We ate a candlelit dinner with scalloped potatoes swimming in garlic and cream, Portobello mushrooms, and baked Atlantic salmon that Patrick had made. We toasted each other and he caught me up and we kissed inside the moonbeam that splashed across his floor. It felt like I was caught in a raging river, my senses magnified to catch every sound, every touch, every taste, every sight. His hand on my skin made my body feel feverish and my mind go to mush as we intertwined like honeysuckle and bindweed, lost in the beauty and the rhythm of love.
I hardly slept at all that night, thinking about him as he lay beside me, thinking about us, about the Atlantic Ocean and how big it is. The next morning Patrick was fast asleep when I had to leave, so I gave him a kiss on the nose and left a note on the kitchen table. When I got into work I caught sight of Martha as she scurried down the hall and almost yelled out to her, but the fact that she was scurrying made me stop. She never scurried. At lunch she dropped in to tell me that she had tracked everybody down and most of them were able to come. She was flustered because she wasn’t going to have time to buy drinks and snacks, and could I do it for her? I told Martha that she could leave everything up to me and she turned to leave.
“You okay?” I asked, but she was gone before she could hear my question.
My graduate student and I spent the afternoon going over his thesis to see what he still needed to do before he had to defend it. I remembered my own defence — four male professors peppering me with questions. After it was over I was sure they had spent hours coming up with the most difficult ones they could find. I had come out feeling sure I’d flunked. But I’d passed with much praise. It made me realize that just because you believe something bad is going to happen that doesn’t make it so.
But it was unnerving to be so sure — I mean, where did that come from? As I said: unnerving.
I left work in plenty of time to get the food and drinks, sit in rush hour traffic, and get to Martha’s twenty minutes before the writing group. I was getting nervous about how I was going to handle my questions and I sat in the car outside for five minutes, pulling myself together.
I managed to juggle all the groceries and drinks so that I could take them all in one trip, except that I forgot about the door into the apartment building. I waited a bit, hop–ing someone would come and was just starting to bend down to put some of the groceries on the walkway when a man’s voice said, “Here, I’ll get the door for you.”
I couldn’t look over the paper grocery bags to see who it was but I was thankful. I felt my way up the step and through the door with my feet, while trying to pin–point the voice, which was familiar.
“Taking the elevator?”
I mumbled “Yes,” and he asked me if he could take some of my groceries. I wasn’t so keen on giving them up to a strange man, especially a strange man I couldn’t see, but as I shifted them in my arms one of them slipped and the stranger grabbed it before it hit the floor. At that moment I could see who it was: Jason. He broke out into a nice smile and said, “Cordi, how nice to see you.”
I smiled back as we stepped into the elevator and he pressed twelve. By the time we got to Martha’s apartment Jason miraculously had both shopping bags and the case of pop, and he made them look about as big as pincush–ions. I rapped on Martha’s door and waited. And waited. We looked at each other and I rapped again. No answer.
“She must be stuck in traffic,” I said.
Jason put down the groceries and we stood awk–wardly in the hall until I said, “What exactly did you mean when you said there had been others; that Michael wasn’t the only one?”
Jason sucked on his lip and stared at me.
I stared back.
“Just little things that only a lover would understand. Sometimes she’d be distraught for days on end for no apparent reason, and other times I’d catch her poring over the newspapers as if her life depended on it.”
“Are you talking about Heather?” I asked.
“You know about her? Terry swore it was an acci–dent, that the wheel had jerked suddenly and the boat had mowed Heather down. Owen said so too. I was there as well, but I didn’t see anything until it was all over. But she was hiding something from me. I know that it had to do with Heather.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know, but I got the feeling there was more to Heather’s death than Terry was letting on.”
We were interrupted as first LuEllen, then Tracey and George (who hadn’t been invited), Elizabeth, Sandy, and Peter all arrived. Arthur and Owen had had to beg off, but I’d follow up with them later.
