Ragged Lake

by Ron Corbett

  The crack dealer’s girlfriend was in the bedroom. Eight months pregnant. She had been raped, and stabbed repeatedly. The child had been alive when the first cops arrived, and there had been news stories afterward about whether paramedics in Springfield had the right equipment to have saved such a child, but Yakabuski figured nothing would have saved that boy. Certainly not medical equipment.

  His first major crime case, and he had stayed in that apartment for nearly six hours. It was maybe four hundred square feet. He stayed until the smell of blood and static flesh had seeped into his clothing, until the eyes of the young woman on the bed were like the back of his own irises, a thing imprinted. The gash on the young man’s throat became as familiar as a path leading from his back door. The baby he only imagined.

  When he left that apartment, Yakabuski marched to the Black Ruby Tavern and started drinking. Hadn’t left until three in the morning, when a patrol car arrived to take him home.

  He had long ago stopped communing with the dead. Worked some cases now from Ident reports. Never saw the bodies. Gained more information from talking to people than he ever did by staring into a dead man’s eyes.

  Yet Yakabuski was old enough to know there are precious few decisions in life truly left for a man to make, and as he sat in the office that morning, he felt Guillaume Roy walk into the room as surely as if a flesh-and-blood soldier were standing on the other side of the desk.

  . . .

  “That was a colonel from National Defence,” said Yakabuski, staring at the people sitting in the restaurant. It was nearly 8 a.m. but the lights were still on in the restaurant, the sky outside still a gun-ship grey. The breakfast dishes were stacked in a tray next to the service table, waiting to be brought to the kitchen. People sat at tables with coffee cups in front of them, their legs stretched out; there was already a languor to the day. “The squatter’s name was Guillaume Roy. He was a Special Forces soldier who helped liberate Sarajevo.”

  “The coco?”

  “Yes, the coco,” said Yakabuski, turning to look at the cook, deciding right then that he didn’t like the man. “Roy — that name mean anything to you?”

  The cook looked startled to be asked a question.

  “No.”

  “You tried to sell him whisky for two years. You never knew his name?”

  “No. He was just . . . you know, the coco.”

  “You know what you have to do to be a Special Forces soldier in this country?”

  The cook stared dumbly at Yakabuski and didn’t speak.

  “Guillaume Roy. That name mean anything to anyone? Ever been any Roys living around Ragged Lake?”

  He stared around the room, but no one moved. No one nodded. No one spoke.

  “Well, a hell of a way for a good soldier to die. Finish your coffee. We have things to do today.”

  . . .

  The three cops stood on the porch, staring at the sky, nodding their heads while Yakabuski spoke.

  “Donnie, I want you to go over to that expedition school and find out if it’s open. If it’s closed, come right back and stay with Matt. If there’s anyone there, bring ’em back and I’ll interview them later.

  “Matt, you’re staying here at the Mattamy. We’re going to put everyone back in the rooms for the morning. I’m going to go get that old Cree woman that lives outside town. We’ll head back to the cabin for a second look this afternoon.”

  “Is there another Ident team coming on the train tomorrow?” asked Downey.

  “That’s right. A couple of detectives as well. Depending on how it goes today, the detectives could be here a while. You boys are probably going back with the bodies.”

  “Are we moving them today?”

  “No. The train is going to wait for us. We’ll move them tomorrow when the detectives have had a look. We don’t even have bags right now.”

  “Are we just going to leave them where they are?”

  “No. We’ll take photographs, and then we’ll cover them up. Or do something. We’ll see when we get there.”

  “Doesn’t look like it’s going to be much of a day,” said Buckham, looking at the sky and turning up the collar of his parka to the wind.

  “That sounds about right,” said Yakabuski.

  . . .

  Inside the Mattamy, the cops told everyone they were going back to their rooms. This time they were staying there. They were to take coffee, water, sandwiches — whatever they thought they would need. They would be there for the morning, at least, maybe most of the day.

  As people stood and began to head down the hallway to the lobby, Yakabuski yelled at the tree-marker: “Son, you know where this old woman’s cabin is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get kitted up. You’re coming with me.”

  . . .

  The tree-marker took Downey’s snowmobile and they travelled along the western shore of the peninsula, beside a frozen bay the size of a decent, high-mountain lake. The main body of Ragged Lake stretched out from the bay. There were few islands on Ragged Lake, a geological oddity for the region, and the view to the north was uninterrupted, a full peripheral scan of frozen water and low-hanging cloud, two equal planes of grey and white that made the two snowmobiles seem small and inconsequential as they hugged the shoreline of the bay, the only things moving.

  They passed fishing cottages and an abandoned marina, then cut inland on a trail that ran through a black spruce forest. Soon, they came to the base of a bluff and started climbing, coming within a few minutes to a windswept escarpment with few trees and a 360-degree view of everything. Ragged Lake stretched far to the north like an inland sea. The BMR line ran east to west, following the spine of the Northern Divide. Rivers and creeks bled off the spine, cutting trails through coniferous forests.

