Читать книгу Meg Harris Mysteries 7-Book Bundle - R.J. Harlick - Страница 52

I reached the bottom of the drop-off in a shower of stones. I frantically searched for Chantal, and spying a lightness in the surrounding darkness, moved towards it. Without warning, my ankle twisted and I plunged to the ground. My ankle throbbed. My knees and palms ached. I heard moaning and realized it was my own.

“Salut! Ça va?” came a shout from above.

“That you, Pierre?” I called back in English. “Come quick, Chantal’s hurt.”

Fearing another fall, I scrambled on hands and feet to where the patch of grey lay stretched out on the ground.

My hand brushed against cloth and the firmness of flesh. “Chantal, you okay?”

Dead silence. With dread, I ran my hands over her body, which felt more like a rag doll that had been tossed out of a second storey window than a living woman.

I was so certain of finding Chantal that it took several seconds for me to realize that the fabric under my hands wasn’t the slick nylon of her pink jacket, but a coarse wool. Only one person in my crew had worn such a coat.

“My God! It’s Yvette!” I cried out.

“Is she all right?” Pierre called down from the top of the cliff, where I could see the pinprick glow of his cigarette.

“Come down here,” I shouted back. “I need your help.”

I felt her wrist for a pulse, but my trembling fingers made it impossible to pick out a beat. I tried under her chin, where the pulse usually beats harder, and encountered stickiness.

“Au secours,” she mumbled. She was still alive. A small stone bounced off my back. More ricocheted off the surrounding rocks. With a final grunt Pierre landed several feet away.

“Au secours,” Yvette mumbled again. I felt her move.

“Where are you hurt?” I asked, switching to my basic high school French. Yvette was in no condition to struggle with English.

“Au secours.”

“Sacrebleu!” Pierre’s swearing cut through the darkness.

“She fall off the cliff, that’s for sure,” he continued, voicing my own thoughts.

“Don’t just stand there. Come and help me.” I ran my fingers over her face and felt it twitch.

“Yvette, do you hear me?” Pierre persisted. “She is, how you say, out cold, eh? I get help.”

“That’ll take too long. We’ve got to take her out ourselves. Check her legs to see how badly she’s hurt.”

Pierre didn’t move, but his face suddenly loomed through the dark in a cadaverous glow as he sucked on his cigarette.

“At least use your lighter to give us some light,” I snapped back, annoyed at his unwillingness to help. I turned my attention back to my friend. “Tell me where it hurts.”

No response. I felt the same sticky wetness on the hair at the back of her head. A pool of it had collected on a rock by her ear. Fearful of causing further injury, I decided not to lift her head to search for the wound. I heard several clicks of a lighter, and the young woman’s crumpled form sprang into view. She’d landed close to the stream on what thankfully appeared to be one of the few patches of moss. She lay on her side with one leg flung out at an awkward angle.

“Broke, eh?” Pierre muttered.

I ran my hands over the leg, but it was impossible to feel any break through the heavy denim of her jeans. However, I viewed it as a promising sign when she didn’t grimace or make a sound while I shifted her leg to a more comfortable position. Too worried about what such a fall could do to her back, I didn’t dare move her body. Instead I ran my hands over first her right, then her left arm, which elicited a sharp cry of pain.

“Looks like her arm might be broken,” I said. “We can’t move her.”

“Like I said,” Pierre retorted.

“Okay, so you were right. Now go to her father’s place. I’ll stay with her.”

“No, I go to the Fishing Camp.”

“But her father’s closer.”

“I go to the Camp.”

I leaned back on my heels and looked towards the cigarette glow that marked the corner of his mouth. “Afraid of the old man, eh?”

His only reply was the brighter glow of his cigarette.

“Okay, whatever,” I said in exasperation. “Just go. Use my truck, the keys are under the front seat. And do me a favour, will you? Get my pack from the other side of Kamikaze Pass and throw it down.”

He didn’t move, but instead asked, “What she doing here? The old man woulda locked her up, that’s for sure.”

“I’m as surprised as you are. But we don’t have time to waste wondering. Now get going.”

I heard him scrambling up the side of the cliff, then remembering the other female, I shouted after him, “Where’s Chantal?”

“Gone ahead,” came back the quick reply, immediately followed by the sound of his retreating footsteps.

