Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle

by Lou Allin

  “Owwww,” said Yoyo and bent forward. Gritting her teeth, she took off her hat to fan herself. Sweat glued her blonde hair to her forehead and stained the light fabric of her shirt between the shoulder blades. Despite the heat, Belle felt a trickle of cold tighten her chest. Moderate exercise was one thing for a pregnant woman. Running for her life was another.

  Yoyo bit her lip, then smiled and waved her hand. “Nothing. Gas. I had a big brekkie. Sausages even.”

  Belle blew out a relieved breath. “You had me going for a minute. Now let’s follow the path to Cracker.”

  They climbed out, and Yoyo carried the paddles while Belle pulled the kayak. Dry grasses cushioned the dragging stern. If it got more than its share of scratches, she’d buy the DesRosiers a new one. If it deflated, she’d see her friends on the other side. Soon the glistening surface of Cracker appeared. Short and sweet, the way she liked portages.

  At the bank in a clearing lay the remains of an old fire ring, nothing but ashes inside, no cans or bottles. People had been through here. But how often? Every ten years? And who? Gary, or just Patch Wells?

  Cracker Lake, an oval with several twisted bays, was pristine and ringed with conifers. A beaver dam at one end kept the water high. She looked downlake to a misshapen lodgepole pine, one branch protruding like a fateful finger. Often the sign of a portage. “We’re heading for that tree. Keep your eyes open for a gap,” she told Yoyo. Here the crapshoot began, with odds slightly better than the lottery. If they wasted time, toured around without success, they risked meeting Patch. That first portage would be easy for a muscled man and a light boat, even at his age.

  After ten minutes at top speed, they reached the end of the lake. Discounting the pine, Belle had noticed a piece of blue tape on a striped maple sapling, a good colour for the bush, neon and unnatural in all seasons. The kayak scraped on the bank, shifting their torsos forward, and like a pro, Yoyo hustled out and pulled up the boat. Quickly they marched down the peaty path, comfortable in their new roles. Belle listened for a sudden hiss that would whisper their epitaph.

  The portage proceeded an easy fifty feet. Pot of jam for them, but also for Patch. Belle found herself in the odd position of wishing for a hell portage. Then they rounded a corner and fought through a stand of pesky, overhanging alders and beaked hazel. “Whoa!” Yoyo said, breaking the last branches. “Look at that mother.”

  Belle put the boat down and stared at the steep, rocky incline. Then she clapped Yoyo’s shoulder. “He’ll never get the boat past this. But first we have to move the kayak together. I can’t drag it over these rocks. One leak, and it’s all over for us.”

  Yoyo firmed her lips and flexed her tiny biceps. “No problem. I’ve been staying in shape with exercises.”

  Together they urged the kayak up the hill, treating it like a newborn. In some places they lifted it over their heads. Other times it rode at their sides. The paddles were tucked in the boat to free their hands and avoid a costly and dangerous second trip. For five minutes they laboured on. Then ten. Despite her conditioning, Belle’s thighs were screaming with the efforts. Often she worked against herself, shifting the weight awkwardly to protect Yoyo. Sweat stung her eyes and fogged her glasses around the nose.

  Yoyo had been humming a tuneless song, twitching her neck at the mosquitoes. Belle was approaching scream mode, heartened only by the fact that at the lake, they could take advantage of a breeze and dig the delta-winged deerflies out of their hair. Suddenly the kayak lurched.

  “Stop! Have mercy! I need dope now, not later,” Yoyo said between clenched teeth. The kayak wobbled precariously as she tried to support it with one hand while slapping her neck with the other.

  “Easy,” Belle said. “Don’t drop it, or we’ll . . .” She stopped short. Negative thoughts brought negative results, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gently they set down the boat and sprayed liberally, coughing at the cloud. A sticky but necessary bargain. The effect would wear off within a few hours, especially with sweat.

  “I forgot to compliment you. Nailing Patch with the can was brilliant. A truly Canadian touch,” Belle said.

  “Saw it on TV once.” She giggled, a girl again. “Damn. The can’s empty now.” She flung it far into the bush, where it merged with the green leaves and couldn’t be spotted.

