Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  “She’ll say ‘nothing.’ She likes to cook.”

  Caroline patted his granite cheek. “She does it well, Martin, that’s not the same thing as liking it. I’ll bring artichoke squares.”

  Martin looked at Val. “Dixon Foote got you.” He knobbed at his nose with a fist. “He was aiming for me.”

  “He wasn’t aiming for you, Martin,” said Caroline impatiently. “You always think someone is aiming for you. Val just got in the way.”

  Like Leslie Decker? All Val herself had done was intercept a punch. But in Leslie’s case, there must have been so much more at stake. Exactly what did Decker’s wife get in the way of? She had been beaten up and hurled through a glass window two stories to her death on the rocks below. There was some kind of rage at work that made Val shiver.

  Martin Kelleher gave Caroline an inscrutable look. “Seven tonight. And tell Wade.” Then he started down to his boat. “Oh, and Val,” he said, half turning, “if you get an audience with Charlie Cable, ask him about his new book.”

  “The Asteroid Mandate?”

  Martin snorted and kept walking. “No, the other new one. The one where he lays all of us out in a row like a shore lunch. Ask him about that one.”

  “Martin hasn’t read it,” explained Caroline, as she slung a black backpack over her bronzed and bony shoulder, and he only happened to hear about it from one of the barge operators on the lake who was transporting the new kiln his wife Diane had ordered for her studio. Apparently he had just come down the lake from delivering supplies to Charlie Cable—well, as close as he could get them, before the moose muck portage, where Cable had to meet him.

  While they transferred the supplies off the barge into the flat-bottomed steel boat, Charlie Cable had been railing about how all the subterfuge and dirty tricks the lake and town people had been up to were getting exposed in his new book like goddamn crayfish in the moonlight. Man hasn’t been right in the head for a couple of years now, Tippy the barge operator had commented. To Caroline, Martin added that surely Charlie Cable wasn’t right in the head long before that.

  Val’s shoulders slumped. Wasn’t right in the head was not the sort of considered opinion she needed to hear about the elusive author she was enduring night terrors—followed by day terrors—to find and sign. Her mind naturally landed back then on the Downy incident. Was Fir Na Tine’s desperate near-miss with the sex offender down the street really—as Peter Hathaway lost no opportunity in suggesting—a failure of Val’s own due diligence? What if Martin Kelleher was right, and Charlie Cable was…off? Where was Val Cameron’s due diligence on this one?

  “There are gaps,” Caroline said over her shoulder to Val, “in all our personal histories.” Cable hadn’t lived on the lake full-time until the wilderness cabin went up two years ago, so maybe his life down in Georgian Shores, where he worked as a stringer for the local paper—“Oldest stringer in the history of the Western World,” Martin had scoffed—included a family. As Caroline spoke, they bushwhacked their way farther into the wilderness of Selkirk Peninsula.

  “What does Martin Kelleher’s company do?” asked Val.

  “Cintorix?” Caroline shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. And where did Dixon Foote’s wife go, considering no one has seen her for four years now, and he’s got the kids?” Caroline came to a stop at a place where the forest seemed dense. “And Leslie,” she said softly. “Oh, yes, Leslie.”

  Val looked around uneasily. “How she died—”

  “What the hell she was doing back here at Camp Sajo in the first place.”

  “So, she—”

  “She told Wade she was visiting me in Peterborough. She wasn’t. On October 6, she came back to camp.”

  “And you don’t know why.”

  “We’ll never know why.” Caroline stood still, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, as if the full realization of that mystery had finally sunk in. Then: “Just another gap.” They had reached a place dense with birch and maple trees and more undergrowth, including wood violets and red toadstools. Caroline pushed on, and there was nothing for Val to do but follow her because she sure as hell didn’t want to be left behind and alone. As she crunched twigs underfoot, she found herself wondering why Leslie Decker made a sudden trip up to the lake from Toronto that weekend in October two years ago, well after the season was over, without telling Wade—or Caroline—where she was going.

