No Return (A Lee Smith Mystery Book 2)

by Jay Forman

  I heard the hard slap of flesh on flesh, then the thud of something heavy hitting the ground, scuffling and more punches.

  “Hey!” I shouted as loudly as I could as I stepped around the corner. But neither Marten nor Joey cared. They were kicking and punching each other with the ferocity of two rabid dogs. There was too much testosterone in the air for me to safely try to break them up. “Joshua! Fight!”

  I couldn’t wait to see if Joshua had heard me. Joey was on top of Marten, beating the crap out of him. I saw Joey reach out and grab one of the rocks from the fire pit and raise it up in the air. There wasn’t time to think. There was barely time to act.

  I took a flying leap and landed on top of both of them. The advantage of surprise was on my side. Joey froze for a second and that’s all the time it took for me to ram my knee up between his legs with every ounce of the strength in my quads that I’d spent hours at the gym building up. He dropped the rock but rolled over onto his back so quickly that I was soon trapped underneath him.

  “You bitch!”

  I felt him start to roll off of me and tensed every muscle in my body, getting ready to fight or flee. Preferably flee.

  Marten’s bloody face appeared above Joey’s head.

  “What the fuck?”

  I heard Joshua’s voice but didn’t see his face until after I felt Joey being yanked off of me. “Are you insane?” He asked me while he and Marten both held Joey back.

  “He was going to smash Marten’s head.” I stood up so calmly that I surprised even myself. The shaking didn’t start until I saw Joey’s axe lying on the ground right beside where I’d been lying.

  My heart was pounding so hard that I barely heard the thudding of police issue boots running around the side of the building, but boy, oh boy, was it good to see reinforcements.

  ****

  “That’s just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen a woman do.” The moustached OPP officer said after I gave him my statement.

  “I had to do something.”

  “You jumped into a fight between two young fit males!”

  He was right, of course, but I’d regained enough of my equilibrium to be able to stop myself from letting him know that I knew he was right. “I’m pretty fit myself.”

  “Physically, maybe. Mentally? That’s up for debate.”

  I didn’t want to debate it. “Is Marten okay?”

  “His nose is broken and I think somebody should x-ray his cheek when we get him down to the hospital in Thunder Bay, but he’ll be okay. You sure you don’t want to come with us to have someone check you out?”

  “No, I’m all right.” But I’d be sore in a couple of hours. And my shoulder was already very mad at me. “Did they say why they moved Ross’ body?”

  “They didn’t say anything. Marten’s the only one who talked.”

  “Do I get to know what he said? I know you’re big on that one-way street thing, but—”

  “Joshua will fill you in.”

  He left me sitting alone on the front veranda of the lodge without giving me any answers. I couldn’t even answer the question that my sensible side kept asking me – what the hell were you thinking? I checked my camera to see if it still worked. The lens cap was cracked from hitting the ground when I landed on Joey, but everything else seemed to be okay. I checked my pockets. Both my cell phone and the chief’s satellite phone were still there … and I’d probably end up with a really nice satellite phone-shaped bruise on my left thigh.

  It was a good thing Jack hadn’t been there to see the fight and my flight. I called him an idiot for even thinking of flying with night vision goggles? I deliberately flew into a fight. Pot, meet Kettle.

  There was a long smudge of dirt down one side of my parka. Joshua wouldn’t be able to tease me about being invisible if it snowed.

  I heard one of the lodge’s front doors open behind me.

  “You are one crazy lady,” Joshua said as he sat down in the wicker chair next to mine.

  “So I’ve been told.” More than once. In many languages. “Why did Marten and Joey move Ross’ body?”

  He shook his head and sighed. “To protect Marten’s pot plants. He’s got a small crop near Eagle Rock that’s ready to harvest and was scared the police would find it if they were looking around there.”

  “Is that why you went on the shore and sent me into the woods the other day? So I wouldn’t see the pot plants?”

  He nodded. “The good news is that they’re holding off on charging him for the pot and they may reduce the causing an indignity to a dead human body charge if he agrees to testify against Joey.”

  “Joey did the scalping, right?”

  Joshua nodded. “He’s a sick bastard. I never should have agreed to let him come over to work here, but I needed the extra hands.”

  “Could he have had anything to do with shooting Ross?”

  “Nah, he’s known for his blade skills. He prefers a hands-on approach. And Marten would never have kept quiet about something like that.”

  Marten seemed to have managed to keep quiet about moving a dead body and a scalping pretty easily, so I wasn’t so sure that Joshua was one hundred percent right in assuming that Marten wouldn’t have been able to keep quiet about a murder. “Do you think Joey could have had anything to do with Bernice—”

  “There’s so much crazy shit happening around here that I don’t know what to think about anything.”

  I felt the thumping blades of a low flying helicopter before I heard them. Within seconds the shadow of a big white helicopter swooped over the lodge as it headed for the Webequie airport. I looked up and saw the stylised diamond graphic on its belly.

  “Your ride’s here,” Joshua said, but he wasn’t looking at the helicopter.

  I hadn’t heard Aileen’s ATV approaching from the forest behind the lodge and really would have preferred to get a ride from Jack.

