Читать книгу Dead Cow in Aisle Three - H. Mel Malton - Страница 10

All set for camping? Forgotten something? Kountry Pantree has all your campsite food needs at “In-tents” prices! Fill your cooler at the Pantree!

—A billboard at the corner of Hwy 14 and the off-ramp to Laingford, 2 km. from Kuskawa Provincial Park

Becker immediately went into full alert mode. The camera disappeared, and, in two big strides, he was crouched at Bryan’s level, looking him right in the eye. The terror on the kid’s face was real. No way this was a little boy joke. “Where?” Becker said.

“Back there along the trail. In the shallow water,” Bryan said. His face crumpled, and he fought back tears. Becker gave him a quick, powerful hug then ran down the path, the dogs following at his heels.

Bryan and I stared at each other for a moment, biting our lips, suspended in child/adult limbo. What was I supposed to do? Should I take him back to the Jeep? I tried to remember what it was like to be eight, although Bryan was more savvy than I’d been at twelve. He’d had a shock, certainly, but wouldn’t it be worse not knowing the outcome? No way I was doing the nanny thing, I decided. Not my style.

“Let’s go, Bryan,” I said. “Your Dad may need help. Just stay back, okay?” He looked relieved. We ran together in the direction his father had taken. Around a bend in the trail, the shallows of the falls lapped against a rocky shore. Becker was already in the water up to his armpits, hauling a motionless figure to the edge.

“Take care of this,” I said to the boy, handing him the backpack that Becker had dropped before he ran. Bryan took it mutely, his eyes wide. “If it’s too scary, you don’t have to look,” I said, then waded in to help. The guy in the water was very big.

“I don’t think we’ve lost him yet,” Becker said. “You know CPR?” I nodded. We laid him out and began, Becker doing the mouth-to-mouth yucky part and me doing the push-on-the-chest bit. We worked together as if we’d been doing it for years, like the guys on that seventies TV show, Emergency. The expression “Ringer’s Lactate” popped into my head by itself, and I heard a snatch of the theme music. (The guys on the show were always plugging their rescued victims into an I.V. drip of Ringer’s. It was kind of a catch word for those of us who watched it.) Funny where the mind goes when you’re high on adrenaline. It only took a few moments of work before the man twitched, vomited all over Becker and started coughing.

Becker and I looked at each other for a long, joyful and triumphant moment. Since we’d known each other, our eyes had met over several lifeless bodies. Death had engineered the initial introduction and continued to check in on us from time to time to see how we were doing. There’d been my friend Francy, hanged in her kitchen; there’d been Francy’s husband, shot in the chest; there’d been an anonymous drowned snowmobiler, a garotted actor and another I can’t talk about. All very horrible, traumatic and gruesome. The emotional fallout had been brutal, and it wasn’t as if we’d ever really sat down and discussed it. I’d never said “Hey Becker, how do you feel about all the dead bodies between us?” He had never asked me if I was troubled by ghosts. I was. I had nightmares sometimes.

For once, Death left the party early. Becker and I had just spent a few amazing and terrible minutes together in a place where the only thing that mattered was pumping life back into a soggy stranger, and we had done it. We had brought someone back. Oddly, this rescue utterly cancelled the other stuff out. I felt all those wispy, pathetic ghosts depart en masse like puffs of smoke, twisting in the air above us for a moment before being whisked away by the wind. I was soaked, and my heart was thumping so hard my ears were ringing, but I could feel the grin stretching my face muscles.

“Is he dead?” Bryan called timidly from his perch on the rock above us.

“I think he’s going to be all right, son,” Becker called back.

“You saved him?”

“I guess so,” Becker said. The man was struggling to sit up now, still coughing, but obviously out of danger. Bryan cheered, his young voice sounding thin against the roar of the falls.

“Bring me that blanket in the knapsack, will you, Bryan?” Becker said. The boy did so, and Becker wrapped it around the man’s shoulders.

“My camera? Where’s my Leica?” the half-drowned man croaked.

“Take it easy, Vic,” Becker said. “Don’t try to talk for a bit. You had a close call there.” Vic? Becker knew him?

“Where are the others?” the man said.

“The others?” I said, glancing around. There was nobody else to be seen.

