Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (27 page)

Above was another shelf. I came to a small box. Cardboard. Lightweight.

Wooden matches.

It took nine tries to light one.

The match flared bright, blinding me for a moment. I turned and looked around the room. Eventually, the match went dim. An acrid odor burned my nose. I looked at the match. It was burning the flesh of my fingers. I hadn’t felt it because my fingers were so numb.

I dropped the match to the floor. It went out.

I struck another. Up on the shelf where I found the match were little candle jars. I lit one. It took a moment to get bright. I tried to blow out the match but I couldn’t form the right shape with my lips. I dropped it to the floor, and it went out.

After a few more tries, I had eight candles lit. They illuminated the main part of the cabin, a rustic space with a plank wood floor, an old wood stove in the corner, a kitchen area with a counter, table, and two wooden chairs. Near the wood stove was an upholstered chair and a small couch. I pulled the upholstered chair over in front of the wood stove, then took a candle into the room where Gertie still lay on the floor and set the candle on a small table next to the bed. I picked Gertie up. She was not responsive.

I carried her into the bigger room and sat her down on the upholstered chair.

“Stay ’ere, Geree,” I slurred, unable to make my lips move. “I’ll geh to ’erk on a ’ire.”

Gertie was clearly in trouble.

Near the wood stove was a box of kindling and a metal rack holding split logs. I found some paper, added kindling, and lit a fire.

The stove drafted well, and in a few minutes I had a good fire going. I held my hands in front of the fire, flexing my fingers to get them to thaw out.

After a couple minutes, I began to feel the intense prickling as sensation returned.

I fetched a blanket off the bed in the bedroom. I didn’t want it over Gertie’s front, as that would insulate her from the fire’s warmth. So I got it behind her back and draped it over her head and around her shoulders.

As the fire began to warm the room, a freezing draft from the broken window in the bedroom became more obvious.

I looked around for some cardboard and found nothing. But the kindling was sitting vertically in a cardboard box. I took the kindling out and stacked it on the floor.

I took a candle and the box into the bedroom. The broken window was bigger than the box. I set the box on the floor and used my feet to break one of the box seams and then crush the box this way and that. When it was the right shape, I held it up to the broken window opening. It wasn’t great, but with something to prop it in place, it might work.

Back at the kitchen counter I found a small tool box. Inside was a tack hammer. I dug through the detritus at the bottom of the box and found five finishing nails.

Hammering with frozen muscles was like when you give a two-year-old a hammer and nail. I missed nine times out of ten. And half of the times that I hit a nail, my blow was off-center enough that the nail flew across the room.

Fifteen minutes later, I finally had the cardboard nailed in place. My efforts had warmed me up enough that the skin pricks in my fingers were gone and the finger I’d burned with the match felt like it was stuck on red-hot metal.

On one of the kitchen shelves were some pans. I took two of them out the cabin’s door and scooped them full of snow. I expected the kitchen area to feature a propane camp stove of some kind, but there was nothing. The wood stove would do.

I set the pans of snow on top of the stove. They sizzled and crackled as snow melted and water ran down the outside of the pans. While they warmed, I took the third and final pan outside to collect more snow and added it to the two cooking pans as the snow melted into very little water.

I searched the kitchen for something to add to the water and found two boxes of tea. I put tea bags into mugs. Five minutes later, I poured boiling water into the mugs.

After they cooled a bit, I sat on the arm of Gertie’s chair and held a mug to her mouth so she could sip it. She dribbled and drooled and demonstrated just how close she’d come to dying from cold.

After she’d consumed most of a cup, she began to shiver, a sign that she was emerging from hypothermia. Her spasms were so violent that I could no longer feed her tea without risk of her choking.

Fifteen minutes of wracking spasms later, Gertie’s shivering slowed. She still hadn’t said a word. Her eyes began to dart toward the door and the windows, fear returning as she warmed.

On one end of the shelf above the counter were a dozen cans of soup, all minestrone. I found a can opener and emptied two cans into one of the pans. It heated fast on the wood stove, which was now very hot. We ate it without speaking. I asked Gertie if she wanted more tea. She shook her head.