By the time Martha arrived everyone was sitting on the floor nursing a beer and talking about all the good times on the ship. I had to endure joke after joke about being seasick and telling everyone that someone was out to kill me.
I was more than a little relieved to see Martha. I hadn’t wanted to start asking questions in the hallway.
We all trooped into her little apartment, which had been transformed into an apartment full of chairs and one sofa. There wasn’t room for anything else and everyone stood awkwardly on the threshold wondering what to do. Martha made a big show about getting everyone to sit down and after some fairly complicated gymnastics everyone finally found a seat.
When I figured everyone was settled I moved to a position where I could see all of them and called their attention to me. I could tell by the way they looked at me that they were expecting a little speech about the trip, and maybe a tribute of some kind to Sally and Terry. But that’s not what they got. Instead they got this:
“Arthur and Sandy tell me Sally was pretending to be someone she wasn’t. I want to know why.”
I looked at all their faces. No one said anything but there were a few shakes of the head.
“Cordi, where do you come up with these scenarios?” asked Elizabeth.
“The same place you do.”
She looked confused. “Meaning what?” she asked.
“Meaning you’ve all been lying about something and I want to know what it is.”
No one spoke. I tried again. “LuEllen.” She jumped at her name. “Elizabeth.” She looked straight at me. “Tracey.” She avoided my gaze. “Peter.” He tilted his head. “Jason.” He returned my stare. “Owen and Arthur. Three of you are members of the writing club. At least five of you are connected to Michael’s death in one way or another. And at least two of you are connected to the death of a woman on the Rideau Canal. Both deaths are connected to Terry. Coincidence? I don’t think so. So what are you all hiding?”
Still no one spoke.
“I don’t know what you were up to, but I believe Sally was an innocent woman and I don’t think she deserves to go down in history as Terry’s murderer.” I stopped speaking and let the silence pull them out of their guilt.
Tracey was the first to break. “She was a monster!” she blurted. George tried to stop her but she shrugged him off and the surprised look on his face was comical. “She killed Heather in cold blood. Planned it perfectly.”
“There’s no proof of that,” I said.
“Of course not. She was too good. She planned the perfect murders. Turned the steering wheel at the last moment, that’s what I think. And my sister had been so excited because Terry was sure her book was going to be a bestseller.”
“Heather was a writer?” I asked, surprised.
Tracey looked at me and then at the others as if look–ing for help. She bit her lip. “Yes.”
It hit me as if I’d been punched in my neurons. “So she was working on a manuscript at the time of her death?”
“Yes.”
“Was it good?”
“I don’t know. I never had the chance to read it. Not that I could have. It was all handwritten and her handwrit–ing was really bad. She was very private about her writing.”
I looked over at Elizabeth and caught her eye. “Isn’t that what Michael was like?
She nodded.
“Three manuscripts: Heather’s, Michael’s, and now Sally’s, all handwritten by shy writers who happened to die either by Terry’s hand or in her vicinity.”
“Sally wasn’t a recluse or a writer, she was just acting a part. But she wouldn’t tell me why,” said Sandy. “And she would never have handwritten a manuscript, so what the hell is going on?”
But I already knew. I looked around at the other faces.
Most of them weren’t looking at me. They were looking anywhere else. “Terry stole Michael and Heather’s books.”
You could have heard a dust mote fall. I looked around at my audience. Only a few people looked stunned at my revelation. The rest shifted their eyes downward in a gesture that unmistakably said, “We already knew.”
“She was stalking vulnerable writers and then mur–dering them for their books. Sally, Heather, and how many others?” I raised my voice. “And what about Sally? Why was she acting a part?”
I let the silence drag on forever, trying to goad some–one into talking.
It worked. “We had a plan to take Terry down.” Elizabeth’s quiet voice cut through the silence like a deaf–ening gong. “She was out of control. Killing for the sake of a book. We had no proof. That’s what Sally was going to get for us. It had to stop.”
“So you hired her to play the part of a vulnerable writer.”