  The two of them pushed aside branches from a couple of spruce saplings and stepped into a clearing that’d had a lot of help, depending on how you looked at it, from man. On the north side of the clearing was a small cliff just one story high. And coming around it, having chewed through the wilderness of the Selkirk Peninsula, was a dirt road wide enough for a small truck, easy, and enough passing room if one traveler pulls way over. The only sounds were birds rustling in the undergrowth, flapping lightly across small branches, searching for food.

  Val and Caroline were alone.

  Caroline strode to the dirt road and looked around, kicking at some stones, her fingers restless on the rifle. Val picked burrs off her pants, jumping at a sound that turned out to be a red squirrel skittering its way up a red pine. She felt her guts lurch, and she looked around wildly. It was probably a bad time to get straight on the subject of bear strategies—were you less likely to be mauled if you banged pots or played dead? Climbing a tree even Val knew was a mistake, because then you could pretty much count on being mauled and falling out of a tree.

  Caroline indicated the access road. “I hired a backhoe operator—someone who works for Dixon Foote, actually—to block the way. I don’t know who’s behind this, but I figured I’d make it more of a challenge.” She leaned against the rock wall, where the cliff began to slope upwards from the unfinished road.

  “How did you get a backhoe in here?”

  Caroline laughed, her red waves falling back from her face, then watched a couple of noisy crows hop heavily in the treetops. “I used their own road. About ten kilometers out of town there’s a turnoff for a legal road—an old logging road called the Timberline Trail. These guys,” Caroline swept a hand at the road, “whoever they are, came 2K down Timberline with their heavy equipment and started working their way down Selkirk Peninsula from there. That’s where I had my own people put up ‘No Trespassing’ signs, for all the good it’s done.”

  “But it made you feel better?”

  “Surprisingly, no.”

  Val looked around at the wilderness, which still seemed dense, and at the crudely plowed road that was causing so much trouble. “It seems like a lot of bother, doesn’t it? Why would these guys—”

  “Hunters, fishermen—”

  “—not just drive on down to the landing and then get where they’re going by water?” It made no sense to Val.

  “The expense, I suppose. Marina fees, dockage fees. And the time. If they’re hunters, this road—” she kicked up some dust and stones, “—opens up a whole new range for them. If they’re fishermen, a little four-wheel drive brings a ten-horse motor down the road which they can then clamp to the boat they’ve left turned over in the bushes down by the water, and they’re off.”

  “Only they can’t get to the water yet.”

  “No, not quite.” She smiled, curling a hand over the barrel of the rifle. Then she stood up quickly and set the rifle upright in the cracks of the rock wall. Val watched Caroline Selkirk unzip the small backpack she had brought and pull out what looked like a rod of solid gray rock, maybe a foot and a half. She held it up like a wand. “This is a core sample. Survey geologists drill down and bring up core samples, which tells them what the minerals are, and whether it’s worth mining. This one,” she moved it in the palm of hand, as though weighing it, “was my sister’s paperweight.”

  “Where would you even get something like that?” Not a common household object.

  Caroline shrugged. “Behind the camp there’
s a footpath that goes straight to an old mining camp. Selkirks have owned the Peninsula for about a hundred years, and we’ve prospected a few times.” She held the core sample up to the sunlight and scrutinized it. “I guess we can never quite believe we get more minerals in a multivitamin than we do from a total of forty-two acres of land.” She grinned. “Last time was when I was a teenager, and my father was hoping for some windfall as a hedge against hard times. Leasing the mineral rights would have done nicely. It was the closest any Selkirk had ever come to mining near Camp Sajo itself.”

  “Still nothing?”

  “Nothing. In a crazy kind of way, I think my father was relieved. When none of these damn things—” she held up the core sample, “—yielded enough copper to make a full-scale mining operation worthwhile, he polished off half a bottle of Jack Daniels and said, ‘Well, I guess at least I don’t have to destroy the camp to save the camp.’”