I hoped she’d made it back to the Fishing Camp in one piece. The last thing I needed was another member of my crew in trouble.

The echo of his passage through the defile faded. I had barely gotten used to the silence when his footsteps returned.

“Attention!” Pierre yelled and tossed my pack over the dropoff before I had a chance to shout my location. Fortunately it missed me and landed with a sharp thud several metres away. Without so much as a pause, his footsteps faded into the night.

I crawled to the spot where I thought my pack had landed. Finding it, I returned to the injured girl and retrieved the emergency blanket that thankfully I’d remembered to bring along. I wrapped her as best I could in the heat-reflecting mylar fabric, but I didn’t dare try to place it under Yvette for fear of a spinal injury.

Rescue could take at least three to four hours to arrive. In the meantime, I had to keep this young woman alive and myself calm. And it was dark, very dark. Although I liked to think that I’d overcome my fear of the dark, I’d never put it to the ultimate test; being utterly alone in the impenetrable night of a forest alive with the sounds of its inhabitants.

I took a deep sip from my water bottle and wished it were lemon vodka. If there was ever a time for a mind-numbing gulp, now was it. But I’d no sooner expressed this thought, than I shoved it aside for fear that the old desire would take hold. I used to be a drunk, but in the past two years I’d barely had a drop, thanks to Eric, who’d made me face up to my problem.

I gulped more water and tried not to notice the rustles, the scrapes and the twitters that shattered the deadening silence. My night demons were converging. Every nerve ending was on high alert. I jumped at one sharp snap just a little too close and knocked against Yvette. She groaned.

“Sorry. You awake?”

No response. If I didn’t calm down, I’d become a blubbering mess and useless to Yvette.

I lay down beside her, hoping my body heat would help keep her warm. Her hand lay beside mine. I gripped it as much to give myself strength as her reassurance.

Her breathing, although faint, sounded regular, which I took to be a good sign. But it worried me that she was still unconscious. On the other hand, it was probably for the better. I wouldn’t want her awake with her pain knowing that rescue was hours away.

I had yet to come up with an explanation for her unexpected presence on this trail. I’d left her in the controlling grip of her father. And judging by the anger in his eyes when he’d pulled her from my crew, he was going to ensure she never strayed again. Nor was she one to disobey. I’d learned that much about her. The only time I’d seen her go against his wishes was the previous summer, when she’d suddenly turned up at my home at Three Deer Point.

I’d known of Papa Gagnon by his reputation alone. In this vast but thinly-populated land, anyone the least bit odd was immediately noted. But I hadn’t known of Yvette’s existence until she’d knocked on my door. I was sitting in the screen porch away from the hot sun and the bugs. My dog, Sergei, was lying flat out on the floor, dead to the world. So silent was her arrival that even this giant black poodle failed to provide warning with his usual half-hearted rendition of a guard dog.

“I want speak English,” she said in that soft anxious manner I soon learned was her. “I pay.”

She stood before me in a faded but immaculate gingham dress, the kind of dress a farmer’s wife might have worn thirty years ago, her dark auburn hair caught up in two long thick braids, her brown eyes, open wide like a startled doe poised to escape. Clenched in her hand was a crumpled five dollar bill. In the other, a plastic grocery bag bursting with lettuce and carrots.

“Please come in,” I replied in French, “and we can talk about it.”

She hesitated, her hand halfway to the door handle as if trying to make up her mind whether to enter or flee. Then after a deep intake of breath, she whispered, “Merci, madame,” and stepped silently onto the porch.

I had intended to talk her out of it, convinced I didn’t have sufficient knowledge to teach the constructs of my native tongue. But the sight of her scars changed my mind. Yvette hadn’t meant me to see them, but Sergei’s welcoming snout brushed her full skirt briefly aside. The second I glimpsed the faint purple tracks of old cuts above her knees, I knew I was dealing with a deeply troubled young woman.

I’d seen similar scars once before on a girlhood friend, whose self-esteem had bottomed out to such an extent that she’d taken to slitting herself periodically with a razor. Although I’d never known what was behind this selfmutilation, I’d suspected the source was my friend’s parents, who were more prone to punishment than kindness.

I decided that I could at least offer this young Québécoise the basics of English, and more importantly, perhaps my place could become a refuge from whatever it was she was trying to erase with her pain. As for payment, we agreed that it would be an exchange. She would help me improve my French.

