Murder on Ice

by Ted Wood

  I have never worked out why city people buy snowmobiles and ride them for fun. Up here they're a tool, a vehicle that does the work of a dog team, without the fighting. But they're no fun to ride, especially on a night like this one.

  By the time I got to Carl's place I could feel the beginnings of frostbite. There was almost no sensation in my cheeks and nose. I stood and pounded on his front door and pounded my frozen face with alternate hands until he opened up for me. I wished he would hurry. There were skidoo tracks on the road but I had no idea which way to follow them, and no idea who to look for if the tracks led to a crowd like there was at the Lakeside or the Legion. I needed some quick details from Carl and I could go after whoever had taken his film.

  I had never been in Carl's house before but had expected taste and elegance. Yesterday, things probably were that way. Tomorrow for sure, but tonight there was a welter of furniture, magazines, books, pictures, all tossed anyhow into the center of the living room. Carl was still wearing the clothes he'd had on at the Legion Hall, but the pockets in the jacket had been cut away raggedly.

  He said nothing to me as I entered, but stood there for me to check the damage and whistle.

  "Were they looking for the photographs you took at the Ball?"

  "That's what they said." He tossed his head to throw back his long blonde hair and waved his hands despairingly. "For a couple of lousy negatives they did this."

  I moved further into the room, stepping over the rubble, stooping to pick up a book. I closed it, noting automatically the title Out of Africa. "How many were there?"

  "Three of them, all wearing blue skidoo suits, one-piece jobs like the kind they sell in Canadian Tire. They all had red ski masks over their faces."

  "All dressed identically?"

  He nodded. "And very bloody tacky they looked, too."

  "Were they men, women, how tall, how heavy? I need anything you noticed, I want a handle on this thing."

  He was bending down to pick up an ebony carving that must have been some kind of fertility symbol. He noticed me watching him and went a little red, dropping the statue and straightening up, wiping his palms on his thighs. "Okay. I'm wasting time. Let me get a drink and I'll sit and concentrate."

  I didn't need a drink, but I wanted his concentration so I said nothing. He set a small sideboard back on its legs. It looked as if it cost as much as my house. He opened the front and swore once as liquor from a smashed bottle ran out onto his rug, a sand-colored Moslem carpet of some kind. He pulled out a bottle of Hennessy and two glasses, one of them snapped off at the stem. He poured about four ounces into each and handed the complete one to me. I nodded thanks and took it. I needed his memory. He was a photographer, he used his eyes better than most people.

  "What happened was I was working in the darkroom when they came in. The door at the side was locked, they smashed a pane of glass and let themselves in that way." He took a sip of his cognac and sat down, cross-legged among the ruined books and paintings. "I came out of the darkroom when I heard the noise."

  Now he straightened up suddenly, importantly, and walked to the back entrance to the room. "I was standing here and I said, 'What the hell is going on?' Something like that. Then the leader said. 'Give us the negatives, faggot.'"

  "The leader?" I prodded quickly.

  He shrugged. "Seemed to be. He was the only one to speak the whole time they were here. The others did as he told them. He had the authority, I suppose you'd say."

  "You're sure it was a man?"

  He cocked his head toward me, surprised. "Of course, why?"

  I gave him a little of the detail about C.L.A.W. that the prisoner had told me. "It's some kind of feminist movement. There may be men in it but they don't figure prominently so far."

  He sipped his cognac, then stood swirling it in the broken-stemmed glass. From his gesture this might have been an ordinary night and he would have been listening to Mozart on his stereo and having a nightcap in comfort. I felt sorry for him, but I was even more sorry for the girl at the motel and beginning to feel sorry for the Carmichael kid.

  "Let me replay this, if you don't mind," he said at last. I waved one hand in silence and he went out, scrunching over the debris, to the back door of his summer kitchen. He paused as he came back, balancing his glass on top of a plant pot that was still standing in the window.

  Now he advanced to the center of the room, stood still for a moment, backed off, advanced again, knelt down to his right side, covering his head with his left hand, then stood up.

  "The man was in front. He was close to your height, maybe five-eleven, well built. He was right-handed." He paused and thought for a moment. "He was the one who hit me and then showed the others how to shake the place down like this. He's the sonofabitch I hope you catch."

  "What color were his eyes?" I asked quietly.

  "Brown," Carl said without hesitation. "So were the eyes of the second person—slim hips, might have been a woman or a small man. I couldn't tell, he or she didn't move around much." He hissed, suddenly angry. "If he-she had moved much I would have known. You can always tell if it's a man by the articulation of the legs. Queens don't fool anybody."

  "What about the third one? What color eyes, any hair showing, what?"

  Carl put his hand to his chin, then clasped the other hand across his chest to lock the elbow. It was the move Jack Benny used to make on TV when the world was younger and warmer and things other than pain and humiliation were worth a laugh.

  "Undoubtedly a woman," he decided. "Not much in the boobies department, rather heavier in the hips, about five-four, perhaps one-thirty." He stopped for so long I was about to ask him another question before he said, "And she had brown eyes with seven gold flecks in the left pupil."

