Seven Days Dead (32 page)

With all of eternity before him, he must let go.

Facing downward, his feet on higher ground, Émile does what he’s told, loosening his grip on his beloved. She remains in Louwagie’s firm clutch. He puts his left hand down when advised to do so, grips a rock with his right hand when that’s the instruction. Then Roadcap asks him to do a kind of flopping motion. “Like a seal. From your knees, then your hips, up through your torso. Only flop yourself back up toward me. I’ve got a hold on you. I won’t let go. Give it a try.”

He does this awkward flop on his belly back an inch. He’s thrilled by that inch. Ecstatic, even. The second attempt yields no progress, and on the third he slides downward and everyone yells in unison. Sandra screams his name, and Émile is again staring into the abyss. Blood rushes to his head. He’s petrified now. His fingers and arms are straining. Oh to be younger, stronger than this. But that thought, an admission of defeat and dejection, is what he needs to steel his resolve. He can find it in himself to do this.

Roadcap is stretched out in agony now, his legs strained to the breaking point. He’s barely able to maintain his handhold on the man, and grunts as he breathes.

“Émile,” he says, and they all hear the desperation in his voice. “We’ve got to time it right. Coordinate. When you’re up in the air for a millisecond, that’s when I have to yank you back. Knees first, Émile. Not your hips. Knees first. On my count. One. Two.
Three!
”

They gain an inch or two. Panting in pain now, Roadcap wastes not a second’s time. “Again! One. Two.
Three!
”

Another inch, but this time Émile has a solid grip with both hands and a toe.

“I got this!” he calls out. I got this!”

That news allows Roadcap to alter his position, and he squiggles back. He keeps his handhold but straightens his legs to lie parallel to Émile.

“Nice and easy. Crawl back.”

He does so. Backward. Crab-like, slow and meticulous. He’s halfway to where he can stand when Roadcap leaves him on his own. Roadcap grips the tree trunk as Louwagie does and leans way forward. All he can grasp is Sandra’s hair.

“This might hurt,” he warns her.

“Who gives a—”

He yanks her straight back and she screams, if only from the shock, and so does Émile in sympathy and alarm. But she is safe now, and grabs hold of the tree trunk on her own. Louwagie has come back partway with her, and now is free to pull himself to safety. Roadcap helps Sandra around to the secure side of the tree. Émile works his way back up the rock face, and all four slump in a pile upon the ground.

They just lie there.

Louwagie is bent, as if mangled between the couple, and keeps them from colliding into each other in a dangerous way as they attempt to move. Émile says, panting, “Sandra, what was that about?”

“Just hanging out,” she pants, “by the seashore. Ouch, my hair.”

Lying on his back, Roadcap chuckles.

“Okay, you two,” Louwagie interrupts, pawing at the earth and trying to straighten his posture without getting up. “Enough wisecracks. Who did this to you, Mrs. Cinq-Mars? And how? Why? What can you tell us?”

When she tries to answer she only gurgles at first. She coughs up dirt.

The four silently and simultaneously agree that it’s time to sit up. Save for a scrape on her forehead, Sandra is physically sound, although the carnage her nerves have endured emerges as she tries to explain. She was brought up to Seven Days Work with a hood over her head in an all-terrain vehicle.

“Those things aren’t allowed up here,” Louwagie takes umbrage, then realizes that that’s the lesser crime of the day.

“Narrows down the field,” Roadcap mentions. “To me, they’re like motorized mosquitoes. Truth is, we don’t have a million of them on the island.”

“Everybody’s a detective,” Cinq-Mars murmurs from his seat on the ground.

Louwagie likes the thought, though. Basic processes of elimination can pare down a short list to potential miscreants.

“Which way did they leave?” Louwagie asks.

“Neither left nor right. I could’ve seen them,” Sandra tells them. “The sound of the machine went back straight behind my tree.”

The three men stare behind them into the forbidding forest, where a network of walking trails fans out like a spider’s web.

Roadcap proves to be the optimist among them. “There’s only a few ways to get in and out on an ATV.”

“Maybe they came across hikers who can provide a description,” Louwagie adds.

“Did they say anything, sweetie?” Cinq-Mars asks. “Why they did this?”

