Naughty on Ice

by Maia Chance

  George was sailing down over the snowy hill, not like a bird, but like a flapping rag doll—

  Ralph was already running toward the spot where George would land.

  —and George hit the hill with a sickening impact, tumbled in an impossible tangle of limbs and skis, and at last skidded to a stop, his spine cockeyed.

  The crowd cried out.

  I stood there, frozen with shock, my mouth open, snowflakes falling onto my tongue and melting.

  Berta, murmuring what I vaguely understood were Swedish prayers, hobbled forward with a pushing crowd. I stumbled forward, too, but by the time I had wedged myself through the frantic throng, Ralph and two other men were kneeling around George’s mangled body. All three were shaking their heads.

  “Telephone the police!” one of the kneeling men shouted.

  “Telephone the morgue is more like it!” someone shouted back.

  “Everyone stand back!” This was Sergeant Peletier. “I’m the police!”

  Peletier took charge, commanding the crowd to disband, barking orders here and there. Some of the crowd was already leaving the slope, especially those with children.

  Berta was beside me. “I refuse to believe that was an accident, Mrs. Woodby,” she said softly.

  “I agree. Three deaths in the same family? That’s too much of a coincidence.”

  “As the famed novelist George B. Jones, Jr., wrote, ‘Coincidences are for suckers.’”

  “So poetic.”

  “I did not hear you complaining about Mr. Jones’s prose when you were devouring Honolulu Heist on the train.”

  “Wait a moment,” I said. “The ski. George crashed because his ski fell off. Come on, let’s try to find it before Peletier does. It flew off to that side.” I pointed. “Close to the top.”

  “I do not think I can make it up there on my sprained ankle—”

  “Of course not. Stay here. If I find it, I’ll bring it down to show you.”

  I trudged up the steep slope, Cedric peeking from my coat. The farther I went, the more the sounds of the crowds were muffled by wind and snow.

  I had been dead wrong. Again.

  I slogged through the snow to a narrow dark shape in the shadow of the jump. George’s ski was covered with a film of snowflakes. I picked it up and hiked back down the hill. No one seemed to notice what I had done. The remaining people were still crowded around poor George’s body.

  “The ski doesn’t look broken,” I said, reaching Berta.

  “Look again.” Berta took the ski from me and positioned it upright. In its middle was a tangle of leather straps and buckles.

  “I don’t know what I’m looking at,” I said.

  “These are the bindings, Mrs. Woodby, with which the ski boot is affixed to the ski—this is a Huitfeldt-style binding, but without the Hoyer-Ellefsen toggle that is growing in popularity. The binding mechanism is quite simple. The skier simply stands on the ski, positioning the boot between the two metal brackets protruding from the front of the binding, tightens the three buckles, and away they go.”

  “But—” I frowned. “—you said two metal brackets? There’s only one.”

  “Precisely. Look.” Berta poked a piece of metal dangling from one of the leather straps. “Someone filed this bracket down. It must have snapped apart from the impact when George hit the crest of the jump, freeing his boot from the ski.…” She shuddered. “Oh, how diabolical.”

  “How could the killer have been sure one filed bracket would’ve been enough to polish off George?” I said. “What if he’d only, say, broken a leg?”

  “Then perhaps the killer would have tried to do him in another way,” Berta said. “The killer took a risk, and the risk paid off.”

  “I hate to say it,” I said, “but we must show this ski to the police.”

  “Yes.”

  When Berta and I drew near the group, George’s body was covered with a wool blanket. Peletier, the policeman Clarence, Mr. Persons, Ralph, and a small crowd were listening to a ranting old man.

  “I saw a thing!” the man babbled. “A—a horrible, dark thing, with fur and—and—it was running away from the bottom of the jump. Mr. Goddard’s skis were leaning on the stairs, see, leaning there when that thing went bounding away!”

  “Now, now, Mr. Peters,” Peletier said. “Tell me, how much have you had to drink today?” He cast a knowing smirk around the ring of onlookers as if to say, You can’t trust the town boozehound.

  “I know what I saw!” Peters exclaimed, but a note of shrill doubt had crept into his voice. “A shape! A great, black shape! It was Slipperyback!”

