Murder on Ice

by Ted Wood

  I got back on and told the girl "Hold tight!" then drove the machine around in a big circle, picking up speed and coming to the gap at full throttle. There was a jolt as we passed over and I slowed back to normal pace and went on watching. I was anxious to be back at the station, thinking about the case rather than my own survival.

  Nobody had been to the station since I left and my skidoo tracks were well drifted in. I wondered how much more snow was going to fall. We already had ten new inches and more was layering down every second. It was a worry. If I went out again I might get the snow machine bogged. Those things aren't magic carpets. They need firm footing or they're liable to sink right into drifts and start cavitating. It was something else to worry about but first I wondered how Val Summers and my prisoner were.

  They were fine. Val had taken the plastic seal off the thermostat and cranked up the heat a notch so the station was gloriously warm to come into. And there was fresh coffee. She hadn't slept but had been talking to the prisoner, woman to woman now the limelight was off and the prisoner was feeling a bit foolish.

  I asked Val to stay out back with the first girl while I drank coffee with the second one. In the full light she turned out to be a dish. She was five-six, one-fifteen, blonde hair, even the makeshift outfit I'd scored for her didn't hide a real sexual confidence. I guessed she was the C.L.A.W. member who had worked as a model. I also guessed that it wouldn't take long to turn her off her man-hating, she seemed too warm a woman for lifelong separation from us all.

  She had the same story as the first girl. This mysterious Margaret woman had contacted her after a hearing at the Ontario Civil Rights Board. She had been protesting harassment by her employer, a fashion-house proprietor who reckoned his models should do their bit for corporate earnings by putting out for his out-of-town buyers. She had kneed him and taken her complaint to the government. He had turned up for the hearing in a wheelchair hired for the occasion, with his wife as character witness, and the case had been dismissed. Whispering through his pain, her employer had told her there and then to look for another job. She was in a boiling fury at him and all other men and had been inducted into C.L.A.W. It might not have stuck in her case except that the fashion industry is a small circle and she found herself unable to get more modeling anywhere. On top of that, her former boss was out of his wheelchair the next morning, taking off for Miami with, for once, his lawful wedded wife.

  "So what was your job this evening? I already know the Carmichael girl was in on it and didn't need dragging away. What did you do?"

  "I drove the getaway truck." She cocked her head to one side and her sweetly blonde hair fell sideways down to her shoulder. She beamed at me like a little girl who had remembered the right text in Sunday School.

  "You understand the vehicle was stolen."

  She pulled her head erect at once and tried to look less amused. "I was told we had the use of it for the evening."

  "You did. But the owner never knew it. So when you reached the highway, what happened?"

  She looked at me for a long moment. You could almost see the chess pieces moving behind her eyes. I had saved her pretty bacon out there on the ice, but I was still a Male Chauvinist and doubly a Pig, the enemy. She wondered what she owed me. I reminded her. "You could have been the second victim of the evening if I hadn't stopped. Somebody already strangled your buddy at the Muskellunge Motel."

  Her eyes filled with tears. It was more impressive than screams or sobs. They were the honest tears of somebody for a friend you won't see again. "Poor Katie," she whispered. "Who would do that to her?"

  "That's what I'm trying to find out. Who did she come up here with?"

  "She said she was coming up with her boyfriend. She was driving, he wanted her to, but he was paying everything."

  "That's no big deal—a few gallons of gas, a motel room."

  "It was to her. Her husband never put out a nickel for her. She thought this guy was marvelous."

  "Did you ever meet him?" I wanted facts, not True Romance. This was a murder.

  She shook her head. "We were going to meet him tonight. He was going to be at the rendezvous with Nancy and Margaret."

  "And where was that?"

  She shook her head again, sadly. I think she would have told me had she known. Now she was warm and safe she realized how close she had been to death. "I'm sorry. I just don't know, we were never told."

