No Return (A Lee Smith Mystery Book 2)

by Jay Forman

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m good.” I stood up as quickly and carefully as I could and tested my ankle. It hurt, but it could still function. I tried to roll my right shoulder. It hurt like a bitch, but it rolled. “Coordination isn’t my strong suit.”

  “I noticed that. You sure you’re okay?”

  I reached down and grabbed the painter with my left hand, then pulled the boat closer to the shore so that Joshua could step out of it. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  He dragged the canoe up to the top of the portage, but it took both of us to lift it onto the series of long logs that had been laid down to form a bush road to make it easier to drag heavy boats across the portage. A fast-moving stream trickled over the rocks under the logs and turned into a small waterfall that poured into the bay we’d just been in. I guess Joshua had seen me wince when we lifted the canoe because he wasn’t buying my ‘I’m fine’ routine.

  “Let me look at it,” he said as he walked over to my side of the canoe that I’d just dropped on the logs.

  “No, it’s good. Honest. Nothing’s broken.” Torn maybe, but not broken. And my ankle was actually glad that my hiking boot was soaked. The water was so cold that it made my soggy boot feel like a laced ice-pack.

  Joshua did more than his share of the lifting to get the canoe down into the water on the other side of the portage. He started the engine and we putt-putted slowly around the whole circumference of a small circular lake, staying near the shore and occasionally shouting out Bernice’s name. She never replied.

  We pulled into the shore at the far eastern end of the lake and I saw a boulder the size of my SUV. It was sitting beside the opening to a small river that disappeared into the woods and, if I tilted my head slightly to the left, the rock did look a bit like an eagle’s head.

  I could see why Joshua and his ancestors found it calming to be on or near the rock. It was even further away from Webequie, a little pocket of nature’s perfection. Once Joshua cut the engine I could hear the river sloshing over the hundreds of smaller rocks on the river’s bed. The lake was in a crater and the forests around it sat up high enough to act as a sound barrier to everything else. The tops of the trees moved with the wind, but there was no wind down where we were.

  “What a beautiful spot.”

  Joshua heaved the canoe up onto the rocky shore. There weren’t any sandy options for landing spots on this lake. A circle of rocks sat on top of a granite slab near us and he walked over to it, knelt down, and pushed around the remnants of a fire. “She wasn’t here last night. This hasn’t been lit in days.”

  We agreed to split up and walk around the area near where Joshua and his family usually camped. He walked along the shoreline. I went into the woods. A pathway, thickly carpeted with pine needles, seemed to lead away from the camp so I followed it. There were so many twists and turns and the forest was so thick that I never knew what I’d see after each turn. What I didn’t see was any sign of a woman, or anyone, being in the area recently.

  I could hear Joshua shouting Bernice’s name, so I called out, too, but neither of us got a reply. All I could hear was the sound of my boots padding along the soft pathway.

  I turned a corner and jumped back when I startled a ruffed grouse who’d been sitting on the ground at the base of a tree. My camera banged against my chest. The grouse exploded into flight, his wings moving so fast that they sounded like helicopter blades thump-thump-thumping through the air. I watched him disappear above the trees and decided to walk just a little bit further down the path. I wasn’t holding out much hope of finding Bernice, though. Then a flash of light caught my eye.

  I turned my head and looked into the woods, but couldn’t see where the flash had come from. It had been bright. I hadn’t imagined it. Like a quick burst of a laser beam. I stepped off the path, tried not to think about the bears Joshua had mentioned, and started snapping the ends of lower tree branches so that they’d still stick out but with their ends pointing down at a noticeable angle. Getting lost in the woods wasn’t on my ‘to-do’ list and I had no intention of adding it now. I kept moving further into the forest, marking my trail at regular intervals, but the light didn’t reappear. My squishy boot was starting to painfully rub against my soggy foot and I still had to make it back to the shore. Was there any point in going further? Probably not. I knelt down to loosen the laces on my wet boot and when I stood up the flash happened again. This time I saw where it had come from – the side of a tree only a few feet away from me.

  The minute I started moving the source of the flash disappeared, but I’d seen which tree it had come from. When I finally made it to the tree I realised what I’d seen and why it had disappeared as quickly as it appeared. There was a shiny metal plate screwed into the trunk of the tree about six inches above my eye level. Below it was a swath of bare tree trunk where someone had sliced off a strip of bark about the width of an axe blade. Depending on where I’d been standing, I’d been able to see sunlight reflecting off the metal plate. Etched into the upper left corner of the plate was the trillium symbol that represented Ontario. Just to be extra clear, the word ‘Ontario’ was engraved into the centre of the plate. In the upper right corner was a big number 3 and below ‘Ontario’ was a series of numbers – 4267081.

  Someone had written in black marker on the bark-bare strip of trunk below the plate:

  Ross McKay/Aileen Barlow

  # 1009463

  3:15 pm

  Sept. 23/16

  “Joshua!” I shouted at the top of my lungs – lungs that were still mad at me for smoking pot the night before. “I found something!” I had no idea what that something was, though.

  “Bernice?” He shouted back, but the forest between us swallowed up most of his decibels.

