Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 9

Bear with me, he said

as his claws dug into my skin.

—Shepherd’s Pie

It's hard being in Ontario cottage country without wheels. When the corner store is five kilometres away and you need a pack of smokes RIGHT NOW, having a car helps. If you have to go to the post office, its a trip—an outing. The closest beer store to Cedar Falls is all the way over in Laingford, so locals either stock up or make their own.

I was auto-free—not by choice particularly. It was a money thing. So, when Francy tugged on my arm and asked me to rescue her, the first thing I did was curse the fates for not providing me with a getaway car.

If I’d had my bike, an old Raleigh I kept on the porch of the cabin with a seat wide enough for a sumo wrestler and his trainer, I could have taken Francy away by road. But I’d arrived by police cruiser, and that was not, at this point, the transportation of choice for either of us.

“You up for a hike?” I said.

“You don’t have George’s truck?”

“Nope. I came with the cops. They asked me to be there when they told you about John.”

“Oh. They’ll be here soon, I guess.”

“Very soon, Francy. How come you don’t want to talk to them? Is Eddie’s story that much of a lie?”

“Let’s just get out of here,” she said. “I’ll tell you later. Trust me, okay?”

“We’ll have to take the old logging road,” I said. “Are you sure you can make it?”

“I’m tough.”

“Is Beth?”

“Like mother, like daughter,” she said and gave me a pale smile, the first I’d seen. I didn’t argue.

We had discovered the old road by accident, the previous summer. After we had become friends, we discovered a mutual interest in herbal remedies and had spent lots of time hacking through the bush together, stalking the wild asparagus. We nicknamed ourselves the “Falls Witches” and had gained a bit of a reputation in the community for pouncing upon anyone with a runny nose, diagnosing their symptoms and forcing herbal teas down their throats. We were often remarkably successful, which is probably why Carla Schreier, who was the kind of person who went to the hospital emergency room with a hangnail, was so snide about our “herb-gathering” activities. Alternative health practices, to some people, are Devil’s spawn.

The old logging road meandered through the bush between the dump road and the Dunbar sideroad, and Francy and I often used it as a shortcut to each other’s homes. It was a favourite of snowmobilers in the wintertime and was well-marked, though a bit rough in places.

“Let’s go, then,” Francy said. Carla was still praying up a storm in the kitchen, the sibilant hiss of her “Jesuses” seeping down the hallway like holy smoke. “Now, Polly, while she’s on a roll.”

“I’ve spent the whole day sneaking around,” I said, as we slipped out the door, closing it softly behind us. I told her about the cloak-and-daggering with Dweezil, then how I took off on Becker and Morrison. “Now I’m escaping from the holy rollers,” I said. “I should have stayed in bed.”

“I’m glad you didn’t, Polly,” Francy said and squeezed my hand.

We knew the police car would be along at any moment, so we stayed on the woods-side of the ditch, keeping our ears open for the sound of an engine so we could crouch in the bushes if we had to.

“Shit. Car.” Francy said. We dropped instantly, like they do in the movies. It was kind of fun, except that I whacked my knee on a stump going down, which hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I didn’t yell. Brave little me. I imagined John’s fist in Francy’s eye. That’s what shut me up. Everything is relative.

As the car went by, I risked lifting my face to see, and it was the cruiser, all right. I caught a glimpse of Becker in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead and looking like thunder. My fault, I supposed, although he may very well have forgotten all about Ms. Deacon, now that he was hot on the trail of the prime suspect.

“It was them, wasn’t it?” the prime suspect said.

“Yup. Let’s move.”

We found the entrance to the trail in a few minutes and struck right into the bush, relaxing as we got further in. Although the trees were still full of splendid gold and orange leaves, the foliage was thinner than it would have been in summer and I didn’t feel safe until we were over the first rise in the ground. That safe feeling didn’t last long. I’d forgotten. Bears.

“Hey, slow down,” Francy called, and I realized I’d been doing the Polly-trot.

“Sorry,” I said, waiting for her to catch up, “it’s that bear thing.”

“They don’t attack on sight, you know,” Francy said.

“Thanks. I feel a hell of a lot better now.”

We trudged on, me feeling like a dink for being so self-centred and frightened about my own skin when it was Francy who was in real danger. Her husband had been murdered, and here I was thinking about myself.

“Polly,” Francy said after a few minutes of silence.

“Hmm?”

“You ever think that maybe your bear-thing is a substitute for something else? Some other kind of fear?” I slowed down.

