The cherry glow of the stove, and darkness through the windows. I was sweating.
“Chet,” Bobby said.
Her cheek lay against mine. It was feverish.
I touched her with my hand. Her skin was dry and burning with fever.
I got out from under the blankets, threw more wood into the stove and re-warmed the coffee. Bobby turned her head to watch me. She watched every move I made. My arms and legs were stiff and sore. I found a can of juice and an opener. I gave the juice to Bobby and drank the coffee myself. Then I sat down on the edge of the cot and peeled the blankets off her. She removed the ski jacket and sat up holding her knees.
“You’ve got a fever,” I said.
“I know it. I can feel it. But I’m all right. I just feel so weak. My leg doesn’t hurt now. It’s numb.” Her eyes widened as she relived her ordeal. “They took me out there,” she said. “On the lake. He held me down. Jerry. Then Dygert … jumped … my leg.” She licked her dry lips. Sweat stood out in little beads on her forehead. “I had to … it was freezing … drag myself along.”
“Take it easy,” I said. “Don’t talk about it.” I kissed her hot brow. Her fingers fluttered against my cheeks.
“If I could just keep moving. That was what I thought. If I could keep moving … stay alive. You would come. I didn’t know where you were. You were still in Washington. But I knew. If I could stay alive. If I could keep from freezing, you would come. You would come, Chet.”
I held her. Her tears were hot against my cheek. Then she started to cough. She held her chest and went on coughing. Her face got red. It was an ugly hacking cough, deep in her chest. When she finished she lay back weakly, her eyes shut, her breathing shallow and rapid. The redness drained from her face quickly after that. She looked gray. She gasped and tried to sit up, tried to smile at me. It looked like a death mask.
She spent a hard few minutes gasping for breath. She opened her eyes. They looked frightened. She was limp and pale, and panting for breath as if she had run a long way.
“It’s so hot,” she said. “It’s so hot in here. I can’t breathe …”
I OPENED the windows and let the cold night air in. She coughed a little, but her breathing was better. After a while she fell asleep. I covered her with two of the blankets and paced back and forth across the cabin, five steps to the wall and back, trying to think. I’m no doctor, but I know the symptoms of pneumonia—and Dygert. Dygert, who might come back. But I had no reason to believe he would come back. And Bobby needed medical help. Antibiotics. Oxygen, maybe.
I knew I had to wait for morning. In the morning, if it didn’t snow during the night, I could pick up Dygert’s ski-trail. If he doubled back, I would know it. If the wind didn’t obliterate his trail.
Twice during the night Bobby woke up coughing. Once I gave her some juice to drink. She complained of pains in her chest. Her fever had risen. I found some canned corned beef and wolfed it down. I slept a little, fitfully.
IT WAS a bleak gray dawn that threatened snow. Bobby’s face was ashen. She was already awake, her breathing harsh.
“Pneumonia,” she asked me, “isn’t it?”
“It looks like pneumonia,” I admitted.
“Did Judson Bonner die?” she asked me abruptly. “He had a heart attack.”
“I know. Last I saw, he was hanging on.”
“I heard them talking, Dygert and Jerry Trowbridge.”
“Just lie still and rest. Don’t talk.”
“No. I want to,” she said as I tossed more logs into the stove. “Dygert was scared. Not of Mrs. Bonner. If the old man died, he said, he thought he could handle Mrs. Bonner. If he got there in time. He was scared that Judson Bonner might live, though. Scared that if he did he would make a clean breast of everything. I didn’t …” She broke off, started to cough.
“Listen,” I said. “Lie still and shut up or so help me I’ll spank you.”
She smiled up at me weakly. “Chet,” she said. “Chet, you’re the gentlest tough guy I’ve ever known. But don’t you see, if Dygert lives, and does talk, he’ll exonerate you? Don’t you realize that?”
“I said be quiet. You’re a sick girl.”
“… said a funny, frightening thing. It would be easy, he said. Just as easy to kill Bonner, in his bed, in his oxygen tent, as it was to kill me.”
