by John Farrow
The road ends and they must tramp, as he and Sandra have done, on foot.
This time, the striking views provoke his tears. His eyes blurry, he stumbles. For a second time, Louwagie makes a good impression on him, forging on without stopping to help, leaving it to Cinq-Mars to pull himself together and catch up.
He’s glad of that. The man has his woes, but he’s capable in a crisis when his forlorn demons fall away. Good to know.
Down hilly paths into pastoral meadows and up the opposite banks into another clearing, then a quick jaunt through the woods, pacing themselves but going hard, fast, and it’s back out under the sunlight and over a stream and across a broad rock outcropping that resembles a giant tortoise’s shell. He stops once, and hates this, but he must lean over, hands on his knees, to catch a breath. He’d love to be superhuman and race ahead, but he can’t, he needs to breathe. Louwagie, younger, faster, also takes a breather, although his recovery time is quicker and he carries on ahead of Émile. The ex-cop does a calculation. Six good deep breaths, then one more, and he’s back in pursuit of this singular hope, this wish, that he’s not too late, that somehow, whatever madness runs rampant here, Sandra lives.
Émile speaks to her as he runs. Speaks to his God. Prays. Moans. Weeps again and flings himself down a hillock in a renewed fury of will and aggression, and he will not think the worst and he will not stop. He sustains the pace and a hundred yards on he passes Officer Wade Louwagie. The younger man’s chest heaves in exhaustion and pain.
He slows down through a stretch of cooler woods, grateful for the arbor’s shade, and just before the bare sunlight breaks again, he stops. Émile breathes deeply, staying upright.
Louwagie stops beside him.
“She’s got to be alive,” Émile says.
“Yes,” Louwagie concurs. Émile glances at him. The cop wants to say more, to be more encouraging, but he can’t talk. He has no breath. Émile touches his shoulder, and the man places his opposite hand over his. They say more that way. Then press on, falling into an improvised scamper, a half run, half high-speed walk.
Roadcap warned that more than two paths connect to Seven Days Work. A network of trails like arteries pump hikers in and out of the space. Any avid walker knows the maze. To monitor every route is beyond their scope, and only the two main trails leading to roads and possible exit vehicles are covered. If a criminal is foolish enough to assume that Cinq-Mars is coming up from Whale Cove, as he’s doing, leaving the exit via the Whistle free, he’ll be caught. Slim chance of that. Cinq-Mars runs and knows that this is not as it has always been for him in the city. He cannot call out uniforms from multiple stations and summon the SWAT team. This is simply all he can do for now, and all he can do for now is run.
He’s frightened that he’s being lured to the precipice. She’s probably crow meat by now up on Seven Days Work. Like Sandra, he’s in the hands of his enemies, whomever they might be. They’re pulling his strings, they’re in charge. And why would they guide him here if not to enjoy his agony when he finds his wife eviscerated? His darkest thought, yet he fights to cling to a fervent hope. Killers don’t normally volunteer information about their crimes, nor guide authorities to the scene. That helps him to believe what he wants to believe, what he insists on believing: that Sandra is all right, that whatever is going on, this is not that, and whatever this is, you’ll come through. Sandra!
Reaching another clearing, with stupendous views across the bay under a brilliant sun, Cinq-Mars discerns that he was right to send Roadcap on this mission. Although the younger man has had to cover twice the distance he has, he’s now in sight. He’s fit. He’s still running, a jog, but a quick one, while Cinq-Mars brings his hands back down to his knees and works to breathe. He vomits. He has to. His breakfast rising up through his diaphragm and gathering with his fright and panic and need. A spasm so violent it tears his lungs out of him, and now Louwagie is back alongside him, a hand on his back, advising him. “Breathe, Émile. Just breathe. We don’t have any brown bags up here. You’ve got to breathe steady. Breathe.”
Cinq-Mars points. Louwagie sees Roadcap then, too, and knows what this might mean. They’ve covered almost the full distance between the Whistle and Whale Cove and still no sign of Sandra. A cruel wild-goose chase? Louwagie, then, sees Roadcap stop dead, and he has seen them, too, but he is viewing something else or has heard something or someone and now waves his arms. The sweetest signal. He’s jumping up and waving his arms.
