“Good photography weather too,” she responded. “I hope it stays this clear.”
Weston put the car in gear.
“We’re in luck: there’s no rain forecast for the next several days. So we’re in no rush to set up camp.”
“Where will it be?”
“About a mile and a half away from the dig itself. An easy walk. We don’t want to disturb the immediate surroundings.”
“Yes, and it’s better for pictures too—nothing messing up the shot.”
“We’re just now taking equipment and supplies up there by chopper. We’ll bring the rest by ATV.”
The SUV passed the last houses in the village, and Lori wondered how many eyes were watching them.
“That must cost a heck of a lot, the helicopter and all,” she remarked.
“NORPUNT’s shelling out for the chopper. It’s good PR. An oil company that also cares about the country’s history.”
“Will you put up a sign with the company’s logo at the dig?”
Weston grinned.
“Not to worry. It’s all untouched up there at the moment. Your first pictures should record everything the way we first found it.”
“Who actually discovered the burial mound?”
“There are lots of old, old stories about hunters who first noticed it. They used it as an orientation point. They called it the Rabbit’s Back. It really does stand out on the plain, you’ll see.”
“And when did you see the grave for the first time?”
“From the chopper.”
“The oil company’s?”
“No, with Gideon Moore. He’s flying us there today.”
“So NORPUNT hired Moore?”
“Right. We don’t want too many people to know. Gideon can keep his mouth shut; I’ve known him for years.”
Lori could see in the rearview mirror that they weren’t being followed. So Reanna had been foiled. She looked back at Weston.
“What about me—can I keep my mouth shut too?”
Weston looked her in the eye before turning onto a gravel road that Lori hadn’t noticed before.
“Of course. It’s in your own interest, after all. If people get wind of this, you can kiss your exclusive photos good-bye. I know how the media can be.”
A little presumptuous, but Lori understood why: Weston was standing before the second great discovery of his life. He was man in victory mode. Her mother’s article crossed her mind.
“If it’s a camp with tents, where are you going to store the finds this time?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Why do you ask?”
“I read an article by one of your colleagues—”
“Beth Ontara,” he shot back.
“Yes. She said it was a miracle that the artifacts had been transferred to a trailer one day before the lodge fire.”
“Well, now . . . so that article is making the rounds in Vancouver, is it?”
When Lori didn’t respond, Weston continued.
“Beth is very modest. She was the one who kept urging me to find a better place to store them. She said too many people were going in and out of the lodge, and we couldn’t keep tabs on everybody. It’s her I have to thank for the miracle.”
Lori thought she heard a slightly sarcastic undertone in his words. Seen in a critical light, Beth had drawn attention to her superior’s inexcusable carelessness. Had she shouted in triumph when she’d been proven right? Everyone would have seen how smart she was. And how the chief archaeologist had put everything in jeopardy. And then Beth went and published an article about the oversight. That couldn’t have been unproblematic for the ambitious Weston.
“What a coincidence—that the fire broke out just one day later.” Lori was talking mostly to herself, but Weston observed drily, “You’re not the only one who’s wondered about that.”
The smile was gone from his face. “The writer will be flying with us today.”
“Who?” Lori turned toward him. Not Reanna!
“Beth. She’s on the dig too.”
Lori had assumed as much; after all, Beth had been at the Birch Tree Lodge. Lori remembered her as a tomboyish woman inclined to ribald humor.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
“I can’t wait. Please help me keep people from walking into my shots.”
“No problem.” Weston was now rather aloof.
They arrived at a paved area next to an old barrack. An orange helicopter sparkled like a giant fat bakeapple on the gray landing area, next to some crates that had been unloaded off a pickup.
“This is an old airstrip from when the zinc mine was still working,” Weston explained.
She noticed a paved road on the opposite side of the pavement; Weston had apparently taken a less-traveled shortcut. He parked the SUV beside the pickup.
One of the men in overalls came over and greeted her like an old friend, although they’d only met when ice fishing, and Lori hadn’t even known at the time who Gideon Moore was.
“We’re gonna have to make two trips, with all this here matériel,” Moore said to Weston, flicking his head in the direction of the crates.
Weston looked at the men unloading more boxes. “Is that a problem?”
“No, I talked to the people at NORPUNT and it’s OK.”
He was looking at Lori but directing his words to Weston.
“We’ll take the lady first, eh?”
“Yes, then she can get right to work.”
“And who else? Beth or you.”
“Me,” Weston replied. “Where is Beth anyway?”
“Over there, checking the lists. She crosses off whatever’s coming with us.”
Weston thought for a moment then turned to Lori. “We’ll take out your stuff so I can park the car.”
Lori took her backpack off the back seat. Moore was Johnny-on-the-spot and snatched up her tripod.
“Is that all you have?”
She nodded. “Did Lloyd tell you I’ll be needing a safety net?”
“Yes, I’ve taken photographers up in the chopper before. One of them wanted pictures of icebergs from above.”
“And where do I sit?” someone behind them asked.
Lori turned and found herself face-to-face with Beth Ontara.
