I nodded and absently swatted at some mosquitoes hovering around my ears. I hauled out my pack and paddle and headed down the woods road to the lake to see if the canoe Ray had offered was okay to use. The air was fresh and clear with a mounting wind, but somewhere off to my left I could hear the buzzing of a chainsaw that neatly eviscerated what would have been the deep, calming quiet of a wilderness morning.
I came out onto the pebbled beach and saw Cameron and two other loggers helping Leslie hoist the last of some big boxes into the back of a rusty old pickup truck. The outboard was pulled up on the beach behind them. I walked over, and after saying “Hi” I told Cameron what Ray had said, and he and his friends dropped what they were doing and headed up to the cookhouse. Ray may not have seemed like a leader, but apparently his requests were not treated lightly.
When they had gone I turned to Leslie and said, “I thought you and the loggers were at loggerheads, so to speak.”
Leslie gazed at me, a quizzical expression transforming her face.
“Cam and the others, they’re good hardworking men. Who am I to criticize them for wanting to make a living? I sympathize with their plight; I may not agree with their line of work, but I sympathize and they know that. They help me out a bit.” She paused. “What brings you up here so early?”
“Just following up a hunch. Ray offered me a canoe to go over to the other side here and snoop around a bit. Does it matter which one?”
Leslie looked surprised. “You going over there? Now? To the campsite? The one the loggers use sometimes?”
“You mean the big cliff?” I asked.
She nodded, looked pensive, and scratched her chin. “This is terrific. Would you mind giving me a lift? I promised Davies I’d pick up Diamond’s spare canoe at the end of the portage across from here. I was going to get someone to paddle me over tomorrow from Diamond’s permanent site near the biology station, but this would suit better, since you’re going over there anyway. You can solo this one back again. That way I can paddle over and help them at Diamond’s camp, and then they can drive me up to get my own gear when we’re through.”
I looked at the choppy waves and felt the wind strengthening. It would make the paddle over a lot easier with a second paddler, even if it meant I’d have to make small talk with her. I waited while Leslie scrounged around in her truck and got out a small pack, a fishing rod, a paddle, and a lifejacket. Without hesitation, she headed for the stern. I shrugged, changed direction, and headed for the bow. What the hell, I thought. It was more work to stern in this weather anyway. As we lifted the canoe down to the water I asked her why Diamond had a spare canoe at the portage.
“Sometimes he had a spare canoe at either end of the portage so he could move through some of his study area without having to portage a canoe,” said Leslie. “He could have taken out here and saved himself a lot of trouble, but he refused to do that. He liked to fish at the base of the rapids there, too. It’s a great spot and close enough to his camp for him to fish for breakfast. Now that he’s gone, nobody uses the canoes and Davies wants them back. He and Patrick and Roberta are out near the bio station sorting through Diamond’s gear and divvying it up. Gives me the creeps.”
“Has there been any word yet about Don?” I asked as I threw my pack in, grabbed the gunnels with both hands, and crab-walked up to the bow.
She didn’t answer, and I looked back over my shoulder at her. She was staring out across the lake, her eyes unfocused, far away in some other part of her mind.
“Is he a good friend of yours?” I asked gently.
She started, and I watched as her eyes came back into focus, thoughts dissolving as others coalesced, like milk swirling in coffee.
“Don?” She smiled. “He was, I guess.”
“Was?”
Leslie grunted as she clambered into the canoe and pushed off.
“He’s a harmless sort of guy but clingy. He was really nice to me when I first arrived on campus, introducing me and all that stuff — a real friend. But then he started trying to horn in on my research program, steal my students. I guess he thought it would be easier to do with a woman than a man, but he chose the wrong woman. We haven’t been close for a long time.”
“Since his wife died?”
Leslie turned the canoe with an expert J-stroke, aimed it toward the narrows leading to the lake, and said, “Who told you about that?”
“Roberta. She said he was devastated, that his work really got quite shoddy after that, and there were rumours of data falsification.”
“I wouldn’t know about any of that, but if he was faking data, God help him.”
