Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle

by Lou Allin

  Yoyo panted, counting to herself. “Well?”

  “Uh.” Belle tried to assess progress on the basis of snowfall. Hers was a generation caught between imperial and metric. “About . . . two centimetres. A quarter.”

  Almost an hour passed, and the yellow birch twigs Yoyo chomped flew by with no more than a hum and the occasional quiet growl. Belle gave Yoyo credit for her stoicism and for the primer in midwifery. Women had babies at home all the time, but they also died without medical help for breech births, haemorrhages, twisted cords. Why hadn’t Mother let her watch Mimi delivering those kittens? Because that night after she went to bed, her father had taken a small bundle wrapped in a towel to the trash can? She’d seen him hunched furtively in the moonlight, opening and shutting the lid without a sound. How strange that Mimi had produced only one, but her parents told her it was common. After that first “right of all females” litter, the cat had been spayed.

  Her father. Now he might be fighting his last battle, the old knight against the dark man with the scythe under his cloak. She preferred those images to the graphic reality. A tear seeped from the corner of her eye. She’d think about that tomorrow. Be here now. Make yourself useful, her mother always said. And the timing was good. The sun still glistened above the horizon in the cleft far down the valley. Night would be at least two hours away.

  Belle looked at her watch, wondering how long this last act might continue. “Am I supposed to tell you to push or something?”

  “Stop rushing me. What the hell do you think I’ve been doing?” Yoyo began puffing, the little engine that could. “Now. She’s coming. They’re coming. Holy shit, it feels like a basketball team.”

  On the fragrant green bed, Belle tried to position herself kneeling at the entrance to what Leonard Cohen called the delta, the alpha and the omega, to catch the slippery little fish on exit. The primal rhythms of the song soothed her, and she nodded in self-hypnosis. Her pupils pulsed with the dilation of the cervix, and she ground her teeth in empathy until they ached. Slowly the crown emerged, and she laughed. Hair as red as hers. So far, so good. Not feet first. She felt her adrenaline surge and hoped that Yoyo was getting a whacking dose of natural painkillers. No epidurals here.

  Then a squirming parcel the size of a football with legs and arms lay in front of her, a cord dangling from the mother. Belle cleaned the mouth and nose with a paper serviette. It was breathing easily, nothing more than a confused look on its wizened face. Eyes as dark as plums. And it was a girl. Fancy that. Yoyo sat up with a grunt. “God. She’s wonderful. Is everything there?”

  Belle looked down. “All accessories accounted for. About this handy but now useless cord, though. The plastic knife is all we have.”

  “So go for it.”

  Belle bent to the gory task, then fashioned makeshift knots with loose threads ripped from the daypack zipper. What had Yoyo told her? Wasn’t there something more?

  Yoyo wiped the baby with a handful of soft fern, then pulled the tiny bundle to her with a dazzling and loopy grin. “Welcome to your first camp-out, darlin’.”

  Belle sat back for a moment, massaging her cramped thighs. Minutes later, the afterbirth arrived, and Belle tidied up, her sticky hands cleaned with a clutch of large striped maple leaves. A metallic smell of blood filled the air. Lest it fetch some beast, Belle collected the matter in a Ziploc, walked a hundred yards away and found a deep rock cleft with a foot of standing water. Letting out all the air in the bag, she managed to sink it under a sizable stone. She hadn’t given a thought to their other predators, bears or wolves. On bush trips, tampons had to be burned in the fire or buried.

  So far the baby hadn’t made a sound other than a soft cooing when Yoyo “latched” it to her breast, another new term for Belle. “Hey, hey. Easy, little cub,” mother said to daughter. She explained that the first few days of nursing brought out the colostrum, a weak and easily digested milk. Clearly she’d studied her books with diligence. Her lessons took their minds off the present.

  “It’ll get colder tonight.” Belle picked up the LCBO bag and the last birch twig. “This is about the right size. Let’s poke a few holes for ventilation and put her in here.”

  Then in the silence, punctuated only by sucking, the baby gave a small cry. “What’s wrong?” Belle whispered, panic in her tones. “We can’t have that. If Patch is around . . .”

