by Fran Stewart
“You mean you can’t guess?” His voice still sounded like he was disguising it deliberately. “I was letting you do my work for me. And you did a great job. You found the flash drive. I didn’t really believe there were only two of them, but that was all I could find. So I’ll just say thank you and be on my way.”
I expected him to turn and flee. I took a quick glance at Karaline. I could see she was thinking the same thing. Turn around, buddy. Just turn around once and we’ll both tackle you.
He must have heard us thinking, or maybe it showed on our faces. Karaline certainly looked grim.
A slow smile revealed white teeth through the mouth hole of his mask. “Both of you, sit down and take your shoes off,” he said. When we hesitated, he barked, “Now!” His voice sort of squeaked, and I wondered for an insane moment if this was some misbegotten young boy whose voice was in the process of changing, going out of control when he least expected it. I sank onto the floor, took off my gloves, and groped for my shoelaces, all the while studying the little I could see of his face, hoping to identify eye color at the very least.
No such luck. The ski mask was loose on his head, as if he’d bought it—or stolen it, for all I knew—two sizes too large. That meant his eyes were shadowed by the excess fabric; not enough to block his vision, but enough so that all I could tell was that the eyes were too dark for me to see. It would have been easier if he’d had Paul Newman eyes. Robert Redford eyes. Mel Gibson eyes. Donald Sutherland eyes. Eyes so icy blue you got cold looking at them. But no, they were brown or gray or hazel or mud-colored for all I could tell. How could I ever pick him out of a lineup? If I even survived long enough to make it to that point. Short guy with white teeth and muddy eyes wasn’t much of a description.
He waited for us to comply. “Now, toss them over into that far corner.”
If he planned to take our shoes, he wasn’t going about it the right way. He’d have to walk over there away from the door in order to pick them up. How could I be thinking so clearly when my heart was racing, my ears were pounding, and I was so close to peeing in my pants I had to cross my legs right there on the floor? Where was Dirk?
“Now, lie all the way down, on your stomach, flat on the floor. Stretch your hands straight up above your heads.”
“Why?” I couldn’t let him do this to us.
“You really think I’m dumb enough to let you jump me before I can get away from here? Lie down. Now!” Each word got progressively louder, and his voice cracked again as he shouted the last order. Threatened by a beardless teenager? I hadn’t noticed any facial hair around the mouth hole. No convenient moles on the upper lip. No jagged scars where his face had been sliced open by a sword in a duel. No black eye patch. No parrot on his shoulder. I was losing my mind.
As I stretched out next to Karaline, I wondered whether boys could grow beards before their voices changed. Maybe not, but they sure could carry guns.
I didn’t know what Karaline was thinking, but the look she gave him was thunderous. I couldn’t think of any way out of this, other than to hope Dirk would show up. I hated having no options. Or rather, I had options, but the only ones I could think of would get one or both of us killed.
Once we were lying down, I reached for Karaline’s hand. I halfway expected him to blow our brains out within the next couple of minutes, and if he did, I’d be darned if I wanted to die alone.
But he didn’t. He still had more instructions for us. “Now start counting. Slow and out loud. Count all the way to a thousand before you even think about getting to your feet. You hear me?”
Karaline’s fingers tightened around mine.
“I can’t hear you,” El Creepola growled.
“One,” Karaline said. I’d never heard her voice so low, so dangerous-sounding. “Two.”
“Louder!”
“Three,” I chimed in.
“Four,” Karaline said.
Between numbers, we heard his shoes clomp backward out the door, and within seconds we heard those same shoes click into their cross-country toe clamps outside the door. By that time I’d reached eleven. “Twelve,” Karaline intoned. Under her breath she said, “Where do you think Dirk is?”
“Thirteen.” My voice fairly rang through the little cabin. “I don’t know,” I said softly, “but I wish he’d hurry up.”