“Émile!” Louwagie cries out, breathless himself, needing to breathe deeply himself. “Has he found her?”
Pure adrenaline now, Émile runs on. For moments at a time, he’s partially supported by Louwagie’s strong hand. He’s puffing and spitting and his heart is all but bursting from his chest, giving out. He slows when he sees her, or at least sees where Roadcap is headed, and that lump hanging on a tree trunk might be her. A flash of color, a blouse perhaps, blowing in the breeze. He slows, not knowing how she will be found, a photo of Lescavage assailing his brain, not knowing if she is even the one strapped to a tree, waiting to be found. But who else?
Dead or alive? The question an intruder that occupies the whole of his being now. Dead or alive? Alive! Alive! Alive! he shouts out to himself. He assails the sky, all hope, and still no evidence to be seen.
Cinq-Mars stops twenty yards off. Louwagie is at his side. Roadcap’s men are far behind him, trying to run but really only staggering along, clutching their sides. Roadcap, though, is by the tree, which curves outward from its base, where a limp form hangs out over the edge of an impossibly high cliff. Cinq-Mars stares. He waits. He can’t breathe. His heart has quit.
Then Roadcap waves him on, shouts, “She’s here! She’s alive!”
ALIVE!
His body’s more battered than he realized and it’s all he can do to hobble on. An ankle is twisted, his hips rebel, and his tongue is lolling out of his mouth, bloated as he gasps for air. Rocking from side to side in a spasmodic motion that he can neither understand nor control, he pulls up next to his wife where she’s lashed to the trunk, and collapses in a heap, nearly toppling off the edge into the ocean below.
“Émile!” she cries out. Her voice!
He’s sliding off the edge when his fingers snare a root and he secures a toehold on a jutting stone.
“I got this!” he calls out, though the root is bending and the stone feels as though it’s crumbling. “Leave me be! Get her off! Get her off!”
“Oh God, you’re a mess,” Sandra says, and he laughs, and squirms in an attempt to help himself back up and not slide off the edge that slopes downward into the sea. He carefully cranes his neck around to look up at her.
“Sandra.”
She’s weeping. Her cheeks are wet.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be.”
“Get her off!”
Louwagie and Roadcap try to unknot the twine that binds her, multiple wraps, but it’s impossible. Roadcap pulls out a knife. Although the policeman confiscated one of his, he rarely goes anywhere without one, never knowing when he might be enchanted by a low tide or a beautiful flowering of dulse.
“Careful,” Louwagie warns, whispering, the danger implied but not stated. Roadcap nods. The Mountie has wrapped an arm around Sandra, but her body leans out over the edge of the cliff, with little surface at her feet to land upon. If released suddenly, she might be hard to catch. A simple trip and she’ll sail clear the whole way down. At least Cinq-Mars is easing his way back up to safety, and finally he shoves himself to his knees. “Steady” is Louwagie’s warning to Roadcap, but a knife stroke suddenly releases more twine than expected and Sandra bursts from her restraints, crying out, falling torso-first onto the sloped grade of the cliff. Louwagie deflects her collapse but loses her from his grasp. Her knees hit next and hard, but her torso is bending over the ledge and she’s looking down hundreds of feet to the surf below when Louwagie clutches a thigh in the crook of his elbow. Émile lunges for he
r also and snags her belt, but his momentum pushes her down closer to the edge. He’s lost his foothold, and his handhold now barely sustains him as he overlooks the sea. Louwagie further secures his grip on her thigh, but it takes yeoman strength to clutch the tree trunk with his fingertips and keep himself on solid ground.
One simple slip, and all three will slide over the cliff.
They shout to one another in combined chaos and delirium and panic.
