No Return (A Lee Smith Mystery Book 2)

by Jay Forman

  “Welcome to Beverly Hills. That’s what we call this area because the houses are bigger and newer. That’s Elba’s place over there.” He pointed at the house next to the one we were walking up to. “This is Dad and Bernice’s place.” He tried to open the door but it was locked, so he banged his fist against the door loudly. From the dents in the door it looked like he wasn’t the first person to knock on it that hard.

  Despite giving the area a swanky name the houses here were only in minimally better shape than the ones I seen further north. The Beverly Hills houses all needed a new coat of paint. The one-storey homes up the road needed several new coats and many needed new doors and windows, too. One of them needed a roof – not a new roof, a real roof. A blue plastic tarpaulin was filling that bill right now.

  I looked over at Elba’s house and smiled when I saw the little girl from Sara’s class poke her head up in the front window. Her head popped up and down so quickly that she reminded me of a nervous groundhog sticking his head out of his hole and then ducking back down when he saw a big bad human. The human Mary had been ducking down to hide from was me. A little boy’s head popped up next, but he didn’t duck down. He blatantly stared at me, so I smiled and waved. I saw his lips moving and then the top of Mary’s head slowly rose up in the window, just until her eyes were level with the windowsill.

  “We’re being watched.”

  Joshua waved at Mary and her little friend. “I don’t think Bernice’s here, unless she’s out back.” He started down Bernice’s front steps and I followed him around to the back of the house.

  The ground sloped to the river shore. Bernice and Arthur didn’t have a dock but given the way there were boats pulled up onto the grassy land behind two other houses I was fairly certain that Bernice and Arthur’s boat usually laid on the patch of flattened grass at the shore.

  “She must have gone up to the gathering camp. We can take Elba’s canoe, she won’t mind.”

  Elba’s canoe wasn’t like any canoe I’d ever seen before. It was made of wood, but it was much wider than my canoe and the stern was flat, not pointed. An almost antique Johnson outboard engine was attached to the transom, tilted up all the way so that the propeller would be off the ground. It reminded me of the engine we’d had on our aluminium fishing boat when I’d been a kid. Stuart had called our old Johnson engine ‘a sewing machine with a prop’ because the engine was so weak.

  I helped Joshua push the boat into the river and was surprised by how heavy it was. “How does Elba push this in by herself?”

  “She doesn’t. Her son Marvin lives here, too.”

  “He’s not at the gathering camp?” I asked after one final almighty heave to get the bow of the boat free of land.

  “Nah, he left this morning for his shift at the Hughes mine. They work three weeks on, two weeks off. Elba takes care of Mary when he’s gone.”

  “Where’s Mary’s mother?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  Joshua’s answer shocked me and I would have asked him to explain it more if Elba hadn’t called out for him from her back door. He left me standing at the shore holding the painter and wondering why the cute little girl’s mother had disappeared.

  Mary and her little friend poked their heads around Elba’s legs as Joshua talked to her. The boy pushed past Elba and marched toward me with all the bravado of an eight-year-old showing off how brave he was.

  “Mary says you’re a ghost.” He firmly stood his ground right in front of me. “But you don’t look like a ghost to me. I’ve seen a real ghost before.”

  “I’m not a ghost, I promise.”

  “I know. You’re the one Blaze called. I’m the one who found the dead man. He wasn’t a ghost, either. He was just dead.”

  “That must have been scary.” If I’d found a dead man, especially one who’d been scalped, it would have really shaken me and I was a grown-up.

  The little boy shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve seen dead stuff before.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you found him.”

  “That’s what I do – find things.”

  “Good to know. If I lose anything while I’m here I’ll come to you to help me find it.”

  He beamed with pride. “My name’s River.”

  “Nice to meet you, River. I’m Lee.”

  “You’re short.”

  “So are you!”

  He stood up a little taller. “But I’m going to grow big and strong like my Uncle Joshua.”

  “Hey, squirt,” Joshua said as he came back to the shore. “Elba wants you back in the house. She’s got lunch ready for you.”