“Any theories on where he might have gone?”
“No idea. The police have been prowling around campus all week getting the lowdown on how depressed Don was. They think he might have just run away from it all. Maybe he couldn’t take the responsibility anymore, so he just kind of disappeared. Poor Don.”
I remembered how the police had grilled me about Don and his kid. How I’d tried to find out if my disks had been found at his house, and what a load of questions I’d gotten over that. But in the end they hadn’t been interested in my disks and said there was no evidence that Diamond’s death had been anything but accidental. They did ask me to call them if anything changed though.
“Do you agree with them about Don being depressed?” I asked.
“Yes and no. There’s no question that he had a lot of problems and pressures. I don’t even know half of them, but even if the rumours of data falsification are wrong, he had his poor daughter and Dean Davies on his back. He was very depressed when I last talked to him. I’m worried. What more can I say?”
“You mean suicide?”
“It’s a possibility in his frame of mind, but somehow I can’t imagine him abandoning his daughter like that. But I guess everyone can reach breaking point, and Don had more reasons than most. It’s amazing he’s lasted as long as he has. Some people get no luck.”
We moved through the narrows of the bay and turned into the wind and talking was made next to impossible. We paddled in silence, the wind lapping at the waves against the boat as we beat into it. I was thankful that I had company. Paddling solo would have been a grind.
The sun was still quite low but the clouds were scudding across the sky like scared rabbits. The wind was warm and the water splashing against my hands was tepid as I carved my paddle through it. The air smelled the way it felt — warm and free. The wind snuffled my hair and the gentle slap of waves against the canoe almost made time stand still. The cliff reared up out of the water like some prehistoric beast, and I wondered how many natives had paddled this self-same lake hundreds of years ago to paint their stories on the face of that imposing cliff.
I shivered as time suddenly pummelled me with its aloofness, its cold, inexorable, relentless need to move on, inexplicably changing some things but leaving others virtually untouched after centuries. At moments like this, I thought, time telescopes upon itself and the past becomes one with the present. It was as close to immortality as I’d ever come, and I felt an almost physical wave of sadness sweep through me as I saw the past millennia, tantalizingly close yet inaccessible, stretched out behind me.
I squinted into the sun, looking ahead at the shoreline, shoving the sadness away to some hidden corner of my mind. I didn’t want to be sad, but it was hard shaking it off. Not that it was ever easy.
The cliff thrust a good sixty feet up out of the water, its weather-beaten face jagged and rough from the wind and rains that had blasted and stained it for many millennia. Slashing down its face like a knife wound was the deep rust red rocky vein that I had seen from the logging camp the day before. Even though the sun had not climbed high enough to wash the face with light, it stood out like an angry red scar against the nondescript grey granite of the rest of the massive rock. Here and there, small cedars had grappled for their meagre place in the sun, growing stunted and twisted in places that seemed impossible for even a single root to take hold.
/>
The canoe leapt and danced through the waves like a ballerina as Leslie skillfully steered it in toward shore. I could feel the pull of the current and the roar of the rapids around the corner to our right. Leslie turned the canoe when we were some ten feet from shore and then we hugged the shoreline. The canoe picked up speed, and Leslie yelled at me to get ready to jump out at the beginning of the portage, which I remembered was alarmingly close to the beginning of the rapids.
I could see the deep black of the water pale as the water became shallow and rocks and sand came looming up. There was a small pebbly beach and smooth rocks that sloped up into the trees, but there wasn’t much between it and the start of the rapids. It wouldn’t do to dump here. As the canoe ground against the sand, I leapt out and pulled it out of the strong current. While Leslie clambered out and got her gear, I secured the boat to a small tree and turned to look around.
There were cedars here, all right. Massive mothers of another time, they soared overhead in a logger’s dreams, growing in the wet moist shadow of the cliff, giant younger cousins to those on the exposed cliff face. I turned and saw Leslie watching me. She had donned her small backpack, picked up her paddle and lifejacket, and stood as though waiting to say something, but before she could make up her mind we heard the roar of a motor-boat as it came around the cliff behind us, heading up to the head of the lake. Leslie galloped up to the top of the rock to get a better view of the boat. I followed at a more sedate pace. She shook her head as the first of the waves from the boat crashed against the shore.
