CHAPTER 6
I thought I would describe what it felt like to be out on Lake Sheelin at night, in winter, with a blustery wind rolling and pitching the little sailboat, and a murderous man holding a naked knife blade just a couple of feet away from me.
I can't do it. I think that terror must be like an earache or a stomachache. After it's over you know that you had it and you know that it hurt bad, but you can't feel it or even imagine it, once it has gone away.
I know it must have been freezing cold in the boat; but I have no memory of being cold. I must have set the sail, too, and used the distant lights of Muldoon Port to guide our course, but I don't remember that, either. What I do remember is the insane sense of relief, when we were a quarter of a mile offshore and Paddy Enderton put away his knife and pulled out of his pocket the same little wafer of black plastic that he had fiddled with back in the house, what seemed like weeks ago but was really only the previous day.
This time he must have done something different with it, because suddenly the plastic card disappeared. The volume around it became a three-dimensional pattern of colored points of light, moving in complicated spirals past each other. Enderton stared at them for a long time, then his hand reached out into the center of the display. The lights vanished. Once again he was gripping a plain black oblong.
It was the fascination of watching those lights that made me miss the other change, the one in Enderton himself. When we had first descended the water tower and floundered through deep snow down to the pier and the sailboat, my captor's breath had groaned and wheezed in his throat. Once seated in the boat, however, I had been too busy to take notice of it.
Now I heard his breathing change again, to a loud, painful grunt. Enderton's hand suddenly jerked up to paw at his throat. I could see his face only as a pale oval in the darkness, and I leaned forward to peer at it more closely. As I did so he gasped, shuddered, and flopped forward. His head met my knee, then slipped sideways to hit the wooden seat with a solid thud.
At first I thought he was doing it on purpose, and for a few seconds I was too scared to react. Then I reached out and shook his shoulder.
"Mr. Enderton!"
He lay face down, his legs caught under the seat. If it had not been for that, I think he would have toppled sideways and gone right overboard. As it was, the boat was too narrow for me to turn him over and I was not strong enough to lift him.
I crouched forward myself, my head down close to his. He was breathing, but in shallow, rasping breaths like troubled snoring.
I peered ahead of us, across the lake. We were less than a quarter of the way to Muldoon Port. The wind was with us, the lights of the port were plainly visible, and we could certainly keep going as we were. But what would I do when we arrived? I felt sure that Paddy Enderton had made his plans, but I had no idea what they were. With Muldoon Port almost deserted, it was not even certain that there would be anyone around to lift him out of the boat.
On the other hand, what would he do if I turned back, and then he recovered consciousness and learned that I had disobeyed his orders?
The weather made my mind up for me. As I sat hesitating, it began to snow again. Within a few minutes the lights of Muldoon Port blurred, then disappeared behind a veil of white.
I reached forward and groped around in Enderton's jacket pockets until I found the knife. I threw it overboard. Only then did I turn the boat around, reset the sail, and head back for the western shore of the lake.
The lights of Toltoona had also vanished into the falling snow, so I could not tell just where I was heading. It was luck, not skill, that brought me to shore no more than a couple of hundred yards south of the pier that led up to our house.
I eased us along to the jetty and tied up the boat, but even in the best of weather I could not have carried the weight of Paddy Enderton up the path. He had to stay there face down, the snow falling to cover his broad back and exposed head, while I ran all the way up to the house, praying that Mother had not gone off looking for me and that somebody would be there to give me a hand.
She was in the kitchen. So was Uncle Duncan.
"There, Molly," he said, as I blundered in. "I told you he'd be safe enough."
"Jay!" began Mother. "I've told you a thousand times—" Then she saw my face.
"Mr. Enderton," I gasped. "He's really sick. Down by the shore. I can't lift him."
When spacer visitors were around, Mother liked to act weak and helpless. She was neither, of course, and now she proved it.
"Unconscious?" she snapped.
"He was, when I left."
"Right," she said. And then, without another word to me, "Duncan, we'll need a blanket, and maybe something to carry him on. I'll find those. You get the flashlight and our coats. Hurry."
Mother had taken over. And with that, I became empty and deflated. All I wanted to do was sink down on the floor of the warm kitchen and go to sleep. But I couldn't, because Mother was hustling me out of the door so I could lead them to the pier.
Paddy Enderton had not moved since I left, and I thought for a horrible moment that he was dead. He groaned, though, when Uncle Duncan straightened him, and he was muttering something under his breath as they heaved him up onto the pier and wrapped him in a blanket. I stood by ready to help, but all I was allowed to do was hold the flashlight. Mother and Uncle Duncan between them carried him up to the house, where they laid him on a couch dragged close to the stove.
