Читать книгу Meg Harris Mysteries 6-Book Bundle - R.J. Harlick - Страница 12

Next morning, I woke up to a hundred woodpeckers pounding my head, while my mouth tasted as if it had become the pit of Aunt Aggie’s old privy. I gingerly raised one heavy eyelid and snapped it shut when the morning sun flooded in. I was disgusted with myself. I’d given in. After lying wide-eyed awake for an hour the night before, jumping at every squeak and rustle, I’d run to my tonic and poured myself a hefty glassful, in fact several. At least, the vodka had done its job. It had put me to sleep, a state I’d just as soon return to right now.

Why not? I had nothing planned for the morning. Eric and I weren’t going to Whispers Island until the afternoon. I rolled over and groaned. Not only was my head pounding, but my body, after yesterday’s encounter, felt as if a herd of caribou had trampled me.

However, within seconds I was sitting up, staring at my clock. I’d forgotten Marie. Seven o’clock. If I didn’t go now, I wouldn’t find out what she wanted until the end of the day.

So once again I found myself bumping along the dusty tree-lined road to Marie’s homestead. This time I drove more slowly, and not just with the interests of my truck in mind. The last thing my head or body needed was more pounding.

And once again, the pile of wood in the middle of her lane prevented me from driving right to her cabin. I climbed out of my truck and walked along the strip of gravel between the logs and the bordering trees. On the other side of the wood pile, the sun was starting to melt a veneer of frost that coated each roughly sawed log. Flies, sparked by the warmth, buzzed in and out of the gaps. They swirled up as my shadow passed over, then settled back down again.

I was amazed that Louis would be cutting firewood this late in the season. Even I, the city slicker, knew freshly cut wood required a summer to dry out, otherwise it would produce more smoke than heat. I supposed this only confirmed Eric’s low opinion of Louis. Just as leaving the wood in the middle of the road did.

According to Eric—for Marie would never tell me—Louis wasn’t up to much. Other than tending his traplines in the bush or taking on the odd job as a hunting guide, Louis spent most of his time collapsed on the sofa with a bottle of piquette, the Quebecois version of moonshine. He preferred to live off the money Marie earned as a housekeeper or the benefits she could receive as a registered band member. Although Louis appeared to have some Indian blood, he wasn’t registered as one, and therefore was not entitled to band-specific social assistance.

Eric acknowledged that she had at least had the smarts not to give up her status by marrying Louis. And even though the Indian Act had subsequently changed, she still hadn’t married him. On the other hand, Eric couldn’t understand why she stuck with him. Unfortunately, I could. I knew too well the vice-grip of a love-hate relation with a man who worked on all your insecurities to keep you grovelling at his feet.

The front yard looked as if it suffered from the same lack of energy. That is, if you could call it a yard. It was really just a patch of dried weeds and dirt that had been hacked out of the surrounding bush. The rusted remains of several cars and a snowmobile were scattered amongst rotting tree stumps. At the far end, a canvas canoe with a gaping hole in its side was propped against a battered oil drum.

Underneath the front windows of her log cabin, Marie had created a small strip of garden with the daisies and phlox I’d given her. I remembered the sparkle of life it had provided in the summer. Now it was faded to a few scraggly blooms and shrivelled stems that rustled in the faint autumn breeze.

As I silently approached, the small, square cabin stared back at me, equally silent. No smoke rose from the blackened chimney. Under the weight of its rust-streaked metal roof, the cabin carried a look of defeat. Strips of bark were peeling from the cedar log walls. Not a single speck of paint graced the weathered exterior. But a spark of defiance at this surrender seemed to leap out from the two front windows that shimmered with a reflected sheen that only came from frequent polishing. Marie wasn’t going to give in.

Not wanting to get splinters from the door’s rough wood, I knocked on its small pane of glass. I peered through the tiny window, expecting to see Marie’s surprised face, and saw only a dark empty room. I knocked again and called out. I turned the doorknob and found it locked.

I was surprised she wasn’t home. It couldn’t be much beyond seven-thirty, a full hour before she usually left for work. I knocked again, but the empty silence continued. I began to wonder if she’d spent the night elsewhere.

I peered through the front windows. The room looked much as it always did, empty but for a few items of basic furniture; a threadbare sofa, three spindly metal chairs and an Arborite table. In the corner stood an ancient television set. Since Louis had never gotten around to having the electricity hooked up, it served no purpose other than as a place to display family photos. In the opposite corner, the wood stove looked cold and forlorn.

The room may not have offered much comfort, but it was immaculate in the same way as the windows were immaculate. I didn’t expect any less from Marie. But it was too clean. There was no empty coffee cup, no sweater draped over a chair. There was nothing to suggest that Marie had been here earlier this morning.

“What are you doing here?” spoke a voice suddenly from behind me. I jerked around to see Tommy walking up the drive. Feeling like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, I backed away from the window.

“I’m looking for your mother,” I replied.

