by Jay Forman
I wanted to ask Sara about what she’d seen the day she and her students found Ross. I wished I could ask Mary and River what they’d seen. Children saw so much more than adults because they hadn’t developed blinders yet. Even though I had limited experience with small children I knew enough to know that I couldn’t just jump into a conversation like that with something stupid like “So, when you found the dead guy …” I didn’t know how I could, or even if I should, start that conversation.
“I bet Lee would like to make some leaves, too,” I heard Sara say. “Why don’t you come and sit with us, Lee?”
They were sitting at a group of four desks pushed together. The only empty chair was the one beside Mary.
“Would it be okay with you if I sat here?” I asked Mary. “I can show you how to make acorns.” They’d been my specialty in grade two.
She didn’t say anything, but she nodded. And she watched me intently as I cut an acorn shape out of some brown paper. It had been a long time since I’d made one and I had to concentrate to ensure that I didn’t accidentally cut through the little stem at the top of it. I used one of the black crayons from the can in the middle of our communal table to draw the detail lines on the top of the acorn. They ended up looking more like fish scales than the actual diamond pattern, but Mary looked impressed. I decided to see if I could make her smile and drew the happy face I’d been known for. My teacher had given me an extra gold star for the happy face.
Mary didn’t smile; she giggled. I felt more pride hearing that than I’d ever felt from making one of my acorns.
She raised her little hand and started moving it toward my face. Was she going to poke me to see if I was real?
“What’s that?” She barely touched my cheek.
“It’s a scar.” Adults always tried to avoid looking at it. I liked Mary’s direct approach better. “I was in a fire.”
She shifted away from me in her chair. “Did you die?”
“No, but I did get burned in a couple of places.” I held my hand out. “Like here. The doctors did their best to fix me, but I think I’ll always have these marks.” The plastic surgeon had done a pretty good job on the scar on my cheek. It hadn’t been burned as badly as my hand.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore.”
“I don’t like doctors. They’re mean. I fell on some rocks and my knee was bleeding and my mummy took me to the doctor and he hurt me.”
“Did he make the bleeding stop?”
“Yes.”
“And does your knee hurt now?”
“No.”
“Then he fixed you. Sometimes it hurts to fix things, but it can hurt even more if you don’t fix them.” When did I get so wise?
“The rocks hurt more.”
“I’m sure they—”
“Good!” River shouted so loudly that his voice echoed down the empty hallway outside the door. “I hope they hurt you a lot!”
“River!” Sara barked. “That’s not nice. Apologize to Mary.”
“No!” Tears were welling in his eyes.
“What’s gotten into you?”
“She took my special rocks, Teacher! She stole them!” Tears were pouring down his cheeks and he was having a hard time breathing and getting the words out without gasping.
“I didn’t!” Mary’s lower lip started to quiver.
“You did!”
“Didn’t!”
I sat back and let Sara handle the emotional crisis, because I didn’t have a clue what to do with two teary eight-year-olds.
“Mary didn’t take them, River. They’re still right over there, on top of the bookcase.”
I looked behind me in the direction Sara had been looking and saw a small pile of dark red, sharp-edged rocks on the bookcase. On the wall above them were brightly coloured cut out letters that spelled ‘River’s Rocks’.
“Not my rubies! My other rocks. My extra special ones!”
River completely lost it; he started blubbering his words out. Sara managed to get him to jerkily explain that he’d tried to find his extra special rocks when Elba took him to his house to pack a bag for his surprise sleepover at Elba’s house, but they weren’t where he’d left them. Mary had been in his room with him, so his eight-year-old mind had deduced that she was the rock thief.
River’s crying was contagious and it wasn’t long before Mary was crying just as hard as she vehemently denied taking his stupid dumb rocks.
Try as she might, Sara wasn’t having much success stemming the tears.
“Your Uncle Joshua showed me where you like to find rocks. I’m sure he’d take you back there again.” I tried to help Sara out. “You could find more extra special rocks.”
Sara was shaking her head, looking at me strangely. Had I said something wrong?
“I want to go now!”
“Your Uncle Joshua’s busy right now, River.” Sara tried to cool River’s jets.
“I don’t want to go there.” Mary sounded scared. “The dead man won’t be sleeping like Nanabijou anymore. He’ll be a ghost.”
Sara was quickly writing something on the back of my acorn. “I bet your rocks—”
“My extra special rocks!”
“Yes, your extra special rocks. I bet they’re still in your house. Why don’t we go look for them together?” Sara pushed my acorn across the table to me and I read her note: ‘They can’t go back there – that’s where we found Ross.’
I looked up at the Webequie map. Was I confused or was Sara? They’d found Ross at the south end of the peninsula, but Joshua had said River’s favourite place to look for rocks was on the other side of Eagle Rock, at the edge of the river that was at the far end of the little lake beyond the portage.
“They’re not there! I looked really hard. Teacher, she took them and I want them back!”
Joshua came into the classroom at the peak of the crying crescendo. “Hey, squirt, what’s the problem?”