  "So all right, tell me where you went after the kidnapping." I already knew the first moves and it was a cold trail anyway, but I hoped it might have some kind of pattern to it, like a child's dot-to-dot puzzle. Maybe with some more information I could infer where the others fit in.

  "Katie was waiting for us at the highway in the big wagon. Rachael and Nancy and I got in and went back to Katie's cabin."

  "That was number six? And Katie was driving a big Ford wagon?"

  She nodded impatiently. "Cabin six. But only Katie went inside. Rachael and I and Nancy went to another one that had been rented for us by Rachael's boyfriend."

  "Was his name Nighswander?"

  "I don't know." She almost shrieked it. Her eyes blazed. "Believe me, if I knew, I would say."

  "Did you go into this other cabin?"

  "Yes, we all did, and Nancy took off her silly swimsuit and put on some street clothes."

  "What kind of clothes—a skirt, a suit, what?"

  I might have guessed. Like all good man-haters, Nancy Carmichael had put on blue jeans. "With an Aran sweater, oyster-colored." On top of which she had put on her skidoo boots and her three-thousand-dollar designer coonskin coat.

  "Then what happened?"

  "That was our part of the exercise completed. Rachael and I left the cabin and walked out front. We were picked up there by another car. A man was driving."

  "What did he look like?"

  She shrugged. "It was hard to see, there was almost no light. I would have said he was under thirty and not very big or very heavy. But he had a wool hat on and I couldn't see much of his face or hair color or anything."

  He might have been one of the three men at the Tavern. I stopped and counted bodies. If Nighswander was part of this, then I had three men against me—two now, with him handcuffed to the log box, as well as the two surviving C.L.A.W. people, Margaret and Rachael. That meant a minimum of four. Three of them had gone with Nancy Carmichael across the ice. That left one wild card somewhere. I wondered where. I needed help, that much was certain.

  "Where did he drive you?"

  She frowned. It was her first artificial gesture. It looked the kind of move she made when men asked her to do things she wasn't crazy about. "We went back down the highway, the way we'd been, and past Murphy's Harbour."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "Positive. Rachael pointed out the Toyota. It was where I'd left it, and we all laughed."

  "And you stopped where?"

  It was as I had begun to guess. There's a provincial campground just south of the turn-off. They had driven there and pulled into the parking lot.

  "The car got stuck but the driver called it some bad names and managed to get through the snow and into the center."

  "What happened then."

  "There were two snowmobiles there. Somebody had taken them off a trailer."

  "How do you know?" If she were right, the trailer might still be there, perhaps with a license plate on it that would lead me into the middle of this tangle instead of bouncing around the edges.

  "Just observation. It had gone, but I could see where it had been driven away. Like, you know, there were two sets of tire tracks—the car, and then the trailer tracks smaller and over the top."

  "You're very observant, noticing something like that." I kept my voice neutral. The comment could have been either a compliment or a sneer. She took it as a compliment. I was beginning to like her better than the other C.L.A.W. member.

  "Wasn't I, though? The thing was, nobody was there for a couple of minutes. We wondered whether to stay in the ca
r or look around. I was looking for footprints to see if anybody had been there recently."

  "And had they?"

  "Yes. Margaret was there. She was sheltering in the privy but she came out when she saw we'd come."

  "You're sure it was Margaret?"

  "Oh yes. She was all dressed up in a skidoo suit and red ski mask but I could tell it was her. There's a big street light in the middle of the lot. You know."

  I plodded on through the story, taking her back over parts she didn't remember the first time. It took ten or fifteen minutes, and by the end I knew that the three women had been joined by Nancy and a man on another snow machine. The car took off then, back north toward the Murphy's Harbour cutoff. The man who had brought Nancy back took the driver aside first and talked to him and then came back to the women. My new prisoner, whose name was Freda, "Freddie" to the cell members of C.L.A.W., had taken one machine with Nancy on the back. They had followed the other two across country, over the frozen marsh and through the woods to the shelter I had found earlier. The other three people had left them there for half an hour and then returned and led them on across the lake to the ice huts. At that point they had stopped and undressed Freddie and left her. She did not know why, but I was becoming certain that it had been solely to prevent my catching up with them. They had seen my lights behind them. None of it was much help. I thanked her anyway and said, "I'm going to have to lock you up, along with your friend from the dance. It's no fun, but it's safer than that ice hut."

