Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  “Nick’s,” she said as she slid my card through her machine. “She’s open all the time.” She gave me my card and a receipt to sign. “Heading back today?”

  “Right after breakfast,” I said. “It’s a long drive.”

  She smiled. “Come back soon.”

  I ate at a small table by the front window at Nick’s. Three eggs over easy, home fries, double order of bacon, wheat toast, a giant glass of orange juice, two mugs of coffee. A fisherman’s breakfast, loaded with proteins and fats and evil carbohydrates. It would keep me going all day.

  Four or five men—they might have been the same guys in flannel shirts and baggy blue jeans and faded baseball caps who’d been there drinking beer the previous night—were having breakfast at the bar. A young couple with a baby in a high chair occupied one booth, and a middle-aged couple sharing a Sunday newspaper sat at one of the tables. Nick waited on all of us.

  I was on my second mug of coffee when she came over and sat across from me. “How was the motel?” she said.

  “Good. Comfortable.”

  “So you heading back home?”

  I nodded. “By popular demand.”

  She arched her eyebrows. “Huh?”

  I waved the back of my hand. “Everybody seems pretty anxious for me to leave.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I’m just hoping I can get back to Boston before it starts snowing again.”

  She pushed back her chair and stood up. “It’s in the forecast for later. Drive carefully.”

  “I will.”

  I paid my bill, and when I stepped outside, I saw that tiny little flakes of soft snow had begun sifting down while I was inside. Already a thin coating had covered the vehicles in Nick’s lot.

  I climbed into my car, turned on the windshield wipers, pulled out of the lot, and turned south. The sky was low and gray, heavy with moisture, as it had been quite consistently since New Year’s Day. It looked like it was planning to snow for a while.

  I stopped at the Exxon station next to the post office and filled up my tank. Inside, I found two bottles of orange juice and three Hershey’s bars and took them to the counter. When I paid the old guy who was sitting there working on the Sunday crossword puzzle, I asked him how long he thought it would take me to get to Boston.

  He scratched the side of his neck and pondered the question, then said, “If it don’t snow, four and a half, five hours. If this snow decides to get serious, who knows? What in hell you want to go to Boston for, anyway?”

  “I live there.”

  He nodded, as if I’d said something profound. “Good reason, I suppose.”

  I pulled away from the gas station and continued south. I passed the intersection and crossed the bridge by the frozen millpond, and a little over two miles later I came to a side road that veered off to the left.

  I slowed down, checked my rearview mirror to be sure nobody was behind me, and took that left. According to the map in my head that I’d sketched from the clock and the odometer in Albert Cranston’s Lincoln SUV the previous evening, in about two minutes I should come to another left that would take me north, parallel to the road that cut through the middle of Churchill, and if I kept my odometer on thirty, it would take me thirteen minutes to get to the right turn, and another minute-and-a-half to find the left that would take me past the long driveway that curved up the hill and through the evergreens to Judson McKibben’s big farmhouse.

  I drove past a couple of roadside farm stands bearing “Closed for the Season” signs, and a little over thirteen minutes later I came to the right turn I was looking for.

  An old metal building shaped like a small airplane hanger sat on the corner. I hadn’t seen it the previous night in the dark. Twenty-five or thirty snow-covered vehicles—sedans, sports cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and one yellow school bus—were parked haphazardly in a big side lot. The sign over the door read “Don’s Auto Body.” The area was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, but the front gates, I noticed, hung unlocked and half open. No lights glowed from inside the garage. It was Sunday. Even tin-knockers took Sundays off.

  Perfect.

  I continued following the map in my head. The narrow road twisted through woodland and swamp, and according to my odometer it was one-point-two miles from Don’s Auto Body to the rocky ice-rimmed stream that tumbled out of the woods and passed through a culvert under the road about a hundred yards before I came to the end of Judson McKibben’s driveway.

  I continued past the driveway for another half mile, then made a three-point turn and headed back to the auto-body shop.