Roadcap is the only one left with free hands and a secure purchase, and he sorts out the situation on the fly. They have but seconds. He comes around behind Louwagie and tells him what he’s about to do. He’ll pull Louwagie back while the policeman maintains his hold on Sandra. That will give the Mountie an instant to improve his grip on the tree trunk. If his fingers slip—and his grip is tenuous—the three will go over the edge. Louwagie wants to argue, but there’s no time for that. Roadcap positions himself behind the tree to provide full purchase, and he’s able to heave. He’s strong. He has Louwagie wholly in hand and all three persons are yanked back and in the same instant, Louwagie reconstitutes his grip on the tree and improves his footing. Exactly as Roadcap instructed. He’s steady now. He’s confident now. He’s fully stretched out between the tree trunk and Sandra’s thigh and can do no more, but he’s holding firm. Émile is staring straight down the cliff into the waters below and sliding farther. An endless fall is imminent, and while he resists what overcomes him, he feels eternity’s touch right up his spine. He’s familiar with danger, knows the calm that takes over at such moments, knows his brain is firing at lightning speed, but in this instance, among all his near-death experiences, he is obliged to do nothing more than not move. He wills himself not to move even as his body slips farther off Earth’s most enduring rock.
Way below him, a pair of seagulls glide. Effortlessly free. He sees that. He thinks of that. Their white wingspans sharp against the dark rocks and water below. The gulls give the distance, his long plummet, definition. He will pass them by on his way down. Sandra’s voice snaps him back from the brink of shock.
“Émile.”
“Sandra,” he says.
They say nothing more than that, but everything they know and believe and all their love is communicated. He has her clasped by the waist and hangs on.
“Quiet, everybody,” Roadcap commands.
They obey.
“Émile,” Roadcap says. “You’re the problem. Your weight is too far forward.”
So he came to rescue Sandra and now might send them both to oblivion. “I’ll let go. Nobody’s going down with me.”
“Émile,” Sandra says, breathless.
“Be quiet.” Roadcap’s voice is controlled, if not calm. “In a moment, on my command, I need you to release your wife very carefully. Very slowly. You think you’re holding her up. She’s holding you. Your weight is the problem. I’m going to get a grip on you. Wait for my command.”
Cinq-Mars is in an awkward position. Roadcap must hook a foot around the base of the tree, stretch his other leg out so that he’s almost doing the splits, and crook that ankle in front of Émile’s knee. Then he grips him by his leather belt and the waistband of his trousers, and when he has as good a hold as he’s going to get, as good a hold as Émile has on Sandra, he says, quietly, emphatically, “Ease off on her, Émile. Starting now. Let go.”
With all of eternity before him, he must let go.
Facing downward, his feet on higher ground, Émile does what he’s told, loosening his grip on his beloved. She remains in Louwagie’s firm clutch. He puts his left hand down when advised to do so, grips a rock with his right hand when that’s the instruction. Then Roadcap asks him to do a kind of flopping motion. “Like a seal. From your knees, then your hips, up through your torso. Only flop yourself back up toward me. I’ve got a hold on you. I won’t let go. Give it a try.”
He does this awkward flop on his belly back an inch. He’s thrilled by that inch. Ecstatic, even. The second attempt yields no progress, and on the third he slides downward and everyone yells in unison. Sandra screams his name, and Émile is again staring into the abyss. Blood rushes to his head. He’s petrified now. His fingers and arms are straining. Oh to be younger, stronger than this. But that thought, an admission of defeat and dejection, is what he needs to steel his resolve. He can find it in himself to do this.
Roadcap is stretched out in agony now, his legs strained to the breaking point. He’s barely able to maintain his handhold on the man, and grunts as he breathes.
“Émile,” he says, and they all hear the desperation in his voice. “We’ve got to time it right. Coordinate. When you’re up in the air for a millisecond, that’s when I have to yank you back. Knees first, Émile. Not your hips. Knees first. On my count. One. Two. Three!”
They gain an inch or two. Panting in pain now, Roadcap wastes not a second’s time. “Again! One. Two. Three!”
Another inch, but this time Émile has a solid grip with both hands and a toe.
“I got this!” he calls out. I got this!”
That news allows Roadcap to alter his position, and he squiggles back. He keeps his handhold but straightens his legs to lie parallel to Émile.
“Nice and easy. Crawl back.”
He does so. Backward. Crab-like, slow and meticulous. He’s halfway to where he can stand when Roadcap leaves him on his own. Roadcap grips the tree trunk as Louwagie does and leans way forward. All he can grasp is Sandra’s hair.