“The Camera Club. We were all up there, getting shots of the falls,” the man said, pointing above our heads to where the Oxblood Falls cascaded down a steep incline, thundering over rocks and throwing up spray. How he had survived the descent without being battered beyond recognition, I couldn’t imagine.

“Vic’s a town councillor. Volunteer firefighter too, as well as a pretty good photographer,” Becker said to me. “Vic, this is my friend, Polly Deacon.”

Vic shook my hand. His was cold and wet. “I guess the Leica’s in the drink,” Vic said, grimacing. “Better it than me, I suppose.”

“You remember what happened?” Becker said.

“Not really. One second I’m trying to get a close-up of the spray over one of those rocks, and the next second I’m ass over teakettle in the wash cycle,” Vic said. His throat sounded raw, and he was shivering. “You know what? It’s true what they say. Your life does flash before you.”

“My son saw you fall,” Becker said. Vic turned his head to look at Bryan, who had recovered a bit of his colour and was listening to the conversation with lively interest.

“You did, eh? Lucky for me. You didn’t happen to see if I was pushed, did you?” Bryan blinked, and I felt Becker stiffen beside me.

“Pushed? Someone pushed you?” he said.

“Could be,” Vic said. “It’s kind of fuzzy, but I don’t think I slipped. I’d remember that.”

Becker gazed up at the falls, his expression doing a Polaroid transformation into grim cop-ness. “So how come the rest of your group hasn’t noticed you’re missing?” he said.

“We were fanned out all over the place,” Vic said. “We were supposed to meet down here for lunch, actually. I guess I’m a little early.”

As if on cue, a trio of retirement-age women appeared from behind a clump of bushes near the falls-side of the trail. When they saw us, they exclaimed loudly and hurried over. All three had cameras slung around their necks and camera bags over their shoulders.

“Land sakes, Victor, what happened to you?” the tallest one said. Her iron-grey hair stuck out like thatch from under her Tilley hat, and she had a comfortable, baggy face that spoke of years spent happily in the great outdoors.

“I fell in, Sophie. Detective Becker here and his friend rescued me. The breath of life, eh? Mark, I don’t know how to thank you. Sorry about your shirt.”

“We need to get you to Emerge and have you checked out, Vic,” Becker said.

“No way,” Vic said. “Hate hospitals. I’m fine. Besides, I don’t want to miss the picnic.”

“You almost drowned, buddy. You’re in shock.”

“Not half as shocked as I’ll be if you drag me to Laingford Memorial. All I need is a couple of Sophie’s lemon squares, and I’ll be fighting fit in no time.” The lady in the Tilley hat chortled.

“What makes you think I brought my squares, Victor?” she said.

“Saw them in your camera bag when you gave me that film,” he said, then grimaced. “Lost my camera, though. At the bottom of the Oxblood, I guess.”

“Oh, no, not your Leica?” Sophie said.

“Does he have any idea how close he came to dying?” I whispered to Becker as the three graces moved in to provide comfort, twittering like sparrows. Obviously, this crew considered the loss of a Leica far more traumatic than a mere near-drowning could ever be.

“It’ll hit him later,” Becker said. “He’s stubborn, though, and right now there’s no way he’ll let himself be taken to hospital unless I arrest him.”

“Can’t you make him?”

“Victor Watson is not a man to be forced to do anything against his will,” Becker said. “We should stick around, Polly. Do you mind very much? If he goes into delayed shock, we’ll have to get him out of here.”

The cosy picnic I’d envisioned melted quietly away. Instead, I realized, we’d have our lunch in the company of a bunch of photography nuts talking about f-stops and light-levels. Other members of the Camera Club had started arriving, and some of them gathered around Vic Watson, chattering excitedly about his accident. Someone was unpacking a huge hamper of food on a nearby picnic table, and things were already starting to take on a carnival atmosphere. “Of course, I don’t mind,” I said, trying my best to sound convincing. “What about Bryan?” We looked up and saw him grinning from ear to ear, posing with Rosencrantz and Lug-nut against a background of pine trees as several Camera Club members cooed and clicked.

“In his element. He’s a born ham,” Becker said, fondly.

