It 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.
That still left two questions unanswered. "If she was among friends, why did she need a bodyguard, and why the hell were you shooting at me?"
It seemed that Nancy was not just a pretty face. She had brains enough to realize that as a rich man's daughter she might be a valuable commodity once she stepped outside the law and disappeared. She knew Irv from years of coming up to Murphy's Harbour, mostly without her father, who was too busy to spend more than occasional weekends at the family place on the lake. She had heard the local rumors about Irv Whiteside's past and had bought the glamor of it.
"Hell, you know, Chief," he apologized, "folks think it was like The Godfather, fer crissakes. I didn't tell her no different. She's a nice kid."
"You still didn't tell me why you were trying to kill me."
"Well, it's like this. I told the help I'd be upstairs, to close up and go home without disturbing me. They figured I had a broad up there. So I went down the firesteps and out to the marina. Like, I keep a skidoo there. That was it. I was out here by eleven, poured myself a snort, and waited. Around eleven-thirty they turn up. I can see right away they're excited. There's five o' them, not six, like I expected. So I open the door and they come stormin' in outa the cold but they're not laughing, like I figured. Nancy's cryin'. So I ask her what's up and she points to the big one who's wearing the ski mask and she says, 'He stripped one of the girls and left her on the ice to die.' So I say to him, because this is a him, this is no broad. I say, 'What's going on?' and he says, 'Keep outa this.' And I say I'm goin' to keep the kid with me and the rest of them can go. But he just sighs, real weary. He says, 'I thought some dumb bastard would try that,' and he pulls a gun on me. He says to me, he says, 'One move outa you and you're through worryin' about anythin'.' Then he grabs Nancy and they all go back out to their machines and away. I go through this place and find the rifle but when I go down to the dock they've screwed up my skidoo. So I lie low to wait for morning, but I'm scared and I'm goddamn mad. So I keep the lights off and my eyes open. And when I see somebody coming over the rocks, sneaking up, instead of up from the dock like a normal person would've, I figure it's the guy with the gun back again and I let fly."
I thought about what he'd told me. On the face of it they had been dumb, leaving Irv here with a rifle, but as I thought it through I could see sense in their plan. For one thing they weren't sure how many more people Nancy had told, including possibly me. Leaving him here, angry and armed, had given him a chance to shoot me if I turned up and left them with the choice of taking Nancy to some place nobody knew about. It seemed to me they were adjusting their plan as they went along, and that made it harder to second-guess them.
My face was burning. I realized it had been frostbitten when I was up on the roof. Tomorrow it would be swollen and blotchy. Tonight it was pins and needles but I didn't care. It was the only thing about me that was really alert. I felt dull and outwitted, trying to keep up with the chain of events Whiteside had described. I rubbed my face with two fingers until I got used to the pain, then I asked him, "Did Nancy give you any idea where they were going, except for here?"
"No. Honest, Chief. This place belongs to the woman who set up the kidnapping. Calls herself Margaret Sumner."
The name meant nothing to me. I pushed him. "What do you know about her? Is she a dumpy broad, in her fifties?"
He nodded, eager as a puppy to please. "That's her. There's no Sumner on the Reserve, that's for sure, but she's an Indian, around fifty-five."
I remembered the September morning. Three bangs of the pump gun, three ducks. Maybe she was Indian, but if so she had made money along the way. Her clothes were expensive.
"Anything else? Is she married, widowed, what?"
He held up his hands. "That's all I know. She bought this place last summer. I've seen her come into the marina a time or two, keeps an old plywood runabout there, got a Mercury motor."
I sensed a pattern to this. She had bought the cottage here and then set about building her little organization. Had it been because she wanted to get her hands on the Carmichael kid for something? Or had the Carmichael kid seemed like a usable totem for her cause? Whichever it was, Irv Whiteside wouldn't be able to help me. I tackled his knowledge from the other end.
"How come you and Nancy Carmichael are so close? Are you getting next to her?"
He folded at the shoulders and crossed his legs guiltily. "Hey, come on, Chief, get real. Me an' a kid like that?"
"Well, how much was she going to pay you for looking after her?"
"Nothing." He muttered it, not looking at me.
"Nothing? You don't work for nothing, Irv. I've seen your sheet, don't try to snow me."
