by Ron Corbett
“They’re calling for snow,” said the old man when he handed Yakabuski the receipt.
“Not till tomorrow. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
They drove on. The land around Palmer’s Junction was flat, much of it clear-cut by logging companies in the seventies and eighties, the second-growth pine still short enough to allow a big clear sky to hang over them as they travelled. There were no clouds, except high in the stratosphere, where you could barely make out some wispy tails. They reached Lac Claire, the headwaters of the Matagami, but followed the shoreline because it was a large lake and looked open in the middle. Then they started to climb again, this time not the high ridges left by retreating glaciers but the tectonic plates of the Northern Divide. There were now so many frozen rivers and creeks around them, it was difficult to follow a trail, the frozen water bleeding out through the forest like ruptured veins. They drove past lakes with tributaries flowing in and out from the four major compass points. Rivers that ran in circles. When they reached the Old Duck River, they stopped.
While the sun was bright and clear, it was a cold day and Yakabuski took a Thermos of coffee from the cargo bin of his snowmobile and passed it to Buckham. When they had all poured a cup, they knelt to drink, huddling together to try and block the wind.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” said Downey.
“We won’t be stopped long,” said Yakabuski, who had taken off his left mitt and was punching in a number on a satellite phone. The bartender answered on the second ring.
“Mattamy Fishing Lodge.”
“So, how do I get to this cabin?”
“Did you get maps?”
“Yes.”
“You’re on the Old Duck right now, where it hooks up with the S and P?”
“Yes. Where I said we’d stop.”
“All right, you want to go west from where you are, follow the river, don’t follow the track into town. The old work camp is on the south shore of Old Duck. You’re about fifteen miles away. The cabin is a mile west of that, on Cap Lake. There’s an Indian name for that lake that’s probably on your maps but everyone around here just calls it Cap Lake.”
“Capimitchigama.”
“That’s it. The cabin is on the north shore.”
“We’ll be coming to the Mattamy after we’re done.”
“We already got your rooms.”
“Good.”
Before he hung up, Yakabuski heard a muffled conversation. The bartender talking to someone. He couldn’t make out what was being said. Then he heard: “Tree-marker says you won’t be able to miss the cabin.”
. . .
Yakabuski could see the cabin a mile away. The roof was red, blue, and green, and, coming through the forest, it looked to him like a navigational buoy.
“You ever seen something like that, Yak?” asked Buckham when the three cops were standing in front of the cabin and could see that the roof had been made of old pop and beer cans — Coke, Export, Laker — the colours faded some, but not much.
“Never.”
“The whole thing looks jerry-rigged to me,” said Downey.
“It does,” agreed Yakabuski. “I have a few uncles who would admire workmanship like this.”
They took in not only the cabin but the land around it — the small frozen lake, the thick stand of spruce, surely dark most of the year, a strange place to build a cabin when the south shore was already cleared. They walked the three steps to the front door. Paused for a moment before entering. Perhaps waiting for a sign, figuring if they were truly about to enter a murder scene, then a rational, determinate world would offer some sort of portent. An animal scurrying away. A foul stench coming from the cabin. But it was a cold, clear day and there was nothing. So after a respectful pause, Yakabuski gave the door a shove.
They saw the dead man right away. He was sprawled on the floor in front of a couch, blood pooled around his body. The blood was frozen, so it was tricky walking inside the cabin, and Yakabuski entered carefully, skating around the floor as though it were an ice rink, sliding on his boots before motioning for the other cops to be careful when they came in.
The man wasn’t cut in two, although Yakabuski had always doubted that part of the story. He was just twisted at a weird angle, the top of him going forty-five degrees to the right, the bottom forty-five degrees to the left, the way a body isn’t meant to twist. It wasn’t natural, so the kid’s mind had broken it down as two separate things. Yakabuski had guessed that as soon as the tree-marker had said the man had been cut in half. He didn’t need an Ident cop to confirm it, although Downey offered it up anyway.
“He’s been shotgunned, Yak. Close range. Took the bulk of the spread right in the chest.”
Yakabuski walked behind the couch to see the woman.
“Same thing here,” said Buckham, looking down at a woman easily fifteen years younger than the man, mid-twenties maybe, long black hair, attractive face, pants rolled to her ankles, a sheet of blood where everything in the middle of her should have been.
“She’s Cree,” said Buckham.
The three cops knew they would have to come back the next morning to start processing the room, so they didn’t bother getting bags from the cargo sled. Any work started and then stopped could be tainted evidence at a trial. Instead, they skated around the room surveying its contents. An airtight stove. A country-style hutch with cereal bowls and dinner plates. A sink below the window looking onto the lake, a bucket of frozen water beside it. A work bench against the back wall, made from an old door. A bedroom with a curtain divider and, inside the bedroom, a hardwood wardrobe and steel-posted bed. Yakabuski was looking at the bed, at the way it was made, the sheets taut and stiff-angled, the way a maid would have done it, when Downey called out.
“Yak, you better come over here.”
