No Return (A Lee Smith Mystery Book 2)

by Jay Forman

  “Do you work for his company?” Len, the councillor whose eyelids were lowered with mistrust instead of genetics, demanded to know.

  “No! I’m a travel writer. I don’t have anything to do with Jack’s business.” At least I could answer that question with absolute honesty.

  “Did Ross McKay work for Hughes Diamonds?” Len asked.

  “Who’s Ross McKay?”

  The chief didn’t answer my question, choosing to continue with his own questions. “Why does Blaze think you can help us?”

  I had to think about that for a minute. “Because I’m good at asking questions and, more importantly, listening to the answers.”

  He seemed to like my reply, but his council members weren’t convinced. At least that’s the impression I got as they talked to each other in Oji-Cree.

  None of their words sounded anything like the Latin-based or Romantic languages I heard on most of my trips. Those languages, like French, Italian and Spanish, were liberally scattered with words that resembled their English counterparts, but there were so many consonants in the words the men were using, especially k’s and g’s, that I couldn’t even guess at what they were talking about. The only thing I knew was that they were arguing, despite the almost melodic, sing-song rhythm of their voices. It was the force of their words that showed their anger. Their facial expressions barely changed at all, something I’d noticed before when talking to other First Nations people. To them, white people like me probably looked like we were distorting our faces like Jim Carrey when we were talking.

  Sara gently tugged my sleeve and I took the hint and followed her to stand by her desk. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I don’t think they’re thrilled to have me here.”

  “They don’t know you, so you can’t expect them to open up and trust you from the get-go, especially with your connection to Mr Hughes.”

  “Why don’t they like Jack?”

  “It’s not him. They actually like him as a person. But they don’t trust the mining companies. You wouldn’t believe some of the ways they’ve tried to suck-up to the people here. One company had warm pizzas flown in every month for the students and another one—”

  Gilbert, the councillor who had barely looked at me, shouted angrily and I was pretty sure I heard the name Hughes in his blast. When he stormed out of the room I started to wonder if I could, or should, catch an afternoon flight back to Thunder Bay.

  “Miss Smith?” Chief Troutlake stood up and pulled out the little chair at the little desk beside his. “Please, join us.”

  I fit the chair easily, but still felt uncomfortable. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m here because Blaze asked me to help, but if you’d rather—”

  “We’d like your help. Not all of us, obviously. Gilbert doesn’t trust any amitigoshi, so please don’t take it personally.”

  “What’s an amitigoshi?” It was what Elba had called Big Red on the plane and it definitely hadn’t been a compliment. While Chief Troutlake sounded friendly enough I had every intention of walking back to the airport, with or without my backpack, if he was about to insult me.

  “A white person.”

  I’d seen enough of the world and met enough people of different nationalities to know that that could often be taken as an insult. But I could tell he hadn’t meant it that way.

  “Specifically, Gilbert doesn’t believe you. He thinks it’s too coincidental that a friend, a good friend, of Jack Hughes has come here to look into why one of Mr Hughes’ employees was killed. It would only make sense if you were an employee, too.”

  “The man who was killed worked for Jack?” There was no way, no way at all, that Jack wouldn’t have told me about it if he known about the man’s death. And he definitely would have hopped on a plane and raced over to look into it if one of his employees had been hurt. Even stranger still, why had Blaze neglected to mention that really, really important detail? I felt like I was being manipulated, but I didn’t know who was doing it or why. “Has anybody told Jack about this?” My surprise must have been plastered all over my face and it made Len smile for the first time.

  “I think he’ll hear about it now.”

  “Now we’ll answer your questions, Miss Smith.”

  A litany of questions started forming in my mind, but they were all my standard travel-related ones that I started most interviews with. They didn’t apply here, so I started with the basics and tried to sound confident. I wanted to give the impression that I actually knew what I was doing.