“I wish they wouldn’t allow motors up here — they wash out the loons’ nests, but the loggers swear they need them to check out the land on this side of the lake.” She suddenly turned and looked at me.
“What are you interested in over here, anyway?” It was asked casually, as if she didn’t really care, but the intensity of her eyes made me wonder.
“Just a hunch that maybe Diamond was here,” I said. He has to have been, I thought, looking at the cedars. I didn’t want to think about the fact that it might be just a wild goose chase or something my imagination had magnified into something it wasn’t.
Leslie chortled, which didn’t help my confidence.
“Of course he was. He came here sometimes, just as we all have. If you don’t want to shoot the rapids, it’s the only portage. It’s a nice ride in an empty canoe, but fully loaded it can be difficult. But as far as I know, he seldom used it when passing through to his study site or to fish — that’s at the other end.”
She smiled and patted her rod. “Maybe I’ll paddle over in the morning and catch me some fish for breakfast. It’s a great fishing hole, but this end of the portage was too popular with the loggers for Diamond to want to use it often, and there’s nowhere at the other end to pitch a tent. It’s a rock garden down there.”
She stared at me as if I had egg on my face, then shrugged and said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
chapter twenty-three
Irubbed my face and watched Leslie disappear into the woods in the direction of the portage. I turned to survey the area around me. It was a beautiful campsite with lots of open rocky areas and smooth flat granite sloping down to the river and the lake. The amount of garbage strewn about — from tins to beer bottles to the carcasses of fish — was alarming. Easy pickings for a bear. Instinctively I felt the pocket of my pack to make sure my bear scare was still there and then hauled the pack onto my back.
The smell of cedar was strong. I climbed up the rock and walked in among the cedars. The ground was bare beneath the towering trees with evidence that it had been used and misused many times as a campsite. I counted three different fireplaces, and there were rings of rock and flattened brown cedar boughs in two places where people had pitched their tents. Someone had left a laundry line strung up between two trees and a ratty old blue sock hung limply from it. I absently kicked a couple of charred tin cans lying by one of the fire pits and the noise startled a crow. I saw with some annoyance that the loggers had posted a brand new “no trespassing” sign.
The cedars blocked out much of the sun here and it was cool and dark, but where the sun filtered down through the trees the sunbeams danced near the base of the cliff as it angled inland and struck something in the near shadows that gleamed. I looked up and saw that the moss, which had covered one side of the massive rock that had whelped from the cliff behind it, had been stripped off fairly recently, almost as though someone had slipped and fallen from the top of the fifteen-foot rock.
A twig snapped nearby, and I looked up quickly, but there was nothing except the gentle wind causing the tree’s shadows to blow the sunbeams all over the forest floor. What I did see were several long, deep scratches streaking down the trunk of a cedar where the bark had been ripped away and the new wood laid bare, glistening and vulnerable. The bear that had made them had made them recently.
With mounting alarm I turned and scanned the trees and found one other with claw marks. Although I had hoped to find signs of bear I hadn’t counted on the signs being recent. After all, the bear had been killed more than a month ago by the loggers, and on the other side of the river. Hadn’t it? These markings were new. The place was crawling with bear sign, but that wasn’t all. Poking out from under a rocky overhang I saw what looked like a piece of leather. When I stooped and picked it up I saw that it was a small collar, sliced in half, but with the buckle still fastened tightly. I turned it over in my hand. There was a tag dangling from the buckle, and when I wiped the dirt and muck from it, the name jumped out at me: Paulie.
I felt the goosebumps rise on the back of my neck, and when a twig snapped I whirled around. No one was there. The woods were quiet, but what tales could they tell? Was this where it had happened? Where Diamond had died? Had Paulie witnessed it, and then tried to make her way back to civilization? Or had she followed her master’s body back to the other campsite, hitching a ride in the murderer’s canoe?
