The Dead Letter (30 page)

77
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A late-model white Honda Civic followed Fenton Peale's Lexus along
the Trans-Canada Highway west from Charlottetown. The driver wore a blue rainproof coat. A hood covered the black ball cap on his head. Raindrops beaded the windshield, wind buffeted his car, and his hands clenched the wheel.

Peale had packed hurriedly and lightly. He had told Veronica that he would be returning tomorrow evening at the latest, but that was a lie. He had planned never to return—not to his family, not to Charlottetown, not to the Island or even Canada. He slipped Veronica's picture and a photo of the kids from the dresser and packed them in his valise next to his passport. He had already drawn out as much cash as he could from the bank without raising red flags, and he retrieved a stack of negotiable bonds from the wall safe in his bedroom. There was no more to do, nothing he could do. The curtain was closing on his deceits and crimes. The time had come. His flight from Halifax to Havana had been booked, and from there he would arrange passage to Caracas.

The driver of the Civic had been sitting in the car outside Peale's home for several hours. He had been waiting for his chance to kill Peale, but there had been no opportunity. He was ready to call it a night when the upstairs light clicked off. Moments later, the garage door raised. Peale slipped behind the wheel of his car, and he pulled away.

At seven o'clock, the evening was growing dark, and it was doing so more quickly than usual because of the thick, low clouds and rain. Both drove west for nearly an hour before Peale's objective became clear—boarding the ferry at Wood Islands and heading for Nova Scotia. Peale purchased a ticket for the passage and entered the embarkation compound. The Civic stopped short and pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. A transport truck and a pickup hauling a travel trailer entered the compound behind Peale. The Civic followed them.

A few minutes later, the vehicles in the compound crept forward in a queue toward the steep ramp and the open stern doors of the ferry. Deck hands waved the vehicles in alternating paths, port or starboard, toward the bow. The cars and trucks were packed tightly together. A few inches separated bumper from bumper, and narrow corridors squeezed between each of the four rows on both sides of the ship.

A large superstructure divided the car deck and separated the two streams of traffic boarding the ferry. Several doors and companionways led to storage lockers, crew quarters, and maintenance rooms or to the engine room below; stairs and elevators led up to the lounge and restaurant on the passenger deck; further up was the wheelhouse.

A whistle sounded from the bridge. Massive steel doors clanged shut. The thump of the engine grew, dock hands cast off mooring lines, and crewmen manned the winches hauling them aboard. Within seconds, the vessel shuddered as a 3,600 horsepower engine lay into the propellers and broke the ship's inertia. The ship slid from its berth, slowly gained way, and glided through the breakwater.

By the time the breakwater light had slipped astern, nearly all the passengers had left their vehicles for the warmth and comfort of the upper decks. As the ship powered into the open waters of the Strait, it became apparent that the crossing would be uncomfortable. The hull quivered each time a wave struck. Even the crew of the vessel had traded duties on deck in the lash of rain and spray for less inclement duties below. Only the starboard watch faced the weather on the bridge, and only Fenton Peale and the sole occupant of the white Civic lingered unseen on the vehicle deck.

Peale was of no mind to go topside. As a politician he was sure to meet someone he knew in the lounge, and he had no desire to see anyone. His mind was running heavier than the seas around him. He wanted quiet. He wanted peace. He wanted to rewrite his last eleven years into a quieter script with a happier ending. He wanted a more hopeful future, but
want
had been his problem, he thought.
Want
had got him neck-deep into the mire he was trying to wade through now.
Want
was destroying him.

Peale's moist, damp breath slowly clouded the windshield of his car. At first it had made him feel alive and animate but, after it restricted all visibility beyond the cabin of his car, he felt as if he were suffocating, the same feeling he had experienced and suffered through while languishing for those few hours in the holding cell at the police lock-up. Starting the car to clear his windshield was out of the question. Painted signs on the bulkheads cautioned against running engines, and to do so would attract attention, and he shunned unsolicited interest in his personal doings.

