“On Monday a mysterious fire destroyed Grant’s Grocery and attached home, claiming the life of a yet unidentified victim. He was believed by Grant and Kessler, when interviewed by police, to have been Thomas Hawk, a student in his twenties, whom Grant had hired only that day. However, forensic analysis of the body indicates an older and shorter man than Grant and Kessler described, with several previously broken bones, at least one old gunshot wound, and extensive dental work in Europe.
“A Thomas Hawk recently registered at the university in the engineering graduate school, but he has yet to appear for class. He is also being sought, and his university ID photograph will soon be generally available.
“Police would not comment on speculation concerning a Sunday death in the Little Superior River near Miss Kessler’s property, where Hawk had rented a room. That body has been identified as that of Angelo Conti, himself sought for questioning by Los Angeles police. Conti died when he fell or possibly was pushed from the river bridge, with head injuries from some previous fight shortly before his death. He had also seemingly been swimming in the river. There is no explanation of why he was in New Range.
“Citizen help is requested in finding Grant, Kessler, and Hawk. Anyone seeing Hawk should
not
approach him but rather contact authorities immediately.”
Dani hadn’t killed Angelo. He’d made it across the river and fallen off the bridge in the dark. That was good. Horst, not Marv, was dead in the fire. That was bad, because it meant maybe Marv, rather than Wyatt, had Beth. Tom needed Gary. He slammed the Nash into gear and headed for Chassell under darkening skies.
****
“Do you have a hairpin, Beth?” Wyatt shouted from the engine bay over the force of the wind.
“To start the engine with?”
“Yes. I saw that on a TV show once.”
“No, I’d have packed one if I knew you were going to abduct me and take me out here. Did that inboard start correctly when you first got it from the marina?”
“No, come to think of it. The guy had to fiddle with it. Aw, nuts!” A wave had washed over the deck, soaking his gym shoes.
“Fiddle with it how?” She hugged herself for warmth against the storm.
“He had to warm up the carburetor. He assured me it’s a real good motor except in cold weather.”
It was August. When did the boat owner think the weather was warm?
Wyatt said, “Maybe we could build a little fire near the carburetor?”
Beth eyed the gas lines. She thought not. Then she eyed Wyatt’s luxurious head of long hair, whipping wildly in the wind. “Do you have a hair dryer?”
“Yes. In the toilet—bathroom—head.”
The hair dryer was a big one, and there was an extension cord with the boat’s tools. The thing was, running it would draw down the boat’s storage battery. They’d need enough juice to start the engine once they’d made the cranky carburetor happy. Rushing back to the deck in the now violently pitching houseboat, Beth fell, her body pitching forward. Her ankle didn’t clear the top step to the deck.
“Ouch! Damn it!”
“What?” Wyatt shouted, looking back at her.
“I’ve twisted my ankle.”
He was beside her in a moment. He might be demented, but he worried about her welfare. He helped her hobble to the engine bay, playing out extension cord behind them.
She explained, “Put the dryer nozzle right against the carburetor body. We can’t use any more electricity than we must if we want to keep enough of a charge for the starter to work.”
She probably shouldn’t have mentioned it. He barely heated the carburetor body before trying the starter. No luck. On the third try the carburetor was finally warm to the touch. She was sure the current to the starter was going to fail when the engine coughed, jerked spastically on its rubber mounts, and fired.
The sky above them had gone from gray to black. She snatched the throttle linkage from Wyatt before he could flood the engine. “Get to the wheel. Point it straight to shore,” she yelled.
He did, and she somehow managed to close the engine cover before her brain had too much pain from the abused ankle, and she passed out.
****
Chassell lay at the bottom or south end of Portage Lake, and, unlike almost every other town in the area, it had been built on lumber, not copper. Both commodities had played out at about the same time in the twenties so the place had the same frozen-in-time look. Tom estimated it was bigger than New Range, boasting, for example, a used car lot, but it could have at most a couple attorneys, and fewer blue Thunderbirds with a dented quarter-panel. Besides, everything commercial or professional was on the wide main street, which was also Highway U.S. 41 to Houghton.
