Forever Dead

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  Inch by laborious inch, she pulled herself closer to safety, her bulging eyes boring straight ahead, staring at something, never wavering, with such a raw intensity that I glanced back and gasped. Patrick was draped over the stern seat, blood from his bandaged wound seeping through and trickling down his face. Slowly, painfully, he unclipped the stern line from its ring and let it go.

  Epilogue

  Nearly a week had passed since Patrick and I had almost died on the river, and I was on my porch lazing in the hammock, nervously thinking about my dinner party just two hours away. Everything was ready except my mind, which wouldn’t stop telling me in great detail everything that might go wrong. And I didn’t want anything to go wrong. I’d invited Ryan, Martha, Duncan … and Patrick. Especially Patrick. The man I had pegged as a murderer; the man who had come to the campsite in search of me after hearing from Roberta that I was alone up there; the man who had discovered my pack covered in oil and had looked up to see the bear coming out of the woods behind me; the man who had tried to save me by firing a flare gun and then, when that failed, who had tried to lead the bear away from me, and nearly died for the effort.

  As I’d watched him unclip the line from its ring and let it slide over the stern and into the fast water, before slumping back exhausted into the canoe, I had felt betrayed by my own thoughts and angry and ashamed that I could have so misjudged him. I had moved then, as fast as my battered body would allow, to get help, and Patrick and I had been airlifted by float plane out to a hospital in Dumoine. I thought back to the day in the hospital when I’d visited him as he recovered from a severe head injury. Now, tonight, would be his first visit to my home, and I was a bundle of nerves jangling in the late afternoon breeze.

  “I think I know who you are, Cordi O’Callaghan.”

  The sudden softness of his voice drowned out the crickets with its sheer intensity of meaning. He must have walked in from the barn because I hadn’t heard a car, and my heart lurched to stalling point. As I struggled to sit up in the hammock, Patrick came up the porch stairs two at a time. He sat beside me then, his body pressing hard against my own, his hand reaching for mine. The livid scar on his forehead where the bear had caught him was healing, and I wanted to touch it, but I didn’t. I thought the heat inside me might burn him.

  “You’re two hours early,” I said instead, trying to hide my nerves. He said nothing, just looked at me with that melting smile of his. He stroked my hand and his fingers moved lightly over my arm, found their way under my blouse, like butterflies, barely touching my skin, and yet I was screaming at their touch.

  “Look at the cows out there,” I croaked. “See how the sun makes them look red?”

  “I don’t want to look at the cows,” he said, his eyes caressing mine. His voice was so soft it was like a blanket enveloping me. My body knew what it wanted, but my stupid mind just wouldn’t let me go.

  “I think Mac’s going to be late milking the cows. They shouldn’t still be there at this hour,” I said, feeling like an idiot — wanting to be otherwise.

  “Shut up and kiss me, Cordi O’Callaghan.”

  He pulled me to him then. I felt his lips hard against mine in an explosion of pent-up emotion that consumed both body and soul. I could still hear the cows mooing in the field and the crickets chirruping, but the sun froze in its tracks within the medley of our wildly beating hearts. We sank into each other and I allowed myself to finally believe what I had seen in his eyes.

  We lay in the hammock, afterwards, peacefully waiting for the rest of my guests to arrive and listening to the sounds of night falling. No need for words. We’d just spoken them with our souls.

  “Well, well, well, what have we here?”

  From deep inside Patrick’s arms, I looked up to see Duncan smiling down on us. I realized we must have fallen asleep, and, embarrassed, I struggled out of Patrick’s embrace and the hammock’s cocoon to greet Duncan, Martha, and Ryan. Martha raised her eyebrows in a knowing way, and Ryan eyeballed me and Patrick the way only a brother can. I introduced them to Patrick, who, totally unfazed, graciously rose to greet them as if he’d known them all his life.

  I left them to it and went to get drinks. When I returned they had all found seats, and as I handed out the drinks Duncan said, “What did I tell you my dear girl? You’ll make a marvelous forensic consultant, having single-handedly solved a murder no one knew about!”

  Duncan’s large form was sprawled on one of my porch chairs nicely snugged up beside Martha’s. Patrick was sitting on the railing and Ryan was in the hammock sipping wine and watching the sun bathing the escarpment a deep golden yellow.

  Ryan smiled and said, “So, you’ve decided, Cordi?”

  I looked at Duncan, and then at Ryan and Martha, who winked at me. It certainly looked as though they had all decided long before I had. I went and sat on the rail beside Patrick.

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess I have. I figure it won’t be too onerous, but we’ll see.” I still had misgivings. “And it’ll be interesting.”

  “Not to mention that it’s a great hook for your taxonomy course,” added Martha with a laugh. She turned to Duncan, who raised his eyebrows in alarm. “Do you realize we had to put ten students on a waiting list in case any of the forty registered students dropped out? They all wanted to be part of a team solving a murder — the course description sounded like a detective novel. Of course the publicity in the paper about the murder, and the halting of the logging, and the cougars, and Cordi’s role in it undoubtedly helped, but the outline is great stuff. You should read it, Duncan. Full of blood and gore and mystery.”