He could tell something had just changed from the tone alone. He walked to the opposite side of the cabin, where the two cops had pushed back another curtain. Yakabuski stood at the foot of another bed. There was blood everywhere. You could hardly tell there were sheets on the bed for all the blood. Just a frozen, dull-red layer of ice where sheets should have been.
Staring up through the ice was the face of a young girl.
. . .
They stayed another half-hour, getting on their hands and knees, shining flashlight beams under the coach, the hutch, the kitchen table, the two beds, the air inside the cabin getting colder, the cops’ breath becoming thicker as they worked, little white clouds that spun around their heads and then disappeared. Yakabuski had investigated cases like this before. He suspected the Ident cops had as well. These were the cases that made you go home and hug your children, your girl, your next-door neighbour, whomever you could grab, make vows to whatever god you knelt before, swear to all that was holy that you would never let your life fall apart so badly you think your best option is get off this lousy planet and take everyone you love with you.
When they were finished, the three cops stood in the darkening gloom, saying nothing until Buckham finally said what all three were thinking.
“Yak, there’s no gun here.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
They drove to Ragged Lake in darkness, down an old logging road that, according to Yakabuski’s maps, was a more direct route to the village than backtracking to the S and P. With Yakabuski in the lead, they crossed frozen rivers and thick stands of spruce, Downey with his head huddled from the wind, Buckham, shorter and not seeming as bothered by the cold, travelling erect, looking around. They climbed a high ridge with old-growth pine and a view of the Northern Divide beneath the stars, a ragged, twisting spine of rock that cut through the night, throwing shadows to both sides. In the distance, sat the massive body of water that was Ragged Lake, stretching north like an inland sea.
They passed an abandoned O’Hearn bush camp, the whitewashed boards of a cookhous
e showing bleached and skeletal through the trees. Then the silhouettes of rusted machinery. A busted timber dam. A small cemetery. After that, they were driving beside miles of chain-link fence that seemed without purpose, coming finally to a shuttered, Cold War–era radar station. Its massive satellite dish lay rusting, fallen to one side. The fence by the front gate was knocked down. The government must have simply walked away. Left everything behind. The bush was convenient for making quick retreats like that.
As they neared Ragged Lake, the forest grew thick and they lost the stars, were forced to travel slowly around the trees, headlights stabbing a path while they tried not to be diverted too far from a straight line. Yakabuski craned to hear the wind above the roar of the snowmobiles, for the slight change in pitch and keel that would let him know the wind was travelling over open ground, that cleared land or a lake lay in that direction. For nighttime bushwhacking they did fairly well, clearing the forest by the southwest arm of the lake, more or less where they were aiming.
They saw the abandoned pulp and paper mill first, a red-brick monolithic building that in the darkness was sensed before seen. The length of two football fields. The breadth of one more. Something so out of scale with its surroundings it seemed to have more presence than a fixed location. When their eyes adjusted, they saw wooden cottages surrounding the mill and what looked like an old school or community centre, a long, rectangular building with a heavy cap of snow, the roof collapsed on the northeast corner. There was an old railway siding. Two-storey homes squatted next to the siding, with verandas leaning or shucked off like useless appendages that had been cut away. The only light was to the west of them, on the tip of a peninsula that jutted far into the lake.
Turning toward the light, the cops reached the Mattamy Fishing Lodge within a few moments. They parked their snowmobiles at the end of a line of other snowmobiles, took off their helmets, and swatted snow from their parkas. Voices came from inside the lodge.
“I’d say we were the first ones to have been on the S and P since the storm,” said Yakabuski. “You agree, Donnie?”
“Sure thing, Yak,” Buckham said. “We were cutting our own track all the way from Springfield.”
“First ones on that logging road, too. You agree, Matt?”
“Absolutely.” Downey nodded.
Yakabuski looked up at the building in front of him. The Mattamy Fishing Lodge was made of split-rail pine, quartered and notched, with a long front porch that could hold fifty people.
“I saw one set of snowshoe tracks heading away from that cabin. That would have been the tree-marker. And one set of snowmobile tracks. Did either of you see any others?”
“No,” the young cops said in unison, and then Downey finished for them: “There was just that one track, Yak.”
“And that track was heading to the S and P. Whoever made it couldn’t have turned south or we would have passed the track on our way up. You agree?”
“That’s right. That sled was going to Ragged Lake.”
“The storm was three days ago. How long do you figure?”
Both of the Ident cops hesitated before answering. It was the question that mattered.
“It wouldn’t be three days,” said Buckham.
“You agree, Matt?”
“I think two would be stretching it. They were probably killed the day before yesterday.”
It didn’t need to be said, and so it wasn’t. Still, it was hard for the younger cops not to look around as they climbed the steps to the lodge. Not nervous, they would have told anyone who asked. And certainly not scared. Just wondering. If the killer they sought was hiding in the shadows right then. Or sitting inside the Mattamy waiting for them.
. . .
