Читать книгу Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle - Lou Allin - Страница 21

The gray mailboxes at the junction of her road stood an inconvenient six miles from the house. Half the time Belle thought in kilometres, half the time in miles. Another decade and the logic of metric would be second nature. She took two pieces of mail from the box, cheques for her father, the Canada Pension, which everyone paid into, and the Old Age freebie—$400.00 a month just for wrinkles and myopia!

When she got to Rainbow Country with the shrimp, her father was spruced up in the blue plaid shirt she had bought him for Christmas. Her careful eye noted the clean undershirt, braces and freshly ironed pants. “Good news, Father,” she announced. “Your pension cheques arrived. And, at last count, you’re on the yellow brick road to becoming a millionaire. The stock market is soaring.”

“Take all the money out of the bank and bring it here, right now, right now.” At his stern face, she nearly stepped back. Then his eyes sparkled, a royal blue which belied his years and waning health. No wonder her mother had fallen in love with the man in the picture on the dresser, serious, wearing a tweed suit and metal-rimmed glasses, holding a meershaum pipe. “Just kidding. Gimme ten bucks, though. I owe the haircut lady.”

While she was setting up his meal, she encouraged him to talk about old Toronto. “Hogtown, she used to be called. Rough and ready. Small houses, family stores, horses still pulling wagons down Avenue Road. Big night out to go downtown for a Chinese feed at the St. Charles and see a show at the Odeon. Or maybe Sunnyside Park in the summer. Did you know your old man was a great dancer? Some bad times, though. Those riots at the Christie Pits in 1938, damn Nazis beating up the Jews. My brother Fred and I got Abie Schneider out fast on the trolley. Took him right home with us. And Ma gave us all tomato soup and crackers. I remember Abie was crying.”

“And your years in the film business, all those people you met. Didn’t you tell me that you shook Gene Autry’s hand?”

He held up his knobby fist proudly and offered it to her. “Shake the hand that shook the hand. All the biggest stars came through the office.”

“Right. And all those glossies of Elvis, was that really his signature: ’To my girlfriend, Belle’?”

That got him laughing, an unusual sight which cheered her in this quiet room. There would never be another home, another room for him. “Norman, my name was Norman then,” he corrected her. At the nursing home in Florida, they had mistakenly called him by his unused first name. Then his girlfriend (his consort, he had called her) and he had decided that George was more British, more noble. How many people changed their name after 80?

“Like my haircut?” he asked, and she gave it an appreciative rub.

“A regular crew cut. You don’t look a minute over fifty.” And he didn’t, thanks to his baby-smooth skin.

“No shave, though,” he added with a definite pout.

“Ontario is broke. You’ll probably get one later today.” Belle arranged the lunch she had brought and filled his glass of water from the immaculate bathroom. It always seemed as if Joyce had just cleaned. Lysol was redolent and the porcelain sparkling.

As her father enjoyed his shrimp, Belle picked at her roast pork sandwich, hardly tasting it, although the bread was homemade, the mustard piquant and the meat tender and lean. With a sigh, she wrapped it for Freya.

“What’s the matter? Not hungry? That’s not like a Palmer,” her father said, clearly “with it” enough today to notice her lack of appetite while tucking into his favourite meal.

“I’m OK. Just too many things on my mind.” She folded up the soiled napkins and set out more for the gooey pie and ice cream, sighing in resignation. You couldn’t keep things from him. She hadn’t wanted to tell her father about Jim, thinking that the report of a death might upset him. “A friend of mine was killed going through the ice on a snow machine. No witnesses. Out in the middle of nowhere. Everyone says it’s an accident, but it stinks. He was the last person who would make a dangerous mistake in the bush.” She paused to mush up the pie, chopping away the tough crust so that his last few teeth could handle the assignment. “But on the other hand, there’s no motive. He was a serious and private man, a university student and about as nice a guy as you could find. Why would anyone kill him?”

Her father shovelled in some coleslaw with a shaky hand, chewed for a pensive moment with his eyes closed, then beamed as if he had just scratched a lottery winner. “Easy. Greed. Don’t you remember that movie? Longest silent ever made! Got me interested in the fillum business. I was only a kid but knew right away the job was for me.”

“What do you mean? What greed?” She drew her chair closer and turned down the disco trash from the exercise show on television.

“Think, girl! What was the motive? Gold. That big tooth, Zasu Pitts lying on a bed of shiny coins.” His eyes glittered as if the curtain had lifted on a favourite picture long faded to shadows. “Aren’t we in Northern Ontario, where gold sits under every tree? Old Sir Harry Oakes died for it. It’s gold all right, always was, always is. You’ll see. Just keep your peepers peeled.” He munched his last French fry and reached for the container of pie.

When the local news started, Belle cleaned away the lunch debris and unsnapped the prison of his lap table. “How about a walk down the hall?” she asked. It was crucial to get him back on his feet to juice the circulation. The nurses had reported that he was not cooperative during his exercise periods. Perhaps extra motivation would help. “You’ve got to get practising again if you want to go back to the restaurant when the weather gets better.”