  “You sure you’re up to this?”

  “I’m fine.” I stood up with renewed energy. Knowing that I’d be seeing Jack in just a few hours fired me up and made me want to get the interview with Aileen over with.

  She stayed on her ATV at the edge of the forest and waited for me to walk to her.

  “What’s going on?” She jerked her chin toward a cluster of police officers who were standing by the fire pit.

  “A lot. Two First Nations boys have just been arrested for moving Ross’ body. He wasn’t killed where he was found; he was killed over by Eagle Rock.”

  “Which boys?”

  That was a strange question to ask. I would have been more curious about why his body had been moved. “Marten and his cousin, Joey, from Wunnumin.” I didn’t know either boy’s last name and doubted that Aileen did either.

  “What about Arthur? He’s still in custody, right?”

  “No, they brought him back last night. It wasn’t his gun that shot Ross.”

  “Did they check all of his guns? He’s got lots of them.”

  “I don’t know, but they did find out that one of the Texans staying here brought a .357 Magnum and they’ve seized that.”

  “So, what, they’re thinking one of the guys staying here shot Ross?”

  “I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

  “Why don’t they ask Bernice who else she was screwing around with?” Aileen revved the engine before I could say anything.

  I climbed onto the ATV behind her and grabbed the metal handles above the rear wheel wells. I didn’t know Aileen well enough to grab onto her and she definitely didn’t come across as the huggable type.

  She had to pull out into the clearing by the fire pit to turn around and, just before she opened the throttle to start down the pathway Joshua and I had walked down earlier, I told her that Bernice had been found.

  “What do you mean? Was she missing?” She let the engine idle.

  “Yeah. She left the Northern after her disagreement with you and nobody knew where she went. They’ve been looking for her since yesterday.�
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  “That explains all the planes flying so low yesterday. Where was she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t she say?”

  “They found her in a bear bait barrel.”

  Aileen turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder. Her eyes were open as wide as weight plates. “She’s dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  She slowly turned to look ahead, but her hand didn’t move on the throttle. What was she thinking about? Whatever it was it had frozen her in place for a minute. Then she cranked the throttle hard.

  I had to hang on for dear life as we raced through the forest, bouncing over rocks and slicing between trees. Each bump sent bolts of pain through my shoulder and down my right arm. It didn’t help any that I had to bob like a duck at a midway shooting range to avoid being hit in the face by low branches. We drove past the end of the path and, thankfully, Aileen had to slow down a bit as the terrain got harder to navigate through.

  At one point I looked over to my left when I saw a flash of bright yellow through the trees. We were close to the shore across the river from Eagle Rock and there were a couple of uniformed officers there, as well as Arthur and River. River was wearing a yellow hoodie.

  We seemed to be going parallel to the river and when Aileen made a sharp right turn I knew that we’d come to the turn in the river that marked the end of Webequie land. After a few more painful minutes, she headed straight for the river at a clearing and I saw a camouflage green inflatable skiff that had been pulled up on the shore.

  After parking the ATV under a tree we walked down to the skiff and I helped her push it into the water. Unlike Elba and Bernice’s almost pristinely empty canoes, the skiff was full of junk: two small pails; coils of rope; two plastic paddles; piles of unwound fishing line. I had to step carefully to get into the boat without tripping on something.

  It had a small electric engine on the back that quietly purred as we started to make our way along the river. The weak engine had to fight against the river current, so our progress was slow.

  “Is it much farther?”

  “About 15 minutes more in the boat. Then we walk.”

  The river was much wider than it was down by Eagle Rock and the shoreline was grassy, with the trees further back from the water than on any other shoreline I’d seen so far.

  “It must be a real pain to bring supplies in.”

  “That’s why we don’t do it often. We live pretty light out here. The bigger operations usually have their own helicopter, but Ross and I hadn’t got to that level of success yet.”

  “How did you get into this as a profession?”

  “A moment of insanity.”

  “I’ve had a few of those.” I watched three brown martens scamper along the shore on the other side of the river and disappear into the woods.

  “Some people run away to the circus, I thought I was running from it.”

  “Which circus?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone.

  “What’s that for?”

  “I’d like to record this, if that’s okay with you.”

  “It’s not.”

  Oh. “Okay.” I put my phone away again. “So, which circus were you running from?”

  “The corporate one. I worked in head office at Scotiabank. It was like being on a treadmill, or being stuck in a mouse-wheel. No matter how hard you pushed yourself you didn’t get anywhere.”

  Everyone had a story and most people loved to tell their own story, if someone was willing to listen. I knew enough to keep my mouth shut and do just that.

  “Get up in the morning, give the kids breakfast, get them ready for school, kiss the husband goodbye, go to work, work, work, work, go home, feed the kids, help them with their homework, do the laundry, work some more once the kids were in bed, kiss the husband goodnight. Wake up and do it all over again. I hated it. I felt so trapped. So I ran away, to the prospecting circus. I guess you could call it an early mid-life crisis. Sometimes I think having an affair or buying a flashy sports car might have been a better option. But out here you’re free and the thrill of the chase never weakens. You’re always just one stake away from hitting it big. At least, that’s what I thought then.”