  The sunlight brightened the clearing just two steps away from where Val was standing, and without a word the two of them moved into it, turning their faces upward. Caroline went on: “It was the only time I’d ever seen my father drunk.”

  “How did he save the camp?”

  “In the end, I’m not sure he did.” Bending, Caroline pinched off a hard, waxy green leaf. “Leslie kept this core sample as some kind of reminder. She told me it helped her focus.” Caroline lifted her shoulders. “On what exactly, I couldn’t say.” She scored the leaf with her fingernail and then held it up to Val’s nose.

  Val sniffed. “Wintergreen?”

  Caroline let the leaf drop. “My dad took a second mortgage on our house back in Peterborough and then there were some difficulties with campers, bad PR—”

  “Like what?”

  “Twenty years ago a kid named Marcus Cadotte died on one of our canoe trips, drowned, which led to months of questions about supervision—” her voice was tightening up, “—which had been just fine, of course, but it was a terrible accident. Hard for us to come back from.” Caroline drifted to some place in the Selkirk past where damage control measures were kicked around at a somber dinner table. “When money got tight my father decided to up the ante on the publicity coming from his own exploits. But by then he was pushing seventy and just got caught in an avalanche when he damn well knew what the weather conditions were. Finally,” her chest heaved, “he just couldn’t swim up.”

  “Swim up?”

  “Avalanche training. You’re taught to swim up through the snow. Dad was done swimming up—through anything, I think. Snow, financial uncertainty, life. My sister Leslie said he died doing what he loved. I said no, he died doing what he used to love—what he never would have found himself doing at the age of seventy if it hadn’t been for the final bust at copper prospecting. Or the bad PR over that camper’s death all those years ago. Sajo had never recovered. Leslie went crazy, and we could never talk about it again.”

  “So there’s been no more prospecting.”

  Shaking her head, Caroline explained that all that’s left of those days are rows of dilapidated shelves holding trays of core samples, where the old mining camp used to be. Everything rotted over the last thirty years. Rotted and scattered.

  As Caroline pushed back her hair, Val noticed how brown and weather-beaten her hands were. Like the walls of the Sajo cabins. “The old mining camp is like a monument to human failure,” said Caroline quietly.

  So is Camp Sajo, thought Val. And so is the woman standing in front of her with only a rifle set awkwardly against the years of bad luck. “I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Don’t be.” Caroline Selkirk leaned close and wrinkled her nose. “To tell you the truth, I like it. And as long as I own Selkirk Peninsula, there will be no more prospecting, no more logging, and no—” she raised her voice, and pumped the rifle for good measure, “—access roads for hunters too cheap and lazy to go the goddamn long way around.”

  “You can’t protect it forever,” Val pointed out.

  Caroline let out a bleat. “You’re right. I can’t. In fact, I can only protect it another two years.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The stately redhead tugged reflectively at her long tanned neck. “The ninety-nine-year lease expires.”

  “Lease? All this Selkirk land is just leased?”

  “Five generations of my family have been on this land,” she told Val, her jaw set. “It’s ours. Ask anyone.”

  Val tried to keep the disbelief from showing on her face. “What happens when the lease expires, Caroline? Do you lose the camp?” From what Val was hearing, Camp Sajo was vulnerable to more than one way to disappear forever.

  “Remember, the camp is a separate parcel. In two years, the rest of Selkirk Peninsula reverts to Crown land.” Then Caroline left her at the base of the cliff and headed toward the wilderness still untouched by any trail from the camp or illegal access road made by trespassers. Away from the place where someone was just waiting to clear the next meter or two in the inexorable shortcut to the lake.

  “Which means?” Val called after her.

  “Which means the Queen can pitch a tent on it or clearcut it. It’s hers.”

  Val watched as the embattled owner of Selkirk Peninsula stepped nimbly over fallen logs and sidestepped undergrowth until her bright green top disappeared into the forest.

