by Medora Sale
Lucas turned back to the document in front of him—Kelleher’s report on the band members—and could only see a pair of wide gray eyes and a mass of tangled, dead-black hair. He gave up trying to read. Miss Hunter was alarmingly well cast for the part of Lulu, he reflected. If you considered Lulu’s fondness for luring men to their deaths, for example. Had Annie done that to Carl Neilson? Set him up for a hit and then screwed up by not getting out in time? If she had, he probably deserved it. Lucas could still summon up the revulsion he had felt when his over-vivid imagination had placed Neilson’s plump and thick-lipped body into that bed with Annie Hunter, young enough to be his daughter. You’re thinking again, Robert, he said to himself. Heroines in operas spend a great deal of time luring men to their deaths. And then, of course, said the little voice in his head, they die, too. That’s how it all ends.
He shoved the report away and stood up. None of those sullen-faced kids in the band seemed to have had motive or opportunity for smashing Jennifer’s head in with a crowbar, and that left him nothing to do that seemed important enough to tie him to this desk. For some inexplicable reason Baldy insisted on ignoring the relationship between the two cases, treating Jennifer Wilson’s death as an unwarranted interruption in the investigation of Carl Neilson’s. Baldy refused to consider the fact that Annie Hunter’s fingerprints were liberally scattered over both apartments. All of this gave the investigation a curious lack of substance. Lucas was too tired, too restless to deal with phantom tasks on paper. He grabbed his coat and headed outside. He turned in the direction of excitement—strip joints, arcades, obscene underwear shops, panhandlers, and underage prostitutes. Amid all that petty crime and corruption, the only thing he saw that engaged his attention was a movie theater. That was what he needed. He would waste a couple of hours on something totally unrelated and let his scattered thoughts sort themselves out.
He lasted ten minutes. The film had promised to be a sophisticated comedy; every word of dialogue touched a nerve. The male lead was pompous and irritating; the female pretentious and silly. He had already run into too many posturing egos of both sexes in the last five days to watch another one here. He stalked furiously out of the theater, elbowing, glowering, and intimidating his way through the crowds on the street.
Lucas passed through them all without noticing their existence. The only sensible thing to do at that point, he concluded, was to throw some clothes in a bag and head up for the woods. He could find the girl, talk to her, get himself a room for the night, and be back by ten the following morning. No one would even notice he’d gone until he walked in again.
In twenty-five minutes he had the car and was back at his apartment, where he changed his suit for a pair of heavy corduroy pants, a wool shirt and a thick sweater—it was still winter up there—and then put on his hiking boots. He picked up his shoulder holster, considered leaving his weapon behind, shrugged, and slipped into it. He grabbed his bag, his down-filled parka, and the tape he had made of his new recording of Lulu the night before while he was listening to it. He slipped the photocopied description of the hunting cabin and the lot it was on from the jacket pocket of his suit coat to his parka and left the apartment.
Chapter 8
By three-fifteen Robert Lucas was on the expressway heading out of the city. The fact that he had not told anyone that he was leaving early impinged briefly on his conscience. But since the difference would be whether he was back at his desk before or after lunch tomorrow, who would give a damn about that? Unless, of course, said the little voice at the back of his head, all hell breaks loose tonight, and they’re looking for you. “Frankly, my dear,” he said to the ramshackle maroon van he was passing at the moment, “I don’t give a damn.”
He was fairly sure he knew where he was going. The cabin ought to be more or less in the center of a square formed by two highways and two connecting secondary roads. There were towns at the northwest and the southeast intersections; as he remembered it, the land in between was rocky bush, drained by several streams, most of which had been dammed by beaver to make a series of shallow, mucky lakes. Not a place he would have chosen to build a cabin, he thought. The center section appeared on his map to be crossed by a couple of gravel roads; otherwise the area was close to impassable. At least it was too early for black flies and mosquitoes. In June there’d be enough of them to carry off a cabin and everyone in it.
