Even then I was not alarmed. Puzzled, yes. Who would visit us at this hour, and in this weather? But I had no sense of danger.
It was Doctor Eileen who halted the ground car twenty yards from the house, and stepped cautiously out into deep snow.
"You wait here, Jay," she said.
It was too late. I had climbed out of the cruiser behind her. I could see an odd patch of white and red on the porch, just beyond the farthest point that the blown snow had reached.
I ran to it and knelt down. It was Chum, lying in a pool of blood. My miniver had been skewered through from back to belly, pinned to the rough planks of the porch by one of our own long-bladed kitchen knives.
"Jay!" said Doctor Eileen again. But I was blundering in through the front door, dreading what I might find.
At first the scene inside seemed to match my worst fears. The living room was empty, a chaos of broken and overturned furniture. Beyond it, in the kitchen, Paddy Enderton lay stretched out on the floor. His face was purple, and he was not breathing. All the kitchen drawers and cabinets had been pulled open and their contents swept onto the floor. There was no sign of Mother, or of Uncle Duncan.
As Doctor Eileen bent over Paddy Enderton, I ran upstairs. The landing was deserted. The door of the guest room, my new bedroom, was open, and it was a shambles. Everything I owned was strewn randomly around the floor. Sick to my stomach, I pushed open the closed door of Mother's room.
She was there, lying face upward on her own bed. Her coat was off, and her dress had been ripped up the front from hem to waist. Her hands were bound in front of her, a broad cloth had been tied around her mouth, and the left side of her face was swollen and turning a dull red. But when I ran to her she opened her eyes and lifted her head.
"Doctor Eileen!" I cried. It emerged as a high-pitched scream. I turned Mother's head to get at the place the gag was tied. "Mother's here. She's alive. She's hurt."
Eileen Xavier came up the stairs two at a time, and was into the bedroom while I was still struggling with the knots.
"Look out, Jay." She pushed me out of the way and cut the gag through with one quick flick of a scalpel. Until that moment I had not realized that she was carrying it.
Mother was coughing, and pushing a ball of cloth out of her mouth with her tongue. Doctor Eileen stepped back, and did a quick survey of her from head to foot. "Duncan West?" she asked.
Mother shook her head. She tried to speak, but it came out only as another cough. Doctor Eileen turned to me. "Jay. Check the front bedroom."
Thinking back, I believe that she wanted me out of the way while she examined Mother. But I didn't know it at the time, and I stepped along the landing to my old room half-convinced that I would find Uncle Duncan stretched out on the floor there.
I didn't. The room was empty, at least of people. But the mess inside was even worse than anywhere else. Everything had been taken apart—the contents of Enderton's big square box removed and smashed to fragments, dressers and desk overturned, drawers emptied out onto the floor. The curtains had been pulled down and slit along their seams. The mattress of the bed had been ripped open, and its stuffing lay scattered everywhere. Even the window had been thrown open, and someone had probed with a knife into the layer of snow sitting on the outside sill.
I rummaged helplessly in the debris for a minute or two, then went across and closed the window. I headed back to the main bedroom, where mother was now sitting up.
"Uncle Duncan—" I began.
"He's all right," Doctor Eileen said. "He went soon after you, to try to get other help. He left long before they got here."
Mother nodded, and gave me a lopsided smile.
"Mr. Enderton?" I said. "Is he—" I found I could not finish the question.
"Dead, I'm afraid." Doctor Eileen was helping mother to her feet. "Of natural causes, just a few minutes after you left. Whatever he'd been doing today, the strain was too much for his heart." She must have seen my guilty expression. "Don't feel bad, Jay. I couldn't have saved him, you know, even if I'd been here. He wouldn't look after himself, even after he was warned. Come on now, take your mother's arm and let's get out of here. The two of you are going to spend the night at my house."
"Do you think they'll come back?" I didn't know who "they" might be, but I was mortally afraid of them. They had spitted Chum for no reason at all. He had been the most harmless pet in the world, a goofy ball of fur who would never attack anybody.
"Since we don't know who they were," replied Doctor Eileen, "we can't say they won't be back. But they were certainly looking for something, and they searched hard, and they didn't find it. There were four of them, and I don't know if one or more may want to try again."
"I don't think they will." Mother's voice was a whisper as we helped her into her coat and out of the door. I noticed a big red blotch I hadn't seen before on her throat. "They were arguing among themselves when they left. They had—changed the subject."
She glanced down at her own ripped dress, and then at Eileen Xavier.
"You were damn lucky, Molly," said Doctor Eileen. "Lucky they had a lot on their minds and were pressed for time."
"Give me some credit, Eileen." Mother was sounding more like herself. "I made a few unkind comparisons, just to make them mad at each other."
"But where could they have gone?" I turned to the doctor, as she opened the door of the cruiser for us to climb in. "We saw their tracks coming, but nothing went back."
She said nothing, but pointed down the hill. Multiple footprints, half-covered with snow, led toward the dark lake water.
Apparently I was not the only one with the idea that travel by boat was easier than struggling along through soft, clinging snow.