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t know whether this was the beginning of some sort of confession on her part, or if she was actually talking about me. While I was ready for the first, I wasn’t sure I could handle psychoanalysis in the bush, particularly because Francy, for all her own demons, was a pretty accurate judge of character. What amazed me was that she could switch like that, from her own private hell to my minor one. Still, I guess that’s what friends are for.

“Remember that seminar we took?” she said. “The Vision Quest one?”

A few months earlier, we had attended a weekend retreat led by a Caucasian, New-Age shaman who called himself Dream-Catcher. (We ended up calling him Bum-Scratcher behind his back. These New-Age people get you in touch with your inner child real quick.) I had seen the ad for it in Aunt Susan’s feed store and it wasn’t very expensive, so we figured, why not?

Aunt Susan came too, but she only lasted one day.

“If I wanted to spend a weekend listening to other people trying to out-dream each other, I’d set up as a shrink and make them pay me for it,” she had said. Which is more or less what Dream-Catcher was doing, I suppose.

The idea was to sit in a big circle, then close your eyes and try to envision going down a long tunnel, while Dream-Catcher played a drum. When you got to the end of the tunnel, an animal was supposed to meet you and take you on a journey of self-discovery. The meditations started out short, ten minutes or so, and by the end of the weekend they were running an hour or more.

After each meditation was over, Dream-Catcher led a talking circle, where everybody shared their journeys.

The problem was that, although your own little subconscious adventure might have been fun, the visions of strangers were about as interesting as a three-hour shopping-channel marathon. Some people went on and on, and we were all supposed to intone “good medicine, good medicine” after they’d finished. Francy and I didn’t behave very well, although we stuck it out for the whole weekend. (There were no refunds.)

The animal who was supposed to have met us at the end of the tunnel was officially our “power animal”, according to Dream-Catcher. He told us this before we started, his white beard trembling with emotion. This was significant. We were supposed to take the power animal with us in our hearts when we left the weekend.

The people in the circle got all sorts of neat spirit guides. Francy got a hawk, Aunt Susan was met by a wild boar, a woman with a voice like Shirley Temple on amphetamines got a king-snake and talked about it for so long I wanted to strangle her, and the young guy who works at the Petro-Can got a cougar. I got a hamster. Really. A hamster popped out of my subconscious on that first Vision Quest and bowed ever so politely, like the white rabbit in Alice. It had spots and stupid little pink eyes.

I was horrified, and although I tried to think up something impressive to tell everyone when my turn came around, I ended up admitting that my power animal was a hamster. They all laughed, in a good-medicine kind of way, and Dream-Catcher spent some time alone with me trying to put a positive spin on it. I could see that he was at a loss for what to say, though.

I didn’t want to be reminded that my power animal was a domesticated rodent, particularly when I was tromping through a forest full of ferocious bears.

“Yes, I remember the seminar, Francy,” I said. “How could I forget it? I’ve never felt so stupid in all my life. You tell just one hamster joke and I’ll never forgive you.”

“Oh, relax,” Francy said. “I was just thinking that maybe the hamster-thing was your mind playing tricks on you.”

“Huh?”

“Look. You dream about bears a lot, right?”

I nodded.

“They scare you, right?”

I nodded again.

“But you’ve never even seen a bear, so maybe the bear is really your power animal and your mind was just trying not to scare you, so it made it smaller. I mean, a hamster’s pretty harmless, but it does sort of look bear-ish.”

“Hmmm,” I said.

“I think that if you’d been met by a bear at the end of your tunnel, you would have given up right there and left with your aunt. Instead, you learned all about Vision Questing—yeah, I know a lot of it was stupid, but it was cool too, right? So your hamster was sort of a substitute for the real thing, so you could learn.”

“This is a good theory, Francy,” I said. My mind was split between the notion that I was not of the hamster clan after all, which made me feel good about myself, and the realization that Francy was acting like Francy again. If talking about bears and hamsters could take her mind off the mess she was in, I was prepared to cope with it, uncomfortable as it made me feel.

“But if the bear is my power animal, my spirit guide, why the dickens am I so scared of them?”

“Maybe you’re afraid of dealing with something which the bear-spirit can help you with,” Francy said.

“Ooooh. Deep,” I said. It was, actually. I knew that I was suppressing something—I had been for years. My parents’ deaths, my grubby string of failed relationships with inappropriate men, my lack of ambition and my complicated vices were all probably bear-related.

Then, as if summoned, from out of the bush came a great big, black, smelly, grunting not-a-chance-it-was-a-hamster.