Cold Snow: A Legal Thriller

by John Nicholas

  "That's exactly what I mean."

  "You think they just gave him money? Out of the goodness of their hearts?"

  "Dave, don't be an idiot. I think he must have cut some kind of a deal."

  "Any idea what that might have been?"

  "Not a clue. Listen, Dave. I have one idea left. That guy at the docks told me it was William Orson who ruined Roland. He also let on where he was buried. I'm going to a Catholic church in Ithaca, and I'm going to hear William Orson's confession. I'm going to find out every sin that guy ever committed."

  It didn't take Machry more than ten minutes to find the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. By then the flurries, which had promised so much after first dropping out of the clouds, had melted to a cold mist in the rising temperature. Machry was wearing a coat over his usual work shirt, and was grateful for it; he sensed that the chill in the air was barely forty degrees. He shivered his way across the small parking lot, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

  The dock manager had been right—it was definitely a beautiful spot, with the characteristic white hills and snowy trees of Woodsbrook in the winter. It's a place you could set a Christmas movie in, he thought, then chuckled to himself as he realized this was a thought Alex would have.

  On the outside and inside, the church was mostly unpretentious. From the outside, a plain large brick building. On the inside, there were simple stained-glass windows depicting little-known scenes from the Bible, the traditional crucifixes and stations of the cross, rows of wooden pews, and an altar which took up most of the back wall. There was a robed priest kneeling there now; it being Sunday, the services had most likely ended recently. Machry sat down awkwardly in the second pew. Churches, no matter how ordinary, had a strange kind of grandeur about them that almost made his regret his lapsed religion.

  Not wanting to interrupt the silent prayer, Machry waited, thumbing through a hymnal and wondering what he would ask the priest when he finally rose. At last, though, he did, and didn't seem surprised at all to see Machry.

  "Have you come to take confession?" he asked. "I don't think I've ever seen you here before, but we welcome everybody."

  "Father," Machry said slowly, "I have nothing to confess to."

  The priest smiled. "Nobody has nothing to confess to."

  Machry didn't want to wind up in a theological debate he knew he would lose. "As a matter of fact, I'm here to see a certain grave. You have a cemetery here, don't you?"

  The priest nodded. "We do. Are you visiting a loved one?"

  "Not exactly. I need to know about the life of a man buried here. His name is William Orson."

  The priest's eyes clouded. It was a strange sight, as if somebody had just flung him out of his church into the world, and he was seeing it for the first time.

  "Are…are you all right, father?"

  The priest steadied himself. "I never thought I'd see this. Nobody's come asking about that grave since his funeral."

  Machry was busy incubating another idea. "Did you preside over his funeral, father?"

  The priest nodded again.

  "Then, do you think you could tell me about him?"

  The priest nodded a third time. "I heard William Orson's confessions for years. I know everything there is to know about him, but it will take a while. Should we go to the grave?"

  "That sounds like a good idea," Machry said, extending his hand. "My name is Henry Machry, by the way. I'm a social worker from Woodsbrook."

  "I'm Father Joseph MacAvoy," the priest said, and shook Machry's hand.

  Father MacAvoy opened the heavy wooden door, and they walked out into the light rain.

  William Orson's grave was at the very back of the cemetery. It was a monolith about four feet high, ending in a point, with a square base about a foot tall at the bottom. An epitaph was carved on the base:

  Here lies William Orson, husband, father, friend, businessman.

  Requiescat in pace.

  "He had family?" Machry asked.

  "Yes," Father MacAvoy replied. "A wife…Anne was her name, I think. She left him, of course, after…" he trailed off.

  Machry stood for a while, letting the rain fall on him, looking at the grave and attempting to visualize the man that was buried under his feet. "Can you tell me more?" he inquired finally.

  With every word, it appeared more difficult for Father MacAvoy to go on. "He started his shipping business when he was young, on the St. Lawrence. It grew quickly, he was rich by the time he was thirty. By then he'd gotten married, and she was pregnant. His shipping empire had become huge. Do you know what they called him?"

  Machry had to admit that he didn't.

  "They called him the king of Hudson Bay. He must have had a hundred routes through that area. But...he'd committed a lot of wrongs to get there."

  Machry knew what was coming. He shivered; the rain, while only mist, was beginning to soak through his jacket. "He ruined a man, didn't he? Roland Johnson?"

  Father MacAvoy's eyes were beginning to cloud up again. He looked across the fence, toward the hills, the woods, and the far-off highway. All of Ithaca was behind them somewhere, but it was lost in this. "He bought out his rival just to cause him pain. William was too ambitious. He wanted everything. He couldn't work with such a decayed man as Johnson standing in his way."

  Machry looked up into the gray expanse of the sky. Somewhere, he thought, Alex is under this same sky. And so are Roland Johnson, and Sarah Jones, and Alberto Ordoñez…and under this same sky, William and Roland carved their paths.

