by P. W. Child
“Don't care,” Joanne chuckled through the clumps of cake in her mouth. She suddenly stood up, staring ahead in stunned silence. Her mouth was hanging open as if she had just seen a ghost.
“What's wrong?” Nina frowned, but when she followed her friend's line of sight she sighed and relaxed. Carrying on with her cupcake as if it was an everyday occurrence, she hollered, “Hey Sam!”
“'Allo, Dr. Gould!” he smiled, walking towards them in cargo pants and a tight-fit, long sleeve shirt that had Joanne swooning. With his duffle bag tossed over his back, he held the handle tight to his shoulder with one hand while the other carried his equipment bag. It had taken him all of two days to travel to Canada after Nina had contacted him about the possible existence of a hidden treasure from the personal coffers of Alexander the Great.
She had forwarded all the details and news reports she could get to Sam via e-mail, finding that he still detested technology after all this time. He had agreed to use his contacts and resources to investigate the case of Leslie Michaud and Sam had managed to dig up some fertile information pivotal to their trek.
“Sam Cleave, this is my old friend and fellow, Miss Joanne Earle, history teacher and treasure detector deluxe,” Nina introduced them. Sam was no stranger to female starry-eyed admirers and he could immediately see that Nina's friend thought the sun rose in his boxers. Keeping as cordial as he had to without leading her on, Sam gave her a hug, complete with the pat on the back.
What he could not deny though, was that she was very attractive. Still, he knew better than to step on Nina's toes by complimenting Joanne. Secretly the journalist was elated that he got to go looking for the remnants of Alexander the Great's wealth with two beautiful and professional women. He’d have them wrapped around his little finger from the start and his juvenile humor was going to elicit every bit of pampering from the situation possible.
“Did you sleep during the flight, at least?” Nina asked as she brought Sam a beer.
“Aye, a few hours, but it still feels like it wasn't enough,” he replied. “Thanks.” He took the beer and cracked it open with a jovial expression. “Cheers!”
Joanne toasted with him, lifting her beer festively while Nina stood behind Sam, leaning against the doorway with her cup of coffee. “When did you start drinking beer?”
“Oh,” Joanne said, trying not to pull a face at the horrid taste she’d never been able to handle since she was a teenager, “I drink the occasional beer, depending on the function.”
Nina nodded, looking impressed, regardless of the fact that she and Joanne knew the history teacher just wanted to impress Sam. Yet Joanne appreciated the fact that Nina did not judge her for it and kept her secret. The historian just smiled at her friend and winked.
“So, Sam, what did you find out about Leslie Michaud that was so good that it merited you flying all the way here to make this happen? Obviously you must have uncovered something worth the trouble,” Joanne pried. Nina was equally eager to find out what Sam had on the case, but she played it cool. Knowing him, he would deliberately keep information from them to jest if he knew how desperate they were to know what he knew. Sam moved forward on his chair to answer.
“I think there’s more to what the reports said and I found out from a reliable source who the boyfriend was and why this despicable thing befell an innocent woman who was just hanging out with the wrong man on the wrong night. The whole affair is actually a sad outcome to an accidental incident and that makes it so much more of a good story,” Sam admitted. “I must confess, ladies, I am as much in this for the tragic story of Leslie Michaud as I am for the treasure of one of the world's richest and powerful kings.”
“That is understandable. Even just the fact that her body was dumped in the middle of nowhere and left where nobody, her loved ones or the world knew she was. That is what is the saddest for me. The moment my student called me over all shocked, pointing out the skeleton in the woods I could feel that sorrow and sense of loss,” Joanne recounted.
“Now I’m curious, Sam. What did you get on her involvement with the trinket?” Nina relinquished her stiff upper lip attitude for the need to know. “Please, Sam, don't fuck with us. Just tell us what you’ve got.”
Joanne laughed, “Yes, Sam! After all, had it not been for us you would not have gotten this story in the first place. You owe us.”
“Full disclosure, mate,” Nina commanded light-heartedly.
