Don Gutteridge - Turncoat

“Was there any sign that the contraption had been recently re-rigged?” Marc said, staring down at the brute log and the tangle of rawhide rigging that had provided the trigger for its lethal drop.

“None. As you can see, it’s the kind of trap the Mississauga Indians used to make when these were their prime hunting grounds. The rawhide is old and quite dried out. Joshua was just unlucky, I figure. Nine times out of ten this rope’ll snap when it’s hit and leave the deadfall in place. Still, the log is designed to fall when the shim is given the slightest shock.”

“You searched the area all around here for other footprints or signs of human disturbance?”

“Yes-once we’d recovered from the shock of seeing one of our dearest friends lying there dead and stiff.”

“I’m sorry,” Marc said. “I must remember he was no stranger to you.”

“As soon as he came back to help out on the farm after his son’s death last year, we took him into our company. He was one of us. He joined us every Wednesday evening he could.”

“Us?”

“The magistrate, the major, me, and Durfee, the postmaster. He was supposed to be with us on New Year’s Eve over at Child’s. It’s a sort of gentleman’s club, made up of like-minded citizens, you might say.”

“Loyal Tory gentlemen,” Marc said with a slight smile.

“That’s right,” Hatch said, taking no offence.

“You were all there, then?” Marc said, more abruptly than he’d intended.

“Could one of us have been floundering about out here, you mean? Lurking in the shadows like Madame Guillotine?”

“No, of course not. Anyone else would have had to come in along the same route that Smallman did, and that means tracks-deep hoof marks or snowshoe tracks.” He was staring back at the turbulence his own raquettes had left in the snow. “And you found no tracks beyond the trap?”

“We went carefully on ahead for a good twenty yards or more. Then we fanned out in a circle twice as wide. Nothing. Not even a rabbit track. Our friend died out here alone, looking for someone or something. Even so, who could have known or predicted that he would take this particular route? Or that the damnable device would work, if someone were obliging enough to blunder into it? It hadn’t been touched for years.”

After a pause Marc said, “What’s beyond that ridge up there?”

“That’s the rim of the cliff before it drops down to the lake,” Hatch said, suddenly more alert.

“The frozen lake,” Marc said.

The two men stood on the ridge and stared out at the endless, ice-covered stretch of Lake Ontario, more vast than most of the Earth’s seas. A little farther to the east, it would be frozen completely across its thirty-mile breadth, and on any Sunday afternoon you would be able to see cutters and sleighs and homemade sleds sliding merrily in both directions between the American republic and the British province. Families pulled apart by borders and politics and memories of the War of 1812 reconvened as soon as the lake froze, as if humanity was meant to be without division or dissent.

“You figure somebody may have come up here from the ice?” Hatch said.

“It’s thick enough to hold a horse, even a sleigh. And the highway at Crawford’s Corners can’t be more than a quarter of a mile from the shoreline, can it?”

“True enough. That would explain why we only found Joshua’s tracks coming in here. But how would anybody coming up along the lakeshore know exactly where he was? You’d have to be an Indian or a wolf.”

“What’s that down there? To your right. Looks like an inlet or a little bay to me.”

Hatch’s eyes lit up. “That’s Bass Cove, a favourite fishing spot in the spring.”

Marc began to move along the ridge in that direction, raquettes in hand. Then he stood straight up and didn’t move until Hatch had joined him. He pointed to a shadowy indentation in the escarpment just below them on the wooded side of the ridge. “I think we’ve found our rendezvous,” he said.

Together they scrabbled down to a ledge that was invisible from above but easily seen from the woods just below. They pushed through a dark entranceway into a low, cramped, but otherwise habitable cave. They waited until their eyes had adjusted to the murky, late-afternoon light before commenting.

“We aren’t the first visitors here besides the bears,” Marc said.

“These ashes were made by more than one fire,” Hatch added, holding up a tin cup and a blackened soup spoon.

“And something’s been stored here at some time or other,” Marc said from his crouching position at the far side of the cave. “I can see the ridge-lines in the dirt: crates or barrels, I’d say.”

Outside again, Hatch said, almost to himself, “Still, we don’t have the foggiest idea of whether anybody was waiting here for Joshua Smallman two weeks ago. And if they were, they might just’ve been as friendly as hostile. Until we know why he came out here, we’re just spittin’ in the wind.”

But Marc was already edging along away from the mouth of the cave, bent low like a hound on the spoor. Hatch was tempted to chuckle at the ensign’s antics but didn’t.

“Come over here, Constable Hatch.”

“Only if you call me Erastus, or just plain Hatch. I’m only a part-time, supernumerary constable, and under duress to boot.”

From their vantage point they had an unimpeded view through the evergreens to a spot somewhere on the trail they themselves had made: their tracks were clearly visible.

“That’s the trail all right,” Hatch said, puzzled. “But the deadfall’s farther down.”

“On the other side of that patch of evergreens. You can just see the limbs of the big oak it was attached to.”

“But if someone was standing here that night-in his snowshoes-looking down and waving Joshua on, he would’ve come straight up this open stretch and missed the trap.”

“Look at the size of the drifts down there,” Marc said. “They’re deep, but not deep enough to cover the trees that’ve been knocked down by storms or something. See how they’re blocking the way?”

“Knocked down by lightning,” Hatch said, spotting the telltale blackened branches and stark, splintered trunks poking through the snow. “You figure somebody stood here and encouraged Joshua? Maybe even pointed to the left, knowing the Indian trail went that way and-”

“Knowing that the deadfall was just ahead at the next bend.”

“Possible,” Hatch said slowly. “Still, it sounds a bit far-fetched. Two maybes don’t make a certainty.”

“Could a person who was really expert on snowshoes have gone down to the trap from here, come back up again, and then whisked away all signs of his tracks?”

“Oh, I think so, ’specially if there’d been some additional snow to cover the brush marks. But you’re forgetting one important thing: anybody meeting Joshua here that night might just as easily have been a friend.”

“Then why didn’t he walk down to the trap to help the man? He couldn’t have been sure that Smallman was killed outright. And that horse of his would have been making a hell of a racket. They can smell death, I’ve been told.”

“That’s so, but we’re still guessing that somebody was actually here.”

“Not now we aren’t,” Marc said. He was hunched over a place where the ledge broadened slightly. Hatch leaned over his shoulder. The webbed signature of a pair of raquettes stared up at them as clean-edged as a palm print. The sheltering rock had kept it almost free of drifting snow and untouched by the recent squall driving off the lake.

“And look at this,” Hatch said. “A stem broken off a clay pipe, right beside it.”

He handed it to Marc, who gazed at it thoughtfully, then tucked it into his tunic.