A Cold White Fear (3 page)

M
y
headlamp lit up the bathroom, bounced off the mirror above the sink, and onto the lion claw bathtub behind me. I rummaged through the cupboard until I found bandages, sterile pads, gauze, tape, and hydrogen peroxide. Living in the wilds, where all manner of accidents can happen, Eric insisted we keep a well-stocked first aid supply.

“You can take these downstairs.” I tossed Professor some old towels and facecloths.

Placing the supplies in an antique porcelain wash­basin, I headed to the front of the house to my bedroom for a clean T-shirt and sweater for Larry.

Behind me, the bathroom door clicked closed.

“Don't flush the toilet,” I called out. “The electric pump won't be working.”

I selected one of Eric's old T-shirts and a sweater an old girlfriend had knitted him. I figured it didn't matter if it got blood on it. Since the house was only going to get colder, I pulled out a sweater for myself, the heavy Aran fisherman cardigan with its distinctive O'Brien clan pattern that Mother had brought me back from Ireland when I was a teenager. She'd wanted to remind me of my distant Irish roots from her side of the family.

Though Mother and I had grown apart after I forsook the Harris family home in Toronto for the wilds of Quebec, I was still mourning her loss from heart failure in September. It was the main reason for Eric's insistence on a family Christmas. Since we were so few and so spread out, Jean and family in Toronto and Teht'aa in Yellowknife, he felt it would be a good time to renew our family ties.

I flashed the light around the large room. looking for anything else that could be useful. It lit up the antique mahogany chest of drawers and the matching armoire, both inherited from my great-aunt. Her three-quarter brass bed had been just a little too cozy. We had replaced it with Eric's queen mattress from his bungalow on the reserve and blown a bundle on a mahogany sleigh bedframe to give our marriage bed that special touch.

As the light shone on the crowded bookcases filling the inside wall, I noticed Aunt Aggie's black rotary phone peeking out from behind some books. I'd forgotten all about it. Unlike the portable phone, its modest electricity requirements came through the telephone wire. This old phone usually worked in outages, as long as the phone lines hadn't been affected. Sure enough, when I plugged it in, I heard the welcoming sound of a dial tone.

I was dialling the police chief's number when the bathroom door creaked open. Stocking feet padded down the hall toward me. I hung up, shoved the phone farther behind the books, and headed out into the hall. As much as this man seemed to care about his friend, I sensed that he didn't want me bringing in authorities of any shape or variety. I'd make the call when he wasn't stalking me.

“Grab the blankets off that bed, will you?” I indicated the open door of the guest bedroom next to mine.

“These look like genuine Hudson's Bay Company blankets, complete with the short black lines,” he said.

“They likely date from my great-grandfather's days. Weren't those lines used to indicate the number of pelts a trapper had to pay for the blanket?”

“Not so. The lines were invented by French weavers in the eighteenth century to indicate the finished size of the blanket.”

“You seem to know your history.”

“I dabble.”

With my arms full, I headed back to the stairs. Surrounded by blinding darkness but for the ribbon of light from my headlamp, I felt like I'd been transported to another world. It was as if nothing else existed but the hallway, the storm, this strange man, and me. The air throbbed with the eerie moaning of the wind as it whipped around the house and through the pines.

The house had been built beside a stand of ancient white pine, one of the few to survive the logging ravishes of the late 1800s. Although no giant had fallen directly onto the house, massive branches had come down in storms such as this. For the most part, they had missed the house, but there had been a few direct hits over the years, including a memorable one a couple of winters ago that partially caved in the verandah roof. Last summer, Eric had hired a logger from the rez to remove some of the lower and dying limbs of nearby trees. But it was no guarantee that an unusually strong gust of wind wouldn't send a branch, even a tree, crashing onto the house.

Larry remained as still and silent as when I'd left him, though I thought his right arm might have shifted. His breathing was steady, and I couldn't detect a fever, all good signs. Like Professor, he had tattoos, but only two, an eagle feather caressing the side of his face and a single teardrop underneath his eye. His skin was pockmarked from acne. A single feather earring dangled from his right ear. I threw another log onto the fire to ensure he would have enough warmth while Professor covered his legs with the blanket.

“What happened to my glass?” Professor demanded.

“I left it in the kitchen. I'll go get it.”

Not that I wanted to be his servant, but my plan was to pour less rye and more ginger ale into the glass.

