Close to noon when the store was mercifully empty, Lauchlin told Shane he had a way with the public. “You can handle them. Tell Jenna Marie you’ll be her press agent someday, promote her writing career.”
“No chance for that, Lauch. She’s heading for England after she graduates, so she says. And she’s not taking anything of me with her, that’s for sure.”
“What now?”
“Over, by the looks of it. She’s leaving this stretch of the world behind, Lauch. It’s too small-time, like me.”
“Worse things have happened, Shane.”
“Sure, I’ll survive. Not the woman for me, to be honest. Maybe I’m just a bachelor by nature anyway, like you, eh?”
“You’ve got lots of time to find out your nature.”
On the back steps, under the breezy leaves, Lauchlin took out his brother’s letter, scanned the pages in the shifting shadow and sun. He’d been carrying it around like some kind of missal, slipping it into his pocket in the morning, grabbing a passage when he could. It’s good to be taken out of myself for a bit, Lauch, I’ve found that very worthwhile. Improves the vision. I can see farther, wider.
MALCOLM’S HOUSE WAS CLOSE to the road and he was standing at his mailbox, talking into the passenger window of Sam Anderson’s old pickup as Lauchlin pulled up behind it. A dark-green bicycle lay in the truck bed among Sam’s stippled ladders and paint buckets. Lauchlin got out and looked it over, Sam watching him in the rearview mirror.
“Want to buy her, Lauchie?” he yelled.
Malcolm stepped back where he could see Lauchlin. “Sam found that down Big Bank.”
“Did he? Worse for the wear.”
Sam climbed slowly out of his cab. He’d been painting houses for years and his clothing was smudged and flecked with a succession of colours, on his glasses a mist from the latest job. He pulled off his spattered baseball cap, exposing grey, windswept hair. “I spotted her this morning, you know, when I got out of me truck. Hit a hole and a bucket flew out, had to fetch her. There’s this here bike lying partway in the culvert like.”
“When?” Lauchlin said.
“Hour ago maybe.”
“You planning to ride it, Sam?” Malcolm said.
“It’s not rideable,” Lauchlin said quickly. A few spokes were stove, a wheel rim twisted, handlebars askew, chain off the sprocket. The tires were khaki with mud. Surely it was not the same bike.
“No,” Sam said slowly. “But it was a little while ago. Them scratches is fresh.”
“You might want to mention it to the Mounties,” Malcolm said.
“What for?”
“You heard about Clement MacTavish?”
“I heard he’s missing, poor devil,” Sam said.
“They found his fish van early this morning,” Lauchlin said.
“They’ve found him too.”
“Where the hell did you hear that, Malk? Jesus Christ, I’ve heard nothing but rumours tripping over each other all morning long, up one side and down the other. You’ve got your own version?”
“Easy. I’m telling you the man is dead. Shot.”
“Well my Lord,” Sam said, sitting down on the running board.
“But how do you know?” Lauchlin said.
“My cousin, Molly? Molly Red George? She was on the phone to me a bit ago. I started for the store, I had to get out, when I saw Sam here. Peter, her nephew, he’s a woodcutter, the one who located Clement’s van, way up a logging road. He’d seen fresh ruts, tracked it. Brought the Mounties in. Then later, a good distance from the van, they came across poor Clement’s body. Been dragged toward a brook and left face down in mud, like the bad footing made the killer give up.”
“Clement was a big man,” Lauchlin said, more to himself, “a good two-twenty at least,” as if this detail could quell the tightness in his chest. “How can you be sure about this?”
“Molly is. I trust her. It took the wind out of me too.”
“What about the bicycle, Malcolm?” Sam said.
“Maybe nothing about it, I don’t know. Some queer circumstances to it, that’s all. Effie next door said a Mountie was asking along here had anybody seen a man on a bicycle.”
“Did they?” Lauchlin said, touching a loop of heavy manila twine on the handlebars.
“Emma Landry, you know, retired from the post office? She got up in the wee hours to let her dog out for a pee the other night and the dog ran off to the road. She’ll trail anybody who passes by, friend or foe it wouldn’t matter to Tippy, off she goes trotting after someone on a bicycle. Emma heard the fella cursing, she thinks he gave Tippy a good boot because the dog yips and comes limping back, her tail down, you know?”
“What in God’s name,” Sam said. “They coming after us on bikes now, are they?”
“But did she see him, the man on the bike?” Lauchlin said.
“No, he was past her. Voice didn’t sound like a kid though. The police have to check it all out, you know, in a situation like this. Every crazy little thing.”
“Maggie liked that MacTavish fella,” Sam said, climbing into his cab. “She won’t like to hear this at all.” Shaking his head, he drove off.
“God. Do you have any liquor handy?” Lauchlin said.
“You know where I keep it. Let’s go up.”
He walked Malcolm slowly up to his porch, the going so painful for him he could barely talk until he eased himself into a chair. Lauchlin felt like an invalid himself, crouched, bent.
“This is the worst, Malk. The worst.”
“I thought maybe you’d heard already.”
“It hadn’t reached the store, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I’d heard it there.”
“You can be sure Tena knows by now. You going to see her?”
