Death on a Foggy Spring Portage, Page 3

  Part 3: Cozy isn’t the Word

  Well, it wasn’t one of the greatest canoe trips I’d been on.

  The six of us stood silent at the end of the portage, at the north end of Serpentine Lake. Canoes and packs lay on the ground, in the early spring mud. It was snowing steadily, and a north wind was already turning the lake into sawteeth.

  It was just after noon, and back home I could have been cleaning out the crawl space or peeling onions or something halfway worthwhile.

  We kept our heads down. We shuffled our feet in the cold wind. We looked at the water, breaking cold on the rocks just ahead of us.

  A half-mile behind us, Hughie lay dead under a canoe. Myself, I was watching my feet and thinking thoughts you really couldn’t put into print.

  Angeline, her blonde hair in front of her eyes once again, sat down on Cam’s canoe and began playing something utterly sad on her harmonica.

  Lloyd, even more red-faced than usual in the cold wind, was conferring with his wife. They looked up, and he spoke. “That water’s a bit too cold and rough for us. Peggy thinks we should camp here.”

  “I’ve got to agree with that.” Cam said, getting a couple of pairs of gloves from his pack. He left a pair beside Angeline, who had launched into “Danny Boy” on the harmonica. That’s what is sounded like, anyway.

  There was a long groupish pause, then Baker spoke up, his dark beard collecting large flakes of snow. “On the map,” he said, waving a topographical in the air, “there’s a cabin of some sort a quarter kilometer south.”

  I’ve camped in the snow before. I’ve camped in the wind before. I even once camped in both before. That’s why I picked up the pack and grabbed the map from Baker and headed south. Even if we couldn’t get into the cabin, the ground around it was bound to be drier than the cedar swamp we were standing in at the end of the portage.

  Baker was right on my heels, and Lloyd and Peggy were close after. Cam and Angeline followed our damp footprints a bit further behind.

  The snow lightened a bit when we got to the cabin, although the wind was getting worse. We were in luck; it was a hunter’s cabin. And it was open. Enough, anyway. Hunters’ cabins are sometimes left accessible, and this one was.

  Within an hour we had the old iron stove going, and since it looked like we were going to spend the night there, we unrolled our sleeping bags onto the bunks.

  Then I went out into the snow with Cam to get wood. There was enough wood stacked behind the cabin, but it’s a decent thing to do to replace what you use. Besides, I wanted to have a conversation with Cam.

  So we walked away from the cabin into the sound of wind in the bare spring treetops. Cam had a fold-up saw and we found a dead oak a planet or two away.

  I was holding the end of a branch, and Cam was sawing through it, when, he spoke, his voice calm above the sound of the saw. “I heard someone say you think maybe somebody killed Hughie.”

  I raised my eyebrows. A small brown bird landed on a nearby twig and inspected us with one eye, then the other, as if waiting for my answer.

  I just laughed. “I seems possible. So I figured you as the prime candidate.”

  He stopped. The bird took off for friendlier trees. “Me? Why would I want to kill Hughie? He may have made fun of my lack of camping experience, but you don’t kill a person for that.”

  I didn’t like the way he waved the saw, but I went on. “For Angeline, I guess. Baker thinks she had reason to hate her brother.”

  “Oh no doubt, but killing Hughie wouldn’t get her her money back.”

  Money? That was news. “Money?” I asked.

  He started picking up pieces of oak. “Didn’t know about that, eh? Try asking Baker. He can tell you about it. Let’s get back to the cabin.” He turned and marched away, leaving footprints in the new-fallen snow.

  I picked up the rest of the wood we’d cut and followed him.

  I liked this less and less. My friend, Baker had had a reason, going back to his childhood, for doing Hughie in, as had Hughie’s half-sister, Angeline. But that implied years of waiting, then a sudden murderous impulse.

  Baker had thought it possible that Angeline had talked her younger tent-mate, Cam, into doing the job. That seemed unlikely: Cam seemed too cool to do murder.

  And what about Lloyd? Was his resentment at Hughie’s success and luck in life enough to prompt murder? Or had Baker been serious in hinting that Lloyd and Hughie’s secretary were doing things that Lloyd’s wife, Peggy didn’t know about?