  She was sitting across the desk from me and she stood up slowly. I thought she was going to protest but instead she stretched out her hand to me. I took it and she pressed it.

  "If you weren't the heat, I'd kiss you," she said matter-of-factly. She was looking at me calmly and I realized that she meant every word.

  "Save it. You'll hate my guts by the time you come to court on Monday," I told her. She laughed and shook her head.

  "I don't think I will, but right now I'm saying thank you."

  "Part of the service," I said. I had more on my mind than flirtation. I had seen Nighswander with two other men. Neither of them fit the description of the guy who had wrecked Carl's house and abandoned this girl on the ice. I was guessing he was also the man who had murdered the girl in the cabin. He was a killer, not a big-city limp-wrist, and I had to get back out into the snow and go look for him.

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  8

  I locked her away and called Val out into the front of the station to bring her up to date on what had been happening. She was afraid. The situation was heating up. The tension had awakened the bad moments from the time her husband had been killed. Like most people she did not realize that evil is almost always selfish and casual. The people involved in giving pain don't consider their victims as people, they don't climb outside their own heads at all. They do whatever they want and are puzzled when the judge or some social worker asks them how they could have done it. Val had swallowed that fact along with the last of her tears for her husband, and now she was tasting its bitterness.

  I promised to be back as soon as I could and I took down the station shotgun and checked the load. "You've got Sam. He can disarm anybody in a flash. And you've got the gun. If you want, I'll call the Legion and have some old soldier come down here and stick around," I offered.

  "They're probably too drunk to know what's happening." She tried a tough little grin. "Don't worry. I'll be fine."

  I kissed her on the nose and winked at her. "Right back. I'm going to follow up those tracks." I knew she was right about the men from the dance. If I asked for one I would get twelve, and they would be in no shape to do much more than blunder around roaring. I would move quietly and more efficiently on my own.

  The wind was blowing just as hard and the snow was sifting down fine as flour. There's a local saying, "Little snow—big snow," and tonight was proving the point. We were going to end up with two feet before the night was over. I tramped back through the big drift to the garage behind the station. There was a five-gallon can of gasoline there, and something even more important—my snowshoes. I brought them out to the machine, topped up the gas tank, and clipped the snowshoes each side of the seat on the brackets I'd had installed. If the machine broke down, I would be able to tramp back over the snow without dying of exhaustion.

  I cruised back into town, staying in the middle of the road. The force of the wind had drifted snow over much of the track I'd made a quarter-hour earlier, and I wondered how much I would find on the icy trail I'd been following when I encountered Freddie. But I had a hunch the others had been heading straight for shelter. And that meant I was looking for one of only a dozen or so cottages in a straight line from the last track I had been following.

  I ran through town, past the Tavern, past the marina, past the line of ice sculptures that had been built during the week. The sculptures were obscured by snow, but I could pick out Carl Simmonds's effort, an eight-foot Mickey Mouse, and I grinned. Trust Carl to do something other than madonnas and snow queens and castles. He would win tomorrow. It might give him some consolation for the wrecking of his home.

  I decided to follow my hunch. I would retrace my track out to the ice huts, then head north from there until I found a cottage with snowmobile activity around it. When I did, I would break in and check. It would mean I would lose the case in court. In a warm room, miles and months removed from the reality of tonight, some smooth lawyer would pillory me for violating somebody's rights. But I didn't care. I wasn't out to win cases or popularity contests. I wanted Nancy Carmichael safe. Let the lawyers scream. The people of Murphy's Harbour would back me up. They'd done it before.