  Once at the top of the hill, in the distance behind, Belle heard the roar of that familiar motor coming across Cracker Lake. Then their path took a turn into the bush and plunged down. The last hundred feet were steep and perilous as they wound their way through a huge rockfall like giants’ building blocks. She looked out over a long, narrow lake. Which one was this? Merit or Dooble? Didn’t one have two portages, east and west? If so, which one should she take? The lady or the tiger? In her original plan, this had been as far as she’d intended to go. The last of three water samples. She remembered that Patch had turned on them when he’d seen what she was doing. The blur of the mystery that shrouded this area was beginning to sharpen into focus.

  Yoyo knelt to get into the boat. Belle put a hand on her arm. “We’d better drink while we can. He can’t follow us over that, except on foot, and he’s no slim jim. Maybe we’ll catch a break, and he’ll have a heart attack.”

  Popping open a couple of diet sodas, they quenched their thirst. “Keep the containers,” Belle said. “You never know.”

  “Yeah, on that grilling show, the guy cooked a chicken over a beer can.”

  “If you’re thinking of grouse, forget it.” She held up her hands. “No matches.”

  “Should have brought Mom along. Smokers have good survival tools.”

  Then they resumed paddling and made the end of the lake in minutes, an Olympic team getting more proficient by the moment thanks to the best motivation, the desire to live. As the kayak reached shore and ground into the sand, suddenly Yoyo hunched over in pain. Her knuckles were white against the boat as she looked up with fear and frustration. “Bad timing. I think junior is knocking at the door. God, I wondered why my boobs were killing me.”

  Belle’s mouth formed a silent scream. Bad timing? Apocalypse Now. She could feel Patch’s bullet slamming into her back. Forward progress was impossible. They’d have to hunker down and hide somewhere. Then when the baby was born . . . born prematurely . . . she couldn’t imagine a worse situation, except for being sick or injured. Pregnant women needed to be warm and safe. Why had she allowed Yoyo to come? She sat paralyzed by the scenarios, all bad. Her hands were shaking from the paddling, or something worse.

  The silence was deafening as Belle’s ears pounded with blood. Could this baby survive? Not without them, and their chances were dropping as fast as the American dollar. Yoyo’s voice wavered. “It’s my fault. I was close, but I thought—”

  Belle lifted her head and locked eyes. “Close? Close to what? You mean—”

  “Mmmmmmwuh. This is my last two weeks. I’m not supposed to get on planes or anything.” She gave a weak laugh, then hugged her stomach. “As if.”

  “Last two weeks! When you hired on, you said that you were only . . . you told Miriam . . .”

  Yoyo looked at the ground as if studying each stone for a geology midterm. Her chin wobbled, and she gave a pointed sniff, wiping her nose with a filthy hand. “I know. But I needed the job. And I worked hard, didn’t I? You said so.”

  “But you didn’t look that—”

  “Neither did Mom. Guess I take after her. She was cooking lunch for two hundred the day she delivered my last brother.”

  Belle sighed. Suppose she had come alone and met Patch? This was the second time that Yoyo had saved her life. Now she was in far more danger, and so was the child, full-term or not.

  “What’s the plan, Belle?” She sounded like a little sister. Was she expecting miracles or just expecting? Yoyo’s sang-froid was admirable, or maybe the pain was distracting her from their real dilemma. Perhaps she thought help lay around the corner, except that she’d lived in the area and knew its amoral soul.

  Bel
le tried to calm her heart, will her blood pressure to stabilize. Now she was their only hope. “I’d say that depends on you. Are you sure about these pains? Remember last time.”

  “Not one hundred per cent. But I’m not nauseous.” She sighed and straightened her back, stretching. “All gone now. Let’s get over the next portage. Maybe we’ll get lucky—”

  Belle laughed in spite of herself, faced down the horror with irony. “Get lucky?”

  “And meet someone. That’s what I meant.”

  Talk about hope limping eternal. Still, it was an improvement over panic and tears. Relieved about the cramps for the moment, Belle heard a splash and a dripping of water. She turned suddenly toward the shallows, then spoke in a whisper and pointed. “Over there. It’s Gary’s elk.”

