She Felt No Pain

by Lou Allin

  Ann’s voice was upbeat. “Her prognosis is good. She had a bone marrow transplant. Leukemia’s not a death sentence any more, thank god.”

  Holly flipped through the guidebook. This was not her métier. And if kids had an expertise she didn’t, why not let them loose? “Do you think he’d like to help me find that cache this weekend?”

  “I’ll set it up. The extra attention will mean everything to him. People say that kids shirk responsibility. That’s bull. They thrive on it.”

  *

  With “Gotta Fly Now” still pounding in her ears from her father’s breakfast music, Holly met Sean at Bailey Bridge on Saturday at nine sharp. He had chained his mountain bike to a tree and was checking every tool on a gigantic Swiss army knife, blowing out dust and making sure the blades were shiny. His honorary RCMP patch, an old one Ann had found, was sewn onto his denim shirt. “Thanks for reporting, volunteer Sean,” Holly said, giving him a crisp salute and keeping her face serious. She’d worn her uniform to add to the drama but was happy to omit the bulky vest.

  “I brought a GPS,” she added. Even two hours last night had left her no wiser about its functions.

  Sean gave the Garmin dinosaur a polite look, but his scorn for out-of-date technology couldn’t be hidden. “That’s okay. I have my own,” he said, patting a slim unit on his belt. “Got it for Christmas. It’s a lot…smaller and lighter than that one you have.” As a second thought, he added with an earnest nod, “But yours is good, too.”

  Holly tucked the device into a small packsack she’d brought along with some drinks. “Hope you like root beer,” she said.

  “Cool. Anyway, I ran off the Bailey Creek cache like Corporal Ann asked,” Sean said, showing her the printouts. “So we start at the parking lot. Uh, should I call you Officer or Corporal Holly?”

  “Just Holly is fine, since we’re officially off duty,” she said, hiding a grin. “Corporal Ann says you’re quite the expert on geocaching.” She watched his eager pink face swell with pride. His light brown hair was neatly combed around a stubborn cowlick. She fought the urge to smooth it down. Memories returned to her of her mother hauling out a handkerchief and spit-wiping a smudge.

  “I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. Scored everything from here east to the city. My parents took me on the Grand Circle Tour when school let out. There’s a whole bunch of neat stuff there. I bought a couple of travel bugs, too. We camped out and made fires in a pit. Lake Cowichan is awesome for swimming. My mom usually doesn’t like me to go into the ocean here. I almost stepped on a jellyfish last time. That’s dangerous.” He added a mock shiver.

  Holly was amazed at how fast Sean could talk. Once wound up, there was no stopping him. “Lead on,” she said. “You’re da man.”

  Walking slowly, they took the path up from the lot. A larger dirt track broken by quads ran up the right side, and a smaller creek path angled down the left. He frowned at the directions on the sheet as he squinted up through the leaf cover. “We can’t get coordinates under the trees, so we’ll have to do some guesswork. We want North 48 degrees 23.235, West 123 degrees 51.767.”

  Though the site had three stars out of four for moderate difficulty, this was harder than it looked. As Sean manipulated the unit, he was so focused that Holly felt like a total amateur. Operating a compass was her limit. Who said that kids had short attention spans? “Do we take the left or right fork?”

  “It doesn’t say. They don’t want to make it too easy, like for babies. Let’s try the right.”

  They tapped in and out of the satellite feed, checking in every fifty feet. “Closer, closer. It says we’re a hundred feet away.” Then Sean stopped and frowned. “What the heck? Now we’re going away from it.”

  Holly tried to think of the angles, the road, the path, the creek. Two ravens danced overhead in avian harmony, dipping and diving in a game. “What now?” She tried not to sound impatient. How humiliating it would be if they had to give up. But Sean clamped his jaw and pointed ahead.

  “We’ll back up and take the left path instead. The clues talk about a mis…mistletoe. It was encrypted, but I figured it out. Only wusses hit the translate button,” he said. “But what’s a mistletoe?”

  Her moment had arrived. “A cute little parasite that grows on trees. In England, the tradition about kissing under it started because it was one of the rare plants still green in winter. But in my knowledge of island botany, it’s possible that the mistletoe idea is only figurative.”

