He shone the thin beam around the room: leather sofa, some steel chairs, the drawing table he had seen that afternoon. Next to the table, a tall, wide drawing cabinet. The drawers were unlocked and unlabeled. He began at the top: aerial photographs of the lake and dam. He worked his way down, drawer by drawer: engineering drawings of turbines; architect’s drawings of Sutherland’s house; more photographs of the lake and the town; a smaller-scale version of the 1969 map which hung on the wall. There were several copies; Howell slipped one out of the drawer. One more drawer; Howell prayed.
He saw the corner of the map before he had the drawer fully open. It was dated 1936. The topography was wholly unfamiliar to him; he could find no landmark. Finally, he looked back at the box containing the date. There was a set of coordinates. He quickly compared them to the 1969 map. Identical. He could have shouted with joy.
The door behind him slammed, hard. Scotty emitted an involuntary cry.
“What? What?” he said aloud, throwing the dim beam on the doors.
“The wind,” Scotty gasped. “There was a gust; sucked it shut, I guess. Oh, God, I think I wet my pants.”
Up the hill toward the house, a dog began to bark, a small dog, a yapper. Howell quickly folded the two maps and stuck them in the waist of his jeans, under his sweater. He played the light around briefly to see that everything was as he had found it. The dog sounded closer. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Scotty opened the door and peered out. Howell jerked her hand from the knob and wiped it with his glove. “Sorry,” she said.
Now Howell could hear a man’s voice, calling the dog. It sounded like the butler, Alfred. They eased out the door and stepped around the corner of the building, then looked back. A flashlight was bobbing toward them from the direction of the house.
“Duchess? Duchess?” Alfred was closer, now. Howell couldn’t see the dog.
“Head for the boat through the woods,” he said to Scotty. “I’m right behind you.”
She started to run. Howell glanced back at the bobbing flashlight for a moment, then turned to follow. At that moment, there was a high-pitched snarl, and a small ball of fur hit him just below the knee and bounced off. Howell ran, but this time, his route was more directly toward where the boat lay, and there was brush to slow him down. It didn’t slow down Duchess.
The little dog was all over him as he moved, going for his throat. Fortunately, being a short dog, it couldn’t reach much above his ankles. Still, it was a damned nuisance. It boiled around his feet, tripping him, hanging onto his trousers when it could, slowing him all the way. Once, he stopped and threatened it with the flashlight, hoping to scare it away. It wouldn’t scare, and he couldn’t bring himself to hit it. It was Yorkshire Terrier. It was too cute.
Finally, he broke out of the trees at a point where he had estimated the boat would be. Neither the boat nor Scotty was there. It must be further up toward the town, he thought, and anyway, he didn’t want to go back toward Sutherland’s. He could hear Alfred calling the dog again.
Then he saw the boat, and he saw Scotty. The boat had been another hundred yards along the shore toward the town, but now it was a good thirty yards offshore, and drifting, and Scotty was in the water, half that distance from the shore, making for the boat. He began to run down the shore, the dog still, amazingly, with him every step of the way. At the closest point to the boat, he turned and hit the water running.
Scotty was three quarters of the way to the boat, now, and up to her chest in the cold water. But then, she was short and short-legged.
Howell yanked the maps out of his waistband and held them above his head as he plowed through the deepening water. Dutchess stood at the water’s edge, yapping still.
When Howell made the boat, Scotty was clinging to it, apparently too exhausted to climb aboard. Howell, who was swimming, now, as best he could with the handful of maps held out of the water, tossed them into the front seat, held onto the side of the boat with one hand, and with the other, grabbed Scotty by the seat of her pants and heaved. That got all but her legs into the boat, and Howell, with his last strength, gave a kick and hoisted himself in with her.
They lay in the bottom of the boat, gasping for air, too exhausted to move. Perhaps a minute later, Alfred’s voice, borne on the breeze, drifted out to them.
“Duchess, what’s the matter with you? Don’t you know how to mind anymore? You been after another rabbit? I keep telling you them rabbits bigger than you, they going to eat you up one of these days. Come here to me! What you barking at?” There was a silence. “Oh, somebody’s boat done gone adrift, huh? Well, it ain’t none of your business and ain’t none of mine, either. Come here to me.” Then, still talking to the Yorkie, his voice faded into the distance.
“You incredible jerk,” Howell wheezed, when he had a little of his breath back. He still could not move, and they lay tangled together in a heap. “When I get my health back, I’m gonna strangle you, if you aren’t already dead.” There was no response. “Scotty? You hear that? I’m going to strangle you with my bare hands.” Nothing. She was lying awfully still, he thought. He struggled up onto an elbow. “Scotty?” He wrestled himself into a sitting position. Over the gunwales of the boat, he could see Alfred’s flashlight moving jerkily toward the house, nearly there.
He got Scotty by the shoulders and shifted her limp form until her head was in his lap. He brushed the wet hair away from her face and felt for a pulse at her throat. “Say something, for Christ’s sake!”
“I can’t,” she said, suddenly. “You’ll strangle me.” Then she began to laugh. “Jesus, you should have seen yourself,” she managed to say. “Some cat burglar you are – not even a Doberman, either, a Yorkshire terrier! I couldn’t believe it!”
He laughed, in spite of himself, at the thought of the determined little dog. “Well, I’ll tell you this, sweetheart, it was the biggest fucking Yorkshire terrier I ever saw. Must’ve been a four pounder!”
It was another ten minutes before they could stop laughing enough to get the boat started.
18
They huddled in front of a roaring fire, naked, swathed in blankets, sipping hot coffee heavily laced with brandy.
“We did it,” Scotty said, elatedly.
“Your first illegal entry?”
“Yep. It was terrific.”
“You’re crazy. We damn near got caught, we damn near drowned, and it was terrific?”
“Well, we got it, didn’t we?”
“Yep, we got it.”
“What did we get?”
“The maps, dummy.”
“I know that, but what’s in the maps?”
“Confirmation of a theory of mine, maybe.”
“Look, you’re acting as though you’ve taken me into your confidence, but I don’t have a clue to what’s going on here.”
“Well, something is wrong around here, and somebody’s trying to put it right. Whoever it is, is using me to do it. I think.”
“Okay, what’s wrong?”
“I told you about the O’Coineen family, the story that Enda McCauliffe told me. Rabbit, remember?”
“Yes, I remember. They were the holdouts when Eric Sutherland was buying the land to build the dam.”
“Then they disappeared, after Eric Sutherland says they agreed to sell. His story was that he went out to their place, got the deal signed, then put the money in their bank account.”
“And McCauliffe says it’s still there.”
“Right. Uncollected. Building up interest for twenty-odd years. Then I turn up, we meet these people at dinner, we have this little seance, and somebody named Rabbit, which is English for the Irish name, O’Coineen, turns up and says howdy.”
“To me.”
“Yes, but mostly, I think, to me.”
“Whaddaya mean, you? It was me, the table liked, remember?”