A smile broke out on his face as he looked up like a trusting child. “Really? OK, let’s give it a try. Where are my shoes?” He shook one red plush bedroom slipper, all his swollen feet could wear. Belle searched the closet, peered under the bed, even plowed through his underwear drawer. How could a large item vanish from a private room whose sole occupant barely tottered down to meals each day? Yet some of the more mobile female patients roamed the halls “cleaning house” in their cobwebbed minds, collecting loose articles and driving the nurses crazy when they had to sort out the belongings.

“Never mind. We can slog along with one. Come on.” She hoisted him up, gripping his wasted arm. Even five years ago, his biceps and calves had bulged, huge bunches of muscles due to genes more than exercise. They used to strike poses together, their arms and legs and faces identical DNA maps. A purposeful grunt helped him to stand, leaning perilously, then shuffling forward, all 170 stomachy pounds. They inched into the hall, past dim rooms with heads lolled back, toothless mouths agape, or worse, quiet bundles of blanketed shapes forever dreaming of a precious time far and away.

“Take the hand rail,” she told him, as they rocked along. Only thirty feet to the nurses’ station. Suddenly he stopped and looked down. Her gaze followed. His other slipper! “It dropped out of your pant leg?” Their laughter echoed down the silent hall. “A miracle! Didn’t you feel it? What else is up there? No, I don’t want to know!” Belle put the shoe on him, and they rounded back to the room in time for the weather report.

As she left by the front desk, Belle had a word for Cherie, the nurse on call. “He looks good. Thanks for the extra effort in dressing and grooming him.”

“Sorry we didn’t get to his shave. All hell broke loose in the kitchen. Dishwasher overflowed. Oh, by the way,” she coughed delicately, and swivelled her head to see if they were being overheard, “that doctor we were discussing the other day?” Belle nodded. “Rumour says that he was involved in abortions a few years before the hospital started providing them without hassles. No charges were ever laid, though. He’s a slick one.” Her eyebrows arched knowingly. In big cities like Toronto, abortions were available if a woman had the nerve to brave the gauntlet of pro-life pickets. In smaller towns and solidly Catholic areas, the procedure could be difficult to arrange.

Belle left the building, still trying to sort out the tangle of clues, hunches and tips revolving in her brain. Something was trying to take shape, to drop out of a pantleg. Although she had latched onto it as a tempting possibility, less and less did the drug angle look viable. Brooks’ gang was rounded up, squealing like shoats (or was it stoats?) for legal aid, but nothing about Jim had been forthcoming. Steve would have told her. Maybe she should speak to Brooks directly; surely he was out on bail by now. And the gold? Perhaps not the romantic dream of an old man at all. Jim’s drop haunted her, the last tangible reminder of her friend. As Omer had said, the area was full of treasure hunters searching new places yet undreamed and old places long played out. The generous meteorite which had blasted the Sudbury basin had planted many precious metals, gold and palladium among them.

One of Belle’s favourite summer haunts, Bonanza Lake north of Wapiti, had been mined briefly around the turn of the century. Since it was accessible by old logging roads, Belle and Freya beat through undergrowth to climb the steep trail to its hills once or twice each summer. Not only were the blueberries spectacular, but the pellucid green lake attracted wise loons, who knew well ahead of the scientists that the PH of the troubled waters had been slowly improving. True, the only mine shaft she had actually seen had been filled in with rubble and ringed by rusted scraps of a fence, but she had traced along the walls of the water-filled excavations the petering-out of the quartzite. Aside from picking up a few specimens and taking a swim in the lake, Belle never ventured further into the dense bush, rife with bloody-minded flies and festooned with poison ivy.

Tom Beardley would know. A retired chemist, he played prospector on the weekends, ferreting out tiny mining claims more for fun, boasting that he was an explorer, not a gold baron. A lucky find near Timmins had netted him twenty thousand dollars once, which he had blown quickly on a new Bronco, but that had been his only major discovery. Now and then Tom taught a night course in metallurgy at Nickel City College; Belle had met him there in the cafeteria on a break from a real estate seminar.

Tom’s wife Dorothy answered Belle’s call. “Tom? Sure, he’s back from Wawa today. Never misses the Jays on television. No sooner unpacked than he’s rushed down to the Diamond Pipe to meet some of his gangster friends. Tell him for me he’d better not be home later than fifteen minutes after the game. And I’m listening.” The radio warbled in the background. Belle knew that Dorothy’s jocular threats held little sting. Tom had nursed her through several breast cancer operations and made sure that they escaped every February to the Portuguese Algarve, a favourite Canadian destination because of its bargain villas.

