Читать книгу Forever Dead - Suzanne F. Kingsmill - Страница 10

“What’s this I hear about you finding a dead body? In pieces, no less. I’m gone three short weeks and you get yourself into trouble.”

I was standing at my office window looking down at the pavement five flights below, feeling like a washed-out watercolour, bits of me fading into the early morning air, thoughts running into each other, creating mud. The early morning sun glinted off the sidewalk below, and the students rushed to make their 9:00 a.m. classes. At the sound of Martha’s deep guttural purr I turned in relief. Martha Bathgate literally filled the doorway of my puny office.

“Really, Martha. Who told you he was in pieces?” Martha had a habit of being able to take my mind off myself and aim it at something productive. She was sometimes even able to dispel my sad moods before they spiralled down into darkness. If only I could figure out how she did it, I might be able to prevent depression from ever getting hold of me again. Unlikely, though; I’d fought it all my life.

Martha winked knowingly at me. “I never reveal my sources, you know that. It simply wouldn’t do.”

I shared Martha with two other assistant profs who didn’t rate their own lab techs, let alone decent office space. But I felt lucky: no one could replace Martha, even working for me full-time. She was my technician, secretary, bodyguard against students, friend, and jack-of-all-trades, who happened to remind me of a tennis ball, round and bouncy. Her black curly shoulder-length hair sprang like a wire mop from her head — cut page-boy fashion it made her face even rounder. Her features were tiny and, although almost eclipsed by the excess weight, they were beautiful, as though designed for fat and not for lean, and her age seemed to have hovered around forty-five for years. In fact, no one even knew her real age. Everything else about her was round as well: round pudgy hands, round belly and legs, short and squat, and now her mouth pursed into a round O. She made me think of the snowmen Ryan and I used to make: three round balls for the body, round raisins for the mouth, and small bright black eyes set against a white face.

“I’m right though? About the pieces? But where in the name of God is Dumoine? That’s where you found him, isn’t it? I’ve missed all the news reports, except yesterday’s. Fill me in. There was no Canadian news in Bermuda.” It was a demand. Martha was the only person I had ever met who knew everything about everyone before they did, without being resented for it. I didn’t even try to keep the smile out of my voice. Gossip was Martha’s lifeblood, but at least she went to great pains to get it right.

“Dumoine. It’s up the Ottawa River about two and a half hours from here on the Quebec side. It’s a medium-sized town, and the local police were supremely suspicious of the whole mess. Apparently dead bodies just don’t pop up routinely there, the implication being that they pop up routinely everywhere else. They asked me if I was sure it was a human body, if ‘perchance’ it might not be a dead moose or deer.”

“As if you couldn’t tell the difference!” huffed Martha indignantly. She was nothing if not loyal.

“To be fair, they’ve had some woman calling in all kinds of false alarms over the years, dead gophers that look like dead babies, the ribs of a cat mistaken for human remains. How can you mistake a dead gopher for a baby? Anyway, they had no end of stories from her. They thought I was her. It seems our voices sound alike.” I spread out my hands in mock self-defence. “When I finally chiselled a word into the conversation and told them that this body was wearing a man’s size-ten boots, they advised me that they’d be along. We waited hours it seems — since the body was dead and in a remote area there was no huge hurry. Someone else had said the same thing earlier. Rather crass, I thought. In the end, they didn’t need us, to our great relief. The two biologists waiting with us knew by our description exactly where the body was and they made an ID of sorts.”

“Two biologists? Anyone we know?”

“I’d heard of them, because some profs from here have collaborated with some of the profs at their university, Pontiac it’s called, but I hadn’t met them before. A lot of their study sites are up near Dumoine. They have a biology station up there.”

I should have known a short answer like that would not satisfy Martha. She put her hands on her hips and waited with eyebrows raised, until I was forced to continue.

“They were a rum pair, two mammalogists — Leslie Mitchell and Don Allenby. They didn’t do much talking while we waited for the cops, but then I suppose they were worried it was their colleague lying up there in the bush. Rightly so, it now seems. The cops took down our names and addresses and thanked us and then turfed us out. Allenby escorted them up to the campsite.”

“That’s it then? No inquest, nothing? You don’t have to get up there and tell your grisly story and get mis-quoted in the papers and bring the top university brass down on you?”

Martha had a running battle with the newspapers. She was convinced they all lied through their pens and hid behind their editors when the accusations started to fly.