He chose the highway that cut through the woods on the far eastern side of the square, for no particular reason except that the one time he had traveled through the area, he had preferred the eastern town to the western one. It was not quite sunset when he arrived, and the main street was almost deserted. He stopped to have a careful look at the description Hennessy had given him, and real doubt began to creep in. What had seemed obvious in the bright light of morning in Hennessy’s office might not be so simple out here in the fast advancing twilight. To start with, he had to find Township Road 23, which ought, according to this piece of paper, to branch off from the highway he was on now. But there was never any guarantee that these local roads would be marked. He started up again. Ahead, a gravel road branched off to the left, miraculously decorated by a small white signpost. He slowed almost to a standstill. There it was. In tiny lettering, black on white, TWNSHP 22. The next one should be—might be—TWNSHP 23. Of course, it was possible that it could turn out to be TWNSHP 21. Only there didn’t seem to be a next one. For miles and miles, he drove at a snail’s pace. At this rate, the sun would be long set before he found the turnoff, and he would be searching for his target by moonlight. The only thing on his left at the moment was an apparently endless beaver swamp filled with tall ragged stumps of dead birch and poplar. Maybe the beaver had drowned TWNSHP 23, he thought. Then what in hell would he do? The answer was simple. Wait till morning and ask the locals. So where was the problem? With that decided, he speeded up and passed by a gravel road on his left, unmarked.
He braked, reversed and swerved left, hoping like hell that this wasn’t a driveway leading to someone’s palatial summer estate. “But it can’t be,” he muttered. Not a chance. Who would build a palatial estate in the middle of a beaver swamp? It seemed worth a try. The car bounced and thudded over sharp ridges and down into bone-jarring potholes. The spring thaw had created its annual havoc with the roads, and it would be months before anyone tried to repair them. He stopped once more to look at the description. If he was on TWNSHP 23, then five miles in he should come across a private road heading south, which, after a mile or so, would give him access to the property in question. He started up again. Around the next curve the road began to climb and to twist as it climbed. The swampy landscape changed; the trees grew farther apart and were more likely to be pines than poplars. There was considerably more snow lying between them. He checked his odometer. One more mile if his calculations were correct, and there should be a road off to the left again. Darkness was closing in under the shadow of the pines, and he began to worry about missing the turnoff. He slowed, switched off the tape, and rolled down his window. The only noise except for his engine was the muted roar coming from a stream on the left. The road continued to climb up, rather more steeply now, twisting to the right around an outcrop of rock dead ahead. When it resumed its rightful line, it was in the middle of a tiny meadow. At the meadow’s edge was a small track running off to the left and into the woods. This must be it.
He bounced and lurched another half mile through mud and slush, trying to convince himself that this had to be the road to Annie Hunter’s cabin. If it weren’t, and the car got stuck, it was a long hike back to civilization. The track turned sharply to the left and climbed, passing over a small wooden bridge. A stream. As he came out of the curve, Annie’s retreat lay ahead of him.
The cabin was indeed small. It had been built out of logs in the last century, he supposed, but recently someone had carefully caulked and patched and shingled the aging structure. It sat in a small clearing that spread out, fan-shaped
, down the southwest face of the hill he had been climbing to get there. The sun had just set, and the sky glowed deep red; the streaks of snow in the meadowland burned scarlet in the surrounding darkness. The stream was even more turbulent than he had realized when driving over it; it rushed past the cabin, skirted the meadow, and disappeared into the woods again. Smoke was pouring out of the chimney of the cabin, and the smell of the wood fire mingled headily with the scent of pine and melting snow. But the sweetly pastoral scene made him uneasy. The cabin windows were dark, and when he pulled his car up in front of the door and killed the engine, the silence was profound and unnatural. Another car was parked over to the right, under a tree, dark in the shadows. He had taken it for a derelict, left there by someone too lazy or too cheap to have it junked. Its windows were smashed in, its tires flattened. But even in the fading light something about it looked wrong. He took his heavy-duty flashlight out of the trunk and played it over the car body. The paint was shiny, the trim unrusted, the roof clean. The interior was filled with pebbles of broken safety glass, but the mess sat on clean, dry, gray plush upholstery. Whatever had happened to that car had happened that day—or possibly the day before. No earlier.