River jumped out his chair and ran to Joshua who scooped him up and held him tightly while talking to him in Oji-Cree.
“It’s okay, Mary. We’re not going back there and I don’t think you took River’s extra special rocks.” Sara came over and kneeled beside Mary while River told his story to his uncle.
Whatever Joshua was saying in response to River’s story, River wasn’t buying it. He kept shaking his head.
Joshua said something to Mary and she nodded in reply.
He walked over to the table and knelt down. Holding River with one arm, he reached out and scooped up Mary with the other.
Sara stood up, too, and gently rubbed Joshua’s back. Her touch only lasted a second but it was enough of a touch for me to figure out that they were more than just friends, or even good friends.
“We’re going to River’s house to see if we can find those rocks. You two can join us once you’re done here.”
“I’m sorry if I caused that,” I said once Joshua and the children were out of earshot.
“You didn’t.” Sara flopped down into the big chair at her desk. “And something good actually came out of it. Mary hasn’t talked that much since she came here. I think she likes you.”
I walked over to the map. “Sara, why did you take the children there that day?”
“To burn off some of their energy. The whole class was hyper because River had shown them his rubies, as he likes to call them, and they all wanted to find some. They’re not rubies, obviously. They’re garnets, but try telling the kids that.”
“But why there?” I pointed at the south end of the peninsula.
“Because that’s where River said he found them.”
Maybe River had two favourite places for rock hunting? “Mary said Ross was sleeping like Nanabijou,” I recognized the name from the Legend of Sleeping Giant that Lorne had told me about, but I couldn’t remember the story. I’d recorded him on my phone, though. Once it was recharged I planned to listen to that recording. “Was he lying on his back?”
“Y
es.”
“Could you see where he’d been shot?”
She nodded. “The middle of his chest. There was a hole. And blood.”
“Miss Smith?”
I turned around and saw a young First Nations woman in a police uniform standing in the doorway.
“Yes?”
“I need you to come with me.”
CHAPTER TEN
Officer Marlee took me to the NAPS station/jail/officer’s residence. Anywhere else it would have been called a house with two caged rooms. It was up by the moo plant and sat in the middle of the island, with the two roads on the island merging together again just north of it. The two desks that made up the official office were in the main area, the cells were at the back of the house. She told me that she and her partner had rooms and a little kitchen upstairs.
She asked me to give her a detailed accounting of my time in the woods with Joshua. Was it my imagination, or was she asking a lot of questions about Joshua? She seemed more interested in his reaction to me finding the blood on Eagle Rock than she was in the shell casing we’d found. Even when she was transferring the photos from the memory card in my camera to her computer she kept harping on the Joshua issue.
“Tell me again, how did he find the other corner stake?”
I explained about the trail of cut branches that we followed.
“And it was you who found the first claim post? Joshua wasn’t with you then?”
“No, he was looking for Bernice closer to the shore, heading south to the portage. I was on my own in the woods.”
“Why? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to let you walk the shore? You don’t know these woods.”
I just shrugged my one good shoulder, because I didn’t have an answer. She’d asked a really good question.
“Did both of you touch the shell casing?”
I closed my eyes and tried to replay finding the casing in my mind. “No. Just me. I showed it to him, but he didn’t touch it. I put it in my pocket and didn’t take it out again until we were in the chief’s office.”
“I knew it,” she muttered under breath.
“Knew what?”
Her shoulders relaxed a bit and she leaned back in her chair. “I know why you’re here; you’re the one Blaze called. I’ll be straight with you if you promise to be straight with me.”
“Deal.”
“You see or hear anything that you think I should know you’ll tell me, right?”
“Yes. Blaze asked me to find out the truth, if I can, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. I won’t jerk Blaze around. I like him too much to do that.”
“That shell casing, it fits what I saw at the scene, but the guys from Thunder Bay wouldn’t listen to me. No surprise. I’ve only been on the job for a year, I’m female and I’m a native. But I knew that Arthur’s Winchester hadn’t sent that bullet into Ross.”
“How?”
“The exit wound. Arthur’s Winchester is an antique lever action .38. There’s no way it could have made the exit wound I saw. It doesn’t even fire half of the time. It’s always jamming.”
“Isn’t that something they should have known?”
“Yes, if they’d taken the time to really look at the evidence. The only thing we all agreed on was that Ross hadn’t been killed where he was found. You and Joshua were able to figure that out! But they looked at the entry wound and figured that was good enough.”
“Wouldn’t a .357 make a bigger hole going in than a .38?”
“Not necessarily. It’s the exit wound that would really tell the difference.”
“They’ll realise that when they do the autopsy, right?”
“When they get around to it. They’ve got a native in custody. Case closed.”
“I’m sure they heard you, they’re probably just—”
“Just what?” Why was she getting angry at me? “Taking over the case because those lazy drunk Indians aren’t capable of looking after their own? I mean, every amitigoshi knows that we only want to mooch off the system and spend our welfare cheques on liquor, right?”