“They did the autopsy at the little university in Dumoine. The cops called and said there would be no inquest as it was pretty straightforward. Autopsy results concluded it was death by bear. A blow to the back of the head and neck eventually killed him. It was not a quick death, though. The rest of the mess was mauling. Case closed.”

“Nasty way to go. Being mauled by a bear, and no one to hear your calls.” Martha shivered and then added, “It must have been one of these rogue bears that come sneaking up on decent folk and, without so much as a by-your-leave, swat them like pestering flies.”

“That’s what the conservation guy thinks. Apparently a team of wildlife enforcers went up there to shoot the poor devil. They’re not going to trap this one and move him somewhere else, not after he’s killed a man.”

“Damn right,” said Martha with an indignant look spreading over her face.

“C’mon, Martha. Most black bears are more afraid of us than we are of them, but a rogue bear, one that attacks without provocation, is different. Too bad they give all black bears a bad name.”

“Yeah, well, no one in their right mind would want a rogue bear in their backyard, and with so many crazy canoeists like you gallivanting through those woods, there’s no safe place for a rogue bear anymore. Too dangerous. Once a man-killer always a man-killer, I say.”

I didn’t say anything. I had had a sudden unpleasant jolting in my stomach as I thought back to the open tins, the food in the campsite, the pack up the tree. I was thinking of the way the sun had fallen across the body, its rays peaceful and warm, quiet and soft, beauty in such horror. The unease was back, and I suddenly realized why. I hadn’t seen any sign of any bears in that area. I thought about the chocolate bar still in the tent and the full cans of food and drink unmarked by any teeth or claws. There should have been signs that a bear had been there. There hadn’t been: no claw marks, no garbage dragged from the campsite, no droppings, no drag marks, no signs at the mess tent or near the food pack, nothing to indicate a bear had been there except for the horror of the body. But if it had never been there, then how or where had Diamond been killed by a bear?

I brushed the thoughts from my mind. I didn’t have time for them, and besides, it didn’t concern me, curious as it was. I glanced out the window. Students of all descriptions were flinging a Frisbee about the grassed lawn across the street. I could see the library to the west and beyond it the Ottawa River framed by a stunning electric blue sky. The city sprawled off to the right and Gatineau, Québec, lay across the river. I liked to pretend that I could make out the Eardley Escarpment where my little log cabin lay snuggled in the most beautiful of valleys within the Outaouais. Wishful thinking though. I didn’t live that close.

“So who was this poor guy?” Martha brought me back to the present.

“We didn’t learn anything at all up in the bush. But when we came back and the police phoned to tell me who it was and ask more questions, I did a literature search on him.”

“You mean you actually got that old computer to work for you?” I ignored her. Martha could make the computer turn somersaults for her but I seemed to paralyze it and funny things happened. I wasn’t about to admit to Martha that I had had to ask the computer guy to help me.

“He was a mammalogy professor at Pontiac University — a well-known and it seems well-liked mammalogist. He’s a cat man. He’s studied all the North American cats and been to Africa studying cheetahs and helped with breeding of endangered species. He was studying the Canada lynx. I ran his name through my database and it lit up like a neon light. The guy’s written dozens of papers on various mammals. Quite a wonder boy. Lectured all over the world and has written several well-reviewed books about the cats of Canada. His name crops up at least twice a month in all the major newspapers.”

“Was he also a columnist or something?” asked Martha.

“Actually, no. He’s at the other end of the media stick. He gets written about. He’s a real wilderness warrior. Couldn’t abide any destruction of anything natural and wild. A real hard-line environmentalist. He’s leading the fight to have logging banned up in the area around Dumoine.”

Martha said excitedly, “You mean the guy with the black curly hair and deep sexy voice that was on all the newscasts a month or so ago?”

I looked at the news clippings piled on top of my desk, rifled through it, and pulled out a piece with Jake Diamond’s photo and looked at the curly black hair and warm smile.

“He’s the one who single-handedly defied the loggers, erected a barricade to stop the logging trucks, and mobilized the masses. It’s been an unpleasant and heated battle. A lot of bad words on all sides, I gather.”

I paused, momentarily discomfited, remembering the light in Cameron’s eye as it slowly dawned on him that the body might be Diamond’s. It had been a very unpleasant moment to watch joy in another man’s eye at the mention of death. Here certainly was no friend. Leslie had been so cold, so matter-of-fact, and Don had simply been what? Upset? Horrified? No, that wasn’t it. What, then? Frightened? That was it, frightened, but for himself or someone else? Maybe he was just afraid of bears. Academic, really, but I hated it when things didn’t fit neatly. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that something weird was happening here.