“I'll do it. You won't put in enough rye.”

“That's the only bottle. When it's gone, it's gone.”

“Bullshit. I'm certain there is plenty more liquor in this house. What else does a person do on cold dark nights like this other than drink?”

Used to
, I thought to myself, but no longer. Eric had cured me of that.

I gave him the glass and watched his back disappear into the blackness of the hall.

T
he
dried blood had caused Larry's T-shirt to bunch up, making it difficult to determine the extent of the wound underneath. When the fabric refused to budge with a gentle tug, I decided it might be stuck to his skin. I then noticed a curious tear in the cloth near the centre of the stain, which suggested that the area of the injury was comparatively small.

“You said this was caused by a car accident,” I said to Professor as he walked into the room, his full glass tinkling.

Sticking out of his jacket pocket was the metallic blue end of a flashlight. It unsettled me to realize he'd gone snooping through my kitchen drawers without asking. I wondered what else he had helped himself to.

“That's right.”

“Was he thrown against something sharp?”

“In a car?”

“That's why I'm asking. His wound looks like something stabbed him, but it's too low on his body for it to be from a cracked windshield. Besides, his face would be covered in cuts. Do you have any idea what it could have been?”

“Does it matter? The key thing is to cleanse the wound and cover it with a bandage.” He resumed his seat in the armchair and concentrated on his drink.

I felt Shoni's warm muzzle on my back. He'd let her out. I started to get up to return her to the crate, when he called out, “Here puppy, puppy, puppy,” and held out a dog cookie. She gamboled over to him. Traitor.

“Please keep her with you. I don't want her bothering me while I am dealing with your friend.”

“No problem, eh,
p'tit
?” He placed her on his lap and hid his face in her soft puppy fur. He seemed to care more for the dog than for the man on the couch.

I snipped away the free edges of the T-shirt and removed most of it, except for the front piece and the back when it wouldn't easily slide out from under him.

I returned to the kitchen, this time without my escort, and filled the washbasin with a blend of hot water from the kettle simmering on the woodstove and cold water from a container kept on hand for power outages. Back in the den, I moistened the bloodied patch of cotton with a wet facecloth until it started running red. I gently pulled at the fabric, lifting it gradually from the wound. When it remained stuck, I added more water, until finally it came away free. Larry grunted once or twice as if from pain, but otherwise remained unconscious.

Before I had a chance to inspect the wound, Shoni was jumping against my back. She nibbled my ear before turning her attention to the dirty water in the washbasin.

I pulled her away. “Professor, could you please look after her?”

My answer was the soft snoring of sleep. He was slumped down in the chair with his head flopped uncomfortably to one side. On the table beside him stood the half-empty glass.

Without another thought, I draped a blanket over Larry, scooped up the puppy, and hotfooted it to the kitchen as stealthily as I could. After placing her in her crate, I headed upstairs to the phone. Big mistake. Before I reached the second floor, Shoni was whining, loudly. I debated returning to quiet her down, but since I was so close to the phone, I keep going. I crept along the hall to my room, but as I reached the door, the tattooed man called out from downstairs, “Red, where are you?”

I ignored him and rushed to the phone, but as I did so, I heard him running up the stairs.

“You up here?”

My headlamp flashed momentarily on the phone hidden in the shadows of the shelf. So close and yet so far. Dare I? But I decided against it. I feared the risk was too high. When I made the call, I wanted to be assured that I could bring in the police without raising the man's suspicions. If he knew they were coming, I wasn't sure what he would do.

I stuck my head out the door. “I'm getting some dry socks for Larry. You could probably do with some too.”

“Don't you dare disappear on me again,” he growled, coming up to me.

L
arry's
eyes fluttered when I knelt down beside him.

“Are you awake?” I asked.

They fluttered again and opened.

“How are you feeling?”

He tried to sit up and then fell back onto the sofa, groaning with pain. “Holy fuck, where am I? It sure don't look like the —”

Professor brushed his hand over his friend's lips. “Sssshh…. It's okay. We're in that fancy old house you're always talking about.”

Larry shifted his eyes questioningly around the den. “How'd we get here?”

“Drove, remember? We hit that damn tree and had to walk in through the goddamn snow.”

“Yeah, but —”

“Ssshh. You're here. That's all that counts.”

