CRIES FROM THE COLD: A bone-chilling mystery thriller. (Detective Calista Gates 1)

by Bernadette Calonego

  “Couldn’t you have taken the snowmobile somewhere?”

  “It was on the back of the truck, just in case.”

  “How many Ski-Doos do you own?”

  “Two.”

  “Where was the second one?”

  “In my parents’ garage.”

  “Did you take it out somewhere?”

  “No.”

  Gates has been taking notes and now takes over the questioning.

  “Why did you claim you didn’t know that dead dog?”

  “There are a lot of black-and-white dogs around here.”

  That’s an exaggeration, but he can’t think of anything better.

  “If I’d said it was Melissa’s, and then it turned out that it wasn’t, she’d have freaked out for nothing.”

  “According to Melissa, it’s the only whoodle in southern Labrador.”

  Gates’s voice is neither loud nor hard, but the message gets through nevertheless: don’t you try to fool me.

  “I don’t know anything about that; I’m not a dog expert. When I . . . when we found the garbage bag, I didn’t really concentrate on the dog. I could barely make anything out during the storm.”

  He looks at the whiteboard in front of him with the main points about gun safety on it.

  “The ax struck me. It could be mine. But I don’t have anything to do with the dog’s death.”

  His interrogators sit stock-still. He can imagine why. He’s spilling the beans, and they want to let him keep on talking.

  “There are green paint spots on the ax. Happened on the job. That’s how I recognized it.”

  He looks at van Heisen, avoiding Gates’s gaze.

  “I lost the ax at some point. It was in the back of my truck. Some of my stuff gets swiped now and then when I leave it somewhere. That’s why I keep most of my tools on the seats and lock up most of the time, though almost nobody does that around here. Sometimes when I’m in a hurry, I leave the keys in the ignition. Old habits die hard.”

  “Do you have any idea how the ax got into the bag?”

  “No, that’s beyond me. And like I said, I have nothing to do with the dog.”

  “So why all this secretiveness?” Calista Gates doesn’t release him from her claws.

  “Because I don’t know what’s really going on. You want answers from me. Then I’ve first got to figure out what’s going on. It’s not every day I find a dog’s head and my ax at the same time.”

  “Can you make any more sense of it now?”

  “No.”

  “And the wooden board with the Viking insignia?”

  “What about it?”

  “Was that stolen, too?”

  He feels he’s on solid ground again.

  “Not on my watch. But I had to send a delivery back to the sawmill because the measurements were wrong. What happened to it, I don’t know.”

  “Any suspicion about who’s behind the garbage bag?”

  Gerald is taken aback. Behind the garbage bag, she asks. Not behind the murder. Where’s she taking this?

  He thinks about his answer. Does he need a lawyer? First the dog, then Bakie. He sees his world turning dark. Like the twilight outside lying over the houses and the ice in the bay. How swiftly everything can change. Not only for him and Bakie’s family. For Melissa as well. And for the people in Port Brendan.

  “It might be that somebody’s trying to frame me.”

  “Who?” van Heisen asks.

  “Melissa’s family. Her brothers. Those people hate me.”

  “Why?”

  Gerald clears his throat. It’s disconcerting for him to disclose personal matters, but he’s got to save his skin.

  “They’re furious with me because I didn’t marry Melissa, although . . . although I gave her an engagement ring. They’re convinced she wouldn’t have hooked up with Bakie if I’d gotten her to the altar.” He clears his throat again. “The Richardses saw me as a good match. They also think I should have compensated Melissa better because we lived together for six years. But I—she took me to court and I won.”

  “The family didn’t approve of Melissa’s relationship with Bakie? Wasn’t he a good match? A widely acclaimed chef, a star?”

  He’s not surprised she’s the one who asks that. She’s not from these parts.

  “He’s an Inuk. An Inuk isn’t good enough for the Richardses. They came over from Newfoundland, and far fewer Inuit live there than here in Labrador.”

