Summer Light: A Novel (37 page)

Chapter 22

T
HE TRIP HOME TO LAC VERT
seemed endless. Martin refused to talk about what had happened at the Falls and they traveled in virtual silence.

When they reached home, their post box was over-flowing with mail. They brought Thunder home from the kennel, but he wanted to return immediately—he had fallen in love with a French poodle in the next cage, and he bayed his heart out their first night home. By dawn, he had scratched a hole in the screen door and escaped.

A neighbor driving to work found him running along the road and brought him back. Kylie was overjoyed, and May found a length of clothesline to tie him to the porch. She and Martin sat on the steps, watching the dog strain his collar, howling in lovesick agony as he attempted to break the rope.

“He’s wild for his woman,” Martin said, squeezing May’s shoulder. “I know how he feels.”

“Don’t flirt with me till you tell me what happened.”

“Right now? Come on, Kylie’s playing in the gazebo, we’re all alone. Come upstairs with me, yes? Want to do that?”

“TALK TO ME! I know you couldn’t see me at the Falls.”

“My eyes were bothering me,
c’est vrai
. They’re better now. It’s traveling, May. And the spray. I get stressed, and I get a headache, and the next thing I know I can’t see so well. Maybe I need glasses, eh? I’m getting old! I’m the old man on the ice, just ask the guys. Don’t worry—it’s nothing serious.”

“You were afraid, I know you were.”

“Don’t remind me,” he said, squeezing her harder. “Water in my eyes, that’s all.”

“You’re full of it, Martin.”

“Come on. Let’s go upstairs. Kylie won’t notice—she’s all wrapped up in her doll or whatever she’s doing out there.”

“Please tell me you’ll go to a doctor.”

“I need you, that’s all,” he said, kissing her neck, feeling her breast. “The only cure is taking you to bed. Come on—”

The day was hazy and bright. The beautiful summer light shimmered across the lake, turning the water dark green. Flies buzzed over the shallows, and a bass jumped out to snap them. The concentric rings settled back into the lake, one inside the other, rings and rings of calm. Kylie was busy talking to her doll.

“Come upstairs with me, eh?” Martin whispered into May’s ear.

She took a deep breath and refused to budge. Once he figured out he couldn’t distract her with superior seduction techniques, he stormed away.

But he still wouldn’t talk.

Thunder escaped again the next day. They found his rope chewed through, saw his tracks leading down the driveway. May took the car for a drive, searching the roads for the old basset hound. As she scanned the meadows and hills, tracing the route back to the kennel, she noticed how tense she felt and realized it was because she didn’t want Martin to drive: She had been worried he would get to the car before her.

“Any luck?” Martin asked when she returned.

“No. He hasn’t been to the kennel. I checked.”

“Where is he?” Kylie asked.

“Just on an adventure,” May said, trying to reassure her.

When the mail arrived, it contained a postcard addressed to Thunder. Kylie had written it from the King Edward Hotel and signed it “Eddy.” When May tried to show it to Martin, he barely even smiled.

The mail also contained a blue envelope addressed to Martin. May saw him hold it very close to his eyes, examine the handwriting, then throw it right into the garbage without opening it. She was about to retrieve it when the telephone rang.

Their next-door neighbor, Vincent Dufour, had seen a police car picking up a dog that looked like Thunder; maybe they had taken him to the dog pound.

“You’d think in a town the size of Lac Vert they’d know where all the dogs live,” Martin exploded.

“Thunder’s new around here,” she said. “I’m sure they’d have brought him home if they knew he was ours. We’ll have to get him a license—”

“So now he’s at the pound?”

“That’s what Vincent thinks.”

“Give me the phone,” Martin said, grabbing it out of May’s hands.

It was painful to watch him snatch the phone book and try to find the right number. He slashed at the pages, ripping one. Bending close to see the names, he got so frustrated he swore at the top of his lungs.

“Would you let me—” May started to say, but Martin had already dialed information. Once he had the number, he had to dial twice before getting through correctly. May listened to him take a deep breath, then explain to the person on the line that he had lost his dog, a basset hound and that he had reason to believe the dog had been taken to the pound.

“My name? Martin Cartier,” she heard him say. Watching his eyes narrow, she saw the anger building.

“He’s there,” Martin said, slamming down the receiver. “And the woman won’t let me pick him up.”

“What are you talking about?” May asked.

“She says Thunder bit her when she put him in the cage, and she’s having him put down tomorrow.”

“No!”

“He doesn’t have a tag on, she said, so there’s no proof that he’s had his rabies shots.”

“He bit her? He doesn’t even have teeth!” May said, watching Kylie out the window. “He doesn’t have rabies.”

“I know. She didn’t say any of that until I told her my name.”

“Martin Cartier? I thought that cut through red tape anywhere in Canada.”

“Not with her. She remembers that business with Nat. She’s thought badly of me from that day on. Thinks I’m just a self-centered hockey player who couldn’t make time for his own daughter.”

“That was never true,” May said.