  His face puzzled as he looked up at her. “Figurative?”

  “Not the real thing.”

  They doubled back and took the other path, which led downward to the creek. Salal, false azalea and fragile red huckleberry branches brushed at their clothes. The massive thumb-thick branches of the Himalayan blackberry were emerging with thorns that could shred skin and blind an animal. Holly stumbled on a fir root arching its back onto the trail. “What kind of a cache would we be looking for? What size?” She hoped her computer research had given her some credentials.

  “They start at micro, that’s like an old film cannister or a medicine bottle, then small, then regular Tupperware or ammo cans, but in the city you’re not supposed to use ammo cans or anything that looks dangerous.”

  “Makes sense. People could panic over a bomb scare.” Ammo cans were ubiquitous in the boonies, where many households contained a shotgun.

  “Then they go all the way up to large, like a five-gallon bucket.”

  Holly laughed and wiped her sweating brow. “Wish we were looking for that size.”

  “Ours is regular,” Sean said with assurance. “Like you could use for leftovers from supper.”

  “Sounds easy enough to spot.”

  He shook his head. “Not really. A lot are covered with camouflage paint.”

  A blaze on a mother bigleaf maple so thick with moss that it housed at least six other biospheres of ferns in its crotches caught Holly’s eye. Then they crossed the creek by skipping over rocks. In the wet season, it would have been a roaring, impassible torrent. On this humid day of activity, a few dunks cooled her sneakers. Back and forth they went like modern prospectors, taking readings, scanning near and far. Sean pointed up a high hill, crumbling at the top, a goat path if a path at all. “The first road we were on is beyond that, and we’re about parallel now. The cliff is too steep. Something’s not right. It’s possible that the rains last winter washed the path away.”

  “Is it always this tough?” She stopped to rest her arms on her knees. Sean wasn’t even breathing hard. Here was one kid with stamina. Inside his cargo shorts, his legs were skinny but muscular. Scabs on each knee proved his fortitude.

  He walked a few more yards, checked the reading and gave a whoop. “I bet it’s back across the creek. I think I see an opening by that tree.”

  They trip-tropped across stones onto a gravel delta and scrambled up the low bank, following what looked like an otter’s slip. Sea otters were nearly extinct all the way to Alaska from two hundred years of trapping for the world’s most sumptuous fur. River otters were smaller, and often quite comical, floating on their backs in the sun, even “holding hands” in one viral video. Then Holly took a few mental bearings and realized, despite the zigging and zagging, that they were in the vicinity of where Joel had died. A chill ran over her neck as Sean thrashed with a stick. From her pack she retrieved two thick pairs of gardening gloves.

  “Put these on. And watch yourself grubbing in the brush. I’m sure you heard about the man we found here. He was a drug user.” Suddenly she felt a sense of responsibility as the dangers of man overshadowed nature’s.

  “Here’s the reading!” Sean said and hustled over to a rotted stump. “It has to be in here.” He mucked around, tossing twigs and moss, rooting like a terrier. “Something’s weird. This is the exact location, but where is it?”

  Holly looked up. Fifty feet above, hardly noticeable in a western hemlock, was a small yellowish parasitic growth, branched and tufted. This �
��witch’s broom” caused a distorted growth of the tree. A west-coast variety of its namesake. “Good eye. There’s the mistletoe.”

  Sean whistled. “I never noticed that. Creepy stuff.”

  “So what do you think happened? Have you come across this before? Found the exact spot but not the treasure?”

  They sat for a moment on soft moss clumps and divvied up the soda. “For sure. I hate that.”

  “It’s not a very funny joke, making people come all this way.”

  “Owners are supposed to maintain the sites, refresh them, make sure they’re not falling apart through the winter rains. And if they take them down, they’re supposed to report back online. Keeping good records is important.” It was obvious that this was a serious business to him. She found the idea endearing.

  Far overhead, a pair of geese took their morning flight to the grassy fields at nearby Malahat Farm for a free lunch. Holly marvelled at the timing, but then she heard geese every day…and most nights. “Right. So people like us don’t go on a wild goose chase.”