His color was awful, a uniform grey pallor except for isolated spots of purple-red flaming on his cheekbones. Mother lowered her head to his chest and remained stooped over him for a long time. Finally she straightened and came to where I was sitting slumped in a chair at the kitchen table.
"I'm sorry, Jay," she said quietly, "But you have to go out again. We'll do what we can, but without a physician's help he's probably going to die. Whatever persuaded him to go out on the lake in weather like this, with his chest and lungs?"
She was not looking for an answer from me, although I could have given one, and she went right on, "You know where Doctor Eileen lives. I want you to go to her house. Tell her what happened here. Tell her that your mother says it's urgent, and bring her back with you. Go now, as fast as you can."
Before I knew it I was pushed out again into the freezing dark, big flakes falling silently on me as I started along the southern road. No one had been this way since the snow began, and in places I sank to my knees in undisturbed drifts. I put my head down and struggled on. One good thing was that the wind was steady and at my back. My eyes and face could at least remain sheltered. But there was little else to comfort me. The day had been exhausting, mentally as well as physically, and I felt ready to drop. After less than a hundred yards I halted and stood panting in the road.
At this rate I would never make it to Doctor Eileen's house. Sheer fatigue would stop me. If I tried to keep going, the first person along the road in the morning would discover my frozen corpse.
It was the wind, pushing persistently at my back, that gave me the idea that saved my life—and not for the reason that I thought at the time.
It occurred to me that if I left the road and went down the hill to my left, I would arrive at the place where the sailboat was tied up. With the wind at its present heading, it would then be child's play for me to hoist the sail and allow myself to be blown all the way to Doctor Eileen's lakeshore house. Even at night, the darkness of the lake and the reflection of light from the snow on shore would be enough to leave me in no doubt as to the land/water boundary.
Before I knew it I had made up my mind. My legs seemed like weighted pendulums as they carried me down the hill towards the pier. Two minutes later I was in the sailboat, scraping snow off the seat and struggling to shake it off the sail. One minute after that the boat was away, gliding smoothly before the following wind.
It had sounded so easy, but real life never seems to work out quite as simple and pleasant as imagination paints it. My hands froze almost at once, so I had to keep one tucked into my jacket and hold the rudder lines with the other. My bottom was the next victim. Sitting for three-quarters of an hour on the bare plank seat of a sailboat, cramped and freezing, was no joke. I felt thawed snow, cold enough to be painful, seeping into the seat of my pants. To add terror to discomfort I had an awful few minutes when I lost sight of the snowy shore. But easing the boat steadily to the right solved that, and once I was past the lights of Toltoona I knew the worst was over. Doctor Eileen's house came next, and the lights were on there all the time. The only question was whether she was home, or had been dragged out into the blizzard for some other nighttime emergency.
Either way, I knew one thing for sure: Doctor Eileen's house would be my last port of call for the night.
* * *
I was wrong about that too, of course. For the past couple of days, it seemed that every time I thought I knew what would happen next, events took a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.
Doctor Eileen was home, and despite the lateness of the hour she was up and fully dressed. She let me get only as far as "Mother says it's urgent," before she swept me into her cruiser and headed north towards our house.
The good news was that the vehicle floated as quickly and easily over snow as over anything else. The better news was that Doctor Eileen often lived in it for days, so hot food and drink could be produced on the little stove in the rear of the cabin. We were hardly through Toltoona before I was feeling, if not restored, at least human. I answered her questions as best I could, about my aborted trip across to Muldoon Port, about Paddy Enderton's collapse on the way, about his symptoms, and about my own desperate decision to reach her by water rather than by road.
It was the last answer that produced the most reaction. She had been sitting quietly in the driver's seat, taking us rapidly but carefully along the north road. I was behind her, paying no attention to anything outside, which from the moment we started had been little more than a whirlwind of white.
"Did I hear you right?" she said. "Did you say that you had trouble walking because the snow was unbroken?"
"Yes. From our house toward Toltoona, no one had been along it."
"Well, they certainly have now. A number of people. See for yourself."
The footprints were already filling, but they were unmistakable. Four or five separate tracks led in the direction we were traveling. There was no sign of them returning. I stayed up at the front of the cruiser and watched, convinced that at some point the trails in the snow would leave the road and head away, up the hill or down toward the shore.
They didn't. They continued, all the way to the path that served the front porch of my own house.
Even then I was not alarmed. Puzzled, yes. Who would visit us at this hour, and in this weather? But I had no sense of danger.
It was Doctor Eileen who halted the ground car twenty yards from the house, and stepped cautiously out into deep snow.
"You wait here, Jay," she said.
It was too late. I had climbed out of the cruiser behind her. I could see an odd patch of white and red on the porch, just beyond the farthest point that the blown snow had reached.
I ran to it and knelt down. It was Chum, lying in a pool of blood. My miniver had been skewered through from back to belly, pinned to the rough planks of the porch by one of our own long-bladed kitchen knives.