“Louder,” came the voice from outside. But we both heard the clunk of a ski pole against the wooden step and the unmistakable sound of skis beginning to swish across the snow.
“Fourteen.” Karaline let go of my hand and began to gather her knees up under her.
“Fifteen.” We must have looked like a couple of shoeless caterpillars, inching our way upright.
“Sixteen,” she shouted.
“Seventeen. To heck with this.” I stood, bracing myself for a second against the woodpile. My hands shook, but whether with fear or anger, I wasn’t quite sure.
I slid across the room and grabbed our shoes, tossed hers to her, and slipped mine on. No time for laces. I tiptoed the few steps over to the front wall, peeked carefully around the window frame at the empty clearing. I could see his fresh ski tracks. “He’s gone,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“No way,” Karaline said. “He still has that pistol. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to run into him halfway down the mountain. Besides, there’s one more thing I have to do.” She finished tying her shoes and grinned. “You won’t believe this.”
“Believe what?”
“Remember when he first surprised us and we spun around?”
“Like I could forget something that happened four minutes ago.” It seemed like we’d had that gun pointed at us for three hours, but really, it couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two before we were down on our bellies.
Karaline was still grinning like a demented monkey. “As we spun around, I saw . . . Never mind. I’ll show you.”
She strode to the doorway and reached up toward the top of that ridiculously tall door. For some reason, I glanced to my left out the window and saw a puff of smoke spout from the edge of the woods, just to the left of where the path headed sharply up out of the clearing, followed half a heartbeat later by the report of a gunshot. He’d been waiting to see if we tried to follow him, the creep.
Karaline doubled over and staggered back a step, both hands clutching her midriff, her face ashen.
“He shot me.” Barely audible, her voice was thick and breathy. She took two faltering steps and sank to her knees, onto a wooden floor worn smooth by decades of passing feet and still stained with the blood of her beloved professor.
31
Encounter in the Woods
Emily Wantstring settled in on her orange chair for a nice cup of hot chocolate, wishing she had Marcus sitting across the table from her in his blue chair. She wondered if he might have enjoyed hot chocolate. She’d never thought to make it for him. Thirty-nine years she’d lived with him—thirty-seven of them married—and she didn’t know something as basic as this.
When the phone rang, her first thought was that it must be Mark, and she had to wipe her eyes and take a breath before she answered. “Hello?”
Her brother-in-law, Josie’s husband, had a breathy voice, unusual in so large a man. “Em, I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner, but I wanted to let you know what’s happened.”
“What do you mean? Aren’t you calling about Mark?”
“Mark? No, what about him?” Without waiting for her answer, he plowed on. “Josie was attacked on the stairs of the Capitol on Saturday. I should have called you from the hospital but I just flat forgot. I was so worried about her.”
“Josie?” Emily placed her hand over her heart. She couldn’t take this. “Josie?”
“She’s doing okay. Some guy knifed her. I saw him headed toward her and I tackled him, but he sliced her leg open pretty badly.
She had to have a lot of stitches. She just asked me a few minutes ago if I’d remembered to call you, so I thought I’d better.”
“Thank you.” Emily could tell her voice sounded very weak.
“Now, don’t you worry about her. She’s going to be fine.” He made a few huffing sounds. “I need to get going. You take care, okay?”
Emily sat there, unthinking, for several minutes before she realized she hadn’t told him about Mark. Why hadn’t she called her sister?
The doorbell surprised her. Deciding it must be Peggy come to visit her again, she opened the door without even looking out first. Sergeant Fairing stood on the porch. She looked . . . What was the word? Rueful?
“Emily Fontini Wantstring?”
“You know that’s who I am. I met you when I was at the station giving my statement. Come on in so I can get the door closed.”
* * *
With my hands shaking harder than I could ever remember, I unzipped Karaline’s parka. “We have to see where the blood’s coming from, K. Hold on. You’ll be fine. We’ll get help.” I moved her right hand, the one on top, as gently as I could. “You have to let go, K. I’ve got to get your parka out of the way.”
