Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

I cocked my leg over the roof and made myself into a toboggan, sliding down the roof to the edge where I caught my heel in the eaves trough, stopped, turned over onto my stomach, and dropped the rest of the way to the ground. I saw the head sticking out of the window and grabbed it, pulling the person out until he was rocking over the sill on his stomach.

"Try anything and you're dead," I said in a low voice. He squirmed helplessly and I hoisted him the rest of the way over the sill, out of the thick smoke that poured out around him, choking me even outside in the air. It was not until I had finished blinking away the tears that I realized who I was holding.

It was Irv Whiteside, his face blackened with smoke, the lapels torn away from his natty suit where I had hauled him out over the glass shards in the bottom of the window frame. I gave him thirty seconds to grab some air, then asked him, "What the hell gives?"

He held up both hands, still coughing as the words glugged out of him. "I didn't know, Reid. I didn't know it was you, honestagod. I thought it was them bastards back to get me."

I wanted more but he was shuddering with cold. I had to get him inside. "Is there anybody else in there?"

"No. Just me."

"Good. Stay here." I shinned back up the tree and out over the roof, leaving him collapsed against the wall, spitting soot and smoke. It was easier on the roof now I did not have to worry about making a noise, and within thirty seconds I had my plug out of the chimney. The hat was scorched and the burnt fur lining smelled like hell, but I kept it in my hands as I slid back down the roof and dropped beside Whiteside. I wasn't thinking of him as Irv right then. This was no friend. Not after shooting at me.

He was twitching uncontrollably with cold and I had to lead him to the back door. It was locked, but I booted it once at lock level and we were inside. Irv stayed by the door as I crouched low to the floor and followed the dull beam of my flashlight through the brown cloud to the stove, holding my breath all the way. I opened the stove door wide and I could see the smoke pulling in and up the chimney, like bath water going down a drain. There was a pile of pine kindling wood next to the stove and I threw a handful in. It burst into a bright cleansing flame that pulled more and more smoky air away. Within a minute or so the air was breathable again and I was able to shut the back door and move Whiteside in where it was properly warm. There was an oil lamp on the table and I lit it. In the dull light with its smoke haze Whiteside looked like some character from an old Dutch painting. But he was able to breathe again and I started asking my questions.

"Why are you here?"

"I was hired as a bodyguard for the kid."

"Which kid?"

"Nancy Carmichael."

"Who hired you and what did she need a bodyguard for, anyway?"

It came out slowly, the way most stories do under interrogation. He forgot, and backtracked, but finally I got the facts. I was sure they were the facts.

It all boiled down to Nancy Carmichael's sense of the dramatic. She knew the C.L.A.W. people were going to bring her to this cottage. She was certain she would get away with the gag and planned to stay here until Monday while I searched the motels on the highway and put the OPP and the rest of the outside world on the lookout for her.

That still left two questions unanswered. "If she was among friends, why did she need a bodyguard, and why the hell were you shooting at me?"

It seemed that Nancy was not just a pretty face. She had brains enough to realize that as a rich man's daughter she might be a valuable commodity once she stepped outside the law and disappeared. She knew Irv from years of coming up to Murphy's Harbour, mostly without her father, who was too busy to spend more than occasional weekends at the family place on the lake. She had heard the local rumors about Irv Whiteside's past and had bought the glamor of it.

"Hell, you know, Chief," he apologized, "folks think it was like The Godfather, fer crissakes. I didn't tell her no different. She's a nice kid."

"You still didn't tell me why you were trying to kill me."

"Well, it's like this. I told the help I'd be upstairs, to close up and go home without disturbing me. They figured I had a broad up there. So I went down the firesteps and out to the marina. Like, I keep a skidoo there. That was it. I was out here by eleven, poured myself a snort, and waited. Around eleven-thirty they turn up. I can see right away they're excited. There's five o' them, not six, like I expected. So I open the door and they come stormin' in outa the cold but they're not laughing, like I figured. Nancy's cryin'. So I ask her what's up and she points to the big one who's wearing the ski mask and she says, 'He stripped one of the girls and left her on the ice to die.' So I say to him, because this is a him, this is no broad. I say, 'What's going on?' and he says, 'Keep outa this.' And I say I'm goin' to keep the kid with me and the rest of them can go. But he just sighs, real weary. He says, 'I thought some dumb bastard would try that,' and he pulls a gun on me. He says to me, he says, 'One move outa you and you're through worryin' about anythin'.' Then he grabs Nancy and they all go back out to their machines and away. I go through this place and find the rifle but when I go down to the dock they've screwed up my skidoo. So I lie low to wait for morning, but I'm scared and I'm goddamn mad. So I keep the lights off and my eyes open. And when I see somebody coming over the rocks, sneaking up, instead of up from the dock like a normal person would've, I figure it's the guy with the gun back again and I let fly."

I thought about what he'd told me. On the face of it they had been dumb, leaving Irv here with a rifle, but as I thought it through I could see sense in their plan. For one thing they weren't sure how many more people Nancy had told, including possibly me. Leaving him here, angry and armed, had given him a chance to shoot me if I turned up and left them with the choice of taking Nancy to some place nobody knew about. It seemed to me they were adjusting their plan as they went along, and that made it harder to second-guess them.

My face was burning. I realized it had been frostbitten when I was up on the roof. Tomorrow it would be swollen and blotchy. Tonight it was pins and needles but I didn't care. It was the only thing about me that was really alert. I felt dull and outwitted, trying to keep up with the chain of events Whiteside had described. I rubbed my face with two fingers until I got used to the pain, then I asked him, "Did Nancy give you any idea where they were going, except for here?"

"No. Honest, Chief. This place belongs to the woman who set up the kidnapping. Calls herself Margaret Sumner."

The name meant nothing to me. I pushed him. "What do you know about her? Is she a dumpy broad, in her fifties?"

He nodded, eager as a puppy to please. "That's her. There's no Sumner on the Reserve, that's for sure, but she's an Indian, around fifty-five."

I remembered the September morning. Three bangs of the pump gun, three ducks. Maybe she was Indian, but if so she had made money along the way. Her clothes were expensive.

"Anything else? Is she married, widowed, what?"

He held up his hands. "That's all I know. She bought this place last summer. I've seen her come into the marina a time or two, keeps an old plywood runabout there, got a Mercury motor."

I sensed a pattern to this. She had bought the cottage here and then set about building her little organization. Had it been because she wanted to get her hands on the Carmichael kid for something? Or had the Carmichael kid seemed like a usable totem for her cause? Whichever it was, Irv Whiteside wouldn't be able to help me. I tackled his knowledge from the other end.