The cowboy came up behind Shaggy and waved his hand at the crowding reporters. They shuffled backward, but not far. Peering between the shoulder-cameras and microphones, Lacey watched the unlikely trio of shaggy woman, grizzled old man, and dapper Rob put their heads together. After a very short conference, Rob led Shaggy back to the bench. The old cowboy strode toward the reporters. Lacey expected a plea for mercy on the distraught woman but he said nothing. His hand flicked again.
The sound of thunder was probably her imagination, but the scrum felt it, too. They parted ahead of the old man like the Red Sea before Moses, leaving the athletic youngsters stranded on the grass. Even Blondie scuttled sideways, leaving the old man and the young ones in a circle of empty lawn. Whatever he said was too low for Lacey to catch, but the Bimmer’s driver took a sudden step backward. His tanned face paled. Scenting blood, the media stepped forward the instant the old man turned away. Rob left Shaggy’s side and drew them off.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called over the murmur of the breeze, “the banner reveal is delayed a few minutes. I’d be happy to take questions now on the development of this wonderful new facility and the opening gala for our first-ever exhibition: A Century of Western Canadian Hockey.”
The reporters, with some backward glances, shuffled toward him, leaving the old cowboy once more seated on the bench with the shaggy woman. He no longer looked like a thrower of thunderbolts, but as perplexed as any man stuck with a crying woman. Lacey dodged around the re-forming scrum to crouch beside Shaggy. If there was any more trouble from this disturbed woman, she might help keep it off camera.
“Can I help you?” she asked Shaggy, who was still sobbing, although into a large white hankie that was probably the cowboy’s. “Are you hurt?”
The woman sniffed, dark curls tumbling over her shoulders. “Sorry. Got out of hand. I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure?” The woman nodded, lowering her head until her droopy hat brim hid her tear-streaked face. Okay then. Since she showed no signs of leaping up or screaming, Lacey scanned the scene for other sources of trouble. There were none. The protester, his sign still held high, was staring from the roadside, just off the property. The media pack had followed Rob to the front entrance, where he was gesturing at the rolled banners high overhead. Nothing to see here, folks. Nothing for Lacey to do with her old, hard-wired police reactions. She went back for the crimpers, counted out the cable connectors, and headed for the staff door.
Fifteen minutes to fetch tools from the van. Not a good way to impress Wayne. He might think she was out here kissing up to the old cowboy, whoever he was — clearly someone the reporters respected and, since he was front and centre at the press conference, a power at the new museum.
Near lunchtime, she left the building by the front entrance. The media and the ladders were gone. The unrolled banners of outsize hockey players fluttered between the log pillars. She turned to view them from across the lawn, recognizing the ubiquitous Calgary Flames jersey on one as well as the Vancouver Canucks jersey she had been only too familiar with in the Lower Mainland. The opening exhibit upstairs in the east-wing gallery held more kinds of hockey memorabilia than she had ever suspected were made: sculptures, posters, comics, bronzed skates, and old uniforms. The walls were mostly bare, awaiting paintings and photographs on the same theme. Why a hockey exhibit in a cowboy-themed tourist village like Bragg Creek? She knew too little about art galleries or hockey — or cowboys — to hazard a guess. She left the Civic in the lot and set off on foot, staying on the side of the road farthest from the river.
Away from the building, the noise was louder. At the corner where the bridge came across, where she usually turned to head back to Calgary, she couldn’t avoid the sight of the water any longer. Big branches and other debris churned up against the bridge abutments. The largest pieces hit with a crack before swirling away, barely a foot below the bridge’s underbelly. She watched in sickened fascination until a car came along. The driver honked at her and she jumped, stepping hastily off the pavement beside the uphill turn to Dee’s house. After two minutes of steady walking, she was turning up Dee’s long driveway through the spruce trees. She let herself in by the mudroom door, noticing gratefully that the dogs were not in their pen to make a fuss. As she stepped into the house, though, a setter loped over from the living room, planted its feet, and growled at her.
Dee’s voice came behind it, sharp with fear. “Who’s there?”
