Murder Sees the Light

by Howard Engel

  The rusty padlock was back on the front door. I took it off. Inside, I found my pack all over the floor. I rescued some food, a couple of hard-boiled eggs and a can of sardines, and put together a rough feast on the empty table. I nearly gagged trying to eat the eggs faster than I could swallow. I drank half of the remaining water from the canteen. It was a gesture in the right direction, but it didn’t help much. A bar of soap that had fallen from the pack was beckoning to me. What I really needed was a bath. I took off my clothes and ran down to the lake with the soap. This I lost quickly before the shock of the cold water reached my marrow and numbed it. By the time I’d finished, I had scrubbed some of the dirt and sweat off the last of the great hikers, and the soap was now gritty with sand. I took a swim out a hundred yards, marked down to about $79.95, and then came back to the oozy black shore. Half of me thought that this was stupid and unnecessary in light of what had happened last night. The other half kept explaining that whoever had hit me and dumped me in the lake hadn’t stayed around to watch me float home with the tide. It was a question of wellreasoned argument working away at an illogical truth that will never quite shut up and be quiet.

  I was trying to get my mind off the threat of walking into trouble when I walked straight into it. It was standing at the corner of the cabin near one of the windows, looking like a man in a moth-eaten bear costume, matted with dung and dead insects and twigs that had got stuck in the dry wiry fur. A bloody bear, b’dad, as my friend Frank Bushmill would have said. Frank was the Irish chiropodist across from my office. I don’t know why I thought of him at that moment; better him than me, I guess. The bear looked at me and I looked back at it. I didn’t even have a towel to flick at it. I thought of the Winchester inside. I thought of the selection of axes. Where was the one I took to the outhouse last night? The bear didn’t move. We glared at one another. I thought of the open cabin door. It could have smelled the food. I was glad I hadn’t surprised it tossing my things. I think I started shivering. I wondered whether I’d have felt braver in a bathing suit. We both held our ground and our breath. I was wondering whether to growl at it, when it blinked. I’d won! It began to sniff and shuffle off sideways, as though it had other business all the time. It didn’t turn and run. It didn’t back away. There was no route. It subsided slowly, that’s all, a shifting of ground, and finally it lumbered off into the woods like a traveller who realized at last that he was waiting at the wrong airport.

  That did it. I was beginning to get the idea at last that I wasn’t appreciated around old Dick’s place. I wanted to be on my way. I went back into the cabin and put my stuff together. When I went past the stove, I got a shock: it was warm. Under the stove lid, I could see grey ashes with a few firefly sparks in them. Why a fire in this heat? I stirred the ashes around and uncovered underneath a potato that had been put on to bake.

  Somehow that didn’t increase my desire to stick around. I didn’t put in a call to the front desk. This morning I felt like travelling faster than most bellhops bend for a dropped dollar bill. But I wanted to have a final look at the outhouse. In the daylight it shouldn’t be too frightening. I ignored the pain in the back of my head as I climbed the path to where I’d been so rudely interrupted.

  The ground it was sitting on was solid rock under a few inches of topsoil. So, the hole underneath had to have been blasted. There had to be some way of moving the shack, but I couldn’t see any. I walked around it a few times, keeping my peripheral vision on the edge of the clearing. Today I was frightened of both man and beast. On the third circuit, I noticed signs that the back end had had contact with the ground: a few pine needles were stuck into the weathered boards on that side, and it looked dirtier. So, I closed the door and pushed from the front. It tipped. I felt like a country boy on Hallowe’en. It was hinged in some way on the back wall. Over it went, as easily as opening a trap door. And there it was, Berners’s mine.