“Hello,” Lori said. “Nice to see you a—”
“I must be on the first flight. I know where everything has to go. Otherwise it will be chaos, and I’ll waste time getting everything back in order.”
Lori noticed Weston’s body tensing up. “It’s better if you fly with the second shipment, Beth. Somebody has to oversee everything here and make sure nothing’s left behind.”
Beth furrowed her brow. “Can’t you do that?”
She was dressed for a serious hike, in black and khaki and with her short hair hidden by an orange baseball cap with the words “Gideon Air” on it. She looked tan and fit, like a high-performance athlete. She reminded Lori that archaeology meant more than office work—it involved rooting around in the dirt. And probably pushing around huge heavy rocks, like those at the first grave.
Weston was the boss.
“I’m flying with Lori so she can get to work while the light’s still good.”
Beth grimaced. “Worst-case scenario, we can always use my pictures,” she said tartly.
Gideon put an arm around her hips.
“You already had an extra ride in my eggbeater. You’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Beth raised her eyebrows but left his arm on her hip until he took it away.
Lori was amazed at the familiarity between the two. What had Vera Quinton told her when she’d come to walk the husky? Rusty had been Gideon’s dog, and Gideon had replaced his first wife with a younger one and built her a new house in Saleau Cove. Beth was perhaps in her midforties, Gideon in his midfifties.
Weston started the SUV.
Gideon handed her a yellow object. “You’ve got to put this on.”
“A life jacket?”
B
eth beat him to it. “Yes, we’re flying over water. You’ve obviously never been in a copter.”
Lori didn’t like the sneer on her face. She had pleasant memories of their evening playing poker, but she was probably caught in the middle of something between them.
“Never with a life jacket,” she replied, laughing to break the tension.
Gideon grinned, but Beth took a rather critical view of Lori’s attempts to put the life jacket on properly. She finally helped her out.
“Pull this tab if you land in the water.”
“We’re not going into the drink,” Gideon shouted. “Not if I’m the pilot.”
“I should hope not. This thing’s brand-new, after all.”
Beth talked as if she owned the helicopter. Lori’s eyes followed her as she walked back to the pickup with a brisk stride. The life jacket felt like a straitjacket. Would she be able to move well enough to take pictures?
Gideon seemed to read her thoughts.
“Everybody’s got to wear a life jacket—even German barons,” he said, stowing her tripod and backpack in the helicopter’s belly. “He didn’t grumble, and his wife didn’t either. You know them, by the way.”
Lori was silent.
“The German baron and his wife.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, you met them at the Birch Tree Lodge, right?”
“Hmm.” Lori feigned preoccupation with her camera.
“He knows everything about German submarines in Newfoundland.”
The turn in the conversation made Lori uncomfortable. But Gideon seemed to take that as encouragement.
“My mother was in one of those subs when she was a kid—1939. She was ten. Told me about it some years back.”
Oh, not this again, Lori thought. Why were German submarines dogging her? She wanted to see a seven-thousand-year-old burial mound, not listen to tales about the war.
“The sub surfaced at Saleau Cove, by Port Saunders, at dusk. Mom’s from there. Only about two hundred residents. No streets and no electricity and just outhouses.”
Lori looked around. Weston had wandered over to a group of workers beside an old shed on the edge of the runway. He couldn’t save her.
“Water’s very deep at Saleau Cove,” Gideon continued, having found a way to kill time until the crates were ready. “Subs could be protected from attack down there. If people there saw Allied ships on the ocean, they knew German subs might be in the vicinity.”
He fished a handkerchief out of his overalls and blew his nose.
“So they’d put blackout curtains over the windows so there were no lights. I don’t mean electric lights; they only had kerosene lamps. Same here, even in 1939.”
Lori nodded and was immediately sorry she had. But Gideon would have gone on talking anyway.
“Kids weren’t allowed on the beach, but you know how kids are. Wouldn’t have thought, though, that mother was such a little rascal. She went down to the harbor with a gang of kids. They saw a sub, and all of a sudden, the tower hatch opened. Some men climbed out, and mother said they were very friendly and invited them to look inside the sub.”
Now Lori couldn’t control herself anymore.
“This sounds like one of those yarns about extraterrestrials who abduct children in their spaceships.”
Gideon gave a good-natured laugh.
“Exactly. I cracked jokes about it at first, just like you. But mother got mad. She thought we didn’t believe her. But she remembers the swastikas on the walls. At least, that’s what she told me. The crew took the kids into the galley and gave them oranges and chocolate. Mother had never seen an orange in her life!”
Lori saw Weston walking over the runway. What would he say to this bizarre story?
“Mother was really impressed by the engine room. A man put her on his lap and stroked her hair. Mother was a blond, you see. And the German was, too, and she said he kissed her on her forehead and said, ‘What a sweet little girl!’”
“Did your mother understand German?” was Lori’s malicious question.
The pilot didn’t bat an eyelash.
“No, the crew apparently spoke a little English. They brought the kids back to shore after and waved them good-bye.”