We established that she would come twice a week to Three Deer Point for two hours, an hour and a half of English and a half hour of French. It had taken all my negotiating skills to convince her that this arrangement was a fair exchange. She finally relented when she acknowledged that perhaps my French was a little better than her English, and therefore didn’t need as long a lesson. But the bargaining wasn’t over until I agreed to accept a weekly bag of fresh produce from her father’s market garden. While her English had clearly improved since that time, I was convinced I’d gotten the better end of the bargain. The cornucopia of vegetables she brought each week was far superior to anything I’d buy in the local stores.

I learned little about Yvette Gagnon on her first visit or even on subsequent ones. All I could glean was that she lived with her father on his farm and had for a number of years. She never mentioned her mother or talked of siblings.

As for her father, I quickly learned what he was all about. The first lesson was no sooner finished than a battered Ford pickup with a cracked windshield coughed to a halt by the front stairs. The old man didn’t even bother to leave the truck, just rolled down his window and rasped, “Yvette, viens!” in a tone I wouldn’t use to call my dog. I half expected Yvette to tell her father to get lost, at least that’s what I would’ve done. But she didn’t. Smiling shyly, she thanked me and with a final “Goodbye. I come Wednesday at two hour,” she walked resolutely to the truck.

I fully expected not to see her again, convinced her father would prevent her, but on Wednesday punctually at two o’clock, the old man dropped her off at my door. And in exactly two hours, not a minute earlier nor a minute later, he returned in that beat-up old truck to take her away. And so it continued, every Monday and Wednesday through the summer and on into the fall. She missed only one day, and that was through no fault of her own. Her father had taken a tumble in the barn and was unable to drive. She could’ve walked, she said, like the first time, but he’d wanted her to remain by his side.

Despite my hope that she would eventually unburden whatever troubled her, she hadn’t. She religiously stuck to the lesson, never strayed from the topic. Though, about a month ago, when she’d arrived confused and trembling, instead of a formal lesson, we’d just sat and chatted like two old friends over a cup of tea until she’d calmed down. However, any expectations I’d had about her opening up were not met. By the time her father came to pick her up, she’d shed no light on its cause, other than to say she hadn’t been feeling well. I hadn’t believed her.

* * *

I must have drifted off to sleep, for suddenly I found myself awake and momentarily confused by my location. I shuddered when reality sank in. The faint, even breathing by my side told me Yvette was still alive, but her lack of response to my questioning also told me she’d not yet regained consciousness.

My watch indicated Pierre had gone for help a little over two hours ago. If he was able to find it at the Fishing Camp, I should expect rescue in another hour or so. Otherwise, if people had to come from Migiskan Village, it could be at least two more hours of waiting stranded here alone in the dark with only the regularity of Yvette’s breathing to keep me company.

The night was no blacker than before. In fact, it appeared lighter. The cloud cover had vanished, leaving in its stead a billion stars filtering a breath of light onto our desperate situation. But it was colder, much colder. I rubbed my shivering and aching limbs and checked the thin silvery blanket to make sure it covered Yvette completely.

I strained to hear any alien sound that would tell me help was arriving but heard only my rustling night demons. I clung to Yvette’s inert body for strength. I tried one of the mental games I had invented as a child to keep the boogeyman at bay.

But night’s shifting shadows loomed closer. The rustling advanced. The shuffles approached. A branch snapped behind me. I jerked around. One snapped in front. I jerked back. A shadow plunged from the sky. Something slapped me on the face. I screamed. I flicked the leaf away, annoyed by my growing hysteria. I was losing control, no longer able to distinguish between my demons and the pounding of my heart.

All of a sudden Yvette cried out, “Non!”

I jumped.

She cried out again, “Non! Fais pas. Tu me blesses.”

“Yvette, it’s okay,” I replied in French. “Wake up. It’s Meg. I’m not hurting you. It’s the injuries from your fall.”

Then with her next outburst, I realized she wasn’t accusing me, but someone else of hurting her.

“Fais pas! Papa, j’suis désolée.”

Her father. The most logical cause of her real pain. I held her tightly. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”

Then I heard the sound of all-terrain vehicles, quickly followed by the sweetest sound in the world. “Meg, hold on. We’re almost there.” It was Eric.