A fresh northeast wind was setting with the rising tide, and the ferry had made enough distance from Wood Islands to feel its discomforting effects. With the wind abaft the ship's beam, Peale could sense a small cant to starboard and, by the manner with which wind and sea struck the port side, one could feel an unpredictable short pitch and roll. Leaf springs and coil suspensions beneath the cars and trucks made them quiver and shake. The added movement made Peale grow ill at ease.

Jacob Dawson was not dismayed or even concerned by the erratic tremors and shakes he felt in the white Civic. Before his incarceration, he had spent a season as cork aboard an old lobster boat off Georgetown. The farmer who had been his foster parent sold Dawson's labour services to his wife's brother. Dawson didn't last the full season. It wasn't the hard work that drove him off. It was the inequity. Little cash for his work ever found its way into his own pocket. He stole some of it back before he left. Then he abandoned both farm and sea—and Kings County. He never returned to boat work, but he had learned never to fear that environment either. He remembered it as a cold job, a hard job, but he also recalled it as clean work, at least it seemed so, somehow, in his mind.

This, too, will be a cold, hard job
, he thought.
Not so clean, maybe, but an obligation to be respected
.

His heart wasn't in it, as it ought to have been, but he had agreed to it. It was necessary, and he had every intention of carrying it out, come what may.

Dawson no longer had an elaborate and detailed plan to kill Peale. After MacFarlane's death, Peale's routine had fallen apart. Now it was more a matter of finding him alone. Peale was no match physically for him, and Dawson knew how to do it quickly. Renous and Dorchester—those prisons had been noteworthy institutions in which to learn the arcane skills he needed.

Dawson's vehicle was parked behind Peale's, the transport truck between them. Dawson couldn't see Peale's car, but he had a clear sightline of his left rear-view mirror, and his eyes fixed upon it as steadily as a fox upon a ground squirrel.

After half an hour, Peale's fear of suffocation and claustrophobia finally overcame him and, when he could take no more, he flung open the car door and headed for the lee rail. The storm front had deepened, or, at least, it appeared to have done so. The feel of fresh air and the vague hint of a horizon freed him for the moment, but the chill northeast wind, working around the open deck, was relentless. The weather side of the ship was dashed with a creamy froth, and the hull convulsed with the thrust of several quick-breaking waves. Spume carried across the bow doors and showered the foredeck with a fine spray.

Peale stood at the rail. A bulkhead gave him some protection, but he still felt the spackling of cold drops and a mist of salty water. Peale wore a long camel hair overcoat. He gathered the collar tightly up around his neck and ears and held it there as if he were going to strangle himself with it. Then he forced down his too-loose cap until the headband ground against his skull, and he buried his free hand into a side pocket. He remained motionless, like a queer sad statue, shoulders unnaturally elevated, stooped over, as if waiting for a beacon of some sort. But there could be nothing of consequence this far off shore, nothing but endless water, broken lines of waves hurtling leeward, evening gloom, and an ill-defined grey horizon, signifying nothing at all.

“You murdered Carolyn Jollimore.”

The words struck him with such horror that he was speechless. He whirled round and saw a man standing a few steps from him, a man he had never seen before. His hand held a tire iron. His jaw was set, his stance ready, and an expression almost mask-like and unreal plastered his face. It carried a grim vacant intensity and the twisted leer of a hunter having cornered some vile and worthless thing.

“You're mad,” said Peale taking a step back. His face was deathly pale and his voice trembled. “You're mad,” he said again.

“You're probably right,” said Dawson. “Prison does that to a person. Being wronged does it even more quickly.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know you. I don't know a Carolyn Jollimore.”

“Chief MacFarlane might not agree with you.”

At the sound of MacFarlane's name Peale felt a new chill creep through his bones. His left hand clenched his collar more tightly, his right hand clenched the bulky Webley revolver in his right-hand pocket.

A moment of hesitancy swept both men, the same misstep that kills green soldiers on a battlefield. Then Peale jerked the handle of the pistol, but the hammer caught on the seam of his coat. He fumbled to clear it. Dawson saw the dark glint of the pistol and doubted his ability to disarm Peale in time. He dropped the tire iron. It resounded with a painful clamour on the steel deck. He ran, vaulted the hood of the nearest car, and took cover amongst others. Peale wasted another split second drawing his weapon. When he looked up, Dawson had disappeared.