“I gather Diamond won an injunction to stop the logging and it was overturned. They erected a barricade last month to stop the beginning of the logging. They set up a camp. Dozens of protesters, including children. There were a lot of arrests, and when the injunction was overturned, there was some sabotage of equipment so the loggers can’t start until next month and they are fuming mad. No one’s taking up his battle and the loggers are gearing up. They plan to start on the east side of Dumoine right away. The north side is slated for cutting next fall.”

“Not a few people would have welcomed Diamond’s death,” noted Martha, echoing exactly what I had been studiously avoiding thinking.

I looked up quickly. The words sent shivers down my spine. I shuddered, remembering our near miss. That flash of purple, was it just a figment of my imagination or had someone really tried to kill us? And if so, why? Had it had something to do with Diamond’s death?”

But Ryan and I were still alive, and no one had tried again. It made no sense. Thank God, I had kept my suspicions to myself. No use looking stupid if you don’t have to.

“Well, that’s all right then.” Martha’s voice brought me back with a jolt. If I keep daydreaming like this I’ll be jolted out of existence, I thought.

“What’s all right?”

“This bear business. All tidied up, neat as a pin; you’ve survived, case is closed, as they say, and we can move on to the important things in life such as your insects.”

God, if only it were that simple. Martha cleared her throat, an ominous rumble. She glanced over the mess in my office, her sharp, penetrating eyes searching among the bottles and vials on the desk.

“Surely, Cordi, this isn’t all you got then, is it?” She waved at the vials and bottles in disgust.

I shook my head. “Everything’s up in the lab, but it doesn’t amount to even this much.” I sighed. One day’s collection salvaged from two weeks of work. If I hadn’t known just how depressing it all was, I could have read it easily from Martha’s face.

“Lord love you, Cordi. That’s not enough for even one new lab, my dear, let alone any new experiments you might have cooking.” She studied my face closely. “What happened?” she asked softly.

I let my anger slide away from me, but I knew it wouldn’t evaporate. It would just go to ground until I hauled it out again, but at least it was being bumped by other thoughts.

“I did get some live larvae. Most of them are in the lab,” I said. “I’m hoping we can get them to pupate and then identify what they are, see how long it takes, show their habitat, and try to incorporate that into a lab. Maybe the students will take a proprietary interest in their charges and not get bored.”

“What happened to the rest?”

“Two wonderful weeks’ worth. We crashed the canoe in the last set of rapids. We hadn’t intended to run them, but we accidentally got caught in them.” Involuntarily I saw again the boulder, the blur of something purple, and Ryan crashing into the canoe. I brushed aside the images.

“Most of my collection was strapped under the stern and bow seats. We found only pieces of it below the falls. All I came out with was the stuff I collected that last day, and that’s only because I left the day’s collection at the end of the portage when we went back for the canoe. I don’t see how I’m going to get this course working for me. I’m hoping some great thought will jump out at me, rescue me from oblivion.” I didn’t put much faith in my thoughts, though.

Those insects had taken me the best part of my two-week vacation to collect. We’d crawled over cliffs, shimmied down into caves, swept fields and trees, and raided the maggots off dead animals in search of the unusual and the mundane. Dozens of little kill jars and live jars, each with a tiny card noting date, location, and habitat in which the critters had been found, had been squirrelled away in my storage case. All gone, shattered by the rocks, I thought angrily, all but the ones inadvertently taken from Diamond’s corpse.

Martha put on her holier-than-thou expression, nose in the air. “Well it serves you right, gallivanting down suicidal rivers miles from nowhere. Really, how do you accidentally get caught in a rapid anyway? I can’t think how you ever got it into that head of yours to go into wild country like that. Why, you’d think you had a death wish,” she said, as though her reputation had just been put on the line.

She had seldom ventured into the wilderness in her life. The closest thing to it she had ever seen was my farm and the parks in Ottawa. An earthen path was a monstrous thing; give her good old cement and asphalt and she was happy.

I smiled, remembering the near miss in the rapids. Martha, for once, wasn’t far off the mark, even though her sentiment was all ass-backwards, but if I told her the truth she would smother me in sympathy and dire warnings. I preferred being bawled out to suffocating.