"Jay!" said Doctor Eileen again. But I was blundering in through the front door, dreading what I might find.
At first the scene inside seemed to match my worst fears. The living room was empty, a chaos of broken and overturned furniture. Beyond it, in the kitchen, Paddy Enderton lay stretched out on the floor. His face was purple, and he was not breathing. All the kitchen drawers and cabinets had been pulled open and their contents swept onto the floor. There was no sign of Mother, or of Uncle Duncan.
As Doctor Eileen bent over Paddy Enderton, I ran upstairs. The landing was deserted. The door of the guest room, my new bedroom, was open, and it was a shambles. Everything I owned was strewn randomly around the floor. Sick to my stomach, I pushed open the closed door of Mother's room.
She was there, lying face upward on her own bed. Her coat was off, and her dress had been ripped up the front from hem to waist. Her hands were bound in front of her, a broad cloth had been tied around her mouth, and the left side of her face was swollen and turning a dull red. But when I ran to her she opened her eyes and lifted her head.
"Doctor Eileen!" I cried. It emerged as a high-pitched scream. I turned Mother's head to get at the place the gag was tied. "Mother's here. She's alive. She's hurt."
Eileen Xavier came up the stairs two at a time, and was into the bedroom while I was still struggling with the knots.
"Look out, Jay." She pushed me out of the way and cut the gag through with one quick flick of a scalpel. Until that moment I had not realized that she was carrying it.
Mother was coughing, and pushing a ball of cloth out of her mouth with her tongue. Doctor Eileen stepped back, and did a quick survey of her from head to foot. "Duncan West?" she asked.
Mother shook her head. She tried to speak, but it came out only as another cough. Doctor Eileen turned to me. "Jay. Check the front bedroom."
Thinking back, I believe that she wanted me out of the way while she examined Mother. But I didn't know it at the time, and I stepped along the landing to my old room half-convinced that I would find Uncle Duncan stretched out on the floor there.
I didn't. The room was empty, at least of people. But the mess inside was even worse than anywhere else. Everything had been taken apart—the contents of Enderton's big square box removed and smashed to fragments, dressers and desk overturned, drawers emptied out onto the floor. The curtains had been pulled down and slit along their seams. The mattress of the bed had been ripped open, and its stuffing lay scattered everywhere. Even the window had been thrown open, and someone had probed with a knife into the layer of snow sitting on the outside sill.
I rummaged helplessly in the debris for a minute or two, then went across and closed the window. I headed back to the main bedroom, where mother was now sitting up.
"Uncle Duncan—" I began.
"He's all right," Doctor Eileen said. "He went soon after you, to try to get other help. He left long before they got here."
Mother nodded, and gave me a lopsided smile.
"Mr. Enderton?" I said. "Is he—" I found I could not finish the question.
"Dead, I'm afraid." Doctor Eileen was helping mother to her feet. "Of natural causes, just a few minutes after you left. Whatever he'd been doing today, the strain was too much for his heart." She must have seen my guilty expression. "Don't feel bad, Jay. I couldn't have saved him, you know, even if I'd been here. He wouldn't look after himself, even after he was warned. Come on now, take your mother's arm and let's get out of here. The two of you are going to spend the night at my house."
"Do you think they'll come back?" I didn't know who "they" might be, but I was mortally afraid of them. They had spitted Chum for no reason at all. He had been the most harmless pet in the world, a goofy ball of fur who would never attack anybody.
"Since we don't know who they were," replied Doctor Eileen, "we can't say they won't be back. But they were certainly looking for something, and they searched hard, and they didn't find it. There were four of them, and I don't know if one or more may want to try again."
"I don't think they will." Mother's voice was a whisper as we helped her into her coat and out of the door. I noticed a big red blotch I hadn't seen before on her throat. "They were arguing among themselves when they left. They had—changed the subject."
She glanced down at her own ripped dress, and then at Eileen Xavier.
"You were damn lucky, Molly," said Doctor Eileen. "Lucky they had a lot on their minds and were pressed for time."
"Give me some credit, Eileen." Mother was sounding more like herself. "I made a few unkind comparisons, just to make them mad at each other."
"But where could they have gone?" I turned to the doctor, as she opened the door of the cruiser for us to climb in. "We saw their tracks coming, but nothing went back."
She said nothing, but pointed down the hill. Multiple footprints, half-covered with snow, led toward the dark lake water.
Apparently I was not the only one with the idea that travel by boat was easier than struggling along through soft, clinging snow.
But as I settled into the cruiser's comfortable seat, and felt my eyes closing almost before my weary head touched the cushioned headrest, it occurred to me that the mystery attackers perhaps had a different motive. One thing was sure: Deep water, unlike deep snow, left no trail to follow.