The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [101]
Why not do the same? I drove out immediately to a local grocery store and purchased two pounds of very lean hamburger. I also bought myself some of those high-energy snacks. On the way home I stopped to fill my little rental car with gas and check the oil and tires. Back in the kitchen, I retrieved some of the pain medicine, a potent form of synthetic morphine, that Elsbeth had taken in her final illness. I took all but one of the pills and rendered them to a white powder in the small stone mortar and pestle my father had brought back decades ago from Central America. This I mixed with about three-quarters of the hamburger. I then wrapped the doped meat in a plastic bag and put it in the rugged little knapsack I had purchased.
I also fetched the tape of Corny’s death from an old safe I have here in the house. I wrapped it twice in plastic bags and secured it in a side pocket of the parka.
For a meal I took the remainder of the meat and made myself a big hamburger, which I slathered with mustard and ketchup, put between two pieces of bread, and ate with a beer.
I moved as if in a dream. I laid out my kit — boots and crampons, thermal underwear and socks made of something called polypropylene, the long-handled climbing ax, the wrist compass, my revolver with an extra box of steel-jacketed rounds, the high-energy snacks, a headlamp of the kind miners wear, Gore-Tex overalls and hooded jacket, insulated gloves, and an old hunting knife I received one Christmas as a teenager.
It was late afternoon when I unplugged the phones and set a couple of alarm clocks to ring at two the next morning. I went upstairs, took the morphine pill with a glass of water, and got into bed. To my surprise, in retrospect, I fell asleep not long afterward.
The two clocks brought me up from an energizing nightmare about dogs and darkness. Fully conscious within seconds, I turned off the alarms and went downstairs. I dressed effectively and quickly while the coffee brewed. It was snowing when I opened the door to load the car. It had been snowing for some time, and I wondered if the roads into the mountains would be passable. It didn’t matter. I would get there one way or another.
How warm and comfortable I felt in my mountaineering clothes! How snug the revolver felt just under the jacket, under my arm in its leather holster. I also tucked in the small portable phone Diantha had left on a bureau upstairs. I thought it might come in handy.
I had not counted on a real nor’easter, blowing and snowing like the end of the world. The rented car, wearing snow tires, did very well in the snow. We poked our way out into the ghostly swirl, the streetlights glowing through the moving veils of the storm, the chunk, chunk of plows sounding along the bypass.
Nibbling at a snack, sipping coffee from the thermos cup, I got in behind one of those rumbling monsters and let it lay down a swath of sanded salt for me to follow. It all seemed both dreamlike and very real. I was nearly hyperconscious. I knew I could take the interstate to an exit not far from Tinkerton. I would walk from there if I had to!
Surprisingly enough, I was able to drive relatively close to my projected destination. I didn’t do anything theatrical like try to hide the car. I simply found the inlet to a logging road, stopped, backed up, and gave the vehicle enough momentum to plow its way well in off the road.
In the dark and the silent snowfall, I sat in the car, the lamp on my forehead playing a spot of light over the survey map. I estimated I was just short of two miles on the Remsdale Road from where it crossed Biggins Brook, a tributary to Alkins Creek. The map showed the logging road as a track. If I followed it about a mile and then turned north, it would bring me to the foot