  “Why prospecting?”

  “I handled the investment portfolios for a couple of prospectors, successful ones. We’d talk about their lives whenever they came into the office and their stories were always so exciting. One of them offered me a job, just a temporary one to try it out, and I took him up on it.”

  I almost slipped up and interrupted her to ask what her husband and kids had thought of her leaving … but I didn’t really need to ask. I’d been a kid who was left behind, so I already knew exactly how they felt.

  “At first, it was great. The guy I worked for hit pay dirt a couple of times and the money was good. But when you see the numbers, the amount a prospector can make if a mining company leases his successful claim, you start thinking that instead of getting a percentage of a percentage it would be nice to get more, and the only way to do that is to strike out on your own.”

  But she hadn’t gone out on her own – she’d gone out with Ross.

  “Ross and I worked on the same crew and started talking and the rest, as they say, is history.” She cut the engine and let the boat drift into the shore.

  Just as she’d done with the ATV, we hid the boat under some trees before starting our hike through the forest. “Stay right behind me. We’ve set some traps out for bear protection.”

  I matched her step for step, even though her stride was much longer than mine. How big a trap would you need to stop a bear? I’d thought the wolverine traps were big, but apparently there were even bigger ones and I had no desire to lose a foot in one! “How did you and Ross decide where to prospect?”

  “That was Ross’ department. He’d been doing this a lot longer than I had. He’d do the research and map out the area and then the two of us would start staking.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Chromite. And Ross had this crazy idea. After we were done here he wanted us to head down to Sleeping Giant. He said he’d figured out a way to get to the silver out of Silver Islet. It was going to be our big payday. He and his girlfriend would be able to go live out their lives as beachcombers in Mexico and I’d be able to buy a place for me and my girlfriend in Tofino.”

  “You and Ross weren’t—”

  “Hell, no! He was an asshole, but we worked well together.”

  “If he had a girlfriend why was he with Bernice that day?”

  “Monogamy wasn’t his thing, but his girlfriend didn’t know that.”

  “Had any of your claims hit it big so far?”

  “No, not yet. But you never know, do you? You have to keep trying.”

  Jack had called them fringe stakers, to me they sounded more like gamblers. They kept losing but couldn’t or wouldn’t walk away from the table until they hit the jackpot that they were sure was just one more play away.

  “I won’t bother with Silver Islet now, though. These claims up here, they’ll be my last. And I’ve got a good feeling about them.”

  How could she feel good about them? Her partner had been killed! And what about Silver Islet? Why did that sound so familiar to me? Then I remembered it had been what Lorne was just about to talk about when Blaze’s call had interrupted him. “What’s Silver Islet?”

  “An island at the foot of Sleeping Giant. It was once the richest silver mine in the northwest, but the shafts got flooded. Ross said he knew a guy who’d figured out a way to pump the water out and keep it out.”

  Definitely gamblers. Mother Nature always had the best hand. If Lake Superior wanted to fill some mine shafts, it was going to fill them and keep them filled.

  “Here we are, home sweet home!”

  Even though I was only a few trees away from Aileen’s camp I never would have spotted it without her pointing it out. She’d draped a large camouflage tarp between som
e trees over a big area and her camouflage tent and fire pit were underneath it. One corner of her tarp was tied to the same tree that had a zippered cooler hanging from a rope pulley. She obviously took the bear issue seriously, storing her food up high enough to keep the bears from smelling it.

  Frazer walked out from behind the tent. “Hey! Good morning. Nice to see you.” He was carrying a fishing rod. “I was just going to go get some breakfast for me and lunch for Aileen.”

  “Bernice is dead.” I couldn’t get a read on Aileen’s tone. It was just as dead as Bernice. “They found her in a bear bait barrel at the lodge.”

  “Huh. No shit?” He went into the tent and came out holding a black handgun that looked even more menacing than the Magnum the OPP had seized from the Texan. “That’s too bad. She seemed like a nice lady.”

  How had he known Bernice? She’d already left the Northern by the time he got there. “Did you meet Bernice when you came to Webequie the first time?”

  He shook his head as he shoved a clip into the gun. “No, but we saw her the other day, when we were coming out here from Webequie. She was at that big rock near the portage and we stopped to share a lunch with her. She and Aileen wanted to kiss and make up. Did her husband do it?”

  “No.” All my senses were firing on all cylinders, especially my sixth sense. I could smell the pine trees, feel the breeze, taste the lingering coffee breath in my mouth, see Frazer’s gun, and hear a helicopter getting closer. And I could sense danger. But I couldn’t tell where that danger was coming from – Frazer or Aileen.

  “You should tell the police about when you saw her. They’ll be trying to figure out where she was and when.”

  “Will do, next time we’re in Webequie, that is.”

  The helicopter flew low overhead and I wished I could fire a flare up to let Jack know where I was. He wouldn’t be able to see me under Aileen’s tarp. He wouldn’t even be able to see the tarp.

  “What’s up with all the helicopters and planes? Why are they back again?” Frazer asked Aileen.

  “I don’t know. Yesterday they were looking for Bernice. Who knows what they’re looking for today.”