The lobby of the Mattamy was the way Yakabuski remembered from that one boyhood fishing trip with his father. The floor and walls of the lobby were wide-planked pine stained chocolate brown. Dark red paint framed the windows and door. There was a hardwood reception desk running nearly the length of the lobby, and wings that ran in three directions from the desk. The east and west wings were guest rooms; the north went to a bar and restaurant with a view of the lake.
Gaming trophies decorated the walls of the lobby: a twenty-eight-point bull moose; the head of a mature black bear; a muskie with its mouth open so you could see its two-inch-long teeth, larger than the shards of a bush-camp chainsaw, the snout angled so it looked like the fish was about to strike a foot-long metal spinner mounted to the plaque. Yakabuski knew, from having read the plaque as a boy, that the fish had been caught in 1954 and was once a North American record for muskie caught on eight-pound light tackle. He peered at the bronze plaque as he walked past the front desk, but it was burnished and unreadable now. The scales of the fish had turned colour as well, so it looked now like wax paper left in a kitchen drawer too long.
The cops walked around the reception desk and made their way down the north wing, following the sound of voices. This hallway was covered with more mammal heads, more unreadable plaques, more fish with scales turned translucent. When they entered the bar, nine people turned to look at them. Nine expectant sets of eyes — a few with the unfocused look of people who had been sitting there too long.
One was obviously the tree-marker, a teenager sitting on a bar stool with a rock glass in front of him, a sherpa’s toque on his head. At a round table near a stone fireplace sat an elderly couple, the woman with the high cheekbones and long black hair of the Cree, the man short, wizened, and white, dressed in dark-green work pants and a plaid shirt, with a John Deere cap on his head.
At another table, as far away from the elderly couple as the room would allow, sat a tall, lanky man in his mid-thirties. He wore fleece-lined guide pants, a heavy flannel shirt, and winter Sorels, that Yakabuski knew from having looked at a pair last autumn, cost four hundred dollars. Some sort of Sport. At a time of year when you shouldn’t get Sports. Another Sport, a pudgy man about ten years younger but wearing almost identical clothing, sat at the table with him.
Behind the bar was the man Yakabuski assumed he’d spoken to on the phone. The bartender stood a little over six feet, with arms that stretched the fabric of his denim shirt, his hair tied back in a ponytail. Beside the bartender was a fat man dressed in white pants and a chef’s jacket, drying a rock glass with a wet towel. Next to him stood a girl probably no older than the tree-marker, in a white uniform with yellow piping and a nametag. The last person in the room, at the bar next to the tree-marker, was a heavyset man in snow pants and a bulky cable-knit sweater. His clipped grey beard made him look a bit like Hemingway in his later years.
The bartender spoke first. “You been to the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Was it the way the kid said it was?”
“No.”
There was a palpable easing of tension in the room. Bodies went slack. Eyes closed and reopened, anticipation replacing the long-distance stare of foreboding that had been there previously.
“No,” Yakabuski continued. “He missed the little girl.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Yakabuski had nine uncles — five on his dad’s side, four on his mother’s. Including his dad, there was a time when all ten men were working in the timber trade. It was the only reason you lived in the Upper Springfield Valley or along the Northern Divide. His dad worked bush camps for nearly eight years before becoming a cop. One of his uncles, Jacko Yakabuski, still worked the camps, nearly seventy now, and so the family considered him crazy, which was probably true, although it was going to take more than that to keep him from going to the camps every autumn. Two other uncles worked for a timber company in High River that made hydro poles, which was about as close to government work as you could get without actually having to get government work. Every other Yakabuski was now doing something else. Or nothing at all.
Several of his uncles had been tree-markers when they were young, and Yakabuski
remembered them coming in from the bush on Friday afternoons, to his father’s house because they had running water, wearing their red underwear and leather suspenders, crazy beaver hats, and winter boots caked with so much snow they were the size of field boulders. The tree-marker who sat across from him now reminded Yakabuski of those uncles. It was a young man’s game, and the ones who did it best were quiet and resourceful, not given to flights of fancy or abandon. Except on Saturday nights.
When Yakabuski said a young girl had been murdered as well, the foreboding and tension that had been in the room returned. There were a few gasps, a few sad faces turned downward quickly, the shuffling sound of rock glasses being moved atop the counter of the bar. No one spoke. Yakabuski unzipped his parka, and the other two cops followed suit.
“I’m Detective Yakabuski,” he said, “and these are constables Downey and Buckham. We’re going to need statements from everyone in the room. You’re the tree-marker, right?” and he pointed to the boy. He would start the interviews with the tree-marker, as he had found the bodies. If it had been anyone else, the boy would have been the second one to give a statement.
The tree-marker followed Yakabuski into the kitchen, and there they sat on stools brought in from the bar and placed before a metal cutting table. It was a large kitchen, with a walk-in cooler and dry-goods pantry, windows looking out on Ragged Lake, three large industrial fans that twirled noiselessly above them.
“I thought you guys normally worked in pairs,” said Yakabuski when he had taken off his parka and sat down.
“We do, sir. My partner got sick a couple weeks back. Pneumonia or something. Had to put him on the train to High River.”