“When I get myself together.”
Lauchlin fetched the whisky from a sideboard, two glasses from the kitchen. A heavy, engulfing sadness was spreading through him. He poured a drink for Malcolm, then himself, two good swallows, and brought them to the porch. “To Clement MacTavish,” Malcolm said. “God rest him, now and forever.” They touched glasses and drank. “He’d been shot through the eye, that’s what it looked like to Peter. He knows guns, he’s a hunter.”
“Jesus.” Lauchlin stared into the woods on the other side of the road. A pipe emerged from the bank above the ditch. Spring water flowed from it and people often stopped their cars there to fill jugs, it had been flowing like that as long as Lauchlin could remember, Archie Bugle’s water. “The forest is different to the Mi’kmaq. Did you know that, Malk?”
“I couldn’t say I did, Lauchlin.”
“It’s Chaos, the unknown, the unconscious, no map for it. And the deeper you go into it, the stranger things get. What’s real and unreal is hard to distinguish.”
“It’s not easy to distinguish right here on my front porch sometimes.”
“I don’t suppose you were sitting here late the other night, before Clement went missing? No.”
“How late?”
“Oh hell, maybe three in the morning, thereabouts.”
“Why, Lauch?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I went down to the road. I…I thought maybe someone else was up too. I had a feeling, I guess, I…”
“Not me, my son. Nobody stops that time of night. There’s no action in this house.”
“There was action somewhere. What’s with the bicycle, Malk?”
“You know as much as I do, Lauchlin.”
EIGHTEEN
WHEN he turned in at Clement and Tena’s, an RCMP cruiser was parked high up the drive and Arsenault was ducking underneath the yellow tape stretched across the driveway. He met Lauchlin in the shade.
“How is Tena doing?” Lauchlin glanced up at her open bedroom window through which a curtain waved.
“Not here,” Arsenault said. “The Mathesons took her into The Mines. She’ll stay with friends there.”
“She could have stayed on with my mother and me, any length of time.”
<
br /> “It’s what she wanted, to get out of St. Aubin for now.”
“Jesus, I wanted to see her.” He looked at the neglected field. The wild poplar saplings seemed higher, a throng of nervous leaves. “Talk to her.”
“I’m sure you’ll get your chance.”
“Nobody thought it would come to this, losing him.”
“She took the news calmly. She didn’t expect it to be good.”
“She knows that Clement was shot?”
“Who told you he was shot?”
“Tell me if I heard wrong. I hope I did.”
“Rumours fly like birds around here. We’re piecing things together bit by bit, that’s all I can tell you.” In the sky two crows were circling like hawks. “I see a lot of those crows. Smart. They know when something’s up.”
Beyond the yellow tape the yard Lauchlin knew so well looked deserted, abandoned. “That blood we found…he was killed here then, wasn’t he?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Jesus, the son of a bitch came back here for the body with Tena upstairs, didn’t he? He took Clement to Glen Tosh and dumped him there.”
“That’s your scenario.”
“It’s more than that. My God.” But how the hell had he done it? When? Before Lauchlin came by? Had to be after, he’d driven right to their driveway, he’d looked at that house, kitchen-lit and normal as rain, the van parked, the yard arranged as always, no sign of threat or danger anywhere. Who, with ordinary sight, would have seen it differently, who could have? Lauchlin had no cause to go further than he did, no reason. Did he? And Tena inside the house while the shooting took place, and upstairs when the killer returned, listening to him retrieve Clement from the bloody spot he must have lain in the whole damn day. “So who are you looking for?”
“We’re narrowing it down,” Arsenault said.
“Ged Cooper, isn’t it?”
“We don’t know yet how the killer got here. Nobody seems to have seen him on the road, and he left in the fish van, no other vehicle anywhere.”
“I heard you suspect a bicycle was used. I’ve never seen Cooper on a bicycle.”
“We’re checking that out, that a bike might have been involved.”
“Where’s Cooper then?”
“Can’t say. Some think he might’ve taken to the woods, and he’s got a good head start if he has. What woods or where we don’t know yet.”
“Those?” Lauchlin gestured vaguely toward the mountain across the strait. Through the high poplars overhead a west wind rushed and swept like a breaking sea, but nothing of the mountain forest seemed to stir.
“Unlikely he’s this near. No shortage of mountains if he wants to hide in them, north or west, and he thinks he’s a bit of a mountain man, from what I’ve heard. Is that true?”
“I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“There’s no way he can get off the Island, not in a vehicle. I suppose he could steal a boat.”
“He doesn’t know boats,” Lauchlin said quickly, not entirely sure that was true but it seemed that it ought to be. He was looking back at the house, the yard, trying to see it as he had that morning. What had he missed?
“You used to box, right?” Arsenault said. “My uncle said he saw you fight in Saint John, way back.”
“Box? Cape Breton mostly. Saint John maybe twice.”
Arsenault smiled. “Lightning Lauchlin MacLean?”
“Yeah. I thought it was funny too.”