“Me,” Lacey called back. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I walked up.” When the dog turned away in answer to Dee’s call, she followed him into the living room. “You missed the excitement at the press conference.” She stopped. Dee was huddled on the couch, her faced blotched and her nose red. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“Not hurt bad, but I wrenched my ankle a bit. Again.”
Lacey scanned the room at light speed, but nothing seemed disturbed. Not an intruder, then. She breathed. “If it hurts enough to make you cry, maybe we should get it checked. Where’s the nearest medical place?”
Dee blew her nose on a soggy tissue. “Nothing closer than Calgary. And anyway, that’s not why I’m crying. Can’t a girl shed a few tears after she’s nearly been run over for the second time?”
Lacey perched on the corner of the massive coffee table and leaned toward her friend. “This happened today?”
“Yeah. I was walking with the dogs down toward the Centre when some assholes came speeding down the hill. I grabbed Boney and Beau and jumped into the ditch. When the dust settled I couldn’t get up right away. I just sat there, shaking.”
“Tell me you called the police.”
Dee lifted her chin. “No need. It was Jake Wyman’s car.”
“The kindly millionaire? He tried to run you over?”
“No. He lets guests drive his cars. It was another stupid bloody hockey player behind the wheel, I’m sure. They think they own the world.”
“Three jocks in an orange BMW, by chance?” Lacey wasn’t surprised by Dee’s nod. The timing fit. “They burned into the Centre’s parking lot while I was out there. Probably right after they passed you. If I’d known, I’d have nailed them.”
“I’m sure Jake has thumped them down by now.” Dee eased her shoulders from her blanket. “I called Rob’s phone right away to tell them not to hold the press conference. Jan answered. She’d have told Jake first thing.”
“Who’s Jan? That shaggy-haired woman with the piercing shriek?”
“My uphill neighbour. Old friend of Rob’s, and she’s known Jake forever, too. I heard her yell his name and then she was cut off.” So Jake Wyman was the old cowboy. He didn’t dress like Lacey’s West Coast idea of a multi-millionaire, but that explained the reporters’ deferential distance while he told off the punk driver.
“Your neighbour was cut off,” she told Dee, “because she threw the phone at the jocks and then tried to beat them up. She had to be restrained.”
Dee sat up. “Seriously? I hope she’s all right.”
“She said she was. She looked a wreck to me.”
“I’m sorry I told her. It just poured out of me when I heard a friendly voice. Like when you walked in. What else are friends for?” Dee grabbed a fresh tissue and mopped her face. “Why are you here? Need lunch? Leftover chicken and salad in the fridge. One of us will have to get groceries soon.”
Lacey explained about Wayne’s offer. “You’ll feel safer tonight if I can get those lights installed in the right places after work. And I’ll get your bike down, too.”
“No rush on the bike.” Dee unwrapped her legs from the blankets. “I’m too shaky to try riding today. But I’m so glad you came home. I feel saner already. I’ll do food while you do photos, okay?”
As Lacey moved around the outside of the house, trying to balance the need for prowler protection with the story she’d told Wayne about the dogs, she wondered a
t Dee’s sudden mood shifts. Was it just the stress, or had she become a bit, well, unstable? Was there any prowler, or had she imagined the whole thing? She’d said she had suspected that of herself; now Lacey suspected her, too. But they had to proceed as if there was evidence to be gathered. If nothing triggered the extra lights by Friday, the day of the museum gala, they could discuss that again. And she’d have three more days to evaluate Dee’s mood swings. Wouldn’t that be a touchy conversation — suggesting that Dee needed to see a therapist.
Chapter Four
Back at the Centre after lunch, Lacey copied her photos to Wayne’s laptop. He skimmed through them and, using his finger on the touchpad, drew arrows and circles on the relevant images to show where she needed to install the lights. “You’ll have to use extension cords for now, and I can’t spare any. We’ll wire them in properly if she wants to keep them. Go load them in your car before you forget. And bring this list of stuff from the van. We’ll do the art vault this afternoon.”
