A Sorrowful Sanctuary Read online

  Rafe Bertolli, pointing toward the bottom of the point, shouted, “Look! A rowboat! There’s no one in it!”

  The boys by this time had gone up onto the end of the wharf and had been jumping noisily into the water. They swam like fish, Lane knew, but she could see that Angela kept one eye on them all the time. The shout, and a thud below her in the water, brought Lane back to the present. Rafe was not pointing at the boat out on the water, as she expected, but directly below where she stood on the rocky outcrop of McEwen Point. Frowning, she leaned forward, trying to see, but the slight overhang made it hard to see properly. Putting aside her fishing rod she scrambled down the slope toward the beach until the area below the point was visible.

  “Can you see it?” Kenny asked, coming along behind her, followed by Angela.

  “Now who would let their rowboat off the leash? It’s drifted here from somewhere. It’s lying pretty low and has one oar dangling off the edge as well. It’s obviously been taking on water.” Lane looked out across the lake, wondering what direction the boat could have come from. Then she heard a hoarse groan. “There’s someone in it!” she cried.

  She bolted the rest of the way down the rocks to the beach, tore off her shoes and sweater, and splashed into the water, an involuntary gasp escaping her at the sudden cold. She swam along the edge of the rocks to where the small green rowboat was banging gently against the edge of the cliff. A frayed rope hung off a metal ring at the prow, trailing into the water. She needed to pull the boat to the beach.

  “Horrors!” Angela exclaimed. “Is he alive? Children, up to the car, right now.” By this time the children had seen, from their vantage point above the water, that there was indeed someone in the boat.

  “He’s bleeding!” Philip shouted. “I bet he’s dead!”

  “Now!” barked Angela, pointing at where she’d parked the car near the apple shed at the top of the wharf. She had reached the wharf by this time and was herding the boys toward the car.

  “I’ve got you!” Lane called out to the person in the boat. She had heard one more soft groan as she had approached it. Now there was only silence.

  Lane pulled at the boat, heavy with water, with one hand, and swam toward the shore, relief flooding her when her feet met the ground. Kenny waded toward her, grabbing at the rope Lane was pulling. He pulled the oar out of the oarlock and threw it onto the beach, and between them they dragged the rowboat onto the shore, the wooden keel scraping along the pebbles and sand.

  “Oh my word,” Kenny exclaimed, his hand momentarily over his mouth.

  Lying awkwardly with his head thrust uncomfortably forward by the wooden slat it rested against was a young man, his arms at his sides, his head flopping with the movement of the boat. The deep wash of bilge water was dyed red and soaked his clothes so that he looked like he was floating helplessly in his own blood.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The man’s lips moved slightly. They were a ghastly shade of blue.

  “He’s alive,” Lane said quietly. “He’s freezing. Can you see if Angela has anything in the car to cover him with?”

  Lane put her hand gently on the man’s shoulder, saying quietly, “We’ll have you out of here in a moment.” He was so young, she thought. She’d seen this before, she remembered with a start, when she’d approached a safe house where she was to make contact during a drop in France and found three men shot to death. One of them had barely been twenty, and she’d been struck by how much younger he looked in death. Where was all that blood coming from?

  Kenny turned without a word and clambered back up to the wharf. He and Angela came back with a blanket and a tarpaulin. The boys, who were confined to the car, had their faces pressed to the window.

  Lane reached in to take his hand, and then saw it: the blood-soaked mess in his abdominal area.

  “I’ve found where that blood is coming from,” Lane said to them. “He seems to have been stabbed or shot in the stomach.”

  Kenny peered forward. “Unlucky fellow. That’s a bad kind of accident.”

  “What do you think? He needs to come out of there. I’m worried about aggravating that wound, but he can’t lie in the water like that,” Lane said to them. The young man’s hand remained nearly frozen in hers. “He’s icy, and there’s barely a pulse.” Lane considered for a moment. Kenny’s truck was also on the wharf, and she thought about sending him to call for the ambulance and the police. “As soon as we get him out of there, can you drive home to call for help? Angela and I will try to keep him warm.”

