The Winter Road

by Caron Todd

  “Daniel!” None of this made sense to Emily. It was horrible to think of the honeymoon couple sending Jason into houses and waiting to see what happened. “You mean they were there that night? Watching? These people of Easton’s were watching my house?”

  “Now, now,” Daniel said. “That was a while ago, wasn’t it? Water under the bridge. First you bring her on a job, Matt, then you scare the poor girl.”

  “Mom’s alone—” Emily headed to the door.

  Matthew followed. “You can’t get to your mom right now. It’s the middle of the night, we don’t have transportation. Anyway, I’ve got someone keeping an eye on her.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had another partner, nephew.”

  “Signed one up on the spot. Alex Blake.”

  “Alex?” Emily exclaimed. How many more people were going to be put at risk because of the gold? “I wish you hadn’t involved him. Susannah is weeks from having a baby—”

  “He jumped at the chance.” Matthew looked at Daniel. “Did I tell you about Blake? It came up when I got a criminal record check done—”

  “On Alex?” Emily said indignantly.

  “He works with the RCMP and Interpol to track down fossil poachers. No training, but they say you’d never know it.”

  A few summers ago Alex had helped catch poachers who hit a fossil bed Susannah discovered, but no one had told Emily it was a regular thing. She was beginning to wonder if she really knew anybody.

  MATTHEW HADN’T SPOKEN to Emily alone since he went to search the cabin where he found Daniel. He tried calling her room and got a busy signal. Checking in at home, he supposed. He waited ten minutes, then went down the hall and knocked on her door. As soon as he saw her he knew he didn’t want to leave her alone for the night.

  “Hey.” She looked pale, subdued. “Come in. I was just thinking this room was too big for one.”

  “Did you reach your mother?”

  “She’s fine. Alex says not to worry.”

  “Think you can manage it?”

  She smiled, just barely. “Nope.”

  “You’re exhausted.”

  “Hands up anybody who isn’t.”

  One after another, things he could say popped into his mind. He discarded all of them. Sorry I lied. Sorry I tricked you. Sorry I think your father was a thief. Sorry I didn’t put up a big fight last night when I knew very well it was circumstances that brought us together.

  “You look so worried, Matthew. It’s all right, all of it. Really.”

  “You’re being kind.”

  “No. I—” She stopped. He had decided that was all she was going to say when she added, “I love you.” Then she closed her eyes and began to cry. Silently, tears streaming.

  He loved her, too. At least he thought he did. With guilt and sympathy on his side and fear and anger and loneliness on hers, how could either of them be sure? But the first thing you did when you thought you loved someone was try not to hurt them.

  So he held her, hoping to give comfort. She reached to kiss him. “Shh,” he said, against her lips. They were wet with tears. He didn’t have a hanky, so he tried to dry them with his hand. “You need sleep, Em.”

  “I need you.”

  His body reacted predictably. Rain or shine, that was one thing you could depend on. He could feel tension and fatigue in her body. Red, raised bites were all over her. By the corner of her eye, on her scalp where her hair parted, on the soft skin above her collarbone. He kissed each one and looked for more, telling himself he would stop in a minute and tuck her into bed to sleep.

  So many bites. A big, sore-looking welt on her shoulder and a whole row on the back of her neck. When he kissed those he heard a quick intake of breath, then a faint throaty sound that made it hard to remember what he was supposed to be doing. Nurturing. Comforting. But he kept remembering how she’d felt last night, soft and warm and welcoming.

  She turned in his arms, hands under his shirt, pulling at him, under his waistband, tugging his belt, fingers on his skin, a hesitant touch of her tongue, teeth light on his chin. She kept surprising him, gentle Emily.

  SHE SLEPT, her head on his shoulder. His arm began to get pins and needles but he didn’t move. Finally she woke, sleepily scratching the bites on her neck before she noticed him. She smiled. “Nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you, too. Unfortunately—”

  “No, hush, we’re not having anything unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunately,” he repeated, “I think I should go back to my room. If Daniel needs anything that’s where he’ll call.”

  “Not yet. Soon.” She rolled onto him, grasping the sheet on either side to anchor herself. “Think you can escape?”

  He made several halfhearted attempts to rise, pounding the mattress the way frustrated wrestlers pound the mat.

  “You got me.”

  “Good.”

  THE NEXT MORNING Daniel claimed to feel as good as new. Maybe he did—the investigation was finally rolling. RCMP detachments from Cranberry-Portage, Flin Flon and Snow Lake were all involved, preparing to check the Cutlass and the trapper’s cabin for evidence left behind, and to search the bush and canvass every lodge, motel and campground for miles around for anyone fitting the kidnappers’ descriptions.

  He asked Matthew to coordinate with the police while he had breakfast with Emily. To save time, he wanted to use a helicopter to retrace the path he’d taken since coming north.

  He shook out the paper napkin and put it over his lap. “Matt says you were about ready to call in a search party for me a couple of weeks ago.” He smiled. “Before there was even any trouble.”

  Emily wasn’t going to accept that fussing label now, if that’s the way he was thinking. Not after all that had happened. “You disappeared without a word.”

