LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

said, sluicing the shampoo from her long hair, ‘If I tell you what happened, would you pass it on to Garry for me, Pam? I can’t go out with Jud tomorrow, I just can’t!’ Biting back the panic that had made her voice rise, she poured another bowl of water.

      ‘Garry makes his own decisions about the camp, Kathrin, you know that as well as I do—but he’s fair, too. Sure, I’ll tell him.’

      Kathrin reached for the soap, lathered it on her facecloth and began to talk, deliberately detaching her emotions from the words she was recounting. ‘I grew up north of Toronto. My mother was the housekeeper on a big estate called Thorndean, owned by a man named Bernard Leighton. You may have heard of him—he’s a major entrepreneur with business interests all over the country: mining, forestry, a couple of newspapers. My mother was there for years, because my father had been the head gardener. He died when I was two, and my mother stayed on.’

      She scrubbed her arms as if getting clean were her only care in the world. ‘Bernard Leighton had two sons. Ivor, the elder, by his first wife, and Jud, whom you’ve now met, by his second. Ivor was the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.’ She gave a rueful laugh. ‘I fell in love with him when I was about six, I guess...I thought the sun rose and set on him. He never paid much attention to me—he was eight years older, after all—so it was Jud I spent time with, not Ivor.’

      ‘Ivor’s better-looking than Jud?’ Pam interposed incredulously. ‘I’d get up at four a.m. any day of the week to make Jud Leighton his breakfast. It’s just as well I’m in love with Garry—Jud’s gorgeous, Kathrin!’

      ‘I suppose so,’ Kathrin said without much interest. She had never seen Jud in that light and wasn’t about to start now. ‘He and I were buddies, Pam. Friends. More like brother and sister than anything else, I suppose. When I flunked an English test and when I had to get braces on my teeth and when my best girlfriend moved away—Jud was the one I went to for comfort and advice. My mother and I were never that close, so I suppose it was natural that I gravitated to Jud. Besides, we both liked the same things—the outdoors and animals and roaming the countryside. And there were only four years between us.’ She stretched to scrub her back. ‘Jud always had a wild streak in him, something untamed and uncontrollable. He used to skip school on a regular basis because he couldn’t stand being cooped up.’ For a moment her voice faltered. One of the many thoughts she had smothered over the years had been how Jud, who had found the brick walls of the school a prison, had ever been able to stay sane in a real prison.

      That was none of her concern, she thought fiercely, and picked up the thread of her story, only wanting it to be done. ‘Jud might have been wild. But he was—or so I thought—totally honest and trustworthy. If he was going to do something to you he’d do it to your face, never behind your back.’

      ‘That’s kind of the way he looks,’ Pam said thoughtfully.

      ‘It’s fake,’ Kathrin said curtly. ‘The summer I was seventeen, he was caught embezzling money from his father’s business. Caught red-handed. It had been going on for months.’

      Pam padded over to the stove and helped herself to more hot water. ‘Are you sure? That’s so sneaky and underhanded. He doesn’t look the type.’

      ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Kathrin’s voice thinned. ‘There was an anonymous phone call tipping off the police. At the trial Jud tried to pin the call on Ivor. But Ivor was with me; he couldn’t have done it.’

      Ivor and she had been in bed together, she thought, ducking her head in a wave of dizziness. ‘It’s awfully hot in here,’ she mumbled.

      ‘It’s a sauna,’ Pam said, reasonably enough. ‘You can’t stop there, Kathrin—what happened?’

      With a complete lack of emotion Kathrin said, ‘Bernard—their father—was so upset that Jud could have accused Ivor that he had a stroke. A relatively mild one, but a stroke, nevertheless. The prosecution had already produced evidence that Jud had been systematically stealing for months, salting the money away in different accounts. He finally confessed, and he was sent to prison. End of story.’

      Pam shook out her cluster of black curls. ‘You never married Ivor,’ she said, making it more question than statement.

      Kathrin said rapidly, ‘Right after the trial Ivor told his father he and I had made love. Bernard fired my mother, and she and I left the next day. I never saw Ivor or Jud or their father again.’

      ‘Until tonight when Jud turned up at the kitchen table. No wonder you looked as if you’d seen a ghost,’ Pam said, obviously intrigued. ‘It all sounds terribly feudal...like one of those family sagas on TV. Didn’t his father think you were good enough for Ivor?’

      ‘The housekeeper’s daughter? I should say not! He couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.’

      ‘He was nuts,’ Pam said succinctly.

      Kathrin managed a weak smile. ‘That’s sweet of you. But Pam, you do see why I can’t possibly go out with Jud tomorrow—I don’t want to be anywhere near him!’

      ‘I’ll speak to Garry,’ Pam said decisively. ‘I’m sure he’ll understand.’

      ‘Thanks,’ Kathrin rejoined in true gratitude, ‘you’re a real friend. Now, are we going into the lake or not?’

      The sauna was on the shores of Loon Lake, which was still partially frozen, and it was the custom of the more stalwart of the scientists to follow their sauna with a swim. ‘Not me,’ Pam announced. ‘The last time I did that, it took me the whole night to warm up.’

      But Kathrin needed some kind of drastic action to shake off the mood of her story. She had told Pam the truth. But she had not told the whole truth, and it was the gaps in the story that were bothering her as much as its fabric. She flipped her wet hair over her shoulder and said, ‘Wait for me, I won’t be long.’

      ‘I bet you won’t!’

      The air outside struck cold on Kathrin’s bare skin. It was one of the unwritten rules of the camp that the men stayed away from the vicinity of the sauna when the women were using it, so Kathrin didn’t even look around as she picked her way down the rocky slope to the lake. The ice was about fifty feet out. Not giving herself time to think, because if she did she would turn tail for the warmth of the sauna, she stepped into the lake.

      It was, not surprisingly, ice-cold. Keeping a wary eye for rocks, Kathrin ran forward and plunged in, gasping with shock. Kicking as hard as she could, she swam to the very edge of the ice, let out a couple of whoops worthy of any loon, then stroked for the shore with an inelegant but highly effective degree of splashing. She was half-upright, her feet seeking a purchase on the bottom of the lake, when she saw something from the corner of her eye. Her head swung round.

      Jud was standing on the shore watching her.

      CHAPTER TWO

      KATHRIN stood still, a rock digging into her heel. Jud was wearing a dark blue parka, a haversack thrown over one shoulder, and something in his posture made her heart skip a beat. Once, when he had been fourteen or fifteen, he had liked to hunt; and just so had she seen him waiting, statue-still in the woods, for his prey.

      The coward in her, that part that subconsciously had hoped she would never see any of the Leighton men again, wanted to scurry up the slope and vanish into the sauna. But Kathrin was twenty-four now, not seventeen, and cutting through the turmoil in her breast was a clear, pure flame of anger. Earlier in the evening she had likened this place to heaven. She had been happy. But Jud, who had invaded her heaven, had by his very presence despoiled her hap-piness.

      Neither hurrying nor bothering to disguise the fact that she had seen him, she straightened, her body a smooth interplay of pale curves against the dark waters of the lake. Her nudity scarcely bothered her; as a child, had she not swum naked with Jud in the lake on his father’s estate time and again and thought nothing of it? ‘You’re breaking the rules,’ she said crisply. ‘The men don’t come

Скачать книгу