  Gates exchanges glances with van Heisen. It’s the first sign of silent communication between the two that Gerald has observed. Van Heisen strikes him as a lynx, silent, intent, lurking to get something. Unpredictable. Nobody knows much about him. What does he do when he’s not on the job? Has he gotten a girlfriend? He doesn’t belong to the volleyball club, and he’s never seen at the ice rink, like Sergeant Closs and the others. Now and then, he’s spotted jogging. Alone.

  Gates addresses him again.

  “I must ask this question: Was your separation from Melissa twice as hard because Melissa left you for an Inuk?”

  At first he is seized with anger, but he quickly gets himself in check. Showing anger would really be bad.

  “Why should that be? I’ve got Inuk ancestors myself, even if it doesn’t show. My grandmother was an Inuk.”

  “Did Bakie have any enemies?” van Heisen asks.

  The two of them are now working in tandem. Like he does with his foreman, Randy, who’s been with him now for seven years.

  “I can’t answer that. He was no enemy of mine, if that’s what you mean. I can’t afford to have enemies. I’m running a business.”

  While he’s talking, van Heisen’s cell phone buzzes. He pushes a key and leaves the room. The door closes tight.

  Gerald slides both hands down his face. He feels Gates’s eyes on him.

  “How did Melissa take it?” he inquires.

  “Take it?”

  “Bakie’s death.”

  “We were at her place and her mother let us in briefly. She said Melissa was too distraught for the moment to talk to us.”

  “It was hard for me back then when she . . . but I don’t wish her ill. Particularly after what’s happened to Bakie. I . . . ”

  Van Heisen reenters the room. The look on his face does not bode well.

  22

  Fred tells Gerald Hynes he can go home because he allegedly has something important to discuss with me. I’m displeased. Hynes’s hard shell was just beginning to crack. We might well have missed our chance.

  What Fred reports annoys me even more. It seems Bernard Closs went to Melissa Richards’s to seize Kris Bakie’s laptop. Melissa refused to hand it over, arguing that it belongs to her as well.

  “Now we’ve got to obtain a judge’s approval first, and that can take time,” Fred says. “The boss wants you and Melissa to talk, woman to woman, and bring her around to cough up the laptop.”

  My mouth opens wide, then shuts immediately—a good thing, because I might have let loose with something I’d have regretted afterward. What crap! It really could have waited. I try to stay objective.

  “Melissa probably panicked and thinks she’s under suspicion. But we told her mother we’d come back tomorrow.”

  Fred comes to Closs’s defense.

  “The sarge might be afraid she’d delete information that could help us.”

  “Does he really think Melissa has something to hide? Then he’d better have very good arguments for the judge if he wants a search warrant.”

  “He’s hoping you can persuade Melissa.”

  “But she’s completely in shock, for sure, and can hardly think straight. All we can do is give her time until tomorrow.”

  “You’d better work that out with the boss.”

  “I thought my communicating with the sergeant has to go through you, Fred.”

  He doesn’t miss the sarcasm in my voice. His mouth widens.

  “That was surely a . . . an oversight.”

  Yeah, sure,
an oversight. But I don’t want to argue with Fred. I’ve got something on the tip of my tongue.

  “What’s with Bakie’s cell phone? He probably communicated by phone rather than by computer.”

  “I asked the boss that, too,” Fred says tersely and stops. He avoids eye contact.

  A light dawns.

  “That can’t be true. Tell me, please, it’s not true.”

  “It is. It’s somewhere in Bakie’s inside pocket and went off to Happy Valley-Goose Bay. The sarge wants it back as fast as possible, naturally.”

  I shake my head. Sullivan and Delgado didn’t take it out of the pocket. And Closs didn’t ask about it. The phone is off to forensics in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, but we could have had a good look at it first and found important leads.

  “So we’ll have to just twiddle our thumbs and wait.”

  Something else occurs to me. All the time we were in the Viking house, Bakie’s phone didn’t make a sound. That could only mean he’d turned it off. Melissa told us she wasn’t able to reach him. He obviously didn’t want to talk to her. Interesting.

  Fred changes the subject.

  “What do you think of Hynes?”

  “We’ve got to check out his alibi . . . and his Ski-Doos.”

  “Do you think what he says is credible?”