“Yeah. After a heart attack, he could probably scare Judson Bonner to death.”
I waited a half hour. I went out on the porch. It was bitter cold and almost windless. The sky was the color of the frozen lake. It wasn’t snowing yet, but you could smell the snow.
Had Dygert gone on skis back to Mt. Tremblant then? It figured, after what Bobby had told me. Following his trail, I’d know for sure. If the snow didn’t cover it.
If the snow didn’t make it impossible for me to get Bobby the kind of help she needed.
I HEARD her coughing, and went back inside. I took her hot hand in mine. Her fingers clutched my fingers. “Look,” I said, “I’ll lay it on the line for you. What you’ve got is probably pneumonia. I could stay here with you and do what I can. But there isn’t much I could do. Or I could go for help. If I go for help, that means leaving you alone—I don’t know how long.”
“Go after Dygert,” she said.
“I’ll go after help, if you tell me to. Dygert can wait till later.”
For a while she didn’t say anything. I made some fresh coffee. I could hear her breathing hard, through her mouth. I gave her some hot coffee. She took a sip and said, “I want you to go. I think you ought to.” Her voice was weak and she had trouble focusing her eyes on me. “But only under one condition. I’m a sick gal, Chester Drum. You’ll have to humor me.”
I had to lean over to hear her. She tried to smile up at me. “Name it,” I said.
“That if you get help … you don’t come back with them. They’ll be able to take care of me. I want you to go after Dygert. Well? Promise?”
We stared at each other, solemnly. She tried the smile again but couldn’t quite make it. For a while she said nothing. She concentrated all her efforts on the job of breathing. “It’s a promise?” she asked finally.
I nodded. “It’s a promise.”
We drank our coffee together. Then I made her as comfortable as I could. Her eyes were too bright and her cheeks had that dead gray look they get with pneumonia.
“Can you get out of bed?”
“… if I have to.”
“You’ll have to keep the fire going.”
“That’s easy.”
I gave her Jerry’s .45 and said, “Dygert isn’t coming back. But anyway.” She took the gun. I turned the cot around so that she could see the door.
I kissed her cheek. She held me for a moment, then let go. I looked back once. She lay very still, as if afraid any movement might start her coughing again.
I stepped outside, put on my skis, and went looking for Dygert’s trail. An hour after I found it, the snow started to fall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I LOST his trail on a ridge west of the shelter where Goheen was waiting. It had been snowing for two hours now, not hard, but it showed no signs of stopping. About a quarter of a mile back, I had found an old, run-down cabin. It was too old and too dilapidated to be part of the Park shelter system. It had probably been standing long before Mont Trembulant Park had a name. Dygert’s trail had stopped there. The cabin had no stove, but there was a fireplace with ashes in it. The ashes were still hot, and when I’d opened the door, the wind had fanned them into brief flames. Dygert had spent the night there, and had gone on. It gave me some little satisfaction to know he’d been as tired as I was.
Dygert’s trail—made this morning, the ruts deeper—had gone on from the cabin. But on the ridge, in the snow, it vanished.
He had headed overland on the shortest route back to Mont Tremblant, gambling he could make better time than on the trail, gambling he wouldn’t get lost. I took the same gamble. There was a frozen stream
below the ridge on my left. I saw a stream on the map. I kept going.
Up over high snow-covered hills. Down long slopes, gliding. Across flat tundras, with the wind blowing again. Skiing was reflex now. I belonged to the snow and the cold. There was nothing else. Nothing behind me and nothing else ahead of me.
Then I climbed a hill, like any other hill. Like a thousand others. I stood panting on the top. I stamped my skis and pushed down and back with the poles. And saw the long low Mountie station leaping up at me.
A PATROL starting up the hill met me. I talked. They talked. I showed them the map, pointing. They told me to slow down. One of them smiled. They led me back to the station and inside. One of them said a helicopter had finally arrived from Montreal, to help in the search. It was grounded, though, until the snow stopped. It was a two-seater and if the snow stopped it could pick up Bobby and bring her out, to the small hospital in Mont Tremblant, in minutes.