  “No!”

  “Where are you?”

  Shouting ‘Over here’ wouldn’t have been a sensible reply. Joshua would need something more specific. Maybe I was near a landmark that he’d know of, but to me I was just standing in the middle of a forest full of trees and rocks. That description could cover three-quarters of the entire province and Ontario was over a million square kilometres big. “I’ll come to you! Meet me at Eagle Rock!”

  “Eagle Rock?”

  “Yes!”

  I took several photographs of the plate and the markings on the trunk, and a few more from the pathway looking toward where my broken tree branch trail started. Then I started a limping run, my right boot squishing loudly with each step.

  He was already waiting for me at the rock. An intense anger tightened his facial muscles when he looked at my photos. It was a scary anger. “Where’d you find this?”

  “Over there,” I pointed in the general direction of where I thought I’d been.

  “Show me.” He ran into the woods.

  I had to sprint to keep up with him and took a shortcut through the trees to get in front of him.

  Both of us were out of breath when we came to the start of the trail I’d marked.

  Joshua walked right up to the tree. The plate was at his chin level. “Fuck!”

  “What is it?”

  “A claim post.”

  “What was the date when Ross was found?”

  “The 25th.”

  He’d been standing here, writing his name on a tree, less than 48 hours before his body was found.

  “It’s a corner stake. We have to find the other three.” He looked around. “I need your camera.”

  I almost cried out when the pain in my shoulder tweaked as I lifted the camera strap over my head.

  Joshua immediately zoomed in and then turned very, very slowly in a complete circle with the camera held tight against his face. He stopped his spin with a jerk and reversed it just a bit, then stared long and hard through the viewfinder. “They went that way.”

  I turned my head to look in the direction he was pointing the camera, but didn’t see anything to indicate that someone had been in that section of the forest.

  “Com
e on, let’s go find the other three.”

  “Other three what?” I didn’t bother draping my camera strap over my head, choosing instead to just hold it while trying to keep up with Joshua as he leapt over fallen logs and crashed through branches.

  “They stake out quarter-mile squares. There should be another claim post about 400 metres this way.”

  My foot slithered off of the fallen log I’d been planning on stepping on. I’d been so focused on watching where Joshua was going that I hadn’t paid enough attention to where my feet were going. I hadn’t seen the big Chicken of the Woods growing out of the log and the mushroom acted like an oil slick under the sole of my boot. “Stop!” At this rate I’d need a stretcher to get me back to Webequie. I’d twisted my ankle again. The same ankle.

  “Why are you sitting down?” Joshua had stopped and turned to look at me, but he hadn’t made a move to come back to me.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I just felt like taking a break – before I break something!”

  “Are you okay?”

  I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to admit it. Instead, I retied my boot; this time making sure it was holding my ankle as tightly as possible. “I will be, but could we please go a bit slower?”

  “I guess so. If you need to.”

  “I need to.” I stood up and put a little pressure on my foot. Painful, but manageable. “How do you know they went this way?”

  Now he came back to me. “See this?” It was the branch of a cedar that looked as if the end of it had been cut off. “That’s been cut with a knife or axe. They have to mark claim lines around the boundary of their claim.” We started walking at a more sensible pace. “And there,” he pointed to the ground. “See that footprint? You can see the pattern of the sole of someone’s boot.”

  I was no tracker, but apparently I was with a real tracker.

  I heard water running and we soon stepped out of the woods at the edge of the rocky river. The tree closest to the edge of the forest had the same plate and markings on the side of the trunk that faced away from the river. The only thing different was the time – 4:05pm.

  “They’re not supposed to be here.”

  I didn’t know where ‘here’ was. If Joshua hadn’t been with me I would have been well and truly lost.

  “This is Webequie land. They’re supposed to be much further east. I don’t care what they do over there,” he pointed east, “but here? No. Not on our land!”

  It all just looked like land to me. “Be my compass. Explain where we are and what it is that’s down there.” I pointed down the river, the same way he had.

  He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me around so that we were both standing facing the river, loosening his grip on my right shoulder when I flinched.

  He pointed straight across the river. “That’s south. Webequie land.” He pointed to our right. “That’s west. More Webequie land. See Eagle Rock?”

  Finally, a landmark I recognized. I could see the rock sticking up from the side of the river.

  “Beyond that is the lake we were just on. Beyond that, the bay we camped in last night. Beyond that, the island. Behind us – more Webequie land. Down there …” he turned to look to his left, “… is east. See where the river bends?”

  The river turned so sharply that if I hadn’t looked really hard I would have just thought it ended. “Yes.”

  “That’s roughly the eastern edge of Webequie lands.”

  “And beyond that edge?”

  “That’s were all the prospectors are scrambling. If you stay on this river, follow it all the way to where it meets up with the Attawapiskat, and then stay on the Attawapiskat, you’ll come to De Beer’s Victor Mine. The Attawapiskat continues and eventually goes into James Bay.”

  “The De Beer’s mine is that close?”

  “It depends on what close means to you. It’s about 200 kilometres away from where we are. Once all the environmental assessments are done they’re going to start digging a second mine that will be even closer to us.”