She didn’t resist me as I lifted her bloody left hand and pushed the flaps of her parka back away from her body. There was a rush of blood and I pressed the heel of my hand against the center of the place it seemed to be coming from, hoping I wasn’t doing any more damage.
By this time, the whole left side of her hip looked like she’d been spangled with splotches of red dye, as if she were being costumed for some sort of bizarre Christmas pageant, with K as a bunch of holly berries.
Even as I pressed, more blood seeped from under my hand. As far as I could tell, it wasn’t spurting, and I knew that was a pretty good sign, but I couldn’t think what to do from here. The Red Cross first-aid training courses I’d taken might as well have been watercolor classes for all the good they did me here, now. I couldn’t recall a single thing except that arteries spurt, veins leak. And something about the pupils. I was supposed to look at them.
“Open your eyes, K. Look at me.”
She cracked one eyelid half a slit. Her face looked blotchy. “No,” she said. “Hurts,” as if even one extra syllable would take too much effort.
I felt her weight shift as she slumped to her left, onto the unforgiving metal of the woodstove. “Don’t you die on me! Don’t you dare!”
In the movies, people get shot all the time. They just grit their teeth and keep on going. Karaline looked like she might not go anywhere anytime soon. I didn’t like whatever scriptwriter had written the current episode. “Dirk,” I shouted as loudly as I could, levering myself up so my lungs wouldn’t be so compressed. “Dirk!”
Karaline’s eyes sprung open. “Ow! Don’t . . . push so . . . hard.”
At least she could talk.
There had been about half a chapter in my Red Cross manual on gunshot wounds, with a lot of emphasis on entrance and exit wounds. Only one shot. Karaline had been facing out the door toward the clearing. This meant that what I was holding, just inside the bump of her left hip bone, had to be the entrance wound.
I could remember the concise voice of my instructor. The entrance wound is usually considerably smaller than the exit wound. The exit wound is frequently where the greatest blood loss occurs. Always remember to look for an exit wound. She had droned on and on, and I had never in my wildest imagination believed that I would ever need that information. One thing I did remember was that the instructor stressed the importance of getting the victim to the hospital as soon as possible. And, crapola on toast, here I was on a mountain.
“K,” I said as soothingly as I could, “I have to examine your back.”
“Shot . . . in . . . front . . .”
I had to strain to hear her. “I know, but I have to see where the bullet came out.”
A fleeting expression colored her face for a moment. “I might . . . bleed to death?”
“No! You are NOT going to die.” I tried to put as much conviction as I possibly could into my words, but my voice squeaked, just like that stupid, asinine, idiotic, dim-witted, fiendish freak of a maniac who’d shot her. “You are not going to die!”
I had to look at her back. Without my knowing it, she could be bleeding to death back there, her parka soaking up the fluid, the blood, her blood, before it could puddle around her. With my free hand, I pulled the two big hankies out of my leg pocket.
I wadded them up, eased the wad into place, and pressed her right hand over the makeshift bandage. “Hold this here.” When I was sure she had at least a little bit of pressure on it—she looked so weak—I positioned her left arm. “Push against your right hand with your left elbow,” I said. “Hold it tight against you. That way you won’t have to do all the pushing with your right hand.”
She studied me for a second or two. “Huh?”
“Never mind. Just push as hard as you can. I have to look at your back, and then I’ve got to find a bandage of some sort, and we need to figure out how we can get you down the mountain, and—”
“P?”
“What?”
“Shut . . . up.”
God, she sounded weak.
* * *
Harper was pushing as hard as he could. The cold felt good. He heard the sound of a distant gunshot, not a common sound along the trail, but it was so far ahead of him, he didn’t worry. He waited to see if there would be another report, but the mountains, the woods, were silent. Some poor rabbit had probably hit the dirt—he chuckled to himself—hit the snow.
