by P. W. Child
Keep still and watch first. If they really want to come in they will come back, his safer reasoning suggested. There was no reason to rush into problems until he knew better. Purdue had to combat his erratic side, the part that wanted instant answers and progress, even in the face of the unreasonable and perilous. A brush at Purdue's leg in the pitch dark room practically made his heart stop and he kicked wildly at the slithering sensation on his calf. A heavy thump sounded a few inches to his side and he knew it had not been his imagination.
Outside the man at the door gave up and started down the old cement pathway toward the road. Only then did Purdue see that it was a police officer that had called at Nina's door, but in the dark room it was more important to determine what manner of reptile was accosting him and the tall explorer pulled a small, but deadly dagger from his boot with great care and silence. He kept his blind eyes to the direction of the thump and waited for a moment, perking his ears for any movement.
An offended meow came from the darkness and the sound of a glass getting knocked over. Purdue switched on the light and found Bruich wet and agitated in the corner, having knocked over the standing vase of water and dead flower arrangement Nina had bought herself last. “Oh geez, old boy, I'm sorry!” he consoled the confused and very unnerved feline in between helpless laughter at the pitiful sight of him. “I thought you were something else, Bruich. Please forgive me.”
But soon his attention was peeled from the wet cat and its dreadful eyes. Again the same insistent knock came from the front door. “Oh shit, my friend, here come the fuzz,” Purdue told Bruich. “He must have seen me switch on the light in here. Back in a minute.”
Mulling over all manner of responses to the predictable questions the officer was going to ask, Purdue formulated something believable and innocent as he walked toward the lobby. The caller waited patiently for him to get to the door, unlike the inconsiderate oafs he was used to who could not estimate the distance a man had to walk to the front after the first knock; those idiots who kept knocking as if they presumed the occupants of the home were usually standing right next to the front porch.
Purdue opened the door and saw the same policeman he had seen leaving a few minutes before.
“Good evening, sir,” the man said.
“Good evening, Sergeant,” Purdue smiled, hoping that the cop hated watching the news. “How can I help you?” he asked, having ascertained the man's rank by his epaulets.
“May I have your name, sir?” the officer asked.
“Only if I may have yours,” Purdue smiled coldly. “What is this about that has you coming to my door at this hour? Sir?”
“But this is not your door, is it?” the sergeant answered. “This house belongs to a woman, Dr. Nina Gould, and unless you have a very good medical team for this remarkable transformation, I suggest you tell me your name or I shall have to arrest you for questioning as to her whereabouts.”
Touché, Purdue thought, and he responded with something he never resorted to – the truth.
“I am a close friend of Dr. Gould's. I saw the newspaper tag lines while I was on a business trip in California,” Purdue explained casually. “So I cut my trip short and came back to see if I could find her. As you can see, I am a friend of hers, because I had the key to her house. I clearly did not break in.”
“Neither did the kidnapper, sir,” the tenacious officer persisted.
Purdue sighed. “Have you heard anything from the kidnappers yet? I find it ridiculous to abduct someone without some contact with their immediate family or friends.”
“I am going to need some identification from you, sir,” the sergeant asked again.
“Just a minute,” Purdue said, but the officer followed him into the lobby to make sure he was not a criminal that would bolt as soon as the door was closed. Purdue got his jacket and produced his fake passport. Whilst the officer examined Purdue's credentials, Purdue peered past him to the exterior of the house and the front lawn. The officer looked up at him with a snide expression. “Expecting friends?”
“No, just peculiar that there is no squad car parked in the street. Did you walk here?” Purdue asked.
“My partner is waiting in the car around the corner, Mr. Hoffa,” the officer sneered. “You know, you look very nervous about something.”
“Only nervous because there is a stranger in my friend's house passing himself off to be an officer of the law,” Purdue said calmly. Flicking at the man's chest, he revealed another peeve. “I also do not see any identification card on this charlatan, who's long sideburns would never pass the dress code inspection and, you have no baton or stab vest on...Sergeant.”
