Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  I thought back to Jim Fiat’s perfect tan and expensive suit.

  “What were you going to ask him?”

  “I got into a bit of an argument about him with our hosts, so I just wanted to get some things straightened out, you know, find out where he really stands on a couple of issues.”

  “You care about that stuff? Maybe you aren’t a kid.”

  “I don’t care that much about it. I just think he’s a fake.” I shrugged. “Do you follow politics?”

  “A little, but there aren’t many people at my school who want to talk about it. Most of them just don’t care. I have to say, though, there are a lot of things more important than politics.”

  “I agree. I just wanted to know why he takes some of the weird positions he has. Like, he wants to decrease the number of people coming into Canada. Not because I have concerns about it, but because it seems like such a dumb idea. A selfish one. It seems like the plan of a rich dude who wants to keep what he has, and it’s full of fear of things that are different. I have so many friends back home from all over the world. If you believe in Canada, then you believe it’s a good place—not perfect, but good—and you want to share what we have with people in need.”

  Antonine didn’t say anything for a while, just looked at me. In some ways, I had kind of echoed what her mom had said about these things. I hadn’t intended to, it was just the way I felt.

  “I’d vote for you,” she finally said.

  Wow, that was a good comment.

  “I bet your dad wouldn’t have voted for Fiat,” I said.

  “You’ve got that right.”

  It seemed like a moment to take her hand. It would have been an awesome move, like the perfect moment in a movie to make things happen between the two of us. Maybe a kiss, too, a long, romantic one that—

  “Look at his house,” said Antonine. “There’s something funny about it.” I had brought my hand out of my pocket but instead of moving it toward her, I reached up and scratched my head. Then I looked toward the house again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at the wood they used.”

  That was when we both almost fell over onto the sand. The wood in his house was funny, for sure, but not ha-ha (not St. Louis de Ha! Ha!) funny. It was unusual, a colour and a grain that wasn’t used on any other house we’d seen as we walked along the beach or strolled through Bathurst.

  It was exactly like the board from the ghost ship.

  17

  Island Visit

  “Remember,” said Antonine, “that I told you the Fiats built this house when I was a child? When I think of it now, I realize that it was around the time Dad and I saw the burning ship...that very summer!”

  Neither of us knew exactly why, but that felt important. I could tell by the look on her face, which I assumed was similar to the one on my own.

  “This could mean nearly anything,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “It could mean that Jim Fiat isn’t a human being. He’s a pirate from long ago. It could mean that pirates built his house.”

  We both laughed. It seemed like the only thing to do.

  “What do we do next?” I asked. “Go up to man-of-the-people boy and ask him why your father had a piece of wood from his house in his shed? Why your dad found it in Chaleur Bay near a burning ghost ship from a few centuries back?”

  “We could do that if we wanted to look like idiots.”

  “Maybe there is a perfectly good explanation for this.”

  “Maybe this wood comes from wherever those ancient ships were built?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “we have to think outside the box. What if this apparition doesn’t exist in the way we are assuming?”

  “We need more evidence. We are just clutching at straws right now, starting to consider bizarre theories without really knowing anything. We keep coming up with more and more of these weird facts and they don’t seem to go together.”

  We just stood there kind of gawking at each other for a while. Then we turned and started trudging along the beach in the direction the politician and his fans had gone, heading back to Youghall. The swarm was moving away from us in that direction, a perfect place for Fiat to draw an even bigger crowd.

  As we strolled along, I looked out toward the water again. I thought about the two of us going out there just a few days ago, that startling night, and of Antonine and her dad there too, long ago. I remembered the riveting details of her story. I turned my head sideways and looked at her, just stared, as we walked. She glanced back and despite her frustration, grinned at me. Then I looked past her. She didn’t seem as if she liked that at first, but was more interested when I spoke.

  “The island!” I had noticed the little island out on the water over her shoulder, the one they had neared at the key moment in their adventure, when the enflamed girl had fallen into the bay and appeared to struggle in the water.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “What if the girl made it to the island? That makes sense, doesn’t it? What if there is some sort of indication on its terrain that she was there? Didn’t your dad say she was struggling in the water, kind of thrashing her way through it? She must have been trying to reach the only bit of land anywhere near her!”

  “Uh, Dylan…that only makes sense if we actually believe there was an actual girl on the boat…on the phantom…on fire.”

  She was frowning at me.

  “Okay, so it sounds nuts, but for now let’s go with the assumption not only that the ghost ship is real, but that all of the other stuff we are finding and seeing are connected to it. You said yourself that we have all this evidence and we can’t put any of it together. So, we need to find some links, or at least find more evidence that may create a link. We’ve run out of things around here. I think we need to go back out onto the water and explore that island.”

