Goheen moved his head up and down.
WE CROUCHED and duck-waddled on our skis laboriously to the porch, keeping below the level of the two windows. I had my right glove off and the Magnum in my hand. The wind made a faint keening in the higher spruce branches. Aside from that it was a dead world, without sound, almost without-color. The bright red chimney looked like an apparition.
When I reached the two steps leading up to the porch I removed my skis. I heard Goheen struggling with his bindings. One of them had iced over. Finally he nodded. We both stood up. One long stride took me to the porch. Another, to the door. I turned the handle and kicked. The door swung in.
A woman screamed.
It was her blonde hair that did it. At first I thought she was Bobby. She stood in the doorway and then her head came up. Her eyes were wide with surprise and fear.
“Who are you?” she gasped.
A man’s voice called: “Carol! Carol, what is it?”
Goheen and I entered the cabin. The woman’s eyes got bigger when she saw my gun.
After hours on the snow, it was almost suffocatingly warm in the cabin. The pot-bellied stove glowed a bright, cheerful red. A man was sitting up on the edge of one of the bunks. His left foot was bare and even from the other end of the cabin you could see how swollen it was.
“Do you usually, burst into shelters like that?” the woman asked. Quick anger replaced the fear in her voice. She was young and quite pretty. She wore ski-pants and a ski-sweater with a big Indian head on a blue background.
I put the gun away. The woman had been close to hysteria. She turned on the man almost savagely. “All this wouldn’t have happened if we’d gone to Stowe. You never hurt your leg in Stowe. But no, you had to try the Laurentians.”
“Carol, for crying out loud.”
The woman started to cry. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. They scared me out of my wits. First last night, then this. Oh, Howie …”
HOWIE got up, hobbled over to her and patted her shoulder. She looked up immediately. “Sit down. Sit right down, will you? For all we know the leg’s broken.”
“No it isn’t. Just a bad sprain.” The man winced with pain and sat on the edge of the bunk again.
“What happened last night?” I asked.
“What a night!” Carol said, laughing suddenly, uncontrollably, with the tears glistening on her cheeks. I looked at Goheen. He looked at me and shrugged.
“About a mile from here,” Howie said. “Yesterday, just before dark. I had a bad fall. We were making for the cabin anyway. Going to spend the night here.”
“Romantic,” Carol said, getting rid of the word as if it was a bad taste in her mouth. “In Stowe, you’re never too far to get back to the hotel. In Stowe.…”
“Shut up about Stowe, for crying out loud,” the man said wearily. “That’s all I’ve been hearing all night.”
“What about last night?” I urged.
“We got about halfway here,” Howie said, his eyes bright with memory. “I was beat. Carol couldn’t possibly have supported my weight the rest of the way. I couldn’t have gone another five steps if my life depended on it.” He smiled. “Heck, it probably did.”
“Then we saw these people,” Carol said.
“It was pretty dark by then. They were far off on a hill, four of them, skiing down at an angle so they’d have crossed our path maybe two, three hundred yards ahead—if I was able to move.”
“I waved,” Carol said. “I shouted. I screamed at them. It was dusk, like Howie said. The wind had died down. They heard me. I know they did. They would have heard me twice as far away. I have a voice that can carry.”
“It sure as heck can,” Howie chimed in, the suggestion of a grin tugging at the corners of his lips.
“But they just continued on the way they were going. It was maddening. After a few seconds I left Howie there and skied after them.”
“Yelling like a banshee all the way,” Howie said.
“Well,” Carol said, “finally one of them turned around and they came down. They didn’t look very happy about it. Especially the girl. If I ever saw anyone scared to death in my whole life, it was that girl.”
“You should have seen your own face when these fellows busted in on us,” Howie told her.
“I know what I’m talking about, Howie Unger. That poor girl was scared of something. Really scared. Anyhow, they helped us down to the cabin. The men talked a little, among themselves. The girl hardly said a word. It was like they were watching her. She was scared to talk, I tell you.”