  They laid out the blanket, and Lane was relieved to see that Angela had also brought the large Thermos of tea she had made.

  As carefully as they could, Kenny holding the young man under the arms, Lane taking his feet, and Angela trying to support the middle of his body, they pulled him awkwardly from the boat. He was a dead weight, and the boat tipped as they pulled him free, spilling the blood-soaked water onto the rescuers.

  They laid him on the blanket, and Kenny said, “Here are the keys. You’ll be faster than me. Take my truck and phone for help. And then bring Eleanor. She was a nurse in the Great War. I think she even has some stuff in a bag.”

  “Hurry!” said Angela. She was already folding the blanket tightly over the man’s body.

  Back up the hill at her house, soaking and shivering, with the acrid metallic smell of blood in her nose, Lane turned the crank on her phone and waited impatiently for the operator at the exchange in the little shop on Balfour Road to answer. “Nelson police station, please.” She tried to put quiet urgency into her voice. The phone went dead. Cursing volubly, she hung up and tried the whole procedure again. Again she got the exchange.

  “What happened?” the operator asked.

  “Bloody phone died. Can you put me through? It’s an emergency.”

  Lane waited tensely, worried that the phone would die again. She knew she should replace it. It was all very well thinking this ridiculous old phone was charming, but you had to be able to count on a telephone! At long last the desk sergeant picked up on the other end. “Inspector Darling, please,” said Lane. “It’s urgent. Is he there?”

  “As it happens, he just got in from a call up the lake. One moment.”

  Another wait.

  “Inspector Darling.” The crisp business-like voice of the man she loved.

  “Darling, it’s Lane. You’ve got to get an ambulance out here immediately. Tell them to drive down to the wharf. We have a young man with a bad abdominal wound. He’s lost a lot of blood. He was floating in a rowboat, which he’s probably been in most of the night. He’s barely alive.”

  Darling, who initially had been delighted at the sound of her voice, now shouted out to his constable in the next office. “Ames! An ambulance to King’s Cove, down to the wharf!” He was rewarded by hearing Ames shout, “Sir!”

  “We’ll be out as soon as we can. Do you recognize him?” he asked Lane.

  “No. He’s young. I’d say under twenty-five.”

  “Do you have an idea about the origin of the wound?”

  “I can’t tell. His clothes are completely soaked in blood. It looks like he was speared by something. Or shot,” she added unhappily. She was beginning to feel her teeth chattering. Cold and shock, she thought. She waited for an answer, but there was only silence. The phone again! She slammed the receiver onto its hook.

  “Damn!” said Darling. He heard the word “shot” and then the phone went dead. “We’re on our way,” he said into the dead receiver. He wanted to add, “You sound cold.” Well, he had what he needed. He seized his hat off the rack in his meticulously tidy office and shouted, “Let’s go!”

  Exhausted, Lane leaned against the wall for a moment. The reek of her clothes was almost unbearable. She hurried down the hall to her front door and peeled off her wet garments outside. She couldn’t bear to have the smell in
the house, but she didn’t have time to do anything but throw on something dry.

  Warmly dressed, she considered what she ought to take down to the beach. The ambulance would not arrive for some forty minutes if all went well. It would depend on which side of the lake the Nelson ferry was on. If it was on the wrong side, there would be a delay of another ten minutes. She grabbed another blanket, a small pillow, and a dry pair of pants for Angela, in case she was going to be stubborn and stay. Lane planned to tell her to take the children home the minute she got back to the wharf.

  Throwing the things she’d collected into the truck, she pulled out of her driveway and drove the hundred yards to the Armstrongs’ house. Eleanor was in the front garden and looked up with first a smile and then a puzzled frown when Lane jumped out of the cab. Eleanor pushed herself off her knees and hurried toward Lane.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We’ve found some poor young man half dead in a nearly submerged rowboat. He has a huge wound in his abdomen. Well, it might not be huge, but there is plenty of blood. Angela and Kenny are with him, and he said you might be able to help. The ambulance won’t be here for nearly an hour.”

  Eleanor took off her gardening gloves decisively. “Stay there.” She rushed into the house and came out carrying a small leather bag. “I was a nurse in the Great War, after all. I’ll remember something in a pinch.”

