Authors: Ted Wood
Murder on Ice (23 page)
"I'll be here when you're ready," I told her. She craned up on tiptoe and kissed me on the lips, a quick, dry, sisterly kiss. A good-bye kiss. Then she was gone.
I went over to the typewriter and wound in an occurrence form. It was the only thing to do. I was only halfway down the first sheet thirty minutes later when the door opened again and Freddie walked in. She had dressed, presumably in spare clothes from her car, blue jeans and a sweater under her parka. She was awkward, swinging her legs slowly and holding her face very tight. She looked as tough as a girl that pretty can look.
"What's up, forget your purse?"
She lifted the flap on the counter and walked through to my side. "No," she said defiantly. "I just figured I'd caused you enough trouble and I came to say I'm sorry."
"You're forgiven. Go home."
She came over to the typewriter and looked over my shoulder at the half page I'd finished. She snorted. "A good job I did come back. I'm no stenographer, but I have to be ten times better than that. Let me see the machine a minute."
I stood up and she slipped into the seat, pulling out the sheet of paper I had so painfully typed. Then she took her coat off and began to type in crisp bunches of sound, like the clatter of an M16 on full automatic. Within a couple of minutes she stopped. "Okay, now dictate the rest, I want to see how it comes out."
I sat down across the desk from her. "You mean you'll type the whole thing?"
"Like I told you," she said roughly, "I owe you."
F
reddie stayed a month before she got homesick for the bright lights of Toronto. By that time the trial had started and the publicity she got for having appeared nude on the ice was enough to get her a couple of decent TV appearances. Then there were the talk shows, and soon she had outgrown both the feminist movement and me.
I stayed where I was, of course. I liked Murphy's Harbour. The town was good to me. They held a roast for me at the Legion Hall and ended up locking me in my own cells on a charge of laughing too hard. It was all very small town and corny and it covered up the embarrassment people feel at knowing you have saved lives, their lives, while they were too paralyzed with fear to know what was going on. Carmichael died within that month. His heart gave out on the night before the trial began. But he had done a couple of gracious things. He had paid for the damages to Carl Simmonds's house. He made a two-grand donation to the Legion. And he hired a sonofabitch of a tough lawyer for his son Tom and for the two women.
That was where the fun all stopped. The story came out bit by bit under the probing of our local Crown Attorney. It was no wonder Margaret Sumner hated policemen. A year earlier her husband had been killed by a car that was being pursued by the Montreal police. It happened the night he retired. He was older than she and had sold out his real estate partnership and taken the money. The two of them were going to Europe the next day. Then they would have returned to Mexico and the circuit of the wealthy retired set. She would have studied ruins and he would have played golf and gotten browner and browner. But fate stepped in and slammed their car broadside as they were on their way home from the retirement party.
Sumner had died the following day. His widow buried him and contained her anger. She made an attempt to overcome it by hiring a detective to trace her illegitimate son. They found Tom just finishing his six years in Millhaven—a sour, silent, angry con. That blew away the last of her resilience. She wanted to hurt the people who had hurt her. That included Carmichael and the policemen who embodied all her reason for hatred. Tom was glad to take part. He'd spent six years of solitary nights dreaming of getting back at me. So she set up a plot that would humiliate and torment Carmichael and kill me. It was a vendetta, but she was clever enough to try to put a barrier between herself and the crimes she wanted to commit. She created C.L.A.W. and conned Nancy into joining. I don't think the rape was intended. Sumner was too much of a feminist to go along with further suffering of any woman. But she used her people well.
They had whisked Nancy away from the dance. They were going to take her to the Sumner place on the island but gave up that idea when they found Whiteside there. Instead they took her to the mainland, leaving Nighswander in the cottage close to the fishing huts in case I should go there, and later leaving Elliot at the end of the crack in the ice. I was marked for death one way or the other.
But Tom's ferocity spoiled the plan. He wanted more than my death. He wanted me to suffer and he picked Val as the instrument. By then the whole crew of them, C.L.A.W. members, Tom's friends, everybody, was so caught up with the excitement that they'd thrown their plans away. They decided to go to the Legion and hold Carmichael hostage. That's why Tom came down there after he severed the kid's arm. He was ready to be Hitler, Attila, anybody with the power of life and death over a bunch of terrified hostages. The way the Crown Attorney summed it up was, "They were drunk on blood."
Only I got lucky and caught that grenade in time. The jury sat stone-faced and listened to the whole story and found the three principals guilty. Tom was sentenced to life in Penetanguishene, the hospital for the criminally insane. The way the Act is written, he's there on a Governor General's warrant, but in fact he was to be there forever, he was beyond rehabilitation. His mother and Rachael were remanded for sentence. Margaret was released on bail, pending an appeal, and she disappeared.
I don't think they tried very hard to find her. She was too important a symbol. She had beaten the odds on her own. Starting a week after giving up her baby she had put herself through school, through college, and into some American university. She was a credit to the whole Indian people and this crazy blot on her copybook could have ended that. So she walked.
And I walked, back to Murphy's Harbour, to lengthening days, to summonses to the owners of ice-fishing huts for not pulling their places off the ice early enough, to looking up at the first crows of February, and the returning ducks and geese of April, to a way of life that was beginning to suit me more and more. Who can tell, I may stay here until retirement. Me and Sam.