“We had to catch Terry red-handed. It was the only way. Sally was our eyes and ears. We knew we’d hooked Terry when, weeks before the cruise, Sally told us that Terry was interested in her book and wanted to help her sell it. She just had to promise to keep quiet about it and not let anyone read it. She said someone could steal it that way. So Sally went along with it.”
“And it killed her,” I said.
In the silence that followed I could hear the thud shunt of the elevator. I was about to say something else when Sandy broke in. “Did Sally know?” Her voice wobbled on all three words as she directed her question at Elizabeth.
“Know what?”
“That you were using her to nail the murderer?”
Elizabeth had the grace to look away as she shook her head and I noticed Tracey, LuEllen, and Peter were all looking away too.
“I think she suspected something near the end,” said Elizabeth and her voice trailed off.
“You killed her,” said Sandy in a quiet, dangerous voice.
“You have to believe us. It was never meant to hap–pen,” said Elizabeth.
“So you set Terry up. You set your trap and you waited for Terry to fall for it,” I said.
Tracey began to cry. The others shuffled uncomfort–ably, but LuEllen stepped up to the plate. “Sally was never meant to die. We had a schedule. One of us fol–lowed her everywhere.”
“Except that night.”
“Except that night. She snuck out of her room and by the time we found her she was dead.”
“We just wanted to catch Terry in the act,” said Eliz–abeth. “We planned to stop her before she killed. We thought we’d thought of every possible scenario and we could protect her.” She paused and I suddenly thought of the asinine question she had asked me that day on the ship. “It was a good plan,” she continued, “and Sally was playing her part beautifully.”
I marvelled at how the human mind could be so con–voluted; all of this horror created by a need for revenge.
They seemed such ordinary people, pushed over the brink by uncontrolled emotions.
“But why would a writer want to steal from another writer?” asked George.
“Because she couldn’t write,” I said.
Elizabeth shook her head. “But the lecture on the ship where she crucified Tracey’s writing. She made it a lot better.”
“But that’s different,” said Martha. “Lots of teach–ers are good at fixing a manuscript, but when it comes to writing a full length book of their own they just can’t do it. Either they can’t do dialogue, or they can’t do prose, or they have no stamina, or their plots stink.” She smiled at me as if to say, “See, I know more about this than you think.”
“Okay,” I said. “So Terry had to use Owen as her ghostwriter for her first non-fiction book. My bet is that when she remembered Michael’s manuscript she decided to make use of it, since he was dead and Owen couldn’t write fiction. After that she had to keep looking for more victims.”
“She’s only written two works of fiction and one non-fiction book in seven years,” said LuEllen.
Which meant she’d had trouble finding her victims — unless she used a pseudonym. The thought made me shiver. I wished Owen was here. He’d be able to confirm all this.
“What about Sally’s manuscript? Where did it come from?” I asked.
“We had her copy out a well-written, obscure book that Terry wouldn’t recognize.”
“Just like Michael and Heather — handwritten. How the hell did Terry find two dinosaurs who were good writers?”
“As Martha said, she could turn a lousy manuscript into something good, she only needed to find authors who hated to create by computer — there’s lots of those around still.”
“Why didn’t Terry recognize you all?”
“She never saw LuEllen after the accident. I never attended Michael’s trial and kept out of the newspapers as much as I could,” said Elizabeth.
I looked at Tracey. She looked scared and George stepped in for her. “Tracey had a medical illness during the trial and never crossed paths with Terry.” Then added, somewhat defensively, “Tracey’s parents were there.”
I looked at Peter and then realized I already knew the answer. He was a completely different man with a beard.
“And Heather? How did you find out about Heather?”
I asked.
“We kept track of Terry,” said Peter. “And when we found out about the boating accident we hired a pri–vate investigator who led us to Tracey. When we learned Heather was a writer and had been taking a course from Terry we began putting the pieces together. It just seemed like too much of a coincidence that one woman could end up being involved in the deaths of two people who happened to be her students. Three now, counting Sally.”