“Who waved good-bye to whom after what?” Weston wanted to know when he got back to the helicopter.
“The Nazis in the submarine waved to the kids in Saleau Cove after showing them around the sub,” Lori summarized.
“Oh, that old story.” Weston put his hand on the helicopter’s shiny orange metal, over the G in “Gideon Air.” “So—can we get a move on?”
“What do you think about that?” Lori persisted after Gideon had gone to the other side of the helicopter.
Weston fiddled with his life jacket.
“It’s possible, of course, but a story like that is virtually impossible to prove.”
“So you actually think it’s possible?”
“Clearly. Why not? I don’t think those kids made it all up. Not all Germans were monsters, and I assume lots of soldiers missed their kids.” He looked Lori in the eye. “The past isn’t always black-and-white, trust me. An archaeologist learns that very quickly. Here—get in.”
Lori didn’t have to be told twice. She was happy to be done with this subject. How had it possibly come up again? What did German submarines have to do with her? She recalled that Volker, during his stay in Canada, always responded patiently when confronted with the issue of the Third Reich. Lori was the one who finally couldn’t take it anymore.
“You weren’t in the war, Volker, and you aren’t a Nazi, and you don’t give a damn about Hitler, and you’d never hurt a fly,” she’d said after one of those conversations. “Why do you have a guilty conscience about things you haven’t done and would never do? Aren’t you sick of it?”
Volker stared at her, half in amazement, half in irritation.
“It’s not a question, Lori, of whether I’m sick of it or not. I must take a position on it today because it happened in my country. I don’t feel like a victim or a perpetrator, but I do feel responsible for not letting it be forgotten so it won’t ever happen again.”
And then he reminded her that it took decades for the Canadian government to apologize for the churches’ compulsory residential schools where Indian children were abused, and for simply taking the children away from their parents—and the parents from their children.
Back then, Lori was still in denial about the fact that Volker was right to handle the subject in a mature way, unlike herself. When he pointed out that Canada took in a lot of Nazis after World War II but refused entry to many Jews, she wasn’t about to back down.
“So we’re back to believing in original sin, are we?” she retorted, whereupon Volker walked out of the room. It took her two days to be generous enough to apologize. At the time, she couldn’t admit to herself that the invisible rift between them had widened just a tiny bit more.
The roar of the rotors broke her train of thought. She put on her headset. Gideon’s voice came out of nowhere.
“Camera all set?”
Lori nodded. The helicopter wound its way up into the air. Her side of the helicopter had no door, just a net stretched across the opening. Lori watched the landscape below as it got smaller and broader at the same time. Countless inlets ate their way into the rocky coast. Where the land flattened out, gravel beaches arced their way around forested bays. From that height, Lori could see where generations of men had cut down trees for firewood, leaving sparse bushes clinging to the stony ground. Sloughs and small lakes glinted in the washed-out tundra like signal lights.
Lori wasn’t sure why, but she forgot everything around her at times like these. The landscape was enchanting, with its breathtaking beauty: black rocks, water, more and more water, the cliffs towering over the ocean, the brown underbrush interspersed with green, and then the shimmering bog of the tundra and the low banks of gnarled bush. She felt as if her soul had separated from her body, been lib
erated from all mundane things to hover above the earth. She had an all-encompassing feeling that she couldn’t pin down, but it was like . . . like a feeling of security. Of belonging. She felt curiously safe in this rough, inhospitable environment.
“Caribou!” Weston, sitting behind her, pointed them out.
Lori shook off her trance and started shooting. She eased out into the net, the yawning void beneath her. The camera was all that mattered right now.
A herd of perhaps ten caribou flew away over the plain. The helicopter made a loop, and the half-moon of a long beach appeared far below, giving way to stony terrain rampant with thick bushes like unkempt tufts of hair.
“Do you see it?” That was Weston.
She scanned the terrain.
“Where?” She’d scarcely asked the question when she saw what he meant. An anomalous form rising from the bedrock like a wart. A foreign body that didn’t fit in with the landscape. Gideon circled many times to give Lori the best camera angles. Then he landed on a flat spot several hundred yards away from the burial mound. The helicopter’s downdraft flattened the vegetation and created clouds of dust all around.
She stooped down as she quickly scurried away to a spot where she could photograph the two men removing the cargo.
Then the machine lifted off and disappeared over the horizon, the roar growing softer until it died out. Cool air came in off the ocean. Lori looked at the jumble of equipment and cartons on the ground.
“I thought the camp was over a mile away?”
“It is, but we couldn’t land there. We’ve got to lug this stuff over, the tools and everything we need for excavating. Not everything, actually, more’s coming.”
Weston picked up her tripod and also shouldered her backpack.
She tried to orient herself.
“I’ve got to look at the burial mound first. Where is it, anyway?”
“Over that way. You can’t see it from here because of that rise in the land. No wonder the mound wasn’t discovered for so long, even though a lot of boats must have landed here.”
They started off. Lori could feel the stony bedrock through the soles of her hiking boots.
Stormy Cove Page 26
