“What did he say, Decker?” When she couldn’t quite catch what he mumbled, she interrupted. “What?”
She heard him sigh rather lavishly. “That he was surrounded by incompetents.”
And there it was.
It hardly mattered that he was wrong.
It was just how Peter Hathaway saw it.
She looked around the carefully furnished cottage where there were probably mice in teapots and garter snakes in cake pans. “I suppose I’ve got to clear out of this place,” Val said softly, more to herself.
“Don’t go feeling bad about that, Val. You can stay at Caroline’s until you figure out what you’re going to do. For that matter, you can stay at my place—”
She felt so…exiled. Like Eleanor of Aquitaine. “I’ll head back to New York as soon as I can.”
“But not before tomorrow, I hope.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s the gala tonight.”
“Gala?”
“The fundraiser for the Youth Alliance.”
“You mean the square dance?”
“Well, yes, but come on, let me take you. You can’t leave the lake thinking it’s all fists to the face and moose muck portages, Val.”
“I don’t know—”
He offered an enticement. “Charlie might even be there. So if you miss him at Point of No Return, you can catch him at the gala.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“Now that Hathaway’s getting him to sign?”
“Make no mistake, Wade,” she said. “I’m getting him to sign. Me. I’m finding him. Wherever on this lake he’s counting loon chicks today, I’m finding him. First.”
It was a crazy matter of honor. If it was the last official thing she’d do in her career at Fir Na Tine.
“And if I then find out for sure, with or without your help, that he killed your wife,” when he tried to override her, she pressed on, “I will tear the contract up.”
Decker was silent.
“I appreciate the ride tonight,” said Val quietly. First thing in the morning, regardless of where she spent the night, she would leave Lake Wendaban behind her forever. “I’ll be ready at seven.”
19
Val studied the lake map like she was planning the Normandy Invasion. Once she located Selkirk Peninsula, and then the Hathaway island, she scoured the map until her eye caught the words Point of No Return. When she gauged it jutted out into the main lake closer to town than to where she was sitting at Peter Hathaway’s dining table, she let out a soft whistle. There was just no way to judge how long it would take her, puttering along in Decker’s little boat.
Call Caroline drifted across her mind. A sensible notion—although Caroline seemed pretty busy—and probably altogether more sensible than trying to corner Charlie Cable at Point of No Return by herself. Even if it looked pretty much like a wide open channel all the way there. On the one hand, fewer scary shallows to hit and pitch herself clear out of the boat. On the other hand, deeper water whenever she managed—in her cowboy fashion—to pitch herself clear out of the boat.
Where could she cadge a quick ride?
Call the water taxi guy who promises to GET YOU THERE AND KEEP YOU WARM AND DRY. Does it get any better than that?
Call Kay and work in something about Iqaluit.
Call Josie and just plain pay her.
Call Luke the handyman and just plain pay him.
Call Dixon and guilt trip the guy. No, she wanted to reach Point of No Return sometime in the present millennium. Slowly, Val folded the map to expose the route from the Hathaway cottage to Point of No Return, there on the north shore just inside the East Arm of Lake Wendaban. She glanced at the scale: one inch equaled one mile. Spreading her fingers across the route, she figured she was four miles to Point of No Return. That didn’t help.
Still, she tucked the map back into the waterproof map case, then paged through the contract for The Asteroid Mandate to the terms. There, in the margins, she penned a fourth item to the conditions of publication. Included in this advance, Fir Na Tine offers to publish Author’s memoirs in a timely manner for which Author will receive standard royalties. Print run will be determined by the Publisher. More than that she couldn’t think through. More than that she couldn’t give him. “Timely manner” allowed enough wiggle room for a total game changer to find its way into the picture, like, say, a well-placed asteroid—the real kind, not a Cable fabrication. There would be no more money up front, and she was counting on royalties being negligible. They’d keep the print run down to something smart but pathetic, and she would refuse to address anything like subsidiary rights or promotion. Some lines she could most definitely hold.