THE ROAD WAS A BLUR. Cooper. On that bike. Where had he got to? But you could’ve stopped him, anyone could have, Tena said. Someone whacking grass along the ditch waved at him but he barely noticed who it was. It seemed so long since he’d talked with Tena. Why hadn’t she asked him to drive her into The Mines? Marsail and Calum have an easy affection with each other, she’ll reach over and touch his hand as they joke or reminisce. It’s affecting in a way, them married so long. Funny, I married late but that’s what I wanted, I wanted her. We’re so unlike, Lauchlin. You’ll never settle on a wife, blind or sighted, you’ll always be a little crazed about women. He was losing his sense of her. What blame or bitterness might she be harbouring? She did not know what he had seen, or not seen, no one did. But yet something had changed between them. Because he hadn’t been there at breakfast? She knew now what a close call she’d had that morning. And that night, the return of the van? Horrible. But Cooper didn’t need to kill her, she wasn’t a witness, he preferred to terrorize her, to mess with her mind. Or maybe he’d thought her irrelevant, she couldn’t see, she couldn’t act, she hadn’t wronged him. Jesus. And Clement, the poor man had walked through his house that morning like any morning. All the ordinary things he did, washing his face, dressing, eating a breakfast, and then out the door into the world as wide as ever, the way it can look here in the morning, the water beyond the trees, the sweep of the mountain. Did he give it a glance? But the fog had pulled in his vision, maybe he wasn’t looking forward anyway to starting a day in that van. Then the flat tire. He must have cursed when he noticed it. An old trick, but Clement didn’t catch it, eager to get underway without a hitch first thing in the morning. More likely to worry about a meteor flaming down than dying in his own yard. But he didn’t have a clue what hid there behind his house. In the barn, in the woods? To continue on with his life, all he needed to do was change a tire, a tire, and then his truck would go, again the wheels would turn, take him down the back roads, around the highways, back home, it was just a truck, the van he drove with fish, for his wages. The clap of the lug wrench, torquing the nuts. Or maybe he didn’t get that far. What he was not listening for, of course, he did not hear. And he’d never heard Lauchlin’s truck idling in the driveway at four a.m. or so. Cooper had. Could there be any doubt?
The commotion and expressions of shock in the store, the comings and goings, the parsing of news and information, the ringing phone exhausted Lauchlin even with Shane’s help. Ged Cooper was on everyone’s lips. Whether or not they’d had dealings with him, assessments of him coursed freely through the room, old suspicions, signs of bad character noticed or missed. Lauchlin stayed on the fringes—the man in his mind looked different from the one in theirs.
After closing, he sat at the desk in the backroom, his head in his hands. Johanna had stayed up at the house all day. I don’t want to listen to the talk anymore, she told him when he brought her the bad news, I want to be alone. He fished out Frank’s letter, riffling through the thin, soiled pages. Climbed the Chaipaval, the big hill on the Head. Keep to the sheep tracks, Calum said, they know where you won’t fall. But a squall caught me up there and I fell anyway, whacked my head on a stone. Not a bad cut but it’s swollen and bruised, pretty ugly. Worse than you looked on your worst night in the ring? Can’t say, didn’t see you, whatever night that was. Marsail wrapped me up in a big bandage, I look like the walking wounded, all I need is an old crutch. I sit by the fire, subdued by a good headache, ice in a towel clapped to my head. My hosts eye me like I’m a sad man who showed up at their door. I won’t go hiking drunk again. What’s the good of it, my mind clouded up? End up at the bottom of a gorge, splattered on the rocks. Be leaving soon. Oh Jesus, whisky and ale in the Rodel, how mellow the light was that afternoon!
Johanna was there, standing in the doorway, and Lauchlin pulled himself out of the letter. She was dressed as she might for church, in an elegant dark blue dress with a white-trimmed lapel. He hadn’t heard her come in.
“Don’t get up,” she said. “I know you’ve got your own thinking to do. But I’ll tell you about the call I got from Eddie MacCormack that runs the campground. Some people in a trailer there saw that Cooper fella, or someone awful like him, on a bicycle two nights ago. He was coming down the New Pabbay road from the Slios. Late, in the a.m. He went onto the highway from there and headed right toward the bridge. Now where was he coming to if not here?”
Lauchlin did not want to say yes or no. He fixed his eyes to the side of her, on a photo of Blair Richardson, poised and you
ng, posing for a publicity shot in the Venetian Gardens gym before the third Greaves fight, a black flashbulb shadow crouching behind him. Cooper must have pitched the bicycle in the ditch, flung it out the back of the bloodied van.
“Seems like every second person thinks they saw that guy, Ma. But that time of night, coming from the Slios? Foggy? Maybe they were smoking pot.”
“Tourists? Retired folks in trailers with little windmills on their lawns?”
“You’d have to put a gun to that man to get him on a bicycle. He’s too cranky, Ma, he’d fall over.”
“They saw him and the Mounties talked to them about it, that’s all I’m saying. I don’t know what to think anymore. It must be forty years at least since there was a murder along here. The MacColl fella up the road killed his wife.”
“Malkie said the men he worked with on the highway made up stories about his wife, that she was cheating on him.”
“He was a bit simple. He buried her in a barrel of potatoes, right there in the cellar. He smothered her, he didn’t shoot her.”
Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Page 31
