Читать книгу Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle - Lou Allin - Страница 24

Belle’s temples began to pound like pumped-up bass speakers on a cheap stereo. Her breath puffed out little clouds, but despite the chill, rivulets of sweat poured down her back; Blondi sat alertly, trusting to her master’s commands, docile so far, but if alarmed? Belle raked, combed and curried her German vocabulary, doubting that the dog was bilingual. Franz and his mother kept their language alive at home. Then she felt like giving her head a smart rap, had her hands been free. So what if the dog were friendly. Would Blondi untie her bonds?

Belle shifted uncomfortably with her aching hands lashed behind her and her feet rapidly becoming numb blocks. She eyed the painted sides of the venerable old chair. As cottagers well knew, wicker grew brittle over the years, especially in unheated storage. She manipulated and pulled methodically until a twig loosened and her wrist mobility improved. Yet though she tested the hold and ground her teeth until they screamed, no way could she free her hands from the rope or the rope from the wicker. Even if she fell over, could she inchworm out the door and home twenty miles? But concentrate on the improbable, use some of Franz’s famous ingenuity. What does it have in its pockets? Paperclip? Nailfile? Lighter? Five-pound Swiss army knife? She’d dropped the screwdriver at the door. Not one tool, nothing but the jerky, still zipped into her arm pocket.

Blondi bared her teeth during Belle’s grunts and twists, but with luck this expression signalled nervousness rather than ferocity, the dopey canine smile she had seen on Rusty. Dogs had an amazing ability for precise nibbling with those small front teeth, as legions of fleas had learned too late. Freya had even worried a bumblebee, peeling back her lips with instinctive precaution. Blondi might be induced to nibble at the bonds if the jerky made them tasty, and she got encouragement.

After some painful gyrations, Belle unzipped the pocket enough to finger out a piece of the dried meat, turned greasy by body heat. She smeared it clumsily on her bonds, snaking it into the cracks of the old rope. The dog watched intelligently, ears pricked for her master’s familiar motor. Then one paw quivered, and her nose wiggled.

“Here, Blondi.” The dog rose cautiously. Good choice, the same in both languages, Belle recalled. Now to coax her to eat. Thank Teutonic gods that Dr. Scheib had drummed the distinction between “essen” and “fressen” into her callow freshman brain, one for humans and the other for animals. She gave a firm command: “Friss doch!” No response. Then Belle tried a lesson in pet psychology. Would the proper Marta speak rudely to her pet? “Sorry, girl. You’re a person, aren’t you? Let’s see, now.” She searched for a more casual, suppertime syntax for a moment, then commanded: “Guten Appetit, Blondi.” Magic! The dog came to rapt attention in front of her, apparently puzzled at the absence of a dinner bowl.

Belle moved her head and eyes in her only sign language, hoping that Blondi retained enough vision to interpret the vague signals. Working dogs were trained to react to the slightest movements, border collies ushering their mindless flocks through complicated sets of gates at a wave of their master’s hand. Finally Blondi got the idea, circled the chair and smelled the ropes. “Guter Hund!” Belle encouraged her.

Doggy interest was confirmed when copious drool lathered Belle’s hands. Finally the animal made a tentative nibble, as if to test reaction. Belle crooned her approval and minutes snailed by. A strand snapped, another, and finally the rope dropped to the floor. Not a tooth had touched skin. While the dog licked her lips and cocked her head, Belle untied her feet, rubbing her ankles and wrists before standing stiffly. For an electric second she thought she heard a motor and froze. But it was only an airplane, likely the four o’clock flight to Toronto.

“Thanks, girl. You never wanted this.” She scratched Blondi’s ears and rewarded her with the rest of the jerky as a tail switched energetically, knocking pillows from the sofa. She was more of a protector than an aggressor, trained to defend the island, not attack a friend of the family. Belle prowled the room in a controlled panic, grabbing first at the rifle, Franz’s weapon of choice. “Hostie!” Just like a law-abiding Canadian to have locked the ammunition firmly into the cabinet. Her mind stuttered through a low blood sugar fog spiked by adrenalin jolts. A hatchet near the woodpile gave her the notion of smashing the rifle, but Franz still had his pistol and perhaps another long-range weapon on the property. The logistics of her Bravo vs. his Grand Touring racer, the unequivocal equation of speed plus miles, guaranteed that he would catch her well before Wapiti. Suddenly a sharp “awk awk” sounded from the roof. “Raven!” Belle said. “Trickster. Help me. What would you do?” A fluttery shadow passed the window. Not an animal itself, but the idea of an animal. The idea of a gun. A gun in appearance only. She fumbled for a splinter of wood to tamp in unseen. Nothing but kindling, and no time to whittle. Then she remembered the gold buttons in the workroom. Soft, malleable. A match to the propane torch; then she rolled a soft cylinder and jammed it up the barrel with a pencil. From jerky to jamming, finished in under ten minutes, her watch read.