Then she stuffed the pen and the publishing contract into the waterproof map case and zipped it shut. Taking a deep breath, Val stepped outside and winced in the bright sunlight. A cloudless sky, a warm and steady breeze. At the edge of the dock, she shrugged into the bulky PFD and snapped the straps. Then, clutching the map case, she stepped tentatively into Decker’s little boat, which started to rock. Val sank quickly onto the seat and grabbed the oarlock with one hand and the motor with the other.
With about as much mindfulness as she could muster at short notice, she tied the cord of the map case to the seat and then mentally ran down Josie Blanton’s checklist for the care and feeding of objectionable watercraft. Squeeze gas bulb, check for neutral gear, press electric starter if too much of a pantywaist to pull cord for manual start. Bulb squeezed, gear checked, electric starter pressed. When the motor sputtered to life, Val gripped the tiller, hoping to hell she could remember complex maneuvers like right, left, forward, and backward, then sat there for a minute just letting it run.
Puttering backwards at a speed that would rival Dixon Foote, the boat suddenly tugged to a stop and the motor whirred. Horrified, Val realized she had forgotten to untie the line from the dock, so she shifted into neutral, fumbled the line free, flipped it into the boat, and started again. When nothing truly dramatic or life-threatening happened in the first five minutes, Val picked up speed, causing a couple of nearby seagulls to take off squawking as she passed.
When a sleek, faster boat closed in suddenly from the right of her, she heard Josie Blanton’s voice: Whenever you don’t know what to do, slow down and don’t panic. The girl had been so impressed with her own sagacity that she added she was pretty sure Gandhi—which she pronounced Gandy—himself had said it. But since it was all Val had, she slowed down and waited to see what would happen.
The sleek silver boat, never having heard of Gandy, apparently, crossed her path at a safe distance, with a quick wave from a tall, blond woman at the helm. Once she was out of the West Arm of Lake Wendaban, Val took a long look around at the views that had opened up in the center of the lake. Without perfect weather, she’d be lost. But all she could feel was a warm, slight breeze that meant her no harm, and all she could see were a couple of little white curls of clouds.
Ahead, according to the map, but still distant, was the Point of No Return. Val squinted against the bright light, looking for a houseboat or an official-looking boat skippered and crewed by folks from whatever ministry tracked loon data. Nothing. No one. But Point of No Return sloped off into back bays, and Val kept her hand steady on the tiller and headed Wade Decker’s little boat toward what she hoped was Charlie Cable, somewhere.
Part of her expected to see a water taxi carrying their archrival Julian Onnedonk, flying the flag with the golden cobra armband of his Astarte Press, cutting her off on its way to Point of No Return. For Val, nothing in the past few days had been named better, because she was going to corner crazy old Cable, get his signature, and leave the place she would never see again as fast as she possibly could.
She closed in on the Point, saw no evidence of the dreaded Onnedonk—or, maybe worse, the dreaded Hathaway, who had panic
ked at the mere rumor of a rival—and slowed the boat. No shoals lurked in her way. No gulls created a diversion. She rounded the point at a good distance from the shore, and there it was.
A houseboat.
A houseboat painted to look like a log cabin against a backdrop of evergreens. Like a floating mural. Perfect cover for a bestselling hermit who just wants to count loons and otherwise be left alone. Tucked up against the ragged shore, the painted cabin on the side of the houseboat looked like the kind of dark and opaque place someone like the Unabomber would call home. Val slowed down, checked the map quickly for shoals—none—and headed toward the houseboat.
Scrutinizing the shoreline, there was no handy dock to ram, so she fervently hoped all she’d have to do is somehow come alongside the houseboat and Cable would catch her line. Then she noticed him mucking around on the shore, crabbing awkwardly along some small rocks in black hip waders and a blowzy gray t-shirt, holding a clipboard. Was he alone? Were the federal loon people somewhere out of sight on the houseboat? Or not there at all? Should she have slid Caroline’s rifle into the motorboat?