  Duncan looked a little nonplussed, and I shot a nasty look at Martha, who in turn raised her eyebrows and pointedly said nothing. All these raised eyebrows were making me dizzy.

  “We’re not talking human murders here,” I hastily reassured Duncan, who had taken out his handkerchief and was now wiping his brow. I could just imagine him envisioning forty undergrads storming his lab for evidence or set loose on the streets asking questions. It was an alarming thought, even to me, and I quickly set things straight.

  “I’m setting up my taxonomic assignments — or at least some of them — as homicides. We’re talking about road kills — you know, dead coons and porcupines, even dead pigs and birds — that sort of thing.” The relieved look on Duncan’s face was comical.

  “You mean someone’s out there murdering pigs?”

  “No, of course not. We’re just going to set it up as though these road kills have been murdered. Each group will be assigned a ‘murder’ and Martha and I will manipulate the corpses so that the students will be told where to find the murder victim. They will then have to collect and raise the larvae to adulthood and identify them. We also want them to determine if the body has been moved from where they find it and how long it’s been dead. So they’ll be collecting flora as well as any biological entity that might help them solve the murder.”

  “Some of them actually are murdered, you know,” piped up Martha. Her face turned dark and ominous as she continued in a low conspiratorial tone. “I’ve seen drivers purposely swerve to hit a turtle or a coon. It’s revolting.”

  We all politely thought about the murdered animals for some seconds, and then I broke the silence and addressed Duncan.

  “You won’t have to worry, Duncan. The students will not be running all over campus. I’ve got permission to use some abandoned land outside the city. The students will treat it like a murder mystery. That’s all. And it’s just one part of the course. Once I get them into the course, I can teach them the basics of taxonomy and hopefully hook some of them for life.”

  Duncan broke out his best smile.

  “I have to hand it to you, girl. It’s a brilliant idea but, please, please, I don’t want any of those undergrads osmosing over into real murder territory if and when I have to call you in on a case. I’m not sure I could handle the hordes.”

  I laughed and said, “I know I couldn’t. Not all at on
ce, anyway.”

  Before Duncan could respond Martha poked him playfully in the ribs and said, “Don’t you dare call on her for at least three months. Now that she’s got her disks back, she’s received conditional approval of her grant based on seeing final research results of her work to date in three months, and revisions for her article for Animal Behaviour will be handed in as soon as she can do them, so she’ll be very busy.”

  She winked at me and I laughed, remembering how ecstatic I had been when the cops, after Leslie’s body had been fished out of the river, had searched her apartment and found my disks as well as photographs of the cougars. I guessed I would never know why Leslie hadn’t thrown the disks away — perhaps the same sort of reluctance that had made her choose to carry a rubber imitation gun. Or the hope that something on the disks would help her own career. Whatever it was, I was grateful.

  “Not to mention the fact that she’s now got Hilson’s animal behaviour course to teach, too,” said Martha as she rubbed her hands in glee. “And you should have seen Jim Hilson’s face when Cordi broke the news about Leslie and torpedoed his career. Of course, the university did the actual firing because of his role in the fumigation of Cordi’s lab. But Cordi got to break it to him big time!”

  Uncharacteristically Martha stopped talking and I realized they were all looking at me.

  “What can I say?” I said. “I won. He lost.” Keep it short and sweet. But I couldn’t do anything from preventing it from running through my head.

  It was indelibly imprinted on my brain. Jim Hilson had waltzed into my lab, given my rear a pat, and said, “It’s farewell time.”

  I pushed him away, but he kept crowding me so I pushed as hard as I could and he grabbed my arm with lightning speed. I twisted away from him and said, “I’m sure you don’t want harassment added to your charge of accessory to theft and murder.” He dropped my arm as if I’d bitten it. “Do you?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. His eyes were glinting like daggers at me and I backed up.

  “You gave Leslie Anderson the keys to this building,” I said.

  He looked at me uncertainly, and I could clearly see his lack of courage surfacing like a methane bubble from a swamp.

  “So what?’ he said. ‘She’s a friend. She asked me for a favour.”

  “She’s a dead friend who just happened to kill two people and steal all my disks,” I said.

  He stared at me in stone cold silence. He was struggling to hide his sudden fear, darting his eyes around looking for an escape route, but he couldn’t find one.

  “You gave her the key, and she fumigated my insects and stole my research,” I said.

  “That makes you an accessory after the fact,” I added.

  He just stood there, at a loss for words, and in I went, straight for the jugular. “It’s official. The Dean has fired you and the cops are probably up in your lab right now.” He looked at me, his head at an angle like an owl, his face sagging into itself like a leaky balloon. We said nothing and as the silence lengthened I wondered what was going through his head. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “How did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Know about everything, Leslie and me, everything.”

  “You really want to know?”

  He nodded, and for the first time in my life I’d felt sorry for Jim Hilson — but not that sorry.

  “You just have to know the right people,” I said, and then I blew him a kiss and left him standing there, stewing in his own words.

  I was brought back from my reverie by Martha.