He called out “Annie?” in the deep silence. His voice echoed. Shifting his flashlight to his left hand, he undid his parka and thrust his right hand inside it. When it emerged he was holding his Beretta. He walked over to the front door, called out “Annie?” again, and listened. Nothing. He reached out with the third and fourth fingers of his right hand to nudge the handle around but, as soon as he touched it, the door swung inward. He jumped out of the square of dimming light that outlined him and at the same time shone his flashlight into the room. There was chaos everywhere he looked. Chairs had been tipped over; broken glass was scattered on the floor. But there was no sign of any human being. A door in the wall opposite him was swinging open; he walked delicately over the cluttered floor and out the door, shutting it carefully behind him.
The ground just outside had been chewed up with footprints. It was easier to see out there, even in the disappearing light, bright enough to notice the body of a man lying on his face near the corner of the cabin. Lucas walked over to him and felt gently for a pulse. The body was cold, very cold. Dead long enough to cool down, but not stiff, he noted automatically. He turned him over. He had been shot twice in the chest and left there in the snow and mud to die. He was dressed in work pants and a dark red-checked heavy wool shirt over a gray sweater; he probably lived and worked somewhere around there. Lucas turned him over the way he had found him. Where in hell was Annie? He retraced his footsteps back to the door in the rear of the cabin and looked around. There was a mess of footprints heading across the meadow in the direction of the woods. He shone his flashlight on them: large feet wearing work boots, he would say, larger even than his; then mixed up in them, at least for a while, smaller hiking boots or work boots—it was hard to tell. But off to one side, there was another set, much smaller than the others, but too large to be animal tracks. He shone his light directly into them. Clearly printed in the soft, almost-melting snow, was the outline of human feet, bare, running across the field.
The bare feet belonged either to a female or a half-grown boy. A sudden vision of Annie, injured and barefoot, running across this field, superimposed itself on the snow, and he tore down the hill after the footprints. The three sets of prints moved along in strict unison until he reached the woods. There the drifts, protected from the sun, still lay deep except directly under the widely spaced, heavy-branched pines. Their thick lower branches, growing close to ground level, roofed over the forest floor beneath them, leaving it free of snow. Lucas was able to follow the two sets of large prints as they blundered down to the stream, but Annie’s—if they were hers—disappeared without a trace. He stopped at the point where she had apparently entered the treed area and tried to figure out what she would have done. He shone his light slowly to the right and then to the left, and then in an arc down to the stream. After a second or two, he walked down to the bank to examine it more closely. At this point the water eddied through some large rocks and then formed a relatively quiet—and probably deep—pool.
The heavy footprints churned up the snow along the bank, a foot or two in from the water, creating a well-defined path. He followed them with his flashlight, searching for a reappearance of the bare feet. To the right, the snow on the ground between the line of prints and the stream was thick and undisturbed, the stream bed was wide and rocky, and the water turbulent. Unless she could fly, she had not gone that way. To the left, the trees were thicker and more impenetrable, tracks impossible to see. And down there, the stream narrowed sharply. He walked along the bank to the left, watching for her footprints, fighting his way past overhanging trees, in constant danger of slipping into the icy water. He wondered if that was what had happened to Annie. As the stream narrowed, it deepened as well. How long would she survive in water that temperature with no one to pull her out? The mind, he knew, would give up long before the body did and allow her the deadly kindness of unconsciousness. That was assuming, of course, that she had made it this far. He crouched down, holding his light at ground level and playing the beam up the slope. He could make out patches of snow, boulders, and fallen tree branches in among the pines, but nothing that looked like the body of a girl. She had reached the woods and vanished. He stood up, discouraged, and without looking, put his right foot on a slippery rock; it plunged into the stream up to the ankle before he could yank it out. The icy water seeping in over the top of his boot burned flesh and bone. For a moment, he could do nothing but shake his foot, gasping and cursing softly; at last, he shone his light down on the treacherous hunk of granite. There, beside the track left by his sliding hiking boot, were more telltale and slippery smears of dirt and pine needles. Someone else had slipped on this rock.