I got Gertie to stand up. Then I switched the chair out for the couch, but positioned the couch a bit back from the stove.

“You sleep on the couch in front of the fire,” I said.

The kid who almost wouldn’t stop talking in Sacramento made a vague nod but said nothing. I found a pillow and another blanket. Gertie sat down on the couch. I got her to lie down, spread the blanket, and tucked her in.

I pulled the mattress out of the bedroom and laid it on the floor, not far from the couch and the wood stove. Then I blew out all the candles but one and, out of excessive desire for safety, set it in the kitchen sink. It would make a night light with no danger of burning the cabin down.

When I turned back toward the wood stove, Gertie was already asleep. I quietly added two more logs to the fire, shut the stove door and dialed down the air intake to the lowest setting so the fire would burn slow and long. I lay down on the mattress.

I didn’t know the time. My best guess was somewhere around four or five in the morning. Two or three hours to daylight.

My last thought before I fell asleep was how glad I was to have gotten Gertie to a safe, snow-bound location where the men couldn’t drive in to find us.

Sometime later, another thought jerked me awake. I realized that it would be easy for the men in the van to find a toboggan and, come dawn, follow our tracks down the mountain. In addition to our tracks, the smoke from the wood stove was like waving a flag to get attention. I turned away from the wood stove to look at the cabin window. It was beginning to get light outside. If the men had found a toboggan in the last hours of the night, they would probably be at our cabin in less than an hour.

FORTY

Gertie was taking long, deep breaths. It was a relief to see that she was, for the moment, not freezing or terrified. The fire was still burning with a low, wavering, yellow flame. The logs had turned to mounds of coals. I stood up and, tip-toeing, added two more splits to the fire.

With light in the cabin, I took another look around.

It was a classic, small summer cabin, probably built 70 or 80 years ago and never updated. No electricity. And no phone line. The small, removable water tank over the sink and the collection bucket under the sink were the only plumbing. In a small closet by the door was a porta potty of the type that people take in their RVs for camping.

I stepped outside and saw that a weather system was building. Light, tiny snowflakes peppered my face. I hoped a good storm would bury our stop-sign toboggan tracks, even though I knew that the men in the cargo van would either be coming down the mountain on a toboggan at that moment, or they’d be studying Google maps and satellite photos, figuring out where the closest plowed road would be in relation to our probable location. They could drive to that spot, wherever it was, and with snowshoes, winter clothing, and weapons, come through the forest to find us.

Either method of finding us could happen fast.

It was likely that Spot would still be in the Jeep. He’d be cold, but I thought he would be able to last a day or more. Hopefully, someone would come along and find him. I was worried, but there was nothing I could do.

I studied the landscape outside the cabin door, where the forest was thicker and thinner, where it rose and fell, how the slope came down to the lake, how the land would direct the route of anyone making their way toward the cabin. Somewhere near the cabin was the road or lane that I knew had to be there to bring people to the cabin in the summer. It might be the easiest path on which to go from the cabin. But it was hidden under the thick blanket of snow and the tangle of numerous trees and brush. The snow was so deep that no one could walk through it. Without snowshoes, skis, or a plowed path, we were trapped.

The best emergency snowshoes were made from thick boughs of fir trees. There was a smallish one ten yards from the cabin. Away from the lake. In the deep snow. So close, but I had no idea how to get there through six feet of soft snow. Maybe it was just as well, because the road would also direct the men into the woods. I went back inside.

As before, I took the two pans outside and filled them with snow, packing it in to make for more water. I carried them in and set them on the stove top, careful not to wake Gertie up.

While I waited for the water to heat up, I looked around the cabin more closely than I had earlier.

There was nothing in particular I hoped to find. But I scanned the entire room, checking the shelves, looking in the few drawers, opening a few containers that I found. A jar at the corner of the kitchen counter had miscellaneous nuts and bolts. A wooden box with a lid had three decks of cards, a small pad of paper, and two yellow, #2 pencils. Hanging on the wall on either side of the largest window were two framed watercolors of Lake Tahoe, each looking like the fabulous view out the window.