  McKibben was smart and suspicious, and I was pretty sure Nate Harrigan, the chief of police, was no dummy. My impression was that Albert Cranston was the smartest of them all.

  If I’d done everything right, McKibben and Cranston now believed that they’d satisfied my curiosity, and Harrigan believed he’d intimidated me. Joanne Sweeney at the motel and Nick at the cafe and the guy at the gas station would all be able to report that the nosy lawyer from Boston had said he was going home, and in fact, they’d seen him driving south. He was worried about getting back to Boston before the snow got too heavy.

  I stopped in front of the auto-body place, got out, and pushed the chain-link gates all the way open. Then I got back into my car and drove into the lot. I found a space between a Dodge pickup and a Ford Explorer and nosed my BMW into it. The front of the Dodge was pushed in as if it had plowed straight-on into a brick wall. The sides and roof of the Ford were dented and crumpled, and all the windows were smashed, as if it had rolled down a rocky slope.

  By comparison, my BMW looked—well, it looked like a spiffy new BMW amid a bunch of banged-up old American vehicles, not even taking the Massachusetts plates into account. But like the other vehicles that were parked there, the roof and hood of my car were covered with snow, and I was fairly confident that nobody driving by would take a second look at it.

  I dug around in my duffel, found my digital camera, binoculars, tape recorder, Leatherman, Swiss Army knife, Smith & Wesson .38, extra bullets, flashlight, and Space blanket. The aluminum-lined Space blanket was an amazing invention that folded into a neat little square about the size of a pack of cards and weighed less. I looped the binoculars around my neck and tucked them inside the front of my parka. Everything else went into the deep pockets, including the juice and candy bars. I tried to distribute the weight evenly.

  I pulled on my black knit hat and fur-lined leather gloves, then slid out of the car and locked it. I walked to the front of the building, then turned and looked back. Aside from the tire tracks I’d left in last night’s snow leading into the auto-body lot, nothing looked amiss. At the rate today’s snow was falling, those tire tracks, plus my boot prints, would disappear in an hour.

  I adjusted the gates so that they hung half open the way they had when I’d driven in. Then I began trudging along the side of the road toward McKibben’s house.

  It was a snowy Sunday morning in January, and this appeared to be a little-traveled roadway. If everything went perfectly, I’d be able to walk the mile and a half to McKibben’s without anybody driving by. Moving briskly under normal conditions, I knew I could walk a mile in twelve to fifteen minutes. On this snow-packed road wearing my heavy insulated boots and many layers of woolen clothing, I figured it would take me closer to twenty minutes.

  It was probably asking too much for nobody to come along in twenty minutes. Nothing ever went perfectly.

  The snowbanks along the sides of the road were about waisthigh. The forest—a mixture of hardwoods and hemlocks, with alders and swamp maples in the low places—crowded close to both sides.

  A soft breeze murmured high in the hemlocks. In the distance a couple of crows cawed at each other. My boots crunched on the snow-packed roadway. Otherwise, the snowy world seemed uninhabited and still.

  I had been walking for about five minutes when I heard the growl of an engine in low gear comi
ng from around the bend behind me. I didn’t wait to see what it was. I launched myself over the snowbank, rolled under a hemlock bough, and lay flat on my belly.

  I peeked up as the vehicle came close. It was a dump truck with a yellow light revolving on its roof. A logo on the door indicated that it belonged to the Churchill department of public works. A plow was mounted up front and the truckbed was piled with sand, but the plow was up and it wasn’t spreading sand. If the snow persisted, it would soon have to go to work.

  I waited for the truck to pass and for the sound of its engine to fade around the corner before I slipped back out onto the road.

  A few minutes later I heard another engine. The sound was muffled by the snow and the hemlocks, and I couldn’t tell whether it was coming from behind me or ahead of me. I didn’t wait to see. I again slithered over the snowbank and crawled behind a brushy clump of alders.