  The crowd gasped, all except Peletier, who shook his head, and Ralph, who was walking toward Berta and me.

  Seemingly emboldened by the crowd’s response, Peters went on more avidly still, “He’s stirred up these days—doesn’t like all these outsiders traipsing around in his territory, I reckon.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Peters,” I called out, stepping forward.

  “What’re you meddling in this for?” Peletier asked me with narrowed eyes. “Why are you still in Maple Hill? And is that Mr. Goddard’s ski you’re holding?”

  I held out the ski. “Yes. Here, take it. I think you will find that one of the, um—” What had Berta called them? Oh yes. “—the bindings—you know, the little metal bits that hold all those straps on—was filed down, with the purpose of having it break when Mr. Goddard launched off the jump.”

  “Filed down by Slipperyback!” Peters shouted. “Oh, Lord have mercy on us all! Slipperyback’s pranks are going too far! He’ll kill us! He’ll—he’ll murder us in our beds! He’ll—”

  “Come along, Mr. Peters,” a man said, taking him by the arm and steering him away. “We’ll get you a nice hot cup of coffee, all right? Sheesh, you oughta stay off the juice. Slipperyback? What next? Count Dracula?” They crunched away, and the rest of the crowd began to disperse, too.

  Ralph was by my side.

  Peletier prodded his mitten and me. “Happy now? Stirring up superstitious rumors? Why don’t you go back to the city, where you belong?”

  “Have you no interest at all in the fact that Mr. Goddard’s ski was intentionally damaged?” I asked.

  “This is your final warning, you three.” He addressed Berta, Ralph, and me. “You keep your noses out of this, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  31

  Ralph and I started the walk toward the inn. We had seen Berta off in Pickard’s depot hack. I had taken Cedric from under my coat so he could walk and, hopefully, pay his taxes.

  “Pickard promised to look after Mrs. Lundgren,” Ralph said. “He seems like a decent fellow.”

  “I suppose you gathered that he and Strom both asked for her hand in marriage.”

  “Yep. She sure has a way with fellows—and say, they haven’t even tasted her baking yet.”

  “She once told me that Jimmy the Ant had proposed to her on numerous occasions, but she turned him down. But Strom and Pickard are different. They aren’t criminals. They own houses—Strom even owns a farm. And Berta … Berta is tired.”

  “Yeah. I can see that.”

  “If she marries, I won’t have a partner,” I said. “What shall I do?”

  “I can’t make cinnamon rolls,” Ralph said, “but if you don’t mind that, well, you could be my partner.”

  “Don’t tease, darling. Not when there’s just been another murder. What comes next?” Clammy, gray despair was settling over me. “Oh golly, poor Patience and her Pea! And George dead, just when everything seemed to be coming up roses for her! What will become of her now?”

  “Her family’ll take care of her.”

  “I hope so. An unwed mother in a tiny village like this … And what’ll we do next?”

  “Well, I don’t suppose I could convince you to give up the case—”

  “No.”

  “—but we had a plan, right?”

  “Staking out Titus’s sugar shack?” In the shadow of death, the p
lan sounded limp and improbable. I mean, could that snow-covered sugar shack truly hold all the answers?

  “That’s right,” Ralph said. “Staking out the sugar shack. I asked Strom if he could lend us a couple of pairs of snowshoes, and he said sure, we could help ourselves from what we find up at the lodge. Said he could meet us up there at four thirty. He said if we went straight up Moose Mountain from the lodge, we’d find a track along the ridge, and then when we see a sign nailed to a tree, head down the ridge on the other side and we’d be on Titus Staples’s land.”

  My scalp crawled. “The ridge? But, Ralph, that’s Goddard land up there. That’s where the upright-walking bear thing went last night.”

  “Yeah, I know. What a coincidence, huh?”

  I swallowed. “Berta says coincidences are for suckers.”

  “Exactly.”

  * * *

  Ralph, Cedric, and I ate an enormous lunch at Peggy’s Restaurant. When we returned to the inn, Funny Papers was sitting behind the front desk.

  Ralph and I exchanged a look.

  “How is Patience?” I asked Funny Papers. “Has she heard—?”