“But she didn’t murder Sally,” I interrupted, deciding to put the record straight.
“That’s not true. Sally could easily have been drowned by Terry, but someone saw and went to her cabin to argue it out,” Peter said, staring at Jason. “Whoever did it drowned her in the tub and then dumped her body in the pool with Sally, hoping everyone would believe one had drowned trying to save the other. They obviously didn’t know the pool was salt water.”
As I digested this new bit of information Peter con–tinued, “And imagine having the good fortune to have the only juror on your trial who’s holding out for a guilty verdict mysteriously fall down a concrete staircase. It was all just too suspicious.”
“And then she killed Sally to get sole possession of her book and made it look like suicide by forging a note.” I didn’t feel like pointing out that the note had not been forged. “Which begs the same old question: who killed Terry?”
I scanned their faces looking for, what? Guilt? It was there in spades. How could it not be when they had sent an innocent woman to her death with their harebrained plan? But I was looking for something more. “Every single one of you had a good reason for wanting Terry dead. Elizabeth, Tracey, and Peter wanted revenge for a lost lover, sister, and friend; LuEllen for what was done to her in Terry’s name; Owen for Terry’s share of their parents’ estate; and Arthur because he was still in love with Sally and wanted revenge. Jason wanted her dead because she knew about his being colour-blind, an afflic–tion that would end his career as a captain.”
I looked at their blank faces as they all just stared at me. No denials, no admissions of guilt, no nothing. It was very unnerving.
My evening with Patrick went by in a whirl. We’d prom–ised each other that we wouldn’t talk business or Lon–don or anything ugly, so things had been good between us. He wanted me to stay the night but I didn’t want to
— it was just too painful and, truth be told, I really had started to distance myself from him and I think he could feel it. Before I left he couldn’t not ask me about the mur–der case, so I told him everything.
“So let me get this straight,” he said when I’d finished.
“Terry faked it and murdered Michael in cold blood for a non-fiction bestseller and then for his book.”
I nodded. “Or she really did murder him while sleep–walking and then took advantage of the fallout. She gets a non-fiction bestseller out of the ordeal, hoodwinks her brother into ghostwriting it, and gets a bonus murder mystery. Perfect.”
“Then, once she makes a name for herself she realizes she can’t write the books so she stalks and kills Heather to get her next fix,” said Patrick. “What about Owen?
Was he simply blind to all this or did he help her? Do you think he knows?”
I told him what Duncan had said about Owen being a doormat. “I think Owen just blindly does what his sis–ter tells him.”
“Would that include murder?”
I shook my head, but it did make me wonder. “And then Terry falls for Sally. She could have killed Sally before being drowned herself.” I told him about Peter’s theory We went over some more details and then I left him standing on the threshold hoping I’d change my mind.
But I didn’t. The instinct for self-preservation; that’s all it was.
I left for work early the next morning and got in before anyone was around. I worked for a couple of hours and then at 9:00 I picked up my list of people to call. Owen was at the top. Shit. He was so hard to talk to and I had no idea how much he did or did not know, but I needed to find out whether Terry had used a pseudonym and whether Owen knew anything about his sister’s double life. I’d have to be careful though. He was her brother, after all. He might not take too kindly to my questions.
I phoned him anyway and told him what I wanted to talk to him about.
“Terry?” he said, the exasperation in his voice travel–ling down the wires. “We’ve been through all that.”
“I just need to ask….” I said.
“Look. You’ve caught me at a bad time.”
“When would be a good time?”
“Next year?”
There was a long silence, which I succeeded in not breaking.
“Look, I’m taking up a couple from New Jersey this evening. There’s room for you. We can talk while they ooh and ahh over the beauty of the Outaouais.”
I was totally at a loss as to what the hell he was talk–ing about. Where was up? “I’m not sure I follow you. Where are you taking this couple?”
“Up in a hot air balloon.”
“You’re a pilot?”