But as I settled into the cruiser's comfortable seat, and felt my eyes closing almost before my weary head touched the cushioned headrest, it occurred to me that the mystery attackers perhaps had a different motive. One thing was sure: Deep water, unlike deep snow, left no trail to follow.
CHAPTER 7
I slept through all the next morning and the early part of the afternoon. So in spite of Doctor Eileen turning up her nose at the idea of anybody passing on "hearsay" to posterity, that's all I can offer for the day, at least until I was sitting in the Xavier kitchen working my way through a stack of sorghum cakes and scrambled phalarope eggs.
Uncle Duncan lolled opposite me, yawning and stretching and complaining of lack of sleep. It seemed he had finally gone back to our house in the middle of the night, bringing with him a vet—the nearest thing he could find to a physician without going all the way to Toltoona. What they encountered at the house had left them baffled: the whole place ransacked, Paddy Enderton dead on the floor, Mother vanished, and the building deserted.
Rather than heading out again into the snow, they built up the fire and stayed there for the rest of the night. The intruders had not returned, and finally Duncan had decided to make for Doctor Eileen's.
Mother was not much more helpful. Four men had burst into the house without warning, while she sat alone with Enderton's body. The sight of him lying dead on the floor had sent them into a rage.
"They could hardly believe it," she said. "The biggest one went across and kicked the body and swore at it, as though Enderton had died just to annoy him. Damned Black Paddy, he called him. He searched Enderton's clothing, then he set the other three to ransacking the house while he questioned me. I did my best to act innocent. Said Enderton was just a lodger who had the upstairs room, and hardly ever came down. I was vague about everything, and I acted dumb as I knew how."
"I'll bet you did," Doctor Eileen said. She had already been out all morning on a call, and was getting ready to go out again. "We'll need a full description."
"I'll give you one, but it won't help unless I see them again. I'm sure they were spacers, every one, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them."
"Nobody with no arms, or no legs," I said, and felt myself blush when Duncan West stared at me as though
I had lost my mind.
"I tried to get them to say what they were after," went on mother. "But that didn't work."
I started to open my mouth again, ready to mention the telecon still sitting high on the water tower, but Mother quickly disposed of that possibility.
"Whatever it was they were after," she said, "it must have been no bigger than your hand, because of the places that they were looking. And when they couldn't find anything they got more and more annoyed. They started to smash things at random. That's when they knocked me about a bit, too, just to take it out on somebody. Then they moved upstairs and tied me down. I think they were getting interested in other options for me when the big one said forget it, the boss was waiting and he'd told them go easy on the redhead woman."
"Lucky for you," said Uncle Duncan.
"Oh, I don't know." Mother smiled at him, but she had her eye on Doctor Eileen. "I think in another five minutes I could have had a couple of them at each other's throats."
"Or slitting yours," Doctor Eileen said. "Molly, you're plain incorrigible. Come on. I'll give you and Jay a ride back to the house. We'll pick up a few strong men in Toltoona, to stay with you and make sure there's no more trouble."
I glanced out of the window. There was a clear blue sky, and outside the snow was melting fast. "I've got to take the sailboat back home," I said. "I might as well do it now, and get it over with."
"All right," Mother said mildly. "But no heading off across the lake again. 'Clean your room,' has a whole new meaning today. I wouldn't like to think you were trying to skip housework."
As the other three left the kitchen I realized that she was right. I was avoiding going home. But it was nothing to do with housework. It was the thought of Chum, casually slaughtered and skewered to the front porch. No matter what Paddy Enderton had done, and no matter what the others wanted from him, they didn't have to do that.
I had lost my appetite. I washed the dishes, put on my coat, and headed for the place where I had tied up the boat. My whole water journey and final arrival last night seemed like an awful dream. It was surprising to find everything just as I had left it, the sail still not properly furled, the seats and the bottom of the boat covered in snow.
Before I could sail home, the boat had to be cleared. I took a square of wood and began to use it as a makeshift shovel, scraping snow into heaps and dumping it overboard into the black lake water.
I had been at work no more than two minutes when I came across the rectangular wafer of black plastic. It was sitting in the bottom of the boat, just where it had dropped from Paddy Enderton's hands.
* * *
Mother's orders had been explicit: Go home, and at once. But no command in the universe could have stopped me from sitting down in the bow of the boat and staring at Enderton's little sealed device.
It was thin, hardly more than a plastic card, and at first sight the front was plain. Upon a closer look I could see dozens of faint depressions, each one the size of a fingertip. I pressed them tentatively, one after another and then in pairs.
No result. But just last night there had been that strange display of moving points of light.
What had Enderton done? I struggled to recall, and quickly realized that I had no idea. It was not that I failed to remember, it was that he had operated in the dark, and until the lights actually appeared all my attention had been on the knife that he had just put away.
I fiddled with the thin rectangle of plastic for another minute or two, pretty much at random, and at last gave up. I jumped out of the boat and stood on the pier. There I paused.
Doctor Eileen Xavier was no longer at the house. She had taken Mother home. The question was, would she stay there for a while, long enough for me to catch her if I started now? Or if not, was she likely to come back to the Xavier house before she headed off again on her rounds, and so make it worth my while to hang around here a bit longer?