  “What’s in that bag?” Lane asked, backing and turning the truck. She was not used to the gearshift and made it scrape in protest as she put it into reverse. “Sorry, Kenny.”

  “It’s my old kit. A tourniquet and bandages, mainly, vials of iodine, which may still be good. I don’t know how long it keeps. A bottle of alcohol. That was still okay a year ago when I cut myself with the garden shears. Tell me about his wound.”

  Lane described it as well as she could. They were turning onto the Nelson road, which they would cross before navigating the curving and narrow rutted road down to the wharf. She hoped the ambulance could manage it.

  “Why would a man with that kind of injury be adrift in a rowboat?” Eleanor asked incredulously. “He’s lost a lot of blood?”

  “Judging by the boat, he’s lucky if he has a drop left in him.” Lane shuddered involuntarily at the memory of the bloodied water sloshing out of the bottom of the boat onto them.

  She drove the truck onto the wharf and parked it in front of the packing shed. She could see the scene farther along on the beach. The sun was glinting off the water. That would dry them at least, Lane thought. Kenny was sitting on a rock, and Angela had the young man’s head on her lap and was holding the top of the Thermos up to his lips. Kenny got up slowly, stretched his back, and made his way along the pebbled beach toward the wharf. The children were still watching from the windows of Angela’s car. Now that Eleanor was here, Angela should take them home, Lane thought.

  “Young fellow is holding on, but just,” Kenny said. He offered his hand to his wife, as the path down to the beach from the wharf was rocky and narrow. “I don’t know that you’ll be able to do much for him,” he added, eyeing her bag.

  “Has he warmed up at all? We have another blanket.”

  “Not much,” Angela said quietly. “But more warmth will be good.”

  Lane spread her blanket over him and carefully tucked it around his body. “He hasn’t spoken?” It was a faint hope, but she wanted to know why a young man would be wounded and adrift in a leaky rowboat.

  “No. He is barely breathing. I think some of the tea has gone down, but I don’t know. He hasn’t taken much.”

  Eleanor was on her knees and feeling the pulse in his neck. “It is very weak.” She looked at the watch she always kept pinned to her dress, as if in unconscious memory of her time in that earlier war. “I’m going to take a quick peek at his injury in case it’s still bleeding, but the medics should come in the next twenty-five minutes. Then I think we should try to keep him warm and drinking tea till they get here.”

  Carefully Eleanor peeled away the two layers of blanket to reveal the torn and bloodied shirt. With utmost gentleness, she tried to peel away the shreds of cloth. At the nursing stations in France she had seen injuries where bits of clothing had been driven into the wounds, increasing the risk of complication and the chance of infection. The young man was wearing a stained and torn singlet, and a wool plaid shirt that had soaked up a good deal of blood, and as she lifted it gently away from his body, she could see what looked for all the world like a gunshot wound.

  “There’s a lot of damage,” she muttered. “And I would say it is a gunshot wound. Can you pass me the scissors and some of the gauze in the bag, please?” She held out her hand but did not take her eyes off the wound. Lane fished frantically in the bag and found a brown paper parcel that felt like it might contain gauze, and tore it open.

  “Here. How much?”

  “Yes, that will do. He’s no longer bleeding heavily,” said Eleanor. She used the scissors to cut away as much cloth as she could to try to expose the wound. The flesh gaped, and with the singlet pulled away, blood began to pool in the gash. “I’ll put this over the wound to keep it clean and I’ll just have to keep up some pressure to prevent more blood loss, not that there appears to be much left. Can you find more gauze in there?”

  Lane fished again and found what was needed. Eleanor wanted to cut the whole length of the singlet to keep the area clear, but knowing the ambulance would be there soon, she decided to focus on keeping him warm. She folded the blankets back over him. “That will have to do. I hope they come soon. It is hot out here, and I’m worried about infection. It’s difficult to know what to do. He seems to have hypothermia, so we have to keep him warm, but I don’t want that wound getting warmer.”