  “She’s hysterical,” Funny Papers said. “She’s with Grandma.”

  “Did you know about—?”

  “The engagement? Yeah. I mean, Patience told us just now.” Funny Papers stuck out his chin. “And she’s keeping that ruby ring if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “I think she deserves to keep it,” I said.

  My heart was breaking for Patience. My only consolation was that she hadn’t seemed to be in love with George. She’d only been desperate to provide a father for Pea. Maybe the ruby ring was valuable enough to help her start fresh somewhere else, somewhere where she could pretend to be a widow.

  * * *

  Ralph and I took a nap with all the grim determination of soldiers preparing for battle. At four fifteen, after I had taken Cedric for a quick stroll and left him in Berta’s care, Ralph and I set forth. He drove the Speedwagon in silence up to the ski club lodge. Strom was there to greet us at the door, and he, knowing we were detectives, didn’t ask questions as he fitted us with snowshoes.

  I take that back—he asked prying questions about Berta, trying to figure out if she’d said yes to Pickard or not. He also asked if we had a flask of water—Ralph did—and a gun. Ralph did. I also had the Eastman Kodak Brownie hung around my neck, underneath my fur coat.

  Ralph and I took the snowshoe trek up Moose Mountain slowly. Very slowly. I’m not sure there is any other way to take a snowshoe trek. It’s a bit like having cookie pans strapped to one’s feet, and all the high stepping made my leg muscles read me the riot act.

  It was somewhere near five o’clock when we finally reached the top of the bare, snowy ridge.

  “We’re making good time,” Ralph said. His breath floated sideways.

  “Don’t lie.” I gazed at the frozen, sprawling world around us. Moonlit hills, black and white and silver, mounded up and rolled away. The western horizon glowed a pale yellow where the sun had melted. The lights of Maple Hill twinkled in a valley alongside the white sash of river. And up here, a trail snaked northward along the ridge, disappearing around a bend.

  “Strom said we take this ridge trail north a quarter mile, and then drop down the other side. That’ll take us to Titus’s place. Water?” Ralph had drawn a metal water bottle from inside his coat. He unscrewed the cap and passed it over.

  I drank deeply, and then drank some more. Ralph drank, too, capped and replaced the bottle, and then we were plodding northward on along the ridge.

  We had gone that quarter mile, as per Strom’s directions, when Ralph slowed his pace. He stopped. “Son of a gun,” he muttered.

  I stopped, too. “What is it?”

  “Tracks.” He pointed to the ground. “And they look fresh. See? They haven’t frozen around the edges yet, and it’s cold enough up here for that to happen pretty quick.”

  “Tracks?” I stooped to see. Oh, thank goodness. They were grooved ski prints—two overlapping sets. Not, say, the clawed prints of a jumbo bear walking around on two legs.

  “Someone’s up here,” I said stupidly.

  “Yeah. Two people.” Ralph dug into his coat pocket, pulled out a wristwatch, and squinted at it in the faint moonlight. “Five fifteen.” He stuck the watch back in his pocket and looked at me. “What do you say?”

  “About following the ski tracks?”

  “Uh-huh. You’re calling the shots, kid. It’s your case.”

  Cold was leaking through the seams of my clothing. My legs felt as stiff as a couple of pirate’s peg legs, and my heart was shriveling with fear. But I thought of how this was Goddard land up here—that a skier was on Goddard land, at night. Why? I thought of how the Reverend Mr. Currier had said he encountered Maynard Coburn up on this very ridge last summer, and how Roy’s dog Ammut ran free in these woods. I thought of Judith, Fenton, and George, all dead now, and how ownership of their land—this land—had passed through each of their hands in the past few days.

  “We have time,” I said. “Let’s follow the tracks.”

  The ski tracks followed the ridge trail without digression for I wasn’t sure how far. We went ten minutes, then fifteen. I worried that we would be late to spy on Titus’s sugar shack at six o’clock, but I was increasingly determined to tail those ski tracks to their end.

  Although we had joined the trail on an open, treeless ridge, the terrain gradually changed. Fir trees loomed in from both sides, blocking some of the light. There were rocky formations up here, too, glistening with icy architecture. I glimpsed shadowy splotches and seams under iced rocky protrusions that could’ve been the mouths of caves.