  “What will happen to Don’s daughter?” she asked out of the blue, breaking the spell. No one said anything, just let the crickets take over our silence, because nobody knew.

  “And what about the will? Did Shannon ever find it?”

  I looked at Martha, wishing she’d just be quiet. I hated not being able to answer questions. “The police never found out who ripped out the pages from the black book,” I said. “Maybe there never was a will. Maybe Shannon lied. We’ll never know.”

  I could see the moon starting to rise over the escarpment and felt content for the first time in weeks. It was a good feeling. “Who’s going to take over the cougars?” This time Duncan broke the silence.

  “Patrick is,” I said and actually squeezed his hand.

  He squeezed back a lot harder and said, “I’ll set up surveillance up there, and I’m working on a paper based on some of Diamond’s notes and some of my own stuff as well.” I thought about how Patrick had sold his share of the mill just before the discovery of the cougars broke out. The company that bought the mill had been livid, but it had been sold in good faith. I felt kind of rotten about it, even though the cougars would make Patrick’s career and halt the logging.

  “Of course Diamond will get the credit for the discovery,” continued Patrick, “but he’s given me a giant career boost. I have a research grant to study Sian — that’s the name Diamond gave her, apparently — and her cubs, and try to locate others in the area. We know there has to be at least one male in the neighbourhood — Sian’s mate — and hopefully more. It’s wild country and they’re secretive cats, so it’s not such a long shot to hope that a viable population may exist up there.”

  His words rang like a gong through my head, moving from room to room in my mind, sounding an alarm like a town crier. Something to do with Sian. What the hell was it? It had bothered me at the blind but the uneasy suspicion now forming in my mind had been scared away first by the boulder, then by all the revelations Leslie had told me, and later by the police.

  When Duncan and Martha finally left, I had to nudge my protective brother out of the house. Before Patrick could immobilize me by taking me in his arms, I grabbed his hand and said, “I have to check something in the barn.”

  “Said the spider to the fly?” quipped Patrick as he allowed himself to be led to Ryan’s office.

  I flicked on Ryan’s computer and the screen came to life. I sat down in front of it, waiting impatiently for all the things to mount before I located Diamond’s folder, and opened “lynx” with the password Leah22.

  “What is it, Cordi?” asked Patrick as he draped his arms over my shoulders. I had to make a conscious effort to forget he was there as I keyed in a word search for Sian in the documents in the folders. And suddenly, there it was staring out at me: Dana, Simba, Sian, and Myth, the four cats Diamond had bred in captivity.

  The prickle at the back of my neck grew as I began to tease around the implications of what this meant. Of course he could have given two cats the same name, but I knew, even as the thought flitted through my mind and I searched through his files, that it wasn’t true. No scientist worth his salt would risk mixing up two study subjects by giving them the same name. Sian and the sixth cat that Diamond had radio-collared were one and the same. And that could mean only one thing.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, leaning back, staring up at Patrick. “Diamond’s cougar was artificially inseminated.”

  “What?” said Patrick, taking his arms away and reaching for the mouse. Together we looked at the locked folder labelled “wild card,” sure it held the key to everything. I started keying in Sian followed by numbers from 11 to 99. Nothing. Patrick suggested a number of passwords too, but nothing worked. We were close to giving up in exasperation when suddenly I remembered Shannon’s sign and Paulie’s pathetic little collar in my hand, the name glinting in the early morning sun. Paulie, not Polly.

  It opened at Paulie22, and there it was in black and white. Detailed information about Sian’s life. I sat back and stared at Patrick, who had sat down rather abruptly on the sofa. The whole thing had been an elaborate hoax right from the start.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Patrick, but it was all there.

  “According to this,” I said, “Sian was one of the cubs that Jeff brought back from New Brunswick, along with her brother. It says here that Jeff had been looking for a breeding
kestrel, and while making the deal some hunters came and told him about some half-dead cubs they’d found. When he realized what they were, he questioned the hunters trying to get more information, knowing that New Brunswick cougars were rare too, but they wouldn’t talk. Jeff smuggled them out, flew them back to Quebec, and called Diamond, who convinced him to sit on it for a while.”

  “What did they do with the cubs?”

  I scrolled through the document, scanning the entries.

  “It appears that Jeff installed the cats in two separate compounds once they were old enough to be on their own. Diamond wanted them as wild as possible. Jeff was in the process of breeding some fox for reintroduction to the wild, and Diamond persuaded him to take on the cougars.”

  “So they worked on it together?”

  “Seems that way. They must have hatched the plan to release a pregnant female cougar in order to stop the logging. When the female got pregnant, they radio-collared her, released her near term, and then followed her until she found a den and holed up. Jeff flew Diamond in now and again and he spent the last three weeks there before blazing a trail out when he was ready to tell the world. He had to make sure she would stay, and the cubs would be all right, before he could let the world know.”

  “No wild cougars,” said Patrick. “That means that three people died for nothing.”

  I went over to him then and snuggled beside him on the sofa, wondering what he was thinking, feeling my own dark thoughts swirling inside me, just out of reach.