The Cardinal Divide

by Stephen Legault

  He intended to do something about this miserable shape he saw in the mirror. He would definitely do something about it. He washed his hands up to the elbow, dried them on his pants, rolled down his sleeves, and put his coat back on.

  He peeked out of the bathroom to establish that the coast was clear. Cole locked the door behind him and listened intently to the sounds down the hall. Tracey was on the phone again, but no other voices were discernable.

  He made his way to her office and stepped around the corner. Again she hung up. “Anything?”

  “No Day-Timer.”

  “What did you find?” she asked, holding her breath.

  “A lot of paper towels.”

  She stared at him, eyes pleading.

  “With a lot of blood on them.”

  She put her face in her hands and began to cry again.

  “Tracey, I have to get into Hank Henderson’s office.”

  She looked up, tears smearing her mascara. “You think that Hank?...”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. I need to case his office for Mike’s Day-Timer.”

  “Oh Cole, I don’t know.”

  “I have to, Tracey.”

  “If he catches you ...”

  “I know.”

  They formulated a plan. Cole would hide in the empty office next to Mike’s. When Hank came upstairs next, Tracey would stall him as long as she could, while Cole slipped downstairs and into his office. When Hank left her office, she would call his extension, let it ring twice, and hang up. That would be Cole’s signal to get out. He figured he’d have less than a minute to clear Hank’s office and hide before the acting manager returned.

  “It’s a big risk,” she said.

  “I’m a big boy,” he said. But his stomach turned over at the prospect.

  He waited in the empty room beside Barnes’ office for half an hour before he heard Hank’s voice. That gave him a lot of time to think. It gave him too much time to think.

  Things didn’t turn out as planned very often in Cole Blackwater’s life. If someone had predicted, during the heyday of his time in Ottawa, that in a few years he’d be trying to solve a murder at a mine in a backwoods town in the eastern slopes of Alberta, rather than end poverty or stop climate change, he would have laughed. If they had told him he’d be elbow deep in a toilet, he would have cried.

  So he laughed. Eyes closed, shoulders moving up and down against the wall, belly contracting, he laughed silently. He sat with his back to the wall next to the closed door and laughed at the sheer stupidity of everything that had happened in the last four years. And the laughter turned to tears.

  Before he knew it, tears rolled down his grisled cheeks, stained his face, and got caught in the scar on his chin. The laughter was now bittersweet. He never imagined being here. Even when things went completely sideways in Ottawa and then turned for the worse, far worse, on that dark night in the barn on the family ranch, even then, during his darkest moments, he never imagined he’d be trying to solve a murder.

  It was half an hour before Hank Henderson left his office to snarl at Tracey. Cole bet that Mike Barnes never did that. Hank angrily demanded where College Boy filed the monthly financials. When Cole was certain Hank was out of the hall, he slipped out of the office and padded toward the stairs.

  He checked his watch. Tracey had promised to keep Hank for five minutes at least, but he couldn’t count on it. He reached the third floor and found that hallway clear. Luck was on his side. He slipped into Hank’s office and shut the door. The room was dark and cluttered. First he cased Henderson’s desk, opened the drawers and looked beneath stacks of paper. His heart skipped a beat when he found a Day-Timer, but it was Henderson’s. On the off chance that Hank had marked down his appointment with Barnes, Cole scanned the previous week. He caught his breath when he read that Henderson indeed had an appointment for eight o’clock that night. It didn’t say with whom; all it said was “Finalize E.A.” Cole read that as finalize Environmental Assessment.

  Cole returned the agenda and quickly moved to the row of filing cabinets on the opposite wall. They were ancient units, heavy and solid, the kind that would come in handy during a nuclear blast or some other apocalyptic event. They squealed when he opened the drawers. Cole looked quickly through the files and stacks of papers, desperately hoping that he would find what he was after.

  The phone rang.

  He froze.

  It rang a second time.

  His heart raced. He was about to slam the cabinet shut when it rang a third time.

  It wasn’t Tracey.