Extension cords weren’t exactly high security; they could be unplugged if someone managed to sneak under the motion-sensor panels the first time. Lacey made a mental note to make sure the sensors covered wherever the cords came from. If the lights went on just once, they’d prove Dee hadn’t imagined the whole thing and demonstrate the need for greater security. She’d convince Dee to spend the money, or Wayne to delay billing for the work, or something. She went out into the brilliant afternoon, shuffled around the equipment per her instructions, and headed back inside to meet Wayne at the elevator that would take them into that holiest of holies in the art world: the vault.
Located deep in the sub-basement, poking its rear end out under the parking lot, the steel-encased, climate-controlled room was reachable by only one elevator, and only if the right key card was used. It was also at least ten degrees colder than the atrium. Standing in the small elevator lobby across from the shining steel vault door brought goosebumps up in waves on Lacey’s bare arms. She tried not to rub them while Wayne briefed her on the security. Only those key cards held by Wayne, Rob, and the board’s president and vice-president would allow access down here. The elevator would not leave if the vault door was unlocked, something staff members would know, but illicit entrants would not. Those top four high-security cards could override that rule and call up the elevator to some other level, trapping intruders until police arrived.
“It’s almost more anti-vandal defence than anti-burglary,” Wayne said, handing up a screwdriver as she balanced on a small plastic stepstool to adjust the angle on the camera above the elevator door. “That protester outside could be the visible tip of a lot of local resentment. Who knows what some shine-swilling bush hermit might try for his fifteen minutes? Since Mayerthorpe, nobody takes chances with disgruntled farmers.”
Lacey nodded, although she thought Wayne was overstating his case. Mayerthorpe, Alberta, was where four RCMP officers had been picked off by a mean man with a grudge. The bright, touristy environs of Bragg Creek seemed a different universe from that of such men. In reality, the two small towns were hardly a half day’s drive apart, and there was plenty of bush around here to harbour angry nutters. The lone protester didn’t look angry enough to worry about, but then, some of the worst mass murderers in history had seemed nice enough to their neighbours.
When the two lobby cameras were cable connected and their angles adjusted to his satisfaction, Wayne unlocked the vault with his key card and a numerical code and pulled the shining door open. A wave of deeper chill flowed out, reminding Lacey of a morgue fridge. Peering past Wayne, she caught her first glimpse of the inner sanctum: ten metres by fifteen of white walls and floors under a six-metre-high ceiling, with lighting so intense it bleached out every shadow. One side of the room held bare, open shelving of varying depths and widths, the other a long frontage of vertical panels, each half as wide as a standard door, with a drawer pull in the middle and three slots for labels above that.
Lacey gestured. “What’s behind those?”
“You, in a minute.” Wayne lifted a remote control from a wall mounting and pushed a button. With a hiss of hidden hydraulics, one panel moved smoothly out into the room. Behind the polished metal front was attached a rigid-mesh construction half as long as the room and almost as high, with a handful of movable hooks hanging randomly from its expanse. “They’ll hang pictures on these for storage,” he added. “All computer hydraulics, and the software programmer is the biggest pain in the ass I’ve met in five years.” It was the most personal commentary he had let slip so far. He pushed another button to send the massive rack back to its resting place.
“Where do we start?” Lacey set down the plastic stepstool and tugged her tool belt into position. They tested and focused the motion-sensor camera over the door, a second camera facing along the shelving, and a third aimed along the front of the hydraulic racks.
“One more,” said Wayne. “Take everything and go tight up against the end wall.”
When she was in position, he pointed the remote. The rack closest to the wall rolled out with a whisper of steel wheels and a hiss of overhead cables, cutting off Lacey from the rest of the vault and giving her a long moment to either panic or admire the posters taped up on the mesh, presumably by the construction crew. Jayne Mansfield’s cleavage made a change from the hockey players on either side, but none of it distracted Lacey from the claustrophobia that was never far below the surface ever since the underwater incident all those years ago. She concentrated on breathing steadily. There would be no panic, no sign of weakness, not when Wayne was finally showing signs of accepting her. At least she could see through the mesh. A solid wall would have sent her through the roof.