  “And the Hughes mine? Where is it?”

  “It’s about 150 kilometres northeast of here, not on the same river, though.”

  Jack had mentioned something about starting a second mine up here, too, just like De Beers. “Where will the second Hughes mine be?”

  “You’d have to ask Chief Troutlake or your friend, Jack, about that. They’re still negotiating.”

  Joshua went back to the marked tree and kicked it. “Fuck. Just wait until the council hears about this.”

  If we’d found evidence of Ross and Aileen staking a claim so close to Webequie, Arthur may have, too. Despite what Joshua said about them being very different people, I’d had a glimpse of Joshua’s anger and I’d heard about Arthur’s anger in his younger days. Both of them had motive, fired by anger, to want Ross and Aileen gone. Both had easy access to guns. But unless Joshua was an amazing actor, it looked like he really hadn’t known about Ross and Aileen staking claims so close to Webequie, so what reason could he have had to kill either of them? From everything he’d said, he wasn’t that fond of Bernice, so her affair with Ross wouldn’t have fired him up the way it may have fired Arthur up.

  “Let’s head back.”

  “What about Bernice?”

  “If she was here we would have found her. We’ll report her missing when we get back.”

  He definitely wouldn’t kill anyone to defend Bernice’s honour. He didn’t even seem that worked up over the fact that she was missing.

  We walked along the river’s edge and I had to pay close attention to my foot placement on the wet rocks. The running water had rolled and smoothed them to landscaping quality. The rich cottagers near my home would have paid big bucks to have a load of river rocks like these decoratively placed in their gardens.

  “I can’t believe they staked here. I was just here last week with River. It’s his favourite place to look for rocks. We come here all the time.”

  “If you don’t want them here why don’t you just pull up their stakes and tell them to go away? They’re on your land.”

  “It’s illegal to remove a claim post and, remember, it’s not legally our land. The Crown just lets us live here.”

  “So talk to Aileen. Maybe they didn’t realise that they were that close to your land?”

  “Oh believe me; the council will be talking to Aileen once they hear about this. They’ll have to find her first, though. We might send a party out on ATVs to find her—”

  “Her Sasquatch-hunting cousin will be easy to find. He’s taller than some of the trees.”

  “Yeah,” Joshua laughed. “Chief Troutlake might ask the helicopter pilots from the mines to look out for them, too.”

  “Or you could just call her.”

  The only way to get past Eagle Rock was to climb over it. Neither my ankle nor my shoulder enjoyed that experience much and I ended up sliding ungracefully down the far side of the rock on my bum. Landing on the rock slab at the bottom didn’t feel so great, either. It was a beautiful spot to sit, though, with a picture-perfect view of the round lake, and I wouldn’t have minded sitting there long enough to let the stinging sensation in my shoulder ease off a bit, but Joshua leaned down to help pull me up to a standing position. I rolled over onto my knees instead of taking his hand. I was perfectly capable of standing up without assistance! No matter how much it hurt.

  “I’ve got Aileen’s satphone number, remember?” I put my left hand on the side of Eagle Rock to steady myself and was just about to stand up when I noticed a weird marking on the smooth surface just a few inches in front of my face.

  “Um … Joshua?” I lifted my hand off the rock, rested my bum on the heels of my boots and looked more closely at the marking. It looked like a large dark brown Rorschach inkblot. There were even lines running down from the bottom of the blot that looked as if the brown ink had been so thick that it ran. “What’s this?” It wasn’t like any rock art I’d ever seen before.

  He knelt
down beside me. “I don’t know.” He scraped the thick hardened blob at the bottom of one of the runs with a fingernail. “Blood?”

  That’s what I had been thinking, but I hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. Dead centre in the middle of the blot was a chink in the rock. A small circular chink. “Sit here, with your back toward the rock.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re bigger than me. I have an idea.” I accepted his hand and let him pull me up, only because I didn’t want to touch the rock again.

  He sat down, leaving a few inches between his back and the rock.

  “Scooch over a bit to your left.” I stood closer to the rock and looked behind him, then at the front of his chest, then at the rock again. “Do you know where Ross was shot?”

  “We already talked about that. There wasn’t any blood over by our campsite, so—”

  “Not where geographically – where on his body.”

  “I don’t know.” Joshua stood up beside me.

  “See the chink in the rock?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if he was sitting here when he was shot? Leaning against the rock? If he was shot in the chest maybe that chink was made by the bullet that went through him?”

  “Could have been, but it would have to have been one hell of a bullet. The OPP took Dad’s Winchester and it’s just a .38.”

  “Maybe the gun was right against his chest?”

  “Even then, I don’t think a .38 would be able to make a chip like that, especially after travelling through someone’s chest. That would slow it down too much. Take some pictures of it. We’ll show them to Marlee when we get back.”

  I took the photos while he walked along the shoreline to the canoe and pushed it into the water. It was while I was walking toward him that I thought of something – if Ross had been shot here, and it was a big if, then there was absolutely no way that Arthur could have been the one to kill him.

  “Have your Texans been hunting over here?” Maybe they’d shot something by Eagle Rock?

  “Not that I know of.”