  Something the dock manager had mentioned surfaced in Machry's memory. "How did he build his business?"

  Tears were now welling up unhindered in the priest's eyes, but not yet falling. "With deceit. He worked at a ship company in Montreal where he learned the ropes of his trade and rose fast…he was working as a vice president five years after being hired. Then came his money-making scheme. That must have been the biggest sin anyone's ever confessed to me."

  Father MacAvoy seemed to suddenly remember something. "You know, I really shouldn't be telling you this, but…" His voice faded away. "He was so proud of his plan. He said if it was legal, he'd tell everybody…so that's why I'm breaking sanctity. I think William would want somebody to know."

  Machry's shirt was now wet from standing in the mist. His mind formed the words before Father MacAvoy could utter them. "Insider trading. That's what it was, wasn't it?"

  Father MacAvoy nodded. "He was making stock choices based on information only he could know. It was completely illegal. By the time it was found out, he'd extended it to the president of the company, Martin Foster."

  Machry was sudden taken aback. "You don't mean—Martin Foster—the same one who's prime minister of Canada now?"

  Managing to blink the water out of his eyes, Father MacAvoy nodded one last time. "He wasn't just a churchgoer. He was my friend…and when he fell so hard, I knew it was my fault. God couldn't save him. I couldn't save him."

  Machry laid a hand on the priest's shoulder. "It's all right, father. You didn't fail anyone. The king of Hudson Bay failed himself."

  Father MacAvoy was able to wipe his eyes. "After Anne learned about it, five years after he'd gone into business for himself, she left him. She went to her family in Winnipeg. She was eight months pregnant then. She was weak, emotionally shattered because her husband betrayed her like he did…she didn't last through childbirth."

  At last, the full realization had struck in. Machry took several deep breaths.

  "She lived for about a minute, and named the boy Alexander Matthew. Then Anne went no further in this world. William was left with nothing but his crimes and his kingdom. He flew to Winnipeg and got custody of the baby. Then he put his entire fortune, along with the documents about his stocks, into the bank."

  "That must have been a huge transfer. Who managed it?"

  "Mostly his accountant in Quebec…Jean le Potard. He vanished from the public eye after that."

 
There was just one more thing to find out. "Did he have a will?" Machry asked.

  "He did," MacAvoy replied. "It was very simple. Just two provisions. Everything he owned would go to Alexander when he turned thirteen. If Alexander couldn't get it for any reason, it would go to government charities."

  Machry looked around the cemetery, truly taking in, for the first time, the pure silence of the scene. The clouds and the mist hung over everything, and the monuments stood stoically, defying the insanity of the world.

  "Thank you, father. You've done some great things for me."

  Father MacAvoy was still looking at the headstone. "William raised the baby incognito, you know. He wanted to throw away the whole world of crime he had immersed himself in." The priest was beginning to cry again. "William…he was not a good man, by any standards. But he was a great father. He didn't want the baby to live like him. Two years after Alexander was born, William got drunk and shot himself…he left a note, you know. All he said in the note was that he never wanted his son to know his name."

  Then tears did begin do fall, from the corners of the priest's eyes down his cheeks. "William said…he said the boy was supposed to be mine. He was going to give Alexander to me if he died. I didn't want the responsibility…I refused him. I put him up for adoption. Everything that's happened to William…to Alex…what if I'd taken him? Would things be all right then?"

  "Father…" Machry said, turning to face the priest, as if his words were coming from somewhere else, "I have a feeling that many of us will be atoning for our sins very soon."

  CHAPTER 23

  A Journey to the North

  Six days after they escaped from the Saskatchewan River, Alex gathered them in a flat area off the railroad tracks and told them that they could no longer walk on roads. Sarah and Hart immediately took up yelling, but Anthony remained silent. Alex looked at him sidelong. Is he consenting?

  They had been following the tracks of the Trans-Shield Express during nights and sleeping through the days, and were now being slowly led up the northern branch of the Saskatchewan River. The next day they would cross into Alberta, which would be labeled with a sign on the tracks. The railroad would then turn north toward Fort McMurray. This turn was where Alex planned to leave the tracks and head toward the source of the Churchill River, a place ominously titled on their map as Cold Lake. Beyond that, he could see that Sawtooth was two days' walk away.

  Alex, however, knew that Cold Lake was a week from their position and two days even from the bend in the tracks, and over all of them, fatigue was beginning to set in. Their backpacks were getting lighter every day, and they were forced to ration food so sparingly that there was often only enough for one meal every day. The non-perishables—cans of meat and fruit, bottles of water—were becoming repulsive to them, especially since they had long ago worked their way through anything that would be desirable to eat. It had become so bad that once Hart and Anthony had refused their food, opting instead to go foraging. They'd returned empty-handed and grudgingly accepted the slightly smaller portions Alex meted out to them.