At that moment in time, absolutely nothing in the world scared her. Her goal was in sight. She slowed the boat and risked frightening the loon families—after all, her experience with water fowl was limited to Daffy Duck—and called out in a chipper way. The words “Yoo hoo” actually escaped her lips, probably for the first time in her life. “Charlie!” As she neared the side of the houseboat, the immediate future was dark and impenetrable. Was she going to ram the houseboat? Was she going to float right up onto the rocks? Was she going to knock Charlie Cable off his feet? Was she going to stall out the motor and drift helplessly back out to the channel—worse yet, without a signature on the bottom line?
It felt like an ecstasy of variables.
Cable stood up straighter, shielded his large, crazy-looking eyes with his hand, and bellowed, “Cameron, cut your motor and let the wind blow you in.”
What wind? “Okay, Charlie!” She waved extravagantly at him.
To Val’s amazement, it worked. And for the next minute, some combination of boat, waves, and breeze blew her closer to the man she was uncomfortably persuaded to think was the killer of Leslie Decker. If she, Val, had caused any homicidal interruption of Charlie Cable’s loon inventory, there pretty much wasn’t a damn thing she could do.
In the moment he waded out into the water to grab the boat, Charlie Cable bore a strong resemblance to his own author photo on the back of that blockbuster, The Nebula Covenant. He looked focused and competent, but still not at all like anyone you were likely to come across at the Starbucks on Park Avenue at 49th. Still, the man had skills. When he grabbed the boat and pulled her to shore, she suddenly appreciated his strength and utter comfort in this wilderness.
Charles Cable brought her alongside, looped her line to the houseboat’s, threw one of Decker’s bumpers between them, and turned slowly to face her, slowly folding his massive arms. He seemed impervious to the fact that he was standing hip-high in lake water. Glowering at her, he yelled, “Bring a contract, Cameron?”
At least she was acquainted enough with this bestselling madman to believe his glower was associated with Serious Thought. Setting aside any images of how easy it must have been to hurl a sylph like Leslie Decker through a second-story window, she went for a normal smile. “I did, Charlie.” She started to unzip the map case.
“Let’s get it done, then.” He flung back his head and cried to the cloudless skies. “I’ve got the MNR meeting me here anytime now.” When he slammed a beefy hand against the side of the boat, Val thought it was more a show of anxiety about the loon meeting than about anything Val herself signified.
The zipper stuck. Val nattered, “Is this a good spot, then, for loon babies, Charlie?”
“Chicks!” He bellowed with a fond look on his mug.
“Chicks.”
“Used to be. Used to be,” he said darkly. “May be again, right here, Cameron, but not if…” He trailed off, scowling at the papers she held out to him. She watched him hang onto the boat as he patted himself rather futilely, then mumbled, “Got a pen, Cameron?” When she produced one, he stuck it between his jumbled teeth and flipped heedlessly through the contract until he exposed the last page. Then he messily folded back all the other pages and set the document on the seat ahead of her. As he clicked the pen and bent over the side of the boat, Val spoke up.
“You really should read it, Charlie,” she told him. She didn’t want any pushback later.
He fixed her with a look. “You leading with my memoirs?” he quizzed her.
“Yes.” As she studied his face, she saw a kind of aged innocence there. All around the eyes. A man with a bad combination of strong ideals and misplaced faith. In all his years, had he been too innocent not to lash out whenever he’d finally understood that he’d been had? Or too innocent, really, even to know when he’d been had?
He grunted softly. “Trust you, Cameron, on all the other stuff,” said Charlie Cable gruffly. “You’ll do right by my memoirs.”
“I will.” And it seemed prudent to add, “We’ll work together on making them the best they can be.” Already her mind flashed ahead to an image of herself as a ragged galley slave, keeling over, finally, unnoticed.
Leaning over the contract, hanging onto Decker’s rocking boat, Charles Cable signed with an illegible flourish, then placed a very delicate period at the end of it. “Appreciate your help, Cameron,” he said, lips tightly shut, pressed into invisibility by the moment.
“And I’m editing Asteroid, Charlie.” Better tell him now. Before Peter shows up and even the clear water of Lake Wendaban gets muddied in ways only Peter could manage. Cable looked up at her with an expression of childlike wonder she found hard to interpret. She cracked a smile. “So you’re stuck with me for both.”
