by Sue Henry
“You took my lotion—my Crabtree & Evelyn
freesia lotion. I can smell it on your hands. You didn’t have to steal it, Anne. If you’d asked, I would have given it to you.”
But another memory was surfacing, immediately
behind her astonished recognition. She had smelled the same scent just before someone had put a cloth soaked in some sleep-inducing chemical over her mouth and nose to knock her out—when she had been blinded by the light and unable to identify that person—when she had been held captive in this very cabin.
“It was you up here in the dark, wasn’t it? You—”
Her indictment was interrupted by a sudden thun-
derous pounding on the front door followed by Tank’s anxious bark.
“Oh, Jesus,” Anne said, turning toward it, raising her hands as if to ward off an attack. “It’s Greg. It’s got to be Greg. He’s here.”
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The pounding continued, steadily, rhythmically,
shaking dust into the room from the front walls of the cabin. It hung in the air like the motes Jessie remembered seeing when she’d been lying, bound, on the floor. She could see the heavy planks move with each new blow. Why didn’t Greg—if that’s who it was—just open the door and come in? For a second or two the noise stopped, then began again, lower on the door this time.
“Anne. Open the door,” she shouted.
“No-o. Oh, God, no. It’s Greg.”
She whirled and grabbed up the rifle from under the window. Pointing it at the reverberating door, she stood facing it, an ugly expression of rage and hatred on her face. The barrel of the rifle caught the light as she raised it, her finger on the trigger.
“No,” Jessie yelled above the noise, and the other woman hesitated, glancing around. “You don’t know that it’s Greg, Anne. It could be someone else. Don’t shoot without being able to see who it is.”
“Who else could it be?” She spat out her contempt, but there was a slight uncertainty in her voice. The rifle wobbled in her hands, and she did not pull the trigger.
“It could be anyone,” Jessie told her, standing up and starting to move slowly across the room. “You won’t know unless you open the door and find out.”
The barrel of the rifle was immediately turned in her direction.
“Sit down,” Anne demanded coldly. “You’ve done
enough to screw up my life. Sit back down and shut up.
Just shut up.”
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“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean, you bitch. You and Greg
thought I wouldn’t know that . . .”
The pounding paused, then once again resumed, this time on the left side of the door by the hinges.
Jessie sank back to her knees, astonished at the angry outburst and accusation. What was Anne talking about? The rifle barrel was turned back toward the crashes coming from outside.
“Who’s there?” Anne called loudly.
There was no answer but the clamorous pounding.
“What the hell do you want? Go away.”
No response.
“Just open the door,” Jessie suggested again, calmly and just loud enough to make herself heard. “You’ve got to open the door.”
It might be Greg Holman. But, if it was, she doubted that he really meant to kill his wife, especially with a witness, unless . . .
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Both of you? No, I won’t open it.”
“Then let me,” Jessie begged. “You stay there—with the rifle—and I’ll open it, see who it is.”
The indecision was unmistakable on Anne’s face. It was plain that she didn’t want to shoot some unknown person, but she was clearly convinced that it was her husband. Fear had drawn the blood from her face and tightened her mouth. She stared at the door and the pounding seemed to rattle her thinking along with the wall.
“I don’t know . . . all right,” she said finally. “But I’m watching, so don’t think you can get away with
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anything this time. Just walk over there and open it, then step back.”
Cautiously, Jessie got up and approached the door.
As she reached out a hand, wondering why whoever was making such a noise hadn’t opened it already, the pounding suddenly stopped. For a long minute everything was utterly silent.
“Who’s there?” she called and received no answer.
Then she could hear someone walking from the
cabin. Footsteps crunched in the sublimating snow and ice outside, growing fainter as they moved away, but no one spoke. Tank was quiet.
Determined to see who it was, she grasped the handle of the door, thumbed the latch open, and pulled.
The door did not move. Again she tugged, then suddenly realized the significance of the pounding.
Whoever it had been had not been knocking—had
not wanted to come in. What they had wanted was for no one inside to be able to go out. The door had been nailed solidly closed. She was, again, a prisoner in the cabin she had occupied ten years before, this time with Anne Holman. Why?
Tank barked sharply outside again.
Turning to look at Anne, who had lowered the barrel of the rifle and stood frowning uncertainly, Jessie caught sight of the smoke that was beginning to rise in a small but growing ribbon from between two of the foundation logs in the corner of the room.
25
Q
BELOW THE
,
CABIN ON THE FLANKS OF THE LITTLE PETERS
Hills, the three snowmachiners had followed Black Creek, crossed the ridge, dropped down along the frozen swamp, and turned west at Sand Creek. MacDonald, still managing to keep up, was surprised, when Becker suddenly stopped, to hear him swearing over the growl of his idling machine.
“Hey, where’s Peterson?”
“Bastard took off,” Becker told him, waving a fist in the direction of tracks that MacDonald could see swinging away to the west along the side of a slope and disappearing into a stand of trees. “He just goosed it all of a sudden and took off like a bat out of hell.”