  At this point in the season, Val thought, while Caroline Selkirk stood watch at Camp Sajo—Caroline with her loyal cook and industrious handyman and hockey-loving goldbricks—the road was blocked, the clandestine work postponed. But…why? Why hadn’t the secret road crew cleared Caroline’s rocks? Why the delay? They’ve got heavy equipment bigger and tougher than anything Caroline Selkirk could muster. Surely her little roadblock must seem like a fly on a lion to those folks, whoever they are. All it would take is a swat. So why hadn’t it happened?

  What was Caroblind missing?

  Despite her roadblocks and rifles, Caroline Selkirk couldn’t stand watch forever as the days shortened, the temperature dropped, and the few remaining lake dwellers drifted home for the long winter. For a moment there was complete silence, even the crows content, and suddenly Val heard the sound of leaves tearing, twigs breaking. Then nothing. In a little while, a glimpse of a green shirt pushed toward her in the clearing, and Caroline emerged.

  The core sample was gone.

  8

  When they got back to the camp office, and her bear issue was happily unresolved, Val realized just how hard her heart had been pounding. She looked around as she followed Caroline Selkirk into the camp office. At least on the grounds of Camp Sajo there were enough wide open areas she’d be able to see seven hundred pounds of danger coming at her, perhaps with enough advance warning that the playing dead issue would resolve itself.

  Noting the chainsaw and rough-looking work gloves that had been set on the porch, Val stepped inside the office where a man was leaning against the desk, in a narrow slant of sunlight, downing a can of Coke. Dressed in a faded red t-shirt, jeans, and tan work boots, he had brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and the kind of face that looked good with permanent windburn. Val put him in his late thirties.

  Caroline headed straight for the locker. “Val,” she tossed back, “this is Luke Croy, friend and camp handyman.”

  Luke set down the Coke and straightened himself away from the desk. He was slender and tall, and for someone who hauled and hammered and stacked, his handshake was surprisingly gentle. “Kay tells me you’re here for Charlie Cable.”

  At least he had the tact not to mention her shiner or swollen face. Val nodded. “I didn’t know it was going to be a blood sport,” she said with a little laugh, catching sight of Kay just outside on the path heading down to the boathouse, a white laundry basket tucked under her arm.

  Setting the rifle in the locker, Caroline slammed the door shut and spun the combination lock. “I�
��ll make some calls, Val. We’ll track him down. He’s probably having eggs and hash browns in town.”

  At which Luke Croy shook his head. “Well, if he had his eggs and hash browns, he had them pretty early this morning,” he said. “Lake grapevine says he hired Portage Airlines to fly him home.”

  Val felt herself sag.

  Caroline shot her a sympathetic look.

  Luke went on, “Caroline, you’ve got some decisions to make about those black spruces down at the waterfront. Want to take a look?” He spread his arms wide. “I’m a man in full chainsaw mode right now.”

  Caroline gave him a smile. “You win. Let’s go,” she said, jerking her head toward the office door. As the two of them left, wrangling about whether it was better to thin out the cedars or the spruces, Val slipped out of the office and headed to the boathouse where she caught up with Kay Stanley.

  “Morning, Kay.”

  The woman jumped, nearly dropping the laundry basket. “You surprised me,” she said with a hearty laugh. Val watched her reach behind a black shutter for a key. “How’s the swelling this morning, Val?” she asked, giving her a quick look, then unlocking the bright yellow front door. Someone had painted it over with swirling green vines and blue flowers.

  “A little better, I think,” said Val, not at all sure, her fingers patting softly at the cheek that stood farther out from her face than it should.

  Kay stashed the key behind the shutter. “Come on in,” she said, and swung the door wide. Inside the boathouse Leslie Decker had renovated and called her home, Val let her eyes get accustomed to the low light. Right near the front door, a set of narrow wooden steps led up to the second floor, where that day in October two years ago Leslie had met her killer. Val eyed the staircase, wondering how she could get invited to see the upstairs room, and giving it up for now.