Tickled, he pushed on the sides of the boat like he was trying to overturn a float in a swimming pool. “Well, that’s just grand news.”
“Peter and I fought over it,” she added, hanging on for dear life.
At that the maniac of the Northwoods cackled. In that moment, behind the ignored hair and the shoddy shaving, the snaggleteeth he could never take the time to have fixed because he was out saving the world, she saw a brief shadow of the young man Charlie Cable must have been. At a time before he had to bellow at all the rest of them because they just weren’t listening. Now he was at an age when crazy and idealistic and strong and completely without vanity was really kind of beautiful. Suddenly she liked him better than Peter Hathaway, who always knew what every cell visible to anyone else was doing, what it was feeling, how it was looking—and what it could do for him.
And then she remembered he was on his way up to find and sign Charlie Cable himself, chased by the specter of Julian Onnedonk. All of which meant—bearing in mind their last conversation—Val was as good as out of a job. At the end of this and every day, Peter Hathaway had no faith. No faith that Val Cameron could deliver. And it struck her that he very likely had never had any faith—and this Northwoods assignment was just a sure way of putting it to the test. The realization felt worse to her than overhearing Daria Flottner crooning nonsense to him and bathing his feet, which were really not so much to look at.
As Charlie Cable handed her the folded contract, she added quietly, “As long as I’m at Fir Na Tine, Charlie, I’m your editor.” She gave him a smile that was more reassuring than she felt. In fact, holding the signed contract it had taken her days of near mythic suffering to get, she felt nothing. All she had managed was to get Peter Hathaway exactly what he had wanted in the first place—and lose her job. The truth of it seemed like just a bald metaphor for her relationship with the man who had suddenly become both her former lover and her former boss.
She had gained nothing.
“You in trouble, Cameron?”
She looked at the bestselling author
, who was scrutinizing her. She took in a big breath that was just a little too noisy. “Hard to say, Charlie.” It always made her nervous when someone—especially a man—caught her out in any of those many small ways she liked to keep hidden. She fixed him with a look, and said, “Are you?” Here in this remote, deserted bay, was she inviting him to confess to the murder of Leslie Decker? Had she really become just that rash?
She watched his chest take in enough air to fill out his old t-shirt in the second before it escaped in a blare of laughter that echoed around the bay. In a movement so quick she didn’t even have time to flinch, Charlie Cable scooped up his clipboard, leaned in toward her, and swatted her on the head. “Me, Cameron?” He stomped around in the thigh-high water like he was seven years old and playing hopscotch. “If I’m not in trouble with someone, then I might as well be dead.”
“Is that how Leslie felt?”
His face fell. “Little Leslie,” he said finally. But that was all.
“Your comrade in arms.”
He squinted at a distant point that could have been a past that had fallen short. “So much more we could have done.”
“Before she was killed.”
“Before she died.”
Why was Charlie Cable splitting these particular hairs? Was he whitewashing his own involvement? “She was thrown out a window, Charlie.”
A tight little shake of his head. And then he said an extraordinary thing. “She jumped.”
“Why would she do that, Charlie?”
“Why would anyone kill her?” he countered.
She could certainly list the usual reasons for murder—greed, betrayal, blackmail, revenge, jealousy, convenience, love gone all sorts of wrong—but she stuck instead with his comment about suicide. It could be an interesting new possibility. One that would make her feel a whole lot better about binding Fir Na Tine to him—with or without her—by contract. “Why would she jump, Charlie?”
At that he started to breathe hard and she realized he was almost hyperventilating. “Because she was too good for this goddamn world,” he shouted, right in Val’s face. For an instant she felt like she had lost her hearing. The boat was rocking, but there was no sound. Overhead, seagulls slashed white, low across the sky, close enough she could see their beaks opening and closing, but there was no sound. All she could hear was the sound of her heart pounding, which felt like a dangerous surf between her ears. Over Charlie Cable’s shoulder, which was way too close to her face to feel secure, she saw a blue and white boat approaching them.
Practical Sins for Cold Climates Page 17