The police officer showed no reaction as he pulled his gun. “Get down on the floor. Put your hands behind your back!”
“No.”
“I will not say it again! Get down on the floor! I am placing you under arrest for suspicion of a crime!” he shouted and pointed the gun at Purdue.
“What are you? MI6? You look the type! Did Patrick Smith send you?” the billionaire growled, biding his time to lunge at the gun aimed at him.
“It is of no consequence to you who sent me, David Purdue!” the officer roared furiously. “Now get on the floor and put your hands behind your back or I swear to God I will cripple you right here! Do not test me, mate!”
“No way,” Purdue repudiated the threat.
“This is your last chance, Purdue!” the man warned. It was indeed his last chance, this was evident to Purdue, so he propelled his body onto the impostor as swiftly as he could to catch him off-guard. He was not going to be arrested now, he thought, not when he was finally back where he could find Nina's trail.
Their bodies clashed with a mighty thrash, wiping all the porcelain off the sideboard in the lobby and sending the plates and tea cups crashing to the floor. Jonathan Beck's gun was between then, a hot steel threat that could end the life of either, or both, at any moment as they matched strength to seize the upper hand. Groaning and rolling on the wooden floor the two opponents fought until the gun came loose from their fumbling hands and slid across the floor into the darkness where neither man could see it.
From oblivion a hard set of knuckles slashed the skin on Purdue's cheek, ringing his ears on impact. He did not see it coming quick enough to block the blow, but it was the power behind it that rendered him unconscious. Still thinking that he was being apprehended by a crooked police officer working for Special Agent Patrick Smith's organization, Purdue passed out imagining in how much trouble he would be for resisting arrest when he woke again.
Vaguely he could hear himself slur, “I'm sorry, Nina.”
Chapter 15 – Lead the Way, Leslie!
Through page after page of PDF documents and online archive material Nina paged, reading every sentence in great detail, just in case she could come across anything significant happening in the criminal history of Newfoundland and Labrador. The term was laughable to both her and Joanne – criminal history of Canada – because of the country's reputation for, well, not crime.
“I get nothing,” Nina huffed heavily, sliding her empty coffee cup across the smooth surface of the nook to hint at a hot beverage – again.
“I’m not surprised,” Joanne replied, her voice yielding absolutely no wonder for the research and its long tedious hours of nothing. “Nothing ever happens here. You know, I heard a myth at school that a certain, undisclosed area in Labrador is known as the 'place of nothing.' It is reportedly a patch of earth where nothing significant has ever happened throughout history. Nothing. No events worth even mentioning had ever transpired in this particular piece of land.”
She could see the disbelief, disregard, and imminent ridicule in Nina's face, so she added quickly, “Apparently.”
“You heard this from high school kids?” Nina asked in more of a statement, keeping herself from laughing.
“I heard it from…yes, a teenager of Inuit heritage a few years ago,” Joanne confessed. “But think about it. This p
art of the continent is so godforsaken that even in ancient times the tribes here were meager, if any, at any given time. It’s really not that absurd that there could be a part of this coastline where nothing throughout history had ever taken place.”
Nina afforded her friend the courtesy of giving it some thought. Joanne was making another pot of fresh black coffee, but she secretly waited for a response from her colleague.
At last Nina said, “Nope. No, I can’t say that I can endorse that theory, honey. Think about how old this planet really is. Not what the Bible tells you, not what scientists tell you, not what National Geographic or the agents of god-one, -two or -three tell you. Just what your instinct tells you when you really think about the things that have been here and things still to come when our tiny race of nothing is forgotten under layers of universes and millennia of chaos.”
“But it is so remote,” Joanne tried.
“Now, yes,” Nina argued her point. “But in this vastness of time where no records were, or could be, kept? Nobody can say for certain nothing ever happened there.”