  Yoyo wrinkled her brow as she stroked the baby’s back. “It could be gas. Come on, girl. Humpty dumpty.” She gently moved the baby up and down. Finally, a small burp emerged. The girl opened her mouth to breathe, squeezed her eyes, then settled back in a nap, milk burbling at her rosebud lips. Apparently the baby would sleep much of the time and become more active once the true milk appeared.

  “You passed the final with an A-plus,” Belle whispered with a smile.

  As the gold of the setting sun flared to burgundy and brought the slow darkness, they settled beside each other for warmth. Every inch of skin was covered against bugs, except for their faces and hands, oily with dope. The baby was wrapped under Yoyo’s coat. Her button nose twitched, but she was well protected.

  “God, I’m hungry,” Yoyo said.

  “But we finished the sandwiches. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find some berries.” And a campfire with boy scouts and a vat of stew and s’mores for dessert. Something lumpy was in her pocket as she shifted. Patch’s whistle. No help there. The last thing they wanted to do was make noise.

  A little cheer came across Yoyo’s face, illuminated by the flashlight they allowed themselves from time to time. “Baron’s Bites! The bikkies. I forgot about that.”

  Belle grabbed for the pack, her mouth watering in spite of herself. “But what’s in—”

  “All natural stuff. Whole wheat flour. Skim milk. Egg. Meat fat. Good for you.”

  “Speaking of meat, I could go for a hamburger.” Belle tasted one, making it last nearly a minute. “Bland, but nutty. I like it. Nutritious, too.” She counted the rest. Two dozen. A treasure chest.

  Tired as they were, they talked to maintain a semblance of normalcy, to sustain their spirits. Plans for the next day went unmentioned. Too many unknowns. “So you write country songs? That’s pretty cool,” Yoyo said.

  “It’s not like I ever sold one.” She recited the lyrics to “Come On Up To Mama’s Table”.

  “I sent it to an address in Writer’s Digest, but the whole thing was a scam.”

  “So you have just the one song? It’s not like a passion or anything?”

  “No, just a little moneymaker, or so I thought.”

  Then Yoyo gave a quiet laugh. “Of course, dear boss. But there are other easy ways to score a quick dollar.”

  Belle gave a scoffing gesture with her hand, barely able to see it in front of her face as the rising half-moon scudded behind a bank of silvery clouds. “Like what? Those TV come-ons? Work at home for a thousand a day? Or are you referring to gambling?”

  To her credit, Yoyo ignored the bait. “You have an English degree, right? You’ve read tons of poetry. Why not try some limericks for Playboy? My brothers had a subscription. I read the articles . . . of course.”

  “Right, the limericks are in the joke section. But what money?”

  “Hey, they pay a hundred dollars U.S. And how hard can it be?”

  Belle pondered this. “The ‘little old man from Nantucket’ idea has been taken.”

  This got them both giggling. “Let’s think of a place or a person first, then go from there. I used to write poems in high school. Perfect rhyming. I have a very good ear.”

  “I wrote poetry, too,” said Belle. “Very gloomy stuff. ‘Misery, companion mine.’ What was I thinking? I wasn’t unhappy.”

  “Listen,” Yoyo said.

  In the growing darkness, a song arose. A gasping buzz. Tuptup-sheeee. Belle pricked her ears. Not the Sam Peabody of the white-throated variety. “A sharp-tailed sparrow maybe. Must be a marsh nearby.”

  “Sparrow. Good name. There once was a woman na
med Sparrow.” Yoyo clicked her teeth, shining in the ambient light. “That gives us narrow, arrow. Where can we go with that?”

  Belle was enjoying the game. It was taking her mind off her aching shoulders. “Marrow, yarrow, barrow and harrow.”

  “What do those words mean?”

  “I agree. Too obscure. But I like the sparrow. Maybe we should try Spanish. Many words end in ‘o.’ It’s an American magazine, and L.A. is nearly half Hispanic.”

  “All I know is salsa and buenos dias.”

  Belle paused to think while Yoyo gave her daughter another slurp. “How’s this? ‘A castanets player named Sparrow/Invited a well-hung torero . . .’ ”

  Yoyo gave a silent splutter, then tucked the girl back under the covers. “Well-hung. That’s the idea. A guy thing. But invited him to what? A party? A dance?”