Belle left the cabin on the run, flexing her wrists, the angry red welts tingling in the cold. The Bravo sat untouched, key in the ignition. Luckily the route to Bonanza headed right, not back to Wapiti, or she would be driving toward him. Since Franz had said that he didn’t normally visit the mine in winter, it made sense that he would be tamping down a path with the snowshoes to facilitate the trip with her body on the toboggan. I’m not a body, not yet, she mumbled through clenched teeth. Suddenly an image she had wanted to forget pushed into her mind, the still, gray form borne away in silence, Meg’s scarf for a winding sheet.

Bonanza couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes by machine. That might give her a conservative hour, including the time already spent in getting free. Her only prayer was to drive hellbent towards civilization and hope to meet a fishing party. Which trail to take at the major fork, the five lakes or the safe way she had come? She opted for the lakes, risky but faster: Merrill, Damson, Warren, Basil and Marion. That Franz would take the wrong trail would be a foolish assumption. He had too much bush sense not to identify the most recent path.

Belle wondered grimly what lay ahead; in the several hours that had passed, the new slush might well be impassable. Nor could she power across open water with her small engine. But Franz could probably cruise Lake Erie in June, and on ice he could clip a good 120 km/h to her feeble 80. Luckily the five lakes were her familiar friends, winter and summer. A few were connected by narrows; on the others the trail followed short portages through the woods. No time now to admire the sun glinting off the quartzite cliffs at Merrill, the giant icicles dripping like transparent stalactites, slant-frozen with the winds. Now she had to anticipate every curve, every rock, every gleam to spot slush or open water. And she had to fly, fly on her underpowered little baby. She would be camping with Jim in the eternal wilderness if Franz caught her in his sights on the stretches.

Belle pushed the Bravo at top speed until her thumb screamed for mercy, her eyes tearing behind the visor as she scanned the first lake. Merrill was about two miles long, narrow and ringed with massive red pines, one cliffside sliced like an eroded layer cake. A few sticks drooped at angles in the ice, makeshift tip-ups, showing that winter folk knew it was heavy with fish. Merrill led directly into Damson, a charming spot with a nineteenth-century trapper’s cabin burned at the point. Canoeists favoured the clearing, which allowed space for tents and the strong point breeze which blew off the bugs.

Belle exited Damson in minutes and sloped up the portage to Warren. Heedless of the damage to her kidneys, she took the bumps too fast and was thrown off on a wickedly-banked curve with a bad rut. The dead man’s throttle stopped the engine as Belle landed up to her waist in melting snow, floundering like a child in a ball pit. For a moment she couldn’t move in the cumbersome suit and boots. She did an Australian crawl back to the machine, grabbed a dead maple branch, and started digging, hoisting, digging, turning, digging, until she hauled the machine back to the trail after losing precious moments. Last time that had happened, she had wrenched her back muscles so badly that she had had to hibernate in bed for three days. Today her right wrist seemed to have taken the punishment, draining her pain reservoir when she turned the steering or hit a bump on the trail. She hadn’t felt her feet since leaving the camp.

A cruise down a hill of soft brushing white pines brought her in sight of Warren, the halfway point. Stopping to clear a rotten birch deadfall from the trail, she detected a faint purr from an indistinguishable direction, a deadly kitten prowling behind her? Another flight to Toronto? Not so soon. She caber-tossed the log back across the path. It might slow him, or with luck, might disable the machine. As she streaked down Warren, the sound droned again. She risked a glance back and glimpsed Franz on that beautiful animal, parting the standing water on the ice like Charlton Heston commanding the Red Sea. Luckily she was just entering the landlink into Basil. She ducked a spruce branch and navigated the trail crazily, skirting trees and bumping the occasional rock emerging in the thaw. After Basil, only Marion to go. Five minutes? Ten? Then safety in numbers. Ahead on Wapiti, the lazier folk, bless them, might still be hauling off their huts, while others fished in the open like Ed and Hélène. Her heart did a little dance of hope. Basil was only a mile long, the smallest lake, connecting into Marion by a waist of open water at a perpetual spring, and she was across it in what seemed like seconds.