  I took a last look around, then placed a nervous foot on the top rung of the ladder leading down into the mine. I’d brought the flashlight, so I could see very quickly that as a mine it didn’t add up to much. I came to the bottom before I expected to and stood on the uneven floor. From the hole at the top, which aligned with the floor of the outhouse, the shaft ran twenty feet then tapered until it was little better than a groundhog burrow. I hunched my shoulders as I walked, but I still scraped myself on the sides as well as on the overhanging rock. I found a pneumatic drill, lying idle and still attached to the buried hoses leading outside. A wooden frame, a box on rockers with a screen bottom, blocked my way, and I nearly tipped one of the pails of dirty-looking water that stood nearby. Against the wall were shovels and hammers. The shaft came to an abrupt end after a few feet. It didn’t satisfy most of the juvenile longing I had felt about secret tunnels and buried treasure. I felt a little like I had as a kid crawling under the Coleman’s veranda. When I had got to the far end, I could hear the electric meter ticking. This place was like that, only I wasn’t twelve and the ticking I heard was the sound of my own heart. I looked around again, shrugged, and worked my way back towards the light trying to keep my head from dislodging low-hanging ore samples. I moved at a hunkering trot along Berners’s single gallery. Once up the ladder, I returned the outhouse to its more usual purpose.

  From where I was sitting, I could see his landscaped slag heap with its powder-darkened rocks and flowers. I could also make out the top of the axe I’d been carrying for protection on my last trip to the mine. My head throbbed on cue to remind me of what that adventure had led to. The axe handle seemed to be low in the slag heap as I came nearer. Then I remembered the excavation with the fuel drum and compressor inside. Memory was rewarded with a sight of the corner of the plywood sheet with its overburden of rock and earth that hid the gravelike trench. The plywood had been shifted so that it was only half covering the hole. The axe handle stood up preventing the sheet from moving any farther. I grabbed two edges, collected some slivers, and pulled. I could see in the dark recess a mass of work clothes—brown trousers stuffed into yellow workboots. The untied laces of the boots were in a tangle. I began to feel funny at the back of my knees. There was a flash of dirty undershirt under a faded green flannel workshirt. A mass of dark hair grew out of the shirt. There was a patch of dark red that belonged to the wound in George McCord’s head where the axe had gone in.

  SEVENTEEN

  Looking back on it now, I think I was suddenly seized with a desire to seek a more densely populated area, like the Granada Theatre on James Street in Grantham during a Saturday matinée. It was time to get moving. Death was catching. I owed George a debt to get moving for both of us. Poor George wasn’t going any place except to the cemetery in Hatchway when the law had done with him. His future was all mapped out.

  He was lying on his stomach with one arm trapped under him and the other twisted back behind like it had been used as a handle to ease him into the pit. His head was face down, so I didn’t have to deal with that familiar gloomy face. I knew I should go through his pockets, but I wasn’t sure the hard-boiled eggs would stay firmly rooted in my belly if I did. So I did it before I had time to reflect completely on the subject. He rolled over easily, with his eyes and mouth open. The axe handle waved a warning as I tried his pockets quickly. Apart from the normal things you expect to find in a man’s pockets, in the front pocket of his shirt I caught up with the piece torn from the front page of The Globe and Mail. I looked at it there and then. It made a welcome change from George’s oatmeal face looking up at me with the question “Why me?” written all over it.

  It was a large picture with a caption under it. I recognized the prime minister at once and the caption identified the other figures as Rosalyn Pike, the Minister of Health and Welfare, and her husband, senior civil servant Desmond Brewer. The three were standing outside the east block of the parliament buildings smiling at a reporter’s inability to get a simple answer to his complex question. The arresting thing about the picture for the likes of George and me
wasn’t the array of tulips already in bloom behind the prime minister, or the round of political smiles, it was the presence in the photograph of fellow Petawawa guest Des Westmorland as Desmond Brewer, the civil servant and husband of the cabinet minister. It came as a shock, but considering the one I had just had, I thought I could deal with it. I considered taking the clipping back with me, but a twinge of conscience made me put it back where I’d found it. I rolled George back on his stomach so he would give the cops the same fright he gave me. I wasn’t being paid to do Harry Glover’s chores for him. I was getting angry, which helped the being afraid. I could feel the dry itch in my throat and I knew what that led to, so I beat it back to the cabin and got my stuff. I didn’t tidy up or even set the padlock straight. I hit the trail.