  “Blaze couldn’t give me many details because he wasn’t here, so maybe you could start by telling me what happened?” I wanted to take notes and automatically looked down beside my chair for my backpack. I was so used to having it handy that I was surprised when I didn’t see it. “Sara, could I borrow some paper and a pen?”

  “Sure thing.”

  She brought me a bright yellow exercise book with extra wide lines on the pages. Instead of a pen I was given a coloured pencil. My first real interview as an investigator was getting off to a less than professional start.

  “It was our first day at the fall gathering camp, down river,” Chief Troutlake looked down at his hands and started scraping his left thumbnail against the side of his right thumb. “Arthur was concerned about Bernice. She’d said she’d come up with the older children in one of the freight canoes from the school, but she didn’t. He came back to the reserve and—”

  I needed to know who was who before I heard about the what. “Sorry, but could you please explain who everyone is?”

  “Arthur is Blaze’s grandfather. He’s the one the OPP have taken away.”

  “And Bernice is his wife, Blaze’s grandmother?”

  “Arthur and Bernice have lived together for many years, but they’re not married. Blaze’s grandmother died when he was just a baby. Arthur’s relationship with Bernice has been … difficult. Arthur came back from the gathering camp and found Bernice still at home. They had words and—”

  “He should have shot Bernice. I would have.” Len stared at me hard, almost as if daring me to react.

  Chief Troutlake started to calmly explain: “Arthur didn’t shoot either of them, though. Arthur and Bernice have had troubles, but—”

  “Troubles?” Len cut the chief off and then cut to the chase. “He found her in bed with Ross!”

  “True, but he didn’t kill him. Ross, the man who was shot … was a prospector,” the chief explained. “He and his partner have been staking claims on the mainland east of here. They’ve been in to stock up on supplies at the Northern a couple of times and I guess that’s how Bernice got to know him. She works at the Northern.”

  “What did Arthur do after he found them?”

  “He came back to the gathering camp, without Bernice. He was upset. He wanted to call an emergency band meeting to have all the councillors vote on a motion to order Ross and his partner off our lands.”

  “And Ross? What did he do?”

  “He stayed inside the house with Bernice. Elba said he was in there for almost half an hour before he left. Elba lives next door to Arthur and Bernice.”

  “Arthur was half-way back to the gathering camp by the time they left his house,” Len added. “And he was there, with us, right up until Sara and the children came in the afternoon and by then Ross was already dead.”

  “My kids found him.” Sara finally joined the conversation. “We’d stopped where a tributary of the Attawapiskat meets the Winisk on our way to the gathering camp.”

  “Arthur couldn’t have killed Ross. Even so, the OPP have taken him away. They took him yesterday. They can only hold him for 72 hours before charging him, and we need to know who did kill Ross before those 72 hours are up.”

  Oh sure, no problem, piece of cake. Solve a murder in less than 48 hours? If I finished up early I could move on to finding the cure for cancer and bringing about world peace to keep myself busy for the remaining hours.

  I didn’t know what to do or sa
y or where to start. Unlike my work trips, I hadn’t done any research about Webequie before flying up so I decided to start by literally getting the lay of the land. Then I’d try to learn about the people on it.

  “I think it would really help me if I saw the places you’re talking about. Could somebody show me around?”

  The chief nodded. “Joshua’s already offered to do that.”

  “Who’s Joshua?”

  “That would be me.” The jerk from the pick-up truck said as he walked back into the classroom.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My grumpy tour guide’s personality didn’t improve any when he was walking. Joshua had long legs and I think he was stretching them out to go extra fast just to see if I could keep up with him. Little did he know how many hours I spent in the gym. My heart-rate barely increased as I comfortably jogged beside him.

  Instead of walking down the road we’d come in on he headed straight across the empty land in the middle of the island, passing just behind the hockey rink. A sign on the outside of the boards proclaimed that the rink had been a gift to the community from Dorian Mining.

  “Is hockey big up here?”