Joanne set Nina's cup down and sat down, propping her face up on her hands. “It would be pretty cool though, hey? A place so barren of energy and so meaningless to happenstance that not a single incident wished to take place there.”
The morbid thought was strangely poetic. “Sounds like my mother's house,” Nina muttered in thought just before she took a sip of coffee, leaving Joanne in stitches. She was still laughing when she heard Nina catch her breath at something on the screen. Instantly Joanne stopped chuckling to inquire.
“What? What? What? Did you find something?”
Raising one eyebrow, Nina looked up from the luminescent screen, slightly adjusting her glasses on her nose. “Are you familiar with a missing persons case in Labrador from 1981?” she asked Joanne, who had been resident in Newfoundland long enough to not be considered a foreigner.
“1981?” she frowned. “Um, not that I know of. I only moved here after my second year after graduating from the Quebec Teacher's College, love.”
“I know, I know. But since you’re a history teacher I reckoned you might have heard of important and/ or infamous incidents in Newfoundland's history too, you know?” Nina shrugged.
“I suppose,” Joanne agreed. “Let me think. I would not have heard of it really, unless someone told me about it. After all, 1981 is too far back for our generation anyway.”
“True,” Nina concurred. “Anyway, I found an article in the Labrador Herald from 1981, imploring the public to keep an eye out for one Leslie Michaud, a young woman from Quebec who had been reported missing by her roommate.”
“Could it be the woman?” Joanne asked, suddenly wide awake and her zest rekindled.
“Could be. Listen,” Nina announced. “Miss Laura Hampshire from Thunder Bay, Ontario, had been Miss Michaud's roommate for over a year. When Miss Michaud did not return to the Montreal flat they shared from a long weekend with friends, Miss Hampshire reported her friend missing. After police questioned Miss Michaud's friends they determined that she left their company an hour after arriving back in Montreal, at 7:20 p.m. on the evening of October 3rd.”
“Whoa, a name, time, date, hometown…the works!” Joanne remarked. “But is it her?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Nina affirmed.
“How come?” her friend asked, drinking faster as the information was revealed.
“The friends they spoke to that she was out with? They described to the cops,” Nina read, scanning and skipping to the important parts, “that she wore a pink knitted top under a large brown parka and corduroy pants with Doc Martins.” Nina looked up at Joanne. “Did she wear any of that kit?”
“I can’t remember the pink top being knitted…” Joanne scowled in frustration at her holey memory. “Wait! Wait, let me get hold of Pam to get hold of Lisa so we can get those pictures before her parents make her delete them!”
“Aye! Good idea. Hurry up, this is getting interesting. Look at this one,” Nina chattered happily, finally getting a pay-off for all of her hours of aimless reading. “This is from the Montreal Post, dated October 12th, 1981, reporting that Michaud went missing in the vicinity of Quebec City, which is different from the other account.”
“Do they say why?” Joanne asked while furiously texting Pam for Lisa's number.
“Aye, this one says that she was last seen with a boyfriend at 9 p.m. in Quebec City at a restaurant. After that, nobody knows where they went. So I suspect her friends parted with her in Montreal and then bonny Leslie decided not to go home, because she had a booty call,” Nina winked. “I suppose she met the boyfriend there and went to dinner with him in Quebec City and then she disappeared.”
“Very plausible,” Joanne replied. “But how did her body end up here? Do you think she was killed somewhere else and just dumped here?”
“Hmm, maybe we should check what Goose Bay was in the Eighties. If it was a holiday resort, or if it had motels or accommodation, we could very well track down who checked in nearby around those dates,” Nina suggested. “It’s a very long shot, but with a bit of backdoor burglary one can uncover the most heinous secrets, and I speak from experience.”
“I'll ignore the double entendre I could milk in those words and share the good news,” Joanne scoffed with a giggle. “Lisa is going to send the pictures she took from her phone to mine. You can load them on your laptop to get better detail from the high resolution.”
“Excellent,” Nina smiled.