“You weren’t there,” Martin told her. “She’s right about me. She’s a bitch, and she has no right to keep Thunder, but she’s got my number.”

“I see how you feel about Kylie, and I know how you feel about Natalie.”

Just then the screen door squeaked open and they heard Kylie’s footsteps on the kitchen floor. Her face fell as she looked up at the adults. But Martin spoke first.

“That old Thunder must be having himself quite a time,” he said, gazing out the window. “Probably searching far and wide for that pretty little poodle.”

“Do you think he’s safe?” Kylie asked.

“That old guy?” Martin asked, snorting with laughter. “Sure he’s safe. He’s a basset hound through and through. It’s the wild animals I’m worried about with him around. He’s probably up the mountain, rooting a badger out of his lair. Or chasing a fox up a tree, trying to gets its tail as a souvenir for Fifi.”

“Who’s Fifi?” Kylie asked, giggling.

“His girlfriend,” Martin said. “The French poodle.”

Kylie laughed, standing beside Martin and trying to catch a glimpse of Thunder charging along a mountain trail across the lake.

After dark, once May had taken Kylie upstairs to read her a bedtime story, Martin walked outside. He had the keys in his pocket, and he headed out back to where they parked the car. Although he knew every inch of the yard by heart, he tripped on a rut in the earth. He walked a straight line, knowing there was nothing tall or deep in his way, but when he got to the car, he decided not to drive to the pound.

He couldn’t drive tonight.

His eyes had been better yesterday, and he could have driven then. But Thunder had been safe at home yesterday, tethered to the back porch, howling for Fifi for six hours straight. That was the problem with Martin’s eyes. They were unreliable. One day he could see fine, the next day he couldn’t. The trouble was, he couldn’t predict or control when the crises would happen.

The pound was located behind the municipal garage—a collection of old trucks and plows and one bunkerlike concrete building—about six miles north on the lake road. Martin had traveled this route thousands of times throughout his life, often on his way to or from Ray’s house. The night was warm, the breeze light. He started off walking, but soon he started to run.

His legs felt strong. Running felt great. His arms began to move with their regular rhythm, and he thought of the team workouts starting in the fall. Back to Boston, straight into the regimen that had kept him fit and strong all his years as a professional athlete.

“Merde,”
he said, stumbling on a hole.

A frost heave or something—he hadn’t seen it coming. The road crews around the area were lazy, sometimes letting three or four summers go by without repairing the damage left by winter’s brutal storms. Martin remembered one winter when he was twelve, when a blizzard had snowed them in for three weeks straight. He and his mother had been stranded without fresh food or heat; they’d had to live by the fireplace, eating canned beans and roasting potatoes while his father lived down in the States.

“Don’t think about it,” Martin said out loud, running easily along the road. Mind control: one of an athlete’s most important virtues. He was good at not thinking about certain things: the blue envelope that had arrived in the mail, the fact that Thunder was scheduled for execution, the fact that he could barely see where he was going.

His feet followed the pavement, and every so often he caught a flash that might have been starlight swinging through the trees. The stars were so beautiful, he felt something give inside. What if he couldn’t see them anymore? What if he could never again see a dark night blazing with stars? Mind control, he told himself. Don’t think about it.

The pound was just around the bend. He heard the dogs, their barking filling the summer night. Thunder’s voice sounded above the others’, wild and passionate and full of yearning. Tearing across the sand parking lot, Martin slowed down when he approached the solid brick building. He tried each of the two steel doors and found them locked.

Until he arrived, he hadn’t known what he planned to do. Picking up a rock, he walked straight over to the front door. Although constructed of steel, it had a window lined with chicken wire inside. Throwing his arm back, he brought the rock forward with massive force and broke the glass. It took three more blows to break the cage wire, and then he reached inside and unlocked the door.

Stepping inside, Martin’s blood pounded in his ears. He had never broken into anyplace before. He had just committed a criminal act, one they could arrest him for. Sweating, breathing hard, he stood inside the office and tried to get his bearings.

Right there,
he thought, facing the spot.
That’s where Natalie had stood. There’s the old woman’s desk, there’s the place I stood telling Natalie she couldn’t have a dog. Archie,
he thought. Down the hall, the dogs barked madly, smelling his human scent. Thunder’s baying changed to a begging, puppylike yelp.

“I’m coming,” he said out loud.

He banged into the desk and a chair, and he came to another locked door. This one wasn’t steel, but he wasn’t going to waste time looking for a key that might not be there, so he applied his shoulder to the wood and heard it crack. Another shove, and he knocked the door right off its hinges.

You’re just like your father.
A criminal, a man who takes what he wants. You skate like your father, you play hockey like your father, you take what you want like your father.

“I’m not like him,” Martin told the dogs. He stood in a long room lined with cages. In spite of all the noise, he was surprised to find only three cages occupied. Thunder, wagging his tail. A mangy-looking shepherd. A retriever mix, covered with mud. Without pausing, Martin opened all three cages.