  I ran up the road around the lake, to the point where I had come up out of the bush and headed for town. I ducked back through the trees and out onto the ice. Going on instinct and my knowledge of the lake, I drove out to the ice huts where I had found the girl. By now the snow had been falling long enough to obliterate most of the skidoo tracks I had found earlier. Without them to follow I was more careful, remembering now what the locals had taught me about the ice in this area. Somewhere above the narrows, close to the place where the C.L.A.W. people had taken to the lake surface, there was a long open section. Some quirk of the current prevented it from freezing completely, although occasionally a treacherous inch or so of ice would cover the gap. Murphy's Harbour people referred to it as "The Cut" and could name the last dozen or so men to go through it. Most of them had been snowmobilers, but one Indian trapper had gone through and so had an exuberant drunk who had driven his pickup out to the ice huts and then had attempted to take a short cut back to Murphy's Harbour. He was still down there somewhere, in his steel coffin; the divers had never managed to locate him.

  But I was confident now that I was heading north, away from the cut. I thought ahead as I drove, remembering which cottages lay on this course and what I knew about their owners. I drew the map of the lake in my mind, marking out any places that were winterized. I had checked them all a week ago, making sure none had been broken into. Some were still in use—a group of four or five on the east side of the lake, just south of the narrows, and another one on Frog Island. And that was the recollection that made me reach forward and switch off the headlights.

  There was one cottage on the island, a big rambling clapboard place like a beach house on Cape Cod. It stood on a rock at the southeast corner of the island. What made it important was the owner, someone I had met once last September on a morning I had paddled my canoe up there along the reed beds. The owner had been out in a solid flat-bottomed little boat with a Remington pump-action shotgun and a limit of mallards. Duck season was open, the sight was not surprising except for one detail. The owner was a woman and she fit the description both C.L.A.W. members had given me of their society's matriarch.

  I swung my snowmobile half left on a course that would take me three hundred yards downwind of the island, far enough from it that they would never hear my motor above the
roaring of the wind. I reached forward and switched off the headlight so nobody would see me coming and dropped my speed. Now that I no longer had to follow tracks it was easy to drive. I watched ahead for bumps or holes and steered by the pressure of the wind coming at me from my right. My eyes soon adjusted to the darkness. The dark was almost worth being free of the hypnotic corkscrewing of the snow coming into the headlight. And suddenly the black whale-bulk of trees loomed on my right front quarter.

  I coasted to a stop, put the key to the engine in my pocket, and unclipped my snowshoes from their brackets. I didn't need them on the hard surface of the ice so I tucked them under my arm until I came to the first long drifts in the lee of the trees. The snow had gathered into tapered piles that would have been pretty in bright sunlight if I'd been carrying a camera instead of a Colt .38 in my gloved hand.

  I went around the island into the teeth of the wind until I reached the edge of the marsh that gave the place its name. All the frogs were four feet under the ice right now, oblivious to the cold. I almost envied them as I pushed my gun back in my pocket and crouched to slip my boots into the snowshoe bindings. I use Indian-style attachments, loops cut from an old truck inner tube. They don't look as fancy as the leather buckles you get when you buy new snowshoes from Canadian Tire, but you can slip them over your boots without taking your gloves off, and that's worth any esthetics you have to sacrifice. Besides, you can slip them on or off in seconds.

  The drifts were up to eight feet high behind the rocks on the edge of the marsh, but I stamped up over the top of them, sinking in less than knee deep. By the time I reached the old snow on top of the rocks I was sinking only a couple of inches. The snow was thinner there and my snowshoes snagged every few steps in the blueberry bushes underneath. I lifted my feet higher and placed them more carefully, but still stumbled. I swore as I fell, but in the same instant I saw the wicked orange eye of a muzzle flash wink at me from a window of the cottage.