by Henry, Sue
“Sorry, ma’am,” the constable said, coming up to her open window. “There’s a mud slide about ninety miles up the road that’s completely blocked the highway. No one’s getting through from either direction, so you might want to stay in town for now.”
“How long till it’ll be clear?”
“Hours, I should think, but we really don’t know.”
Jessie climbed down from the cab and trotted back through the rain with a map over her head to speak with Maxie. Stretch barked a greeting at the constable, who had followed and listened while Jessie repeated his information.
“Must we stay here?” Maxie asked him.
“Oh no. You can go on if you want. But you’ll have to wait at Summit Lake until the road’s clear if you do. There’s a lodge with a restaurant and a campground up there.”
Maxie nodded. “I know the place. There’s a pretty little lake at that campground. Let’s skedaddle on up the road, Jessie. The weather can’t be worse there than it is here.”
The highway leading away from Fort Nelson curved gently through farms and thick stands of first growth white spruce, poplar, and aspen, some of which were in the process of being cleared for fields and pastures. Spray flew up from passing vehicles to be swiftly cleared from the windshield by constantly working wipers, and fog drifted in periodically to further obscure visibility.
Jessie saw the dark shapes of buffalo in one pasture, all lying down contentedly resting, oblivious to the rain that soaked their thick coats. The fog grew thicker as they reached foothills where the road began to climb gradually upward toward Steamboat, and it was hard at times to make out other traffic in either direction. At one point she slowed even more to allow a moose to amble across the road on long gangly legs and disappear into the mist.
The road grew steeper, and around one long sweeping curve two cyclists materialized out of the gloom ahead of her. She recognized one as Severson, pumping hard. His friend Leo must have talked him into going on immediately, though the rain had not lessened, and they must have started early to make it this far already. She hoped he had recovered his emotional equilibrium, but there was no place to pull over and say hello, so she honked one instead and caught a glimpse in the rearview mirror of his wave as she passed.
In just over an hour the two motor homes turned into the parking lot of the Steamboat Café, where they parked one behind the other.
“Was that the cyclist who found the boy’s body at Kiskatinaw?” Maxie asked as Jessie climbed hurriedly into the Jayco to get out of the rain, leaving Tank behind in the Winnebago.
“Craig Severson,” Jessie told her. “He must be feeling a lot better to start off again in this weather, but he slept most of yesterday, so he must be okay.”
“I wish we knew what happened to Patrick,” Maxie said a bit plaintively, “and if that really was his jacket you saw. I can’t stop wishing I’d found out more about him.”
“Me too,” Jessie confessed, wiping at her wet face with one hand. “When that policeman stopped us, I thought maybe it had something to do with Kiskatinaw or your breakin.”
“That crossed my mind as well.”
There seemed little more to say about it.
“Let’s go in for coffee,” Maxie suggested.
“There’s a trash can out there,” Jessie said, noticing a lumpy plastic bag near the door and picking it up as she was about to go back to the Winnebago. “Want me to get rid of this for you?”
“Yes, please. But wait a minute. There’s another thing or two to go out as well.”
She collected two damp paper towels from the counter next to the sink and bent over to pick up a magazine from the floor under the table where it had fallen from the bench.
“What’s this?” she asked in a hesitant tone of voice and straightened up, holding a small bottle that she had retrieved from far back under the table. Her obvious confusion became concern as she turned the bottle so Jessie could read the label.
It was a bottle of brown hair dye.
“This isn’t mine,” Maxie stated flatly. “What’s it doing here?”
“Patrick.” Jessie breathed, eyes wide with dawning apprehension and anxiety. Her mind was racing—then stumbling. She had a vision of the dead man’s brown hair as she had seen it upon lifting the hood of the black windbreaker—and Patrick’s own red hair.
“Oh God. Do you think…”
They stared at each other in distress. Then Maxie, without speaking, took a new plastic bag from her cupboard and put the hair dye bottle inside carefully, without touching it any more. “Let’s go in and talk about this before we go on,” she said through tight lips.
Dropping the trash in the parking lot barrel, they ran through the rain to the café and were soon settled, deep in conversation, with coffee and a huge cinnamon roll, which they divided.
Half an hour later, Butch Stringer pulled his rig into the parking lot at the top of the long winding grade from Fort Nelson, shut down the Peterbilt, and swore to himself as he trotted through the downpour to the Steamboat Café. It had rained for most of the 860 miles he had driven from Seattle. He was tired of being drenched every time he climbed from the cab for fuel or food, and fed up with the constant monotonous rhythm of the windshield wipers.
From past trips he knew that to the northwest the landscape fell dramatically away from 3,500-foot Steamboat Mountain to the Muskwa River Valley far below, making tourists catch their breath when the weather allowed them a look at the treetops hundreds of feet below. Oncoming traffic always bore watching, for flatlanders nervously hugged the inside of their lane, made skittish by the drop, and sometimes wandered across the yellow line. At almost nine on this morning, there was nothing to see but a layer of dark sullen clouds that clung to the summit, obscuring one of the most spectacular views on the long run to Anchorage.