  “I still don’t understand why he didn’t come out with the truth about the ax and the dog right away while we were on the ice. I held the ax right under his nose, and he didn’t say a thing. Nada. At least he’s a bit more talkative now. Too bad you interrupted my interrogation.”

  “Won’t happen again, Gates. However . . . Hynes isn’t stupid. Sooner or later somebody would have recognized an ax spattered with the green paint. His foreman, maybe.” Fred puts his jacket on. “Does Melissa’s family really hate him so much that they’d pin a dead dog’s head on him? And maybe even a murder? And if so, why?”

  We stand up and Fred adds: “So you’ll take Melissa Richards? I’ll take care of Hynes’s foreman.”

  Before leaving the building, I scroll through the text messages on my phone. One is from Melissa Richards: “I want to talk to you alone. Tomorrow at ten?”

  Well, that’s a breakthrough. She didn’t throw away my card.

  I phone Closs and tell him about Melissa’s text. He’s got a reporter on the other line at the moment, and to my astonishment he doesn’t insist on my seeing her this evening.

  Once I get home, I warm up some soup. As I’m eating, it crosses my mind that I promised my godson, Jeremy, I’d videochat him. I lay the computer on the kitchen table and dial him up. When his innocent face appears on the screen, happiness hormones flow through me.

  “Aunt Calista, what are you doing with that?”

  He’s spotted the snowmobile helmet on the dresser. Jeremy’s two sisters crowd into the picture.

  “It’s my call,” Jeremy shouts, pushing his sisters away. Five years old and so possessive.

  I tell him about the piles of snow here, and he wants to see my snowmobile.

  “It’s already dark where we are,” I explain to him, “I’ll show you some other time. How’s the guinea pig doing?”

  He disappears, and I see the familiar living room of my oldest sister and her husband in the background; then Jeremy holds the guinea pig up to the camera.

  “Mama says it’s too fat and shouldn’t eat so much.”

  His words are drowned out by a loud din. Not at his end, but at mine. Wouldn’t you know.

  “Wait a second, Jeremy, there’s somebody at the door. I’ll be right back.”

  I go around the corner and see some silhouettes through the door window. I open it carefully and stare at three little costumed figures before me, their faces hidden by some remnants of fabric.

  A child’s voice shouts, “We are mummers! Can we come in?”

  “Mummers, mummers, we are mummers,” a second, wildly excited voice. Kids in costume. I surrender and wave them inside.

  “Come in,” I say, and they follow me into the kitchen.

  Jeremy is bug-eyed when I hold up the laptop to show him the procession.

  “Look who’s come to visit.”

  My nephew is momentarily speechless. Then there’s a confusion of shouts and chatter, and soon all his siblings are in front of the screen. Even my sister shows her face for a minute.

  “It’s an old custom in Newfoundland and Labrador, and it’s called mummering,” I explain to them. “The people dress up in costume and go from house to house and dance; then you must give them something to drink.”

  Curiosity overcomes my little visitors when they hear voices emanating from my laptop. They take off their masks. They are Inuit children; one of them seems to be Rick Stout’s daughter, Dulcie—Wendy told me about her Down syndrome. I don’t know the two others.

  “Are they going to dance now?” Jeremy asks, excitedly, giving his guinea pig back to his mother.

  “Dancing, dancing,” Rick’s daughter repeats, beaming, and begins to hop around. The two others—they’re boys—are probably a little older than Jeremy, and can’t tear themselves away from the screen.

  “We don’t have any music to dance to,” one of them shouts.

  “Music, music, music,” Dulcie sings, in high spirits. She looks seven, but I’m not a good guesser.

  “I make music,” Jeremy gets his child’s guitar and strums it.

  All the kids talk at the same time, in Vancouver and Port Brendan. Technology presents no obstacle to them; they’ve found out how to connect with one another. I watch the spectacle for a while until my sister thinks it’s time to end the call.

  Jeremy and the girls protest, but my sister promises them caramel corn. Unfortunately the mummers in the kitchen hear her, and I don’t have any caramel corn.

  I end our call and gaze into three expectant faces.

  “Do your parents know where you are?”