“So’s Rosie,” I said, reminded suddenly of another picture of the puppy that had appeared on the front page of the weekend newspaper a few months before. Then, she had nestled in the arms of actress Amber Thackeray and actor Shane Pacey, three golden-haired beauties against a pretty Kuskawa background. The photo caption had been a sombre one, the circumstances tragic. I felt a prick of superstition and had a sudden urge to dash in and grab Rosie out of Bryan’s arms before something bad happened to both of them. Becker, never one for recognizing omens, blatant or not, just smiled.

“You’re soaked through,” I said, noticing that Becker was standing in a puddle of river water.

“I’ve got a change of clothes in the Jeep,” he said. “What about you? You’re pretty wet too.”

“I’ll dry out. The sun’s baking.” It was, too. When we’d started out, it had been overcast, but as soon as we’d performed our emergency-team rescue—actually, at the moment that Vic had upchucked and returned to the land of the living—the sun had come out from behind a cloud. Lighting effects courtesy of God, maybe.

“Would you keep an eye on Bryan for a few minutes while I go and change?” Becker said.

“Sure. I was thinking of offering to be his agent, anyway,” I said. The boy was red-haired, like his father, freckle-faced and wholesome-looking. He was totally at home in front of the camera, obligingly gazing with an impish seriousness at the cluster of photographers surrounding him. The Camera Club members had helped Vic to his feet and guided him over to one of the picnic tables, where he discarded his blanket and stretched out in the sun.

“How are you feeling?” I said to him. Sophie, the tall woman whose lemon squares he lusted after, settled companionably beside him.

“Not too bad, considering,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt and removed it unselfconsciously, wringing out the water and spreading it out on the table-top to dry. I reflected that if he’d been a woman, restored to life after being tossed in the river, and had stripped down to nakedness moments afterwards, she’d have been bundled off to the hospital no matter what. Watson looked familiar, not an unusual occurrence in a town the size of Laingford, where you’ll meet everybody eventually if you hang around long enough. His muscular, barrel chest sported a thick mass of greying hair, not unattractive (I wasn’t staring or anything) and his arms were like tree trunks. The powerful body twigged my memory, and I had a sudden image of Archie Watson, leaning over the counter at the Laingford Gazette.

“Watson. You’re Victor Watson, right?” I said, inanely. “Any relation to Archie?”

“My little brother,” Vic said. “You know him?”

“Not very well. I met him last night.”

“He try to sell you one of his horse steaks?” Vic said, laughing in a way that was not exactly the epitome of brotherly love.

“Now Vic, that was uncalled for,” Sophie said. “Your brother works very hard.”

“Keeping up the family tradition,” Vic said. “That’s right. Never lets me forget it, neither. Never forgave me for ditching the grocery business and going to law school.” He sneezed explosively and gave a great shiver like a draught horse caught in the rain.

Sophie produced a towel from her camera bag (which appeared to be bottomless, like Mary Poppins’ carpetbag) and proceeded to rub him down. Vic didn’t seem to mind, although I felt like I should maybe look away. There was something proprietary about the way Sophie wielded the towel, something decidedly intimate.

“You should try to be more careful,” Sophie said to him. “That’s the second time you’ve had an accident on one of our field trips. Remember last week?”

“What happened last week?” I said.

“It was just me being clumsy,” Vic said.

“We were at the lookout tower taking bird’s-eye shots of Laingford,” Sophie said. “Vic was sitting on the railing like an idiot, leaning way out and he almost went over.” Her face drained of colour at the memory. “I happened to be nearby and grabbed him just in time.”

“She’s a strong one,” Vic said. “It was crowded up there, and I should have known better.”

“You mean you were pushed?” I said, remembering Vic’s remark about possibly being pushed at the top of the falls.

“I might have been jostled a bit,” Vic said. “I forget. Moments like that, you don’t remember much. I was lucky Sophie was there, though.”

“You don’t have any enemies in the Camera Club, do you?” I said, half-jokingly. Sophie shot him a warning look that I found very interesting indeed.

“Nope. We’re all friends here,” he said.

“Hey, Watson, get your damned shirt on. There are ladies present,” came a loud voice from behind us. I turned to see David Kane, Kountry Pantree magnate, striding down the trail towards the picnic area.