“Alright, alright, ladies,” he surrendered. “Let me just take a leak and get another beer and I'll meet you in my cabin in ten for a debriefing.”
“I'll help you lug your stuff so you don't spill that precious beer. Joanne will kill me if I allowed any of her favorite drink to go to waste, right Jo?” Nina mocked playfully as she grabbed Sam's photographic gear and started toward his cabin, one over.
“That’s right!” Joanne played along, digging into the last cupcake. “Don't…spill my beer, guys.”
Out of earshot of Joanne, Nina asked what she was desperate to know from Sam.
“Have you heard from Purdue, by any chance?” she asked.
“The last time I spoke to him face to face was when I Skype'd you for your birthday and he was with you, remember?” he reminded her, sounding a bit sour. “But he left me a message at my hotel and when I called him the woman harboring him told me he took off in a hurry. To tell you the truth, I thought he was just rushing back to you, since you are so close these days.”
“Hey, you’re the one who decided to take off and break communication with Purdue, so it's not my fault that he was with me on my birthday while you were God knows where, enforcing your distance policy,” she defended.
“I had to be far away, otherwise Paddy's agency would use me to track Purdue down and you know it,” he snapped back.
“So why the hell are you so pissed off that he was with me on my birthday?” she asked angrily. “Jesus, I'm not your wife, you know!”
Sam stopped and turned to her, shoving the door shut. He grabbed Nina without warning and kissed her passionately, wrapping her up in his muscular arms to keep her from protesting, which she would not. She missed him terribly and although she would never admit it, he could feel it coursing through her – an intense and shadowed yearning. Almost inaudible moans sounded inside her throat as he kissed her and her hands told him what her tongue never would.
Suddenly he just let her go, her body still reeling from the erotic surprise. Off-balance, Nina reached for the table corner just to steady herself.
“You're goddamn right, you're not my wife,” he punished her. Sam opened the door and waited for Nina to leave. “Go back before Jo thinks that something's going on between us.”
She could not figure out if he was kidding or if he was as hurtful as he sounded, but she obliged anyway. “Don't take too long,” was all she said as she left. On her way back Nina's body was burning with sensual want, but Sam's shitty notion that he alone determined when they got it on pissed her off to such measures that she decided to dismiss the entire incident as his obtuse need for attention.
“Jo, give me one of your beers, will you?” she ordered when she entered cottage.
“Um, sure,” Joanne smiled and opened the fridge. “I thought you didn’t like beer either.”
“I don't,” Nina pouted under her dark scowl. “In fact, if you had any hard spirits right now I would have sank a few doubles.”
Joanne was not stupid. She could tell that her friend's demeanor had suddenly fallen down a bottomless well. “What did he do?” she asked Nina.
“How could you tell?” Nina choked on the weak drink.
“Psychology. I work with teenagers, remember? I know a lovers' quarrel when I see one,” Joanne shrugged, feeling a bit stung by the obviousness of her crush's feelings toward a woman she could never compete with.
“We are not lovers,” Nina gritted unconvincingly. “And I hope he knows that too.”
“Right, then, let's go to your…not lover's cabin. He’s h
ad his ten minutes and I want to know what we’ve been waiting for for three days,” Joanne suggested firmly.
“Aye,” Nina agreed and left the beer to get warm. It was her passive-aggressive way of getting back at Sam in some roundabout power-play.
Chapter 17 - Contrition
When the three of them sat down at the kitchen table in Sam's cottage, he had his laptop rigged up to some audio-visual equipment so that they could all hear the interview he’d prepared.
He explained, “Now this was yesterday morning, where I interviewed a disturbed patient at a minimum security institution in Montreal. Apparently this bloke is terminal, so he wanted to make amends for all the shit that got him sick and all that, you know?”
On the screen a gaunt, pallid man appeared, no older than fifty-five. At the bottom of the screen rapidly running editing track numbers flickered in white in stark contrast to the man's slow, barely noticeable movements.
