by Gail Bowen
“You could ask at the hotel about the fishing shacks,” she said. “They’re awfully small, but they’re clean and they’re right on the lake. Pretty views.”
The man behind the desk at the hotel was huge. He was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Jackfish in Lard Makes a Fisherman Hard.” When I asked about a room, he opened the registration book, ran a thick finger down the page and then grinned at me.
“You’re damn lucky, lady. There’s one unit left. Last empty bed in town. Twenty bucks. Pay now. The money’s up front for the shacks. I’ve put you in number three.”
The shacks were, in fact, one building, which must have been built before the province had passed its law about not building directly on lakefront property. The place was right down by the docks. It was old and had the frail, stripped-down look of wartime housing. The individual units were tiny, just one small room and a bathroom, but each unit had a small kitchen and a large window that opened onto a screened-in porch. It was obvious that they were a place to sleep for people who wanted to fish.
Taylor was enchanted. “It’s like a doll’s house,” she said, opening the little refrigerator and pulling out an ice tray that made six cubes.
We unpacked and then we went for a swim. When we’d changed out of our swimsuits, we sat on the dock and watched the boats come in. A sunburned man with a tub full of fish asked Taylor if she’d had any luck.
“Yes,” she said, “I got to stay in the little house up there.” She pointed toward the shacks.
He laughed. “That makes us neighbours. I’m staying there, too.”
Nice. We had supper at the hotel, and after we ate, I decided to call Jill Osiowy to give her the hotel’s number in case there were any changes about our July eighth show. It was almost seven, but she was still at her office. She answered on the first ring, and she sounded tense and distracted.
“You sound as if you could use a little down time in the north yourself,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I have company. Con O’Malley and his Corporate Choir Boys. It’s been years since I’ve seen that many pinstriped suits.”
“You didn’t mention you were having a royal visit,” I said.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “They just arrived two hours ago. I was editing some of the Little Flower tapes – on my own time, of course – and my secretary called and said we’d been invaded. I haven’t the slightest idea what they’re doing here.”
“Spooking you,” I said.
“You’ve got that right,” she said. “I’m spooked. CEOS are like cops. Even when you know you haven’t done anything wrong, you’d rather they weren’t around. Listen, Jo, I’d better go. I’ll call you tomorrow night.”
I gave her the hotel number and hung up. Taylor and I walked down the hill to the shacks. It was such a beautiful night that we stayed on the dock until sunset. I looked out at the lake and watched Taylor’s small silhouette black against the red sky and the dropping sun. How many nights had Theresa Desjarlais stood on the shore of Havre Lake and watched as the sun dropped in the sky and the water turned to fire? Finally, when the darkness closed in on us, Taylor and I walked to our cabin.
There was just one double bed. It felt good to lie there on the cool smooth sheets with Taylor’s body curled against me. Her hair smelled of heat and lake water, and I closed my eyes and remembered holding Mieka in just this way when she was small, and the boys, too, when they were little. I touched the silver circle of my bracelet and remembered Christy. “Did anyone ever hold you like this when you were little, Christy-Theresa?” I said. “Did anyone ever encircle you in close and protective arms?” And because I knew the answer, I wept.
CHAPTER
11
When the boy appeared outside the shack’s screen door saying there was a phone call for me up at the Kingfisher, Taylor and I were just finishing dinner. On the table between us was a map of Havre Lake; we were planning the boat trip we were taking the next morning. It had been a good day. We’d walked the shoreline from Blue Heron Point to Hampton Narrows, an hour and a half away, and Taylor had found a piece of driftwood shaped like a bird, some fool’s gold, and the torso of a Barbie doll. Serendipity.
She’d had more luck than I’d had. As soon as I knew the bars were open, I’d started checking around for Jackie Desjarlais. No one had seen him. In the last place we tried, the bartender told me Jackie had been blind drunk the night before, and if I had anything serious to say to him I’d be smart to wait until the next day.