Tall and angular, tough as rawhide, wide through the shoulders and narrow at the hips, at forty-six Stringer was beginning to develop a bit of a pot belly, which lowered his belt buckle an inch or two and which he sucked in when he thought about it. There wasn’t much physical exercise in sitting behind a wheel hour after hour, for ten hours or five hundred miles a day.
Some people are born with the natural grace of athletes or dancers. Butch Stringer seemed born not just to drive but to choreograph the movement of big trucks. He wheeled the Peterbilt and trailer with the effortless assurance of an exact knowledge of their capabilities. Instinctively he almost wore the tractor, employing its power to ease a heavily loaded trailer deftly through traffic or reverse into the tightest of spaces against a loading dock, playing the gears and pedals like a musician, with rhythm and efficiency.
For the fifty-one miles from Fort Nelson, hard rain and thick bands of fog had created hazardous passing conditions as the scattering of oncoming headlights barely pierced the curtain of mist before the vehicles became visible. Taillights headed cautiously west had appeared with little or no warning, and Stringer had been thoroughly frustrated by a senior citizen behind the wheel of a mammoth motor home who had slowed to a scaredy-cat crawl in the poor conditions and stubbornly refused to pull over to let him by. It had cost him speed and forced him to wait impatiently for miles before a slow-moving vehicles keep right lane finally appeared and allowed him to pass.
Damn dim-witted dawdlers shouldn’t be allowed on the road. Why couldn’t they take a ferry up the Inside Passage and leave this singular road route to commercial traffic? Between the RVs, local vehicles swinging out of side roads, and the weather, he was losing more time than he liked.
With a quick pat and a “Hi there, Boots” for the black-and-white spaniel who greeted him just inside the door of the café, Stringer whacked his baseball cap against a thigh to rid it of rain and held out a hand to the younger man who came to the counter from the kitchen, a spatula in one hand, in response to the bell that rang when anyone entered. “Hey, Al, you order this shit?”
“Not me. Where’ve you been hiding, stranger? It’s a couple of month
s since we saw your ugly face.”
“That construction section the other side of Muncho Lake must be slop. What’s the weather doing up there?”
“You’re looking at it.” The younger man scowled and shook his head.
“Damn. Tomorrow?”
“Weather report says more of the same. Coffee?”
“Ah—yeah, I guess.”
Taking the steaming mug Al handed him, Stringer turned to find a place at one of the small tables. Except for two women sitting by a window, who had looked up as he came in, there were no other customers. They were probably driving the two motor homes parked outside, so he intended to sit a good distance away, drink his coffee, and leave before they could pull out and slow him down some more. But the younger of the two nodded and spoke.
“Weren’t you at Kiskatinaw night before last? I think I saw your truck on the road as we pulled out in the morning. That’s a good-looking Peterbilt.”
A little surprised at a woman who could tell one eighteen-wheeler from another, he paused, then, curiosity overcoming reluctance, walked across and dropped into a chair at the table next to theirs.
“Yeah, I was up above on the access road, trying to get some sleep. But it was tough with the cops coming to ask questions. Nasty business—the kid going off the bridge like that. Were you in the campground?”
“I was,” Jessie told him. “A guy in a space next to mine heard him fall. I went with him to see if there was anything we could do and waited until the police got there.”
Maxie was listening with a thoughtful frown. Now she joined the exchange. “Did you happen to notice any kids in a pickup turn off the highway and go down to the bridge?” she asked.
Stringer gave her a long look of appraisal and took a sip of his coffee before he answered. “There was a pickup,” he said slowly. “Camping gear in the back and three kids in front.”
“One with red hair?”
“It was too dark to get a good look, but the one on the passenger side had on a western hat.”
“You’re sure there were three?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Seemed a bit crowded in the cab.”
Maxie and Jessie stared across the table at each other, both wondering if the boys this man had seen were the ones who had been looking for Patrick on the Icefields Parkway—and if Patrick really had been with them.
“It would explain his leaving in the middle of the night,” Jessie commented.
Maxie nodded. “But how did one of them—if it was one of them—wind up dead under the bridge? Where is the other one—and Patrick?”
As they talked, Stringer had scooted his chair up to their table and set his half-empty coffee mug on the edge of it. “You knew that boy?” he asked in a more interested tone.
“No. Well—we knew of him—met someone who may have been with him,” Jessie told him.
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
Maxie sighed and shook her head in frustration. “It’s confusing,” she told him. “You see, we were camped next to each other just below Radium Hot Springs in British Columbia when Jessie—this is Jessie Arnold, by the way, and I’m Maxie McNabb—found this red-haired boy under her motor home in the middle of the night.”
The details of everything that had happened tumbled out as they took turns telling their own bits of what had transpired. Stringer interjected a question or two as the tale progressed.
“Unbelievable! And you told all this to the cops at Kiskatinaw?” he asked Jessie, when they had finished.
“Ah—no.” She shook her head and frowned. “You see, I didn’t get back together with Maxie until Fort Nelson. Then we put some of the pieces together. But it’s all speculation. We don’t really know anything but what Patrick told us. The rest is just guesses.”