"This was a favor." The rawness of his longing for the girl was painful to watch. "I mean, she's a pretty kid. I'm a man of the world. You know. I'd be shut up here with her a couple days. You never know what'll happen."
I slumped down in an armchair, weary beyond belief. "You mentioned pouring a snort. Is there any more around?"
"Yeah! Sure. You want some?" He was on his feet at once, desperate to please. He found the bottle. It was J & B.
"Sorry it's not Black Velvet, Chief. I'm a scotch man."
"Sounds good," I said. He found a couple of coffee mugs and poured a solid belt into both.
He gave me mine, then raised his and said, "Chimo!"
"Chimo yourself." I toasted him and sipped. It went down smooth and spread out into my tired body like fresh blood.
Now he was setting his drink down and feeling in his pocket for cigarettes. He found them in his side pocket, crushed flat from his exit through the window. He extracted one, rolled it gently, and lit it with a stick of kindling he then threw into the stove.
"Now." I sipped again and set down my drink. "You probably don't need me to say it, but I have to. You're in trouble up to your ass. For openers, you're a part of a conspiracy to commit a felony." I looked at him to see how he was taking it. The kidnapping was nothing more than a case of public mischief and that's just a misdemeanor, but I wanted him scared. And besides, the caper involved a murder now.
"What's more, you attempted to murder a peace officer." He put his drink down on the floor and spread his hands like a crucifixion victim. "Come on, Chief. I told you what was goin' down."
"You know as well as me that story wouldn't last a minute in court."
He said nothing, just sat staring at the floor. Slowly he lowered his hands and brought the right to his mouth for a drag on his smoke. He cupped the cigarette in his hand. He had never been in the pen but he had worked for men who had. He knew the drill. No J & B, no Friday night women, just noise and fear and the chance of ending up as somebody's punk if you didn't hit any guy who looked at you sideways.
I took pity and got to the point. "So we'll scratch the shooting. I've been shot at before, by experts."
He looked up now, his eyes narrow as he considered the thin slice of hope I'd handed him. "And you're no part of the conspiracy, so we can scratch that as well… for a price."
"You mean you'd forget about everything." His voice was quiet. He spoke almost without moving his lips, a criminal again.
"I'm ready to."
"I'll pay whatever wants payin'." He made a half swoop toward his wallet but backed off when I looked at him.
"You know me better than that. What I need is some help. Hang in with me until this is over and I'll forget the rest of this nonsense."
He reached out his hand automatically, forgetting the cigarette butt. As his fingers extended, the butt fell to the floor and he stepped on it firmly. I shook his hand. "This is going to be hard," I promised him. "These are tough bastards. They've already killed one woman and tried to kill another."
"Killed a woman?" His horror was genuine.
I filled him in briefly, including the bit about the girl on the ice, then asked, "Waddya say?"
"Let's get 'em," he said.
"Okay. First thing, I want to know all you can tell me about the plan. Start talking, give all the names and facts you've heard, all the details. So far, none of it is making much sense. Maybe you can put the pieces together."
There wasn't much. He had known about the plot for three weeks. Nancy had come up alone and stayed over at the Tavern, ostensibly to go cross-country skiing. She had confided in Irv. She thought the thing was a big joke and hoped there would be plenty of headlines because it might help her when she reached the Miss Toronto contest. She would go into that contest, as she had ours, because her father owned houses in both places.
I stopped him here. "She has to be nuts. Doesn't she know the Miss Toronto is always chosen at the Police Games? No copper would vote for a dingbat like her."
"She's no dingbat." Irv was just the safe side of angry. "She's real smart. She's already in college, at seventeen. She speaks French better'n Jean Arcand at the bait store."
"She's got a thirty-eight bust, Irv, and you never looked any further. She's also got a big mouth. If she was letting you in on this dumb plan of theirs, she must have told half the world. She's likely got a whole lot of other people involved, people with no connection with this C.L.A.W. outfit."
He said nothing. I guess he knew I was right, that he wasn't the only one with the kid's secret. But that's not what he wanted to hear. I believe he was in love with her. I softened my approach. I wanted him to help me from choice, not anger.
"Did she tell you anything about this group of hers?"
"She said they were a great group of women."
I set down my empty coffee mug and sighed. "That shows it's wide open. There's at least one guy with the group, maybe more. And the one you saw is a tough, mean sonofabitch."