  “Can I come with you? I can show Lee where I found the dead man.”

  Joshua took the painter from me and motioned for me to get in the canoe. “Not this time.”

  “But—”

  Joshua cut him off, using Oji-Cree words. I didn’t need to know exactly what he was saying. The disappointment on River’s round little face was easily identifiable and his half-hearted wave as we floated away from the shore was depressingly droopy. He was the kind of adorable kid that tugged at my heartstrings and made me feel a flash of regret for not having had children.

  Where the heck did that thought come from?

  I quickly pushed it back down from whence it came, somewhere in my subconscious.

  It took Joshua so many yanks on the pull cord to get the Johnson engine to come to life that I couldn’t help but glance at the little glass fuel gauge bubble on the vintage six-gallon red metal gas tank attached to the engine as I climbed over it. It was showing that the tank was just under half full. I sat at the bow of the boat on top of a second red metal gas tank. The ‘F’ for full wasn’t moving inside its gauge bubble, despite the fact that we were bouncing over choppy water.

  My sweater had kept me almost too warm on land. Out on the water with the wind blowing straight into me I was glad to be wrapped in the thick cables and twists of one of Auntie Em’s creations.

  The engine was so loud that conversation was out of the question and I was just fine with that. I was thoroughly enjoying being on the water, especially on water so far away from civilization. This was the best part of Canada, as far as I was concerned. Rocks, trees, even if they were a little shorter than the ones near my place, clear water, clear skies, clean-tasting air, my hair blowing in the wind, my cheeks chilled – heaven. Even the sky felt like it was closer.

  Webequie was on our port side, the mainland about a kilometre away on our starboard side. We headed northeast, past the northern tip of Webequie. From there on in, no matter which direction I looked in, all the shoreline I could see was pristine. There were so many islands, big and small. On Google Maps the Winisk River was just a thin line that ran from the shore of Hudson Bay until it widened south of Winisk Provincial Park. Both the river and the islands looked like they’d been pulled and stretched out. The image on the map had reminded me of the man’s face in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Being on the river gave me my first real understanding of what a significant waterway it was, and I started to think about how it probably hadn’t changed much since Henry Hudson first sailed into Hudson Bay in the early 1600s. Had he sent an expedition down the Winisk to see if it opened to the passage to Asia that he’d been looking for? Joshua’s ancestors would have been here then.

  The first sign of human life that I saw was an engine-powered canoe heading south toward us from a point of land on the mainland that was so close to a big island that the opening between the two would have been easy to miss. Joshua waved at the men in the oncoming canoe as we passed each other and they waved back. I almost fell off the gas tank when we hit their wake. My camera painfully banged into my chest, reminding me that it was there.

  I turned around and motioned for Joshua to slow down. He did, but not enough.

  “Put it in neutral!” I screamed.

  He twisted the throttle down so quickly that I almost fell, face first, into the bottom of the boat.

  “Thanks.”

&
nbsp; “Why do you want me to stop?”

  “I want to take some photos.” I flipped the lens cover off my camera. The splashes of water on it told me I’d been right to wait until we weren’t bouncing all over the place to take my shots.

  Looking through the viewfinder concentrated my perspective and I started to notice more details, especially when I zoomed in: the boat far away over on the western side of the river that had two men standing up in it, presumably fishing; the twisted trunk of a pine tree bravely standing all alone on a rocky point without any protection from the wind; a deer climbing up out of the river onto a smooth slab of the Canadian Shield and shaking off the water before it disappeared into the trees on a small island; four dots in the sky that quickly looked bigger as they got closer to us. They were float planes, coming from the south, and when they flew over us I could see that each one was carrying two canoes, one strapped to each pontoon. “Where are they going?” The planes were dropping down, flying one in front of the other.

  “The entrance to Winisk Provincial Park. High school kids from Toronto come up here with Outward Bound to do the adventurous journey requirement for those awards named after the Queen’s husband. They’ll paddle down the Winisk to the shore of Hudson Bay and then get picked up in Peawanuck.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “About two weeks. That’ll be the last group of the year. They’ll be lucky to get out before the snows come. The tourists usually only come up in the summer.”