He looked across the stream. Here it was at its narrowest, between four and five feet across; a large pine growing on the other side bent its branches over the width of the water. He could swear that there was a faint disturbance of snow and pine needles visible over there. With a deep breath, he grabbed the branch and leaped, hoping that the footing on the other side was good enough not to send him sliding back into the water.
He landed neatly, on both feet, to his intense gratification, and paused to reconnoiter. Here the bank rose much more steeply and was clear of snow—and footprints—as far up the rough, tree-covered slope as his flashlight allowed him to see.
He was getting cold, discouraged, and furious at himself; blundering around in the dark like this, he was obliterating all useful traces of whatever had gone on here. The temperature was dropping rapidly, now that night had fallen, and something wet and cold landed on his cheek. He looked up. The sky, clear an hour ago, was banked with fast-moving clouds. Snow. “Oh, my God,” he said aloud. “Now what do I do?” He shone his light up and down and, desperate with worry, called out, “Annie, for chrissake, if you’re out there, say something. It’s Robin. I won’t hurt you and I’m getting bloody cold standing here.” He listened to his speech echoing through the trees and felt as great a fool as he must have sounded.
She had just finished dumping the last of the fresh vegetables into the soup pot. She had frowned and chewed nervously on her bottom lip as she considered the problem. Should she risk driving into town tomorrow to get more—and some fruit—or make do with the canned food stacked up on her makeshift shelves? There was plenty to keep her going for a couple of weeks, but the dreary prospect of living for days and days on precooked pap depressed her. It was time she bought a paper, anyway, and found out what was going on. Now that that was decided, she went back to her comfortable spot, pulled off her shoes, and curled up again with her book.
She spent most of her afternoons reading by the west-facing window that overlooked the sloping meadow behind the cabin, staving off the moment when she would have to light the lamps. That was when she felt the loneliest. She ha
d even doggedly cleaned all the windows in the place shortly after she had arrived—windows that hadn’t been cleaned in years—to capture every possible ray of light. In fact, she had been cleaning ever since she got here: sweeping, polishing, scrubbing. Maybe she would buy some paint tomorrow as well. And now the western sun shone on the window seat, warming her back as she perched on the old cushions and lazily drowsed her way through an ancient paperback. Today one could believe in the reality of spring. It was almost four o’clock.
She heard a car in the distance, climbing up the township road. Some fool trying for a shortcut, not realizing that once he got down on the other side of the hill he was going to discover that the road had washed out. Again. It washed out every spring, and every spring the township council pretended to find the matter amazing, and every spring they said that something must be done about the road, and nothing was. Not that she minded; it kept down traffic. She went back to her book.
When she heard it again, the noise of the car engine was much closer. Too close. Hell! She had no desire for stray visitors. Only Joe MacDougal knew she was here, and he didn’t go in for bothering people—just drifted by every afternoon on his way back home from wherever, his hunting rifle over his arm in spite of the season. He would nod at her, giving her a chance to speak if she had anything to say, mutter something vaguely like good night and leave. Who else could possibly turn up here? She closed her book and sat up. The car was definitely on her road. She heard it rattle over the logs on the bridge and pull up in front of the cabin. Feeling alone and vulnerable out here, she walked over to the stove, noiseless in her stocking feet, and picked up the poker. She waited for whoever it was to knock.