  At that point I suddenly wondered why Hughie’s secretary wasn’t on this trip. Everybody else in this evil little game was here!

  I’d had enough. Before I was going to spend a night in a tiny cabin with the I-used-to-hate-Hughie-but-now-he’s-dead gang, one of whom may have killed Hughie, I wanted some answers. I wanted a lot of answers.

  I stood at the doorway of the cabin while Cam stacked wood beside the stove. “Baker!” I yelled. The windows rattled. “I wanna talk to you. Now!” There was dead silence in the cabin.

  Baker silently got up, put his coat and hat on, stuffed gloves into his pockets, and went to his pack, where he retrieved his hunting knife. He unsheathed the eight-inch blade, and came at me with a truly evil gleam in his eyes. “You’re dogfood,” he grunted through his bushy black beard.

  I stepped back. Baker went out, slamming the door behind him, put the knife back into its sheath, and threw one arm over my shoulder. “What’s up, ol’ buddy?” he asked. “You seem a bit upset about something.” We angled into the cedar woods before the door opened again.

  “Well,” I said, “let’s start at the beginning. Did you kill Hughie?” He unwrapped his arm from my shoulder, stood back, and looked at me.

  “That’s the second time you mentioned that. Is there some reason you think I might have?”

  “You had the opportunity,” said. “You and I are the only ones who slept alone last night.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t do it?” Baker asked.

  “Fairly sure,” I said.

  He looked at me with a big smile. “I’m obviously guilty. Let’s get on with the hanging.” He tilted his head to the side and stuck his tongue out.

  “Seriously,” I said, continuing to tramp up a hillside. Somewhere behind us people were calling our names. “Any idea how he might have been killed?”

  “I’d like you to answer that question,” Baker said The snow had almost stopped, and the sky was beginning to clear.

  “Picture this, then,” I said “There it is, three or four in the morning. Hughie’s got his pack on his back, his canoe over his head, and a flashlight in his hand. He’s standing at the edge of the mudhole thinking about how to get around it. It’s in the middle of a thunderstorm, and rain is pouring down.

  “Now someone comes up behind him,” I went on, “grabs the back of his canoe, turns it so Hughie faces towards the nastiest part of the mud hole on the trail, and pushes. Someone could run Hughie right into the mud before he’d know what was happening.

  “He’d trip, of course,” I said, “and fall face forward into the mud. He’d have let go of the canoe, so the person grabs it, rolls it over so it’s floating in the mud. The killer gets in the canoe, runs along till they’re beside him. Then that person puts a foot on his head, and leaves it there till he stops moving.”

  Baker turned to me and raised one eyebrow.

  “Either a man or a woman could have done it,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  By this time we were on a hill overlooking the lake. It was late afternoon, but dark because of the storm clouds. We were only five hours paddling and a couple of portages from the cars, but it was obvious, from the whitecaps on the lake, that we’d be in the cabin for the night. Both of us stood in silence for a moment, watching the clouds stampeding across the sky like the ghosts of all the elephants that ever died.

  “Why,” I said, my coat flapping in the wind, “did anyone invite Hughie on this trip? None of you co
uld stand him.”

  Baker laughed. “We didn’t. Hughie found out about the trip, and invited himself along.” To my unanswered question, he added, “He never believed anyone could hate him. Peeved at him for a couple of moments, maybe, but no more than that.

  “And, I suppose, we figured he’d go on ahead pretty soon. Which he did.”

  We turned our backs to the lake, the wind, and the clouds, and began to make our way down the hill.

  “I was talking to Cam,” I said, “and he said to ask you about some money that Angeline wouldn’t get by killing Hughie.” We slid down the hillside in the dead wet leaves, slowing our passage by grabbing small trees.

  Baker came to a dead halt, hanging on to a maple. ‘Geez. He’s right. With Hughie dead, that money might be lost forever.”

  I grabbed a matching tree and waited.

  “When Hughie’s mother died, she left her son the company business, a chain of water softener stores. It was making lots of money. She left her stepdaughter, Angeline, an agreement that gave her a good portion of the profits from the chain and a senior executive position with a good salary.