Did she forget that she was talking to an amitigoshi? “I don’t think that. And I don’t think the OPP think that.” Some of them, maybe, but not all of them. Uncle Doug never thought that about the First Nations people living in his detachment area.
“Well, they’ll have to look into it now; now that you’ve found that shell casing.”
I could tell that it would be a waste of time trying to talk her out of stereotyping all white people, so I stayed on topic. “Does anyone in Webequie have a .357 calibre gun?”
“I hope not. Arthur sure doesn’t. He’s a traditionalist; he’d never use a gun like that.”
“What about the people at Joshua’s lodge?”
“What about them?”
“When I was in the Northern I overheard a couple of boys saying someone had brought a Magnum with them. They said they were going over to the lodge to see if whoever brought it would let them shoot it.”
“Americans and their guns. This is what happens when outsiders start coming here. I sometimes think the elders might be right about keeping strictly to the old ways. I can’t imagine what will happen to Webequie if a road gets built to here. Everything will change and we’re having a hard enough time dealing with the changes we’re already facing.” She stood up and pushed her chair under her desk. “I think I’ll make a visit to the lodge. It’ll be a couple of hours before the OPP guys get here. I might as well make use of the time, even if they ignore everything I tell them.”
“What about Bernice? Will they help you look for her?”
“We’re capable of taking care of our own. The NAPS plane is already on the way up from Thunder Bay. They’re sending us more people to help with the search. I’ll give you a ride back to the school.”
****
Sara was walking across the centre of the island, from the school to her house, as we came down the road. “Just let me out here, please.”
“One more thing,” she said as I opened my door. “Keep an eye on Joshua. Tell me if he does anything out of the ordinary.”
“Okay.” How would I know what was ordinary for Joshua? I barely knew him. I wasn’t so sure that I’d be telling Officer Marlee much of anything. I wasn’t fond of people who had serious issues with stereotyping. And, boy, did she have issues! In our short meeting she’d covered the gambit with her biases – race, profession and nationality. She didn’t trust white people. I could understand that; we didn’t have a stellar track record when it came to our treatment of First Nations people. She didn’t respect the OPP. I knew, all too well, that there were some good cops and some bad cops – Uncle Doug and my brother were two perfect examples of that – but that didn’t mean the entire OPP organization was racist. And the way she’d said ‘Americans’ made it perfectly clear what she thought of them, en masse. Again, there were some good ones and some bad ones. The same could be said about Canadians. But I’d give her a pass on the gun issue. Almost every Canadian was baffled by Americans’ fixation with needing so many handguns to protect themselves from all of their neighbours who also had handguns for protection. They had more guns per person than any other country in the world. Their logic didn’t make sense to me. It was like saying that the only way to protect yourself from cancer was to load yourself up with cancer. We didn’t walk around carrying handguns and, as a result, we didn’t have anywhere near their rate of gun crimes, either. I chose not to think too much about the irony of the fact that I was in Webequie because of a gun crime. As for Officer Marlee’s issues with Joshua, was she seriously considering him a suspect? I wasn’t so sure. It felt like there was more to it than that. Then again, I’d wondered whether he might have been the one who shot Ross, too.
“Hi,” Sara said as I met up with her. “How’d it go with Marlee?”
I decided to keep my conflicting thoughts to myself. “Okay, she just wanted me to tell her what Joshua and I saw. And she copied some of my photo files. Did
River find his rocks?”
“No,” Sara opened her front door and stepped into her house. “But Joshua got River’s mind off of it by taking him fishing. He’s going to take him over to the west side of the island. That way River won’t see all the people going over to the mainland to look for Bernice.”
I followed her into the house. I desperately wanted to use her hot water tank – I needed a shower.
“Oh, before I forget, the chief wants to talk to you. He’s waiting for you in his office.”
My shower would have to wait. But there was one thing that couldn’t wait. “Mind if I use your phone?”
“I don’t have a landline and my cell can’t make long-distance calls.”
“Do you have internet access?”
“Yes, but I left my computer at the school. I just came home to grab something to eat. You hungry?”
How long had it been since I’d eaten the poached fish at the campsite on the peninsula? Too long. My stomach grumbled loudly at the mention of food. “Starving.”
“Cheese sandwich okay? It’s all I’ve got.”
“Then it would be perfect. Thank you.”
“Dave’s over at the school, helping some kids shoot a video. If you want to get online why don’t you go over and use the office computer again? I’ll bring your sandwich with me when I go back and you can grab it after you talk to the chief.”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
“Just let Dave know you’re there before you go to the office.”
“Will do.” I took my smelly, limping, hungry self back over to the school.
The wind was really picking up, bringing with it an Arctic chill. There was a veritable flotilla of boats heading to the southern tip of the peninsula on the mainland, some from Webequie, some from the gathering camp, and they were all being tossed around by the waves on the river. The water looked darker, almost angry black. It wasn’t licking the big pontoon boat that was carrying two ATVs over to the mainland – it was punching the pontoons. It was still sunny, but wispy white clouds were leading a parade of snow-laden, graphite grey clouds in from the west. I should have worn my parka because I was freezing by the time I made it to the school.