“But I thought you told me last night it was the girl who finally answered you up there,” Howie said.
“It was. So what? I have eyes. I have ears. Something was going on.”
“A blonde?” I asked. “Hair about your color? And three men, two of them pretty young, the third a very big guy, say in his late thirties?”
I knew it!” Carol cried triumphantly. “I knew they’d done something wrong. You men’re the police, aren’t you?”
“They left here how long ago?”
“That’s the crazy thing,” Carol said. “One of the younger men wanted to leave as soon as we got here. The other young one didn’t say a word. The big fellow told the first one to shut up. Then … well, there are provisions stacked in these cabins. Beans, coffee, tins of beef, things like that. We tried to make Howie comfortable, then the girl and I made supper. I tried to get her to talk, but everything she said was a monosyllable. Also, one of the men—usually the big guy—kept hanging around us. Finally, we all turned in. I was worried about Howie. And scared, I guess. I tried not to show it, but I didn’t sleep much.”
CAROL stopped talking long enough to light a cigarette. I didn’t ask her any more questions. She was a girl who liked to talk and it would be quicker this way, I decided. “Here comes the crazy part,” she said. “At night the stove gives enough light so you can see. They should have been bushed, just like we were. They were skiing most of the afternoon, they said.” She dropped her cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. The floor was littered with cigarette butts, more than she and her husband possibly could have smoked. “But still, all night long one or the other of them was up. Every time I dozed and woke up I could see him there, sitting near the stove. Sometimes it was one of them, sometimes another. Never the girl, though. The girl was sleeping. I heard her moan in her sleep. Once I even went over to her. The man near the stove came over. It was the very young one, the fellow who wanted to leave last night. He just looked at me. I—I’ve never been looked at like that before. I went back to bed.
“I thought perhaps I’d get a chance to talk to the girl in the morning. But they were up before dawn, putting more wood in the stove, getting breakfast. The young fellow who didn’t do much talking waxed all their skis. I didn’t get a chance to go near the girl. They went just as they came and just as they’d been all night—as if they were sorry they ever laid eyes on us. I didn’t ask them to take us out, which I would have done, Howie being injured and all, They didn’t offer it. The big fellow promised to tell the Mounties where we were.”
Carol took a breath. I don’t know what else she had in mind to say. She looked like she was quite willing to talk all day.
I said, “They left at dawn?”
“Around five-thirty. Going to La Macaza, they said.”
“This isn’t the trail to La Macaza,” Goheen pointed out.
I was already zipping my windbreaker. “What time is it?” I asked Goheen. My own watch still said six-thirty. I’d forgotten to wind it.
“Almost nine forty-five.”
Four hours and fifteen minutes, I thought, not liking it. In that time, moving steadily, they could have covered a lot of distance.
“Don’t worry,” Goheen told the couple in the cabin. “We’ll let the Mounties know where you are. Just sit tight.”
“Listen,” I said. “If the Mounties come for you, tell them to follow those ski trails outside. Tell them it’s urgent. Tell
them a girl’s life depends on it.”
“You’re going after them now?”
I nodded.
“You see!” Carol cried. “I knew it. I knew it! What did they do, mister, rob a bank or something?”
“Sure,” Howie said with a grin. “They’re high-tailing it on skis clear up to Hudson’s Bay, where a kayak will take them to their hideout in Greenland.”
“Oh, shut up, you,” Carol said indignantly.
I crossed the porch in two steps, looking down at my skis in the snow at the bottom of the stairs. I turned around to say something to Goheen. Then something made me look up. I started to say, “Bobby’s had two good breaks—”
And saw a figure skiing toward us, not fifty yards away, coming with a rush down the slope of the hill.
Simultaneously a gunshot cracked across the snow and a bullet thumped into the logs a foot from my head.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I DOVE back into the cabin and slammed the door. “Get down!” I bawled.
