She wrapped the body, the plucked feathers, and the shot in a piece of silk and buried the package below the sycamore. There was no sign of the male bird and she knew he wouldn’t come back. She recalled seeing the two lads from the trekking centre coming up the lane as she drove to the village. They had been carrying their guns.
The following night she was lecturing on the other side of the pass. She left early because she couldn’t work beside the open window that looked out on the dead tree. She drove slowly over the mountain, trying to fill in time.
About two-thirds of the way up, right on a hairpin bend, the road had been widened to make a passing place. The gradient was very steep here, and she usually took the hairpins in a rush with her wheels spinning and her teeth clenched. But today the hill held no terrors; she was purged of fear, she even welcomed the prospect of danger.
She stopped at the big hairpin and pulled into the passing place. She switched off the engine, left the car in gear, and stepped out.
There was a kestrel hovering above the trees in the gorge far below; she could see its chestnut back against the new leaves. She sighed and stared idly at the mountainside dropping away below her for several hundred feet until the turf met the lip of the gorge. There a hidden burn ran below cliffs that must be all of eighty feet high. There was no wall below the passing place; if a car failed to round the hairpin on the way down, the occupants didn’t stand a chance.
On the top of the pass there was a big weatherproof box containing a stretcher and first-aid equipment. Originally it had been placed there for injured mountaineers, but its contents had been taken out more than once for motorists, although when rescuers reached the smashed cars in the gorge it had been too late for any kind of treatment.
Miss Todd returned to her car and, to her surprise, managed to start on the hill and negotiate the rest of the bends without incident.
Her lecture that evening was a success, and she was detained for some time answering questions. It must have been eleven o’clock when she came slowly up the far side of the pass and saw the summit cairn in her headlights. There was a van parked beside the cairn. She felt the vague uneasiness which always came in lonely places at night on such occasions, but this time she saw people clearly, not as embarrassing shapes in the back of the vehicle. Two men were standing beside the box that housed the rescue stretcher. The box was open and the stretcher lay on the ground. They were smashing it with a sledgehammer.
They would have been making too much noise to hear her approach, and a spur of the mountain hid her lights until the last moment. Besides, as they looked up, startled and lurching against each other, she saw that they were drunk. She recognised them immediately: the pale loose faces and the pale eyes, hostile now. They knew her car and they’d guess that she was alone.
One stepped into the road, then wavered back as she floored the accelerator. She heard savage shouts.
She didn’t think, didn’t work things out. She knew the consequences: They had been caught in the act and now the other outrages would be tied to them. She would go straight to the police when she reached the village. They could get away in the van (which was surely stolen) but she had an eye for detail and a good memory; she had its number. And then she saw the snag. She was the only person who knew.
Before she reached the first downhill bend she saw headlights in her mirrors. They gained rapidly and at the second hairpin they were a few yards behind. On this single-track road there was no room to pass. She waited for them to sound their horn, expecting a continuous blast, but all she heard was the whine of the van in low gear, looking for the chance to overtake.
The road widened for the curve and they swung out to pass on her off side. She pulled over, blocking them. The van dropped back and swung to the other side but now they were round the curve, the road narrowed, and she saw their lights tilt in the driving mirror. She had squashed them into the mountain and their wheels had gone in the ditch.
On the straight stretch the van nosed up again on the off side and she felt a bump. Now they were trying to force her off the road. She saw the van’s fender edging forward, she felt a nudge. Below and ahead she saw the start of the hairpin where she had stopped that afternoon. She braked before the bend and pulled close to the hill. The van roared and swerved into the passing place on her right. As it did so she sent the heavy car diagonally across the road, twisting the wheel at the last moment for the bend, so she caught the van only a glancing blow between its nearside wheels, but that was enough. The driver, who’d had inches to spare before, now had nothing. He couldn’t make it back to the road; thrust sideways and forward by the big car, the van tilted above the drop. She had a brief glimpse of its side lifting, the curious indecency of its exposed belly with helpless wheels turning in the air, then she was rounding the bend and the next, her hands clenched on the steering wheel.
She stopped on the straight and wound down the window. She heard the clank of metal on stone with long pauses between; she saw great shafts of light wheeling down the mountain; there was a crumpling crash and the lights went out.
There was silence for a moment, then a white glare in the gorge. Flames climbed the trees, throwing the mountain into black relief. There were crackling sounds and little popping explosions. Miss Todd was reminded of woodpecker colours and pork roasting in the oven.
Copyright © Gwen Moffat.
The Hound
by C. McArthur
— C. McArthur
Remodeling
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Under her mystery pseudonym Kris Nelscott, Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been getting lots of good press recently. Her series featuring African-American P.I. Smokey Dalton debuted with A Dangerous Road, which won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was nominated for an Edgar Award. The most recent series entry, Thin Walls (St. Martin’s/September 2002), received a starred review in PW. Ms. Rusch also has a new story collection: The Retrieval Artist (Five Star).