  He hoped. They had agreed on two rings. What if she had forgotten?

  Then his name was mud.

  He continued his search. Nothing but paper. He removed a wad of files to search beneath and dropped one on the floor.

  “Sweet mother of pearl,” he muttered.

  The phone rang.

  He scooped up the file and jammed it back into the drawer.

  The phone rang again.

  His heart beat louder than the phone.

  He waited for the next ring, but it never came.

  He made a dash for the door, knocked the table as he went, upset several giant drill bits, and bruised his leg. He groaned. He reached for the door handle when he saw, through the opaque bevelled glass, movement down the hall. Henderson. Caught. The adrenaline coursed through his ears.

  He searched for a place to hide in the room and spotted the windows with their dust-laden vertical blinds. He had only seconds.

  Then he heard a female voice. “Mr. Henderson, I found them!”

  He watched the doorknob slowly turn to open the door, and then stop. He could see Henderson’s outline through the glass. He wondered if he himself was as plainly visible.

  “Mr. Henderson!” It was Tracey. The door remained closed. Cole scrambled through the drapes to the windows. He knocked a cloud of dust into the air as he pushed his way through, careful not to cough or sneeze or make a racket. He found the latch to the four-foot high window, pushed it open, and lifted himself out onto the sill.

  The Buffalo Anthracite Mine’s administration building was rectangular, four storeys high, and made of red brick, trimmed modestly with wide cement windowsills. Cole found himself twenty-five feet off the ground standing on such a sill. He closed the window behind him and prayed for the first time in his life, hoping that Hank Henderson had not seen him step out into this ledge.

  The ledge in question was about eight inches wide, and the window was four feet tall. Cole’s toes hung over the edge and he had to press his head into the brick above the window to balance. He took a deep breath. When he was younger he and his older brother Walter had often gone into the Highwood Range, west of the family ranch, to scramble in the mountains. He had been in a number of tricky situations in those days, and heights hadn’t bothered him much then. But now, middle-aged and out of practice, Cole closed his eyes against the long drop to the ground below.

  He forced himself to breathe. His lungs relaxed as moist air, still cloaked in cloud, still wet with rain, entered on a deep breath. He grew calm. And calmly he assessed the situation. I’m caught on a ledge three storeys above the ground, outside the office of a man who very likely killed his boss and took his job, a man who hates me. A man who threatened to kill me if I was seen on the mine property again. Cole suppressed a laugh. I’m in plain view of anybody who wanders by. This is not good.

  Cole looked down. Behind the administration building was the two-storey-tall maintenance building that he had seen when he clambered over the fence. Below him were the wheelbarrow and other assorted tools, carelessly left in the rain.

  He looked to his left. He could make his way along this ledge and, if he could turn around without falling, step to the next window, which he figured must also be one that looked into Hank Henderson’s office. Three feet of red brick separated the two windows. Could he turn around, and then make the awkward, off-balance step to the next window, somehow holding onto the
brick as he did? And then what? Repeat it half a dozen more times to get to the end of the building. There was a stout-looking drain spout, not the cheap aluminium eavestroughs that were installed on homes today, but a solid iron affair that Cole thought might hold him. But he had to get to it. Then he could tackle the problem of what to do. Maybe his fleeting luck would hold and one of the empty offices would have an open window.

  He looked in the other direction. Same situation. Half a dozen windows and corresponding ledges, and a drain spout at the corner.

  He sighed and closed his eyes briefly to quell his fear.

  What if he waited for Hank to leave? He looked at his watch. It was about two-thirty. He knew from Emma Henderson that Hank left for Oracle by five-thirty or quarter to six each night to make it home by six-thirty. Could Cole balance on this ledge for three hours or more? He doubted he could balance there for fifteen minutes. He looked at the gap between him and the next window. What if someone in one of the offices saw him as he shimmied along? Then the jig would be up, wouldn’t it?

  He looked at the maintenance shed. He guessed it was about a ten to fifteen-foot gap between the older admin building and the newer maintenance building. And about a fifteen-foot drop. He tried to do the math. Could he make that jump? He might be able to make ten feet. Any more, probably not.

