The Call of the Mild

Chapter Forty-Seven

Just a few hours earlier, Gus had wanted nothing more than for the bickering among the lawyers to stop. Now that it had, all he wanted was for it to start again. What had replaced it was so much worse: a hostile silence marked only by suspicious glares and the tromping of feet on the forest floor.

They were marching down the same trail they had taken before. It wasn’t just Savage and Gwendolyn. It was all the lawyers, along with Shawn and Gus.

Shawn’s plan had been a good one. It would have sent the group’s two strongest hikers down the mountain, almost guaranteeing they’d make it to a rangers’ station. Even if one of them had been the smuggler or Rushton’s spy, the other would have made sure the mission was carried out. And best of all, it removed two of the most annoying bickerers from the campsite, ensuring that the rest of them could enjoy the time they spent waiting for rescue.

But that plan couldn’t work once they found Mathis’ body. “We have to face the truth,” Shawn said. “One of our group is a murderer.”

“You don’t know that,” Savage said. “For all we know it could have been one of them.” He waved a hand at the acting troupe, who were huddled together as far from the lawyers as they could get without leaving the safety of the camp.

“Save it for the courtroom,” Balowsky said. “There’s no jury here to taint.”

“It wasn’t one of them,” Shawn said.

“How can you rule them out so definitively?” Savage said.

“Do you even know their names?” Shawn said.

“I know Miranda,” Balowsky said. “And I can vouch for her whereabouts all night.”

“Which by some astonishing coincidence gives you an alibi, too,” Gwendolyn said.

“That never occurred to me,” Balowsky said. “But I suppose you’re right.”

“The fat chef is named Bram Tchaikovsky, or something like that,” Savage said. “The rest of them have some kind of cowboy names.”

“Exactly my point,” Shawn said. “These are anonymous, faceless figures. Redshirts, actually.”

“They’re wearing white,” Jade said.

“It doesn’t matter what color their clothes are,” Shawn said. “You’ve got your three stars and one major guest player beaming down to the planet along with one security officer you’ve never seen before. Who do you think is going to get mowed down by space Nazis before the opening credits?”

“They’re wearing white and they’re still alive, while Mathis is dead,” Jade said. “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“He’s trying to say they’re bit players,” Gus said. “We don’t really know them except for the limited function they perform in the camp. We haven’t been able to differentiate them in any substantive way, and they are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. So there’s not much point in assuming that one of them is the killer.”

“Are you saying that you are ruling them out as suspects because they lack sufficient entertainment value?” Savage said incredulously.

“Absolutely,” Shawn said. “Do you think it’s too early to start thinking about lunch?”

“We can’t just sit down and eat lunch when there’s a killer among us,” Jade wailed. “One of us is dead. Don’t we care at all?”

“We sat down and ate breakfast when there was a killer among us,” Shawn said.

“We didn’t know,” Balowsky said.

“One of us did,” Shawn said. “Which brings up an important point. We need to rethink our plan.”

“It seems to me that the only change we need to make is to accelerate it,” Savage said. “Gwendolyn and I should leave immediately.”

“That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “If these two are our only hope of survival, we want them on the trail before the killer can get to them.”

“Unless,” Gus said, “one of them is the killer.”

“That would be a problem,” Shawn said. “Because if one of them killed Mathis, then it would only make sense for that person to kill the other hiker and escape, as we all starve to death waiting for a rescue that will never come.”

“Go ahead, say it,” Gwendolyn demanded. “You mean me.”

“It could be Savage,” Shawn said.

“Standard English usage is to use the male pronoun when talking about someone whose gender is not known,” Gwendolyn said. “When you avoid pronouns altogether, you really mean ‘she.’ ”

“Female pronoun there has a point,” Gus said.

“I can prove it wasn’t me,” Gwendolyn said. “Because I wouldn’t have used a knife. I could have snapped his scrawny neck with my bare hands or smothered him with a pillow. Hell, I could have jammed a finger through his eye socket into his brain and he’d have been dead before he noticed I was in the tent.”

The other lawyers moved a step away from Gwendolyn.

“Well, that certainly sounds like the declaration of an innocent person to me,” Shawn said. “Who’s for sending her out on the trail with Savage? Show of hands?”

Not a hand went up. Not even Gwendolyn’s.

“What if one of them isn’t the killer?” Balowsky said. “Then do we just stay here waiting to be picked off one by one?”

“There’s no reason to assume the killer is going to strike again,” Shawn said. “Of course, since we have no idea why that person killed Mathis, we have no way of predicting what that person will do next.”

“There are other pronouns beside ‘he’ and ‘she,’ ” Gwendolyn said. “For example, there’s ‘I.’ And then of course there’s ‘ you.’ How do we know you aren’t the killer?”

“She’s right,” Savage said. “We don’t know anything about you two.”

Shawn looked hurt. “What do you want to know?” he said. “I’m an open book. With pictures. And a table of contents. An index. Pull me off the shelf and check me out. And you don’t even have to reshelve me when you’re done. There are metal carts placed in the aisles for your convenience. Which is actually kind of annoying if you’re looking for a title and someone has stuck it on the cart and no one’s gotten around to putting it back in its place.”

Gus could see the lawyers getting restless again. And worse-suspicious. If Shawn kept talking this way, it wouldn’t be hard for the real killer to plant a suspicion in the minds of the others.

“Morton Mathis infiltrated Rushton, Morelock six months ago,” Gus said. “We joined the firm only a couple of days ago. Whoever he was hunting there, clearly it wasn’t Shawn or me.”

“We don’t know he was searching for any of us,” Gwendolyn said. “All we have is your word on that. For all we know you were the criminals he was hunting all along, and you came along on this trip just to kill him.”

“And a darned good plan that would have been,” Shawn said. “So many criminals are able to plot the perfect crime, but when it comes to the getaway, that’s where they slip up. So we designed a murder in which getting away was impossible from the beginning, so there was no chance of it going wrong.”

The logic of Shawn’s argument, or at least the complete lack of it, seemed to quell the lawyers’ suspicion of the two of them. Gus took advantage of the opening.

“Grab your packs,” he said. “We need to get going.”

“Before lunch?” Shawn said.

“No lunch for us,” Gus said. “We need to leave the fresh food for the Triton Players. They’ll stay here until we can get a helicopter up to them.”

“All of us?” Balowsky said. “What if I want to stay here with Miranda until you come back?”

“What if you want to stay here until we’re gone, then kill all the actors and make your escape in the wilderness?” Savage said.

“Then at least there would be five fewer actors in the world,” Gwendolyn said. “Mathis wouldn’t have died for nothing.”

“Gus is right,” Shawn said. “We all go or none of us goes. And if none of us goes, none of us is getting back home.”

There was grumbling from the lawyers. Grumbling and more suspicious looks. But then Savage marched over, swung his pack up on his back, and fastened the straps. “Let’s go,” he said. “Those trails aren’t going to hike themselves.”

One by one the lawyers put on their packs and headed towards the trail. Gus took a moment to tell the actors what was going on and give them a chance to join the trek down the mountain. Either Coty or Bismarck-Gus still couldn’t say which was which-looked like he wanted to come along, but troupe loyalty outweighed the desire to flee the meadow, and since there was no way the chef would make it past the first day, they all decided to wait for rescue. If nothing else, Helstrom reasoned, the owner of the costume shop where they had rented their terrorist outfits would report them missing if they didn’t return the clothes in a few days.

Shawn, in the meantime, had been going through Mathis’ pack and dividing the packets of dehydrated food between his load and Gus’. When Gus came up to him, he swung his pack up on his back. “Race you to the bottom?” Shawn said.