  Yakabuski looked around the escarpment and found the cabin on the northwest tip, tucked inside a small stand of spruce.

  “I don’t understand why she lives here,” said the tree-marker, once he had parked his snowmobile and was standing in front of the cabin brushing away the snow. “There are abandoned fishing cabins right on Ragged Lake.”

  Yakabuski looked around and saw what any military officer would have seen. High, defensible land.

  “Must be the view,” he said.

  . . .

  The woman who answered the door was someone for whom age was no longer a thing specific. She could have been eighty. She could have been a hundred and eighty. She was dressed in dark-green mill pants and a Cowichan sweater, her grey hair wrapped in a bun that sat atop her head like a pillbox hat. She was a small woman, with a spine that curved so she was smaller still, skin the texture of old pine bark, and eyes a dark black that had begun to cloud at the edges of the irises, as though snow were moving in.

  Yakabuski introduced himself and asked if they could come in. The old woman took small backward steps and motioned them inside. Stepping in, they were greeted by the scents of white pine and summer mint, and Yakabuski looked around, finding the small cotton potpourri bags sitting on the windowsills. When they were seated on chairs placed around an airtight stove, Yakabuski asked her name and the old woman said, “Anita Diamond.”

  “Madame Diamond, I am here because of something that has happened by the old work camp,” said Yakabuski. “It’s something bad, I’m afraid. Some people are dead.”

  “The squatters?”

  “Yes, the squatters. Did you know them?”

  “I knew her. She came to the cabin from time to time. She brought her little girl.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  Diamond seemed not to hear the question. She rocked back and forth on a Morris chair, her small body hidden beneath her thick winter clothing, close enough to the edge of the chair to be teetering. “What happened to them?”

  “It looks like they were murdered, Madame.”

  “Who would kill a littl
e girl?”

  “I’m not sure. That is what I’m trying to find out. Did you ever go to her cabin? Meet her partner?”

  “They lived on Cap. That is a long way to go if you don’t need to.”

  “I have been thinking that myself. You lived at the old work camp, I am told, is that right, Madame?”

  “Yes. Five Mile Camp, it was called. I ran Anita’s Place.”

  “Anita’s Place?”

  “Yes, I’m Anita,” and with that she laughed. What started as a small titter grew until it was much heartier, the small woman bouncing precariously on her chair, laughing and saying a few more times, “Yes, I’m still Anita.”

  “Was it a business you ran, Madame?”

  “How much do you know about Five Mile Camp, Detective Yakabuski?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. I know it was an off-the-books work camp set up by the Cree at the same time O’Hearn opened a mill in Ragged Lake. That would have been back in the thirties. It was called Five Mile Camp because that’s how far it was from the camp to the front gate of the mill. It shut down when the mill shut down. How long did you live there?”

  “Almost forty years. When you put it all together. Before and after the mill. You think it strange they would build their cabin by the old camp?”

  “I do. There are better places. You could live right on Ragged Lake in a cabin that’s already built for you. Or go a mile out and build on better land. I think there is a reason they were living there. You still haven’t told me if you knew her name, Madame.”

  Again the old woman acted as if she hadn’t heard the question. Rolled her upper body forward to pick away at a piece of lint on her pants. Then she straightened and said, “I think you are right. There was a reason she was living there. Although, I’m not sure what it was. Would you like to know more about Five Mile, Detective?”

  “Yes, please.”

  And she started talking. A rambling narrative that to Yakabuski later would not seem rambling at all but a lucid account of the building and dismantling of a small village on the Northern Divide, told by an old Cree woman who rocked back and forth like a newborn in a log cabin high on a bluff overlooking Ragged Lake, with the wind skittering and tapping against the window panes, the scent of pine and mint mixing with the dark musk of wood burning in an airtight stove, the sky outside shrinking and turning a flat grey, the first snowflakes starting to fall.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Anita Diamond spoke of Five Mile Camp as though she had awoken in the work camp that very morning. How she would hear the low-gear rumble of logging trucks coming through the forest at all hours of the day and night. How the rivers flooded every spring, so the Cree built their houses on stilts, hundreds of stilted cabins along the Old Duck River with throngs of men heading back and forth to Ragged Lake, the mill running three shifts for many years. How the lichen was so plentiful in the camp it shrouded the gneiss and granite — so much purple lichen you could lie anywhere in Five Mile, wherever you were tired, and be as comfortable as though you were in your bed.

  “I came with my husband in ’73,” she said. “We came down from Kesagami; in skiffs we rowed across James Bay. It took us nearly two weeks to reach Old Duck. Another week to get into Five Mile.”

  Anita’s husband was killed two years after they arrived. An explosion in a bleaching vat that killed two workers right on the floor of the mill left Anita’s husband badly burned yet still breathing. He was taken back to the work camp, where he screamed and swore at anyone who approached him for three days before finally dying, his screams ringing out over the camp, and everyone agreeing long before he was dead that it was a tragedy he had not died on the floor like the others.