  It was a big square SUV coming from the direction of McKibben’s house, and as it got closer, I saw that it was the same Lincoln SUV that Albert Cranston had driven when he shuttled me from the motel and back the previous night.

  Cranston was behind the wheel. He was driving very slowly, and I could see his face behind the windshield. He was hunched forward, tense and alert, and it looked like his eyes were darting from side to side, although I could have been imagining that.

  I lay flat on my belly behind the alders and tried to burrow into the snow. My parka was olive, my jeans were faded blue, my cap was black—all neutral natural colors that should not draw attention.

  If Cranston spotted me, I’d have to do some quick thinking to explain why I was hiding in the woods beside the road that led to Judson McKibben’s house with binoculars around my neck and a .38 revolver in my pocket.

  I tried to think quickly, just for practice, but nothing occurred to me.

  He was poking along in second gear, driving cautiously on this narrow snow-covered road. But he didn’t slow down or give any indication that he’d spotted something worth noticing as he approached and then passed my hiding place. He just kept going, and after a few minutes the sound of his engine faded and disappeared.

  I crawled back out to the road and started walking again. I walked fast. I didn’t want to encounter another vehicle.

  Soon I came to the place where the rocky brook curled out of the woods along the bottom of a hillside and passed through the culvert under the road. The end of McKibben’s driveway, I remembered, was just around the bend.

  If I figured it correctly, I could follow the brook into the woods for a couple hundred yards, then cut off to the left and climb up the hill. McKibben’s place was on the other side of the hill.

  The winter brook was running low and clear over a meandering sand-and-gravel streambed. It ranged in width from about five to ten feet. In most parts it ran just a few inches deep, although here and there the water quickened and funneled between some boulders and spilled into a pool deep enough for a trout to hide.

  I climbed over the snowbank and held on to some branches as I skidded down the slope to the brook.

  My leather Herman Survivors boots came up over my ankles. They were absolutely waterproof. When I stepped into the brook, I didn’t feel any cold, even though the water temperature was probably one degree above freezing.

  I picked my way carefully up the stream, feeling the stone-cobbled bottom with my toes before shifting my weight forward, as I had learned to do from a lifetime of wading—and slipping and falling more than once—in slick-bottomed trout streams. In places where it ran too deep I got out of the water and stepped from boulder to boulder. My aim was to leave no boot prints in the snow.

  Assuming the snow kept falling, it would eventually cover the tracks I would have left if I’d decided just to walk off the road and trek through the woods. But this was better. Even bloodhounds couldn’t follow me as long as I walked in the water and on the bare rocks.

  By looking back to the roadway, I judged that I’d gone far enough. I left the stream and began slogging up the wooded hillside. It was slow going. The snow was thigh deep, and within minutes I was sweating heavily under all my woolen layers.

  After fifty yards or so my route intersected a well-used game trail running diagonally up the hill ahead of me. It looked like the local deer herd had been following it since the year’s first snowfall, and hares and squirrels and turkeys had also been using it. It wasn’t exactly a boulevard, but the snow was packed enough to make the going easier for a human animal such as I.

  The crest of the hill grew thick with a mixture of scrubby oaks and big hemlocks. On the far side, it sloped down to McKibben’s clearing. The game trail had taken me to a vantage overlooking the rear of his rambling buildings.

  A low structure with double-wide doors that seemed to be a horse stable was attached to a big barn. The barn had glass windows and wide weathered boards and a couple of aluminum stovepipes poking through the roof. It was attached to McKibben’s farmhouse by a long one-story ell.

  I didn’t know what I expected to see, but I was prepared to spend the day looking.

  I glanced at my watch. It was about half past ten on this Sunday morning. I would watch until dark. It would be better to walk out in the dark. I wouldn’t even need my flashlight. I could follow the game trail, then cut down the slope to the brook, and then follow the brook back to the road.

  In mid January, darkness fell around five in the afternoon. Earlier on an overcast afternoon. Six, six and a half hours. I could do that. I had juice and chocolate and warm clothes and patience, and I didn’t mind peeing in the woods.