“I know, I know, Martha,” I said lowering my voice in a conspiratorial whisper, “but some of the best insects are up there, miles from nowhere, in the deepest darkest corners of the Canadian wilderness where bears and wolves and bobcats and dead bodies lurk around every corner and you take your life in your hands just venturing into the woods.”

“Oooh, you see? I told you. Too effing dangerous. Sheer stupidity.”

Martha took everything at face value, believed everything. Watching her as I told her my story, I could relive it through Martha’s facial features. They rose and fell and plummeted and bucked with the rapids, grew round and menacing with the sweeper, grew blank and then widened in fear with the falling of the boulder (I omitted the possibility that someone had hurled it at us and longed to know what facial expression would have gone with that), and finally grew exhausted as she mentally hauled herself out alongside me and Ryan at the end of the rapids.

It was exhausting to watch, but at the end she collected her features, remoulded them into a business-like form, added a frown, and said, “Just what do you suppose we’re going to do about course material, with all your insects at the bottom of the river or wherever they go when they dump in a rapids. Classes start in less than two months and I have no specimens to set up your labs.”

“We’ll have to phone around, find out if some colleagues have some extra unsorted material, and I’ll have to scramble and do some more collecting. I’m sure someone would happily lend us some material, especially if we tell them we’ll sort the insects from the leaf litter and identify them. ”

Martha grimaced. Sorting was not pleasant work.

“Worst case scenario we can use some of Jefferson’s collection, but they’re not in very good shape.” I sighed. “I just don’t have time to go on another field trip, with all my experiments needing to be written up. The Dean is on my case pressing me for papers. Publish or perish, as they say.” I was eager to get at my research. Animal Behaviour wanted more analysis before they’d accept my paper on what male praying mantids might gain from their lopsided encounters with their cannibalistic mates.

“We’ll have to get the lab material somehow,” I said.

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Well, I don’t want to have to admit I have nothing new and use the old collections, do I? Not unless I want to get the ass end of the lab next year too, and miss out on a chance at tenure by showing them that I can’t breathe new life into a hemorrhaging course.”

Seeing Martha’s face, I realized I’d said too much. It was one thing to believe your career is stagnating. It was quite another to advertise that fact to your staff. Dreadful idea — too demoralizing, even if I believed everything I said, and Martha knew it. I added hastily, “Oh, it’s not that. I’m just disappointed. There were a couple of spiders that I collected that were really rather exciting.”

Martha curled her upper lip and hooded her eyes in a look of sheer disgust.

“They’re not that ugly Martha, really,” I laughed, but it was true that I had never seen anything like those spiders before. Now I wouldn’t get the chance to find out if anybody else had seen them either.

“I’d best be phoning around then,” Martha said. In a flurry of activity, totally at odds with her considerable bulk, she corralled some vials and jars from my desk and started to leave. I watched in amusement as her face began a one-act play. The features moulded and changed into dawning realization of something, and the something became quite horrendous until her features once again puckered in a kind of silent scream of revolt. She stopped suddenly and looked back at me, her face spewing disgust.

“Those larvae in the lab, they’re not from …” I raised my hands in self-defence. Martha’s face grew more disgusted still. Shifting like an ocean wave battering against the sand it ebbed and waned as her thoughts raced through her head, changing her features like the skin of a chameleon. I really believed that her features might disintegrate in imitation of what she was thinking. “Oh, lord save me, Cordi, how can you do these things?”

I shrugged, stifled a smile. “Two of them are on the far wall in the two cages by the sink. The rest are in the common lab. There wasn’t room in mine.” Not surprising, I thought — my lab was almost as small as my office. I was always having to beg for space from my colleagues who seemed to have gobs of it … but then, they all had the perks that go with tenure. Martha marshalled her features back into a more or less normal position and waddled out of my office.

I looked at the mail piled high on the desk, sorted through it quickly — nothing from the NSERC grants people yet. God, how they kept me waiting and hoping, second-guessing myself and my competence ten times a day. I was almost out of funds, and without the grant I wouldn’t be able to fund a graduate student next fall, and without a graduate student, the department might not be interested in granting me another year. Jesus, life could be a bitch. I stashed all the mail in a big box for some future free moment, and then I returned a dozen calls and put off the lecture planning people another two weeks — how could I give them the synopsis of my course when I had no material? I’d have to fudge it and hope the Dean didn’t call me in and grill me.

