Читать книгу Death in October - Lowell Inc. Green - Страница 5

Through the blurred windshield it looked like a large white rag streaked with red dangling on the gate. It wasn’t until he stepped from his car into the rain and the night that he was sure it was Niki. His cry was filled with anguish and fear.

“No!”

A large spike had been driven through the dog’s neck, pinning her to the top bar of the wooden gate. Most of the blood had been flushed away by the rain, but her once-beautiful snowy coat was still streaked with red.

Niki, Dog of the North (as her registration papers identified her), had been a much loved member of the family since she arrived nine years ago, a present for Lee Henry’s third birthday, a tiny ball of bouncing, whirling, tumbling, fluffy white Samoyed.

Listeners to the nightly Grant Henry syndicated open line radio talk show were often amused by the stories he related and invented about her, but as horrified as he was at the sight of the sad, limp bundle dangling grotesquely on the gate, the terror exploding inside him, sucking the breath from his lungs, had nothing to do with the family pet.

Frantically, he lifted the metal latch and threw his shoulder into the gate, jolting it partially open. The limp torso swung violently on the spike. As part of his fitness regime, Grant had jogged that gravel lane countless times and knew it was almost half a kilometre to the house. Driving would have been faster, but for reasons he would later have difficulty explaining, he abandoned the car, motor idling, door flung open, headlights blazing, and ran.

As he approached the corner of the sprawling house faintly discernible in the glow of the distant car lights, his heart racing, lungs on fire, he began shouting.

“Lee! Lee! Madame Gratton!”

He wrenched open the kitchen door and plunged into thick darkness.

“Lee! Honey, where are you? Madame Gratton, are you all right?”

Moving from memory now, in suffocating blackness, room to room; breath, sobs of desperation.

At first he thought the electricity was out again, something, which occurred with maddening frequency in these Quebec hills a few kilometres north of Ottawa. The crunch of broken glass beneath his feet revealed the truth. Every light in the house had been smashed – except one. A faint sliver of light splashed the carpet beneath the door to his office. Cautiously, he pushed the door open and recoiled in horror. A blood-soaked cloth had been draped over his office desk lamp, which projected a narrow rectangle of light. Centered in the grisly, muted spotlight was a familiar piece of metal. Its numbers had been very carefully painted over, but clearly visible was the fleur-de-lis and the word Quebec across the top. Along the bottom was the provincial slogan: Je me souviens.

He recognized it immediately: The licence plate, which had disappeared from his Lexus two nights ago, removed from the car sitting in his driveway as he slept only a few metres away.

But of his twelve-year-old daughter, Lee Tracy Henry, and their housekeeper, good friend and neighbour Therèse Gratton, there was not a trace. They had disappeared into the rainy October night.