“I’ll bet you did,” Doctor Eileen said. She had already been out all morning on a call, and was getting ready to go out again. “We’ll need a full description.”
“I’ll give you one, but it won’t help unless I see them again. I’m sure they were spacers, every one, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of them.”
“Nobody with no arms, or no legs,” I said, and felt myself blush when Duncan West stared at me as though I had lost my mind.
“I tried to get them to say what they were after,” went on mother. “But that didn’t work.”
I started to open my mouth again, ready to mention the telecon still sitting high on the water tower, but Mother quickly disposed of that possibility.
“Whatever it was they were after,” she said, “it must have been no bigger than your hand, because of the places that they were looking. And when they couldn’t find anything they got more and more annoyed. They started to smash things at random. That’s when they knocked me about a bit, too, just to take it out on somebody. Then they moved upstairs and tied me down. I think they were getting interested in other options for me when the big one said forget it, the boss was waiting and he’d told them go easy on the redhead woman.”
“Lucky for you,” said Uncle Duncan.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Mother smiled at him, but she had her eye on Doctor Eileen. “I think in another five minutes I could have had a couple of them at each other’s throats.”
“Or slitting yours,” Doctor Eileen said. “Molly, you’re plain incorrigible. Come on. I’ll give you and Jay a ride back to the house. We’ll pick up a few strong men in Toltoona, to stay with you and make sure there’s no more trouble.”
I glanced out of the window. There was a clear blue sky, and outside the snow was melting fast. “I’ve got to take the sailboat back home,” I said. “I might as well do it now, and get it over with.”
“All right,” Mother said mildly. “But no heading off across the lake again. ‘Clean your room,’ has a whole new meaning today. I wouldn’t like to think you were trying to skip housework.”
As the other three left the kitchen I realized that she was right. I was avoiding going home. But it was nothing to do with housework. It was the thought of Chum, casually slaughtered and skewered to the front porch. No matter what Paddy Enderton had done, and no matter what the others wanted from him, they didn’t have to do that.
I had lost my appetite. I washed the dishes, put on my coat, and headed for the place where I had tied up the boat. My whole water journey and final arrival last night seemed like an awful dream. It was surprising to find everything just as I had left it, the sail still not properly furled, the seats and the bottom of the boat covered in snow.
Before I could sail home, the boat had to be cleared. I took a square of wood and began to use it as a makeshift shovel, scraping snow into heaps and dumping it overboard into the black lake water.
I had been at work no more than two minutes when I came across the rectangular wafer of black plastic. It was sitting in the bottom of the boat, just where it had dropped from Paddy Enderton’s hands.
Mother’s orders had been explicit: Go home, and at once. But no command in the universe could have stopped me from sitting down in the bow of the boat and staring at Enderton’s little sealed device.
It was thin, hardly more than a plastic card, and at first sight the front was plain. Upon a closer look I could see dozens of faint depressions, each one the size of a fingertip. I pressed them tentatively, one after another and then in pairs.
No result. But just last night there had been that strange display of moving points of light.
What had Enderton done? I struggled to recall, and quickly realized that I had no idea. It was not that I failed to remember, it was that he had operated in the dark, and until the lights actually appeared all my attention had been on the knife that he had just put away.
I fiddled with the thin rectangle of plastic for another minute or two, pretty much at random, and at last gave up. I jumped out of the boat and stood on the pier. There I paused.
Doctor Eileen Xavier was no longer at the house. She had taken Mother home. The question was, would she stay there for a while, long enough for me to catch her if I started now? Or if not, was she likely to come back to the Xavier house before she headed off again on her rounds, and so make it worth my while to hang around here a bit longer?
All too often in the past couple of days my fate seemed to have been determined by the wind. Now it was blowing steadily, pushing the boat’s little pink pennant like a pointing finger to the north.
Towards home.
I tucked the plastic rectangle in my jacket pocket so I would not be tempted to fiddle with it any more, unfurled the boat’s sail, and was on my way.
It was perfect sailing weather, clear and crisp and with a following wind that was just right. The only sound was clean lake water, lapping at the bow. On another afternoon I would have reveled in every moment. Today I could not enjoy it at all. I felt dreadfully dejected, for what I’m sure anybody else would have said was quite the wrong reason. Mother had been gagged and beaten. Paddy Enderton was dead. Our house had been invaded and almost demolished.
But the only thing on my mind was Chum. When I got home I would have to pull out the knife that pinned him to the planks of the porch, carry his body away from the house, and bury him.
The picture in my head was very vivid: four men, frustrated and furious as they rushed out of the house into the snow. Chum, convinced that the whole world was friendly and anyone running must be playing a game, gambolling across to greet them. The men’s jerk of surprise, the curse, the vicious thrust of a knife.
At least it would have been quick. With luck he had died before he understood what was happening. But that was little consolation.
I patted my pocket as the boat came close to the dock leading up to the house. If this had been what they were after, one thing I knew for certain: They would not get it from me—
—if I could help it. That qualification came into my head as I started up the path. My footsteps slowed.
In a few more steps I would be in full view of the house. There was no sign of Doctor Eileen’s cruiser out by the road. In all likelihood she had been and gone and Mother would be safely inside with her tough-guy guards, beginning the long job of cleaning up the mess.
But suppose that they weren’t? Suppose that Mother and Doctor Eileen had not arrived yet, and last night’s attackers had returned and were lurking inside waiting for me?
And what I was carrying.
I back-stepped a little way along the path, then dropped to one knee. I was at Chum’s favorite burrow, a hole that he had carefully dug out and furnished with dried leaves.
I pushed the rectangular plastic card into the round hole. Then I recoiled as my fingertips met cold, wet fur.
Chum’s body. And no one outside the family knew about his burrow.
I stood up, still holding the rectangle of plastic, and ran for the house. When I was twenty yards away a window went up with a sound like a gunshot. Mother’s head poked out.
“Jay! I thought I told you to come straight back here. Get inside.”
I halted. “Chum—”
“I took care of him. I put him in his burrow. If you want him somewhere else…”
“No.” I couldn’t bear to look at her, though she had only been trying to help. “He’s home now. He can stay there.” I stuffed Enderton’s black wafer into my pocket and hurried into the house. The kitchen drawers and cupboards were closed again, and the mess of the previous night had been cleared up. Three men from Toltoona were sitting at the table playing cards. I knew them. They were all big and broad and self-confident, and they nodded at me casually.