Now, it was his turn to hunt.

The pistol felt odd in Peale's hand. He was not a shooter or sportsman of any description. He had taken the gun with him as a deterrent, rather than a weapon. But now it had come to that. Point and shoot was all he knew of marksmanship, and that would have to do. It seemed obvious now that Dawson had killed MacFarlane, and that reasoning in itself would suffice to justify his killing Dawson, even more so knowing that Dawson intended for some reason to kill him.

Peale made a quick visual survey of the starboard vehicle deck before moving. He saw no passengers wandering about, nor a deck hand on a walk-through. So he edged his way aft along the starboard rail. Except for the trucks, it was unlikely that Dawson could conceal himself underneath a vehicle, and there was too little clearance between bumpers to hide. Likely he was between rows.

Peale reached the end of the first row without sighting him. He felt too timid and inexperienced to walk up between the files of cars. He could be too easily surprised. Instead he traversed the ends of the remaining rows. Between the second and third he spotted something move about halfway up the queue, a leg perhaps. He rushed past the end of the final row, just in time to see the flash of blue, Dawson's rain jacket, disappear into an opening in the superstructure amidships. Dawson was heading up the stairs, Peale surmised, or maybe through a corridor to the port-side vehicles.

Peale's Webley preceded his cautious walk toward the portal where he had seen Dawson vanish. As he drew near, he heard the faint sound of a machine or motor, and, the closer he got, the more noticeable it grew. Caution slowed Peale even more as the edge of the portal drew near. Dawson could pop out of anywhere, he thought. Only a few feet more. He cocked the hammer, his back grazing the nearest car, and quickly sidestepped the opening. A short empty passageway faced him. Another hatch, inside and to the left, was open.

Peale moved gingerly toward it. He saw a ladder that led down into a vast, well-lit chamber. A draft of heat swept up from it. He caught the scent of oil. He poked his head into the opening. Suddenly, the full impact struck him as stunningly as if he had been electrocuted. Every nerve ending in his body quivered as if it had been assaulted. An unbearable noise had leapt from the mouth of the ship's engine room.

It was only a matter of a few steps forward or back between toleration and painful noise, but in that brief venture, Peale had glimpsed Dawson huddled alongside a turbine just past the foot of the ladder. Dawson's eyes had a wild look to them; his hands clasped his ears.

The chief engineer sat at a small fixed desk out of sight in the control room, a narrow compartment just forward of the engine room. Industrial headphones covered the bald and deeply freckled crown of his head as he checked a panel lined with gauges and busily jotted entries into a log book.

Once more, Peale ventured forward, this time steeled against what he knew would be a necessary ordeal. He had a clear view of Dawson and, Dawson, quivering like a spooked dog in the nerve-jangling din, had not yet seen him. Peale leaned in, raised his pistol and fired. The bullet struck the steel bulkhead just to the left of Dawson. The sound of the gunshot was no more than a ripple amid the shriek and rumble from diesel pistons, whirling drive shafts, and throbbing manifolds. Dawson heard nothing of the shot, but he felt a spatter of lead fragments, flinched, looked up, and watched Peale level a revolver at him.

Although the engineer could hear very little in the control room, he sensed something. His fingers rose searchingly to his protective earphones. He turned in his chair, one eyebrow cocked attentively. Perhaps he caught only a single arrhythmic note in the clamorous ocean of noise that engulfed him. He gazed about, saw nothing. Then he stood, entered the engine room, and walked the metal grate of the cat-walk between two resonating ship's engines. He studied gauges, checked fuel lines, and, finding nothing amiss, wiped his hands on a cloth stuffed in a rear pocket of his overalls and disappeared into the aft heeling and trimming compartment.

Peale had held his second shot when he saw the engineer begin his rounds. Meantime, Dawson had shifted position. When Peale poked his head in again, Dawson was out of sight. So was the engineer. Another heavy sea struck. Peale tottered unsteadily with the impact. His gun hand, braced against the door frame, prevented a fall, but his torso swung forward with the momentum, and his left hand reached out instinctively for the rail of the platform just inside the engine room.