  His knees started to knock. He wanted to relieve the pressure on them, but there was no room to squat on the ledge. He had to choose. He decided to try and reach the drain spout.

  He inched along the window ledge and when he got to the end of it, pressed a palm up against the brick above the window, and using that force, pivoted around on his right foot, swung his left foot around, and placed it on the sill. He pressed a second palm above him to steady himself. He took a calming breath. So far, so good. He was facing in now. Inching his right hand close to the end of the window opening, pressing hard on the brick, he began to reach his left foot out around the wall to the next windowsill.

  Three feet is a long way. Even for a man as tall as Cole, three feet is a long way to reach with your foot when there is nothing but open space beneath you. He reached, tapped his toe along the wall, pressed harder and harder with his right hand, balanced the left hand on the brick wall, and searched for a gap in the bricks. After what seemed like a lifetime, but was more like five or ten seconds, Cole’s left foot found the ledge. He settled it there, awkwardly, and pushed his left hand toward the next hold. He planned to grab the side of the window opening with his left hand, and with his right, do the same on the window opening he faced now, and use equal and opposite pressure to hold on as he transferred his weight. He risked a look at where he was going. He couldn’t tell if the blinds were up or down. His eyes strayed and he saw the ground below.

  He shifted his weight, breathing as slowly and consciously as he could.

  He hadn’t counted on the ledge being wet and he felt his left foot start to slip. He tried to press it more tightly to the concrete surface, but it continued to slide. He was going to fall. In the moment before he lost control he lunged, bending his right knee as deeply as he could, and pushed away from the wall with every ounce of strength in his body.

  The gap between the administration building and the maintenance building was much closer to fifteen feet than ten. Even if it had been ten, Cole Blackwater, falling backward, could not have hoped to land on the roof of the shed. The only thought in his mind as he fell was that he didn’t want to land on the tools by the door.

  He hit the ground with a thud, his left foot first, then his left arm, and his back. He grunted loudly as he hit the ground, rolled backward in the mud, and collided with the wheelbarrow, which fell on top of him. He blacked out momentarily, the air forced from his lungs by the fall, and a sharp pain shot up his left leg. God, I’ve broken my leg, he thought as he lay in the mud by the door to the shed.

  He lay there for a minute in a puddle of mud. Rain fell on him, getting in his eyes and nose and ears. The pain in his leg dulled. Maybe it wasn’t broken. He moved his arms. His left elbow was very sore, but it worked. He tried his legs. The right leg was OK. He moved the left. Some pain there, but bearable. He pushed the wheelbarrow off and it clattered to the ground. He tried to stand. As he put weight on his left leg a spasm of pain shot up his left side. He scanned the windows to see if he had been observed. He couldn’t tell in the rain if anybody peered out at him.

  He grabbed for the door handle to steady himself. He had to get off the mine property. How was he going to get back to his truck? He couldn’t climb the fence.

  Then he remembered that he still had the keys. Tracey would understand. She had, after all, bought him valuable seconds when he was in Henderson’s office. He patted his pockets and felt the keys’ reassuring weight.

  The he bent down to pick up the wheelbarrow.

  He stopped. He looked up from where he had fallen.

  Mike Barnes was a heavy man.

  It was a solid wheelbarrow.

  If the murderer had known about a wheelbarrow behind the admin building, he might have used it to transport the body to the mill. That might also explain why none of the suspects limped from their collision with the bits and steel. The wheelbarrow had knocked over the pallet, dumping Mike Barnes to the floor.

  Cole inspected the wheelbarrow for signs of blood. Nothing. He tried the door handle and found it locked. He fished the keys from his pockets, careful not to drop any of his trash, unlocked the door, and slipped inside. It was pitch black. He patted the wall, found a light switch, and flipped it on. There was a riding mower, a gas-powered push mower, a wall full of garden tools, a broad workbench, and three wheelbarrows on the opposite wall. Above the workbench there was an eye-wash station and a red plastic case with a familiar white cross on it. First aid. Hallelujah, thought Cole.