  “You don’t want to go with party. But dance lead to pants. Imagine the possibilities.” She wiggled her eyebrows, though she knew Yoyo couldn’t see them.

  “A dance. What kind of music? Something sexy, I bet.”

  “Ravel. Everyone’s fantasy.” She snapped her fingers. “And played a two-minute bolero.”

  “Two minutes is more than a lotta guys can handle.”

  Finally, they slept, a bonded trio. Only once in the night did Belle twitch awake. An old nursery rhyme was stuck on her mental disc drive. “Bye, baby bunting. Patch has gone a-hunting.”

  As diffused light from the morning sun reached their shelter, Belle opened one eye, nearly swollen shut from bites. She was frantically thirsty, having rationed the last sodas. She watched Yoyo nestle with the baby under her chin. They had to move on. And the bugs would be fierce unless they caught a wind. She thought again of the early blueberries. A few would give them fresh heart, even if they were a bit sour.

  Yoyo yawned and checked the baby, whose mouth opened. Before it could close, Yoyo had popped in a warm spigot. Way to go. No getting up in the wee hours warming bottles. Not to mention the cost of formula.

  “I’m going to scout around for a minute, Yoyo. Open the last pop can. We’ll get more water back at the river.” Dehydration would punish them far faster than the perils of giardia.

  “There’s a stream where we came in.”

  “Larger sources are safer.”

  Belle rose stiffly and found the game trail. She squinted. It seemed a bit broader here than she would have expected. Was it more than an animal path? Then she saw the black scab of an old blaze on a white birch. Did it lead somewhere? She glanced back at mother and child, dozing again, then set off on a lope.

  The path climbed a maple ridge, then down again, widening as it went. Checking her watch to monitor the time, she finally reached a clearing. Man had made his ugly mark here. It was an old mine site, now levelled and burned to nothing more than a few boards and bricks. Toxic pools seeped from the ground. A yellowish clay oozed at her feet, and she moved off. From the hardy poplars that had reasserted themselves in this hell, she judged that more than half a century had passed. In the trees at the edge, she saw the remains of a shack and went over, careful where she stepped.

  Underneath the tin panels was a rusted metal sign with fractured letters. The Old . . . Batty. Where had she heard that? From Rosaline’s mother. She had thought it referred to a person. Was this what Gary had found? Or discovered arsenic traces in nearby watercourses? Had its poisons killed the vulnerable baby elk? Then she froze. What if Yoyo wandered back to the river?

  She began running, tripping over roots in the path. Finally she reached their tree and paused to catch her breath, bending over with her hands on her knees. Yoyo was still lying there, a contented odalisque. “The water . . . you didn’t . . .”

  “Huh? Did you bring some back? I’m parched.”

  Briefly Belle explained what she had seen. “We can’t drink from anything around here. Once we get downstream a mile or so, we can risk it. I’m thinking that this is what Patch was hiding.”

  “But why? If it’s that old, it had nothing to do with him.”

  They munched a few biscuits and shared the last can of pop. Then Belle scouted down to the river, happy to see nothing from her hiding place in a thicket. Patch wouldn’t waste energy. He’d be waiting for them back at Bump Lake.

  They set off in the kayak, the baby nestled between Yoyo’s legs. From her bra and some moss, she’d fashioned a rustic diaper. Father of Industry, meet Mother of Invention.

  A short portage took them over to a river, where they made faster time. They were travelling light, but quickly, the bonus of a kayak. At a few points, large dead trees had fallen into the river, blocking their path. “Lie down,” Belle said, as she lifted the branches and they slipped beneath in a potentially fatal game of pick-up sticks.

  At another junction, the logs were too large to move. Belle got out and stood on one, bending over to lift the boat and Yoyo over a few inches at a time. The effort was costing them. All of the biscuits were gone. Then the river disgorged on a larger body of water. Not Georgian Bay yet, but the Penage system. Farther to the west, the main lake was full of cottages, some of which she’d sold. Here, many inlets away, the shoreline was wild. At an island, they pulled in close and stopped to gather a few handfuls of blueberries, nature’s debut ripening on a south bank with plenty of sun-collecting rocks. They drank thirstily from the big water and continued west, navigating by the sun behind them.

  “Gotta be someone around,” Yoyo said half an hour later, then wrinkled her nose. “But I have to change the diaper. Pull in somewhere.”