“’Copters,” a corporal said. “We used to have dog teams. Not any more. You never saw a dog team the snow stopped.”
The door opened. It was still snowing. Sergeant Moriarity came in. He looked beat, but his face lit up when he saw me.
“You went in,” he said.
“I went in.”
“I figured you would.”
I drank three cups of black coffee and spread the map out on a desk for Moriarity. I showed him the cabin where Goheen, Howie and Carol were. Marked the cabin where Bobby was waiting. Told him that Curt might be dying or already dead in the woods. Told him Jerry Trowbridge was dead.
“You killed him?”
“We shot at each other. I didn’t miss.”
He rubbed his chin. He hadn’t shaved. His beard was stiff and wiry and made a scraping sound when he rubbed it. “Don’t leave Mont Tremblant,” he said.
He looked at a man seated before a short wave radio set. “We still have any units in the field?”
“Two patrols, Sergeant. I’ve called them in.”
“Near Lac du Diable shelter?”
“O’Connor called in about two miles from there.”
“Get him back, if you can. Send them to the shelter.”
The radio operator called. “Patrol Four. Patrol Four. Doyou hear me? Over.”
The radio squawked and a voice said faintly: “This is O’Connor with Four. We’re coming back. Over.”
“Don’t. There’s a sick girl at Lac du Diable.…” The operator gave instructions.
“Better phone the St. Laurent,” I told Moriarity. “One of them is loose. He might try to go back there.”
“To do what?”
“To kill Judson Bonner, if he isn’t dead already.”
Moriarity grabbed for the phone. I opened the door.
“Where the hell you think you’re going?”
“Over there.”
“For Christ’s sake, we can take care of it now … Hello, St. Laurent? Just a minute.” He cupped the phone. “Haven’t you had enough?”
I DIDN’T answer him. I went outside and put on my skis. I heard Moriarity talking on the phone. Then the door slammed behind me. I started moving. Moriarity shouted something after me. I kept going.
The lobby of the St. Laurent was almost deserted when I got there. A small group sat quietly, subdued, in one corner. A girl was saying, “Then why don’t we go over to Hemlock? This place is like a morgue.” A boy and a girl were talking about the first winter carnival down south in St. Agathe. I passed the desk, where the elderly desk clerk was complaining to the doctor who had been in the Bonner suite the night before last.
“… my business. Ruining it! You must move him.”
“We can’t move him yet, Bouvet. It would be dangerous.”
“But a dozen guests have checked out already. More, in the morning.…”
The doctor shrugged. The clerk, Bouvet, shook his head sadly, his wattles quivering. “How long?” he asked, when the doctor just stood there.
“I don’t know how long.”
“Mont Tremblant is no place for a heart attack,” Bouvet said stubbornly.
I went upstairs.
The Mountie sitting on a chair outside the Bonner suite was wearing the red-coat uniform that Hollywood had immortalized. He had a revolver on a lanyard in a shining leather holster.
“You can’t go in there,” he told me politely.
“Been quiet?”
“They don’t even know I’m here. I wasn’t supposed to scare anybody. Who’re you?”
“Drum,” I told him. “I’m the guy who suggested they put a guard here.”
He looked at me. He was very young, but he had smudges under his eyes and lines on his face as if he’d gone without sleep for too long. His eyes narrowed, then widened. He stood up. “Say that again.”
“I’m Drum. I—”
“I just let a man who said he was Chester Drum go in there.”
I got to the door a step before he did. I turned the handle. The door was locked. He shouldered me aside and used a key on it. We went in together, the Mountie fumbling with his polished leather holster.
He never had a chance to use his gun.
