I slammed the machine to a stop alongside her but she turned away, leaping over the surface as if the ice were hot instead of killing cold. Bundled up as I was in a parka and skidoo boots over my regular indoor uniform, I could not move fast and it took me thirty yards to catch up with her. I had to tackle her and drag her down like a rugby player. She screamed and fought, but I tore my parka off and bundled it around her and suddenly she stopped struggling and crouched there, whimpering like a child.
I picked her up, clear of the frozen surface. She pulled up her legs, trying to snuggle them out of the wind inside my short parka as I struggled to the skidoo and sat her in front of me behind the windshield. "Sit still," I ordered over the noise of the wind and the ticking motor.
I got on behind her, pulling her against me with my left hand as I opened the throttle, searching ahead for the closest fishing hut. I knew she would never make it to the mainland without freezing, probably losing both feet to frostbite. I had to get her under cover where it was warm.
I found a hut and stopped. "Stay put," I shouted, and went to the door. It was locked on a flimsy hasp, but I kicked it once and it opened. I went back for the woman, picking her up and carrying her into the hut. Her teeth were chattering like typewriter keys and she was shuddering so hard she shook in my arms. I knelt at the door and pushed her in. Then I pulled out my flashlight and followed her. It was the standard local hut, made from sheets of plywood lying on their sides, four feet apart. The roof was made of two more sheets and the ends were the same, cut to shape with a door one end, a window the other. Inside was a hole in the ice, bathtub sized, a bare wooden bench eighteen inches wide, and a tiny homemade stove about the size of one of the tins cookies came in when I was a kid. I helped her onto the seat and bent to the stove. There was a pile of wood chips beside it. I pulled my gloves off and took out my pocket knife. Working as quickly as I could I split one chip into slivers, then reached in my pocket for my notebook and ripped out a handful of pages. I crumpled them and put them in the stove, then the slivers on top. I always carry emergency matches in a waterproof tobacco can and I took it out and lit the fire. Within thirty seconds it had taken hold and I fed in more wood, slowly at first, then half filling the stove. The wind outside sucked the flames up around the raw wood and in another minute the hut was beginning to warm.
I turned then, still crouching, and looked at the girl. In the beam of my flashlight her face looked blue with cold. She blinked against the light and I could see that her eyes were gray. She had not been at the shivaree at Carl's house. "Will that bench move?" I asked her. I tugged at it, but it had frozen into the ice surface. The girl said nothing, just shivered, although her teeth had stopped chattering. I said, "Stretch your feet out to the stove. I'll get more wood from the other huts."
I ran across to the nearest hut, feeling the chill knife through my summer tunic as if it was a mosquito net. The hut was locked but I kicked it in and went inside. There was a pile of wood chips and, even more important, an empty beer can. I picked it up, along with the wood, and ran back to the first hut.
The girl was reviving. She had slipped her arms into the sleeves of my parka and was sitting with hands and feet stretched out straight toward the stove. I dropped the wood and drew my stick to break through the new ice in the fishing hole. It gave easily, only an inch or so thick, and I filled the beer can with water and set it on the stove. It hissed as spilled water boiled instantly on the hot metal. "I'll have a hot drink for you in a minute," I told her. "Now, why don't you tell me who you are and how the hell you got out here in the nude?"
The question broke her down. She began to weep helplessly, sobbing so hard it made her outstretched arms jerk convulsively. She was in shock and I knew that talking to her would do no good. Instead I said, "Feel in the top left-hand pocket of the parka." I had to repeat it but then she came to and did as I asked. Inside she found a Cadbury's Thick bar, wrapped in aluminum foil. It's the other half of my emergency gear. I never go outdoors in winter without knife, matches, and candy. That's enough to keep you alive indefinitely if you don't panic. The feel of the candy stopped her tears. She slowed to a snuffle and began to unwrap it, crushing the paper in her hand neatly and dropping it on top of the firewood. Then she bit into the chocolate with a survivor's fury, twice, three times, until her mouth was so full she could hardly chew.