At some level, I had been relieved. The prospect of a day without sadness or ugliness was appealing. Cut loose from responsibilities, Taylor and I had given ourselves up to the pleasures of cottage life. We went down to the beach for a swim, then we sat on blankets on the sand and let the breeze dry us off. At midafternoon, we walked to the store in Blue Heron Point and bought supplies: groceries, matches for fire starting, a bottle of sun block and a jar of blackfly repellent guaranteed to be environmentally friendly. On the way out of the store, Taylor picked up a baseball cap with the words “I’d Rather Be Fishing” written in fish across the front.
“It’s to keep the sun off my head,” she said. “Angus says too much sun can boil your brains.”
She’d put the hat on the coat hook by the door the way Angus always did at home, and that night as we followed the boy out of the cabin, she reached up, grabbed her cap and jammed it over her hair.
“Nice hat,” the boy said, and Taylor beamed. They talked about fishing all the way up to the hotel.
I went inside. The man who had checked us in was sitting on a stool behind the front desk. He handed me a message slip with a number I recognized as Jill Oziowy’s.
“The lady said to call her back reverse the charges.” He slid the phone across the desk to me. “I’m here to make sure those charges get reversed.”
Jill sounded edgy and excited. “Things are happening, Jo,” she said. “Last night when I finally got home, there was a message on my answering service. A man’s voice, muffled. ‘Check out the Lily Pad,’ he said, and hung up. Just like in the movies. It was after midnight, and I was dead tired. Those little trolls from head office had been nipping at my heels all night, so I didn’t go over to the Lily Pad till about seven this morning. Guess what? The place was closed up tighter than a drum, padlock on the front door, blinds drawn. There were two kids on the lawn by that wooden frog, but they were so pilled up I don’t think they knew where they were.
“I went around and checked out the back. Same thing. Incidentally, you were right about that door, Jo, that’s a serious security system. I just don’t understand what it’s doing there. Why would the Lily Pad people tie up that kind of money in the back door of a drop-in centre for street kids?”
“Because it’s something more than a drop-in centre,” I said. The manager hadn’t moved from his stool. He was less than two feet away from me. As soon as my call to Jill had gone through, he’d pulled out a pair of scissors and started cleaning his nails. When I mentioned the drop-in centre, he stopped digging and looked up at me with quick and interested eyes.
I lowered my voice. “I can’t talk here,” I said.
“I’ll talk,” Jill said. “I remembered what you said about Helmut Keating taking all that liquor in on Saturday. I thought the kids on the lawn might have heard something. At first, I thought I was out of luck. Whatever drug those kids had been doing had propelled them to another dimension, but I just kept talking, and when I mentioned Helmut Keating’s name, I got a reaction. One of the boys pulled himself together enough to get out a full sentence: ‘They say Helmie blew town,’ he said. What do you make of that, Jo?”
“Interesting,” I said, and I smiled at the hotel manager. He didn’t smile back.
“Keating’s not in the book, but I called a friend of mine who’s also into good works and she had an address for him. Jo, you wouldn’t have believed his house. A big split level out on Academy Park Road.”
“The dysfunctional populatio
n business must be pretty lucrative,” I said.
“Right,” said Jill. “But listen, Helmie’s place was shut tight, blinds pulled. The neighbour was out watering her lawn and she said Helmut took off this morning, very early, in a cab. He had suitcases. That’s all she knew. Jo, it’s just a hunch, but I think Helmut Keating was my mystery caller. I think he’s decided to blow the whistle on the Lily Pad. I’m going to make some calls to people I know at the airport and the bus station. See if I can track down our travelling man. Then I’m going back to the Lily Pad. There may be a kid there who’s kept her eyes open and her brain unfried.”
She swore softly. “I’ve lost a whole day, but there was no way around it. My new best friends from head office insisted on getting an early start. On what, I still haven’t figured out. Jo, I was tracking down stuff for them all day, figures, employment records, old interviews. And whatever I got wasn’t enough, they’d just send me off again. I felt like that girl in the fairy tale who had to keep spinning straw into gold, and no matter how much she spun it was never enough. What was the name of that story anyway?”