“Sure, Professor, whatever you say. Jeez, I hurt like hell. What happened?” He inched his hand down to where his wound gaped. A trickle of blood oozed from the hole.

“The car accident, remember? You got stabbed by something in the car.”

But now that I could see the injury clearly, I noticed that it didn't have the ragged edges I would expect from an object sharp enough not only to penetrate the man's flesh, but also to go through two layers of fabric, including the thick wool of the coat. Nor did I see any bruising that would be expected from being hurled against a dash. Rather, the hole was perfectly round, about the diameter of my baby finger, with the edges puckered and blackened. A few scattered fibres were stuck to the edges of the wound. Redness radiated out from the hole.

“Are you sure he was injured in a car accident?” I asked.

“Yes.” Professor's unwavering amber gaze stared back at me, as if daring me to challenge him.

So I bit my tongue and kept my opinion to myself. Although my experience was limited, I was convinced it was a bullet hole. This, of course, led to the obvious questions. Who had shot him, and why? And more importantly, why pretend it hadn't happened?

I shivered from more than just the cold. The room had grown darker, the shadows deeper. Through the window only sightless black. The wind had ratcheted up several notches and changed direction. The agony of the pines filled the room. The snow no longer scraped the den window, but from the kitchen its scratching came loud and clear.

I was worried about Jid. At least the tightly packed evergreens of the forest would protect him from the worst of the blizzard. If the snow became too deep, he knew enough to burrow under the protection of spruce boughs and wait until the worst was over. It would mean that he wouldn't be alerting the police. But that was okay. It was more important that he remained safe.

Ever since Sergei had found him passed out from a drug overdose in an abandoned shack on my land, I'd had a special place in my heart for this orphan boy with the elfin grin. Small for his age, he'd looked so forlorn and lost and in need of love. I soon learned, though, that he'd plenty of love from his
kòkomis
, who was doing the best she could to raise her great-grandson despite her blindness and her poverty. It was a very sad day for all of us when she died.

Jid and I had developed a special relationship. He would often come to Three Deer Point to play with his buddy Sergei and to talk to me. Keenly curious, he would ask me endless questions about the broader world beyond the reserve, while at the same time he would help expand my knowledge of Algonquin ways. His grandmother had been a highly respected elder within the community and did her best to follow the traditional ways. But sometimes they collided with the modern world. Rather than ridiculing them and tossing them aside, as any child his age would do, Jid, knowing how much they meant to his grandmother, would find a place for them in the modern life he wanted to lead.

I remembered the time he came down with strep throat. Kòkomis, who had little trust in modern medicine, threw away the antibiotics the nurse had given him and brought in a shaman to heal him properly. His face flushed, his eyelids heavy from fever, Jid had calmly lain back and accepted the ministrations of the medicine man and the healing powers of the tobacco tie. But as I left the room, he winked and surreptitiously showed me the bottle of antibiotics retrieved from the garbage.

It wouldn't matter if the boy were delayed in reaching Will. I still had Aunt Aggie's phone. I watched the tattooed man take another long drink of his rye and ginger and settle farther into the comfortable chair. The glass was almost empty. If he continued drinking at this rate, he would hopefully pass out, and I would be able to call without fear of being caught. I only had to keep him in an amenable state until then.

For the moment I had a bigger problem. I might not know much about gunshot wounds, but I did know that where there was a bullet hole, there would be a bullet. Unless the bullet had passed straight through Larry's body, it was still inside him, somewhere in his abdomen. I also knew that it couldn't stay. It had to come out, or infection and all sorts of other nasty side effects would ensue. But I didn't have the foggiest idea how to take out a bullet.

“Do you know anything about removing a bullet?” I asked, deciding to bite the bullet myself, so to speak.

The tattooed man stared at me without blinking. I stared back at him, equally noncommittal. If he wasn't going to admit his friend had been shot, I wasn't going to either.

“Maybe,” he finally said.

“You're going to have to help me. If we don't remove it, your friend's going to die.”

He ran his hand over the snake slithering over his head.

“There is another way, a much better way,” I continued. “I can go for help.”

I left the words hanging in the sudden stillness. The first time, he'd turned me down. What would he do this time, when the need for medical attention had become all that more imperative?

His answer was to brush me aside. “I'll do it.” He knelt down on the floor beside his friend and shone the flashlight onto the wound.

My suspicions grew, along with my uneasiness.