I let her finish the bar, then hoisted the beer can off the stove. It was hot to the touch, and she made a little hurt sound as I gave it to her but drank obediently until it was all gone. I took the can off her, refilled it, and set it back on the stove. Already, the hut was warm enough for me to be comfortable in my summer clothes. Within minutes it would be too hot. If I were fishing here I would have to take off my jacket. The girl was warm enough to talk now.
"Okay. You're thawed out now. Tell me what happened."
She hesitated for a moment. I had put my flashlight away and the only light in the hut was the flicker of flames through a crack in the stove. Her face was a ripple of shadows that shattered suddenly as she began to talk, the words tumbling urgently out on top of one another. "It was awful. They made me undress. I said 'No.' I thought they were kidding, you know. I mean, it was terrible, but he hit me and they took my clothes off and drove away and left me. I was trying to catch up with them but they wouldn't stop."
"Who are they?"
I took my light out again and flicked it over her face. There were no bruises apparent, but her face was still pinched with cold. It would have been hard to read any marks more subtle than a black eye. I could see that she was pretty, prettier than the corpse in cabin six had been. This one could be a model. I wondered where she fit into the crazy puzzle.
"I was riding behind Rachael. I didn't know the others. We had never met them."
"Rachael who?" Rachael had been one of the other women my prisoner had mentioned.
"I don't know her last name. We just used first names."
"You were a part of the C.L.A.W.? You and Rachael and Katie?"
She nodded eagerly. "That's right, and Billie. Did she tell you about C.L.A.W.? Or was it Katie? She always did have trouble keeping security, Katie did."
"Katie is dead." My light was on her face and I saw her mouth yawn open and her shoulders shrink back in horror. Then she covered her mouth with the back of her hand. I could see her biting on her knuckles.
"She was murdered, strangled." I simplified the story for her. She didn't need all the details. I let her nurse her horror for another ten seconds and then told her, "These are ugly people you're involved with. I have to know everything you can tell me about them."
She didn't have anything extra to give me beyond what I already knew. She had come north to take Nancy Carmichael away from the beauty pageant. That was all she knew. She had met Nancy but did not know her whole name. Her group had been assured by Margaret, the same middle-aged Margaret my prisoner had met, that Nancy was sure to win. And then they would take her away and it would be a moral lesson to all the male chauvinist pigs who stood around and lusted for her beauty. And then Billie would strip and parade up and down to make the message even clearer. Billie had not wanted to do it. It had meant acknowledging to herself that she was as plain as a board fence, but she had overcome her reluctance and agreed, at Margaret's quiet insistence.
"Who was with you when they took your clothes?"
She wasn't sure. She had been driving the machine on which Nancy was a passenger. The other machines, one with two people on it, the other with one, had rendezvoused with them at the shelter. There had been no light except the headlights of the machines. She had only seen that the others were all wearing ski masks. She had simply fallen in behind them and followed obediently, through the woods and out over the ice. Then the lead machine had stopped and the driver had come back and asked her to strip. I didn't bother pressing for a description. It must have been the man Carl described. His assessment didn't fit either Nighswander or the two guys he'd had with him at the Lakeside. This was a fourth man. I wondered where the others were and if I should go back to the station and pick up a shotgun before I went after them. They were a murderous crew.
"You said they all undressed you. Did Nancy help?"
She thought about this for a moment. Probably her memory had slammed the door on the incident. She remembered it like a traffic accident, a sudden explosion of force and pain that had no edges to it beyond the dullness of the blows she had taken and the snatching of unknown hands.
"I don't think so. It was confusing, but I don't think she did. In fact, I'd say no." She rubbed her face with her left hand. "No, that's right. She stayed sitting on the machine where I'd left her, and then one of the other people got on in front of her and drove it away."
"Why did they do it? Were they punishing you for something? Had you done something to make them mad?"
She thought about it before answering. "I don't know," she said at last. "I just know I was certain I would die."
My own mind was bounding ahead. The only thing that fit my theory was that they had known I was following them and had wanted to slow me down. Any policeman would have done what I did, while they got away. I wondered only where they had been heading in such a hurry.