  A massive white bull plunged his muzzle into the lake and let water cascade from his fleshy lips. He grabbed a large mouthful of pickerelweed and turned to watch them as he munched, his eyes dark and deep. Magnificent beast. His antlers were as large as a moose’s. Was this the dominant male in the neighbourhood, the father of the baby that had died? What Gary would have given to see this rare and noble sight. Then the stag threw back its head and bugled as if on cue. The eerie sound echoed over the still lake. It seemed to say “Go on. You are under my protection.”

  Miraculously, the final section of the portage was gently downhill and soft as a rubber running track. Belle took the kayak herself. But as they reached the next lake, now into unnamed territory, a blind country, Yoyo had fallen behind. Belle ran back and found the woman on her knees, crying softly. “It’s for real. I’ve been counting. Only ten minutes between.” She pounded the soft moss at her side. “Man, these pains are wicked.”

  Frantically, Belle looked around. It was early afternoon. Plenty of daylight. Giving birth in the dark would be a worst-case scenario. All she knew about labour was what she had seen on the silver screen. Prissy mewling in Gone With the Wind. Bette Davis taking a firm hand to whiny Mary Astor in The Great Lie. “You asked for a plan. We’ll land the kayak somewhere unlikely, cover up the tracks, and head into the woods—”

  Yoyo’s voice trembled, and agony was etched on her cheery face. “Into the woods. But you said we were safe now after the last portage. That he couldn’t . . .”

  Belle gulped back a cry of pity as she looked at the woman’s hand, the knuckles scraped and the jolly teddy-bear polish chipped and cracked. “Listen. Hunters and trappers sometimes cache canoes in the bush. I forgot about that possibility. We don’t know where Patch is, except that he’s God in this area. And anyway, you’re not going anywhere until that baby is born. Let’s move up the east side of the lake and scout the banks. It’ll keep the sun longer.”

  They got back into the boat and slowly edged along the shore, in parts rocky but often opening to a sandy beach. “Sand we don’t want,” Belle said. “Might as well leave him a letter. I’m not saying Patch has the tracking abilities of a native, but he’s lived in the bush and done plenty of hunting. And remember that spotting scope?”

  They came to a jumble of slippery rocks half covered by steeplebush. A carpet of snaggy blueberry bushes traced over the ground, their green berries full of hard, round promise. “Not here. We don’t want to crush the vegetation.” She scanned down the shoreline, then fixed on a small point of grey granite entering the water on a gentle slope. “Over there. Good traction. No moss. No footprints. Nothing to be disturbed. But watch where you put your feet. A broken ankle is not on the agenda. Being in one piece is our only chip in this casino.” She paused, and a ghost of a smile raised the corner of her sweaty mouth as she licked away the salt. “That, along with a double helping of feminine wiles.”

  In a dangerous slow-motion dance, Belle choreographed Yoyo’s exit from the kayak, then her own, and finally lugged the boat up the rough bank, careful to avoid punctures or rips. Once off the shore, she reached for a large, twisted branch of dead red pine and placed it over their entrance. Plunging into the thick bush, predominantly white birches and poplar with an alder undergrowth, they stepped where their prints wouldn’t show and finally found a narrow game trail leading past a grove of conifers. Belle swept a cedar bough behind them to disguise any tracks.

  Yoyo sat down on a log and groaned. “I can’t go much further, I mean farther, Belle.”

  Belle pointed to a giant balsam fir a foot wide at the trunk. “Home sweet whatever. Give me a minute before you come in.” The dry branches at the bottom could easily be broken for access to the rude shelter. Underneath, the ground would be soft with a cushion of dried needles. Right now it didn’t look like rain, but the thick overhang would afford some protection . . . if she could find sloughed-off birch sheets to use as impromptu shingles. She shook herself back to the present. This was hardly the time to contemplate constructing anything complex. Although they were in a small valley between ridges, Belle shoved the kayak underneath the tree to serve as partial wind protection. In the global warming that had unbalanced the climate in Northern Ontario, fierce gales and storms could spring up out of nowhere. Hail might be on the agenda twice in one summer.

  Belle scavenged to find whatever would make Yoyo more comfortable. She settled on gathering brackens and ferns for a bed. Their smell reminded her of camping trips. Then she ripped up a large cushion of sphagnum moss, spongy and green.