“His name is Erich Bonn and I found him by employing that long shot you ladies suggested – by checking the local accommodation logs to locate former managers or clerks who could remember a woman matching Leslie's description checking in,” he smiled. “And believe it or not, I found one lady who was disbelieved by her husband back when the news first talked about the missing woman. She gave me the boyfriend's name from one of her registers in a back room, gathering dust. And I found him!”
“Play it! Play it, Sam! I am dying to know all this. Did they tell you what this Erich guy was locked up for?” Nina asked.
“They did, but according to them there are a file's worth of shit wrong with this boy,” Sam explained. “Delusional, schizo, sociopath, you name it, but…get this, the court did not believe that he was dangerous and he was put in this holiday resort for psycho's. Can you believe that?”
“These days the world's common sense is so goddamn backwards that I could not say I was surprised,” Joanne remarked. “But what is your take on this guy? Is he dangerous, you think?”
“Honestly? I think he is completely sane, but that is a hazard of my vocation, and especially the adventurous side of it. I mean, the things we've seen, the things Nina and I know are possible, would make us sound batshit crazy to any therapist.”
“True, true,” Nine nodded fiercely. “They'd lock us up in a blink.”
With that Sam played the short clip where he asked Erich to tell him the story from a firsthand perspective. Erich spoke clearly, even though he was clearly under mild sedation to assure docility and compliance. He looked terrible, even for a man of his age and illness. Eyes sunken into their sockets made their color barely visible and his lips, if the slight swelling could be called so, were chapped and thin. Deep dimple cuts fell into his face to display his dreadful state of emaciation, but his recollection lacked nothing.
“Is it on?” he asked, his shadowy eyes leering at the camera lens. “You know, I have told my story so many times, but nobody believes me and nobody cares. They just bring another hypodermic, you know?” He sighed and looked up at the ceiling.
The loud audio setting gave the silence in the room an ominous hiss, reminiscent of old horror films of experimentation and medical malpractices. Sam's adjustment of the camera started Nina and Joanne with its sudden crackling sound.
He smiled at their reaction. “Sorry. The lens was off-center.”
Erich's blank eyes stared at the camera and he just started talking without warning.
“I met her two days before I…lost…her,” he said. “She was with some friends in Victoriaville and we met at the lake, you know? So we got along great and such. Then she told me that she had to go back to Montreal, because she didn’t have her own car. She had to go back with her friends in their car. I did not want her to go so soon, so I offered to take her home after we spent some more time together in Quebec City and she could tell her friends I'll take her,” he rambled, wringing his bony hands off camera.
Nina felt uncomfortable just listening to the story. It was an intuitive reaction to the manner in which things progressed in his tale and perhaps the fact that she knew how it was going to end. Joanne placed her hand on Nina's arm and said, “I know. I feel it too.”
“What?” Nina asked curiously.
“That sickening feeling; that apprehensive morbidity that makes you not want to hear what he remembers, but you have to because otherwise you cannot forget,” she told Nina. She caught Sam's dark eyes studying her, but he said nothing.
Erich continued. “But her friends did not trust me…”
“Christ, I wonder why,” Nina mumbled softly.
“…and they took her back to Montreal just as planned. But me and Leslie decided we would meet at the Notre-Dame Basilica after her friends dropped her off, you know? So that is what we did. I met her there and took her to Quebec City for dinner…”
Erich stopped, biting his lip. His forearms stop moving, implying that his locked hands kept still now as his thoughts wandered down a dark and thorny path. He looked at Sam and down again, catching his breath. “That was the last time Leslie was ever happy.”
“Oh God, I really need a drink now,” Nina declared with sorrow plaguing her pretty face. “I’m not sure I’m ready for this, Sam. Can't you just tell us in short?”
“It’s not that much longer, Nina,” he offered. “It’s less than thirty-five minutes long and he doesn't use detail. I know that doesn't make it less evil, but it’s not as explicit as you might expect.”
“While we were…you know, having sex in a motel outside the Mingan Archipelago Reserve, there was a knock at the door. The office of the motel got a call from the people I worked for. They had landed at the Natashquan air strip and needed me to help them up at the weather station in Torngat,” he spoke quickly as if relaying the story quicker would make it easier.
