“I think so. This is a very remarkable vehicle—one of only two or three in the world like it. It is one of my dreams that we will eventually be able to mass produce it so cheaply that even national health insurance plans will be able to buy it for all who need it.”
Actually, the trail proved more than wide enough, and the suspension on the chair proved more than merely adequate so long as Angie was strapped in. He admired her confidence and control and couldn’t help saying so.
“Part of the key was that I was still young when the accident happened,” she told him seriously. “Another was the aid of what I now know was Magellan and Uncle—my father. What could I do? I could lie in some nursing home forever, or I could take advantage of everything that was offered and accept it, knowing what worked would eventually make its way down to everyone in need of it. I have much, and now I will have more. At the Center in Montreal they have voice-activated computers like the one in this chair. It is possible with robot arms to get my dinner and feed myself. I can pick up things and examine them. In special rooms with special equipment sensors can be attached to allow the computers to move my muscles, give me a minimal flexibility. God has been very good to me.”
“I don’t know if I could be in your place and say that.”
“But he has! He has put me here as an example to all those now wasting away or thinking of suicide or going mad in their self-pity! We only got out one step ahead of the newsmen as it was. Eventually I will leave this island and return, and I will be, like it or not, a public figure. I intend to be an example to everyone. I will be—Oh! It is so beautiful!”
They had come to the meadow with its strange altar stone.
“We believe it started here,” MacDonald told her grimly, breaking her mood. “We believe that your father was lured to this spot by some bait we don’t yet know, and waiting here was the mechanism to kill him.”
“But—he died on the beach! Is it not so?”
“He did, but it started here.”
“What was here?”
“I don’t know, and 1 don’t know if we’ll ever find it. Whatever it was, it was made to look as if it appeared at the altar stone—that big rock over there. He saw it, and ran down that trail over there. Even then, they took a big chance, or the … thing … or whoever did this, was overconfident, because he almost escaped. I’m sure they didn’t think he’d make the beach. The trail forks down there, one going to the beach, the other back to the road. If he’d taken the one to the road they would have had him, and it was the most logical route to take. The beach trail isn’t used much and it’s not in good condition. Whatever was chasing him had more of a problem with it than a man on foot. It slowed it down and also made it expose itself. It was blind chance that nobody was on that beach or in a boat out past the breakers. Would you like to see the beach?”
“Yes, I would.” A thought suddenly struck her. “Monsieur MacDonald—pardon, Greg—you are quite charming and very light and flip and irreverent, if that is the word for it. I think this masks a very serious man below your surface. You acquiesced far too easily to my foolish trip in the heat. You would not, by any chance, be attempting to discover if this chair of mine can make it to the beach?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Unmasked and exposed to the roaring mobs! “Yes, I will admit that the thought had crossed my mind. Don’t tell the others, though—they think I’m a half-witted has-been.”
She laughed, then grew suddenly serious, almost somber. “You think, then, that some sort of mechanical device was used? A robot or something?”
He was really impressed with her. “You are indeed your father’s daughter. You’re gonna do just fine, lady. The old boys who run the corporation think they’re gonna control and devour you, but I think they’ve got a real shock coming. Yes, I think it was done that way because it’s the only way it could be done, and you yourself just told me that the technology’s there.”
“But that was to help people!”
“So was atomic energy, but they made a bomb first. I once investigated a case in which the murder weapon was an egg beater. Old laws of history. First, anything and everything can be misused and perverted. Second, anything that can be misused and perverted someday will be. Somebody had the thing built, either here or somewhere else and then transported here, and then they ordered the computer to do it. Then they ordered it all erased from the computer’s memory, so there’s no record, while their device is out there in the sea someplace, although that was probably an afterthought or a contingency. End result: Sir Robert killed by unknown monster, another mystery of the islands. We needn’t go on now, you know. It’s not really necessary.”
“Perhaps it is. It is for me, anyway. Please—lead me onward.”
He did so, and when they came to the fork in the trail she did hesitate, but then ordered the chair onward. It was a very tight fit, and several times he had to assist in getting it and her over an obstacle or exactly on line, but ultimately they made it to the cliff edge and the clear trail down to the beach. She had to stop, however, where the trail started down the cliff in a series of short switchbacks. “There is no way that this chair can be maneuvered down that,” she said flatly.
“I agree, and it’s too dangerous to let you try, but it was also not used by your father’s killer. It jumped from this point—you can see here where the brush is broken and a small part of the shelf has fallen down—to the beach below. Made a hell of a cavity you can still make out down there.”
“It is out of my possible field of view. Still, it is a long way down there. Nothing human, even inside a machine, would have likely survived it unscathed. I also find a robot walking on legs difficult to accept because it would have to have tremendous balance, yes? You, yourself said that they could not expect to have to chase this far. Would they have built all the little gears and levers and the like to have it right itself so easily after such a leap?”