  “What do you mean, without a word? I left a note with Liz and Jack’s gift.”

  “You did?” What kind of note? she wanted to ask. One about a sick aunt, or one that said her father had been implicated in a major crime? “It must have got lost in the shuffle.”

  Daniel pushed his coffee mug over to her. “How about a refill? Go ahead, Em. You must have questions.”

  “They can wait.”

  “They’re popping out of you, like penny firecrackers. All these silent little explosions. But I can tell.”

  Emily looked into her tea, amused and embarrassed. It was exactly how she felt, sitting here with him. But how could she, after all he’d been through?

  “Why do you think I sent Matt on an errand? I’m not the kind of man who idles over a room-service breakfast.”

  She smiled at his tone. “Grandma said the Rutherfords are always good in a pinch.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “And it’s true.”

  “And that’s nice of you. She’s nice and you’re nice and I’m good in a pinch. Now that we’ve got that all straightened out, go ahead. Let me have it.”

  She took a breath, and slowly exhaled. Some tension left her body, making her more aware of sadness. “You knew my father.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Before, I mean. Before he moved to Three Creeks.”

  “I knew him really well. And I liked him, Emily.”

  Her stomach went tight. “Anyway” was implied. Daniel had liked her father anyway. Even though. In spite of everything.

  He shifted his position and winced. “Your dad came to us when he was still a kid. Late fifties, ’58, I think. He’d got into a situation he didn’t like and he wanted to do something about it.”

  “Us?”

  “His local police station first. He got bounced around from there to an RCMP detachment and finally to Frank and me. We were in Special Branch at the time—mostly involved with counterespionage—but we had a case that overlapped with Criminal Intelligence. So we met with your dad and the three of us were a good fit.”

  Emily let all that settle in her mind for a minute. “What kind of situation was he in?”

>   “What do you know about him, Emily?”

  “Not much. I found a letter that mentioned boys taking the wrong path. Coming to a bad end, it said.”

  “Where’d you see that?”

  “Mom had it in a file labeled, Graham’s Death.”

  Daniel winced again, sympathetically this time. “Must have been from a teacher or a social worker. Your dad was one of those kids you hear about, growing up in one foster home after another.”

  “My dad?” she repeated. “Where was his family?”

  “Frank and I looked. We never found his parents. An aunt took care of him the first few years, died of cancer, and there wasn’t anybody else. So he got into the system.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Five, the first place they sent him. Mad as hell, according to the report I read. The family wouldn’t keep him.”

  Keep him. “They couldn’t manage a five-year-old?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “A frightened five-year-old.”

  “He wouldn’t settle down. Over the years the social workers kept moving him. Pretty soon he was looking to other kids for a family. Children do that. They start following each other’s example, trying for approval, looking for a place to belong.”

  “He got into trouble?”

  “He and his friends found their way to the edge of a crime family operating in their neighborhood in Montreal.” Daniel looked at her, apparently wanting to see how she was before he went on. “The kids started doing little favors, nothing much, delivering an envelope, taking a message, making a little money in the process. It seems harmless at first.”

  “Like Jason.”

  “Maybe.” Daniel drank some coffee. “When Graham and his friends started to get in deeper, he saw what was going on. He tried to persuade the others to back out of it with him. They weren’t having any of that. They thought they had a good thing going. Steady money, steady meals, a sense of purpose. I’ve seen it over and over. Kids who felt like nothing start to feel important. So, as I said, your dad came to us.”

  Daniel stopped. When he spoke again he sounded less sure of himself. “And we told him to stay where he was.”

  Emily stared at him.

  “We told him the best way he could help his friends or himself was to help us. Work with us.”

  “You said he was a kid!”

  “Nineteen, maybe. I don’t remember exactly. Look, Emily, Graham grew up fast. He was tough. He wanted to do the right thing.”

  She wished she was tough. Then maybe she wouldn’t be trying not to cry all the time. “So what happened?”

  “He became what we called a long-term source. He worked with them, kept us informed, we went after the guys at the top. Thanks to your dad, several shipments of heroin didn’t hit the streets, a couple of murders didn’t happen, an off-shore shell bank got closed down.”

  “He was good at it?”

  “Very good.”

  What a dark world he’d lived in. It must have taken courage to go to the police. It would have been a last resort. Maybe he thought they would arrest him, but was willing to risk it. Maybe he thought they’d protect him.

  “That went on for fourteen years. Then Frank and I retired. We didn’t want to leave Graham hanging there. By then we were friends. I told him I was going to check out this little town where I grew up, a place so far off the map no one would ever look for him. So he came with me and he met your mom and that’s that.”

  “Did they look for him? Is that what happened?”

  Daniel shook his head. “I can’t say for sure. I don’t think so. His cover was never blown.”

  “Matthew thinks he helped Frank take the gold.”

  “Don’t be angry with Matt. He thinks that’s what happened because I told him it did.”

  “But you said my father wanted to do the right thing. Why would he turn around and break the law?”

  “It happens. Guys like him live with it so long they can go either way.”

  She wouldn’t cry again. It was ridiculous. Absolutely no more. She drank some tea and waited until she thought her voice would be steady. “What about Frank? He was like you. Why would he become what he fought against?”