  He didn’t slow down. “Yeah, you’re still in Canada.”

  I wasn’t going to take the bait he’d just thrown out. “Does Dorian have a mine near here?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So was the hockey rink a suck-up present, like the pizza deliveries that Sara told me about?”

  He slowed down to a sensible walking pace. “Modern day beads. Give the dumb Indians something shiny and they’ll let you take anything you want.”

  “Has Hughes Diamonds done that, too?”

  “No, Jack hasn’t sunk that low, yet.”

  I almost tripped over his words. “You know Jack?”

  “I’ve met him. He’s been up here a couple of times for band council meetings.” We crossed the road on the east side of the island and walked up three wooden steps to the small house that his pick-up truck was parked in front of. “I put your backpack in Sara’s spare bedroom.” Joshua opened the door and stood back to let me go in first. “Second door on your right. Toss your parka in there and grab whatever you’ll need for the next couple of hours.”

  Where the heck was he planning on taking me? From what I’d seen from the plane we could do a complete tour of Webequie in under an hour.

  Sara’s house consisted of an open area at the front with the living area and kitchen in it, two bedrooms that were barely bigger than Jack’s walk-in closet, a washroom with a washer and dryer in it, and a room that housed a hot water tank that had seen much better days.

  I traded my parka for the thickest sweater in my backpack. After putting a new memory card in my camera I pulled my water bottle out of the side pocket and was just about to head back to the front of the house when I put everything down and unzipped the front pocket where I kept my cell phone. Hopefully Joshua wouldn’t mind me recording him if he said something interesting, instead of something just plain rude. Sweater on, camera strap draped around my neck, water bottle in one hand, cell phone about to be shoved into my pocket … Jack. If the man who died really had worked for him Jack would hear about it. And he’d probably hear about me being here, too. He’d be upset. I owed it to him to be the one to tell him about my change in travel plans. I’d do it by text though, not with a phone call. Live voice-to-voice communication would give him the chance to ask too many questions and, even worse, I’d hear the disappointment in his voice. I pushed the side button to turn the phone on and waited for the connection symbol to appear on the screen. It never did. I didn’t have too few bars to make a call or send a text – I had no bars.

  “Do you think Sara would mind if I logged into her Wi-Fi?” I asked Joshua as I walked down the hallway toward him. “I have to send a quick message to someone.”

  “She’d probably be fine with it, if she had Wi-Fi.”

  “Oh. Is there somewhere we could stop so I could connect?”

  “Your phone won’t be able to connect to anything up here. Sara might let you use the Internet at the school, but it’ll have to wait until we get back. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we lose the light.”

  Hopefully, we’d get back before someone else called Jack. “I’ll just fill my water bottle and then I’ll be good to go.” I started walking toward the kitchen sink.

  “Don’t use the tap water.”

  That’s when I noticed the big upside down water bottle on a dispenser beside the refrigerator. “Isn’t the tap water safe?”

  “It’s questionable right now. The filter in the water treatment plant is acting up again.”

  So much for the purity of Canada’s north. We had the world’s largest supply of fresh water within our borders, but what good was that if you couldn’t drink it?

  Once we got outside I stopped to take a couple of photos of the hockey rink just as a white man came out of the house next to Sara’s.

  “Hey, Joshua! Sara home?”

  “She’s still at the school.”

  “I thought you’d be up at the gathering camp.”

  “Heading up there soon …”

  We were?

  “… I’m playing tour guide. See ya, Dave.” Joshua got back into the pick-up truck and its engine coughed to life. At least it made some noise, because there sure weren’t any noises coming out of Joshua’s mouth.

  I tried to start something that might resemble a friendly conversation. “Who was that?”

  “Dave.”

  It was going to be a very long day.

  Joshua loosened up enough to add a few more words. “He’s another teacher. These houses here, they’re the teacherages.”

  Some were detached houses, most were semi-detached. “Do all the teachers live here?”