“Of course I am. You can’t pilot those things without a pilot’s license.”
“Will we be able to talk?”
“I wouldn’t be asking you if I didn’t think we could. They’ll be too busy clicking photos to care what we’re talking about. Take it or leave it.”
Sounded fair enough. We arranged a time to meet early that evening and I spent the rest of the day miss–ing Martha, worrying about Patrick, and working on a research paper.
I arrived at the field in the late afternoon, following Owen’s excellent directions to a field near Carleton University. That and the presence of a number of bal–loons gave it away. I was early so I stood and watched as Owen and his crew readied their balloon. They’d already spread it out on the ground close to the wicker basket, which had some sort of contraption attached to it that I figured must be the burners used to heat the air. Two people were attaching the basket to the balloon using carabiners that I hoped weren’t as flimsy as they looked.
A big burly guy then took a rope — or was it a line? — that was attached to the very top of the balloon and had some kind of wicker ring on the other end. He walked it straight back from the crown of the balloon and waited.
Meanwhile, Owen had manhandled a big fan so that it was facing the little opening of the balloon that was being held open by two other crewmembers. I wondered how many crewmembers were normally needed to make this thing work. It was nowhere near as easy as I had thought it was. You earned your flight with these things.
I watched as the balloon began to move, the air from the fan swirling around inside and the gossamer red cloth billowing out. The burly man, now a long way out in the field, was holding the rope’s ring, had planted his feet, and was attempting to keep the motion of the balloon to a minimum. Once the balloon was about two thirds full of cold air Owen started the burners and hot air began flowing into the balloon. Slowly, gracefully, it began to rise from the ground. Fire and fragility. The cloth so thin that it didn’t look possible for it to lift the little wicker basket. I glanced at my watch then looked around and saw others like me, hovering in the wings, waiting for their rides or just watching.
Owen’s balloon was now fully inflated with a line tethering it to the truck that I presumed was going to fol–low us by land. I started forward and stood close to the balloon while Owen did whatever he had to do to ready the balloon for takeoff — a slightly different set of rules from a plane but the same basic training. Two of the crew came over to the basket and leaned on it as human anchors. When Owen finally noticed me he gave me a smile and waved me over.
“The couple from New Jersey are a few minutes late. They should be here any minute. You can come aboard if you want.”
The basket looked so flimsy! I’d never been near a hot air balloon, much less been in one. I climbed into the basket. It was smaller than I expected, perhaps because of the propane tanks, fuel lines, and naviga–tion equipment, and everything was padded like an iso–lation cell. I looked up. The burners above my head were supported by a four posted metal frame and fired by propane. When I looked beyond them into the mes–merizing softness of the balloon it reminded me of all the tents I’d ever slept in. Of course, none were ever as big as this.
I dragged my eyes away from the balloon and watched the big burley guy coming in from the field. He handed Owen the rope and then became another human anchor. Owen was busy with the burners and absent-mindedly dropped the end of the ringed rope into the cor–ner of the basket. I wondered if there were two kinds of balloonists, the way there are two kinds of sailors: those who secure or neatly stow all their ropes and those who don’t. I watched as the balloon next to us took off and saw that they hadn’t even bothered to bring their line in; it was dangling beneath the basket like a loose thread.
I took my camera out of my pocket and snapped a bunch of artsy-fartsy shots while I waited for Owen and the people from New Jersey. They were taking their own sweet time. I hoped they wouldn’t be too talkative and make it hard for me to talk to Owen, but I didn’t really have much to say.
I’d read all there was to know about the accident with Heather. Terry had been at the wheel and it had seemed pretty cut and dried. She hadn’t seen her; the bow of the boat was riding high because of the weight of people in the back. But I knew that Owen knew more about Terry than he was letting on. He was her brother.
He had to.
I was leaning on the basket, watching another bal–loon take off, when the balloon moved and I glanced back to see Owen fiddling with the burner. Suddenly he yelled “Hands off!” and let the tether line go. We immedi–ately began to rise, our three human anchors fading from view. I instinctively stepped back from the edge but there wasn’t really anywhere to go, the basket was so small.