  Caves big enough for even rather large bears to hide.

  “The ski tracks turn here,” Ralph whispered.

  We followed the grooves off the main trail a few yards, circled around a large boulder—

  Two skis and two poles were leaning against the backside of the boulder.

  “Look!” I whispered, pointing. The snow was packed down, as though something had happened. A single, wide track—wide as a body—went off into the shadows. “That looks like someone was dragged over—” I fell silent; Ralph had put a finger to his lips.

  “Listen,” he whispered.

  I heard the wind in the fir boughs, the skitter of tiny grains of ice across the top crust of the snow. I listened to the blood pounding against my eardrums.

  And … crunching. Stealthy crunching. Coming closer.

  Oh sweet baby bejeezus.

  Ralph was drawing his pistol. “Your camera,” he said so softly, the breeze whipped his words away.

  Right. My camera.

  I fumbled with my coat buttons—

  The crunching was just on the other side of that boulder now.

  —I pulled out the Brownie with shaking mittened hands.

  Rats. Mittens. You can’t operate a camera wearing mittens!—

  Crunch. Crunch.

  —I tore my mittens off with my teeth. Ralph aimed his pistol toward the side of the boulder. I aimed the Brownie, positioned my freezing fingertip on the button—

  Something big, dark, and furry burst out from behind the boulder.

  —I snapped a photograph and, at the same time, I screamed.

  “Stand down!” Ralph shouted.

  The thing—oh, that awful dark fur! Those erratic motions!—pounced on Ralph and took him down into the snow.

  “Ralph!” I shouted, jumping onto the back of the thing.

  Its back was hard and angular, and it was making an oddly familiar rattling sound.

  Quite like booze bottles in a wooden crate, actually.

  Ralph and the thing were locked in a wrestling match, twisting and pummeling each other. I was thrown off into the snow. I staggered to my feet—snowshoes still strapped on—and went back at the writhing thing, still on top of the cursing, grunting Ralph.

  But instead of leaping on the thing again, I took h
old of a loose-looking flap of its fur—

  And yanked it off.

  There was a wooden crate under there, all right, strapped like an oversized knapsack to the back of Titus Staples.

  Ralph, though still underneath Titus, managed to sock him in the nose. I heard a splatting crunch. Blood spurted. Titus grunted and slugged Ralph in the jaw.

  “Ralph!” I cried again.

  Titus was reaching a gangly arm out, pulling a thick stick from the snow.

  “My … gun … Lola,” Ralph said. “Flew … into … the sno—”

  Thunk.

  Ralph sagged back into the snow. Titus had clubbed him over the head with his stick.

  “You monster!” I screamed.

  Titus, his face expressionless, got to his feet, panting and unsteady. Again, he hefted the stick in his hand.

  I staggered sideways and tripped on my own snowshoes. I fell back, back, like a child flopping down to make a snow angel.

  The last thing I saw was Titus looming up over me, his big stick raised against the moonsheened sky.

  32

  “Ralph,” I whispered. My throat was painfully dry and my voice sounded far away, as though it belonged to someone else. Louder, I called out, “Ralph?”

  I was curled on my side. My head hurt like the dickens. There was something numbingly tight around my ankles and wrists, and I could feel that my snowshoes were still buckled to my boots.

  With great effort, I cracked my eyelids. There was a bright ball of light somewhere nearby. A small, steady hissing. The air smelled of dirt and kerosene and stale liquor.

  “Your mascara’s running,” a man—not Ralph—said. “I’m surprised you could get your eyes open at all.”

  My eyes flew wide. I struggled to a seated position, despite the snowshoes and—rats—my rope-bound wrists. “Maynard?”

  Maynard Coburn sat nearby, leaning on some kind of curved dark wall. His legs were outstretched and bound with rope at the ankles. His wrists were bound, too, hands in his lap. He wore a coat and boots and thick pants.

  “Where’s Ralph?” I said, my voice curling upward in panic.

  “Don’t get hysterical. He’s right over there.” Maynard tipped his head.