A Dismal Thing To Do (3 page)

Madoc was drinking his tea, thinking up any number of perfectly harmless and innocent reasons why Janet might have had to pop out on the spur of the moment, when the phone rang. Ah, there she was now, stuck with a flat tire she wanted him to come and fix. He sprinted for the phone. “Hello, darling!”

“That you, Inspector?” replied a basso profundo voice.

Madoc gritted his teeth. Didn’t they know he was officially, positively, irrevocably off duty? “What’s the matter, Sergeant?” he snarled.

“Sorry to bother you, Inspector, but we’ve had a report.”

“About what? Well, come on, spit it out.” If they thought he was going anywhere tonight—

“Er—would Mrs. Rhys be with you now?”

What the hell? “No, she’s not.”

“You haven’t heard from her?”

“No, I’ve just been—look, what is this?”

“Now, Inspector, don’t get excited. The thing of it is, her car’s been reported found.”

“Found? What do you mean? Found where?”

“Gone off the road down near Harvey Station.”

“Harvey Station? What would she be—Sergeant, what about my wife? Where is she?”

“They don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of her, except her pocketbook. It was under the seat, with all her stuff in it. Money and everything. Some kids on a Skidoo found it.”

“What about the car keys?”

“Still in the ignition.”

“Oh Jesus!”

Madoc didn’t realize he’d whispered. The sergeant started talking faster.

“The car wasn’t smashed up, Inspector. It may have been deliberately ditched. There were no footprints, no bloodstains, no—”

No body, that was what the man was trying not to say. Of course there weren’t any signs in the snow. Those kids would have mucked them up with their damned snowmobile, trying to be heroes. Blast their souls to hell. No, that was not fair. They’d only done what anybody would who didn’t know better.

“How deep is the snow there?”

That was a stupid question. Deep. There hadn’t been a real thaw since December. On the other hand, there hadn’t been a fresh snowfall recently. The snow wouldn’t be soft and fluffy, the kind an unconscious person could sink into and smother. The crust would be thick. Thick enough, God willing. If the sergeant answered, Madoc didn’t hear. He was already on the case.

“Send around a car. Now.”

He wouldn’t trust himself to drive the Renault. Anyway, he wanted lights flashing, sirens whooping. He wanted time to sit and get his head together. He wanted both arms free for Janet.

What the bloody, flaming hell could she possibly have been doing at Harvey Station? Nothing. Therefore, maybe it hadn’t been Janet who ditched the car. She was a careful, sensible driver. She wouldn’t go off that far without letting him know. She wouldn’t leave the car without taking her handbag.

But suppose she’d had her handbag snatched. The thief would then have her keys and registration. Suppose he’d located the car, driven off hell-a-whooping toward Harvey, skidded off the road, panicked, and run, forgetting about the money in the bag.

That wouldn’t explain why Janet hadn’t called. If it was a simple case of snatch and run, she’d have got a message to him somehow by now. Unless it hadn’t been only that. Unless she’d been knocked out and dumped in another ditch, someplace where she wouldn’t be found.

Driving himself crazy wasn’t going to help. Madoc put on the coat and boots he’d been so glad to take off, and started out the door to meet the car they were sending. Then he stopped. What if Janet was all right? What if she tried to phone home and nobody was here to answer? Why hadn’t he asked for a spare man?

Because he knew damned well everybody who could be spared was already either out there or on the way, sticking long poles down into the churned-up snow around the little blue car, hoping to God they wouldn’t hit anything solid.

Muriel, the neighbor, she’d come. He picked up the phone again. Muriel was over in a flash, a coat clutched around her, house shoes on her feet, nothing on her hands.

“But I talked to her just at noontime,” she was protesting. “Janet was fine then.”

“What did you talk about?” Madoc demanded. “Did she say she was going anywhere?”

“Not that I recall. She said she was sewing on some curtains for that spare bedroom she’s fixing up for when your mother comes. Oh, and I told her about the washstand.”

“What washstand?”

“Well, you know Janet’s been wanting one. The old-fashioned kind, with a hole cut out for the basin and a shelf underneath to set the pitcher. It’s to hold that nice decorated ironstone set your friend over in Pitcherville gave her. You know, that belonged to the old lady Janet was so fond of.”