  First, we needed to borrow another boat. Well steal it, sort of, for a while. Antonine and her mom certainly didn’t have enough money to own a boat. Jim Fiat likely had a yacht. I really wished that I knew where it was so we could take it for a spin. Instead, we had to get Antonine to jig another boat down at the docks at Youghall. In order to do that, we had to stick around until it got a bit darker, until the beach began to clear off. Fortunately it was well into September. The sun would be setting soon and the air would cool rapidly.

  We borrowed someone’s phone, called Eve, told her Antonine would be home late, and not to wait up. Then we did the same thing with my mom. The Bill and Bonnie Show went to bed early, so the parental units had no choice but to hit the hay at the same time.

  I bought Antonine a hot dog, chivalrous dude that I am, and was surprised at how much mustard she put on it, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. It just kind of made sense, when I thought about it. She was a mustard kind of girl.

  We slipped over to the docks side of the beach as the crowd began to thin, and Antonine found the same boat she had taken the other night. She started it up and I jumped in with her. We headed out without looking back, perhaps because we did not want to face seeing someone running toward the shore screaming at us that we had stolen his or her boat. However, there wasn’t a sound on the now-still water, just the hum of our vessel’s motor as we made a wide turn and swept across the cove and then out into the bay, our wake a question mark on the surface.

  I couldn’t believe how quiet the world seemed beyond our little boat. I sat beside Antonine, our legs touching, the approaching dusk creating a grey-blue colour in both the sky and the water and making the whole setting seem like something from a different reality. I could imagine a pirate ship out here, its boards not having aged a day, its young crew in the midst of the fire that was raging all around them.

  The island was so small that you had to focus to get a bearing on it. We buzzed toward it for a good ten minutes or so and then Antonine c
ut the motor. We drifted closer. The near night was eerie here, made especially that way by my memory of seeing the burning ship so close to this spot and knowing Antonine was remembering it too. I tried not to think of the flaming ghost on the water, or of the woman I thought I had seen screaming at its helm. We floated silently forward.

  Before long, we bounced against land, a soggy short shoreline that seemed almost to give way as we stepped out and put our feet upon it. We dragged the little motorboat up onto land and between some trees so it couldn’t dislodge and drift away on the water. Everything was stunted in size here, the trees more like bushes or Christmas trees for a small apartment. We walked through a stand of mini evergreens, our heads about even with their tops, and before long, the centre of the island opened up into a little clearing. We had only taken about ten or fifteen steps.

  We saw it at the same time.

  There was another, smaller open area just beyond the clearing. It was on the other side of a row of five scrawny trees that looked like starving castaways. It was about the size of a coffin. We walked up to it. Instinctively, we didn’t stand on top it. There, on perhaps the largest tree we had seen, right near the head of the coffin, was what looked like a cross, carved deeply into the bark and right into the tree, grown over now, but its shape still obvious.

  We got down on our knees. We looked at each other for a moment and then began to dig with our bare hands. The soil was soft.

  I found the first bone. It was only six inches below the surface, obviously put there by someone who had been frantic; someone who did not have the tools or the time for a proper burial. It struck me instantly that it was a human bone, at least it looked like one. It was slender and seemed like part of an arm.

  “I think it’s a girl,” said Antonine quietly.

  I wasn’t sure why she thought that.

  Neither of us could pick it up. We didn’t even want to touch it. My hand had pulled back in a reflex when I saw it. And we could tell that there were more bones there, stretched out for about five feet just under the surface. We stood up, shaking, and quickly stepped back from the site, but I put my foot in the wrong place, right near the head of the grave, and I could feel the sole of my running shoe pressing against something round just an inch or two underneath.

  A skull.

  I lifted my foot as if it had been shocked and actually cried out.

  Antonine took my hand and steered me out of the clearing. We quickly made our way down to the boat, got into it and roared out onto the water, heading back toward Youghall Beach, our eyes locked on our destination.

  We tied up the boat at the dock, staggered back onto the beach and slumped to the ground.

  “So,” said Antonine quietly.

  “So, there’s a body out there on that little island where you and your Dad saw a young girl engulfed in flames floundering toward land…a girl from a ghost ship.”

  “You ever get the feeling that you don’t exist? You ever feel that maybe the whole world is just made up? Maybe I’m just making up everything, even you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lots of times. Scary thoughts.” She moved closer to me. “Maybe I made up Bomber too. After all, he’s not here anymore.”

  I could feel tears welling in my eyes. Not a good thing.

  She turned to me. “I know I didn’t make up my dad. Here is in here.” She pointed to her heart. “He isn’t just with me, he’s inside me. Your friend is inside you, too.” She paused. “You know what I think?”

  “No.” When I looked at her, I could see defiance in her eyes.

  “I think my father is more real now than he ever was. I think the spirits of people…the ghosts…are often more real than anything else. It’s like Dad said: it isn’t the surface of life that matters.”