“Wonder who he worked for,” Joanne noted. “It sounds illegal to me.”
“Aye, probably a cover,” Nina replied.
“I could not leave her there and I could not drive to Montreal to drop her off, you know? So I took her with me in the plane. At the airstrip I met up with my sire, Johann…he is dead now.”
“Your sire?” Sam's voice sounded sharply on the speaker.
“That’s what they called the guy who brings you in, you know, the guy who is responsible for you and gives you High Command's orders. Johann Kriel was my sire. And his sire was waiting for us to get to the Torngat Mountains, but they told me nothing up front. Johann was very upset about Leslie, but she promised to stay out of the way and she promised, you know, not to let Yvetta see her.”
“Yvetta was Erich and Johann's boss, an Austrian aristocrat with a hard-on for gold and guns,” Sam said briskly.
“They flew us to Weather Station Kurt way up, up, up, you know...there by Martin Bay?”
By Erich's expression his interviewer (Sam) was not familiar with the places he mentioned, so he carried on. “There was a weather station there, but a few miles from there a temporary weather camp was set up by my peopl, for us to stay over if we had to, you know? I’d never been there before, but before Yvetta got there Leslie hid under one of the military beds in the second prefab structure, waiting for me.”
“We're running out of battery. Shit,” Sam's voice same from behind the camera again. “Erich, can you maybe recount your story a little bit quicker?”
“Of course. We were there to load three MAC trucks' worth of stuff hidden off-shore in Martin Bay onto two trawlers. Gold coins, precious metals cast as kettles, pots and vases, you know? Even entire boxes made of solid gold with jewelry inside! Took eight of us to load it. Of course, Leslie got curious about the temporary stores so near to the place where nothing happens…”
Nina gawked at her friend, who in turn gloated and smiled. They would leave this discussion until after the credits, so to speak.
“…and she somehow got her hands on one of the large coins when Johann and two of his men saw her come out of the toilet with it in her hand, but they decided to deal wit
h her later. So when Yvetta arrived, we were all in deep trouble – cavity searched by Yvetta's security men for gold pieces because she did not trust us after loading the loot into the containers on the boats.”
Sam turned to Nina and Joanne. “See, he told me afterwards that the loot was kept in a sunken German U-boat under the water of Martin Bay. The perfect vault to have hidden treasure, right? I almost admire their guile.”
“It is rather cunning. Besides, nobody would even think to go up there. It’s cold as fuck and there’s no indication that a shit load of gold is stashed there,” Nina said. “It’s a perfect hiding place.”
“When I went back inside, Yvetta was on my ass. I tried to warn Leslie, but she was climbing out of the bathroom window with Johann grabbing at her feet. He told Yvetta that Leslie was a thief, but before he could point fingers I…” Erich swallowed hard and dropped his chin in remorse. “I shouted out that Leslie was with him, that she was his girlfriend and he was playing Yvetta…and then…she shot Johann in the back of the head right there!” he wailed, wringing his hands again. Erich's eyes were so wide with terror in his recollection that the lens almost captured the long lost humanity in them. “Just like that, Mr. Cleave! Right in front of me without even thinking twice, she shot my sire for a lie I told. I betrayed him and I betrayed Leslie, because Yvetta immediately promoted me and told me to help her hunt Leslie down!”
“You had to or she would have killed you,” Sam's voice sounded through the speaker.
“Do you know what it is like, Mr. Cleave? To live your whole life a wretch because your recklessness caused your woman's death?”
Oh shit, thought Nina, quickly glancing at Sam, wondering if he was thinking of the same thing she was – that his passion for getting a good story inadvertently got his fiancé killed right in front of him. Nina wondered if Sam still cried in his sleep when his recurring nightmares cheated him out of saving Trish to perpetuate his guilt complex.
But Sam did not return her gaze. Either he was actively fighting the horrible recollection or he was simply past the compunction. So she let it go, not having heard if the voice behind the camera lens even answered the wasting, weeping man.