  Daniel shrugged. “He liked a challenge. He had the contacts to do it.”

  “So did you.”

  “He had access.”

  “You’re not saying that’s all that separated you and Frank? That he had access to the gold?”

  “I think he felt unappreciated. A little bitter, maybe. All the dots connect, sweetheart, with both of them.” He smiled sadly. “I don’t like it, either.”

  DANIEL YELLED over the roar of the engines and the whir of the propeller, but Emily could hardly hear him.

  “Look down there!”

  She had been looking, ever since the RCMP helicopter had taken off so dizzyingly from the Flin Flon airport. Trees, water, rock. Bare and beautiful and wild.

  He jabbed a pointing finger at the ground. An eddy of soil began to form, a miniature whirlwind over stone.

  Matthew shouted, “I see it!”

  The pilot, an RCMP constable introduced only as George, nodded. Then, through parted branches, Emily saw it, too. The cockpit and wings of a small plane.

  “You see?” Daniel bellowed. “He didn’t crash. He rammed it up and into the trees.”

  “Why is it still sitting there?” It was found weeks ago. Daniel didn’t hear the question so Emily leaned closer to him and called louder. “Are you going to move it?” Where, she wasn’t sure, but she felt an urge to tidy up and show some sort of respect.

  “Too expensive from way out here. No need.”

  He gestured to George. The helicopter rose and turned, going southeast. The forest that started by the lakeshore went on for miles.

  “This is it,” Daniel called. “The winter road.”

  All they could see in summer was a wide gap in the trees, long and straight. Where bush gave way to muskeg, Emily thought she could still see a road-sized impression where the ground had been packed down. Had her father really driven one of those cat trains way out here, in danger from frostbite and breaking ice?

  Muskeg became pockets of water connected by streams, streams widened into a river, the river emptied into another lake where seagulls dipped to the water and flapped away. Then the helicopter was over woods again, and that same broad strip of cut trees. They followed it until Daniel tapped the pilot’s shoulder, motioning to him to land.

  “Now look, Daniel,” George said, when the engines were quiet, “you’ve got to be careful about getting ahead of the evidence.”

  Daniel, gritting his teeth and bracing one arm against his ribs as he got to the ground, didn’t answer.

  “Our crash investigators noticed the same things you did,” George went on. “It’s true the damage to the plane isn’t consistent with an impact from any height, but the storm could have forced him down. Maybe he was trying to take off again and didn’t have room. Who knows?”

  Daniel acknowledged all that with a brief nod. He looked at Matthew and Emily. “It’s a little walk in.”

  He didn’t say what it might be, and no one asked. The ground was spongy underfoot, wet in places. It reminded Emily of the marshy field at home.

  “Here we are.”

  They were standing in front of a ramshackle caboose. There was a small window on one end, a door on the other, more windows on one side. The rest was weathered plywood.

  “You think this is where he came?” Matthew asked.

  “For a while. They ran these things at the end of cat trains, a place for the men to sleep and eat. The winter road passes by fifty feet from here. Guess somebody dropped the caboose one year and left it. A company that went out of business, maybe.”

  Moving stiffly, Daniel led them up rotted plank steps onto a porch in the same condition, and then inside. Under their weight the floor creaked. The whole structure tilted as if it had hit a bump in the road. Matthew reached for Emily.
r />   “Don’t worry,” Daniel said. “This thing has a few hours of life in it yet. I slept here a couple of nights.”

  It was like a little house. There was a wood-burning stove, a table, and several bunks. The mattresses were still in place, but full of holes. Some creatures or other had been helping themselves to the stuffing.

  Daniel pointed to a duffel bag lying under a ground-level cot. “That’s Frank’s.”

  “You’re kidding,” Matthew said. “After all this time?”

  “Shelter’s a matter of life and death out here. You leave a port in the storm as you find it.”

  George peered inside the bag, moving items as he identified them. “Hatchet. First-aid kit. Tarp. Fishing net and snare wire. A paperback, an aerosol can.” He read the label on the can. “Ether.”

  “An anesthetic?” Matthew asked.

  “It’s for starting engines in cold weather,” Emily said. “I’ve seen my uncle use it.”

  “How do we know all this belonged to Carruthers?”

  “It’s typical survival gear,” Daniel said. “Except for the ether. Look, the orange tarp is still there. If Frank had wanted to be found he would’ve spread it over the wreckage.”

  George zipped up the bag. “These things could belong to anybody. Or someone could have taken them from the Beaver.”

  “This is one of the pieces. They all fit together.”

  “You got more pieces?” George said. “Feel free to share.”

  Daniel eased himself onto the bench beside the table, one arm pressed against his ribs. “Take a look around, see what you can figure out. I’ll give you a hint. Go right to the end of the field before you start. West.”

  “If you know something just tell me. I don’t have time for games.”

  “I do,” Emily said, “if it’ll get me out of this creaky place.” Couldn’t he see Daniel needed rest?

  She left the caboose, and Matthew and George followed. The three of them started walking.

  “What is it your uncle thinks we’ll see?” George asked Matthew. “Gold? Or the mansion Carruthers built with it?”