It was obvious that Nancy was to be hidden in a cabin or a cottage on the lake. My task was to find which one. The easiest way to do that was to try to round up help to assist in the search. I should call the OPP and have them seal the roads a few miles north and south of the Murphy's Harbour side road. Then I'd know I had the girl and the gang bottled up and I could look for fresh skidoo tracks at any cabin and go calling. I could find Nancy Carmichael by morning, with luck. But first I had to take care of this one. If the stove went out she would be dead in a couple of hours. She needed clothes and proper shelter. What I had done for her so far was first aid, nothing more. It didn't solve the major problems. She had to be dressed and locked in my nice warm slammer alongside my other prisoner before I could do any more hunting.
I explained it to her. "I want to take you to the mainland where you'll be warm. The first thing is to find you some clothes to travel in."
Her voice raced up into a near scream. "You're not going to leave me? Please? Please?"
"Just for ten minutes. There's a cottage on an island close to here. I'll break in and bring you back some clothes. Ten minutes is tops."
She was weeping again in panic. "What if they come back?"
That was when I made the decision to leave her my gun. As a professional, dealing with killers, I needed that gun, but this girl needed it more. "There's a gun in the right-hand pocket holster. Can you feel it?"
She dug her hand into the pocket and nodded.
"Good. All you have to do is point it and pull the trigger. If somebody comes back and tries any rough stuff, just do what I said and they'll go away."
If she was cool enough to point the gun properly they would go away for keeps, but most amateurs are too frightened of guns to use them for the money.
She shuddered, not a gesture but a deep-down tremble of dread. "I couldn't do that," she whispered.
"Remember what they've done to you, leaving you to die on the ice. If I hadn't come by, you'd be dead right now."
She lowered her face and I reached out and bumped her shoulder. "Don't worry. I'll be back before you can think."
She grabbed my arm. "Hurry," she said. "I'm frightened."
I left her squatting on the bench like a blue-coated monkey in some zoo. She thought she had problems. I knew I did. With no moon, nothing to steer by but the direction of the wind which had been steadily northeast the last time I'd had a chance to assess it against the shore line of the lake, I was gambling on finding a cottage soon. If I missed and began some crazy circling out of cold and desperation, I would be dead myself within an hour.
I stepped out, ballooned in warmth from the stove, but the cold knifed me within seconds. I had my gloves so my fingers were steady as I turned the key in the snow machine, but my teeth were clenched and about to chatter. Fortunately the machine started first click and I knelt in the saddle, pulling as low as I could behind the windshield, and headed slightly south of west toward the closest cottage on the lake, a big luxurious place built in the 1930s on an island about a quarter-mile from the ice huts.
I didn't force the speed. I was already getting rigid from cold and I didn't want to add a slip stream to the other problems. I kept the wind almost directly behind me, willing it to blow my machine down to the island, and I counted seconds. I figured I was doing fifteen miles an hour-that's four hundred yards a minute. I had counted to sixty-eight when the first rocks and trees flashed into the beam of my headlight.
I remembered that the cottage was on the southwest side of the island where it took the sun from morning on. I speeded up and zipped around, close to shore, thankful for the windbreak it made after I had rounded the southern tip.
The cabin was dark. I stopped at the foot of the wooden steps that led from the big stone dock to the verandah on the ground floor. By now I was so cold that my legs would hardly straighten. Like an old man I clambered slowly up, counting thirty agonizing steps.
The wind whistled across the verandah. I suppose I should have checked for footprints but my head was beginning to let me down. I was turning into a struggling survivor. Nothing mattered but warmth and shelter. I was ready to kill for it without thinking.
The door was covered by an old plywood screen door. I pulled it open and checked the door handle. It was secure, so I balled my fist inside my heavy glove and smashed the glass above the lock. I put my hand through and turned the handle from the inside. Something puzzled me as I did it, but I had no idea what it was and I pulled my arm back out and opened the door.
As I went through it I could feel a blast of warmth from the stove and I remembered a whiff of wood smoke on the wind outside. I should have worried, but I was too grateful for the heat until the languid voice said, "Well, aren't you a resourceful little nuisance."