  “Angeline didn’t last long as an executive. Too many conflicts with Hughie, as you might expect. But she got the money regularly from the company. For a couple of years. “Then the money dried up.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “I couldn’t tell. Angeline hired an accountant, but Hughie wouldn’t let her near the place. One of his competitors tried to buy him out, but Hughie turned him down. Now there’s just enough money to let Hughie live comfortably. Profits seem to have vanished.”

  “You think Hughie was stealing it?” I asked.

  “I certainly never met anybody who doubted that,” Baker said, starting downhill again. But nobody knew where it was going. I always figured it was on its way to some overseas bank.”

  “Now that Hughie’s dead, can’t someone find the money?”

  “If it’s under his bed, or invested in banking stocks, yes. If it’s in a numbered account – which is what the accountant figured – not likely. She says you’d need the account number and the password. And a death certificate. That’s three things. Only one of those seems to be available. Anyone who wanted the money wouldn’t kill Hughie until he had all three of them.”

  By now we were within sight of the cabin. A trail of white smoke came from the smokestack, only to be hurried into the woods by the wind. There didn’t seem to be anybody outside.

  We stood and shuffled our feet for a few moments.

  “Do you think Hughie kept something like the account number or the password on his Blackberry?” I asked.

  “You didn’t find the Blackberry, I guess,” Baker said, looking at me with one raised eyebrow, his bushy gnome face turned up and a few last flakes of snow settling onto his beard. It wasn’t really a question.

  “That’s been bothering me,” I said, “ever since I found him. He usually kept it in his shirt pocket, on the left side.” I patted my own shirt pocket.

  “You think it’s in the mud now?”

  I shook my head. “When I went to pull Hughie out of the mud, the packsack strap that crosses that pocket was undone. I think someone undid the buckle, but wasn’t able to get it done up again in the mud. I think that person took the Blackberry.”

  Baker nodded. “I always knew computers would kill. So someone in that cabin has it, maybe.” He didn’t need to say the rest. That that person probably pushed ol’ Hughie into the mud and stood on him till he stopped showing signs of life. I felt cold, and opened the door to the cabin.

  For a while nobody spoke to us. But eventually they forgave us our strange sense of humor, and conversation continued.

  Not that there was much conversation. It was obvious that the next day we’d get to the cars, phone somebody in authority, and wait for instructions.

  So we cooked supper on the old iron stove and waited for dark.

  There was no light in the cabin other than the candles we were carrying, so when the sun set, we mostly sat around looking at the candles flicker and watching the spiders come out from hibernation.

  I did get a chance to speak to Baker again, just after dark, when we were outside just past the cedars for a bio-break.

  “See Hughie’s Blackberry?” I asked.

  “Nope. I watched pretty close, but if it’s hidden, it’s really well hidden. I can rule out Cam, I think. He doesn’t pack very well and has to take everything out to get his cooking gear.”

  “Same with Lloyd,” I said. “When I asked him for a pill for my headache, he pretty well took his pack apart looking for it.”

  “That just leaves Angeline and Peggy,” Baker said. “And you and me.” He grinned. “And you’ll never figure out I’ve got the thing hidden in my anal orifice.”

  “No way,” I said, stumbling through the dark. “It’d fall out too easy.”

  I must say, we did our best. I searched Baker’s pack, and he searched mine. Quietly, of course. And we pretty well got to look through the women’s packs, using one excuse or another. Not completely, of course, but it was a start.

  By ten we let the fire in the stove burn down, and there was silence in the cabin. Once or twice in the night somebody got up and went outside carrying a flashlight. I slept fitfully, listening to Peggy and Baker snore, and finally fell asleep sometime after three.

  When I woke in the morning, the sun was just brightening the day, and Baker was pouring a coffee.

  “Gawd, you snore,” Baker said.

  I was just sitting up, sipping my coffee when I realized Baker was still standing there, waiting.

  “Something up?” I asked.

  “Angeline and Peggy,” Baker said. “It looks like they’re gone.”

  ***