“Why?”
“Evidently, he’s bailing out as tour guide,” Becker snapped angrily. “I’ll bet we’re not even close to that cabin—that he’s got us completely turned around and headed somewhere else.”
MacDonald sat for a moment, thinking hard. Was
this the answer to his question about Peterson’s eager-286
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ness to accompany them on this trip? Had he intended to lose them somewhere along the way? It would make sense if he were somehow involved in the confusion of fires and murder, responsible for some part of it, knew more than he had told.
If he had meant to lose them and purposely gone—
wherever—without them, where would Peterson be
most likely to go?
“Two ideas on where he’s gone,” he said to Becker.
“Either he’s planning to leave us here and has gone back to the road, or he’s headed for the cabin by himself. If he’s involved, he’ll probably go to the cabin.
You agree?”
Becker nodded. “But why bring us out here at all?”
“Who cares about his reasons? There’s nothing we can do now, right? I think we should go ahead and try to reach that cabin by ourselves—not follow his tracks off down the hill but go up there and hunt around till we find it.”
“I don’t think we’ll have to do much hunting,”
Becker, who had been looking past him toward the top of the Little Peters Hills, said. “Somebody’s sending smoke signals.”
MacDonald twisted around to look where Becker
was pointing. A column of smoke was rising out of the trees just under the crest of the hill to their left.
Later, recalling their wild ride up the hill toward that cl
oud of smoke that was larger every time they caught sight of it through the trees, he would wonder at his own ability to stay aboard the roaring snowmachine.
Following close behind Becker, with periodic glimpses of the frozen Kahiltna River below them on the right,
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he somehow managed to keep to the tracks the trooper left with little awareness of their speed or the complicated maneuvers they executed in avoiding trees and brush that seemed to fly past. All his concentration was on reaching the source of the smoke and finding out what was burning.
If Jessie Arnold was on that hill, it was clear to him that whoever had started another fire would not hesitate to add another victim to the growing list. She had barely escaped one blaze. Had this one also been lit in her name?
“The cabin’s on fire! ”
Anne Holman, who had still been totally focused on the door, whirled at the word, caught sight of the growing cloud of smoke rising in the corner, and panicked.
Dropping the rifle in a clatter on the floor, she ran to the door and began to yank repeatedly with all her strength at its immovable handle.
“Oh, God—oh, God,” she shrieked with each yank.
“Let me out. I’ll be good. Oh, ple-ease, let me out. Oh, God.”
Unable to open it, she gave up, ran to the corner farthest from the smoke, flung herself into it, sank to the floor, and curled into a fetal position, face turned away from the sight that terrorized her, eyes tightly shut.
There, she began to rock, bang her head against a log, and wail incoherently.
Jessie’s first thought at seeing the smoke was more rational—put it out.
“Water.”
Grabbing the bottle of water she had used to take the aspirin, she dumped its contents onto the smoke, hop-
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ing to reach its source. For a moment, no more, the smoke thinned, but it was soon seeping in between the logs more heavily than before. Listening, she could hear the crackle of flames out of reach on the outside of the wall.
Maybe it would help if she could pour water through from a higher crack. Snatching up a knife that lay on the edge of the countertop-bunk, where Anne had evidently been using it to make sandwiches, she dug at the insulation between two of the logs at waist level above the smoke. When she had extracted enough to open a narrow foot-long crack through which she could see daylight, she took the large kettle of hot water from the stove and carefully poured it through, so the majority of it drained down the outside. There was a sizzle of water hitting fire and a small amount of steam rose, but, when she looked down, the smoke that had been coming in at only one location had spread along the wall to her left and was now rising in three new places.
There was no more water. It was time to get out
somehow.
“Anne,” she said sharply. “Anne. We’ve got to find a way out of here.”
Huddled in the corner, Anne did not respond—
didn’t even seem to hear.
Crossing the room, Jessie took hold of her shoulder and jerked the woman around.
“Help me, dammit. Do you want to burn?”
The word elicited a moan from Anne, as she struggled to turn back and hide her face.
Raising a hand, Jessie slapped her, hard.
“I said help me.”
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“I can’t. I can’t. Oh, God, don’t let me die.”
“You can. Grow up. We’ve got to get out, or we’ll burn with this place!”
Pushing and shoving, she got Anne to her feet and dragged her toward the window, picking up the rifle from the floor on the way. Once there, she used the stock to knock out the dirty panes.
The glass shattered easily, shards falling back into the room as they hit the boards that had been nailed across outside. When Jessie had broken off most of the sharp fragments that remained, however, and tried pounding at the boards themselves, she encountered not resistance but complete refusal. These boards, too, had been reinforced at some time with heavier, additional boards. The rifle stock was not heavy enough to knock them loose from the nails that held them securely.
The air that now flowed through the broken win-
dowpanes allowed a fresh supply of oxygen to reach and encourage the fire. Jessie could see that flames had followed the smoke and were beginning to finger the logs on the inside. From the loud crackling sound, it was evident that the fire was making headway and had involved most of the outside wall. The smoke grew thicker, billowing into the room, making it hard to breathe without coughing.