“Rumpelstiltskin,” I said.
Jill laughed. “Jo, you’re so well read. Anyway, after I spent the day spinning my straw, I came home and there was a threat on my machine.”
The hotel manager leaned forward; he was so close I could smell his aftershave. It was artificially piny, like the little deodorant trees people hang from the rear-view mirror of cars.
“What kind of threat?” I asked.
“Just a garden-variety death threat,” Jill said quietly. “I’ve heard worse. Anyway, that’s where we are now.”
“I think you should call the police,” I said.
“Not yet,” she said. “This one’s still mine. Jo, I can feel the adrenaline. Something’s coming.”
“Be careful,” I said. “Please, please, be careful.”
I had a troubled sleep that night. I dreamed I was at the back door of the Lily Pad. I could hear a child crying inside, and I was frantic to get in. I had a card for the security system, but every time I tried to use it to open the door, the system spit the card back out at me. No matter how many ways I tried, I couldn’t get the card to fit. Then Blaine Harris was there in his ponytail and his beaded moccasins. “The rain,” he said urgently. “The rain,” I said, and it seemed to be the right thing to say because he smiled at me and gave me an old paper dollar. I put the dollar into the card slot, and the door opened. Then I woke up.
The next morning I was up with the sun; after the puzzling dream of the night before, I was glad to see it. A car pulled into the parking lot in front of the unit next door, and that was reassuring, too. It felt good to be part of the solid world where the sun shines and people come and go. I could hear the voice of our neighbour, the sunburned man who had talked to Taylor when he came in from fishing the night we came. It was obvious that he and the man who had just arrived were old friends who met somewhere every year to fish. As I heard my neighbour and his friend exchange their bluff hearty greetings and run through the familiar litany about the condition of the roads they’d driven and how much booze they’d brought and where the fish were biting, I was smiling. Unreconstructed, unrepentant Real Men. No one needed to give these guys drums to get in touch with their inner selves.
Then the man who had just arrived lowered his voice. “So where’s the hairless pussy around here?” he asked.
The sunburned man laughed. “On an island, if you can believe it. You need a fucking guide to take you there, but, sweet Jesus, it’s worth it.”
Beside me, Taylor, still asleep, rolled over onto her back. She muttered something, then she smiled and stretched out her arms in a gesture of animal trust.
I felt my stomach lurch, and I sat up, tense, alert to danger.
Next door, the sunburned man said, “First things first. Come on in and we’ll have an eye-opener.”
The screen door slammed. For the next fifteen minutes, as I sat, still and silent, I could hear the low murmur of the voices on the other side of the wall. Finally, the screen door slammed again, and I could hear the men’s voices fade as they moved toward the dock. I walked onto our porch and watched until they got into the boat and started the motor. I didn’t stop watching until their boat disappeared into the line that separated the blue of the sky from the blue of the lake. I hoped they would drown.
When I went in, Taylor was sitting up with the candy box full of dolls on her knees.
“We’re going to the island to make breakfast,” she said. “Remember, Jo? You’re going to make a fire and we’re going to cook bacon. I dreamed about it even.”
My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would beat out of my chest. I wanted to take Taylor’s hand and run.
Oblivious, Taylor arranged her dolls on the bedspread. “Kokom says on the islands you can find moss that will keep my dolls from breaking when I carry them. She says when she was a girl people used to put that moss around real babies.” She looked up at me hopefully. “Jo?”
“Just trying to remember how to make a campfire, T.,” I said. “Come on, let’s get rolling. Get dressed and we’ll pack up our food. I’ve already looked at the lake this morning. It’s like glass. Perfect weather for a shore breakfast.”
Three-quarters of an hour later, picnic cooler loaded, Thermos filled, we were fastening our life jackets. It was going to be a great day, hot and still and sun-filled, but the man at the boat rental had been cautious.
