The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  He pointed. “There’s a road this way!”

  “No,” George said, “he’ll expect us to take it, then. We’ve gotta go overland back to the camp.” He looked back. “He’s gonna come after us,” George guaranteed, moving strongly.

  The trees and bits of sky wheeled over our heads as we fled; our breath streamed white behind us.

  “Why didn’t you just kill him?” I said irritably.

  “Rita!” protested George.

  “When a dangerous animal attacks you,” I said, “you kill it!”

  “They didn’t attack us! We attacked them!”

  “Nobody takes my hatchet!” I yelled defensively. “We needed it!”

  Indeed, that was part of the plan. The hatchet was for cutting Kenner’s bonds, if any, in a hurry. Not for slamming anybody’s face, but hell, you do what you gotta do. My gut told me that if I relinquished that hatchet, we’d never get Kenner out of there.

  Because of course George did not have $1.2 million in cash; he only had a couple of packs of hundreds given him by Mrs. de Sauvenard.

  It was not our problem that these people were desperate assholes.

  Kenner panted, “Thanks. Thanks. Where’s Gina?”

  “She’s safe,” I told him.

  “Where?”

  “Where we’re going.”

  Kenner nodded with gladness.

  He cradled his left arm in his right.

  “How is it?” I asked.

  “They broke my arm and fucked up my elbow,” he panted. “Hurts like hell.”

  The forest of broken bones.

  I tucked the arm inside his jacket for him, to better support it.

  We hustled through the woods. Eventually Kenner began to move as if his hiking boots weighed twenty pounds apiece, and we stopped next to a freshet spraying down like silver from a cleft. We drank handfuls of the ice-cold water, the droplets splashing our chins, then moved away from it to let Kenner rest for a minute, the better to hear anyone coming.

  “Those fuckers,” muttered Kenner, the stubble on his pale jaw like charcoal smeared on paper.

  George needed to explain something to me. “I didn’t kill him, Rita, because I didn’t want to kill him. Jesus! I knocked him out, and I hope that when he comes to he’ll give it up, or assume we went down the road Kenner indicated. But he could be insane enough to try to overtake us. We have to count on it.” We all pricked our ears but heard no one.

  “I really wish things had gone differently,” George went on, “but I have to say, I admire your technique in coldcocking Dendra back there. The lack of hesitation.”

  “Why, thank you, George. I hope she’s spitting teeth.”

  “That is so unladylike to say.”

  “H’h. A lady’s supposed to do stuff like that while holding her nose, right?”

  “Right,” he laughed.

  Yeah, I thought. A lady’s still a lady as long as she doesn’t relish the violence she commits. Goddamn slippery slope.

  At last Kenner pulled it together to ask the question I’d been dreading. “Where’s Lance? Do you guys know?”

  I was momentarily paralyzed, but George said, “We’ve gotta get moving. Now.”

  Kenner hauled himself upright, his body as spare as a praying mantis’s—with the disproportionate strength of such an insect, I felt—and blocked us. “I said where’s Lance.”

  George glanced the question to me. I said, “We found him in the river, Kenner. He’s dead.”

  Kenner was silent for a moment, his eyes wild. He threw back his head. “Nooooo!” His volume was almost as earsplitting as Dendra’s.

  “Damn it,” said George tightly. “Be quiet!”

  Simultaneously, we heard an unmistakable crashing in the woods behind us, the sound of a large animal suddenly changing direction, having just caught a better whiff of its prey.

  “That’s him,” said George, already moving. “Come on!”

  It was then that I realized how tangibly different it is to be pursued by a wounded animal, rather than one who is merely hungry. That extra surge of dread.

  “He’s no more than three minutes back,” said George, as we all dashed on, Kenner admirably quick, given his sudden shock. Those brothers were so close.

  George muttered, “If we make it back to the camp, Daniel and I’ll have a chance to stop him. He’ll realize he’s beat, and I’ll be able to talk to him. Right now all he can see is a million dollars running away from him.”

  “All we have to do is get to the log bridge,” I panted, “and still have those three minutes between us.”