Irv stood up, convulsively clenching his fists. They were big, a fighter's fists. I was glad he was on my side. "I'd like a couple o' rounds with that bastard."
"You'll get them," I promised. "And we've got to find him. Unless I'm badly off base, he's the guy who murdered the girl at the motel and left the other one to die on the ice. He pulled a gun on you. We've got to stop him."
Irv was pacing, making small chopping punches with both hands, working out his anger as if this were a gym and he were honing himself for a bout.
"Did Nancy say anything about her group, what it was for?"
"Not much." He was still chopping punches that could have cracked ribs. "Only thing she said was, it was a feminist outfit."
"Feminist, not just a women's group. You're sure?"
He frowned. Subtleties of politics weren't his line. "Sure I'm sure. Feminist is what she said."
That made a difference. Feminist groups drew support from left, right, and center, all the shades of political color there are to the left of the Ku Klux Klan. The thought made me angry. I'm supposed to keep the peace here. It's not in my charter to hammer people into the ground or shoot them or open their mail or any of the other things that activists worry about. But on the other hand, I am a one-man band, and if she was calling on some heavy-duty troublemakers I would have to break some more rules and earn some more bad black ink. It would be the only way I could prevent somebody from doing worse to some helpless member of the public. They would justify their actions in the name of "The People," whoever the hell they were, but mine would be the actions of a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary.
I stood up and pulled on my scorched and smoky-smelling hat. It didn't improve my mood. "All right, so security is shot full of holes. She's been talking and there's a good chance she's got some wild-eyed radicals on her side. We've got to get hold of her before they do anything crazy."
"Tonight?" Irv was startled. His plans had been for a couple more scotches and a few hours sleep, helping me with the rough stuff by daylight if he had to.
"Tonight." I confirmed his fears for him. "The weather's too bad for them to make a run for it down the highway. She will still be here in some cottage until the snow stops. After that, they could take her cross country on a skidoo and meet the road someplace."
Irv reached for his outdoor clothes, a one-piece skidoo suit, extra large, to cover his out-of-place gray suit. I waited while he dressed and pulled on big rubber boots over his shoes. "Have you got any more shells for that rifle?"
He patted the pocket of his skidoo suit. "I already put them in here."
"Load up. You may need that thing."
I left him doing that while I went out back to the tree where I had dumped my showshoes and slipped them on. Irv came out of the back door as I finished. "Wait here," I told him, and stumped out to my snow machine. It was standing in the center of its very own snowdrift, but it started first try. I brushed the snow off the seat and drove up to the front of the cottage. Irv came down the steps to meet me, plunging waist deep in one drift. He climbed on behind me and I asked him, "Which way did they take off?"
He pointed vaguely west and I started off that way, making a big loop first to my left, then right again until I picked up the trail. They had done their best to run Indian file so the track would be less obvious, but it was the only track on the lake not yet covered with new snow. I followed it toward the far shore through the hypnotic dazzle of the snow that was still falling as fast as ever.
The track led straight to the shore line, then turned north until it reached a big older place, one of the summer houses that had once belonged to some lumber baron or other. Right now I wasn't interested in history. I just knew it would be a pig to search, especially if the guy with the gun was alive and well and hiding somewhere inside. I would have given anything to have had Sam with me instead of Irv Whiteside.
I drove right past the place without stopping. Irv was bumping me on the back trying to get my attention, but I just held up my free hand to let him know I'd heard. This was no time for a frontal attack.
We stopped a hundred yards past the place and I switched off the lights and the motor and strapped on my snowshoes. It was hard to talk over the rushing of the wind, but when I was set to go I beckoned to Irv and he leaned close.
"I want to go round the back of that place with the tracks. How good are you with that rifle?"
"Not bad," he said automatically, then remembered I could prove different and added an apologetic, "Not usually, anyhow."
"Good. I want you out in front of the place, where you can see the top windows. Give me five minutes. Then loose off a round that hits the roof line. Don't shoot the window out, there may be some poor innocent bastard inside and you'll kill him. I just want you to get everybody diverted. Can you do that?"
He by God could. I patted him on the shoulder and said, "Count to five hundred." Then I jogged clumsily on my showshoes over the lake snow and up the slope, about a hundred yards north of the cabin. I was lucky. The original rich owner had owned enough of the shore line that there was no other building around to confuse the issue. I cut through the wood, ducking under the snow-laden branches of the second-growth spruce near the shore. Then I was up on smooth rock at the level of the cottage. After my experience with Irv, I was careful to keep my silhouette always against the trees, even though the snow was so thick I could hardly have been seen anyway. The flakes stung my face, biting at me endlessly as if I were under a carefully directed dry shower.
