Don Gutteridge - Dubious Allegiance

“At least I didn’t make a spectacle of myself weeping and wailing over the coffin!”

“Keep your voice down! Do you want the whole house to hear?”

The next exchange, though vehement, was conducted in tones too low for Marc to determine the tenor or topic. But soon the voices rose again in pitch and volume.

“Don’t you ever- ever, you hear-contradict me in public one more time. I won’t have it!”

“Don’t you know what a strutting peacock you’re making of yourself? For God’s sake, Randolph, you were once such a proud man, such an intelligent-”

“Shut your mouth this instant! I won’t stand for much more of this! When are you going to start acting like a proper wife?”

“When you stop playing the fool!”

“Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”

Marc got up, lamp in hand. He was waiting for the slap or the woman’s cry.

“Take your hands off me!”

Marc eased his booby-trap aside, cursing himself as he did so, and slipped into the dark hallway that ran along the width of the upper floor. He had lost a precious minute, was not even sure what he was about to do, but he reached the Brookners’ door out of breath but reasonably alert. He put an ear against it. Silence. There had been no slap, no outcry or gasp of pain at a hurtful male grip. He could hear nothing for a while, then, finally, a sequence of what sounded like snores: the deep-throated kind that interrupt themselves. Brookner had apparently fallen asleep. Marc continued to listen for another minute. The snores subsided. The swishing of sheets or clothing suggested that Adelaide was slipping quietly and safely into bed. She may have been weeping.

Marc made his way back to his room, re-established the booby-trap, poked at the dying fire, re-arranged himself in his place of observation, and prepared to watch and wait for his assassin.

Outside the rear window, the snow continued to fall softly and persistently. In the peaceful quiet of the room, Marc’s thoughts turned to the revelations about Lambert. Beyond the remote possibility that Lambert might be gunning for him, Marc considered the larger question of who he was and what he had been up to for the past several weeks. It seemed doubtful he had ever visited Cobourg, even though his wife was reputed to be there waiting for him, let alone lived in the town for four months. Was the Cobourg story he told merely a cover for secretive and seditious actions he had been carrying out for some time now? Perhaps he was a close aide of Papineau or Nelson, who had tried to establish an English identity (or had one) for some nefarious purpose. Was he possibly en route to Toronto to execute mayhem of some kind or to Buffalo to rendezvous with Mackenzie and the Patriots, as the exiles threatening invasion liked to call themselves? Whatever was going on, Marc was determined that he would get to the bottom of it before they reached Cobourg.

As he lay thinking thus, he began to realize that the element of excitement and danger, which had beset him since his miraculous awakening in the hospital, was actually helping his rehabilitation by constantly bringing him back to his senses, to a quickness of thought and decision that could easily have mouldered under the strain of coping with Rick’s death, facing his own precarious mortality, worrying about Beth and whether there was any future for them, or raging futilely against the inordinate injustices he detected everywhere about him in the world. Then a more profound thought asserted itself: Could a visceral revulsion against such grim realities have been part of the reason that Rick Hilliard had courted danger all his brief adult life? Did it explain Rick’s willingness to step into the path of a bullet meant for somebody else?

The answers did not come before Marc fell asleep.

* * *

Marc was not unhappy to be wakened. He had been dreaming that he and Beth were rumbling over a dusty, grasshopper-ridden prairie in a Conestoga wagon towards some Yankee paradise named after a decimated Indian tribe, and Beth was saying, “But I don’t see any millinery shops!” just before a typhoon of some sort came wriggling out of the endless horizon like a rabid black cobra. He recognized it as a nightmare even before he was fully awake.

But it was not the morning sun he felt on his right cheek. In fact it felt more like snow. The pistol lay where he had placed it, on his chest, except that it was now covered with fine, white flakes. His hair was ruffled by a tiny, chill breeze.

He sat up quickly, knocking the dressing-screen over against the fireless stove. His eye went immediately to the door. The booby-trap was intact. He sighed with relief. He had not counted on the extent of his fatigue and the consequent depth of his sleep: even if someone had forced the door open, he was unlikely to have heard the intruder, who would have had plenty of time to murder both the dummy and its creator.

He turned now to the source of the draft and the snow. The lone window-overlooking the woods behind the inn-was ajar. If there had been much wind, it would have been blown completely open. With growing dread he turned slowly and made himself look at the bed. The night-capped pumpkin was still in its place, but the bedclothes had been knocked askew. He went over and examined his “head.” There was a two-inch incision just below the “chin.” In the deep of the night, someone had crept in through the window, stabbed him through what should have been his throat, and crawled back out-undetected by the great investigator.

Despite the obvious jeopardy Marc’s fatigued sleep had placed him in, it had left him feeling rested, alert, and ready to discover who was trying to murder him-and why. That he was the intended victim was no longer in doubt. Stiffly but with great determination, he walked over to the window and peered out. The snow was falling gently, drifting down with just the whisper of a breeze to suggest it was in motion at all. Marc could actually see a hazy outline of sun above the shadowed treeline to the southeast. Looking directly down, he noticed for the first time that a wooden ledge, about a foot and a half across, ran along the width of building between the two floors, all the way to the rickety fire-stairs, now mantled with snow like a derelict scaffold. He could see footprints-two sets probably, one going and one coming-stretching along the ledge to the fire-stairs. The assassin must have come up those stairs, or out onto them from the inside hall, and shuffled along the ledge to his unbarred window. From there, if one were bold or desperate enough, it would be simple to ease open the window, enter, and do the deed.

Marc noticed also that it seemed to be about nine o’clock, from the position of the sun, and that the footprints on the ledge were three-quarters filled with fresh snow. Thus, he could not determine their true size or imprint, though he guessed that they were made by a small or medium-sized person, certainly not a large man.

Dismantling his booby-trap, he went out into the main hall. He could detect no sounds from the other rooms. No doubt everyone but he was down in the dining area having breakfast. Well and good. He went to the smaller hall, where it met the main one, and followed it back to the rear exit. Again, he stopped to listen and heard no-one. He eased open the rear door, ignored the sudden chill of the January morning, and examined the landing. It was dotted with bootprints, as if someone, or more than one person, had stomped about there-impatiently? to keep warm? to get up enough nerve? These imprints were also drifted in with snow. Several pairs of prints were visible leading up and down the stairs and, at ground level, veered off in several directions. He realized that the hotel staff might use this back entrance in the course of their duties, and so it was really impossible to tell if the assassin had climbed these stairs to reach the ledge or had got to it from inside the inn.