  That made me smile. I stood up and she got up with me.

  “Does your mom know anyone on the police force?”

  “Absolutely.”

  When we got onto the last bus into town, however, sitting at the back far away from the three other folks on board, I started thinking about our situation and a sinking feeling started to come over me.

  “We are getting ahead of ourselves,” I said. “We’re screwed.”

  Antonine had been sitting there looking excited, our legs touching on purpose this time. She looked at me with a puzzled expression.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “They are never going to believe us.”

  “Dylan, there’s a body out there on that island, buried in a shallow grave!” She was trying to keep her voice down. A woman six rows in front of us turned around and looked back.

  I lowered my voice even more.

  “So what. Sure, they’ll go out and examine it, attach it to a missing person’s report from long ago, maybe. How are they going to connect this to the phantom though? Or to Jim Fiat?”

  “We have the burned plank.”

  “And a story, told by two kids, about a now-deceased man and his small child seeing a woman on fire on a ghost ship more than a decade ago. That isn’t exactly evidence that can be seriously connected to the skeleton on the island, especially evidence that might incriminate one of the most powerful men in this area, about to become the most powerful. I’m sure he has lots of friends on the police force. Imagine us trying to tell them that our burned piece of wood came from his house. They’d laugh us out of the police station. They wouldn’t even look at the board.”

  I could see in Antonine’s eyes that she knew I was right. She lowered them, and her head, and stared at the floor below the seat in front of us. All we could hear for a while was the roar of the old bus as the driver changed gears.

  “I might as well just get off somewhere and walk back to Bill and Bonnie’s.”

  “No,” said Antonine and she took my hand.

  All right, I thought, I’ll stay for a while.

  I wondered what she might be thinking. If we couldn’t connect all of this to Jim Fiat, if we couldn’t come up with some sort of reasonable explanation for what we’d seen out there, her father would still be just a desperate guy who saw a hallucination long ago; who saw someone on fire in a boat and did nothing about it. Antonine would have to live with that forever.

  Then I felt her squeezing my hand. When I looked over at her, she was staring back at me and she looked excited. It was as if she was watching something happen in her mind, some sort of possibility.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  What she then told me was more than a little daring, and dangerous. Her idea could get us both into a boatload of trouble and probably wouldn’t even work.

  It was all we had, though, and it came from the imagination of one Antonine Marie Clay…so I went along with it.

  The police station was on King Avenue, just around the corner from the library (though most things are “just around the corner” from almost everything in Bathurst). It was a two-storey brick building with a peaked roof at the entrance, called Le Complex Roussel-O’Neil Complex, a very New-Brunswick name. It was a good-sized building, which made me think that there was a need for a bit of enforcement of the law around these parts. By now, it was late at night so not many police were on duty. In fact, from what we could tell, there was just one available and he looked like he was about ninety years old. We actually had to knock on the bullet-proof glass that went up to the ceiling from the top of the counter a few strides in from the entrance in order to get him to even realize that we were there, that there was life, living species, in the room. It took him about ten minutes to get to his feet and stagger over to us. He was as skinny as a skeleton and his glasses were down near the end of his nose. It looked like he had once filled his uniform much better than he did now.

  “Yeah,” he wheezed through the little opening.

  “We have a crime to report,” said Antonine, her voice quavering a bit.

  “E
h?” said the man, cupping his hand behind his ear and bending it toward us.

  “A crime!” I said.

  “A crime? Where?” He looked a little alarmed.

  “Out on Youghall Beach.”

  “Okay,” he said and searched around for a pen. He patted his breast pockets and then his pants pockets as we stared at the pen sitting in its holder in front of him. Finally, Antonine tapped at the glass and pointed to it.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. He seized the pen and began to look for a piece of paper. There was one on the desk, too. He looked around for a while before he noticed it. “Aha!” he said. He poised the pen over the paper. “Description please. Exact location, nature of event, time of event.”

  “Well,” said Antonine. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Pardon me,” said the man, “I didn’t quite get that. It sounded like you said it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “It hasn’t,” I confirmed. “Well, the important part has, but that was long ago and not right on the beach…the next part, the part we need the police for at the moment, will happen in a few hours.”

  He stared at us. His glasses dropped even lower on his nose.

  “Is there anyone else here for us to talk to?” asked Antonine. “This might get a little complicated, more than just a report.”

  “Well,” he said, looking relieved, “there is the Forensic Identification Section.”

  “An entire section is here, at this hour?” I asked.

  “Um,” he said and cleared his throat, “the Forensic Identification Section, examining dead bodies, you know, that sort of thing is…Constable Gabrielle Leblanc.”

  “One person?”

  “Yes, but she’s here! Dedicated lady.”