  "You're kidding!" I almost laughed. To stand in the wreckage of your home and take notice of that kind of detail called for a toughness of spirit most people don't have.

  "Absolutely true," he said, throwing up his hands. "I know you're going to catch her and when you do, I'll identify her for you."

  "So. Okay. What exactly happened after he hit you?" I was scribbling the descriptions in my book as I talked and he paused a moment to let me catch up.

  "They looked for the negatives of the film I had shot at the Ball. They got them right away, I hadn't even had time to print them up. Then, just to be sure, I guess, they did all this."

  "Was that the only reason, do you think?" It was a guess, but this was turning into an unusual case. I wondered if one of the C.L.A.W. people had been a closet gay, resentful about his leanings, carrying on the ancient sport of fag-bashing.

  Carl went back to his cognac and took a solid bite out of it. "I think the man was enjoying himself," he said simply.

  "I'll try to get them all," I promised. "I saw skidoo tracks outside, just point which way they went and I'll follow."

  He came to the door with me as I zipped up my parka and pulled down the flaps on my fur hat. It was savagely cold at his door but he stood there in his light jacket without shivering as he pointed out the direction they had taken. I admire that little guy. As I got on the machine he called out, "They went thataway!" and laughed.

  I laughed and started my skidoo. I didn't need to be an Australian bushman to follow the trail. Once he had told me which way was coming and which one going, I followed the overlapping belt tracks at close to thirty miles an hour. It seemed to me there were only two tracks. One person must have been riding pillion. On the machine it was almost calm as I ran with the wind at my back. The tracks were still crisp and fresh, only beginning now to drift in.

  Within two hundred yards they left the roadway and turned up over the rocks that loomed bare red in the headlights, swept clear of snow by the relentless wind. I followed up through the trees and onto an old logging trail that had been recleared that fall for snowmobiling. It was all part of the Reeve's plan for winter fun and games. He hadn't counted on its being used as a getaway road. But maybe the escapers hadn't reckon
ed on my following them, so I wound up the throttle and pushed on as fast as I could in the flat footprint of the machine ahead. The track led to a small open shelter in a clearing. It's not fancy—three walls and a roof with a stone fireplace. It's not worth vandalizing, and it's stood up for a few years now of snowmobiler rendezvous. The tracks turned into the front of it and I pulled in just behind, where they had obviously stopped. There was a welter of footprints and unmistakable evidence that a man had relieved himself, outside the shelter, out of sight. That meant Carl was right. At least one of the party was a man.

  I checked the ground and decided that the two machines had met up with a third. It was hard to examine the footprints in the snow with a flashlight, but it seemed that two other people had been waiting here. That meant I had five of them to worry about. I flashed the light around the shelter, but whoever it was had not whiled away the time carving their initials or leaving their wallets, so I was no further ahead. There was nothing to do but get back on my machine and follow the triple track further on down another branch of the trail.

  I could tell from a sudden dip that I must be nearing the lake, but was still surprised to burst suddenly out of the trees through one long snowdrift which had fortunately been beaten down enough by the people ahead that my machine didn't flounder. I gasped with cold as a long-bow wave of snow flung itself back over me, and I craned up tall to see over the windshield. The machine was not new and the windshield was scratched. With the loose snow on it, I couldn't see through. And now I needed to. The surface of the lake was frozen a foot thick, but on top of the ice the old snow had thawed in our bright January sunshine and refrozen until it was mirror slick. There were clear patches like this one all over the lake. Where the snow had clung it would be easy to follow the skidoo tracks, but here with new snow blowing, dry as sand over the smooth surface, I had to count on luck.

  I slowed my speed to just above walking pace, finding the beam of my light picking up dimples on the surface where falling snow had been crimped under the belts of the machines ahead and had stood long enough to sculpt its own tiny drifts. As I went on, my head stuck out to the side of the windshield, I gradually picked up the pace to perhaps half the speed the others would be making, moving surely to a destination somewhere on the lake. I had worked out that much. They had no other reason for heading north as they were doing, away from the highway. And that meant I was within six or seven miles of them, perhaps of the missing girl. I might even wrap up this case and make it home by midnight.

  And so I drove on, warmed by my own cleverness behind my single cone of light that picked up a million driven sparks of snow and the tiny crusted remains of a track in front of me.

  At the very limit of my vision I saw something dark and square edged, low to the ice. I slowed a fraction before the geometry made sense. It was an ice-fishing hut out over the deep shoals in mid-channel where the big pickerel spend their winter. There is a village of them out there, from late December until March, when I would start handing out warnings to bring them in before the breakup.

  A second hut came in view, and then a third, and then something so startling I let go of the handles of the machine to rub my eyes. The machine slowed to a stop on its deadman's throttle and I started out again slowly, not sure what I had seen. It was tall and white, flashing even whiter than the merciless snow. I wondered if it was an albino deer, and then my headlight caught it again and I drove up as fast as I could to the running woman, naked as the day she was born, screaming in a long formless wail.

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  6

  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 be
er 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.