“What for? She’s at work.” He looked at me suspiciously, through those startling blue eyes that I could never quite reconcile with the rest of his dark features. For Marie’s sake, I hoped that was all he’d inherited from his father.

He was dressed in a dark suit with a white shirt and very bland tie. He reached up and pulled hard on the knot to loosen the stricture around his neck. His body seemed tense, as if unused to such conforming attire. I imagined it wasn’t. A recent law school grad, he probably preferred the pro forma uniform of jeans and sweatshirt.

“Was she here last night?” I asked.

“I assume so, but I’ve been away. Just getting back now.” He unlocked the door, swung it open and stepped inside, sports bag in hand.

Not sure if I should follow, I waited on the doorstep. I didn’t feel the warmth of an occupied house or smell the smoke of a recent fire.

“I don’t think she stayed here last night,” I shouted to his retreating back.

“You’d better come here,” answered his voice from another room in a tone that only intensified my concern.

“Where are you?” I called out.

“In the kitchen.”

He was lighting the kerosene lamp as I entered.

“Look.” He held the lamp high to light up the dark room.

My heart sank at the sight of cupboard doors gaping open, dishes scattered on the counter, drawers lying upside-down with their contents spilled over the floor. Tommy’s feet crunched over splattered coffee grounds. He bent down to pick up the overturned coffee tin and stopped when he spied something else. He pulled up a piece of material, filthy with coffee. He shook it. With dread, I realized it was Marie’s red dream scarf.

Without saying a word, he looked up at me. We both knew what the mess pointed to. Seeing Marie’s scarf without Marie confirmed it. She was in trouble.

“Where’s your father, Tommy?” I asked, very worried that Louis had beaten her up in a drunken rage.

“Supposed to be in the bush.”

“Not any more. No one else would do this.”

With his young face a mask of stone, his fists clenched, Tommy brushed past me into the main room.

“Dorothy,” he said, walking out the front door. “Dorothy will know.”

I ran after him.

By the time I reached my truck on the other side of the woodpile, Tommy was backing his mud-spattered Honda Civic down the drive. He rolled down his window and shouted, “I’ll take it from here.”

But he wasn’t going to get rid of me that easily. I had just as much right as he to make sure Marie was all right. In fact, I was feeling guilty I hadn’t ensured she was okay the night before.

I tried to keep up with him, but he soon left my truck in a whirl of dust. At least I knew Marie’s friend, Dorothy Tremblay, lived in Eric’s Acres, as the band jokingly called Eric’s improved housing initiative.

I manoeuvered my truck around the potholes of the one and only street of this miniature replica of faceless suburbia and headed towards the last square bungalow on the street. While they wouldn’t win any awards for innovative design, they were a considerable improvement over the older form of reserve housing.

Dorothy had tried to give her bungalow a bit of flair with a coat of pale yellow paint and dark green trim. A small flower garden wound its way along a brick path leading to the front door. Next to the house stood one of the village’s few garages, which I attributed to her status as a teacher at the school.

The front door was closing as I stopped behind Tommy’s car. I raced up the walkway, as Dorothy swung the door back open.

“Meg Harris!” she exclaimed, clearly surprised by my presence. Tommy glared at me from over her shoulder. “What brings you here at this hour?” She turned around to Tommy. “Both of you?”

A few years older than my early forties, Dorothy was tall, with a certain feline elegance to her walk. She was dressed in a simple earth-tone skirt and turtleneck sweater. Her thick hair flowed over her shoulders and down her back like a shawl of ebony satin.

I didn’t know her well, but what I’d learned from Marie I liked. I had the impression Marie confided much of her troubled life into Dorothy’s care and saw her as a sanctuary when things became just a little too unbearable.

“You’re lucky. I was about to leave for school,” she said. Her warm brown eyes arched in worry. “It has to do with Marie, doesn’t it?”

She led us into the front room.

While the outside of her house was sedately suburban, inside was an exotic world. The walls were a riot of rainbow coloured creatures. Some I recognized as paintings by the native artist Norval Morrisseau. Others were less familiar, but equally dramatic. Sprinkled amongst the cavorting creatures were other staring faces with empty eyes peering through cornhusk masks, their tongues sticking out in mock derision.

In the window hung a dream catcher. The circle of delicate webbing with seven long slender feathers flirted gently with the sun. Dorothy had hung it where Marie had told me to hang mine, in a spot where the morning sun could turn the bad dreams trapped overnight by the web into dew. It had worked. I was no longer bothered by nightmares.

“I want you to tell Meg to leave, Auntie,” said Tommy. “This has nothing to do with her.”

Before I had a chance to state my case, Dorothy replied, “Meg’s presence says it does. Quit your complaining and tell me what’s happened.”

Dorothy gestured us to sit in the two wing-backed chairs, one on either side of the fireplace, dark but for the faint glow of a few dying embers. I took one of the chairs, while Tommy remained standing, arms crossed in front, an angry scowl on his face.