  “What?” said George, his legs pumping hard.

  _____

  Daniel took Alger Whitecloud to Badger Cabin.

  The cabin smelled of musty wood and fresh air, as Daniel believed his patients needed it. He’d made sure they were covered well against the draft from the four inches of open window. This morning, when Gina had begun to feel better, he had temporarily shut the window, then washed her hair in a basin and rubbed it dry. That seemed to help her feel quite better, but she’d fallen silent, had refused the water, flavored with a little sugar, he’d offered her. And now she didn’t look well at all.

  Alger washed his hands in the bucket of clean water Daniel kept in the room, then knelt to Gina and examined her. “Does your stomach hurt?”

  Her eyes flew open as he probed her abdomen and swollen side. She smiled thinly. “Alger. I’m glad he didn’t kill you.”

  “Me too.” To Daniel, under his breath: “She feels hot.”

  “Yeah,” said Daniel. The men stood up.

  “She might have an infection building somewhere inside,” Alger said quietly. “Maybe a spleen laceration as you’re guessing, but maybe a viscus rupture, which would—”

  “Gut rupture, you mean?”

  “Yeah, which would be gravely serious.”

  Daniel’s mouth went dry thinking of an internal infection. Alger speculated, “Could be a lung contusion, you know; that can cause a transient fever, which she could get over by herself. The shoulder looks OK for now. You’ve been pushing fluids?”

  “Yes, but no solid food.”

  “Good.”

  “But she hasn’t been drinking enough today. She seems—indifferent, sort of.”

  “Looks like you’ve done as much for her as can be done. She needs to be evacuated.”

  “I know. As soon as they get back, we have to move.”

  “Who’s breathing over there?” Alger touched the curtain. Daniel inclined his head, and Alger drew it back.

  “Joey.”

  Daniel saw that they knew each other, and by Alger’s lack of reaction Daniel knew he was very surprised.

  “Hi, dude,” said Alger after a moment. “Funny to see you here. What happened to your leg?”

  “What’s funny about it?” said Joey, propping himself upright in his bunk. He rubbed his elbows.

  Daniel explained, “While we were looking for Gina, we found Joey in some trouble.”

  Joey Preston said, “I had a mishap.”

  Alger stood in silence for a minute.

  Unnerved by Alger’s quiet stare, Joey went on, “I seen Lance de Sauvenard in trouble at the gorge, and I tried to help him.”

  “You tried to help him?”

  “Fuck you, Alger!”

  Daniel asked, “What’re you guys talking—”

  “Hey, man, everything’s OK,” said Alger. “Come on, I’m sorry, fuck it.” He knelt to Joey. “Let me see your leg.”

  Joey permitted him, wincing as Alger carefully felt it with his brown, tree root-like hands.

  “Did you set this?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Good job.”

  In a fluid move, Alger settled himself on the floor, cross-legged, next to Joey’s bunk. Alger’s manner was easy and matter-of-fact and Daniel could see Joey relax a little.

  He knows nobody believes him, Daniel thought. What a position to be in.

  “Been a long time,
” said Alger to Joey, “since we were here. Was this your cabin?”

  “No, I was in Marmot.”

  “I was in Kestrel both summers I came. The jokes we used to play on each other, eh?”

  Joey closed his eyes.

  Alger went on talking. “You had it tough around here.”

  Joey said, his eyes still closed, “It’s just ’cause you were an Indian that you didn’t get it worse.”

  “If I remember right, you were little for your age back then.”

  “I guess I was.”

  Daniel realized that Alger was intent on learning what the hell Joey Preston was doing with Lance de Sauvenard at the river gorge and he was setting out to do it like a smokehouse puts flavor into meat: slowly but penetratingly.

  Alger said, “You know I wasn’t in on any of it.”

  Joey now looked at Alger cuttingly. “But you sure as hell didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  Alger shook his head. “Too much to ask, dude.”

  “Were you the camp scapegoat, Joey?” Daniel asked.

