Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [30]
Now she looked appalled. “I didn’t know.”
“Yeah. I also…I threw a rock at your ex,” he added lamely.
“You what?”
“I threw my hand axe at him. I saw a look on his face I didn’t like, and I just did it.” And in fact the stone was below in the glove compartment of his van.
She squeezed his hand. Her face had the grim inward expression it took on whenever she was thinking about her ex. “I know that look,” she muttered. “I hate it too.” And then: “I’m sorry I’ve gotten you into this.”
“No. Anyway, I missed him. Luckily. But he saw the rock go by his head, or felt it. He took off running down the Metro stairs. So he definitely knows something is up.” Frank didn’t mention going by their apartment afterward and ringing the doorbell; he was already embarrassed enough about the hand axe. “So, what I’m still worried about is if he starts looking, and, you know, happens to replicate what my friend’s friend did.”
“I know.” She sighed. “I guess I’m hoping that he’s not all that intent on me anymore. I have him chipped, and he’s always in D.C., at the office, moving from room to room. I’ve got him covered in a number of ways—a spot cam on our apartment entry, and things like that, and he seems to be following his ordinary routine.”
“Even so—he could be doing that while sending some of his team here to check things out.”
She thought about it. Sighed a big sigh. “I hate to leave here when there might not be a reason to.”
Frank said nothing; his presence was itself proof of a reason. Thus his appearance had indeed been a bad thing. The transitive law definitely applied to emotions.
She had directed him through some turns, and now they were driving around the head of Somes Sound again, back toward her place. As he slowed through Somesville, he said, “Where should we put my van?”
She ran her hands through her short curls, thinking it over. “Let’s put it down where my car is. I’m parked at the south end of Long Pond, at the pump house there. First drop me off at the house, then drive down there, and I’ll sail down on the iceboat and pick you up.”
So he drove to her camp and dropped her off at the house, feeling nervous as he did so. Then he followed her instructions, back toward Southwest Harbor, then west through the forest again, on a winding small road. He only had a rough sense of where he was, but then he was driving down an incline, and the smooth white surface of Long Pond appeared through the trees. The southern end of its long arm was walled on both sides by steep granite slopes, six or seven hundred feet high: a pure glacial U, floored by a lake.
He parked in the little parking lot by the pump house and got out. The wind from the north slammed him in the face. Far up the lake he saw a tiny sail appear as if out of the rock wall to the left. It looked like a big windsurfing sail. Faster than he would have thought possible it grew larger, and the iceboat swept up to the shore, Caroline at the tiller, turning it in a neat curlicue at the end, to lose speed and drift backward to shore.
“Amazing,” Frank said.
“Here, wait—park your van up in those trees, just past the stop sign up there.”
Frank did so and then returned to the craft, stepped in and stowed his daypack before the mast. The iceboat was a wooden triangular contraption, obviously handmade, more like a big soapbox-derby car than a boat. Three heavy struts extended from the cockpit box, one ahead and two sideways and back from the cockpit. It was an odd-looking thing, but the mast and sails seemed to have been scavenged from an ordinary sloop, and Caroline was obviously familiar with it. Her face was flushed with the wind, and she looked pleased in a way Frank had never seen before. She pulled the sail taut and twisted the tiller, which set the angles of the big metal skates out at the ends of the rear struts, and with a clatter they gained speed and were off in a chorus of scraping.
The iceboat did not heel in the wind, but when gusts struck it merely squeaked and slid along even faster, the skates making a loud clattery hiss. When a