Looking a bit sheepish and uncomfortable, Joanne sank into her seat and stammered, “So, Nina? When are you going to call Sam Cleave to join us? I mean, if he can join us.”
Nina laughed. “You have such a thing for him, don't you?”
“I'm not blind,” Joanne grinned. “He is kinda gorgeous, even with those wild tresses.”
“I like those wild tresses. When I met him he looked like a rebellious schoolboy. Suave and groomed like a proper journalist. But along the way he became feral. As he found himself, I guess you could say, as he survived harsher and deeper waters, Sam came into his own,” Nina recounted dreamily. She could never tell Joanne, but as she spoke fondly of him she could smell his skin and feel his touch from her reminiscence. “So from what I can figure, when Sam Cleave finally grew up, he realized that he had grown up into the skin of the man he is now – the devil-may-care wild man who wields his temperament, judgment, and loyalty like fierce weapons. Through all the hell and tribulation, he’s morphed through a long and painful metamorphosis from a romantic and straight-edged Romeo to a hardened and strong Achilles.”
Suddenly she noticed that she was caressing her forearm lightly as she spoke of him. Opposite her Joanne was smiling, admiring Nina's admiration for the man she’d once called her lover before they’d drifted apart and inadvertently reverted to close friendship. “See? You know what I’m talking about,” Joanne giggled. “God, I sound like a school girl.”
Nina sighed and took to her cold coffee at the bottom of the cup to pry her thoughts away from Sam. “Anyway, speaking of schoolgirls, has that Lisa girl sent our images yet?”
“The first two are loading.”
“Okay,” Nina said satisfactorily. “Oh, and to answer your question…I first want to see if we can find a tangible trail to a physical location from where we can search for the rest of this hoard before I call Sam. I don't want to drag him out of his business there before I’m sure we have a solid lead here. And that solid lead we can only get from finding out where darling Leslie Michaud went astray in early October, 1981…literally.”
When the images were downloaded, Nina enhanced the best one and leaned closer to see better. It was close to 2:15 am already, but the women had their blood pumping in the excitement of drawing nearer and nearer to the young woman, Leslie Michaud. “She was shot in the head, Jo,” Nina announced. “Twice, by the looks of it. Fucking swine. I bet it was the boyfriend.”
“Of course it was,” Joanne concurred. “
Wonder where he vanished to. If we could follow the trail…but where…ugh, God, all this for a treasure that probably got plundered long after Alexander the Great was dust.”
“Hey, stop that shit,” Nina frowned. “I did not come all the way here for this. Look!” She held up the coin. “Here it is, hard evidence that this treasure exists! This is not the typical coin with Alexander's face on, honey. This is from one of the empires he conquered during the height of his campaigns…and that is solid proof that it is from the hoard of Alexander of Macedon!”
“I'm sorry,” Joanne apologized, burying her hand in her hair. “I'm just so tired of dead ends.”
“Ha! You think relic hunting is all car chases and booby traps under the temple floors? Hell no, Jo! This stuff is 90% research, running into dead ends a thousand times until you get that one, just that one open door. And we are nine-hundred and ninety-eight tries away from breaking this goddamn code, so please humor me and think of the destination of our journey so that you can help me swim through this swamp of shit we have to drown in before we get an arrow to Alex's gold.”
“Whoa,” Joanne groaned, “you are passionate about history. Not to hammer on Sam, but, wouldn't he have the investigative skills we need to find out who Leslie Michaud was hanging out with in those last days?”
Nina froze, staring into space. Then she rose to her feet and embraced Joanne. “Jo, you are a fucking genius. Dick-whipped, but genius nonetheless.”
Chapter 16 – The Third Hunter Comes
Three days later Nina and Joanne were sitting on the front porch of their rented cottage, eating cupcakes the camp director's wife had baked.
“Not bad,” Nina mumbled with her mouth full. “Sam's going to love these.”
“My tummy just tingled,” Joanne grinned.
Nina shook her head. “He can be quite insufferable, you know?”