The Bravo nicked one of the warning signs which routed riders over land at the spring danger spot to Marion, and Belle heard the fibreglass hood crack smartly. She whispered in quiet desperation over the thrum of the motor: “If you get me back, sweetheart, you’ll get the best tune-up, the most expensive oil change, platinum plugs if they have them, those sliders which I never put on, and OK, OK, even a new track. Trust me!” The trail snaked twenty feet off the lake over a small hill worn to bare grass under the hot sun. Belle braked for control on a sharp turn as the machine chewed turf.

Back onto Marion, the last lake. Three miles until the final portage to Wapiti. Her vision blurring from tears, the white and green and black of the scenery jerked along like a silent film. Half-way across she stopped to clear her faceshield and glanced around, confused by a profound silence. Franz was fewer than one hundred yards back, braced against his machine, taking careful aim with the rifle. Even if he missed her, he had the rest of the lake to catch up. And with his speed, he would close in, until even the pistol would suffice. Belle aimed for a wet spot, throwing spray up on both sides, her only protection from the powerful sight of the rifle. Then she heard a shot. But was it a shot? So muffled, thundering in all directions. And with the curious geographical acoustics, it echoed again and again as the hills replayed the ugly sound. Belle kept ducking in reflex, amazed to feel no pain, to see no fabric and blood and bone tear away. Then she charged up the trail, spurred by the line from Now, Voyager. “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

The blessed sight of the Dunes set Belle cheering until she fogged the facemask and tossed it onto the ice. In one long heartbeat she sailed onto Wapiti, waving off the flying sand, huddling behind the windscreen to prevent frostbite on her exposed face. When she had ridden the remaining few miles to the familiar escarpment near her camp, she peered back cautiously. No one followed.

Blasting through the door, she ran through the house to bury her face in Freya’s smelly ruff. “So you are still sulking and didn’t even give me a welcome. This time I don’t care.” With the dog following her around sniffing both Blondi and jerky, Belle grabbed her single-barrelled shotgun from the hall closet and loaded it for bear, or something more dangerous. Only then did she call for help.

Her binoculars, trained on the lake while she waited, revealed no riders. Steve drove into the yard with Al Morantz, and soon after, an O.P.P. helicopter landed in the yard and took them to Marion Lake in minutes. With its wap-wap-wapping drowning her words, she struggled to describe what had happened. Far below a tiny figure stretched like a broken marionette, the ice sprinkled with pink. With an eye to safety, the nervous pilot set down on a level, sun-drenched blueberry field, the scraggy shrubs poking through the snow.

They plowed behind Al through the slush at the edge of the lake to reach the body. Steve spoke quietly. “I never met the guy, but murder didn’t seem his style. I mean, a professor? And where were the connections? The accident was textbook, and the drugs angle had us running in other directions.”

Morantz moved closer and stooped down; for a moment Belle wondered if he were going to turn Franz over. She hoped not. “That barrel you plugged really did a number on him. I’d say a piece of metal cut the main artery. Wonder that he has any blood left. Fast way to go. Couple of minutes, max,” he said, scribbling a few notes.

“Stop. Please don’t go on.” Belle turned from the scene to study the puffy cumulus clouds moving across the sun, sending shadows onto the lake. Mel was right. Everyone could use a protective aura now and then. “What’s happened to our medical system when someone commits murder to assure his sister of treatment?”

Steve looked at her in disbelief. “What kind of a crazy spin are you putting on this? It was more than that. He hated Jim, killed him for the feeblest of reasons. And let’s not start analyzing his relationship with his sister.”

Belle flexed her wrist, shivering as she sipped a cup of coffee from his thermos. “You’re right. And I hate him for taking my friend. It was just so clear that he loved Eva with a passion that nobody could understand.”

Steve shot her a sceptical look. “So much the better for that. Say, you don’t think the old woman helped, do you?”

Who would tell Marta about her son, knock on the door of that fairy tale world on the magic island, illusion though it might have been? For such a short time, Belle had enjoyed it too. “One glance will tell you about her bad heart. Franz wouldn’t have risked using her . . . or telling her. He didn’t need to. Time and chance put him together with Jim the night of the storm.”

Like Marley’s ghost dressed by Alec Tilley, Dr. Monroe arrived in the next helicopter with two stretcher bearers trotting at his heels. He seemed perturbed that he hadn’t brought boots and was soaking his Mephistos. “Of all people, Miss Palmer,” he announced as he set down his bag and touched a well-manicured finger to his lips. “How curious to find you involved in another death on the ice.”

“I’m thinking of writing a book,” she said pleasantly. Then she touched Steve’s arm. “We have to get Blondi.”