  Yoyo gave a long, low moan, a trickle of blood dripping down her chin from biting her lip. “Sorry. I know we have to be quiet. Jesus. What’s the matter with me? Mom told me she never made a sound. Am I a wimp?”

  A dead wimp, if a loud wimp. She watched Yoyo crawl forward as heavily as if she were hauling a bag of anvils. “How’s your nest, little mother bird? Are you warm enough?” She knew the answer. It was nearly thirty degrees, their only good fortune.

  “Real soft. Thanks.” Then as a spasm hit, she clamped a hand over her mouth.

  Belle had an idea and duck-walked out, then headed for the nearest yellow birch. Returning with a handful of thick twigs, she said, “Bite on this. It’s like wintergreen.”

  Monitoring her breathing in measured huffs, Yoyo gave her an odd look and put it aside. “I’m no beaver. Maybe later.”

  Belle wiped her forehead with her sleeve. Mother Nature was writing the screenplay. They were mere attendants. And if the baby was born, and if it was healthy, and if it didn’t make any noise . . . too many ifs.

  A minute later Yoyo gave a relaxed sigh. “All over for now. Next round in a few minutes. Guess what? I’m starving.”

  “Coming right up.” Lying beside her, Belle reached inside the kayak and pulled out the daypack. She retrieved a large green plastic bag from the LCBO and measured it with her eye. Bunting for the twenty-first century. Unwrapping the sandwiches, she handed one to Yoyo, who wolfed it down, licking the last crumbs from her fingers. Two cans of soda remained. Despite being made from white bread and processed slices, the cheese sandwich was so luscious that Belle forgot the painful brick in her empty stomach. They were burning calories like pine kindling. Two apples came with a plastic knife, so Belle cut them in quarters, nearly snapping the tiny weapon in her haste.

  Suddenly they heard a crunch nearby. Belle put a hand on Yoyo’s shoulder, and the woman’s anguished eyes went wide with terror. She bit down on the stick so hard that it broke, then spit out the residue as a brown rabbit hopped across the path twenty feet from them. “Isn’t that cu—”

  Without a sound, a red fox pounced and cracked the rabbit’s neck with one efficient shake, hauling off its prey with a beady eye on the crouching women. A fast lesson in bush ethics.

  “You’d better tell me what to expect before all hell breaks loose,” Belle said. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies! “Better that you were a bear. Their cubs weigh only half a pound.”

  “I could handle that.” Yoyo gave a light laugh, but then her eyes rolled back in torment.

  As the afternoon wore into early evening, and the intervals between pains shrank, Belle unwrapp
ed Yoyo’s jacket and spread it over her. At least they had basic covering, but with the dope wearing off, the mosquitoes would regroup. No wonder moose ran berserk onto the highways to escape their tormentors. As she slapped at a sipper, she remembered the old trick of coating the skin with mud. Then Yoyo groaned. Prepared to help her, Belle shoved the pack into the recesses of the kayak, then had a second thought. Was it possible that something of value in the small boat had been overlooked? Crawling forward, she fumbled around in the zippered pockets. She didn’t hold out hope for matches, but . . . then her fingers discovered a tiny Maglite, a toy in size but a serious one. It went on with a glow, and she grinned. At least they would have some company in the dark tonight. Until the batteries died.

  “It’s time, Belle,” Yoyo said and squeezed her hand. “I think my water’s breaking. Let me get my pants off. I don’t want to lie in that.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Yoyo shuffled herself to the side as Belle counted to a hundred. Everyone had heard of the concept of the water breaking. To Belle it brought the image of floating away on a salty tidal wave. But the reality was smaller, a few cupfuls. Then Yoyo arranged herself in a sensible straddle that recalled the posture of a birthing chair. “Not long now. Hope I’m fast like Mom. Take a look and tell me how far I’m dilated. Say like a dime.” At Belle’s horrified face, she added, “Come on. When I was a little kid, I saw worse. Why one time—”

  “Why do you think I never went to medical school?” Tentatively, Belle lifted the jacket aside, bent down and gulped. “Oh, my God.”