Thursday Noon
Halifax Homestead
Jim slept through breakfast Thursday morning. He’d been up very late, letting Himself know that Ginny and Charlie were trapped in New Brunswick, and trying to come up with a plan.
He slipped past the door to the Great Room and helped himself to the lunch buffet laid out in the dining area. He had the room to himself and that suited him just fine. In his present mood he didn’t want to have to make small talk.
He finished his meal, then got another cup of coffee and wandered back to the Great Room. It had a huge TV mounted on one wall and more than a dozen people in front of it. They were making noises Jim classified as ‘ghoulish,’ the kind onlookers make when watching a horrific scene, usually involving blood and body parts.
He stepped into the room and approached the back of the crowd, his eyes on them, then on the screen. He watched for a moment as the announcer explained what they were seeing.
“In a spectacular feat of bravery today, an unknown man dove off the ferry, swam over to a passing whale, and freed a teenager that had somehow gotten caught in a rope twisted around the animal’s tail. The boy was rescued by the ferry. The man has not been found and is presumed dead. The story is even more remarkable because several passengers were filming the whale and caught the whole thing on camera. Here is an exclusive, first-hand look at what happened.”
Jim had his coffee to his lips as the picture changed. He stared, then realized what he was looking at.
“Ginny!” He dropped the coffee.
Several people turned to look at him.
“That’s Ginny!” He pointed at the image, gone as soon as seen. “Can we get it back?”
Mrs. Robertson had hurried over to deal with the spill.
“Come with me,” she said.
Jim found her hand on his arm, pulling him first into the kitchen, then beyond it to an elevator. She took him up three levels, then let him into a room full of electronic equipment.
“John, can you pull up the noon news, please?”
“Which channel?”
“Let’s start with CBC.”
Jim watched as the tech pulled up the Canadian Broadcasting Company feed.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“Something about a whale in the Bay of Fundy.”
“Oh, that!” The young man spun a few controls and the image of the ferry popped onto the screen. He let it roll.
Jim watched over his shoulder. “There! Freeze that!”
“Can’t. We’ll need to do a frame by frame to get anything other than copyright image and blur. Watch it again.”
He launched the clip again, then two more times. By the end of the third viewing, Jim was sure.
“That’s Ginny. She was on that ferry.” What’s more, the man who had dived off the ferry and saved the boy’s life was Charlie.
“Can you get me a copy of that clip? Something I can put on a computer?”
“Sure. I’ll collect the rest of them, too.”
Jim turned to the Matron. “I’m going to Digby. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“How can we help?”
“Make a copy of that footage and send it to Angus Mackenzie.”
Jim grabbed his coat and keys, then flew down the stairs and out the front door, cursing the snow that now lay on the SUV, forcing him to sweep it off before he could drive the vehicle. Even so, he was out the gates and on the road to Digby in fewer than twenty minutes. He pulled out the burner phone and called Himself.
“Grandfather!”
“Auch Jim! Ye sound a wee bit flistert.”
Jim explained the incident on the ferry, his words tumbling over one another, forcing him to repeat himself to be understood.
“Charlie dove off th’ ship?”
“And saved the boy’s life. Yes.”
“Ginny was wi’ him?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she noo?”
“I don’t know. I’m on my way to Digby to see if I can pick up her trail.”
“Let me know, lad, when ye find her.”
“I will.”
Jim hung up the phone, but left it turned on, cradled beside him in the car. Now, with Charlie no longer in danger from the police, maybe now she’d call. He set his jaw and drove as fast as he dared toward Digby and the ferry dock.
* * *
Thursday Afternoon
Nova Scotia 101
Ginny ran to the car, turned it around and headed back toward Digby, the tracker out on the seat beside her. It took her several tries and two hours, but she finally managed to locate the pier where the fishing trawler had pulled in. She found a place to wait and watched as a couple, obviously in the midst of a quarrel, got into a battered truck and headed into the town. The signal was coming from that truck. No Charlie.
Her heart sank again. Still, if that man had the beacon, he could tell her something. How had he gotten it? Could she ask him to give it to her? What would he think? Nothing good, she suspected.
She followed the couple into the city and straight to the police station. Ginny caught her breath. She couldn’t follow them in there. She found a parking space and settled down to watch the doors. Sure enough, an hour later they emerged with a boy in tow, the boy, the one Charlie had rescued.
Ginny tailed them back across town to a rather grubby neighborhood full of tract housing. She let them unload their unhappy cargo, the man cuffing the boy as the argument continued, showing her which door to approach.
Ginny carefully pulled out the velvet bag with the loose gemstones in it and looked them over. The most impressive was a dark blue topaz. It was larger than the others, being almost the size of her thumbnail, a fine quality, not absolutely flawless, but close, and cut to sparkle in any light at almost any angle.