“I think you should tell them the whole thing. They may be able to fit it together with what they know or have figured out since Kiskatinaw.”
“I think you’re right,” Maxie agreed. “My cell phone will work here, I think, but this would be hard to explain on the phone. I’d rather talk to someone in person. We’re over halfway to Summit Lake, and with the slide, there should be someone there.”
“Good thinking,” Stringer agreed.
Jessie nodded, slowly. Inspector William Webster, who had come to Kiskatinaw, was now over three hundred miles away in Dawson Creek, the Prince George police at least six hundred miles. They could go back to the RCMP detachment in Fort Nelson, but Summit Lake was closer—they could be there in an hour. It seemed important now to get in touch with the police.
With a scrape of chairs they pushed back from the table and headed for the door, Stringer jamming his hat back on and yelling a good-bye to Al, who had vanished back into the kitchen.
Stringer pulled out of the parking lot first. But in a few minutes the two women were also back on the highway, heading carefully down the long grade into the Muskwa River Valley behind an early-in-the-season bus full of tourists who would rather ride than drive, though there was little to see through swirling fog and depressing rain.
As she drove, Jessie wondered about the hair dye bottle. The night Patrick had disappeared his hair had still been red, but it would seem from the bottle of dye that he had intended to dye it brown. If he had joined up with the two young men who had been looking for him, he could certainly have obtained more hair dye in Jasper or Prince George. Maybe the RCMP at Summit Lake would be able to answer some of the questions that troubled her. She thought of the night below the bridge and how sure she had been that the dead man was not Patrick because of the color of his hair. Now she was anything but sure.
14
THE RAIN HAD MOMENTARILY STOPPED, THOUGH THE clouds still hung threateningly low and dark. Jessie, with Tank at her feet, stood looking out across Summit Lake from the campground space in which she had parked the Winnebago. They were waiting for Maxie and Stretch to come out of the Jayco parked next door and join them for a walk. The highway continued in a curve around the right side of the small lake, and from where Jessie stood it was possible to watch earth-moving equipment working to clear away the wall of mud that had slid down a gully in the rocky cliff, buried the road, and continued on to the edge of the lake.
At 4,250 feet, Summit was the highest point on the highway and so rugged that early building crews had been forced to blast a space between cliff and lake to create the roadway. A line of vehicles stretched along the highway from the site of the slide all the way back to the campground, parked where they had been halted by a flagman, waiting to get through as they had been for hours. The first few cars of a similar line were just visible beyond the slide, snaking back to disappear where the road began to descend in the distance. Rather than join the line of impatient people, Jessie had followed Maxie as she drove into the campground and parked where they would be able to see when traffic was able to move again.
Maxie soon came out wearing a blue raincoat and carrying an umbrella, locked the Jayco, and taking Tank and Stretch, they walked together from the campground to the lodge with its small store and restaurant, in search of an RCMP officer. But law enforcement was nowhere to be found, having departed for their usual duties in Fort Nelson. “They didn’t have time to stick around here,” a woman behind the counter in the store told them. “We’ll let ’em know when it’s open. Be a while though.” She agreed to ask the police to contact Maxie or Jessie if they came back before the slide was cleared.
When they came back out into the parking lot, the clouds had parted slightly and a ray or two of sunshine lit up the area. The tour bus Jessie had followed away from Steamboat was parked outside, and its passengers, mostly senior citizens, were stretching their legs in the lot, some heading for the restaurant. With only a few tables, it was already jammed with people from the line of cars—a diversion as they grew hungry and tired of watching the work on the slide slowly progress—so the seniors were in for a wait.
“Glad I have my own kitchen.” Maxie sighed as they walked slowly back toward the
campground. “Shall I make some more coffee?”
Jessie nodded, distracted by a truck that was parked at the end of the lot nearest the campground. The driver was bending over beside the trailer to check its tires.
“There’s Butch Stringer,” she said and they both began to walk in his direction.
Finished with the chore, he straightened, raised his face to the sun, and closed his eyes. Sticking his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans, he rocked on his heels and half-smiled to himself in the thin warmth. The expression wiped a concerned frown from his face and changed him from just another irritable person unwillingly held up by the slide to someone who could take pleasure in the small things in life. Hearing the gravel crunching under their feet as they approached, he opened his eyes, turned his head, and his smile grew broader.
“Hi, again.” Jessie nodded to him and paused, attracted by his expression of appreciation. “Nice change, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. It’s been rain all the way from Seattle. But this break in it won’t last long.”
He squatted as Stretch trotted across under Tank’s leash, stopping just close enough to inspect him.
“Hi there, fella. Who’re you?”
“That’s Stretch,” Maxie told him with a grin. “He thinks you need his permission to park here, arrogant galah that he is—or he might just want to piddle on your tires.”
The big man chuckled and held out a hand for the dachshund to sniff. “Great name! Long and low, like a limo.”
Stretch evidently approved of the scent of the proffered fingers, for he padded forward and allowed his ears and throat to be stroked, leaning into the gentle motion of the large hand on his smooth coat.
Tank, now sitting quietly beside Jessie, watched intently.
The trucker glanced up to meet his look. Tank blinked but didn’t move.