  Alger said, “This was a savage place for boys back then, you know? You don’t know. Lance de Sauvenard—what a little cannibal. The parents sent them here to toughen up, but that guy didn’t need it. He victimized the counselors. Not a violent guy, necessarily, but a treacherous one.”

  Joey Preston cleared his throat. “He wasn’t so tough.”

  “He got you so mad, though.” Alger spoke quietly, persistently, and, Daniel thought, compassionately. He was a different sort of guy. Daniel barely knew him, yet he found himself admiring the Indian in the torn jean jacket.

  Alger said, “Guys got a kick out of how mad you’d get; your face would get—I swear—his face would turn purple, he’d get so mad. A little kid with a Welch’s-purple face.” He didn’t smile.

  “What’d they do to him?” asked Daniel.

  “The madder a guy gets, the funnier it is. You know. Oh, they pushed him into stinging nettles. If there’d been poison oak around here, he would’ve got pushed into that too. They put ex-lax in his desserts.”

  “I’d just as soon not discuss it,” said Joey. Blood was rising up his neck.

  But Alger kept going, in his low voice that sounded to Daniel like the voice of a massive tree, if one talked. “How old were we? Twelve, thirteen?” He neither fidgeted with his hands nor twitched his legs, simply sat motionlessly and comfortably. “Lance de Sauvenard had a Polaroid camera, he swiped it from his grandpap or something, and he and some guys rigged the shower, and we knew Joey habitually jacked off in it every chance he got, so it was easy to get pictures of him doing it. Lance rigged it.”

  Joey said nothing.

  “The older brother, he was OK; I don’t think he got into shit like that anymore. Lance got two really good pictures and he threatened to mail them to a girl in town. Joey had said he liked her, which was a mistake. He was just being honest, trying to get the other guys to take him seriously, but that was—”

  “A big mistake,” Joey finished. “How great that your memory’s so good.” His eyes fixed themselves in the middle distance.

  “Memory’s a funny thing,” said Alger as if agreeing with Joey about something important. “To keep Lance from sending those pictures, Joey here became Lance’s slave. Did everything for him, brought him his food, did his cleaning detail for him. Even the counselors called him Lance de Sauvenard’s bitch.”

  “Good God,” said Daniel, who had had problems of his own on the football bus.

  “Lance promised him he’d give him the pictures on the last day of camp. But he used a stamp and envelope from his parents, got the Grolechs’ address from the phone book in the office, and mailed them to Olive Grolech anyway, didn’t he, Joey?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “He did it as soon as Joey became his slave. So when Joey finds this out, he knows that the whole time he was his slave, Olive already had the pictures. Ah, hey, that was a long time ago.”

  “I’d almost forgot the whole thing.” The casual smile on Joey’s grape-juice purple face looked grotesque.

  “Well, Olive’s a deputy now, she married Chip Lawson, then got that divorce. It’s rest in peace for Lance now, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Daniel here says you guys bumped into each other out at the river gorge.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Funny coincidence,” said Alger Whitecloud patiently.

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “And he got in trouble at the edge and you tried to save him.”

  “That’s what happened, yeah.”

  Chapter 27 – Like Ten Thunderclaps

  “Run!” urged George from behind. “Run faster!”

  Kenner and I tore through the undergrowth, dodging trees and leaping logs like rabbits.

  A couple of times George pulled even with me and took my arm to try to boost my speed with his, but I shook him off. Together, over that uneven terrain, it didn’t work.

  We came to a place I remembered from our trip in, the stretch of deadfalls: hundreds of yards across, a jumble of colossal pickup sticks ready to shift, roll, and trap an ankle or leg beneath their tonnage.

  We could skirt it again, but it lay directly between us and the log bridge and I didn’t want to take the extra time. It was here that my lighter body weight and yoga-fueled agility served me well. This, I thought, is why you do it. Why you work out, why you watch what you eat. So you can leap three-foot-high logs, one after the other, and not lose your balance.

  I scampered ahead of the guys, not lighting on any one log long enough to dislodge it, not slipping far enough down any crevice to catch a foot.