  With the lake came the growing chop of waves. They tacked and weaved in an effort to avoid swamping. They were navigating a knife edge and making little progress as the winds slewed the craft and their two compartments began filling with water.

  Suddenly Belle glimpsed what looked like a small canoe disappearing around a point. They yelled, but the rising wind blew their words back. Then Belle pulled out Patch’s whistle, and its shrill shriek shot across the water like an arrow. The canoe turned, and a person waved. So that they wouldn’t be perceived as mere sightseers, Belle kept on whistling and flailing her arms until the canoe sat dead in the water. The paddler aimed something at them. Its large eye glistened in the sun.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Bonnie Fleischer was a wildlife photographer whose work had been featured on many nature calendars. She’d aimed her telephoto lens at them like a telescope. The float plane that had dropped her off was due back, and all of her gear was packed into the canoe. Her tanned and wiry body testified to a fitness far younger than her fifty-five years. A sensible brush cut of steel grey hair streamlined her intelligent face.

  As they sat on the beach, Bonnie offered a litre of drinking water, beef jerky and two bananas. Belle wiped her mouth as she searched the sky and began calculating the weights. Bonnie’s cumbersome Sportspal was built more for stability than lightness. “The boats can stay. We have to get this lady and her daughter back.”

  “I agree.” Bonnie traced a finger over the baby’s chin and smiled. “I can’t imagine how you managed it.”

  The baby gave a lusty cry. “Let her exercise her lungs. She’s been patient long enough,” Yoyo said, waiting a minute before giving her the magic flute. Then she secured the baby in a soft bed of moss, and she and Belle went into the water to scrub off two days of dirt and sweat. They used nature’s scouring pad, swamp horsetails growing at the water’s edge, the original pop-it beads.

  At three, when the pilot touched down and motored to the small bay where they waited, he got out onto the pontoon and tipped back his cap. “What is this, a party?”

  Having been filled in, he asked the women their weights. One hundred and thirty for Belle, one hundred and twenty for Bonnie, and one hundred and ten for Yoyo plus about five for the wolf cub. “If you gals were a big man and we were taking the canoe, it’d be about the same. Hop in. I’ll radio ahead.”

  Belle rode in the rear seats with Yoyo. The plane took off quickly, and within hal
f an hour was cruising over Lake Ramsey. It landed at the Eagle Flight Centre’s docks, where an ambulance was waiting. As Yoyo was being lifted onto a gurney, her daughter in her arms, she waved goodbye. “I thought of a perfect name. Cocobelle.”

  Belle groaned inwardly and blew a kiss. She made arrangements for the pilot to return for the boats, all expenses paid. Bonnie had been a lifesaver.

  Then she took a quarter from her wallet and went to a pay phone. “Hélène?” she said as someone answered.

  A shriek came from the receiver. “Where in God’s name are you? Why didn’t you call us? Freya was all night on the deck. We saw her in the evening, and she was still there next morning, but your van was gone. We left a note and took her—”

  “Stop the presses. I have quite a story. But I have to see my father first. Then the police.”

  She took a cab to Memorial, well aware of the sweat reeking from her clothes when the driver rolled down the windows. She asked at reception for her father’s room. He still had one, a good sign. On the way she passed a non-denominational chapel and slipped in to compose herself. She still recalled a few prayers from the wonderful Cranmer prayer book. But this time she addressed someone other than God. Her hands were shaking from running on a diet of adrenaline and dog biscuits. “If the old man can beat this, leave him with me. But if suffering will be his lot, come and get him now. Tonight. And I mean it, Mother.”

  As she entered 510 in the geriatric wing, she heard a familiar voice. It was hoarse but strong. “I saw every film ever made. Shake the hand that shook the hand of Gene Autry. Smiley Burnette, too. Didn’t like Gene much. Too cold. But Smiley was a prince.”

  Her father was propped up in bed, his face pale but free of sweat and pain, his cornflower blues clear and sharp. He was talking to a young Filipina nurse who was taking his pulse and had probably never heard of the singing cowboy.

  He looked up at Belle with a mild annoyance and shook one bony finger. “I thought you weren’t coming. Where’s my chicken? And double ice cream on the pie.”