All too often in the past couple of days my fate seemed to have been determined by the wind. Now it was blowing steadily, pushing the boat's little pink pennant like a pointing finger to the north.
Towards home.
I tucked the plastic rectangle in my jacket pocket so I would not be tempted to fiddle with it any more, unfurled the boat's sail, and was on my way.
It was perfect sailing weather, clear and crisp and with a following wind that was just right. The only sound was clean lake water, lapping at the bow. On another afternoon I would have reveled in every moment. Today I could not enjoy it at all. I felt dreadfully dejected, for what I'm sure anybody else would have said was quite the wrong reason. Mother had been gagged and beaten. Paddy Enderton was dead. Our house had been invaded and almost demolished.
But the only thing on my mind was Chum. When I got home I would have to pull out the knife that pinned him to the planks of the porch, carry his body away from the house, and bury him.
The picture in my head was very vivid: four men, frustrated and furious as they rushed out of the house into the snow. Chum, convinced that the whole world was friendly and anyone running must be playing a game, gambolling across to greet them. The men's jerk of surprise, the curse, the vicious thrust of a knife.
At least it would have been quick. With luck he had died before he understood what was happening. But that was little consolation.
I patted my pocket as the boat came close to the dock leading up to the house. If this had been what they were after, one thing I knew for certain: They would not get it from me—
—if I could help it. That qualification came into my head as I started up the path. My footsteps slowed.
In a few more steps I would be in full view of the house. There was no sign of Doctor Eileen's cruiser out by the road. In all likelihood she had been and gone and Mother would be safely inside with her tough-guy guards, beginning the long job of cleaning up the mess.
But suppose that they weren't? Suppose that Mother and Doctor Eileen had not arrived yet, and last night's attackers had returned and were lurking inside waiting for me?
And what I was carrying.
I back-stepped a little way along the path, then dropped to one knee. I was at Chum's favorite burrow, a hole that he had carefully dug out and furnished with dried leaves.
I pushed the rectangular plastic card into the round hole. Then I recoiled as my fingertips met cold, wet fur.
Chum's body. And no one outside the family knew about his burrow.
I stood up, still holding the rectangle of plastic, and ran for the house. When I was twenty yards away a window went up with a sound like a gunshot. Mother's head poked out.
"Jay! I thought I told you to come straight back here. Get inside."
I halted. "Chum—"
"I took care of him. I put him in his burrow. If you want him somewhere else . . ."
"No." I couldn't bear to look at her, though she had only been trying to help. "He's home now. He can stay there." I stuffed Enderton's black wafer into my pocket and hurried into the house. The kitchen drawers and cupboards were closed again, and the mess of the previous night had been cleared up. Three men from Toltoona were sitting at the table playing cards. I knew them. They were all big and broad and self-confident, and they nodded at me casually.
"I didn't touch your room yet," mother said. "I thought you'd prefer to do that yourself. Come on."
I followed her, waiting until we were at the top of the stairs before I spoke.
"Mother." I kept my voice down to a whisper. "I've got it—the thing that the men were looking for last night."
She halted at the door of the guest room and glanced back to the stairs. For the first time in my life, I had the feeling that Mother was frightened.
"Go on into my room," she said. She followed me and closed the door after us. "Now, what do you say you've got?"
I pulled out the innocent-looking piece of molded black plastic, and told her where it came from. She took it from me, turning it over and examining each side.
"He made it
work last night," I said. "He made it show a lot of lights in the air. But I don't know how to do it. What is it?"
"I'm not sure." Mother sat down on the bed. Her room, like the kitchen, was back to normal. She began to press the surface of the black oblong, placing her fingertips into its shallow depressions. "If I had to guess, I'd say it was never made on Erin—or anywhere in the Forty Worlds. That means it must be very old, from the days before the Isolation."
It was strange to hear her talk that way. "I thought you said there never was a Godspeed Drive."
She glanced up, all the while pressing the concave areas on the wafer. "Oh, that's just me agreeing with Duncan. He says there never was one. But if you ever went over to the big museum in Roscommon, you'd not doubt that we came here from another star, a long time ago, and that goods and people were coming to and from Erin for hundreds of years. Until one day, suddenly, it all stopped."
"Why don't you take Uncle Duncan over to Roscommon with you, and show him?"
"Because he won't take the time to go. He says, and I half agree with him, what's the difference? There's no Drive now, and we have to get on with our lives without it. I don't dwell on the past much myself, but there never was a man like Duncan West for living in the here and now. That's why I like him. He's all in the present."
"Where is he?" It had suddenly occurred to me that he was not in the house.
"He left, as soon as he was sure that I was safe home and protected. He said it had been chaos yesterday, but he still had to earn a living."
All the time we were talking, Mother had been studying what she was holding, and pressing in different places with various combinations of fingers. "There!" she said with satisfaction. "That's got it."
I leaned over. There was no sign of the beautiful three-dimensional display of lights that I had seen in the boat, but the dark surface showed a glowing set of numbers and open round spots. "What did you do?"
"Turned it on. It was just power-protected, against being turned on by accident. To activate it, you have to press here, and here, and here, all at the same time. See."
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