When the motion stopped, she sidled along the rack to its back end. The plastic stepstool’s feet bumped along the mesh behind her, bouncing away only to rebound off the cement wall and back again. She wiggled past the rack’s cold steel end plate, reached back for the stepstool, and angled its leading legs into the gap. It stuck. Ignoring with difficulty the visual weight of all those other mesh monsters pressing in on her, she yanked. The stool moved a bit. The rack moved too. It rolled in toward Lacey, dragging her plastic stepstool sideways, pinned between the end plate and the wall. She shoved hard against the endplate but the rack kept coming, cutting off her only exit. She backed away, yelling for Wayne.
If he answered, his voice was lost between the overhead hiss of hydraulic cables and the underfoot whisper of the rack’s wheels. The stepstool collapsed with a whine of tortured plastic.
Her butt bumped the rear wall and still the rack came. She squeezed sideways, trying to fit between the end wall and the next rack. There wasn’t enough room. Nowhere to go.
“Wayne!”
The rack reached her hands, flat out at arms’ length. She leaned on it with all her might, but still it came.
Her elbows bent. Her wrists were bending …
The hiss stopped.
The steel behemoth stopped, too, so close that she went cross-eyed at the blur that was her reflected nose. Her hands pulled back from the panel as if it were electrified. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, each quiet breath a victory against screaming.
Wayne’s voice came from a long way off. “McCrae? Are you okay?”
Deeper breath. And another. She tested her voice and heard it say calmly, “Yes.” Just a bit stressed by nearly being crushed to death in an enclosed space, but she couldn’t say that out loud. In Wayne’s book that would be whining. Ex-RCMP officers did not whine.
“I won’t risk turning the power back on,” he called. “Can you push?”
“It weighs a ton.”
“It’s balanced like a dream. Once started, it will roll like a baby stroller. Now push.”
He was right, sort of. It took a lot of will for Lacey to put her hands against the rack again. But with him pulling from the front end and Lacey’s feet braced on the wall beh
ind her as she pushed, the monster began to move. She kept pushing as it rolled smooth and slow, unwilling to wait even a step behind the first chance of freedom. When it cleared the opening, she slipped out of the gap and past the pin-up posters to the widest spot in the vault’s corner. If she’d had Jayne Mansfield’s cantaloupes on her chest instead of these fried eggs, she wouldn’t have fit back there in the first place. She swallowed a hysterical giggle.
“I’m clear,” she said. “Next time, you take the back, okay?”
“Nobody’s going in there again until the installer adjusts the auto-close. It should take a good shove to get this to move. Not like a CD player.”
“CD players only pinch your finger.” She might have been crushed, and even if she’d survived, she’d have been out of work for ages. Was she eligible for workers’ comp in Alberta? She wasn’t an official resident yet, just a temporary migrant from B.C. without a Calgary address or an Alberta health card. And here she’d thought the threats to life and limb had been left behind with her RCMP uniform. Deep breath. And another. She wasn’t crushed. No whining. “Do we put it back by hand, too?”
“Nope. Go turn the power back on. We need to know if it’s one rack or all of them.” He pushed buttons and watched the immense racks slide out into the room.
Lacey took her turn tapping the racks to start the auto-close sequence, pushing her fingers past the fear of touching those polished plates. The merest tap was all it took to start the racks. Nothing stopped them once they started except cutting the power at the switch box in the elevator lobby. Anyone hanging up a painting could get dragged sideways and mangled, like the stepstool.
Wayne wore his old impassive ex-cop’s expression, but the flint in his eyes matched the steel vault door. “We’re done in here until that’s fixed. Go download the elevator log so I’ll know who to yell at. Then you can take a break.”
Glad to escape the cellar that could have been her tomb, Lacey grabbed the log-reader gizmo and went, hoping she would remember where to shove the reader’s little flat plug. Wayne had shown her yesterday, but her hands had developed quite a tremor since then, and her mind wasn’t much better.
When the Flood Falls Page 4