  As Auntie Stella said, she needed the patience of a deer. Giving up wasn’t setting a good example for Sean. She stood up and assumed an official stance.“Look around, in and under everything. We’ll establish a logical perimeter. Could it be buried?”

  “Uh-uh. You can’t make people dig. No shovels allowed, no knives, nothing.” Sean finished the soda, flattening the can on a rock for easier carrying.

  Twenty minutes later, under a suspicious pile of rocks and broken roots, they found a Tupperware container wrapped in a new plastic bag from BC Liquors. A smear of dirt marred Sean’s freckled brow. “This is pretty far away. Why did someone move it? No fair.”

  Together they knelt and took off the bag, revealing a plain plastic container with a watertight lid. “Wow,” Sean said. Removing his gloves, he took out a couple of action figures. “Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Chewbacca. Cool.” His eyes glowed. Joy in small things after a hard-won fight.

  There was also a compact logbook, a cheap ballpoint and scribbled entries from people during the last year, all before Joel’s death. This cache had been popular. She tried to put herself in his mind, addled by drugs. In all likelihood he didn’t even know what he had found, probably some kid’s pirate treasure. But in his craft and cunning, he’d changed the location.

  A smudged white envelope lay on the bottom. While Sean was inspecting the toys, Holly opened it. Instead of the money she’d expected, it was a few folded pieces of lined paper from an old exam book, ripped out and ragged at the edge. The careful printing seemed to be the cast of a play and the description of a few scenes.

  “What’s that? Another log?” Sean asked, putting his small hand on her shoulder and peering. “A letter? Weird.”

  “It’s…like a story.” Was the paper as aged as it looked, or had it weathered in the damp?

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s called…” She struggled to make out the blurred title. “Triumphe of Love: Godde Save Gloriana.”

  He squinted as he looked at the words. “Godde? That’s not spelled right. Stupid.”

  A tiny smile broke out on her face. “I think it’s meant to sound very old. They used to spell things differently.”

  His little eyes scanned the paper as he cocked his head in concentration. “Metchosin? Something or other of Renfrew? I know those places. What’s it all mean? Are you supposed to, like, add to it?”

  “I’m pretty sure not.” Holly’s right ear itched, and she scratched it thoughtfully. “There’s no mention of this…story online, is there?”

  “No, it just says the action figures.”

  “It’s possible someone else left the envelope. Someone who didn’t know about the game.”

  “You can take it,” he said in an officious tone, “if it’s not part of the cache. But what will you do with it? Does it have anything to do with that dead guy?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, thinking about how she’d been about to give up the search. As for taking it, this was no crime scene. Or was it?

  Sean looked at her, his cherubic face serious. “Can we update the log?”

  “If that’s the idea, why not?”

  As they packed up, Sean added a tiny yoyo to the box, promising to log the cache online and post about the different location. “Never leave food,” he said. “It gets stale and animals come around.” They put the Tupperware into the liquor-store bag and tucked it under the log.

  Going back down, Sean seemed to remember something. “Hey, I was gonna ask you about Scott Bouchard. Everyone’s saying he’s in deep shit..sorry, I mean trouble.”

  Word spread quickly in the small community. “It’s against the law to deface public property, but he seems to have learned his lesson. No one wants a quad confiscated.”

  “For sure. I don’t like him anyhow.” He bit his small lip as his voice assumed the conviction of an older boy. “He’s a big fat liar.”

  “A liar?” This interested her in the face of his accusations about Marilyn. She hadn’t denied that they’d quarrelled, but she’d downplayed the level of violence.

  “For sure. He couldn’t tell the truth unless he thought he was lying.” He laughed at the joke. “That’s what my friend Pat says. He’s in Grade Eight at the middle school in Sooke, same as Scott.” Fossil Bay had only one school Sean’s elementary one.

  In their conversation, other noises were blocked out. Then Holly heard a sound that stopped her heart. It was a faint but determined huffing, coming closer. Then a scrabbling in the bush. A streak of black. “Sean,” she said, “make noise. Lots of it.” What a time to be caught without pepper spray. She’d left her duty belt at home.

  He caught her hint. They started whistling and clapping their hands, and as she walked slowly back along the path, Sean sang, “Bear, bear, go away, come again some other day, go back in your den and stay, I don’t really want to play.”