  A long green twig came lashing at my eye as I plunged onward, but my senses were so heightened that my eye snapped shut just in time. Sharp sting on my lid.

  Funny how you get so...acute...at times like this.

  I scrambled and jumped, heedless of anything but speed, glad that I was putting distance between me and the guys—all the guys—because a special job waited at the bridge and I wanted to do it myself.

  I ran faster still, aware of the burning in my lungs but not caring.

  The deadfall zone now behind me, I made it to the river, remembering enough landmarks to know which way to turn to find the log bridge, for somehow I’d strayed from the faint path we’d beaten.

  The huge cedar trunk spanned the chasm. It had been felled from the camp side of the river, and I guess it was about thirty inches in diameter, its adzed surface narrower than that but nice and level, its flimsy railing wobbling uselessly as I dashed the sixty or so feet across.

  I pawed away a cluster of ferns, holding my breath for an anxious second—yes, there it was, just as I’d left it. I uncovered my carefully cached prize, hauled it free, and set it heavily on the ground, each of my movements beginning a split second before the last was finished.

  Its blaze-orange composite engine casing glowed bright against the espresso-brown dirt. I squeezed the safety trigger and flipped the choke full on. The T-shaped starter handle felt just right in my fingers. Forcing myself to calmness, I pulled smoothly. The cylinder gave that satisfying chuggly resistance as it gulped fuel, then I pulled again and the spark fired, and the fucker roared to snarling, timber-chewing life!

  I flipped down the choke and revved the throttle—such an easy saw.

  By the time George and Kenner got to the bridge, I’d begun my top cut.

  To tell you the truth, I didn’t know a hell of a lot about felling trees, but I did know how to cut up downed ones. When you’ve got a log suspended on both ends, you cut out a wedge on top first until it starts to compress.

  George and Kenner zoomed across to me, and I allowed myself a microsecond’s worth of pleasure to look up.

  In the dictionary next to the word ecstatic ought to be a picture of George Rowe’s face at that moment.

  “Goddamn!” he shouted. “Keep cutting!”

  Seeing my plan, he positioned himself below, ready to tak
e the saw for the final cut.

  I cut a nice big V out of the top of that log, the chips flying. I kicked the wedge out, and it bounded down the gorge’s rockface—silently to me, as my ears were filled with the saw’s aggressive vvvvrrrrRRRR!

  “Pass it down to me now!” George yelled, extending his hands.

  I glanced toward the woods and saw no one, so I figured there was enough time to do this my way.

  I dropped down to them, the saw still running.

  “Out of my way!” I shrieked.

  It’s miraculous how people instinctively shy away from a growling chainsaw manipulated by a woman dressed in raccoon skins. The guys scrambled backward and formed a human chain as I wedged myself between a couple of rocks, George’s hand locked on my belt, Kenner holding to a root with his good arm, his legs laced around George’s midsection.

  “Here he comes!” Kenner’s voice pitched upward in excitement.

  A sudden, total peace came over me as I realized, peeking up to see Bonechopper emerge from the woods and snap his eyes left and right, that I had enough time to finish the cut.

  My hands guided the heavy machine evenly as the fountain of yellow chips gushed on. I felt George’s steady knuckles at the small of my back. The job was awkward; the sharp chips sprayed downward into my face, but I shifted position slightly and kept on. The resinous smell of cedar swirled with the acrid exhaust fumes.

  Chainsaws take time to make a big cut; you can’t force them. I’d reached to my limit first, starting the cut away from me, so to speak, and drawing the saw ever closer and higher, doing a sort of diagonal thing because the log was wider than the saw was long. A down and dirty way to make a cut, but good enough for the purpose today.

  The log creaked. It was a long creak, a wood-fibers-splitting-down-the-length creak.

  Bonechopper halted as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “Look who’s cutting timber now!” I hollered.

  He decided to chance it. With a samurai-like cry, he launched himself across the bridge, his boots thundering straight at my face.

  As the mighty Stihl reached the conclusion of the cut, the saw moving freer as the volume of wood decreased, a sound like a rifle shot split through all other sounds.