  February gave way to March one night as they trudged forth toward the provincial border, but it made very little difference in the temperatures. They each had nothing more than a shirt and a heavy coat to protect them from the elements, and it was quickly clear that this was woefully inadequate. At nightfall, they'd awake to find thin, or sometimes thicker, layers of frost on their sleeping bags, and be struck by the realization that they were faced with walking twenty miles in below-freezing weather.

  It seemed that even the landscape was against them—the forests and mountains that had long kept Alex going simply to see more of them were thinning out, until they were the lone travelers on a wide prairie, the Great Plains of Canada. It was infuriating—he knew they were recently in a forested region, and that there were boreal woods to the north and east of where they stood, but he needed the bend of the tracks as a guideline, so they continued forth through the plains. As if the world had conspired with that strange void in between winter and spring to make them miserable, they had been plagued by heavy fog that reduced visibility to as little as ten yards ahead. He wished he could look off into the distance, and see into the forests, into the mountains, and past them, into the sky.

  Altogether, it was the closest any of them had come to real suffering, even considering the lives they'd led. Because it wasn't just the physical pain and weariness they were going through—it was mental fatigue. Hiking behind or ahead of the others, each of them found themselves thinking troublesome thoughts.

  Hart found himself considering what it would be like to lie down there on the tracks and sleep until morning, or until summer, or until the end of the world.

  Anthony was beginning to wonder if they would ever get there at all, or if Alex even had a plan.

  Sarah, though she tried not to, thought about what was going on right now in Woodsbrook. She wondered what life would be like if she had just stayed. She wondered what Alex was thinking.

  Alex was, in fact, thinking about Sawtooth. He wondered what would happen if they got there—would they be received? Cast out? Could the Moose Killers find them?

  What was Sarah thinking?

  What would Jake have been thinking?

  It was every one of these circumstances that contributed to what happened when, and after, Alex told them about the roads. He called Sarah, Hart and Anthony off to the left of the tracks once the fog had let up slightly. They were about to go to sleep—the sun was breaking the horizon in the distance.

  "It's a safety precaution," he tried to explain. "It's about the police and the Moose Killers and whoever else wants us dead. We have no idea where the gunmen are—"

  "Yeah, well, we know one thing," Sarah interjected. "They have no idea where we are."

  "She's right," Hart said, "it'd be pretty much impossible to find anybody out here."

  He quickly caught Sarah's eye; she looked back, and Alex felt his blood boil despite the cold.

  "Look," Alex said at last, "I'd like to believe as much as you that there's no threat anymore. But every time we've believed that, we've been attacked again. The reality is, something more important's probably happened to divert their attention from whatever reason they had to kill me in the first place. And another reality is that we have a fair distance left to walk. But let's face it—" he screwed up his courage, "when has anything ever blown over when somebody didn't work to make it happen?"

  He scanned their faces. They didn't appear to be convinced.

  "If we can't use roads," Sarah said at last, "what can we use?"

  "That's a good question," Alex said, glad that the conversation was back on his terms. "When the tracks turn, it's an almost straight shot north to Cold Lake."

  "How do we know where north is?"

  "Don't we have a compass?"

  "I've got one," Hart said, stepping forward and displaying it in the palm of his hand. It was made of silver-colored iron. Inside it, the needle pointed reassuringly north. "I didn't keep it in my backpack because it's a personal possession. It was my father's."

  They paused for a moment, Alex and Hart mulling over their shared knowledge.

  "All right," Alex said, by way of breaking up the meeting. "I want to get to Alberta tonight, so we should get moving."

  They fell into step along the worn iron of the rails, Alex in the front, Anthony bringing up the rear, still silent.

  As the lid began to crack on the next day, Alex had a hunch and hurried ahead of the others. A few minutes later they heard him whooping with happiness. Each of them quickly guessed what he had found, and raced after him. Sarah turned to look behind them, was blinded by the crescent of sunlight over a distant hill in the east, and shielded her eyes, blinking out the remaining luminescent ghost. She raced to catch up with the others and found them seeking out something on the horizon that had caught all their attentions.

  Alex jumped off the low bluff of the tracks and searched for a slope. Sp
otting one about twenty yards away, he scrambled through the grass toward it and scaled it. He thanked god, or whoever was in charge of this sort of thing, or just the unknowable internal machinations of meteorology that the pea soup fog had finally thinned.

  He scanned the faraway plains, noting hills and woods, looking for the best possible route. To confirm what he'd seen, he traced the winding iron rails with his finger—and they were, indeed, bending. He descended the hill to reunite with the others.

  "I guess we missed the Alberta sign in all that damn fog," he said by way of an explanation. "It doesn't matter anyway."

  "Hart," Sarah asked, "which way is north?"

  Hart produced the compass from the back pocket of his filthy jeans and studied it for a moment. "Over that way," he said.