Smith.

"The police have just been here. A man named Sergeant Rice. Asking questions. I've phoned a few people, and most of them say the same thing has happened to them. Sergeant Rice nosing around asking questions."

Smith shook her head, trying to clear it. "I thought they'd given up! What sort of questions?"

"Well, they haven't given up. You should come over, Smith. We didn't tell him anything. We sent them away with a piece of our minds to chew on, but we heard enough to figure out what's going on in their fascist little minds.

"They think you did it, Smith. They think you wanted something from your father—they think you and some friends..." Valerie's voice was high-pitched, and she took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. "Sergeant Rice had the goodness to inform me that if you had, it would be a criminal offence. Smith, for some reason they think you conspired in your own kidnapping!"

Twenty-three

She had never heard a voice as chilling as the one Sergeant Rice was using now, nor seen eyes as flatly inhuman. No amount of reason could reach him, it seemed. He had a theory, and he heard nothing that worked to disprove the theory, nothing that did not—however remotely—in some way support it.

He was like a dog worrying a bone, except that a dog could at least be reached. A mad dog, Smith thought wildly, a rabid dog, worrying a human bone.

"I hear you hang around with Horse," he said, and his voice now had none of the ordinary respect he had shown her before. It was as though she were already a criminal, already beneath contempt.

"I don't
hang around
with anyone, Sergeant," she said clearly. Only the dreadful, sick fear of him that sat in the pit of her stomach allowed her to keep a grip on her fury. "And I am not acquainted with anyone with a name like Horse."
 

"Horse," he repeated. "The rock group Horse."

"Good God!" she said, in contemptuous amazement. "I probably haven't said ten words to the rock group Horse in all my life. I hardly even know their names. Where do you get your information, Sergeant?"

Laboriously he consulted a note. "Guardino of the rock group Horse," he said, "has served time in prison for a drug-related offense."

Guardino, she thought—could he mean Anthony, the one they called Tone onstage? Mel had told her that in a few years he'd be the best lead guitar in North America.
Guardino,
Sergeant Rice had called him, his voice, like a mug shot, robbing Tone Guardino of all human dignity.
 

"Since he is free now, I take it he has paid his debt to society?" she asked in a brittle voice.

"How well do you know him?" persisted Sergeant Rice.

"I don't
know
him at all. What is this leading to, Sergeant?"
 

His eyes were what she would have expected to see in a hired killer—blankly conscienceless. "You'd make things easier if you'd just answer the question," he said.

Easier for whom?
she wanted to ask, but suddenly she was afraid of hearing him say, "Easier on yourself."
Steady,
she told herself.
He hasn't said anything about thinking you did it. It's just the tone of his voice. Maybe Valerie was wrong.
 

"Sergeant," she said slowly, trying to remember that she had done nothing, trying not to let him make her feel guilty of something, "among my friends I happen to number a music producer by the name of Mel Ruff. He produces and manages several groups and individuals, among whom the most famous is the rock group Horse. I was introduced to them once, a year or so ago, after a recording session. I'm not sure I even got all their names. In any case, what possible connection have they with anything?"

He waited till she had finished speaking, then went on as if she hadn't said a word.

"Were you in contact with Guardino before your alleged kidnapping?"

Anger and fear sharpened her wits. "What alleged kidnapping?"

Sergeant Rice surveyed her from blank eyes, then flipped through his notebook. "On the tenth of this month, your father—"

"Sergeant Rice."

He stopped and looked up. She did not think she had met such an unimaginative human being in her life.

"For the tenth time," she said evenly. "I was not kidnapped. I was away with friends. Who they were and why I am keeping it a secret have no bearing on anything and are none of your business. But for your information I will tell you that Anthony Guardino is not my friend and was not a member of the sailing party."

"How are your relations with your father?" asked Sergeant Rice. He had heard nothing.

***

Smith paced through the empty rooms, swamped by fear, rage and impotent self-loathing. She shouldn't have told them anything. She wasn't a criminal; she wasn't required to talk to the police about her friends and activities. Why had she answered their questions? Why had she been such a coward?

Because there was a chink in her armour. Because she was trying to protect Johnny Winterhawk. And she had been afraid that if she stood on her citizen's rights she would make them angry enough that they might...they might what?

That's interesting,
she thought mildly.
I live in a country where an innocent citizen is afraid of the police, as though they have some power they shouldn't have....
 

When she had calmed down enough, she called Mel. Violet Ruff had been a college friend of Smith's, but it had been with her older brother that the real friendship had formed, and when Violet moved east Mel and Smith had maintained the friendship.

"Have the police been talking to you?" she asked without preamble. Mel was one friend she had been glad to hear from in the days after she got back.

"Not that I know of," said Mel, in his deep pleasant voice. "These days, of course, one can never be sure."

"They were asking me about Tone Guardino. They say he's been in prison?"

"He makes no secret of it. Two years less a day for possession."

"They seem to think he had something to do with my 'kidnapping,' Mel. I haven't the least idea why. Can you think of anything?"

"Oh
ho."
He drew out the vowel as though something had clicked.
 

"What?" she shrieked.
"What?"
 

"Is it merely coincidence, do you suppose, that Tone Guardino was arrested and sentenced with a wild but interesting young man who styles himself Chief Crowfoot?"

"Good Lord," Smith said faintly.