MRS. BONNER was just getting out of her chair. She looked angry. She stood up in the Mountie’s line of fire. Ernie Dygert stood behind her, a few feet from the door to Judson Bonner’s room. “… to reason,” he was saying. Then he saw us. His reflexes were very good. In two steps he had reached Mrs. Bonner. He circled her waist with his left arm. An automatic appeared in his right hand. He looked out on his feet. I must have looked like that too. He had been going on nervous energy. But he had enough left to know we wouldn’t let him walk from that room.
“I’m getting out of here,” he said.
The door behind him opened silently. I saw it and the Mountie saw it, but Dygert didn’t.
Judson Bonner crouched in the doorway behind him.
He looked ghastly. His wrinkled pajamas were draped on a frame of bone. His eyes were sunken into his pale face, like dark holes punched in a ball of raw dough. His left hand twitched, clawlike, on his pajama jacket, then clutched out at the doorframe for support. In his right hand he held a small automatic. He lurched out of the doorway on bare feet and started to fall forward from the waist. That was when Dygert heard him. As Dygert started to turn, Bonner’s left leg slid forward, supporting him.
He shoved the automatic against Dygert’s side and pulled the trigger. He pulled it five times, his frail body jerking with each shot he fired.
Dygert’s arm slid down Mrs. Bonner’s dress. She opened her mouth to scream. She didn’t make a sound. Dygert fell back away from her. He teetered for a moment on his knees. He dropped the automatic and went down after it on his face.
Bonner made a noise which might have been a cry of terror or a cry of joy. Then he collapsed, falling across Dygert’s body.
Mrs. Bonner never moved, never made a sound, not even when the Mountie went over to examine them. “This one is dead,” he said, indicating Dygert. “The old man’s breathing.”
Then Mrs. Bonner really cried.
I ran for the phone.
THEY had draped a blanket over Dygert and returned Judsbn Bonner to his bed and his oxygen tent. The doctor came out. “I don’t understand how he ever had the strength to get up,” he said. “His heart is bad, but he has a slight chance.”
“He wouldnt want any kind of chalice at all,” I said.
His wife was at His bedside until the end came. Judson Bonner died just before dawn.
A little later it stopped snowing. The helicopter went out for Bobby and flew her in to the Mont Tremblant hospital. Judson Bonner’s oxygen tent was the only one in town, so they brought it to the hospital and put Bobby in it. All morning the helicopter was busy, ferrying back and forth to the other cabin, bringing out Carol first, then Howie, then Curt, who had walked into the cabin to surrender a couple of hours after I had set out after Bobby, and finally Goheen. I heard about that later from Goheen and Sergeant Moriarity.
&nbs
p; They let me stay with Bobby until she passed the crisis. In the early afternoon her breathing was better, easier. Then, later, she smiled up at me through the plastic of the oxygen tent.
When Gilbert and Curt were brought into the hospital two days after that and confronted with Bobby, they confessed their part in the attempted murder. The inquest on Jerry Trowbridge was brief and ruled that I had shot him in self defense.
In a week, Bobby and I said goodbye to Goheen and flew back to the States. He promised to look us up when he got to Washington.
THERE was another hearing in the building where Aaron Burr had been tried for treason. Jefferson Lee Jowett presided. This time he didn’t bother with oratory. It wasn’t necessary.
Mrs. Lord and Laurie, wearing black, attended the hearing with Professor McQuade. I was surprised to see them in mourning clothes. So much had happened, it seemed as if months had passed since Duncan Lord’s death. They didn’t try to talk to me before the hearing or after it. They had come to see the men responsible for Duncan Lord’s suicide punished, but Dygert, Jerry Trowbridge and Judson Bonner were all dead. The bleak, bitter hostility they had left they aimed at me. I don’t think they were ever quite convinced I wasn’t responsible for what had happened.
The only surprise at the hearing came in Mrs. Bonner’s statement. She also wore black and already in her mind she had built a legend of her husband. He had only wished to serve his country, she said. Everything he did, he had done for his country. I was too weary to argue with her. For all I knew, she was right. Maybe Judson Bonner really had believed that. It didn’t matter—now. No one at the hearing tried to take away from her the little she had left.
Violence Is My Business Page 17