  I went over the first path at a trot, or so it seemed. I could feel my breathing becoming wheezy as I dodged the roots and rocks in the way. The sun was still high, and I could feel it leaning on my back between the pack and the aluminum frame. I didn’t waste any time at the edge of the lake when I got there, but headed straight over the portage. It ran downhill all the way. I’d developed a stitch in my right side, but I kept up the pace as well as I could. The image of my boat, waiting for me at the end of the trail, kept me at it, one foot after the other. All I could see as I made my way along the blurred green tunnel were my feet as I placed them—one, two, one, two—between the roots, beside the stones, just short of the depression, this side of the muck, in the stupid muck and, sometimes, bending the ankle, sending me flying into the bushes because I’d skidded. At last I could see the clearing that led to the big lake. It wasn’t as secretive as the other. Soon I could see the sun glinting on the hull of my tin fish, pulled up out of the river. I raced the last few hundred yards. And then I stopped short. The hull of the aluminum boat had been ventilated by nearly half a dozen chops from an axe. My yachting days were over.

  If I sat down and wept it wasn’t because I was beside the waters of Babylon. The waters I was up had another name, one that even Dalt Rimmer hadn’t thought of. I thought absurdly of a Mickey Mouse cartoon in which he’d chopped a second hole in his boat when the water was flooding in through the first. The second was to let it run out again. I had three holes to let the water in and only two to let it out again.

  I threw my pack down and tried to think what to do next. I had to get past the swearing part, past the part where I was telling myself how smart I’d been to leave my fishing spot opposite the Woodward place, how clever to have left the paved streets of Grantham, if it came to that. Oh, I was smart all right. And I’d run out of cigarettes to boot.

  I turned the boat over when I stopped shaking. The mortal wounds to the hull all puckered inward. I wondered whether I could do further damage with a rock, found one, and beat the ragged pucker with it for a few minutes. It made me feel better, for a start. Then I put another stone underneath the hole I was working on. Gradually, I was able to get the two parts back together again, at least so that I couldn’t see through them any more. I bashed away at the other four holes and got them all to the same state. They were in no way waterproof, but at least they didn’t look like they’d sink me in ten seconds. Now it would take about thirty. In ten seconds, at least I’d be in shallow water. My playing about insured my drowning in water over my head.

  What was the next step? I needed a bleeding pine tree. The place was a home away from home for bleeding pines. I found one and tried to get it to drip on my knife blade. It did, but not much. I worked away at the wound in the tree, making it bigger, and tried to hurry the drops which looked to be a third slower than molasses in January. I got another tree started. By the time I’d added a bladeful of goo to the boat, I could go back to another tree and find a couple of drops. I felt like Robinson Crusoe building his boat. At least I could carry mine to the water. That’s where my trouble would start. After an hour—call it an hour, who knows how long it really was?—I had a patched boat. I flipped it and tried it in the river with no weight in it. I’d mended it outside and inside, so I wasn’t surprised that the water didn’t start appearing right away. The problems would start when I added my weight to the hull. That would test my patches. I brought out the motor and attached it. Still no water to speak of. I left the pack where it fell and climbed in. One of the mends began to gush. I put a finger on it, like I was a little Dutch boy and my sister was standing at my back yelling, “You’re only making it bigger!”

  I started the motor. I figured I could get as far as the river mouth before I was in deep trouble. Deep, ha! I know how to pick words sometimes. I headed out into the channel and nothing more went wrong. The hole under my palm throbbed a bit with the vibration of the motor. I moved slowly around the curves of the river. A bloody big whooping crane or something took off in an explosion of blue-grey feathers, nearly giving me heart failure. I felt like an African explorer looking to the riverbank to see whether the logs slid into the water to become crocodiles. Nothing moved. Not far from the place where Big Bird had leapt into the air, I saw the still form of a deer, dead in the water, and not at all Disney-like. I was beginning to dislike what I’d been discovering in the north woods.

  I got to the mouth of the river, spat in the water for luck, and revved the motor up a notch. I may have been feeling brave, but I kept my tiller arm moving with the shoreline. I was moving at no great speed about a hundred feet off the nearest landing spot. Another of the wounds opened, first just a trickle of sculpted water, then it rose like a fountain, until my other hand stoppered it. I tried to move the pine resin around to fix it again, but it was useless for sticking once it got wet. I had to steer, so I took my hand away and to hell with it.