  Angela, still holding the Thermos, had been standing to one side watching Eleanor with amazement. In no way could she square the prim, elderly, white-haired postmistress and baker of lemon oatmeal cookies with this woman who apparently knew her way around bloodied and broken men.

  “Gosh,” she said finally.

  “Angela, why don’t you take the boys home? They’re being very good, staying in the car, but it is hardly suitable,” Lane said. The boys were sitting now, playing a game of slapsies, having found that the adults huddled on the beach around an invisible man had failed to sustain their interest.

  Angela nodded, relinquishing the Thermos to Eleanor and looking anxiously toward where her children were still incarcerated in the car.

  “He’s still alive, tell them, and we’ve sent for help,” Lane said.

  “Are you sure?” Angela asked. “I don’t want to leave you in the lurch.”

  “Certainly, my dear,” said Eleanor. “We can handle it from here.”

  Gratefully, Angela hurried up to the car. The people on the beach could hear the chorus of questions floating out of the car windows as Angela drove her brood back up the hill and away from the awful scene of carnage. Lane wondered if they would have nightmares. She wondered if she would. Since the war she had had them in waves, sometimes going for weeks without one and then suddenly having her nights shattered by shuddering and images of fire.

  While Eleanor and Kenny worked on trying to keep the patient warm, Lane walked over to the edge of the water where the boat lay tipped, the one oar beside it. Much of the water had drained out, but there were still the remains of the bloodied water, now turning a darker colour. She was about to turn away when a metallic glint caught her eye. There, mostly submerged in the gory water, was a revolver. She frowned. She reached toward the weapon and then drew back. The police, she thought, can deal with that.

  She turned. Eleanor was leaning forward. “No, no. Hold on. An ambulance is coming.”

  Lane hurried back to where Eleanor was standing, looking anxiously at the young man, who lay as if dead.

  “Is he . . .?” Lane asked.

 
Eleanor shook her head and turned away from him. “He said something but he was slurring so badly I could scarcely catch it. It sounded like ‘Just let me die.’”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Before you start, this one is still alive,” Darling said. “Can you hurry it along?” They were stuck behind a logging truck that was struggling up a steep section of the road. Darling was referring to the fact that in his relatively short acquaintance with Lane Winslow, she seemed to be responsible for the bulk of his work because of her habit of finding bodies.

  “The medics got out ahead of us, anyway.” Ames leaned impatiently to the left, hoping he could pass the truck that was not only holding them up but also throwing up a whirlwind of dust. Why couldn’t someone oil the roads out here, he wondered. “Hurrah!” Ames revved up and bolted past the truck, whose driver had waved them on. Putting his hand out the window in thanks, Ames settled back in the seat. “I can’t believe we’re doing this twice in one day.”

  “How are you getting on with your studies?”

  “Middling, sir. How will you get around while I’m gone to Vancouver? It’s a six-week course.”’

  “I can drive, Ames. See you don’t botch it up. I must have been mad to suggest a promotion.”

  Ames smiled. “It was a weak moment on your part, sir, I grant you. You were no doubt relieved to be home and relieved that Miss Winslow came back and did not stay on in England. What did happen while you were in the old country?” Ames glanced at the inspector, who was staring moodily ahead. He’d been a peculiar combination of moodier and more cheerful lately. The moodiness Ames was used to, the cheerfulness he hoped came from Darling’s growing attachment to the beautiful and intelligent Miss Winslow. Sadly, the inspector was no more forthcoming about his personal life than usual.

  Darling sighed. What he told people was that he’d gone to London to sort out some bureaucratic details regarding the crash in ’43 of the bomber he’d piloted, followed by a short holiday in Scotland. What truly happened was more along the lines of being jailed and nearly hanged for a wartime crime he did not commit. At this moment, on the way to a possible crime scene, he did not want to think about the peculiar complication his sense of gratitude to Lane Winslow had imparted to his abiding love for her. Nothing about their relationship fit any of the narratives he was familiar with, though admittedly, those came mostly from fiction. His one brush with romance during the war had been an embarrassing and unmitigated disaster, a circumstance that both freed him and at the same time filled him with an underlying anxiety about where the whole thing was going.