It took me four minutes to get close to the cottage. The first thing I saw was a light in the window. I inched forward, checking for some sentry posted outside. That's where a soldier would have waited. But these people weren't soldiers. There was nobody there, no track in the snow. What was more, I couldn't see any snowmobiles on the back or north sides of the house. I would have checked all around but it was getting close to Irv's time and I wanted to be in position.
I waited the remaining forty-five seconds, hunched against the wind, blinking away the gritty snow. Then I heard the smash of Irv's rifle and the angry buzz of a ricochet off the high front of the house. There was a thirty-second silence, then a second shot, closer this time. Irv was creeping up on his target, letting off some of his anger by blasting the house.
I crept closer to the window and peeked in from a yard away. It would have been a dumb thing to do normally, but I could see no disturbance in the snow outside. Nobody had booby-trapped the window to snare eavesdroppers. The room was like the interior of a thousand other cottages. Heavy wooden furniture, propane lamps, two of them lit. A bookcase filled with the kind of soft-backed junk people read on holiday, a pretty good rack from a white-tailed deer. No people. I wondered if our birds had already been and flown. And if so, why were the lights burning? I kicked off my snowshoes, took out my flashlight, and went to the back door. There was a heavy old screen door on the outside and I could tell from the pie-slice depression in the snow that someone had opened it that evening. It must have been an hour or so earlier, the depression was drifting in. And there were no footprints away from the door.
I stood and thought about that for a moment, wondering what had happened. Had someone inside made a run to escape, then been caught at the doorway and dragged back inside? It was not logical that anybody had come to the back door, there were no tracks there except my own. I flashed my light around in the snow as Irv loosed off his third round in front. I was looking for stains in the snow, a sign that someone had emptied a coffee pot or a man had relieved himself here. But there was nothing. I straightened up and gave three long whistles through my teeth. After a couple of repeats, Irv responded and then came out of the snow, rifle at the ready.
"It looks like they've gone," I told him. "But they've been here, or somebody has, inside the last couple of hours. I'm going in."
"Good idea." He held the rifle in his left hand and swung his numbed arm against his side a couple of times. "I'm goddamn freezing."
He reached out for the storm door but I stopped him. "Don't touch it yet, I'm not sure what's going on here."
He shrugged, a vague, disinterested move in the dark. "You worry too much, y'ask me."
"It's kept me alive so far." I went around the corner of the cottage. There were no lights on this side, no disturbances in the snow, either. I crept up to the closest window, ducked under and past it, then reached up to the corner closest to the back of the house and shone my light in. Nothing happened. Nobody shot at my light. I relaxed a touch and straightened up to peer in and check the inside catches. I was lucky. It was a single-glazed casement made up of six panes of glass. I pulled my glove tightly on my right hand and punched out the pane closest to the handle. Then I reached in sideways to the window as I unfastened the catch. It was that turn that saved me. I was a narrow target, hunched into my fur hat, my collar raised right to the edge of the hat covering my entire bare skin from harm when the blast hit, showering me with broken glass from the remaining window panes. I fell to the ground, rolling instinctively close to the wall for shelter while my head unscrambled. My eardrums were saved by my leather hat but both ears were deaf.
I pulled off my right glove and drew my gun. Then I stood up and hoisted myself over the window sill into the room. In the flashlight beam I could see it was a bedroom and the door was blown in toward me, broken off its hinges. I guessed what had happened but ran forward anyway, through the familiar smell of explosive smoke into the kitchen. The back door of the cottage was flung in shreds around the room. Outside in the snow I could see the ruin of the storm door and the bloodstains that told their own story.
Irv Whiteside was dead. The blast had taken him waist high. One leg was severed, the other hanging by a clotted strand of flesh. His entrails were spread around him. I stood for a minute, playing my flashlight over him as if the beam were a magic wand that would put him back together again. Shocked as I was, I knew what had caused those wounds. He had walked into a booby trap, something triggered by opening the storm door. And by the mess he was in, I knew what had been the device at the heart of it. Those wounds came from a fragmentation grenade.