He found the lawyer’s place under a faded sign, “Barry Lehto, Attorney at Law.” Gary’s car was parked in front, illegally close to a fire hydrant on an otherwise deserted block. A spindly middle-aged woman sat at a desk facing the front door. Tom smiled in greeting. “Excuse me, but I have to talk to Mr. Grant right away.”
“Sorry, he is with Mr. Lehto.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
She glared at him. “The door is closed. Mr. Lehto doesn’t like it when I interrupt him. I’m new here, two weeks. They laid my husband off at the paper mill, and I was lucky to get even this lousy job. Do you know how much of our paper is coming in from Canada now? I been there, and those folks aren’t starving. We got as many trees to make paper from as they do. Why can’t everyone leave us alone?”
“Gary, get out here!” shouted Tom.
“Mr. Lehto’s first name is
Barry
,” snapped the woman, apparently accustomed to visitors screaming at her employer from his lobby.
Gary came out of an inner office. “Hey, Tomahawk, did you guys find Beth?”
“No. We have to talk privately, outside.”
“Oh. Wow, look at your face. I’ll come out.” He called to the door he had just exited. “Hey, Barry, call them and tell them I’ll pay for the bar mirror and the chairs, and throw in twenty-five shares in my mining company.”
A Finnish-accented voice called back, “What about the cost to fix Hector’s nose, eh?”
“Screw that. He’s got medical insurance and he looks better than he did before our fight. Go to fifty mining shares if you have to. I got to scoot.”
On the sidewalk Tom said, “I thought you were here about some patent infringement?”
“Did I say that? That must be the Tuesday thing. So what’s the emergency?”
“The radio says the cops want to interview Beth, you, and me.”
“What? Why?”
“Little things: two bodies in two days, a suspicious summer fire destroying your place with you watching from a shadowed doorway, and a body in the fire that you told them was mine but it doesn’t match me or Marvin Sartorelli. I’m pretty sure from what I heard on the radio it was Renada’s boyfriend, Horst, who burned up.”
“The Commie assassin? No kidding. So Wyatt and I did a public service. Hey, I feel better.”
“I’m so happy for you.” Tom sighed and shook his head. “Gary, the
police
are after us. They see me as an appealing candidate for the murderer of Angelo and Horst or whoever you guys fried. It undermines my credibility in testifying against Tony Sartorelli. You lied to them and they remember you lying to them before.”
“I told as I saw it at the time, Tomahawk. You’re getting to be as big a worrywart as Robert is.”
Tom growled in frustration. “My point is that if Horst died in the fire it means Marvin is still alive out there. And if he listens to the radio or reads the paper, he’s now as interested in you and Beth as he is in Dani and me. Maybe he, not Wyatt, has Beth.”
“Oh. That’s not good. What do we do?”
“We’ve got to find Beth, avoid the cops, and, if
he
hasn’t been holding her, find out whose side Wyatt is on. We’ve got to find Dani and tell her. Meanwhile, it’d be better if Marvin didn’t get a chance to whack any of us. First thing, though, is to call Beth’s place to put Dani on alert. She should be back from Houghton.”
“You can use Barry’s phone. Come on.”
In the attorney’s office, with the telephone in hand, Tom told Gary, “You start looking for Beth, but remember the cops are looking for all of us and if they nab us, well, you know.”
Gary sprinted for the Thunderbird as Tom dialed.
Dani listened to Tom’s update without interruption, but as soon as he paused she said, “A guy called here and claimed he was a student looking for a room, but he sounded a lot older. He asked if Beth is still out on her houseboat.”
“On her what?”
“He saw her on a houseboat on Portage Lake, pretty much straight out from the marina. Does that make sense?”
“None at all, but I’m on my way there. Call Mildred. If you see Gary and Robert, tell them I’m checking out this houseboat claim.”
“Can I come to the marina too?”
“Uh-uh. I need you there in case Beth shows up. And if Marv or Wyatt shows up, don’t try to be a hero. Get out fast. I’ve got to go now.”
“You guys have all the fun.”
Chapter Seventeen
Beth came to as they cleared the breakwater into the safety of the shipping channel. She was back in the bunk of the houseboat’s little forward cabin. The engine sounded strained. They had probably taken on a lot of water before Wyatt got the houseboat off Lake Superior into the inland waterway that sliced through the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula. She hobbled to the porthole and peered out. They seemed to be in no immediate peril of sinking, but they were being pelted with rain.