  “You get a lot of tourists?”

  “Mostly Americans. Some Germans. This year we had a group of hikers from the Faroe Islands and a photographer from Iceland.”

  Was I the last person to learn about this magical place? It was starting to feel like it. A photographer from Iceland knew about it? With $60 billion worth of minerals in the ground thousands and thousands of people in the mining industry, and all the related industries, knew about it. Maybe I’d spent too much time looking elsewhere and not enough time looking and learning about my own home? Why was I always looking away?

  It was the second, and hopefully last, deep and meaningful thought to pop into my head that day.

  I put the camera back up to my eye and scanned the mainland shoreline to the east. It was then that I noticed three pale grey plumes of wood smoke rising up from near the tip of the northern point of land. “Is that where the gathering camp is?”

  Joshua nodded and twisted the throttle open to full when I put the cap back on my lens.

  It all looked so empty, unlived in, unspoiled, yet even if I couldn’t see it, everywhere around me things were happening, lives were being lived.

  ****

  The cut I’d seen between the northern tip of the mainland and the island turned out to be a fast-moving rapids. Joshua beached the bow of our boat on the sandy shore just south of the rapids and we pulled it up next to a large collection of boats – some wooden, some tin, one fibreglass. As we walked along a well-worn pathway through the woods the sounds of a large group of people started to get louder.

  For the first time since arriving in Webequie I saw an actual crowd of people. Little children were playing, running without a care – or adult supervision – through the woods. Multi-generational families were fishing, cooking, eating and laughing together. One older man was showing his younger relative how to skin a dead moose that was lying on a makeshift table made out of sections of small tree trunks. The old man, using a very sharp knife, was able to slice under the skin of the animal without nicking the meat. It was obvious which sections the younger boy had been working on; the meat was marked by numerous nicks. Three women were sitting together on a large rock, plucking the feathers out of dead partridges. Leaning up against the trees behind them were two babies, wrapped in brightly coloured blankets and strapped into the wooden baby carriers that I knew were called tikinaagans – I remembered learning about them in school when we studied First Nations history. A group of teenage boys were taking turns throwing double-bladed axes at a red circle target painted onto the white trunk of a thick birch tree. One boy missed the tree completely, much to the amusement of his friends, and while he was walking behind the tree to retrieve his axe another boy took a shot. He, too, missed the tree but almost hit a bullseye on his friend’s back.

  “Hey! Watch it!” the boy behind the tree shouted.

  Those were the only English words I heard. Everyone else, no matter their age, was talking in Oji-Cree. The only time they weren’t talking was when I walked by them. Then they’d go silent and watch me with untrusting eyes.

  Joshua stopped to talk to several groups of people and I understood just one word of what he said each time – Bernice. Each time the response was negative, emphasized by an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

  We walked past a makeshift smokehouse, made with canvas and plastic tarpaulins draped over a frame of small tree trunks, with cleaned fish fillets draped over branches above a smoky fire. Joshua asked the group of people cleaning fish near the smokehouse about Bernice. This time he waved for me to come sit with the group. There was one empty plastic chair, but I didn’t feel right taking it so I sat on the ground.

  I may have joined the group, but they still weren’t talking in English so I decided to make myself useful and used a tried and trusted trick I’d learned in my travels. The fastest way to get a group of women to open up to me was to reduce their workload somehow. There were four large walleyes lying on the ground next to me. Underneath the plastic chair on my other side was a knife and sharpening stone. I reached over and picked them up.

  “Does anyone mind if I clean one of these fish?”

  Everyone stopped talking and stared at me as if I’d just asked them if they’d mind if I stood on my head and spit nickels.

  It was the oldest woman in the group who finally spoke. “Leave the fillets attached at the tail. That way we can hang ’em proper.”