She nods yes but can’t answer just yet. Her trauma and the adrenaline of her rescue rebounds across her nerve endings. She fights to pull herself together, and Cinq-Mars, who’s recuperating also, who suddenly feels so light-headed he could fly, stretches his arm behind Louwagie’s back and holds her hand. “Next time,” Sandra says, “I go over the side. That’s what they said. That’s their message. This was a demonstration. Next time, they shove me over. That’s what they told me to tell you.”

Émile blows out a gust of air.

“All right,” he determines, and attempts to rise to his feet. He benefits from Louwagie’s helping hand as the Mountie’s getting up also, and stretches once he’s on his feet. His lower back is an old lament that’s been behaving all summer—after the cross-terrain gallop and these gymnastics he’s doomed for a relapse. “I’ll get you off the island.”

“Émile,” Sandra states, in a tone he finds worrisome.

“What?”

“Don’t give me that crap. We’ve been through worse stuff than this.” The two men look at him as if he ought to be arrested for what he’s done to this woman. “I know your arguments. It’s not what I signed on for. We don’t know whom we’re up against. We don’t know the odds. We don’t know how it’ll play out, so we might as well err on the side of caution. Blah blah blah. Cry me a river.”

“That’s about the size of it. Sandra—
think
—we don’t need this. Not our fight.”

“Oh, Émile,” she says, and again he’s not happy with her tone.

“What, San?”

“Didn’t you see me tied to that tree? I believed they were going to throw me over! I was terrified, Émile! Saying my prayers. You’d be proud of me for my sudden switch to religion.”

She makes him laugh, she makes him cry. “So?” he asks.

“When you were sliding off the edge, you didn’t see me scared out of my mind? This is our fight now, Émile. This is
so
our fight.”

He blames her life on horseback for her competitive fire.

It’s taken all this time, but the men who came with Roadcap finally arrive. They collapse into the tall grasses thirty feet away, panting and gasping.

“All right.” Émile relents, and will say nothing more about beating a retreat. He’s back on the case, and back in charge. “No arguments on this one point: when we leave here I’m taking you to Maddy Orrock’s. At least she has locks on her doors.” He turns. “Mr. Roadcap. I need to talk to you. Walk with me.”

Way in the distance, not over the water as yet, as their views are to the east and northeast, but to the west over the hump of the island, the heat and high humidity of the day are bringing on storm clouds. Cinq-Mars doesn’t take the younger man too far, as the conversation will remain a secret only if the man so chooses.

“If you recall, we came to an agreement,” Cinq-Mars reminds him. “You don’t get jail time for something you didn’t do. I was less clear on my side of the bargain in that, what I get out of it. I didn’t know. Now I do.”

“Okay,” Roadcap says, studying him.

“Here’s the deal. Tell me what you know. No further negotiations. Thank you. Really, I can’t thank you enough for saving Sandra and me. Sandra especially. To say that that’s appreciated is so much an understatement, it’s ludicrous. I’ll show my gratitude when I can. Right now I need answers. No more keeping your cards so damn close to the vest.”

“All right,” Roadcap responds, a tentative acquiescence.

“You didn’t like my asking you about dulse. Why not? What makes you uncomfortable with that? Before you go back into your shell, please remember that I saw my wife tied to a tree overlooking a cliff.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Should it be? What makes you uncomfortable about dulse?”

Roadcap looks down, then away, internally hemming and hawing through a possible response. He seems to decide on a course to follow, and looks up.

“I’m Orrock’s man,” he says.

Not an answer Émile expects. He actually takes a step back, then has to retrace the movement. “What does that mean?”

“I operate the dulse trade for him, on the home front anyway, the supply end. He takes care of—sorry,
took
care of—the distribution end.”

“I picked you as a man who might try to take it away from him.”

“You’re wrong in that.”

“Okay. Tell me, how does his death change things?”

“To be decided. The winds of change are blowing. There’s been competition lately, long before his death.”

“Who from?”

“We don’t know.”

“We?”

“Orrock. Me,” Roadcap explains.

Cinq-Mars is skeptical of that response, distrusts it. “How can that possibly be true?”

“How? Whoever is involved knows who they’re up against. I don’t mean me. I mean Orrock. They’ve done a helluva job of staying on the down low. Haven’t shown their faces. They haven’t made a move that risks their own exposure. My guess, they’re setting things up, and when they make a move, it’ll all be over. That, at least, is the plan.”

