Voodoo Summer (LeGarde Mysteries Book 11)

by Aaron Paul Lazar

I waved it away. “No thanks, I’m too cold already.”

  I noticed she was already shivering and her lips were tinged with blue.

  Not a good sign.

  “Help me up,” I said, swaying when I got to my knees. “Geez. He really cracked me good with that bat.” I felt around the back of my skull and came away with a palm full of blood.

  “Oh, Gus!” Willy turned me around to inspect the wound. “It’s still bleeding.”

  Somewhere in my distant past I’d heard about scalp wounds being ‘bleeders,’ and I shrugged. It hurt, but I felt clearer now and there were more immediate needs. Like getting out of this place before we were turned into human icicles.

  “Toss me that rag.” She grabbed the white cloth that was looped through the door handle and gave it to me. I wrapped it around my head, wondering if I looked something like Lawrence of Arabia now, and when it was tight enough to stem the flow of blood, I took Willy’s hands and turned her toward me, locking eyes with her. “We have to get out of here.”

  “I tried the door,” she said. “It’s locked.”

  “Let’s take stock of what’s in here. Maybe there’s something strong enough to crash through that little window in the door. Or maybe there’s a pry bar or tool we could use to jimmy the lock from the inside.”

  “D’accord,” she said. “But hurry. Vites, vites.”

  “Wait,” I said with a sudden thought. “If we get too cold, we’ll get sleepy. Let’s do some jumping jacks to generate heat.”

  She almost laughed, and then got my point and we both started jumping like lunatics in a gym class.

  “Just a few more,” I said. “Your color’s coming back to your lips.”

  We slammed through another twenty-five cycles of the exercise, and then stopped.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Oui.”

  I found a heavy box of frozen fish that was just about the right size. “Let’s try this first.” With all my might, I heaved it at the window.

  It bounced off and landed on my pinky toe. “Gosh darn it!” I said, hopping around the room. “I think I broke it.”

  “Are you okay?” she asked, looking down at me from a chair she’d climbed up on to search the tall shelves.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, tenderly placing my foot back on the floor. “I’ll be okay.”

  Willy unlatched a meat hook and its chain from the ceiling. “What about this? Could it crash through that window?”

  My eyes lit up. If I couldn’t smash it through the window, maybe it would work as a pry bar.

  “Good idea. Give it here and stand back.” With the chain in one hand, I swung the heavy hook in a wide arc, aiming for the glass. Again, the darned thing just bounced off the window.

  “What is that? Bullet proof glass?” Willy asked.

  “I think it’s reinforced with metal wires or something,” I grumbled, trying again. After four more swings, I gave up.

  “It’s not going to break, Gus. Try the lock.”

  The door was sealed with a rubber gasket, and the outer handle controlled the latch that was buried in the seams of the door. This place had no safety net. If you were caught inside, you were sunk.

  I sighed. Yes. We were indeed sunk.

  I pried around the rubber edge for a while to no avail.

  “We’ve gotta search for more stuff,” I said, feeling discouraged. What else could we find? A blowtorch? An axe?

  This room, just like the outer storage room, was neatly packed with supplies probably intended to last the whole summer.

  We systematically went from wall to wall, pushing and pulling goods off the shelves. I noticed frost forming on my hair, and began to panic in earnest.

  “Let’s check out those bins in the back.”

  Long lidded lockers lay horizontally at the back of the room, gleaming in silver like the rest of the place. The first two were filled with cuts of meat wrapped in butcher’s paper. Steaks. Chicken. Ribs.

  I dug through them as if there were treasures laying in wait until my hands burned with cold.

  “Let’s try the next one,” I said.

  Willy opened the lid to find bags of corn, peas, and okra.

  Okra?

  I shook my head and almost laughed hysterically. Definitely a Southern thing.

  I joined her and dug a little more, knowing it was useless.

  It was then that I saw the blue hand buried beneath a bag of carrots.

  Chapter 38

  I stopped mid-motion and stared at the locker, backing up a few steps.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Willy said, coming closer to look. “What is it?”