  McKibben told me he lived there with his cousin, Jeanette Perkins, his housekeeper, and Albert Cranston, his caretaker. He was still mourning the death of his Ursula, he said, and he just wanted to be left alone.

  Everything he told me was plausible. He really did seem to be a sad, grief-stricken man.

  But he had lied to me. I was sure of it. I just didn’t know which things he said were the lies or how significant they were.

  I chose a large hemlock on the crest of the ridge and crept under its bottom boughs. There was very little snow on the ground near the trunk of the tree. I brushed it away, and underneath was a soft bed of dead needles. I used the blade on my Leatherman to cut out a few branches to give me a clear look at McKibben’s buildings and yard and the big sloping field behind the barn. Then I opened my Space blanket and spread it on the hemlock needles. It would insulate my butt from the cold ground.

  I wiggled around so that I could lean my back against the trunk of the tree and scan the area below me with my binoculars.

  I took a few photos with my digital camera—some wide-angle shots, and then, through the zoom lens, shots of windows, doors, and any other details that might be worth blowing up on my computer later.

  I put my camera back in my pocket.

  Ate a Hershey’s bar and took a sip of juice.

  Sat there and watched.

  Nothing happened.

  About five hours later, or so it seemed, I checked my watch. It was eleven-thirty. The same day. The same morning, in fact.

  A chickadee landed on a hemlock branch so close I could have reached out and touched it. I made little kissing sounds and he turned to look at me.

  Then he flew away in a soft whirr of wings.

  Sometime later a door on the side of the barn opened and a person wearing a knit cap, a hip-length parka, blue jeans, and boots came out. Through my binoculars I could see it was a young, plain-looking woman. She had a blond braid hanging halfway down her back.

  She wasn’t Jeanette and she certainly wasn’t Albert Cranston. Which meant that McKibben had definitely lied to me.

  I barely had time to ponder why he hadn’t mentioned this blond girl when the door opened again and another young woman came out. This one wore no hat. She had short brown hair and a round face. I didn’t recognize her, either. She was carrying a broom.

  Both girls were teenagers, I guessed. Seventeen or eighteen, at the
most.

  The blonde picked up the snow shovel that was leaning against the side of the barn and began scraping off the walkway. The other girl swept the snow off the steps.

  I got out my camera, zoomed in on them, and took a few photos.

  From my hiding place I could hear them talking, although I couldn’t make out their words. They didn’t laugh or fool around the way a couple of carefree teenage girls might, and their body language in general suggested to me that they weren’t, in fact, carefree.

  After a while they went back inside.

  A few minutes later a different young woman came outside. She was also a blonde. I put the binoculars on her, and when she turned her face in my direction, I was pretty sure I recognized her. I’d only seen her that one time outside the Shamrock Inn. It had been dark, and most of my attention was on Misty. But I was pretty sure this was Kayla, Misty’s friend.

  She disappeared behind the stable, then reappeared lugging an armload of cordwood. She took it to the door. She pushed it open with her shoulder and took the wood inside.

  A few minutes later smoke began to curl out of one of the barn’s stovepipes.

  I continued watching and waiting. But now I had a puzzle to occupy me.

  Why was Kayla here? Who were the other girls? What were they doing here? Did they live with Dr. Judson McKibben? And why did McKibben want to keep them secret? What was going on here, anyway?

  I watched and pondered and sipped my juice. I got a cramp in my leg, which I pounded with my fist until it went away. I ate another Hershey’s bar. I wiggled my butt around, trying to find a more comfortable sitting position.

  Nothing happened for at least a week and a half.

  When I looked at my watch, it was a little before one in the afternoon.

  A few minutes later I heard a creaking noise. As I watched, a double-wide door on the side of the stable building swung open and a vehicle backed out. It was a panel truck.

  The driver got out and went back to the garage door. I looked through my binoculars. It was Albert Cranston. He was wearing the same parka he’d had on when he came to my motel to pick me up.