“And you don’t have a suspicion?”

“I have a suspicion. More than one. I draw blanks when it comes to proof.”

“I’m all ears.”

Roadcap takes a second to line up his opinions, then proceeds. “The timing of when things started to go wrong might be a clue. People who cut dulse for me started bickering about prices. I didn’t think much of it at the time, it’s normal, only Orrock started hearing from his distribution end about price, and I was hearing from my supply end about price, and that all occurs more or less at the same moment. Me and Orrock, we both get suspicious. So I kept my ears to the ground.”

“And?”

“That’s partly why I was on the cliffs the night of the big storm. The cult goes up there in a storm. I go for my own reasons, but because I do, I’ve encountered them up there before. They’re trying to obliterate their minds in the wind and the rain, use the power of lightning or the storm to fly, or some harebrained stupidity. I went up there specifically to spy on them, because I know they race to get there in those conditions. They’d mark that storm down as perfect.”

“Okay, so you’re not quite the Daffy Duck I took you to be. But why spy on them? What’s the interest?”

“Because. We had issues cropping up from both our supply and distribution ends, and that time exactly coincided with the arrival of the cult on the island. With my ears to the ground, that’s all I came up with. That, and checking out their parking lot one day. I noticed a lot of American plates. Including, notably, California. That state is our biggest customer by far. But that’s all I’ve got on them. Coincidence.”

“Coincidence is good,” Cinq-Mars notes. “Always a thread worth following. Okay, who else? You said two.”

“Maddy Orrock.”

“Seriously? What’s her line? Do you have more evidence on her?”

“Less. But she comes in here every few years like a tide. Then fades away again. Every time she comes and goes she leaves her father in a crappy mood. He didn’t trust her much. His own daughter. He told me she might be out to get him. Orrock was a wealthy man—from various sources. The salmon farms dwarfed what he made on dulse, but dulse started him out. It’s still the backbone, not just the original component that put him on the map. Dulse is as steady as the tide when it comes to making money. That’s really all he cared about, making money. And dulse was the one business he could own outright without the bigger boys being involved, you know who I mean, without the really big fat cats also having a bite. That meant something to him and maybe, maybe, not just for the steady cash. Maddy? Not so much. He was skeptical of what she was playing at, and, you know, she lives in the States. She knows the business. Grew up with it. She might be forming her own distribution network. After all, she’s always hated her dad. She’s been my big fear, anyway, that she’ll take over, either over me or instead of me.”

“Control the distribution, you control this trade, is that the idea?”

“Totally.”

“What’s your degree from McGill?”

Although Cinq-Mars wants to hear the answer, his technique in an interview is to keep the person off guard. Allow no one to anticipate the next question or know what the last one was meant to reveal.

“What? Why? Biz admin.”

He said it so fast, Cinq-Mars can’t be sure. “Business administration? You?”

Roadcap doesn’t confirm that right away, as if he already regrets mentioning it. “Orrock,” he says, then stumbles. “Orrock … I know that everybody is down on the man, but Orrock put me through school. Financially, he helped people who helped me when I was growing up. He pointed out to me what my opportunities on the island might be. He believed in me. He set me up.”

“Maddy Orrock,” Émile brings up, “comes in like a tide. Attracted much?”

The man from Dark Harbour receives the inquiry as a challenge, straightens his shoulders only for a moment before he relents. “Sure. Why not? Although she’s always hated me. Through school and that. For good reason. My father pushed her mother off a cliff. So the story goes. My dad told me that Mrs. Orrock fell, and him I believed. Not the cops. Not the courts.”

“Strange, isn’t it?” Cinq-Mars proposes. “Your father throws Orrock’s wife off a cliff, or that’s how the courts ruled, yet he takes care of you while you were growing up, then trusts you to manage the business most dear to his heart. How do you figure that?”

The question provokes a sorrow, opens an old wound, which Cinq-Mars can see. In thinking it through, Roadcap has to deal with variant emotions along the way. Émile is patient.

“I believe he was never sure. My feeling is that he had doubts, that maybe his wife neither fell nor was she pushed. He might’ve had an inkling that maybe she jumped. So looking after me was a kind of guilt thing, on account of my dad. But there you go. I don’t know. I’ve never known for sure. And now he’s dead.”