“The New Jersey couple?” I said, as I tried to calm an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Couldn’t make it. Just got the call. Might as well go anyway,” he said.
I cautiously looked over the padded edge of the bas–ket. We were already forty feet up. Too high to jump. But maybe I was jumping to conclusions.
“Pretty impressive, eh?” he said. “Look over there. The Parliament Buildings.”
And there they were, stalwart stone edifices of another era, soaring towards us, the clock tower like a finger beckoning. We were low enough that I imagined I could see the eternal flame on Parliament Hill. I could clearly see the library at the back of Parliament, its many windows reflecting the sun as it sat perched on the cliff overlooking the Ottawa River. I wondered if we were actually allowed here. It seemed like such an easy thing to fly over and drop a bomb. Between blasts from the burner it was quiet, no rushing air because we were mov–ing with the wind. I was mesmerized by what little lay between us and annihilation. A little wicker basket, like an oversized picnic basket, yards and yards of gossamer cloth that reminded me of a spinnaker, and the flames licking up into the balloon.
Owen brought the balloon down quite low as we cruised over Gatineau, then silently flew over the trees to Meech Lake. By now I trusted the little basket and was actually leaning up against it and watching the land fly by us. I could see little wavelets on the water but felt no wind on my own cheek. Weird. I had totally forgotten the reason for being there, I was so mesmerized by the whole experience. We were really close to Harrington Lake, the Prime Minister’s summer retreat. I wondered if he was in residence and if there was a no-fly zone over his place — but how can you enforce that on a hot air balloon driven by the wind?
I suddenly remembered why I was there and turned to look at Owen. But as I began to ask him about Heather he handed me a paperback book. I looked at him questioningly.
“Look at it. It’s an advance copy,” he said. “I need you to know what a mess you’ve made of things for me.”
I looked at him curiously and then took the book; KillJoy by Terry Spencer. I looked up at him, uncertain what he wanted me to do.
“Read the back.”
The little blurb said it was a book about black mar–ket organs and then it quoted some of the book.
“Now read the first page,” he said.
I opened the book and felt the skin crawl on the back of my neck as I read. “Drenched in oil and blinded by blood, she held her breath and jumped.”
My heart did somersaults in my throat. Dear god, I was alone in a little basket way up in the sky, with the man who had been trying to kill me. Had it been Owen all along? Trying to safeguard his investment? In cahoots with his sister? Did he know it was a book that had already been published? Sweet revenge that.
“Is that why you tried to kill me?”
He smiled at me and said, “You ruined everything the minute you picked up the manuscript on the plane and I saw you reading the first page. Unfortunately, I couldn’t know how much or even what pages you’d read.” He reached out and took the book from me. “You know, you’ve been particularly difficult to kill. When I visited your cabin on the ship I was sure that I could knock you out and throw you overboard. And that polar bear was a gift that didn’t quite work out.”
“And the Zodiac?”
“You are so impressionable, but you were barking up the wrong tree when you thought someone had cut the ropes. They really were frayed.”
“So you had no hand in the Zodiac fiasco?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “But Terry did.”
I waited impatiently for him to continue.
“I’d told her about you reading the manuscript and she was livid, with me and with you. When she stood up in the Zodiac she was aiming directly for you.”
“To knock me overboard,” I said slowly.
Owen nodded.
“And what about the dog?” I said.
He smiled. “Everybody just thought you were nuts. I played into that and took advantage of circumstances.”
“And the fire?”
“Yeah, well, that took a little more thought.”
“I’m glad you’re so lousy at murder,” I said, keeping my distance, trying to formulate a plan, any plan at all. “Why did you stop trying?” I was playing for time.
“Because I could afford to wait for the perfect oppor–tunity. I never had to be good. If it worked, it worked. If it didn’t there was always another time. It just had to look like an accident and happen sometime before the book came out.”