Madoc knew. Marion Emery, Bert and Annabelle’s neighbor, had brought it over from the Mansion. She’d thought Janet would like a memento of the late Mrs. Treadway. She’d also, as Annabelle pointed out, saved herself the price of a wedding present. Madoc could see Janet now, laughing over the gift and dashing away a tear or two at the same time. Yes, she’d mentioned a stand, but she hadn’t been about to pay what they were asking for one in the antique shops.

But Muriel had seen one in a flea market out on a back road somewhere. At least it hadn’t been a real flea market, just somebody’s barn with a few bits and pieces, most of which a person wouldn’t give houseroom to. But there’d been this perfectly decent washstand they were only asking thirty dollars for, and she’d thought Janet would want to know.

“Did you tell Janet where the place was?” Madoc asked with his heart thudding against his back teeth.

“Oh yes. She asked me about four times, till she was sure I’d got it straight. You know how I am about directions.”

Madoc did know how Muriel was about directions. He made her go over them a few times, too, scribbling frantically on Janet’s grocery list as he listened. They looked easy enough once he’d got her pinned down, but Muriel’s directions always did. Janet and he had found that out on a couple of other abortive missions.

The one clue that popped out of his jottings was that if Janet had in fact gone to look for the washstand on the strength of what they purported to indicate for a route, she might have wound up in one of several places, all of them fairly close to Fredericton and none of them on the road to Harvey. So now what did he do? He had to check out Janet’s car for himself, but instinct told him to head the opposite way. He compromised by switching on the siren and telling the driver to go like hell.

Yes, that was her car, all right. Madoc opened the door, stuck in his head, and sniffed like a hound on the trail. At first the interior didn’t smell anything but cold. Gradually, though, he picked up a trace of—what? Oil and smoke. He put his nose to the nylon carpeting and sniffed harder. Oily smoke, no doubt about it, and a smudge of grease in front of the gas pedal. He reached into the glove compartment for the flashlight he’d put there himself, and beamed it at the stain.

“Who’s been in here?”

“N—nobody.”

That was one of the kids from the snowmobile, chilled to the marrow, no doubt, but not about to quit while there was any excitement going. “We couldn’t see anybody through the window, so we opened the door.”

“Both doors were properly shut?” Madoc snapped.

“Yeah, that’s right.” The kid’s teeth were chattering. “Just shut. Like as if you just got out and shut the door and walked away. Only there weren’t any footprints. None at all. We looked.”

“How? Did you drive around in the Skidoo?”

“No, we had snowshoes. But we didn’t need ’em, really. The crust bears you up.”

“So it does.”

Madoc realized he hadn’t even thought about putting on snowshoes himself. He was not a big man, but he outweighed Janet by at least thirty pounds. She could have walked away from here without even cracking the surface. Only she hadn’t, because she wouldn’t have left her pocketbook.

Unless she’d been dazed. She hadn’t been dazed. She hadn’t been here. Somebody had got the car away from her, as Madoc had thought from the first. Somebody with big feet and heavy boots, who stank of burning.

“Any fires around here today?” he asked the kid.

“Fires? You mean like a house burning down?”

“Or a dump, or a car that caught fire. Give a sniff.”

The boy followed Madoc’s example, cupping his nose between his mittens to thaw it out. “Hey, yeah! That’s like we smelled when we opened the door. First we thought it was the wires under the hood, and jumped back for fear she was going to blow. Remember, Pete?”

Pete remembered. There’d been this funny stink, sort of like burning rubber. He’d wanted to lift the hood, but Duane said they’d better not, so they hadn’t. Anyway, it hadn’t been all that much of a stink.

“More as if somebody wearing smoky clothes had been in the car?” Madoc suggested.

“Yeah, like that,” said Pete. “But then we found this lady’s purse.”

“Where?”

“Underneath the driver’s seat. We didn’t notice it right away.”

“Did you open it?”

“Well, sure,” said Duane. “I mean, what the heck, why not? We had to find out who owned the car, didn’t we? We never took anything, honest.”

“All right, I’m not blaming you.”