  I pointed with a shaking finger. “It’s…um…a hand.”

  She frowned and peered inside, then stumbled backwards with a high-pitched scream. “Mon Dieu!”

  I gathered my courage, feeling colder than ever now. “Come on. We’ve gotta see what it is.”

  Willy came closer. “You mean who it is,” she whispered.

  Together we removed the bags of frozen vegetables, slowly unburying the icy body of Monique LaFontaine.

  We stared at her ice blue face with the opened eyes rimmed in frost. Her lips looked waxy, as if she had just come out of a subzero Madame Tussauds Museum.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. My teeth had begun chattering again, but with my broken toe I didn’t think I could manage any more jumping jacks. It felt like it was swelling up and pushing on the sides of my sneakers. The constant throbbing made me want to put ice on it, but I was already turning into an icicle and somehow that idea lost its appeal really fast.

  “They killed her,” Willy said.

  “Which one do you think did it?” I leaned in closer, trying to see what might have been the murder method. I couldn’t see anything other than a perfect body. No blood. No marks circled her throat. She looked like a crystalline doll, still dressed in her cobalt blue ball gown sparkling with rhinestones. I suspected she may have had a bloody mark on the back of her head, because of the reports of the bloodied rock in the woods near The Seven Whistles, but I couldn’t see it. “She lost her fancy shoes,” I said, staring at her perfectly formed little blue feet with the nail polish she’d been so insistent on having Willy apply.

  Willy huffed. “She probably lost those expensive dancing slippers running from Pierre. I’ll bet he was the one. She hated him. They fought like cats and dogs, those two.”

  “What about?” I asked, still mesmerized by the frozen mannequin who stared up at me.

  “He hated that she flirted with Bosco all the time. Which must be why he set up my brother to look like the peeper, non?”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “Maybe Monique found him peeping into a girl’s room at The Seven Whistles? Who’s to say he only came over to your camp to do that? C’est vrai?” She warmed to the subject. “Oui, and maybe she confronted him, threatened to tell on him. They fought, and he pushed her too hard.”

  I added, “And he went to his father to help him cover it up.”

  She shivered and turned to me. “Gus? I don’t want to end up like her, covered in frozen vegetables. We need to get out of here. Rapidement!”

  I took her hand. “Come here. Hold me close for a little bit, maybe we can get each other warm while I think of a way out.”

  I enfolded her slim body in my arms and together, with teeth chattering, we slowly shared a bit of warmth.

  My eyes suddenly popped open when I tuned into our prison and really listened for the first time. The air vent sucked hot air from the freezer out into an external register that led to the outdoors. I was pretty sure I’d seen an exhaust fan earlier when I’d passed the lower part of the lodge.

  “The air vent,” I said, pointing to the rectangular silver-wired cover in the back of the room.

  Positioned about two feet above the floor, it was securely framed by a heavy mesh cover. But it was at least two feet square and we could easily pass through it.

  “Only problem
will be dismantling the fan when we get to the end,” I said thoughtfully. “But there’s gotta be a way.”

  Willy’s eyes lit up. “Oui! But how do we get this cover off?”

  I reached into my dungarees pocket and brandished my Swiss Army pocketknife that I’d had since I was ten. My father had given it to me for Christmas that year, and I hadn’t gone anywhere without it since.

  “This is our salvation,” I said with a near hysterical laugh. “I knew it would come in handy one day.”

  “Let’s go, Gus. Vite, vite.”

  While I worked to undo the gazillion little metal screws that held the frame in place—so cold they hurt my fingers—I talked steadily to Willy. “Listen. We need a way to disable an electrical fan. Something big and heavy to jam it first, then some rubber gloves or something to yank out the wires. And we need a heavy cloth or piece of rubber to sit on when the wires come loose. I don’t want to electrocute us if the wires touch the ductwork. See what you can find, okay?”

  With a grim smile, Willy came around to my side, holding Pierre’s baseball bat, which he’d obviously tossed into the room when he imprisoned us. “Would this work?” Frosty breath plumed from her lips as she spoke.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Now look for gloves and something insulating.”