Anne whimpered and began to babble again.
Jessie shook her and the gibberish stopped, though she continued to whimper and was now shaking un-controllably.
“Stop that. What are we going to do?”
She was talking to herself and knew it, but verbaliz-
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ing helped her think. Coughing that she couldn’t control made her headache worse in spite of the aspirin she had taken. At the rate the room was filling they would soon have nothing to breathe but the deadly smoke, would pass out and be unconscious, or dead, long before the flames came anywhere close.
The water was gone, but the towel she had used to wipe her face was half wet. She retrieved it and cut it in half with the knife. Grabbing up the coffeepot, she poured what was left onto the fabric.
“Here. Tie this around your face.”
Anne looked at her as if she were mad and dropped it on the floor as she bent double to cough.
“Dammit, Anne. It’ll help you breathe,” Jessie told her, picking it up and tying it on her before she tied the other half over her own mouth and nose and desperately looked around, assessing everything she could see for some way to get out.
When she had lived here, she had considered digging a small cellar under the floor. Deciding to leave, she had abandoned the idea. Now she wished she had completed it, for she had heard of people surviving fires by crawling into their storage spaces. I’m playing what-if, she thought, and turned her attention elsewhere.
The towel mask smelled of coffee, but seemed to be keeping most of the smoke temporarily at bay. She could feel the temperature rising dramatically in the room. Flames now engaged half the wall and had crept up just under one of the peeled log beams. The builder had planned for heavy amounts of snow. About three feet apart and eight inches in diameter, the solid beams reached across the width of the cabin and supported
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the posts and struts that braced the rafters and, in turn, the roof.
The roof. Could they break out through the roof?
The rising smoke was thickest under the peak of the roof. She knew that you were supposed to get down as close to the floor as possible, where the only breath-able air would be found, but there was no possible exit on the floor. The roof just might be worth a try.
“Over here,” she yelled to Anne, who did not move but stared at her dumbly, tears streaking what could be seen of her sooty cheeks.
Impatiently grabbing Anne’s arm, Jessie dragged
and shoved her over to the bunk and pushed the rifle into her hands.
“Stand here and give that to me when I ask for it. Do you understand?”
Anne nodded slowly, hopelessly, and watched as
Jessie scrambled quickly onto the foot of the bunk, then, one hand on the wall to give her balance, onto the post at the foot, tossing Anne’s parka to the floor. From there she could easily reach the beam over it.
Grasping it with both hands, Jessie swung her legs up and wrapped them around the log that ran straight across to the fiery wall, where, as she watched, a tongue of flame reached up to lick its underside. Hurriedly, but careful not to fall, she pulled herself up and around, until she lay on top and could reach down with one arm.
“Now. Give it to me,” she instructed Anne and, for once, the woman comp
lied, holding the rifle up by its stock, so Jessie could grasp the barrel. Settling it securely in the angle of roof and beam, she pulled herself to a crouch, then put one foot on the next beam and
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stood up enough to use her hands to tear off the plastic vapor barrier, then the insulation. When she had exposed the planks, she turned around and stood, back to the roof, leaning her shoulders against the steep angle.
Holding the rifle barrel pointed forward, she began to pound the stock as hard as she could against them, regretting the insult to her father’s gift.
These planks had not been reinforced by the person who pounded the door closed but were held in place with nothing more than a single nail holding each plank to each rafter.
At first there was little result, but increasing the length of her swing provided more force, and in a few strikes she felt one plank give slightly. Attacking that spot again and again, she kept up the battering until it splintered at last and broke away from its nail.
Repeating her efforts on the next plank, Jessie soon had it loose as well. Nails still held it to the next rafter and, though now she could use leverage, she was gasping for breath, rapidly running out of air.
“Jessie. Come down, Jessie-e-e,” came a shrill wail above the roar of the accelerating fire.
Looking down, Jessie found it was hard to make out Anne’s terrified uptilted face through the dense smoke.
She could see the burning wall and the flames advanc-ing across the beams on which she stood. The heat was almost intolerable; her exposed skin felt scalded.
“Jessie-e.”
Ignoring the panicked wail, bracing her back solidly against the loosened planks, feet on the beams, knees bent, Jessie threw all her weight and strength into ap-plying pressure to the roof.
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Escape would have to happen now—or not at all. In a very few minutes it would be impossible to remain where she was.
Years of constant exercise—large amounts of time on the back of a sled, pumping with one leg then the other, or running along beside it and lifting dogs in and out of harness, weighty sleds over uneven trails, and heavy kettles of food and water—had kept Jessie fit and gradually built her a powerful body that she took for granted. The test she had now set for herself, however, required more than her average strength and determination. Had she tried with her arms to lift the weight she had set herself against, she would have failed miserably. By putting her back and legs into the effort and adding to it adrenaline-produced strength, she had a slim chance. The deciding factor was anger.