Madoc picked up the slender pouch of dark blue leather. Janet wasn’t one to clutter herself up with a bunch of stuff she didn’t need. Her checkbook, a wallet with fifty dollars in the billfold and two dimes in the change purse. Driver’s license, registration, charge cards from a couple of department stores, a snapshot of himself that might have earned him a kidding from the sergeant if the situation had been less dire. A clean blue plastic comb, a blue pen to go with the checkbook, a lipstick in a light coral shade that went well with Janet’s bronzy brown hair, and a clean handkerchief with forget-me-nots embroidered in the corner and a scent of lavender wafting from it. That was what the car should have smelled of, if anything. Madoc’s sister Gwen had presented Janet with a great flagon of Welsh lavender cologne to take away the whiff of sheepdip while they were over visiting Great-uncle Caradoc, and she’d been dabbing it on herself and her possessions, though not to excess because Janet didn’t go in for excesses.

They hadn’t raised any fingerprints from the wheel, but there was again that odor of greasy smoke, along with something more pungent that none of them could identify. Janet’s handbag, on the other hand, smelled only of good leather and just barely of lavender. So it would appear that the lout who’d had his greasy gloves on the wheel hadn’t handled the bag at all. Maybe he’d never even noticed it.

“I’d say she got out of the car for one reason or another, and some thief jumped in and drove off with it,” he told his driver.

“Sure, Inspector,” the constable replied kindly.

“Damn it, she must have!”

Madoc kept on pawing around until he found it jammed down behind the gadget the seat belt fitted into: a slip torn off Janet’s grocery pad like the one he had in his pocket, with more or less the same directions scribbled on it. So she had gone to look for the washstand and he’d wasted all this time fiddling around in the wrong direction.

“Come on,” he barked, and raced back to the police car.

This time Madoc drove while the constable sat beside him and recited poetry to himself, for the constable was a man of literary tastes. “Back he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky.” Funny how this mild-mannered wisp of a Welshman, who seldom raised his voice above a murmur and tended to disappear into the background unless one kept a pretty sharp eye on him, could turn into Sir Francis Drake all of a sudden. “If ever she needs me, living or dead, I’ll rise that day.” Only Mrs. Rhys, not England. That was Alfred Noyes, too, only a different poem. The constable was all mixed up.

He wasn’t the only one, the constable decided some while later, after they’d sped back past Fredericton and over toward Oromocto. Those directions Inspector Rhys was trying to follow were getting him lost, from the look of things. Instead of being furious, though, he was acting grimly pleased.

“That’s what happened, you can bet your boots on it.”

This was the first thing Madoc had said since they left the Harvey Road. The constable was naturally nonplussed by the remark. Being also outranked and somewhat unmanned, he agreed.

Abruptly, Madoc slewed the car around in a hair-raising swoosh. The constable started to say, “What—” then he shut up. He could smell the smoke, too, and see the glow in the sky to the northeast. This might be the wrong fire, but any fire was better than none.

Even as he was straightening out of his deliberate skid, Madoc pointed at the sawhorse and the detour sign tossed into the snowbank at the corner of the side road that led to the glow.

“Firemen must have done that,” he grunted. As he wound his way up the long lane that had turnings enough but nothing around them, though, he neither saw nor heard any sign that engines had arrived. Maybe the fire hadn’t even been reported. How could he radio in an alarm when he still hadn’t the foggiest idea where they were? Muriel had really outdone herself this time.

“Open the window,” he told the constable. “Keep your ears peeled.”

But it was Madoc himself who heard his name called, and caught the silvery glint of a plastic emergency blanket being waved wildly from the middle of a snowfield between two separate fires.

H
E EITHER RAN OR
flew over the icy crust. Madoc couldn’t have said which, and it didn’t matter. Janet was in his arms, smelling like a finnan haddie and shivering like a toad eating lightning, but all there in one piece, self-possessed enough to warn him, “Watch out how you hug me. I expect I’ve got slivers of glass in my coat.”

“What from?”

“The kitchen window. It stuck when I tried to open it, and I didn’t have time to fuss.”

Madoc started to laugh. He laughed a good deal longer and harder than the situation called for, and it finally occurred to him that he was having a fit of hysterics. That sobered him down enough to ask, “Were you really shouting my name just now?”

“Of course. I knew it was you.”

“How?”

“I just did. You didn’t think to bring along a cup of hot tea, by any chance?”