  By the time I’d finished the last screw and dropped the heavy cover onto the floor with a resounding metallic thud, Willy was at my side. The long gloves she’d found hung on the wall had been specifically designed to handle frozen foods, and they were coated with thick black rubber. She found a heavy foam cover inside the lid of each locker; it came off with a little tugging and ripping of the corners.

  Finally, we’d caught a bit of luck. We had what we needed to make our last ditch effort to survive.

  “How will we see in there?” she asked, sounding a little nervous now that escape was actually upon us.

  I pointed inside. “There’s a little light leaking through. See?” I showed her the dim light reflecting inside. “It’s not great, but not pitch dark. We’ll feel our way if we need to.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I think I saw a flashlight in the corner.” With a proud smile—albeit still tinged with blue—she held out a silver flashlight. “Here we go. And look, it even works.”

  I led the way and we folded ourselves into the vent. After a short burst of crawling, the vent angled upward. It was manageable, but I hoped we didn’t come to any sharp vertical turns. It would be impossible to climb up a shaft with these shiny aluminum walls.

  “Gus?” Willy asked, putting a hand to my ankle. “Wait.”

  I stopped and turned back to her. “What is it?”

  “Do you smell that?”

  In an instant it hit me. Smoke curled up inside the vent, blowing past us into the direction of the fan. It was acrid, black, and thickening by the moment. And somewhere, in the distance, the roar of a crackling blaze overpowered the fan’s whirring sound.

  Had Pierre and his father set the camp ablaze? Were they that insane? I realized that I already knew that answer. They were both genetically flawed. Seriously flawed.

  “Pull your shirt over your mouth and breathe through it,” I said. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

  We hurried forward now, crawling fast through the last twenty feet of ductwork which seemed to warm as we moved over it. Probably due to us being inside a burning building. At the end, as I anticipated, we found the fan whirring steadily, blocking our escape.

  “We have to lay out the foam,” I said over my shoulder to Willy.

  She passed it to me. “Here you go, Gus.”

  We smoothed it out beneath us. “Good. Now, Hand me the bat, and hold the light on the fan for me.”

  We exchanged flashlight for bat and she leaned against the side of the ductwork that had doubled in size when we reached the box housing the fan. I couldn’t stand, but I could kneel without my head hitting the ceiling now.

  I jammed the small end of the bat into the fan. The thing was powerful, and it flung the bat wildly around for a few seconds before coming to a smoking halt with the wood jammed against the wall. It kept trying to move, and jittered forward every few seconds.

  “It’s not going to hold,” she said, speaking through her shirt.

  The smoke was getting worse and I coughed hard. I couldn’t hold my shirt up and do what I had to do, so I took a deep breath and grabbed the gloves out of my back pockets, putting them on with a prayer.

  “Stay on the foam, away from the metal walls or floor,” I said, making sure I didn’t touch them, either. A thick black power cord snaked along the outer edge of the fan box and disappeared into the wall.

  “Dear God, please help us,” I said under my breath, then grabbed hold of the power cord and yanked hard on it.

  It didn’t budge. The thing was securely attached.

  “Try again,” Willy said. “Hurry, Gus. The smoke is getting worse.”

  My eyes stung and my lungs burned. I pulled again. And again. On the fifth try, the black casing came loose, exposing three wires: white, black, and green. After two more tugs, the wires broke free, sending fireworks around our heads when they touched down and grounded out on the metal ductwork. With a huge thumping sound, the circuit breaker popped and the line went dead.

  “You did it!” Willy cried.

  Her voice sounded weak and hoarse, and I began to panic a little. What if I couldn’t get the fan out of its casing in time?

  “We aren’t out of the woods yet,” I said, taking out my knife again. “We’ve gotta get this fan loose from its mounts now.” I studied it for a minute through bleary eyes. “Oh, drat. It looks like the screws are on the outside.”