  I was making slow progress. I’d done for the bend at the end of Big Crummock and put paid to the sandbar at the shank of the long run home. I grinned at the first sight of the second island. It was like a talisman, pointing up to the sky. It got bigger as I got closer. My palm was getting weary holding out the lake and the heel of my foot was keeping the other leak from sinking me. I was clearing the island when another of the holes blossomed a fountain. In shifting to put my other heel over it, I put the right heel through the mend, and water started coming into the boat wholesale and retail combined. I revved the motor up full and lifted the prow sufficiently so that I wasn’t filling up from the forward hole, but the holes near me were making up for that.

  I was just coming abreast of the Woodward place when the motor cut out. I looked behind me and saw the reason: it was mostly underwater. I was in fact sinking. Three-quarters of the way home and I was sinking. My plan to stay near the shore was a good one. Unfortunately, I’d abandoned it when I first saw the island. I was like a racehorse sniffing his stall. And now I was up to the gunwales in Big Crummock Lake. The flotation tanks at the ends of the boat only served to make me more ridiculous than I would have been without them. I couldn’t go anywhere; I could only wallow. I remembered the rules my camp counsellor told us: one man scuppers the group and nobody leaves the foundering boat, not even the rats. So I wallowed.

  I didn’t hear the other motor start. I only became aware of the noise when it got close. I was so far down in my troubles and the water that I didn’t even look up to see who was off to the rescue. I heard the motor move into a lower gear, felt a hand on the gunwale, and looked up into the face of my bearded rescuer, Norbert E. Patten.

  “You!” We both said it at once. Patten added: “Delivered from the deep.” I was glad to see him, even with a dirty bandage on his right hand. “Have you got a painter?” he yelled over the sound of his idling motor. His boat was the aluminum twin of mine but the motor was bigger; it could have torn all my patches off with one mighty jerk. I flipped him the limp, dripping rope. “I’ll make it fast,” he said, putting the rope around a cleat on the transom. “You’d better come over the side, Benny.”

  “Where do I stand on salvage?” I asked lamely. “It’s not my boat.” He didn’t seem to think I was being funny, keeping my head and all th
at, so I shrugged and climbed aboard his craft. He lent me a steadying hand, and I found myself tripping over cans of bait and landing nets. As soon as I’d picked myself up, I could see that he had his act in gear and we were heading towards his familiar dock.

  “Who sprung you from the hospital?” I asked.

  “I checked myself out after a couple of hours. There wasn’t anything they could do that you hadn’t already done. Luckily the thing wasn’t poisoned, Benny. Just the same I’m in your debt again, fella.”

  “You’ve evened the score now.” I was beginning to feel strange: cold and sweaty at the same time. Not poisoned? Damn it.

  “What happened to you anyway?” he asked after tying up both boats to his dock. “That thing’s not seaworthy.” An unconscious humorist was my rescuer. He didn’t show it playing chess.

  Suddenly, I began to come apart at the seams. Shivering started it, then the feeling that my gut was trying to climb past my tonsils. He saw that I was soaking, threw me a rough wool sweater, and motioned me up to the house. I followed leaving wet marks from my feet all the way up to the front door. Pausing there, because I didn’t want to warp his floors, I waited until he grabbed my arm and hauled me into the cabin.

  Twenty minutes later, I was in dry clothes—Patten’s, I think—and trying to get my jaw to stop snapping like a new elastic. Except for the girl, Lorca, Patten was alone in the place. She had appeared wearing a bathrobe fresh from a swim, had looked at the shivering wreck that was dripping everywhere, brought a towel that still smelled sweetly of shampoo, and began pulling off my wet clothes. She made no more than a stab at this. Since this wasn’t really a matter of life and death, the proprieties might be observed. She tried to get circulation moving in my blueish feet. My skin was grey with dirt and exposure. My fingers and toes had water-logged furrows running between dead-looking white puckered flesh. My fingers were filthy under the shock, with gravediggers fingernails. I saw a face in a mirror but couldn’t focus on it. With a turban made from an undershirt, it looked like Gunga Din’s.