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.
Chapter 7
I slept through all the next morning and the early part of the afternoon. So in spite of Doctor Eileen turning up her nose at the idea of anybody passing on “hearsay” to posterity, that’s all I can offer for the day, at least until I was sitting in the Xavier kitchen working my way through a stack of sorghum cakes and scrambled phalarope eggs.
Uncle Duncan lolled opposite me, yawning and stretching and complaining of lack of sleep. It seemed he had finally gone back to our house in the middle of the night, bringing with him a vet—the nearest thing he could find to a physician without going all the way to Toltoona. What they encountered at the house had left them baffled: the whole place ransacked, Paddy Enderton dead on the floor, Mother vanished, and the building deserted.
Rather than heading out again into the snow, they built up the fire and stayed there for the rest of the night. The intruders had not returned, and finally Duncan had decided to make for Doctor Eileen’s.
Mother was not much more helpful. Four men had burst into the house without warning, while she sat alone with Enderton’s body. The sight of him lying dead on the floor had sent them into a rage.
“They could hardly believe it,” she said. “The biggest one went across and kicked the body and swore at it, as though Enderton had died just to annoy him. Damned Black Paddy, he called him. He searched Enderton’s clothing, then he set the other three to ransacking the house while he questioned me. I did my best to act innocent. Said Enderton was just a lodger who had the upstairs room, and hardly ever came down. I was vague about everything, and I acted dumb as I knew how.”