  “The name of the area wasn’t obvious enough for you?”

  That did it. “What is your problem?” He didn’t answer so I filled the silence again. “Look, I’m perfectly capable of exploring by myself and quite frankly, given the attitude you’ve been dishing out, I’d enjoy it a whole lot more than being around you.”

  He slammed his foot on the brake pedal and the truck slithered to a stop in the middle of the gravel road. “My problem is people like you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re a do-gooder. You’ve supposedly come up here to help us, but you don’t know the first thing about us. I’m sure you think you do, but you don’t. And when you’re done with your super-hero routine you’ll fly away, forget all about us and write a cheery little article about life on a reserve. Hell, you’ll probably start it off with how lucky we are to have been given a hockey rink, how that’s somehow made us more Canadian. Lady, we’ve been Canadian for a lot longer than you and your kind have been.”

  “You think you know me, but you don’t!” I used his own words to shut him down … and only allowed myself to feel the tiniest bit guilty about him being right about the hockey rink thing. “I make my living by learning – about places and the people in them. I respect all ways of life and from what I’ve seen no race or religion has got it right yet, so I’m in no position to judge you or anyone else. I came up here because someone I care about begged me to. I came here to learn, maybe even learn enough to find out who really did kill that prospector.”

  “And if Arthur really did it?”

  “Then he did it. I don’t make assumptions. I never go to a new place or talk to a new person assuming that I know anything. You should give that a try sometime. And as for that hockey rink, maybe, just maybe, it was a nice thing to do? Do the kids up here enjoy playing on it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “So your community did get something positive out of it. That’s not a bad thing.”

  “If Dorian really wanted to do something purely altruistic just for us, not for the photo op, they could have given us a new filter for the water treatment plant. But, hey, we’re not as bad off as Marten Falls and Shoal Lake 40
. Marten Falls have been under a boil waiter advisory for ten years, Shoal Lake 40 for 19 years.”

  “Isn’t that what we Canadians pay property taxes to our local governments for? To pay for our basic services?”

  “We don’t pay property taxes.”

  “Must be nice!” My huge property tax bill was just as responsible as Blaze was for me being in Webequie, and my house wasn’t serviced by any publicly funded water services.

  “We don’t pay property taxes because we don’t own the land.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  A satisfied smile spread across his face. “It looks like you’re learning something now. This may be our territory, our nation, but the land is owned by the Crown. We’re just allowed to live on it. Only recently have we started to make some headway in being able to freely govern it, even though we’ve been caretakers of it for centuries. And it’s just been in the last couple of years that the mining companies have been legally required to consult with us before tearing it up.”

  “Oh.” It was my turn to go silent, because I didn’t know what to say. He was right, I had learned something.

  “I don’t think all the mining companies are trying to rip us off, just most of them. Jack Hughes seems okay.” He threw out a conversational peace offering as he slowly pushed down on the accelerator again. “If it wasn’t for him, Blaze wouldn’t be able to go to that art school for the next couple of years.”

  “Blaze is a great kid and so incredibly talented. The emotions in his paintings are like nothing I’ve ever seen before. He did a painting of my place that took my breath away.”

  “He says spending time in the woods around your home makes him less homesick.”

  “You talked to him about me?”

  “I talk to him about a lot of things. He’s my nephew.”

  It only took me a second to do the genealogical math. “Is Arthur your—”

  “Father? Yes.”

  “And you think he might have killed that man?”

  “I don’t know.” We pulled up in front of the industrial building I’d seen on my way in from the airport. “He was a shitty father, with a violent temper. But I’ve seen the way he is with his grandkids and that guy wouldn’t kill anyone. Maybe the man he used to be resurfaced when he found Bernice in bed with another guy again? Or maybe not? Like I said, I don’t know.” Joshua kicked open his door, but didn’t get out of the truck. Instead, he turned to look right at me. “Truce?”