They didn’t need any instructions. They had heard the gun. Howie and Carol squatted on the floor in front of bunks. Carol didn’t look surprised, just scared. Howie’s face would have looked the same if he had just seen the sky fall. “Hudson’s Bay,” Carol said.
Goheen was crouching near the pot-bellied stove. I rushed to the window, drawing my Magnum and breaking the glass with it. The lone skier out there had executed a ninety degree stem turn and was cutting diagonally across the flank of the hill toward the cover of the trees. Crouching low, he dug hard with his ski poles. He hadn’t done the shooting unless he had a third arm.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” I yelled.
He kept going.
When he was about forty yards from the trees and eighty or ninety from the cabin, I steadied my elbow on the window sill and fired. The kick of the Magnum slammed my hand against the jagged edge of broken glass and blood began to flow. The skier kept going. Hitting a moving target at ninety yards with a pistol takes luck, not skill. His luck was better than mine. He kept going. His ski cap had come off, probably when he made the stem turn. I could see his blond, crewcut hair silhouetted against the dark trees. I steadied my arm a second time, sighting on his legs. Just as I squeezed the trigger, Goheen came up behind me and pushed my arm, forcing my elbow through the window and off the sill and sending the bullet into the snow ten feet from the porch.
Seconds later, the, fleeing figure disappeared.
“You—you couldn’t just kill him in cold blood,” Goheen said. “That was Curt.”
I didn’t reply. Goheen looked at my face. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have let you alone. I guess I’m not cut out for this.”
“Get away from the window,” I told him. “Get down.”
He did so. I hunkered down near the window. Carol was crying softly while Howie awkwardly tried to comfort her. They had us, I thought. But we had them. If we opened the door and tried to get to our skis, we’d be sitting ducks. But if they shot, us, they’d have the kind of murder on their hands they’d been trying to avoid with Bobby. Still, was there anything else they could do?
“What the hell,” I said suddenly. I’d made a fine target framed in the window. They hadn’t done anything about it.
“Give me your hat,” I told Goheen. He threw it along the floor and I raised it slowly above the window ledge oh the barrel of my Magnum. I held it that way for a minute or two. There wasn’t any gunfire. I removed the hat, stood up and fired blindly at the woods, then dropped to the floor again.
“What you do that for?” Goheen asked.
“To keep Curt in the woods.”
He scowled. “What difference does it make?”
“Plenty of difference,” I told him. “Are you willing to take a chance?”
“What kind of chance?”
“Well, I think I can figure out—more or less—what happened.”
GOHEEN showed me a frown. “If you can you’re a better man than I am. I’m all confused. Why the devil’d they come back here? I don’t get it.”
“Try to put yourself in their place. The last thing they wanted to happen yesterday was some other skier to cross their path while they had Bobby with them. But that’s just what happened. They couldn’t just run when it was pretty obvious they heard Carol calling for help, not if they were going to leave Bobby out there to die. So they had to come down and spend the night here, like any other cross-country skiers would. They had to help Carol and Howie.”
“That much I figured out. So what?”
“All right, first thing this morning they took off. They were, still going ahead with their plan, but they had to change it because they’d been seen with Bobby.”
“Change it how?”
“Sooner or later the Mounties were going to find Carol and Howie. That much they could be sure of. Sooner or later the Mounties were also going to find Bobby—frozen to death—that much they could be sure of too. And what if Carol and Howie were still around?”
“Sure. Sure, how I get it. Carol and Howie might put two and two together, their suspicious behavior during the night, the fact that they didn’t let Bobby do any talking.”
“Now you’re getting there. They’d have to convince Carol and Howie there wasn’t any dirty work.”
“How could they do that?”
“They did it. Or they were going to. They just turned the whole thing around. Instead of mysteriously disappearing after leaving Bobby out there, they decided to come back here. Probably they had some story cooked up explaining how Bobby got lost, separated from them. Probably, they were going to act concerned, scared. Maybe they were even going to ask Carol to help them.