  He hobbled to the wheelbarrows to inspect them. The first one in the stack of three revealed its dark secret. The hub over the wheel was speckled with blood. While the barrow itself was clean, the killer, as he had in the bathroom, had been in a rush and missed this. Cole smirked. Maybe the RCMP would get lucky and lift a set of prints from the barrow. He leaned it back against the wall and took a few pictures of it with his cellphone. Then he looked for the Day-Timer on the off chance that the killer had stashed it here. Nothing. Finally he took down the first aid kit and opened it.

  He found a broad tensor bandage, a bottle of extra strength Tylenol, and an sa m splint. This would help. Sitting on the bench, he slowly removed his shoe, gritting his teeth and grimacing as the pain shot up his leg. The ankle was nearly black – a deep sprain, if not a small fracture – and he couldn’t move it without pain. He wrapped the tensor bandage around it and then applied the splint. He left his sock off, but put his shoe back on. He still had to drive to Oracle. He swallowed two Tylenol, washing them down with water from the eye-wash station, and pocketed the bottle.

  He put the first aid kit back on the wall. Time to get the heck out of Dodge, he thought.

  He limped to the door, opened it slowly, and peeked out. The rain continued, and he stepped out into it and closed and locked the door behind him.

  As quickly as his injury allowed, he hobbled to the fence, checking behind him for trouble. None appeared, and he unlocked the gate, let himself through, and locked it behind him. He discovered that the lock could easily be pushed back from the outside so it didn’t reveal anybody’s passage. He did so, and sloshed to his truck in the falling rain, wincing from the pain in his ankle.

  He slumped in the seat, breathing hard from exertion and from the adrenaline that coursed through him. He took his hat off and his hair flopped across his forehead. He ran a hand through it and water ran down his face. He closed his eyes. He could hear his heart.

  What am I doing here?

  He opened his eyes with a start, realizing that he had fallen asleep. Pushing himself up with the palms of his hands on the seat, he winced at the pain in his left elbow. He’d have to have that looked at too. He wondere
d what Sarah would say when he returned home looking as if he’d been through combat. He had told her two weeks ago when she had implored him to be safe, that he was just going to do a little strategy work. Now he was falling out of third-storey windows.

  Jumping out of third-storey windows.

  He looked through the rain at the administration building and considered what he had learned in Henderson’s office. His Day-Timer showed that Hank had a meeting to finalize the environmental assessment on the same night that Barnes was killed. Cole had seen Hank leaving the admin building. Did Hank go home for an early dinner and return later to meet with Barnes? If so, had the meeting gone so badly that Henderson, already an angry and violent man, followed Barnes into the bathroom and bashed his head in? Cole shuddered. Some missing piece pestered him, something that he could not put his finger on. But despite all his snooping and risk-taking, he had found nothing to vindicate Dale van Stempvort and convict someone else. Despite great risk to his miserable life and limb, he was no farther ahead than he was that morning.

  How, Cole thought, could this possibly be worth the peril he had put himself in?

  He turned the truck’s ignition over. He’d limp back to town, pay his second visit to the hospital, and reconsider the crazy notion that in one fell swoop he could solve the mystery of Mike Barnes’ death, save Cardinal Divide, and purge himself of his anger, guilt, and sorrow for all that had happened in his downward-spiralling life. There were less demanding forms of therapy, mused Cole. Nobody in Vancouver took this sort of risk. They got their chakras realigned or went to Hollyhock and sat in supportive circles and ate vegetarian food; they didn’t solve murders and confront killers.

  The stereo started up with the truck and he turned up the volume on Ian Tyson, hoping the crooner’s cowboy polkas and the lament of his ballads would vanquish Cole Blackwater’s remorse. The Toyota in gear, he backed away from the gate, onto the track that paralleled the mine site, and toward Route 40. As he drove past the main gate he wished good riddance to the place. This was the last time he’d see it.