  “Okay.” It had been a long, long time since Stuart had shown me how to sharpen a fillet knife, but it only took a few strokes against the sharpening stone for me to get the feel of it again. A sharp knife was crucial to doing a good job and I really wanted to do a good job for my audience.

  I slit the fish open along its belly, from just under its chin down to its anal fin, being extra careful to slice between its pelvic fins. Then I made the diagonal cuts on either side of its head behind the pectoral fins, going down just until I felt the blade touch the spine. Only then did I turn the fish around, place my knife on the spine and push down to cut through it. I grabbed the head and hoped I’d done it right. If I had, the head would come off with all the guts still attached and I’d be able to pull them out easily. If I hadn’t, my audience wouldn’t be impressed. I pulled gently and when the guts came sliding out I probably had the same look of pride on my face that River had had earlier. “Where should I put this?” I held the head up, the guts dangling from it for all to see.

  “You forgot the cheeks,” the old woman said.

  Damn. I had. I carefully cut out the fleshy cheeks behind the eyes on either side of the fish’s head and sliced off the skin. “What should I do with them?”

  “Give ’em here.” The old woman held out her hand.

  I dropped the cheeks into her palm and she immediately turned to drop them into the cast iron frying pan full of hot oil that was sitting over the open fire.

  Cutting along the spine and removing it wasn’t too difficult, but I was way out of practice at slicing between the skin and meat and had forgotten to give the knife another quick sharpening before attempting it. Hopefully, I hadn’t left too much meat still attached to the skin. But from the looks on the faces watching me I had accomplished my goal. The white woman, the one Blaze called, had just cleaned, skinned and filleted a fish, leaving the two fillets still attached at the tail.

  Thanks, Dad … I mean Stuart.

  “Should I go hang this in the smokehouse now?”

  “I’ll do it.” A woman on the other side of the circle stood
up and reached over to take my cleaned fish.

  “Here,” the older woman scooped the cheeks out of the pan with a slotted spoon and put them on a paper plate. “Eat.” She handed me the plate.

  In almost every culture I’d ever visited the offer of food was an invitation to be included and to turn it down was the ultimate insult. Stuart always said that walleye cheeks were like scallops. I’d never agreed with him. They grossed me out, but I managed to chew and swallow them without gagging.

  “Arthur was using his .303 British that day and Marlee said the OPP think Ross was shot with Arthur’s .38 Winchester.” The old woman opened the floodgates of information. “Arthur just put the Winchester in the winter hunt shed last week, so anybody could have taken it. That gun means too much to him for him to waste a bullet on a prospector. It was his grandfather’s gun.”

  Thanks, Uncle Doug. I recognized the rifle names so I knew what she was talking about, mostly. “Who’s Marlee?”

  “One of our NAPS officers.”

  It was Joshua who explained what NAPS was – the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service. They serviced 35 First Nation communities in Northern Ontario, with the help of local Peacekeepers, and two of their officers were stationed in Webequie. The OPP only got involved in major cases, like murder. Ross’ had been the first murder to ever happen in Webequie.

  Two fillets of deep fried whitefish, one bag of potato chips – ketchup flavour, yuck! – and a can of Coke later I had spoken to three groups of people and learned very little. It seemed that no one liked Bernice. She was always looking for a way out of Webequie and that way usually presented itself in the form of a white man visiting the reserve. All of the men were more than willing to have sex with her; none of them were willing to take her with them when they left.

  Why Arthur put up with Bernice was the big mystery. Some said it was because he was lonely after his wife died. Some said it was because he thought River should have a mother figure in his life. When I asked where River’s real mother was I was once again reminded of how harsh a life the people lived up here. River’s parents, his mother and Arthur’s second son, took their snowmobile out on the ice road before it was thick enough to travel on safely. Their bodies were never found. Some blamed global warming for the unpredictable ice. Others blamed River’s father’s addiction to Oxycodone for the accident. No matter the cause, River had been orphaned at the age of two and had lived with Arthur and Bernice ever since. And, despite their obvious dislike of Bernice, several people complimented her on her mothering abilities.