  Because her husband was a hard-working man, Anita was left with a well-built cabin and enough food to get by for two seasons. Maybe longer if she ate only two meals a day. She was twenty-five and liked living at Five Mile Camp. Had no interest in returning to Kes’ or in having another man in her bed. She had loved her husband and would miss him for many years.

  “I didn’t know what to do with my life,” she said. “That was the plain truth. I was sitting in my cabin, and I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next.”

  Given this, it would later seem pre-ordained, the thing that happened next, although at the time it lacked import and seemed a random event. It started with a knock on her door. Anita opened it to find three men standing on her stoop. Two were holding bottles of Bright’s sherry. The third had a string of pickerel. The man holding the fish spoke.

  “You have to help us, Anita,” he said. “Marie is acting like a crazy woman. She has thrown us outside.”

  “Why would she do that, Eddie?”

  “I’m not sure. We’re not sure,” and he turned to look at the two men behind him, who shook their heads and said in unison: “We’re not sure, Anita.”

  “You’re drunk. All of you.”

  “Yes,” they said as one.

  “None of you are working today?”

  “No,” said Eddie Blackstone, a cousin of her late husband. “We have the day off. A day off to drink. But Marie is not letting us. She’s being nasty. Maybe we can we drink here, in your cabin, Anita?”

  “Why would I let you drink in my cabin, Eddie?”

  “Because we can pay you.”

  And with that, he thrust forward the string of fish he was holding. Anita inspected the pickerel and said they could stay two hours.

  That’s how it started. Anita’s Place. Within a few months, Anita had more fish, herbs, and dried venison than she could store and was accepting only cash money. She was also selling the liquor. She was smart. A single woman with a well-built cabin; she had an asset in a work camp like Five Mile. And she kept on being smart. Got some of the musicians who played the bush camps in the winter to play shanty songs in her cabin in summer and fall. She built a small stage for them outside and had cook fires on holidays and pay days. She let young women spread blankets outside her cabin and hold picnics in the evening, so long as they behaved, so long as they were discreet. Inside the cabin, it was strictly tavern rules — men only.

  At its peak, people travelled from as far as Palmer’s Junction and Lake Simon to drink at Anita’s Place. And it wasn’t just Cree and Algonquin. White boys from the mill at Ragged Lake came all the time. Indian and Northern Affairs bureaucrats up on inspection tours were steady summer clientele. Executives from O’Hearn came. The O’Hearns themselves, father and son, more than once. Anita’s Place was the best juke joint and whorehouse on the entire Northern Divide.

  . . .

  It was easy to live in Five Mile back then. The men working at the mill made more money than they could spend. Many purchased trucks and cars at dealerships in High River, although they could drive them only on the stub of land next to the rail line, as O’Hearn wouldn’t let the vehicles onto its logging roads. The men bought boats and chainsaws and snowmobiles, expensive hunting rifles and winter clothing made from fabric most of them had never heard of before. Tales of this wealth were well known around Kes’, and there were always people arriving at Five Mile. At its height, there were close to a thousand people living at the camp.

  “Most of us should have realized it was never going to last,” said Anita Diamond, drawing the Cowichan sweater a little tighter around her, staring at the airtight stove as though debating whether to put on another log.

  “All the boys thought the shutdown was going to be a temporary thing,” she continued, deciding against the log. “You get used to one way of living, you think it’s always going to be that way. I don’t know if there’s ever a good way to prepare yourself for what’s coming down the road next.”

  It was early fall, and the men with cars came back from the mill first and told everyone what had happened. The mill had been around so long, most in the camp thought it was just a seasonal change. There was even a festive mood to the camp
that night as men gathered at Anita’s Place to celebrate the unexpected holiday.

  The next spring, when O’Hearn came to dismantle the company store, the men started to leave. Some went to Buckham’s Bay to look for work. Some went all the way to Springfield, or Minnesota, the Dakotas even. None of them found work. Mill jobs weren’t going to Indians anymore. Even white men were looking for work. Most of the men were back at Kes’ within a few years. Or they disappeared, rambled so far they never found their way home.

  Most of the cars were left behind. As were the boats and snowmobiles. The children’s playground toys. The furniture. Anita was the last to leave, after several years of being the only one in the camp. She lived with the abandoned cars and the rusting snowmobiles, the rotting cabins, the cedars pushing through the stilted floors, the windstorms taking out the windows, ripping down clotheslines, the small dock on Old Duck disappearing beneath the snow one winter and not being there come spring. Before the forest reclaimed her as well, she hired John Holly to build her a good, sturdy cabin on a bluff overlooking Ragged Lake. Anita Diamond had no interest in moving to another village. She had reached that age when people stopped looking for better places to live. She did not think that was a bad thing.

  . . .

  The old woman was silent for several minutes before Yakabuski felt confident enough to finally speak.

  “The murdered woman was from Five Mile Camp, wasn’t she, Madame?”

  “Yes. I knew her as a little girl. Prettiest little wisp you ever saw. I knew her father as well.”