The Diamond Pipe on Bathurst Street was jumping as Belle strolled in shortly after seven, so as not to interrupt the game. Her friend sat with Paolo Santanen, demolishing a platter of Buffalo wings. Tom, a huge man with a matching gut but strong as a Terex truck, looked as if he had not only pounded in the last spike of the Trans-Canada railway single-handedly, but all the others as well. He clapped his massive paws on the table and set his unshaven jaw in Paolo’s milk-mild Finnish face. “They’ll never make the grade without another couple of pitchers, my son. And sure as hell they trade any of their duds, those bozos’ll win the Cy Young award for their new team. Maybe it’s the coaches’ fault, who knows?”

Nearing eighty, the small and wiry Paolo was developing a bow to his back, and he moved with slow deliberation. Derek had come along when he had been well into his fifties. Last time he and Belle had met, he had wiped tears from his eyes as he thanked her for helping his son get the Snopac job. “I want to die the day before I go into a nursing home, and the day before Derek ever gets in trouble again,” he had confessed privately as his wife Gerda boiled up some potatoes. Yet tonight Paolo seemed full of fire. “Jays got power to spare. Let ’em get five runs in the opposition, these boys’ll bring ’em up. You ain’t got no trust at all. Don’t you know baseball’s a game of faith?” Belle moved forward to catch Tom’s eye.

“Belle? I haven’t seen you in months. Too busy grubbin’ real estate to talk with old pals?” With a friendly wink, he nabbed an extra chair from the next table and patted it. “Now how’s my Freya?” He and his short-haired pointer Duke loved to go birding. Three fat partridges that he had dropped off last fall, ivory breasts more succulent than chicken, had made a memorable stew.

Paolo took her hand and squeezed it wordlessly as he met her eyes. She signalled the waitress for a beer by hoisting Tom’s bottle. “Good, for all of her ten years, but getting on like her mom.” She nibbled at a wing he offered. “Yow, hot stuff. Listen, I need some information from you, some mining expertise.”

He roared into high gear, flexing his masculinity and nudging his friend. “The Midnight Prospector strikes again. And you said I was over the hill.”

“Stop showing off, you old coot. I need to know about gold north of Wapiti, the Bonanza area maybe. Is anything still there?”

“Up where the new park’s goin’ in? Nah, she’s all played out. Bonanza. Some joke, that name. Never did find nothing much, though they thought at first they had another boom like Cobalt. ’Course, that was long before my time. Closed up about a hunnert years ago. Nothing left now but a couple of filled-in shafts and rubble.”

“That’s it? You mean the quartzite piles at the top of the hill? I’ve taken some pieces for my rock garden. White and brown.”

“It’s pretty stuff. The brown’s siderite, a crystalline carbonate. That one heap’s all most people ever see. Couple other shafts a few hundred feet farther into the bush. Pretty dense and overgrown. Could be flooded, too. Dad said they were almost ninety feet down. Tanned me once as a kid when he thought I’d been fooling around there. Say, listen to me rattling on. What do you want to know about that played-out claim for? You don’t want to poke around those rotting timbers. The gasses are toxic. Methane, for one.” He gave her a serious look which spelled worry.

“Could there be any gold left?”

“Well, the companies gave up and never went back. That tells you something. Odds are against it. They mined out any veins as far as they could.”

Belle narrowed her eyes and tapped his wrist gently. “But if someone found a streak, even a smallish one. Don’t ask me how; I never took geology. Why would they keep it quiet? Why not cash in?”

“Are you kidding? Someone still owns rights to that land. And it would be ‘thank you very much, buddy. Now get lost.’ Except it probably wouldn’t be worth the company’s money to pursue a peanut find even with high tech. Cost them five million to get in, they’d need to make fifteen. This isn’t the Klondike of 1898, girl.”

“So how could anything be retrieved profitably?”

“Well, hell, you could blowtorch it out,” he boomed and gulped his beer with an approving belch. “A rich little vein, pocket gold mine. Drip her into what we call ‘buttons’. Ounce or two. Easy to carry. ’Course, you’d have to sell on the black market at less than half the price. Be worth it, though, damn government taxes. Lots of fun, too.”

Paolo had been listening with interest, nodding at the excitement as he tried to get their attention. “You know, that could be. A chum of mine, after he retired, used to spend weekends loading tailings from an old site in Kirkland Lake into his pickup, take it back to his garage to crush. Called it the Lost Deutchman Mine. And you know, he made hisself enough to live on a good ten year. And good for him, I say. Pensions weren’t worth nothing back then.”

Belle placed Jim’s drop in front of Tom’s bottle. His eyes widened, reflecting the yellow flame of the table’s light as he touched it lovingly, rubbed at the sheen. “That’s the ticket. The real thing, as they used to say before that there cola.”

“Could this come from that method you describe? Dripped off? It sounds so primitive.”

“Nothin’ more simple and more valuable than gold. Whoever made this has a pretty little girl for sure. Lucky devil.”

Belle pocketed the drop as a baby Jay belted a lead-off double to galvanize the crowd. What had Omer said about the drop having blood on it?