“But you told me you didn’t stand to gain anything from Terry’s death.”
“The book contracts were in both our names and I earned every penny. She agreed to it before she started making money because she was so grateful that I ghost–wrote her book. She tried to renege but our agreement was solid.”
“What happens to her share now?”
“It goes to her estate.”
I kicked myself for not getting back to Derek but I hazarded a guess. “Which, since she has no will, will go to you.”
He shrugged and waved the book in my face. “This book is due out in a month and it stands to make me a pretty penny now that she’s well-known. This is just an advance copy. So you see, I can’t have you bouncing around like an out of control bowling ball.” He looked at the book in his hands and then dropped it on top of a packsack.
So he didn’t know. That gave me some much-needed courage. “Your so-called book was already published in 1927,” I said, then paused to look at him. “By an Archibald Graham. Sally just copied it to get you to show your hand.”
His jaw had dropped and I knew I’d hit a very raw nerve. But he recovered his cool frighteningly quickly. “A doomed woman will say anything to save her skin.”
He smiled as if he had some secret he wanted to tell me. And then, with no warning, he lunged at me. I didn’t even have time to put up my hands as his body slammed into mine. As I felt myself going over the edge of the basket I saw the line snaking down from the crown of the balloon. I reached out and grabbed it just as Owen pitched me overboard. I went into a dizzying drop as I swung out and away from the basket, slipping a few feet down the rope. I managed to stop my fall with clenched hands and a prayer as the end of the rope fell out of the basket and tumbled past me. I looked up and saw the underside of the basket and the balloon soaring far above it.
Of all the thoughts that tumbled through my mind as I hung suspended, the last thing I expected was anger that I’d die without answers. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to hang on for long. I tried to grab the rope with my legs, but it was swaying wildly and I couldn’t get a grip. I had to get to the wicker ring and give my hands something more concrete to grasp. It would buy me time. I glanced down quickly and looked up again, my mind and my body fighting over control of me. There was only five feet of rope below me and I cautiously moved down, hand over hand, to grab hold of the ring with both hands. But the psychological loss of the extra length of rope was unnerving. Nothing stood between me and Mother Earth.
I glanced down again and sucked in my breath. We were awfully close to the trees. If Owen dropped much lower maybe I could let go and chance getting skewered. We seemed to be going quite fast though.
My body was starting to tell me that I couldn’t hold on, that I had to let go and everything would be okay. My head was in a screaming match with my body. It hor–rified me that my body might win, no matter how good an argument my mind had.
At about that point my brain finally registered what was happening on the basket end of the rope. Why hadn’t he cut me loose? Surely there was some way a pilot could secure an errant line he couldn’t reach by hand? I tried to remember what had been in the basket, but my mind was too traumatized to concentrate. I looked down again and saw that the trees were closer, looming up like little pointy umbrellas, and suddenly I realized what he was doing. He was going to drag me through the trees until I let go. Nice and clean. Of course, he could just wait for me to fall, but maybe he was just impatient to be rid of me.
I was on the verge of panic and my arms were throb–bing from holding on. The urge to let go was almost over–whelming. I looked up but he was busy doing something.
We were dropping and suddenly the trees were right there.
As they raked my legs I tried to climb back up the rope, but there wasn’t a hope with the condition of my arms. I brought my legs up as the treetops bent past me.
Suddenly the trees gave way to a lake. I looked down at the water and found it hard to judge the dis–tance. We were almost level with the trees on the shore–line so we couldn’t be that far from the water. I weighed my chances. A fall from, say, thirty-five feet into water would be okay if I fell the right way. Those Olympic div–ers dive from heights like that, don’t they? Of course, I wasn’t an Olympic diver, but it seemed like a better bet than being slammed into a forest.
By now I was hanging at least twenty feet from the basket; plenty of space for him to smash me into the trees on the far side of the lake and still control the balloon.