“Where you want to go is South Bay,” he said. “You’ll be okay there. It’s close, and on that map of yours, the Xs show where the rocks are. Don’t go through the narrows into the lake proper. Too much can go wrong. Hit a rock, get stuck out in the middle when a storm hits, and you and the little girl here will buy it.”
I looked at my map; there were a lot of Xs, but it was reassuring, for once, to know where the dangers were.
It had been years since I’d driven a motorboat, but it wasn’t a complex skill, and it felt good to put some distance between me and Blue Heron Point. As our boat cut through the shining water, Taylor’s eyes were wide, taking in all the sights. When we came to the bay, I cut back the motor. There were perhaps twenty islands to choose from. They weren’t the gentle islands of children’s books; they were steep, with shirred rock faces that rose sharp and hostile from the water. The treeline was high on these islands, and it wasn’t until you climbed to the top that you were protected by bushes and evergreens.
“You pick,” I shouted to Taylor over the low hum of the motor. “Which one looks good to you?”
“Can we move closer?” she said.
“Sure,” I said, and we moved slowly through the bay, checking them out.
Finally Taylor pointed to one that seemed tucked away behind the others. “That one,” she said. “No one will ever find us there.”
It was as if she had read my mind.
We pulled the boat up on shore and tied it to a rock. When we were sure it was secure, we climbed up the rock face in search of wood. At the top of the hill the terrain was hospitable, flat and tree-covered. The sun came through the evergreens and made shifting patterns on the moss. I was standing there admiring the view when Taylor called me.
“Look,” she said. “People were here before.” On a stump between two trees, someone had piled stones and made a little altar. A plastic figure of the virgin was wedged into the stones at the top. On the ground in front of the altar was a ring of stones enclosing the charred remains of a fire.
As I looked at the garish little figurine I thought of Theresa and her brother. Two children on an island. At night it must have been terrifying: the unbroken darkness of the northern sky, the birds swooping to shore, the lake black with secrets. Had Theresa built a fire? Had she found a plastic Mary like this one to mother Jackie and her through the night? So many terrors. But she was a child who was used to terrors.
“Jo? Jo, what’re you thinking about?” Taylor was tugging at my hand. “Are you thinking a
bout eating? Because I am.”
“Time to make a campfire then,” I said.
We built a fire on the rock, and we cooked bacon and made toast and boiled the lake water for tea. The tea tasted of twigs and smoke. After we cleaned our dishes and put out our fire, we explored the island, then we swam in the icy water. Taylor dog-paddled for a while, then she floated on her back and looked at the birds circling in the blue sky. When we got tired, we came ashore and lay in the sun on towels stretched over the rocks.
With the sun hot on my back, the warm rock under me and the sound of birdsong in the air, the tension seeped out of my body, and I drifted off to sleep. I awoke to feel my bracelet burning from the sun. Taylor was sitting on her towel, carefully arranging the moss she’d collected around her wishbone dolls.
“You were sleeping,” she said with a smile.
I looked at my watch. It was twenty to twelve. By the time I got back to shore and changed, the pubs would have been open half an hour. With luck, Jackie Desjarlais would be ready to talk.
As we tied the boat to the dock in front of the shacks, I decided I’d try the Kingfisher first. That way I could check for phone messages, too. Taylor and I dropped our picnic gear at our cabin and walked up the hill to the hotel. The steps were filled with blank-faced kids smoking – Lily Pad north. When I asked if anyone had seen Jackie Desjarlais that day, they didn’t even bother looking up, and as we went up the steps, Taylor and I had to walk carefully to keep from stepping on them.
It wasn’t hard to find the bar. A plastic muskellunge arced over the doorway to a dark and cavernous room. Burned into a block of cedar under the fish were the words “Angler’s Corner.” It was only half an hour after opening, but already the pine room deodorizer was losing out to the smells of stale beer and cigarettes and urine. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, then Taylor and I started across the room. We didn’t get far. I hadn’t taken three steps when a hand reached out from behind me and closed around my upper arm.