“This might hurt,” he warns her.
“Who gives a—”
He yanks her straight back and she screams, if only from the shock, and so does Émile in sympathy and alarm. But she is safe now, and grabs hold of the tree trunk on her own. Louwagie has come back partway with her, and now is free to pull himself to safety. Roadcap helps Sandra around to the secure side of the tree. Émile works his way back up the rock face, and all four slump in a pile upon the ground.
They just lie there.
Louwagie is bent, as if mangled between the couple, and keeps them from colliding into each other in a dangerous way as they attempt to move. Émile says, panting, “Sandra, what was that about?”
“Just hanging out,” she pants, “by the seashore. Ouch, my hair.”
Lying on his back, Roadcap chuckles.
“Okay, you two,” Louwagie interrupts, pawing at the earth and trying to straighten his posture without getting up. “Enough wisecracks. Who did this to you, Mrs. Cinq-Mars? And how? Why? What can you tell us?”
When she tries to answer she only gurgles at first. She coughs up dirt.
The four silently and simultaneously agree that it’s time to sit up. Save for a scrape on her forehead, Sandra is physically sound, although the carnage her nerves have endured emerges as she tries to explain. She was brought up to Seven Days Work with a hood over her head in an all-terrain vehicle.
“Those things aren’t allowed up here,” Louwagie takes umbrage, then realizes that that’s the lesser crime of the day.
“Narrows down the field,” Roadcap mentions. “To me, they’re like motorized mosquitoes. Truth is, we don’t have a million of them on the island.”
“Everybody’s a detective,” Cinq-Mars murmurs from his seat on the ground.
Louwagie likes the thought, though. Basic processes of elimination can pare down a short list to potential miscreants.
“Which way did they leave?” Louwagie asks.
“Neither left nor right. I could’ve seen them,” Sandra tells them. “The sound of the machine went back straight behind my tree.”
The three men stare behind them into the forbidding forest, where a network of walking trails fans out like a spider’s web.
Roadcap proves to be the optimist among them. “There’s only a few ways to get in and out on an ATV.”
“Maybe they came across hikers who can provide a description,” Louwagie adds.
“Did they say anything, sweetie?” Cinq-Mars asks. “Why they did this?”
She n
ods yes but can’t answer just yet. Her trauma and the adrenaline of her rescue rebounds across her nerve endings. She fights to pull herself together, and Cinq-Mars, who’s recuperating also, who suddenly feels so light-headed he could fly, stretches his arm behind Louwagie’s back and holds her hand. “Next time,” Sandra says, “I go over the side. That’s what they said. That’s their message. This was a demonstration. Next time, they shove me over. That’s what they told me to tell you.”
Émile blows out a gust of air.
“All right,” he determines, and attempts to rise to his feet. He benefits from Louwagie’s helping hand as the Mountie’s getting up also, and stretches once he’s on his feet. His lower back is an old lament that’s been behaving all summer—after the cross-terrain gallop and these gymnastics he’s doomed for a relapse. “I’ll get you off the island.”
“Émile,” Sandra states, in a tone he finds worrisome.
“What?”
“Don’t give me that crap. We’ve been through worse stuff than this.” The two men look at him as if he ought to be arrested for what he’s done to this woman. “I know your arguments. It’s not what I signed on for. We don’t know whom we’re up against. We don’t know the odds. We don’t know how it’ll play out, so we might as well err on the side of caution. Blah blah blah. Cry me a river.”
“That’s about the size of it. Sandra—think—we don’t need this. Not our fight.”
“Oh, Émile,” she says, and again he’s not happy with her tone.
“What, San?”
“Didn’t you see me tied to that tree? I believed they were going to throw me over! I was terrified, Émile! Saying my prayers. You’d be proud of me for my sudden switch to religion.”
She makes him laugh, she makes him cry. “So?” he asks.
“When you were sliding off the edge, you didn’t see me scared out of my mind? This is our fight now, Émile. This is so our fight.”
He blames her life on horseback for her competitive fire.
It’s taken all this time, but the men who came with Roadcap finally arrive. They collapse into the tall grasses thirty feet away, panting and gasping.
