But Tom's ferocity spoiled the plan. He wanted more than my death. He wanted me to suffer and he picked Val as the instrument. By then the whole crew of them, C.L.A.W. members, Tom's friends, everybody, was so caught up with the excitement that they'd thrown their plans away. They decided to go to the Legion and hold Carmichael hostage. That's why Tom came down there after he severed the kid's arm. He was ready to be Hitler, Attila, anybody with the power of life and death over a bunch of terrified hostages. The way the Crown Attorney summed it up was, "They were drunk on blood."

  Only I got lucky and caught that grenade in time. The jury sat stone-faced and listened to the whole story and found the three principals guilty. Tom was sentenced to life in Penetanguishene, the hospital for the criminally insane. The way the Act is written, he's there on a Governor General's warrant, but in fact he was to be there forever, he was beyond rehabilitation. His mother and Rachael were remanded for sentence. Margaret was released on bail, pending an appeal, and she disappeared.

  I don't think they tried very hard to find her. She was too important a symbol. She had beaten the odds on her own. Starting a week after giving up her baby she had put herself through school, through college, and into some American university. She was a credit to the whole Indian people and this crazy blot on her copybook could have ended that. So she walked.

  And I walked, back to Murphy's Harbour, to lengthening days, to summonses to the owners of ice-fishing huts for not pulling their places off the ice early enough, to looking up at the first crows of February, and the returning ducks and geese of April, to a way of life that was beginning to suit me more and more. Who can tell, I may stay here until retirement. Me and Sam.

  Author Biography

  Ted has been a flyer, a beat cop, a pinboy, soda-jerk, freight porter and advertising hot-shot. He has also written dozens of short stories, hundreds of magazine articles including two long-running humour columns, television plays and one musical comedy. He has had fourteen books, thirteen of them novels, publishing in Canada, the U.S., Britian, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Japan. He has been widowed and married Mary in 1975. He is the father of three, stepfather to another three and granddad to a total of nine, counting steps and one step-step. He now runs Whitby's Ezra Annes House bed and breakfast in partnership with his wife Mary.

  ***

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  Ted Wood, Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

 

 

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