“Mooti’s not at home. I’m hoping you know where she is,” Tommy said.

“What has Louis done now?” Dorothy said in a voice that suggested more resignation than surprise.

“Hell, how should I know? Probably nothing, but it looked like there was some kind of argument or fight. Thought she might’ve come here.”

“God, the number of times I’ve prayed he’d just disappear into the bush and never come back.” Dorothy shook her head. “Sorry, Tommy, but your father should have been locked up years ago.”

“I’d just as soon not get into that now, if it’s okay by you.” Tommy’s blue eyes flashed quickly in my direction, then back to Dorothy.

Insulted by his inference, I shot back, “Tommy, I’m not sure what you’re trying to hide from me. It doesn’t take too much brainpower to figure out what your father was doing to her. Besides, don’t think you Indians have cornered the market on abuse.”

“Okay, okay, just tell me where she is, Noshenj, and I’ll be on my way.”

“Relax, Tommy, you’re not going anywhere until we all know.” Dorothy sat down on the velvet sofa across from me and motioned Tommy to sit too. “Where’s your father?”

Tommy remained standing. He glanced at me, then turned back to Dorothy. “Thought he was in the bush. Not sure now.”

Dorothy continued. “I don’t know where your mother is this moment, but she was here Tuesday after work, two nights ago. She was okay then. Do you know when this fight took place?”

“Tuesday night, last night, what does it matter?” Tommy wrenched his tie from his neck and tossed it with his jacket onto the chair.

“It matters a lot,” I retorted. “Say the fight happened after she left here. Say your father injured her badly. That would mean for the past two days, your mother has been lying hurt and unattended, possibly outside in this cold.”

“Okay, I get the point,” he replied.

“But you’re lucky,” I continued. “The fight probably happened yesterday between the time she phoned me and the time I was supposed to meet her at the store. Still, one night outside in these near freezing temperatures wouldn’t do her any good.”

Dorothy added, “I can’t believe Louis would hurt her that badly. He always seems to stop just short of doing her serious harm.”

Without a word, Tommy pulled Marie’s dream scarf from his pants pocket.

Dorothy’s shoulders fell. “Are we sure it was Louis? Maybe something else happened?”

“Perhaps, but what? Louis beating her up is the only explanation that makes sense,” I replied. “But before we go too far, I think we should at least check to see if by some miracle there wasn’t a fight, and she’s working this very moment blissfully ignorant of our fears.”

“I’ll check,” replied Tommy as he headed down the hall to the kitchen.

“And yesterday too,” I yelled at his retreating back.

“God, it’s all my fault,” Dorothy groaned. “I should have made her stay. I knew something was up. She was so upset, wouldn’t sit still, kept fidgeting with her amulet. At one point, she even took it off. I thought after all these years she was finally going to show me what it contained. But she changed her mind and put it back on again.”

“Did she say what was bothering her?” I asked.

“Louis, who else.” Dorothy played with the gold band on her finger. “I’ll never forgive myself if something has happened to her. “

“Please, don’t blame yourself, Dorothy. There’s no way you could have anticipated this.”

“If you only knew the number of times I’ve blamed myself for not interfering.”

I nodded in sympathy, thinking of Monday afternoon, when I hadn’t interfered either. I’d let Louis drag her off without a whimper of protest, knowing full well what would probably happen, and it had.

“Did she say why she was upset with Louis?” I asked.

“Not really, but she was very upset about the gold mine, kept asking me all sorts of crazy questions, as if I would know anything about it. She wanted to know who CanacGold was. How’d they know where to find the gold? Who told them? Questions like that. She never stopped. You know, from the way she was talking, it was almost as if she knew the gold was there before talk of this mine started.”

“Is it possible?” I asked, wondering if this was the information she had refused to tell me.

A low murmur, punctuated by the sound of a fridge opening and closing, drifted in from the direction of the kitchen.

“I don’t see how. The first any of us learned about it was a few days ago, when those planes came in. Except now that you mention it, she did mutter something about Louis and a lot of money. She seemed to be accusing him of something.”

“What’s that about Papa and money?” joined in Tommy walking into the living room. He carried a bottle of beer.

Before he had a chance to take a slurp, Dorothy grabbed it from his hand. “I don’t care whether you’re white enough to be a lawyer or not, you’re not drinking in my house at this hour of the day.”

Tommy stopped, plainly startled by the force of Dorothy’s response. For a moment, I thought he was going to grab the bottle back from her, but he kicked the chair instead.

“Is she at work?” I asked, anxious to know the answer.

But Tommy ignored my question and turned to Dorothy. “What were you saying about Mooti and a gold mine?”

“Nothing to do with you,” she replied impatiently. “Just tell us if your mother is at work today?”

He shrugged his shoulders, as if to say “have it your way.” “No, she’s not there, and she wasn’t at Betty Braun’s yesterday.”