She limped her way to the bedroom door and took the knob. Locked. “Wyatt!”
No response. He probably couldn’t even hear her. She screamed twice more without result. Ten minutes passed, the rain stopped, and so did the boat engine. She heard the anchor chain moaning at being called to service. “Wyatt!”
This time there were footsteps and his voice through the door. “Beth, are you okay?”
“I’m locked in here. Open the door.”
“I can’t. I have to kill Marvin and then force Gary to say he was lying about me starting the fire. You will warn Gary.”
Who had told him that Gary was lying about him starting the fire? Oh, yeah, she had, to get them off the big lake. “I’ll come along and help you.”
“No. You can hardly walk. And Gary will talk you out of what has to be done. I put food and soda and other stuff you might need in there. I’ll get us some eggrolls. They have good frozen eggrolls in the A&P in Houghton.”
“Wyatt, this is crazy.”
“Please don’t use that word. Dr. Martin said no one should use that word to me.”
She could guess by now who Dr. Martin was. She heard Wyatt dropping the tiny skiff over the side and screamed his name again. Footsteps returned to the locked door again.
“I’ll be back in five or six hours, Beth. There are
Readers Digest
magazines in the chest of drawers; kind of old, though.”
Beth hammered on the door for a minute as a matter of principle before going to the porthole and watching him try to start the minuscule outboard on the skiff with an abysmal lack of coordination. He got it going on the sixth or seventh pull.
Didn’t his daddy teach him anything?
She suspected, hoped, he fought like a girl, and prepared for their coming bout in five or six hours.
She found some old adhesive bandages in the little chest of drawers located below the porthole, and wrapped them around the neck of the pop bottle so she wouldn’t cut herself if it shattered when she slammed it down on Wyatt Stone’s head. If Tom could bring Dani down with a can of ravioli, she should be able to drop Wyatt with a diet soda. She salivated while thinking about it.
She studied the little chest. It was secured to the wall like good boat furniture. But if you pulled the drawers out, why, you had a ladder. Could she get out through the porthole? It was so tiny. She pulled the porthole latch and it came open easily. So, pull out the drawers, climb up the chest, go out through the window, and swim a half mile or so to shore. It was a piece of cake. She had won a medal for swimming in high school. Except the ankle was now swollen to double size.
Wyatt had left her a full gallon of distilled water in a plastic container for drinking and a second empty container for sanitary needs, apparently forgetting that women could not pee with quite the accuracy of men. It too had a cap. Empty the water from one, put the caps on tightly, and you had two flotation devices. She dumped the drinking water and removed the drawers. She set the empty jugs on the chest and used the last of the adhesive bandages to try to secure them when she clambered onto the chest.
The houseboat had rotated on its anchor, and she could see the marina through the grimy porthole. As she stared at the shoreline, it seemed to have come closer. More than the play in the anchor could allow. And it was so quiet. Why was it so quiet? It looked like the rainstorm on the lake had not reached land.
Then she realized that the shore was not coming closer. The boat was tilting to the landward side. There was no wind after the storm. Nothing on the boat was moving, not even her. Which left one reasonable assumption: the decrepit scow was taking on water. No generator, so no bilge pump. It was time to disembark—through her porthole.
She clenched her teeth against the pain as she let her weight go to the injured ankle long enough to get her good right foot on the first “step.” From there, she could get her fingertips in the frame of the porthole and pull herself up enough to get the right foot on the second drawer. Lifting herself up to the top of the chest and dislodging one water jug in the process, took nearly all her strength. She rested a minute, grasped the remaining water jug, put that hand through the porthole and started wriggling through. She got totally, hopelessly stuck.
****
Harold peered around the boat fuel pumps and hissed, “Wyatt, I’m over here!”
The boy came to him. “Oh, hello, sir.”
“Don’t give me ‘hello’! Where did you go with the houseboat?”
“I misunderstood. I thought you wanted me to take it into the big lake. I brought her back, though. I mean Beth ‘her,’ not boat ‘her.’ Well, both of them, of course. It’s right out there.” He pointed. “Oh, and Beth doesn’t know anything about a cassette tape.”