He frowned, knowing that she had a valid point. “I can’t guess as to the nature of the thing without seeing it,” he responded a bit lamely. “However, I’m convinced I’m right. It’s either my way or we have to accept that a tremendous monster materialized in the meadow, chased Sir Robert down here, did him in, and then vanished once again. Which one is more plausible no matter what the loose ends, eh?”
But she did not answer him. She was staring out at the beach and at the roaring surf. The salt smell seemed particularly nice and the breeze that brought it and that wonderful roar of crashing breakers felt cool and comfortable. She felt a tremendous urge to run down to that beach and dive into the warm waters.
“Something the matter?” he asked her, concerned that actually viewing the site of her father’s death had been a little too much for her.
She sighed. “A feeling, one that I have not had or allowed in a long, long time, that is all. You take this beach and this sea for granted, and look down, missing its beauty, seeing only a crime scene. I look at it, and its very beauty beckons to me, and I am reminded exactly of what I have lost.”
He undestood it now, at least in abstract terms, and felt both pity and guilt. “I guess I shouldn’t have brought you here. Come on—let’s go back up the trail and over to the road and I’ll call for a car to take us back up.”
“No!” she. said sharply. “Not yet! Please! It is very important, this thing I am feeling. The water and the wind are warm, but it blows like ice in my face. In a small town one knows well with few attractions and fewer distractions, it is easy to fool yourself into thinking that everything is still all right, that you go on and do not look back. That is a lie now, I see, born of my ignorance and isolation. This life, this wider world I am now confronting, will always reflect back this thing, this loss. I will always after wish to do what I can not do. I feel, suddenly, the turtle, wishing to withdraw into her shell and remain there, yet I am no turtle. I know that I can not.” She paused a moment, noting that he was looking less at her than out at the sea, and she knew his discomfort.
“Tell me about yourself, Greg MacDonald,” she said to him. “You have read up on me, I know. Save me the trouble of reading up on you.”
He turned and faced her. “Me? I’m thirty-five, born and raised in Victoria, B.C., My dad was a desk sergeant with the city police, and I never much thought of being anything else, although I envisioned following in my dad’s footsteps as a constable. I went over to Vancouver to do it, though, partly because I really wanted to see if I could make it on my own, and I got the job and a rather rough beat and I took courses nights at university. After two years I got a bit bored with the beat and I wanted a degree, and so I applied to the RCMP, mostly on a lark, partly because they would help with grants to finish my degree. They took me on, I got the degree in sociology, and wound up spending another two years in Saskatoon, then two more in Whitehorse, then back to Vancouver where I took more training and then back to the Yukon, only this time certified in homicide work. I worked it in the Yukon, then Calgary, then back in Vancouver again, and I got rather good at it. I finally quit two and a half years ago to take a job as a security consultant with Magellan and, being the closest to the scene with homicide experience, here I am. Did I leave anything out?”
“Only the important details. For instance, are you married?”
“I was once. It didn’t work out.”
“Oh. Sorry. I did not mean to pry that much.”
“No problem. It’s all in my dossier anyway. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but it wasn’t anything ugly. I have few regrets about the way things have gone for me so far.”
“Tell me—why did you leave the RCMP? Whenever you bring it up I can feel your fondness for it. You loved that job and that service. Or is this something too personal I should look it up, too?”
He looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Urn, no, well… It’s just difficult, that’s all. Difficult to talk about, particularly to you.”
Her curiosity was overcoming her sense of propriety, and her mind raced with thoughts of scandal. “If it was something illegal or immoral in their eyes it is all right if you don’t tell me.”
He mumbled something she couldn’t quite catch. “Pardon?”
“I couldn’t learn French!” he snapped irritably and in a very loud tone. He calmed down, looking a bit sheepish. “It’s the law. You can’t make lieutenant or get any further promotions in government service unless you pass your promotional tests in French, both written and oral. I had the best performance and job rating record in the entire west, but I couldn’t get promoted. 1 tried their classes, I tried Berlitz, I tried everything, and no matter what happened I couldn’t ever get the right case for a verb or stick a sentence together that made any real sense. Oh, I could have cheated my way through—some do—but what if I were posted to Montreal? We had a few Quebecois in the office and they knew it and teased me unmercifully, but they were ambitious bastards—pardon the language. I couldn’t stay in when I could be so easily exposed or blackmailed.”
“But they have a language requirement in university, no?”
“Yeah, they do. I took Spanish—don’t know why, except that I had a couple of friends who were neighborhood folk, immigrants from someplace in South America, and the Spanish department was small and they were doing double and triple duty with what assistants they could find. Spanish had do-it-yourself exams. I cheated, that’s all. Just plain cheated. Oh, I could remember the day’s lessons enough to fake it back, but as soon as I didn’t need it any more it was gone.”
She laughed, and stifled it only when she saw that it really hurt him to admit all this. “I will tell you what,” she said, trying to break his mood, “we will trade handicaps, yes?”
He smiled a bit guiltily. She did have a way of putting things in perspective, he had to admit. He was, however, quite curious about all this. “Can I ask what this is all about? You wanted more than just to see the scene here, and you trusted a complete stranger. Why?”