  They say yes so convincingly that I don’t dispute them. I sit the children around the table and melt some chocolate into hot milk. I find some muffins in the cupboard. Georgina Closs really thought of everything.

  While the trio are chattering away around the table, I do a futile search for Rick Stout’s number in the phone book and on the Internet. Finally I resort to an old trick. I pick a number in Port Brendan at random and ask the woman on the phone for Rick Stout. It works: everybody knows everybody in the village. The woman gives the information out almost instantaneously.

  When I dial the number, I get a woman’s voice and leave a message. Surely it’s Rick’s wife Meeka. I sit down on a chair beside the children.

  “Are you the police?” one of the boys asks.

  “Yes, but I’m not working at the moment, not until morning.”

  Actually, I’m always on the job, and a lot of work is waiting for me.

  The boy gives his and his brother’s names, but I can’t keep Inuit names in my head.

  “Dulcie, Dulcie,” Rick’s daughter shouts and points to herself.

  “Hello, Dulcie. I’m Calista.”

  A children’s chorus repeats my name.

  But Dulcie is doubtful.

  “Carl, you are Carl?”

  “No, Dulcie. Carl is the doctor. The doctor’s name is Carl.”

  Silence around the table. Then a boy shouts: “Dulcie has to go to Dr. Carl.”

  His brother joins in and the two of them chant: “Dulcie doesn’t want to go to Dr. Carl.”

  Dulcie’s smile disappears. Suddenly tears stream down her face. I tell the boys to stop their teasing and caress Dulcie’s cheeks and head until she calms down.

  I have to think of something, and what comes out is: “Drink your hot chocolate, and I’ll tell you the story of Sasquatch.”

  All eyes are on me while I tell them about the legendary ape-creature in the British Columbia wilds who appeals to the imagination of many Canadians.

  Dulcie interrupts me all of a sudden and says, “Dr. Carl hurts the dog.”

  I stare at h
er.

  “Why does he do that, Dulcie?”

  “The dog, the dog,” she replies.

  The front door opens.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice calls.

  Dulcie beams. “Daddy!”

  I go into the hallway. Rick takes off his hat, visibly contrite.

  “I’m so sorry the kids invaded your house. I had no idea they’d left. They are allowed to dress up but not to go outside.”

  “I’m glad you got my message. You certainly must have wondered where they were.”

  I don’t ask him where he and his wife were.

  “What message?”

  “In your voice mail.”

  “Oh.” He seems surprised and a little concerned. “I didn’t listen to it. I just followed the footprints in the snow with my flashlight.”

  “So you didn’t . . .”

  His daughter sticks her head around the corner.

  “Daddy, I’m a mummer.”

  “Come along, sweetie, we’re going home. Where are the other two?”

  “I’m staying here,” comes from the kitchen.

  Rick laughs.

  “Mommy will be back soon, with chicken from Mary Brown’s.”

  Instantly the two other Inuit children appear in the hallway, where little puddles have materialized on the floor.

  “We had hot chocolate and muffins,” the bigger boy announces.

  “Well, weren’t you lucky? And you haven’t taken your boots off. You must take your shoes off in a stranger’s house.”

  Turning to me he says: “They’re always up to something, these rascals.”

  He opens the door and nudges them into the cold air.

  I shout after him: “Thanks for clearing away the snow, Rick!”

  He raises his hand as an answer. I watch them out the window going down to the house next door by the bright beam of the flashlight. I reheat the cooled-off soup. The table’s covered with crumbs, along with three dirty cups. The kitchen suddenly seems lived in.

  Rick might get a tongue-lashing from his wife when she learns that he lost track of the children for a while. Just a few days ago she probably would have laughed it off. But Bakie’s murder must really alarm parents in Port Brendan.

  And not only the locals. Also the “Come from Away”—that’s what strangers are called in Newfoundland and Labrador. Shannon Wilkey was visibly shocked by Bakie’s death. She hadn’t counted on something like that in her creative refuge in Labrador. She must have heard about Lorna’s skeleton as well, although she’s isolating herself. I wonder how Ann Smith is coping with the news of Bakie’s murder. The dog’s head definitely upset her, as I could easily see.