Keith Thomson - Once a spy

Fielding trod the creaky planks as gingerly as a cat. Charlie followed, just as careful to be quiet. Cooperating now was his only chance of survival.

At the door, Fielding waved Charlie ahead. Charlie gripped the crystal doorknob, twisted it without a sound, then tapped open the door. With the curtains shut, the room was nearly black, but the spill from the hallway sconces was enough to reveal, in silhouette, the man beneath the comforter on the four-poster bed, a halo of white hair against a pillow. Fielding inched past Charlie and into the room.

Charlie believed his greatest advantage was that Fielding wasn’t expecting him to try anything. Elbowing his fear aside, Charlie backed into the hall and took a silent step toward the stairs.

He heard the snap of the light switch in the wall plate back in the bedroom. No light came on. Of course. He’d yanked the fuse twenty minutes ago. Still, in a second or two, Fielding would know he had captured not Drummond but Mort.

Charlie ran for all he was worth. To the landing. Fourteen stairs in four bounds. Then into the bathroom beside the den. He jumped onto the toilet seat-he’d closed it ahead of time. He dove through the already-raised window, landing in a prickly hedge behind the house.

Bouncing to his feet, he raced to the toolshed. The open Durango sat on the structure’s far side, driver’s door open, engine idling softly, dashboard dimmed to nothing, and headlights off. Charlie flew in.

Now, conspicuous was desirable. He popped on the high beams, slammed the accelerator for maximum tire squeal, then tore into the gravel driveway.

Once the hilly driveway dipped to a point that the Durango was out of sight of the house, he swatted off the headlights and slowed to as close to a crawl as first gear would allow. He turned onto a pasture, then bobbed for about a hundred yards to a onetime hay barn, parking on the side that faced away from the house.

He opened the driver’s door, in slow motion, for fear that the sound would carry over the open fields, slipped out, then closed the door just as gingerly. With an armful of winter clothing and other provisions found in the mudroom, he stole to the barn’s side door and ducked inside.

Candicane was waiting. Drummond was dozing between a pair of horse blankets in the hayloft.

Charlie led Drummond and Candicane out of the hay barn. “Where were you?” Drummond asked at normal conversational volume. The fallow fields between them and the house had the acoustics of an amphitheater. In addition, the night was extraordinarily quiet; snow had begun to fall, and the flakes could be heard tapping down individually.

“I was doing what I said I was going to do,” Charlie whispered.

“Oh.”

Charlie helped him onto the saddle, then pressed his own shoe onto one of the stirrups and winched himself aboard. Squeezing in ahead of Drummond, he draped the horse blankets over their legs for warmth, then gave a rendition of that fusion of cluck and kiss with which jockeys started racehorses.

And they were off!

The ride was bumpy at first. It smoothed out as Candicane picked up the pace. At top speed, perhaps fifteen miles per hour, though she began to breathe hard-nostrils venting shafts of steam-Charlie felt like he was aboard a hovercraft. The house on Hickory Road shot aft. Quickly it was a flicker on the horizon, then it was swallowed by the night.

Charlie directed the horse to the trailhead at the base of the ridge. A hand-painted trail marker pointed to Bentonville, a dot of civilization two miles due east over the Massanutten Mountain, according to the atlas he’d used in formulating his plan, though possibly much longer along a windy, wooded trail. The hope was to obtain a vehicle in Bentonville.

Innumerable bends and inclines slowed Candicane to little more than a trot, but the trail seemed as familiar to her as her bit. Woods enveloped them. Charlie hadn’t known that darkness could be so black. Or silent. Peace and quiet, he reflected, is an oxymoron to city dwellers accustomed to the soothing drone that’s the sum of the subway, thousands of motor vehicles, and millions of people. He took in a deep breath of pine and felt flush with satisfaction at his escape. At all times, he kept a hand within reach of the saddlebag. When readying Candicane, he’d packed his mother’s Colt, reloaded by Drummond with some of the armory’s worth of bullets found in the Durango.

Candicane’s mane now glistened with snow. Flakes turned to steam on impact with exposed parts of her hide. She slowed when a small stream came into view. Her breath was ragged.

“Maybe we should let her have a quick pit stop,” Charlie said.

“Maybe,” Drummond said, with misplaced decisiveness.

At the bank, Candicane halted and plunged her nose into the water. Charlie watched her shadow bobble on the far side as she drank. He noticed sharp impressions of hooves in the quarter-inch of snow there.

Anvils for hooves.

A rush of nausea nearly knocked him out of the saddle. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “We’ve somehow doubled back over our own steps.”

If this troubled Drummond, he didn’t show it, or say anything.

“Fielding and his backup team have to have figured out our game plan by now,” Charlie tried to explain. “To track us, all they need to do is follow gigantic hoofprints through fresh snow.”

“I see.”

“I don’t suppose you have any idea of what to do?”

“Get going?”

“I’m with you on that. The thing is, without knowing which way to go, it’s fifty-fifty we gallop smack into them.”

Drummond looked at the stream. The spots of light bobbing atop the water appeared to transfix him.

“Dad, at least help me get our bearings.”

“Do you have a compass?”

“No, but don’t you have some ‘interesting piece of information’ about moss-you can tell north by the side of the trees it grows thickest, something like that?”

“We need to find north?”

“East, actually, but north’ll do the trick.”

“All the times we went camping, you never learned how to use the North Star?”

“We never went camping.”

“Oh.”

“What about the North Star?”

“If you draw an imaginary line from it to the ground, you have true north.”

“What if it’s cloudy, like it is now, and you can’t see the North Star?”

“If a crescent moon has risen before the sun sets, its illuminated side faces west. If it has risen after midnight, the bright side faces east.”

“Okay, what if you can’t see anything. Like now, for instance?”

“You’d need a compass.”

Charlie was light-headed in reflection of his own shortsightedness. He could have had a compass-five of them, probably. As Mort had promised, the mudroom had anything a person could ever need. Charlie had had a pick not only of sizes in coats and hats, but styles. He packed the saddlebag only with bottles of water and a bag of trail mix. He added Hattemer’s fountain pen, for no reason other than general utility. A fountain pen! But he left behind enough tools to start a hardware store. He never even thought of a trail map; surely that mudroom had a drawerful.

He clucked Candicane back into drive, sending them splashing down the center of the stream. “Hopefully this puts their idea of our course at a coin toss,” he said. “And maybe we can spot another trail marker or a rooftop or a road.”

“Or a compass,” Drummond said.

Snow accumulated, thickening both Charlie’s coat and hat by an inch in places. It provided unexpected insulation, but it burned the skin between his sleeves and gloves and at his collar and his extremities were numb. Drummond never complained, but he alternated between shivers and coughs. Poor Candicane wheezed with each step. All this was better, certainly, than getting caught by Fielding’s team. Charlie sensed, though, that they were delving into woods so vast that, for all practical purposes, there was no other side; survival would be an issue even if Fielding and his men called it a night.