"One does hear things, about the police mentality—"

She shuddered and wondered whether Sergeant Rice were questioning Chief Crowfoot today, and how. "Let's talk about something else, please."

"Certainly," responded Mel with alacrity. "I hear you've been cooping yourself up lately. What have you been doing?"

"Sleeping," she said. "Also reading a lot. And writing."

"Writing what? Not your memoirs?"

"No," she said, although in a way she had been. "Poems, actually." She laughed self-deprecatingly. "And songs. At least I hope they're songs."

"Well, well," he said approvingly. "So you're finally doing something about it."

She blinked. "Doing something about what, Mel?"

Mel laughed. "You've been saying for years you wanted to write."

"I...
have
I?"
 

"Quote, I used to want to write poetry/songs once, end of quote. Note of wistful longing. Every time Bradshaw came up with a winner."

Bradshaw was the member of Horse who wrote most of the group's lyrics. Smith had never realized before that she was envious of him, though it seemed Mel had. Envious because he wrote and because what he wrote moved people. She had attended or watched videotapes of the group's concerts and had been too moved afterward to speak.

It wasn't so much the music that got her—she had been too busy all her life to get caught up, as her friends had done, in rock music. It was the way the audience would suddenly scream out the lyric of a favourite song along with the group, just one line or two, without any advance warning, as though the same frenzy had hit them all at once. And the lyric was always one that Bradshaw had written. "Take me home with
you,
babe, take me home with
yewwww."
The shout would shake the hall, and a chill of excitement would shiver up Smith's spine and prickle her scalp. Was that when she turned to Mel and said. "I used to want to write"?
 

"You keep it up," said Mel.

"The police will probably be calling you," Smith warned him.

"My lips are sealed."

***

"I thought you'd called off your dogs," she said to her father on Sunday afternoon.

Her father frowned. "What dogs?"

"The police, Daddy."

"Oh," he grunted. Just the faintest expression of relief flickered across his face, and Shulamith frowned in surprise.  "They aren't for me to call off."

"They would be if you told them you were hallucinating that night. Which you were."

"If you want to try to fool the police, my girl, you go right ahead. But you won't fool me. I have better faith in my memory. I've lived with it for fifty-three years. You were at home that night. You went to bed in your bed expecting to see me over breakfast in the morning. In the middle of the night a bunch of masked men got into my bedroom, and the next day you had disappeared. All of that is fact. None of it is imagination, and I intend to get to the bottom of it."

"The police intend to get to the bottom of it, too, Daddy, or something they can
call
the bottom of it. Don't underestimate them. Thanks no doubt to your insistence on your version of things, they have now decided that I conspired in my own kidnapping in order to extort something from you."
 

"What?" thundered her father.

"Yes," she said in a cool, light voice. "They may even decide I was trying to kill you. They've been questioning all my friends, Daddy. And me, of course. They don't call me Miss St. John anymore. Yesterday they wanted to know what our relationship was like—do I love you? Had I been aware that a deep shock would bring on another heart attack? Do I have connections with criminals and dope users? Et cetera."

Her father's face was white with rage. "Why, those..." he began. "You should have called me, girl! You should have told me!"

"I am telling you now. But having so insistently set this machine in motion, you shouldn't be surprised if I doubt that you can or want to stop it."

He stared at her in silence. "I can stop that stupid line of inquiry!" he snapped. "Hand me the phone! No—" he looked at her "—I'll talk to them later."

"Of course."

"Why the hell won't you tell me what happened? I only—''

"All right, Daddy, I'll tell you what happened: nothing happened. Nothing that is anyone's business but my own. But if you can stop this investigation, you'd better."

"Shulamith," he said, "I'm your father. Why can't you tell me?"

And she looked at him across the yawning gulf of all her years of anger, hurt and rejection and saw that he knew nothing of it. To him she was no more than a hand's reach away. The anger in her urged her to tell him now of the decision she had come to during the long silent hours of the week just past, as though that way, better than any other, she could make him understand that he no longer held any power over her, that she no longer needed his love.

"When are you coming home?" she asked instead.

"Next week," her father said, a determination in his voice that told her he was arguing with his doctors over this. "Week after next at the latest."

"You'll miss testifying to the Cartier Commission?"

"They're coming here," said St. John.

"What?"

"They're convening a session here in my room next Thursday," he said.  

She said dryly, "You're going to explain to them how good timbering will be for the wildlife of Cat Bite Valley?"

He looked at her sharply. "I paid good money for those timber rights. I've got a right to exercise them."

She couldn't help herself. "A very latter-day right!"

"What do you mean?" His voice was curt, as though he had not expected opposition from her and yet expected it from everyone.

"You think money gives you a right. What about the people who live on the land, have been living on it for centuries—millennia? What about their rights?"

His eyes narrowed. He was still, watching her. "What about them?"

"The land is their home, Daddy. Sovereignty over it was taken from them by trickery and fraud. Why should you be able to destroy the life-style of thousands of people because you've got money—and want more?"

The arguments, the emotions were all confused in her brain. She couldn't construct a logical argument; it was all too new and devastating.

"Where the hell did you get all this?" her father demanded.

"What does it matter where I got it? It's true, isn't it? You know it is. We're going to destroy hunting and fishing in that whole valley. There are two reserves in that valley. The people depend on hunting and fishing for their livelihood. What will we get out of it, Daddy? A little extra profit this year?"