He tried to focus on the Wantstring investigation, which had gotten precisely nowhere, but the pull of the exercise, his muscles working harder than they generally got a chance to do, was almost intoxicating. He’d spent so much time doing basically nothing recently, it felt good to push himself to go a little faster, lengthen his stride, swing his arms. He hadn’t looked at his watch before he left, but he could tell he was making good time. He forgot about his job, forgot about everything but the swish of his skis across the snow.
Ahead of him, another skier approached, heading downhill a lot faster than Harper was managing uphill. Harper adjusted his weight to carry him about a foot to his right and could see the other skier moving about that far to his right, so they could pass with no danger of collision.
“Good day to be out skiing,” Harper called out as they drew near to each other. The skier nodded in friendly acknowledgment. At least, Harper assumed it was friendly. It was hard to tell when someone was wrapped up that much against the cold.
As they passed each other, Harper had time to notice the ring of ice fully formed on the fellow’s knitted face mask, where the frigid air had frozen the moisture-laden breath coming from the skier’s mouth.
Harper shrugged—as much as one can shrug on skis. Full face masks were worthless unless you were standing still. Good thing the fellow was moving fast headed back toward town. That much ice would create a problem eventually. Happy to have his face free, he inhaled deeply. By the time that breath reached his lungs, his body had warmed it.
32
Crapola on Toast
I didn’t want to risk folding her over, so I reached behind Karaline and felt underneath her parka all the way from her hip to her shoulder blade. All the fabric was intact.
I tugged off my parka and tried to rip it apart. All that happened was I got something approximating rope burns on my fingers. How did women in pioneer days ever manage to rip apart their petticoats for bandages? They were always doing it in books and films. Now, when it was real life and I desperately needed something other than a couple of hankies to stem the flow of my dear friend’s lifeblood, I couldn’t make a scratch, much less a rip in the fabric. I tried my teeth. The effort left my parka soggy with saliva, but still intact.
I vowed to pull out my old S
wiss Army Knife and carry it with me everywhere from now on.
But for right now, what could I do? Please let her live.
* * *
Harper paused near a rock wall that towered twenty feet above the trail and unzipped his parka about halfway, releasing a cloud of steam. Cross-country, especially when you were going uphill, could work up a sweat.
He’d always liked this part of the Perth, ever since he’d found it while exploring shortly after he moved to Hamelin. Once these investigations were out of the way, he planned to invite Peggy up here for a picnic. He knew she loved it, too, because of the way her voice had softened when she described it for the police report. For that reason alone, it was doubly precious to him.
The police report. He went over the details in his mind, how Mac had broken his leg—where? He skied a few yards farther up the trail and located the sharp lump of fallen granite and the heavy branch beside it. The first bone Harper had ever broken was his big toe. Dropped a heavy rock on it when he was about eleven or twelve. It probably wouldn’t even have made a dent if he’d been wearing shoes. But he’d spent most of his boyhood summers barefoot over in Arkane.
He turned ninety degrees to his left, a maneuver that took a bit of time on skis, moved off the trail a few feet, and stopped, looking straight ahead of him at the curves of two birches leaning in toward a maple. If he squinted his eyes, he could see how they formed almost a heart shape.
He wondered what Peggy had looked like as a little girl.
* * *
I’d just leaned Karaline back against the woodstove when Dirk pounded through the door at a dead run. “Wha’ would be wrong?” He skidded to a stop—hard to do when you’re a ghost who can’t touch anything. How had he gotten any traction? “I heard the . . . the cannon,” he said for want of a better word. Maybe they didn’t have handguns where he was in Scotland when he was alive. “I was atop the wee hill.” His motioned toward the top of the steep mountain incline behind the cabin. “Mistress Karaline?” He studied her pale face, the blood on both our hands, and looked over at me. I could see fear, anger, and something approaching dread in his eyes.