It was all she had to bargain with and she might not need it, but it was better to be prepared. She tucked the other jewels away and climbed out of the car. The light was fading and she could feel snowflakes settling on her cheeks as she knocked on the door.
It took a moment, but eventually the woman came to answer the knock.
“Yeah?” She looked Ginny up and down.
“I’m looking for the man who saved your son’s life.”
The woman hesitated for a fraction of a second. “We haven’t seen him.”
Ginny put on her coldest expression, hoping she was being mistaken for someone with a badge under her coat. “You have either seen him alive or seen him dead, or both.”
The woman’s eyes flickered. She studied Ginny for a moment, then stepped back to let her in, then closed the door behind her. She looked Ginny in the face. “He was alive when he left the boat.”
Ginny nodded. She might be lying, but she might be telling the truth. “You have a keychain you took off of him. I’d like it back.”
By this time the man had joined his wife. “What’s going on here?”
The woman answered, her eyes still on Ginny. “She wants the keychain.”
The man turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised. “How do you know about that?”
“None of your business.” Ginny tried to make it sound harsh and true. She crossed her arms on her chest and looked at him, imagining him as the face on her paper target, her gun settling down to make nice little groupings; eyes, nose, forehead. It must have worked for he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking uncomfortable.
“It ain’t worth nothing.”
“Then you won’t mind giving it back.”
The man had pulled the keychain out of his pocket. “It has sentimental value. But I tell you what.” The man looked up. “You can buy it off of me.”
“You want a reward for returning stolen property?”
“I saved his life. That deserves something.”
“He saved your son. You’re even. Where’d you put him?”
“Ah, well. Information costs extra.”
“Did he offer to pay you?”
“Yeah. One thousand Canadian, but all he had on him was five hundred.”
She nodded. “I’ll make up the difference.” She pulled the gemstone out of her pocket, but didn’t show it to them, yet. “Where did you put him?”
“Margaretsville, on the ramp. That’s the last I saw of him.”
Ginny held out her hand for the keychain. When he handed it over, Ginny turned to the woman and took her hand, placing the topaz in the center of it. “This should settle the debt.”
The woman gasped, gazing at the jewel, her husband looking over her shoulder.
Ginny seized the momentary distraction and slipped out. She made for the car, jumped in, and took off. She found her way back to the 101 and headed for Margaretsville.
It took her an hour to get up the coast to the turn off. Margaretsville was another historic lighthouse. Ginny followed the signs and found herself back on the coast, this time in a snowstorm, with almost zero visibility, and both beacon and receiver in her possession. Nonetheless, she parked the car, got out and started searching, calling Charlie’s name and trying to separate the whistle of the wind from the sound a man in trouble might make. She had a flashlight. He would see that, even if he couldn’t hear her.
She kept an eye on the time. Charlie was no fool. He wouldn’t have stayed on the beach to be caught by the rising tide. He’d have found some sort of shelter. She chewed her lip, trying to think.
That blood-sucking pirate had taken Charlie’s cash and beacon, probably his credit card as well. Charlie needed a warm place to spend the night and he couldn’t go far, not on that broken leg. He was here, somewhere.
Ginny soothed herself with the common sense of this line of thought. Best case scenario, he was in a house or other solid shelter, but, in this storm, she would never know it. Worst case scenario, he was lying in a ditch and she still would never know.
She got back in the car and spent another three hours driving up and down the coast road from Margarestville to Port George, then back again, as far as Harbourville. No bodies in the ditch and no Charlie hobbling out of the snow in response to her call.
When she finally decided she could do no better in the dark, with the snow coming down, she made her way into the nearest town, located a bed and breakfast, and settled in for the night.
Ginny hugged the knowledge to her heart that Charlie had survived the whale, had been picked up by the pirate, and had been deposited on the coast—alive—just hours ago. She frowned at the thought of his spending the night in the snow. She wanted to call in every resource available, to mount a full-scale search and rescue mission, but that could not be hidden from the police.
She wished she’d thought to give Charlie the number to Gordon’s spare phone, but she hadn’t expected them to be separated, or him to be separated from the beacon.
The Canadian police had known where to look for Charlie, had set a trap for him. She couldn’t trust the phones, couldn’t trust the natives, couldn’t trust anyone but herself. Jim might have done a better job, but Jim wasn’t here and she was. It was up to her to figure out how to find Charlie and get him safely to Halifax.
Ginny was bone tired, but she couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned and dozed, waking frequently, her mind struggling with her missing menfolk and what to do about them. The night seemed to stretch into eternity, but under such conditions, even eternity passes. The darkness slowly turned to dawn and she rose to begin the search again.
* * *