In the corner closest to the door leaned two kayak paddles. Next to them hung two flotation vests. I picked up a paddle. It was a modern, lightweight design, a blue fiberglass handle with plastic blades at the ends, one blade turned 90 degrees from the blade at the other end of the paddle. On a nail hung a small key. I lifted it off. It was tarnished brass, and it looked just like the key for the padlock on my bike lock cable. I slipped it into my pocket.

There was no way to know, but I guessed that somewhere outside, buried in the snow, was a kayak. If I could find it...

I opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind me. If this were my cabin where would I stash my kayak?

The snow was not so deep right next to the cabin walls. The overhang reduced the accumulation, and the way the wind whirled around objects often created a kind of a low-snow zone like the tree wells that trap unwary skiers. I walked along the outer cabin wall, stepping through two-foot-deep snow that quickly rose to six feet just out from the cabin. I didn’t expect to see a kayak, but I’d seen people hang them on racks mounted to the outside of sheds.

I went around the outer corner and marched along the next wall. No kayaks. At the far corner, the wind micro-climate had behaved differently, and the snow was drifted against the cabin wall eight feet deep, flowing up and over the eave and onto the roof in a seamless mountain. There were no kayaks. I turned around and retreated.

From the door, I went the other way and once again got around two sides of the cabin before I came to another impenetrable snow mountain. No kayaks anywhere to be seen.

Back inside, I found Gertie still sleeping. I stood at the main window that faced the lake and looked out. If this were my place, I’d probably keep my kayak near the water, secured under a small lean-to, or lying on the ground, locked to a tree.

All I could see was snow. No dock, no boat shed, no gazebo, no kayaks.

But there were several large, rounded humps of snow. Under them were likely fallen tree stumps or boulders or groups of Manzanita. Or kayaks.

Back outside, I marched toward the lake. As when we’d arrived a few hours before, the lakeside snow was frozen and crusted from wind-driven spray. It wasn’t easy to walk on, but it could be done. At each big, long hump of snow, I kicked and probed. On one hump, I hit nothing. Two humps turned out to be logs. The fourth covered a bright green kayak lying upside down. It was difficult to uncover because the big white hump of snow was mostly white ice. I kicked and stomped. I scooped up ice-chunk conglomerations in my arms and tossed them aside. Once, my kick slipped and hit the kayak hard. I worried that the plastic material would be brittle in the cold and crack under the blow. After that, I hand-chopped the ice that was next to the kayak.

It took a quarter hour or more of kicking and chopping to free the kayak enough to break it loose from its frozen mooring.

It was a tandem kayak, with two small seats, one in front of the other. There were storage compartments at the bow and stern. I thought I was done with my project, but I discovered that it was still stuck beneath snow and ice at both bow and stern.

After another serious chopping session, I finally exposed the bow, which revealed a bike lock just as I’d imagined. I pulled out the key, but was unable to insert it into the padlock. The opening was filled with ice.

I got down on my knees and breathed on the lock, gradually warming it. When I thought it was no longer cold enough to freeze to my lips, I put the end of the padlock in my mouth, sealed my lips around it and blew hard. Not much air moved, but my breath was hot enough that I could sense the internal ice gradually thawing. I put the tip of my tongue on the key opening, transferring more heat.

Again, I tried the key. It slid into the lock, turned easily, and the lock popped open. I unhooked the cable from the bow ring, and the kayak was now free.

By taking some of ice chunks I’d removed and wedging them in next to the kayak, I hoped to prevent a gust of wind from blowing it into the lake. I left it there and went back inside.

Gertie was sitting up on the couch, the blanket wrapped over her shoulders. From her angle, she probably had seen me out the window, trying to free the kayak. I saw her eyes glance in my direction, but she didn’t turn her head.

I moved slowly so I wouldn’t startle her and sat down next to her.

“Are you okay?” I said.