I clung to the rope, my body feeling numb and surreal
— my mind foggy and dozy. It happened suddenly. My mind and my body let go as one and I concentrated on making my entry to the water as straight as possible, my body rigid through fear, not design. I hit the water feet first, the impact took my breath away as I plum–meted deep beneath the surface. I crawled my way back up, fighting for air and retching as I treaded water and watched the balloon languidly float over the trees and out of sight with Owen staring back at me.
I was in the middle of the lake. Fortunately, the weather was still warm so I didn’t have any heavy clothes on. I kicked off my shoes and swam towards the nearest shore, confident that Owen would not be there to greet me.
I crawled out of the water and lay there for a while, thinking about nothing, looking up at the trees and lis–tening to the birds twittering.
I didn’t hear the man coming. All of a sudden he was just there, looking down at me, puzzled. I sat up and he immediately drew a gun on me. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old and since I was all out of adrenaline I eyeballed him with some curiosity, wonder–ing if Owen had hired crew to follow my descent.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he asked gruffly.
I could have asked the same of him but I didn’t. Instead I said, “I just fell out of a hot air balloon.”
He looked skeptical and asked for my ID. That was a relief — he wouldn’t ask for ID if he was one of Owen’s minions. But that’s when I got skeptical and asked who he was.
“I patrol the grounds for the Prime Minister.” Har–rington Lake. Of course; I’d landed in the Prime Minis–ter’s summer retreat.
I fished through my wet jeans pocket and handed him my wallet. He eyeballed it and then offered me a lift back to his station where he said he had to fill out a report.
I didn’t get to meet the Prime Minister, but I guess I couldn’t complain. After all, I was alive.
I told my story about Owen and the balloon to the secu–rity guards and again to the police. They were very polite and didn’t question my sanity, but the cards were stacked against me since apparently no one had noticed the bal–loon with a person dangling from a rope flying over Har–rington Lake. Something about a change of shift was mentioned. They told me they’d look into it and get back to me. The fact that someone had tried to kill me didn’t seem to merit immediate attention. A bodyguard would have been nice.
I called Patrick and told him there was a change in plans and could I stay at his place? It was a mess of packed boxes, he said, but I could tell he was happy for my call.
I didn’t dare go home for a change of clothes for fear of Owen, but I did call Ryan and let him know the situation.
I arrived at Patrick’s still wet and bedraggled. I showered and changed into some spare clothes with many caressing interruptions from Patrick and a back–rub in the shower. It had been what I had wanted to avoid and not avoid. The last time. So final. The last time remembered as the last time, as it was happening, was worse than remembering the last time in retrospect. I told Patrick about the balloon incident and he was really upset.
He grabbed me by the arms in the bathroom and I winced. They still felt like pulled taffy wrapped in one big ache. He tightened his grip, staring straight into my eyes. “You can’t keep putting yourself in danger like this; you’re going to get killed. It’s not worth it, Cordi.”
But I actually thought it was very much worth it. Jus–tice; plus, if I had to be truthful, it was a real adrenaline rush to be put in situations where I had to test my own strength and courage. And even more of a rush when it worked. I felt invincible, which probably wasn’t a good thing — I thought of all the invincible people now lying six feet under. I changed the subject. “Patrick, Owen showed me the jacket cover from Terry’s new book. He’s obviously publishing it posthumously.”
He waited for me to go on.
“The back cover has an excerpt from the book.” I paused for effect. “Word for word, it’s what I read on the plane.”
I waited for his reaction but there was none.
“Don’t you see? Terry stole Sally’s book, although it wasn’t actually Sally’s. It was written by a guy in 1927. Anyway, the manuscript was handwritten by Sally and the suicide note was identical to a scene in the book.”
Patrick whistled. “So you think that’s why he was trying to kill you on the ship? Because you would know as soon as you saw the book that Terry had stolen the manuscript.”
“And that I might recognize the suicide note.”
“So now I’m leaning away from the murder-suicide theory.”
“And leaning towards?”
“Double murder.”