“Hold on,” Goheen said. “Now you’re going off the deep end. Because it isn’t snowing. Because all Carol would have to do is follow the ski trails to where they left Bobby. Then what? If they found her too soon, she’d still be alive. Heck, get right down to it, they’ve only been gone less than five hours. It’s daylight. There isn’t any blizzard. Why couldn’t Bobby come back here under her own power?”
I shook my head. “I can’t answer either of those questions, but if you’re willing to take a chance, maybe I can answer them before the day is up.”
“Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Okay. Grant they came back?”
“That’s easy. We know they’re out there.”
“They came up over the hill. They didn’t have any reason to hide in the woods, not knowing we were here. Then one of them—Curt—came down the hill to ask for help. They couldn’t very well be accused, of killing Bobby if they asked for help finding her. Got it?”
“Sure. I’m still listening.”
“The others are waiting up on the ridge. Watching. Then I open the cabin door. They can see me. They know who I am. On impulse, one of them takes a shot at me. That wouldn’t be Dygert. He’s too cool. It’s the one you don’t know anything about.” I paused. “It’s Jerry Trowbridge. Dygert stops him from shooting. Then what?”
“Curt goes off into the woods,” Goheen said bitterly, “and I stop you from taking a pot-shot at him.”
“I show them the hat, and of course it would look like someone’s head out there. Still, they don’t fire. Because they’re not going to, if they can help it. Not that they know what they can do next, except maybe just wait us out. Anyhow, I can take it up to there.”
“Then what?”
“Then I don’t know. But Curt figures he’s covered, figures he’s a dead duck if he tries to come out of the woods and make his way back to the others. That’s why I took a blind shot at the woods. To give him something to worry about. As for the others, they’re better off where they are, on top of the hill where they could watch us and see what well do. They could work their way down the flank of the hill to the woods and keep out of sight, like we did, but what’s in it for them?”
“I got you, and it makes sense. Two of them are on the hill and Curt’s in the woods. So what?”
&
nbsp; “So I’m willing to bet there won’t be any shooting if I walked out the door, put on my skis and went into the woods looking for Curt.”
GOHEEN didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Why not bet we could both walk out of here, mount skis and take off after those ski-trails? What do you want Curt for?”
“For his gun. He’s probably armed.”
“You have a gun.”
“You don’t. And there’s no telling what they do after I leave. They might follow me. They might wait, but I doubt that. They couldn’t just wait. They might come down here. They might split up.”
“Let’s say you get his gun. Then what happens?”
“I bring it back to you. Then I take off after Bobby. If I don’t draw any fire by then, I won’t draw any—until I find her.”
“But two of us—”
“Use your head,” I interrupted. “We won’t have any guarantee they won’t finally decide to come down here. Because then we wouldn’t be sweating over what they were going to do next, they’d be sweating over our next move. We couldn’t leave Carol and Howie alone to face them. So somebody has to stay here.”
“Fellow named Goheen,” he said, a little sadly.
“Right. Fellow named Goheen. There’s only one way into the cabin. The front. If they came down you could pick them off. They wouldn’t have a chance.”
Goheen stood up. I must have convinced him: he wasn’t afraid of the window now. He said, “Would you?”
I didn’t get it. I looked at him blankly.
“Would you have a chance?”
“I told you. I’d bet my bottom dollar there wouldn’t be any fireworks if I went out there.”
“It isn’t your bottom dollar you’d be betting,” he told me. “It’s your life.”
I went to the door. “If you have a better idea, spill it.”
“I don’t have any ideas at all. But hell, Curt’ll see you coming. If you get that far. You wouldn’t see him.”
“That’s not how I figure it. Why should he wait in the woods? He’d try to make his way around the slope of the hill and back up. He wouldn’t be looking for me. The last thing he’d expect is someone to come in there after him. All right?”
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