I gazed out the window, wondering how to pick up my career, feeling the dark cobwebby entrails of depression reaching out for me. My heart lurched at the horrible feeling, and I struggled to rid the thoughts from my head. I’d never get tenure if I couldn’t control my periodic depressions.

There was a quick step and heavy breathing, and I was thankful for an interruption until the round, wrecked face of Martha reappeared in the room. I read disaster in every nuance of the wobbling, shivering flesh on her face.

“Jesus, Martha, what happened to you? You look like a squashed spider.”

It was true. Every ounce of flesh on her face seemed to be sagging into a puddle and her skin was as white as milk. Martha took in a great deep breath and grew rounder, like a balloon. “It’s your lab, Cordi.” It came out in a screech that set my nerves to grinding.

“What is it? What’s happened?” I asked, moving quickly around my desk, the pit of my stomach lurching like a tugboat in a jar full of hurricanes.

“I think you’d better come see for yourself.” I took one last look at Martha’s face as it seemed to metamorphose into even greater doom and raced out of my office, taking the stairs two at a time. There was no one in the long corridor. The doors were closed on all sides and the institutional tiles on the floor sparkled in the overhead fluorescent lighting. My door was the sixth from the end, on the right.

It was ajar, and even before I reached it, I smelled it. What is it about smell and disaster these days? I thought calmly, in that unreality before reality hits. I walked in.

Everything seemed to be in its place, nothing wrong except for the heavy reek of insecticide. It was everywhere — the air was glutinous with it. “This isn’t happening,” I said, trying to will it so. “It’s not happening.” I moved in a daze from cage to cage. Insect after insect, dead. The mice and salamanders seemed okay, but who knew what the chemical would have done to my controlled conditions? All garbage now. Thank God I wasn’t in the middle of any mantid experiment.

Nothing could stop the deadly work of the insecticide. I moved from cage to cage unbelieving, touching the cages, looking in. But at least my data was safe. The insects could be replaced. I turned to my laptop computer to boot it up, but I didn’t get far. The keyboard was drenched in some sort of fluid that had spread throughout the computer. A horrible feeling crept through me as I bent to sniff the keyboard. Formaldehyde. It was swimming in formaldehyde. Like an automaton I turned on the computer, but nothing happened. I remembered the death sentence handed out to the computer of a friend of mine, who had once spilled a glass of red wine on her computer. All my files gone. My raw data, gone. But I had backups. A pain in the ass to get them reinstalled, but at least I had them. Or did I?

I turned from the room, took the stairs on the run, and raced into my office to the drawer where I kept my computer backup disks. I yanked it open and stared at the empty drawer. No disks. I pulled it all the way out and flung it on the floor, getting a precarious sense of relief from watching it splinter and shatter. Not very well made, I thought, in that strange displacing calm that disaster spawns. With a sinking heart, I remembered doing a backup the previous week and asking my grad student to put them in my office when the backup was done. But he’d lost his key to my office and had left the disks in the lab. I raced back upstairs and flung open every drawer and cupboard, but there were no disks. I turned in desperation to the computer and started madly pushing buttons, looking for a miracle I knew I wasn’t going to get. What can I say? I’m an indecisive fatalist. Sometimes.

It was some time before I was aware that Martha was standing in the doorway, with a handkerchief draped decorously over her nose.

“Who would want to do this to you Cordi?” she whispered. “In all my years here I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing exciting ever happens around here, and then suddenly, in the space of weeks, you find a dead body, nearly die, and have your lab gratuitously fumigated?”

I kicked the drawer with my foot. “Whoever it was, I’ve got to find them. I’ve got to get those disks back.” After months of lethargy induced by one of my black moods, it felt good to feel so motivated, even if it was out of fear.

“But, Cordi, what makes you think they’ll still have the disks?”

I looked at Martha, giving the butterflies in my stomach a ride worthy of a sailboat in six-metre waves. I took a deep breath to calm the waves and swallowed hard. I thought I was a pessimist, but this horrible thought had miraculously eluded me.

“Because if they don’t, I’m history.”

“You sure are, my dear Cordi.”

The voice grated every nerve in my body as I turned to face Jim Hilson. He walked in without being invited and casually picked up one of the fumigated cages.

“Oh, Cordi, this is just dreadful. Now you won’t be able to publish any papers.” He looked at me ruefully. You’re going to need a bit of luck, Cordi, to get out of this mess.” He smiled then and replaced the fumigated cage. “Cheers,” he said. And then he was gone. Just like that.