She thought a moment before answering. “I must trust strangers all the time. I am totally at the mercy of almost everyone. Don’t you see how it is for me? I am more than handicapped—I am a talking, thinking head. The machines can do only so much. I must always have others to be extensions of my will. No, no, that sounds bad and I did not mean it to be. Since I was fourteen my life has been a medical complex, a convent, and a very tiny town. I know a lot of people, but since this—condition—happened I have no social life and my friends are friends out of pity or mercy. I am a burden to everyone, and, down there, I lost the only family and the only true friend I ever really had these past seven years. I am an heiress, true, but everyone here is either fearing for his job or currying favor or seeking advantage. I am not a human being to them, either, and I can’t be their friend or they mine. One of them killed my father and may have terrible plans for me.”
He looked up sharply. “Why do you think that? Just nerves?”
She told him about the dark figure in her father’s office, and was pleased when he did not immediately dismiss it.
“It was a man-like shape?” he asked her. “Average height and build?”
“I would say. I only saw it briefly. You do not think I am hysterical?” Her voice was quietly hopeful.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I might if you were the first, but you aren’t. A number of people both at the Institute and in town have reported similar things. They’re mostly dismissed, but the evidence accumulates. The villagers call him simply the Dark Man. Some of them think he’s a ghost or spirit.”
“You mean—my father?”
“No, the sightings predate his death by several months. Some of our scientists have seen him, too. They won’t admit it, but you can see it in their faces when the subject comes up. Some references in your father’s notes and papers indicate that he, too, had seen it more than once and was trying to track it down. He didn’t think it was any spirit, though, and neither do I.”
“But you have not personally seen him?”
“No, but your description tallies with the others, leaving out the fear factor.”
“Yet he vanished where there was no place to run!”
“I didn’t say he was actually there, only that you saw him. We don’t know all of the experiments going on up there, and we don’t know all the equipment the security forces have and use—but I’d say it’s a dead certainty they know just where both of us are right now and even odds they’re monitoring this whole conversation somehow. What I don’t know is if it connects in any way to your father’s murder. It may have everything to do with it—or nothing.”
“I am feeling more afraid and uncertain every moment, yet—where can I go? You can see now what I was trying to tell you? Right now, you are the only one on this island who was both not here at the time of the murder and who has no vested interest in his death or my future other than Sister Maria, and I really do not know her all that well, either.”
“She’s not from the convent?”
“Oh, yes, but she has not been there long. She trained at the Center in Montreal with the kind of equipment I need and use, like this chair, but after I was there. I am a patient to her, not a friend, and if I do not give this all up and return and take my vows she will be gone very quick.” She sighed. “Don’t you see? It is not my affliction but my position that is the occasion for pity. I am alone. Monsieur MacDonald— Greg—what I need is a friend, a confidant. You are correct—I truly know you not at all. But you are here, and I need someone. If you are that someone, then I must reach out to you.”
He stood there a moment, trying to think. O.K., MacDonald, this is one turn you didn’t consider, eh? Beautiful, handicapped daughter of murder victim under investigation who stands to inherit a billion or two pleads for your friendship. Damn it! I didn’t even think they’d let me near her without ten bodyguards, twenty nurses, and a security force.
And yet, in spite of everything, he really liked her. He hadn’t expected to, and certainly hadn’t expected her to be what she was
, but she had one hell of a mind behind that pretty face, and a willingness to gamble. “All right, Angie. I’ll be your friend.” He said it sincerely and he meant it.
“Greg—thank you. Now, will you be honest with me?”
“I’ll try.”
“Do you think you will discover who killed my father?”
He nodded. “Yes, Angie, I think so. It’s too spectacular and too messy to cover up forever. Also, I fear, just because of the way it is done it is the beginning of a plot, not the objective of it. But even solving it is not justice, nor even proof. It is quite possible that I may never be able to bring them into a dock. It’s even possible that it was done on government orders.”
“I understand. But—what do you mean, it is only the beginning?”
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to kill him in just this way. There are thousands of ways to kill someone, many undetectable, and Sir Robert was wide open to an inside job anywhere on the island. He could have vanished mysteriously, or choked on a bit of food, or had what looked to be a stroke or heart attack. He might have been blown up, for that matter. Yet whoever did this instead went to great lengths to be a magician, to commit the possible murder by an apparent monster in broad daylight. Why do it in such a spectacular and bizarre manner that I’m only the tip of a huge investigative iceberg?”
“I—I don’t know. But tell me truthfully—am I next? Am I the idiot for even thinking of coming here?”
“No, I don’t think so. If they wanted you out of the way they could have done it far easier where you were and with few questions. There is also a sword hanging over all of this until the full estate is settled and you can write your own will, if you didn’t know. It’s why I’m certain that every move we’ve made, every word we’ve uttered, has been monitored and why they’re almost panicked that you’re even this close to the cliff edge.”
The Messiah Choice Page 5