  “Mon Dieu.” Her face fell. “Wait. Let’s take the bat and beat the fan out of the wall.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. Now that the fan had stopped turning, I managed to slide the chipped bat out of its wedged position between the metal blades.

  I hammered at the edges of the box, to no avail, and then started working on the blades themselves. After a while, they began to bend, and after about five minutes of feeling like I’d die from smoke inhalation, one of them actually snapped off at its base.

  “Bon! Now get another one. We can squeeze through with two missing, I think.”

  I slammed at the blade with all I had, and finally it gave way like its twin. “Got it.”

  When she didn’t respond, I turned. Willy had slumped against the wall with her hands limp at her sides. It looked like she had passed out.

  “Willy! Get up.” I shook her awake and somehow maneuvered her toward the opening. “Crawl through. Hurry.”

  She roused herself enough to flop through the opening. I helped her over the last few feet, then scrambled out beside her, only to find flames roaring in the lodge and flickering orange fire traveling in the pine trees overhead. She fell face down and didn’t move.

  With my last bit of strength, I grabbed her wrists and dragged her inert body along the path toward the lake. Hot cinders fluttered down from the flaming pine trees, burning my arms and clothing. I pushed onward, limping because of my toe, and feeling frightened as the roar of the fire came closer, mushrooming into a towering inferno behind us. The entire lodge was ablaze and the fire had started to jump to some of the side buildings.

  Water. We needed to get to the water.

  I dragged Willy toward the lake. When I was halfway to shore, a crowd of workers who’d been running a fire brigade line spotted us and hurried in our direction. Carmen shrieked and called to Bosco, who scooped up his sister and ran with her toward the edge of the lake, laying her gently on the shore. I staggered behind them, coughing and spluttering. When I reached the beach—still hacking from the smoke in my lungs—I kicked off my sneakers and plunged into the water to let it cool my blistered skin and throbbing toe.

  People were asking questions now, but I couldn’t quite process the meaning of them. I lay on my back, floating in about a foot of water, and watched the blackened cl
ouds rolling overhead. In the distance, I heard Willy cough and moan, then say her brother’s name.

  “Bosco,” she whispered weakly. “You’re home.”

  Chapter 39

  It took two days to contain the fire that destroyed The Seven Whistles and many acres of forest beyond it. On the third day, I sat with Willy and Elsbeth on the dock by Wee Castle, watching the steam and smoke rise off the land where the lodge used to be. The air still smelled of charcoal. The flames had come perilously close to our camp on several occasions. The firefighters had dug a twenty-foot trench from the road down to the lake to separate our properties. Bulldozers growled and shoved trees aside through the night, and by morning, the ditch stopped the fire from crossing to our camp. Now the flames had finally gone out, but the sizzling sounds persisted and steaming smoke still spiraled high overhead. Someone said they would have to keep watch for days to insure it didn’t reignite.

  Carmen, Bosco, and Willy were invited to stay with us at Loon Harbor, along with every other worker and former guest who needed a place to sleep while the authorities conducted their arson investigation. The police had reported that the fire was set on purpose. They’d said it started in the cellar, by Pierre’s room and the deep freezer from which we’d barely escaped. I heard snatches of conversation implying that some of The Seven Whistles people were missing. They were still looking and hadn’t accounted for everyone. It was all we’d been able to gather so far, and we wondered who had escaped and if anyone had died in the fire.

  My grandparents set up cots and blankets in the living room and dining room when our Loon Harbor cabins were full. No one went hungry. No one slept outside. The Seven Whistles guests vanished as soon as the police allowed them to leave, although many had to be bussed out because their cars were destroyed in the inferno.

  I sloshed my feet in the warm green water, feeling for the first time as if I could breathe without a hitch in my lungs. My toe was broken, but there was nothing we could do for it except wrap some white adhesive tape around it and its neighboring digit to keep it still while it healed. Thankfully, they hadn’t made me go to the hospital, and after some oxygen treatments, the EMTs had released both Willy and me from their care. There were others from The Seven Whistles who hadn’t fared so well, and we heard that Mrs. LaFontaine had been badly burned.