I looked back through the woods and thoughtfully eyed the claw marks on the trees. If this was where Diamond had died then the bear sign might belong to the rogue bear. A disturbing thought, but the loggers could have lied about killing the bear near Diamond’s camp or killing it at all. I looked out along the shoreline and figured it’d be a good place to fish. Would they go to all that trouble to guard their illegal fishing for a few measly fish? But there had been no bear to show the wildlife guys, who had taken the loggers at their word, so maybe they hadn’t gone to much trouble after all. You’d think they’d want to kill the bear for their own safety. Unless, of course, they wanted it to scare everyone away.
I stared out over the water, wondering if Diamond had seen any of this view in those last agonizing minutes of his life. I shivered as the wind caressed me. It didn’t seem right somehow, that a life should have ended alone, here in this beautiful, timeless place, that a man should have died and no trace of his passing remained but the broken collar of a cat. I tried to picture it through Diamond’s eyes. What had he been doing? What was so important that he had died for it? Had he really discovered some cougars in an area that hadn’t seen them in years or was I just being too fanciful? Yet it all fit my theory: the bear sign, the cedars, the paper with “red welt” and the compass coordinate on it, and now poor Paulie’s collar. I pictured the three-legged cat as she had run back to me and rubbed against my leg on the portage trail. Not for the first time I wondered what had become of her.
I shook myself out of the gloomy mood I was falling into. I studied the cliff and realized there was no way up here without ropes. I’d have to skirt it. I pulled out my small daypack and stuffed it with an emergency blanket, some food, a map, compass, matches, flashlight, and pepper spray, reluctantly foregoing my collection pack. I threw a rope over a branch of one of the cedars and hauled up my pack to keep the bears from tearing it to shreds. I hoisted my daypack onto my back and headed up into the cedars. I skirted the base of the cliff as it ran inland and after ten minutes found a w
ay up.
It was a long narrow cleft in the cliff that angled gently up through the rock. The going got worse as the crack narrowed like a funnel until my shoulders touched both sides and the trail ended abruptly. I looked up and saw blue sky twenty feet above my head. Before I could give myself even a second to think about my fear of heights, I braced my back against one wall, my feet against the other, and began the slow shimmy up. My legs were aching from the effort by the time my head emerged into the dazzling sunshine. I hauled myself out and looked out over the lake as I took a swig of water from my canteen. I hoped I could find a better way down than the route up.
I walked along the edge of the cliff face trying to get my bearings. The sun was almost directly overhead and beat down relentlessly. The sheer drop of the cliff made my stomach queasy and my knees weak, but what I was looking for was unmistakable.
The thin jagged red welt in the face of the cliff cut up through the top and ran back behind me toward the woods. I sat down astride the welt with my back to the lake and took out my compass. Diamond’s compass reading, if he had taken it here from astride the red welt, pointed off to the left. Northwest. I could feel the excitement building in me as I followed the compass reading across the top of the sun-baked cliff, the wind blowing through the trees and a veery singing its waterfall song somewhere off to my right.
When the rock of the cliff gave way to the forest, I stopped and scanned the trees, searching for a blaze, willing it to be there. There were no easy bright orange markers, but then I hadn’t really expected Diamond to be so obvious. In the silence I could hear a motorboat in the distance.
I started walking a transect back and forth, looking at every damn tree within a hundred and fifty feet of the rock, and in a path twenty feet on either side of the welt. It took me fifteen minutes before I found the first blaze, a hundred feet from the open cliff and practically invisible to anyone not looking for it, because it was low down, well below eye level. I took a compass reading from the first blaze and almost didn’t see the second, Diamond had placed it so far ahead. A very cautious man, but once I reached the second blaze, the rest were easy to follow, coming every twenty feet, which was a good thing because there was no trail and the going was rough. I checked to make sure he’d blazed both sides of the trail before chasing his blazes into the bush. It didn’t look as though anyone had used this trail except Diamond the day he had blazed it. Curious. Surely he would have used it often.
Forever Dead Page 24