  Nothing pleased them more than the brushy sounds of retreat. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear… Dramatic though it was to actually meet Bruna, either up a tree or nose to nose, it was better not to. Both species had made the wiser choice to head in the opposite direction. “That was a great song,” she said as they stopped to catch their breath.

  “Works every time. My grandpa taught it to me. But you have to stay calm. They can tell if you panic. They can smell your fear.”

  Back down at the trailhead, Sean unlocked his bike and saluted Holly. “Wait until my sister hears about this. We went on a real mission, didn’t we?”

  “Tell her you’re our number one scout,” Holly said.

  Driving home, her heart rate returned to normal. This had to be the envelope Pastor Pete had mentioned. The proximity of the body was too coincidental. But why did Joel want it kept safe? This was no item of value. The writing was so small that she couldn’t read some of it in the muted light of the rainforest.

  *

  At home that night at her desk, dictionary in hand, she was better able with a strong lamp and a magnifying glass to decipher the words. As for Joel, he had been farsighted, as Bill had said. If he could barely read it, how could it have any meaning to him?

  On a piece of foolscap, she jotted the names. Lord Thomas, a ghost. The Duke of Metchosin. The… Earl of Renfrew. Eville Clarissa. Then the knights, whose names she couldn’t decipher. A Page, Messengers. It seemed like a childhood fantasy exercise. Harry Potter in the middle ages. To what purpose?

  This rough outline started with the Ghost’s invocation. Hadn’t there been something similar in Hamlet, which they read in Grade Twelve? Then came a scene in Hell with Ate and Lust. Lust she understood, but Ate? Act Two involved a kind of inquisition with comic relief from a Moorish servant and a cook. Act Three brought a test involving a temptation and an echo scene, whatever that was. In the last act the Eville Clarissa perished, having been cast from the ramparts. Ramparts? She thumbed the dictionary. Battlements in a castle. In a final scene, complete with
a song, Gloriana was crowned during a celebratory masque. Masque? A dance, a pantomime. Was this a comedy or a tragedy, a little of both? Amateurish, though, even to her untutored eyes. English lit courses were as far from the practicality of criminal-justice courses as her father’s profession was from her mother’s.

  This wasn’t her father’s area of expertise. But there was someone who could help. Sister Clementine at Notre Dame, Holly’s old alma mater in Sooke, the private school where her father had sent her against her mother’s wishes. Bonnie had felt that she should swim with the rest of the common folks, not paddle in an elite pool. Would the good sister still be working? Until they pried the chalk from her cold dead hands.

  TWELVE

  Chipper yawned and stood to stretch his tall frame. It was after five, but he was staying late to finish traffic stats, the downside of his job. Numbers of speeding tickets. Types of accidents with or without injuries. A routine seat-belt check at the Fossil Creek Bridge had yielded ten violations in one afternoon. One elderly woman claimed that the belt must have slipped open because she was “religious” about fastening it. When she saw the $167 fine, he thought he was going to have to radio for an ambulance. “Twenty-five dollars less if you pay in thirty days, ma’am,” he said, touching the bill of his cap. Bean counting. If he’d liked that so much, why not become an accountant? Getting drunks off the roads pleased him most.

  Holly had asked him to monitor the situation near Port Renfrew, where a landslide had washed out one lane. Only rudimentary repairs had been made. A visit down the road showed that the way was passable, but barely. More warning for motorists was needed. They’d need to call for official signage. Plastic cones alone weren’t cutting it. And kids were stealing them. He had an idea about addressing the Port Renfrew grade school. If kids growing up formed a positive impression of the police…

  For once, he was in no hurry to get home to his small room at the apartment. His grandmother was visiting from Durgapur, and since she was nearly deaf, the television had been blaring sitcoms every evening. His mother ruled the house, but she had to defer to her own mother. “When are you getting married, Chirakumar? Your cousins have all given me grandchildren. You will be an old bitter man and die of loneliness like the moneylender on our corner. Warn him, Gupta. He needs to hear it from his father,” she’d say, wringing her small brown hands. Telling her his nickname had elicited a hiss worse than a cobra’s. “What abomination is that? It sounds like a biscuit.”