Fire Lake

by J C Paulson

  Grace paused, sniffed and shivered. Adam put a blanket around her shoulders.

  “Do you want a drink, Grace? Let me get you some scotch or something. Wait here. Don’t move.”

  Adam went out into the main area, made sure Al had helped himself to coffee, and grabbed two glasses and a bottle of Glendronach, his favourite single malt.

  He poured two ounces for Grace. After she had downed a sip or two, she went on.

  “Thank you,” she said first, with a weak smile. “I’ll make this as short as I can.

  “After fifteen, twenty minutes of thrashing around in the dark, I started to cry. I didn’t know what to do. I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes and it was getting pretty chilly. Out of nowhere, I heard a human voice. I thought my insides were going to fall out of me. Who could be out there in the dark? I stopped crying, held my breath and huddled behind a tree.

  “The voice said, “Miss Grace? Is that you?” Who on Earth would call me Miss Grace? I didn’t answer, although I thought about it. You know: Yes! Yes! It’s me! Come save me! But I didn’t know who it was, although he obviously knew me.

  “Well, it didn’t matter. He had found me. A moment later, I could barely make out the shadow of a man — a very big man, right in front of me. He stood there, not moving, and finally said, ‘Please don’t be afraid, Miss Grace. It’s just Elias.’

  “The whole thing clicked together. He was the man everyone called the Hermit. I thought he was a legend; a myth, would be a better word. A story was going around at the time about a war veteran who had built a cabin in the woods and a fishing shack on the island. He had come back from serving overseas with terrible PTSD and couldn’t bear being around people. So, he lived this quiet life off the grid, and he was big and really messed up. People talked about him in hushed tones; they were afraid of him.

  “He said, ‘I won’t hurt you. I’ll help you find your way home.’ And I figured he had me anyway. How would I get away from someone who knew the woods that well in the darkness? And I mean dark. It was pitch black, even darker than tonight.

  “He took me by the arm without another word and led me through the forest. Eventually, we got to the path I was familiar with. He walked me to the cabin, turned and walked away.”

  “But that wasn’t the only time you met him, was it?” Adam asked.

  “No. I saw him a few more times. I went looking for him — in daylight, of course — and the first time I found him, I think I spooked him. I wanted to thank him, properly. But of course, I was also curious as hell. Anyway, when he spotted me, he ran off.

  “But the second time, he talked to me. It was months later, and he was in better mental shape, for whatever reason. Maybe he had healed a bit by then.

  “I asked him what all that “Miss Grace” stuff was about and told him to call me Grace. He laughed and said he used the honorific so I wouldn’t be frightened. He was trying to demonstrate respect and show that he knew who I was. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought if I used your name, you’d be less scared. I thought using ‘Miss’ made me sound nice.’ And he was nice. After that, I’d try to find him every time I came to the lake. Went fishing with him, once.”

  “Tell me about him. Who was he?”

  “I don’t know a lot, really; he didn’t want to talk about his past. He was from a nearby First Nation. He was vague about what had happened to him. I looked up some news coverage later, and from the timing, I think he might have been involved in an incident in Somalia, when the Canadian Airborne was on the ground there in 1993.”

  “Not the Shidane Arone murder?” Adam asked. He, and everyone else in Canada, remembered with horror the death of a Somali teenager at the hands of two crazed soldiers. The brutal Arone affair led to an inquiry and the disbanding of the elite Canadian Airborne Regiment. A Saskatchewan soldier named Clayton Matchee attempted to take his own life after being charged with second-degree murder; he did not succeed, but brain damage caused by the attempt made him unfit to stand trial.

  “It wasn’t the Arone killing. I think it was a raid on a village near the Airborne camp.”

  “I don’t think I’m familiar with that.”

  “It didn’t get a lot of public notice. Neither did the case of a Somali man shot to pieces after trying to steal from the base at Belet Huen. The Shidane Arone killing seemed to take over national attention, especially since it ended up the focus of an inquiry. But I looked up the shooting at Belet Huen. An Airborne captain had decided that petty theft was sabotage, so the soldiers had a shoot-to-kill order if they caught someone stealing. They used it.”

  “Could he have been in Rwanda? Our forces were there at about the same time.”

  “It’s possible. I couldn’t find any really ugly stories about our soldiers there, but many of them came back having seen terrible things, too.

  “I asked Elias what happened, that second time I found him, and his demeanour changed. Completely. He shook and stuttered, and I thought he was dealing with PTSD. The physical manifestations were shocking to me; he had seemed very calm until then.

  “He just said, ‘They saw monsters.’ Over and over again. Then he said, ‘They followed them. They followed them! They saw monsters.’ But he said they, not ‘I’ or ‘we.’ I interpreted that as meaning he wasn’t involved, but it’s hard to say.

  “What I was able to piece together,” Grace went on, for a moment, and stopped. “It wasn’t much. Something happened in that village.”

  Grace’s voice cracked, and she began to weep openly.

  “Stop, Babe, that’s enough for now.” Adam reached out to hold her.

  She swallowed hard but shook her head and finished her story.

  “After that, Elias fell off the Earth. He landed at Ferguson Lake, and enclosed himself in the forest. And now he’s dead.”

  “You never did a story on it.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “By the time I became a reporter, all of that was well in the past. All I could go on was news coverage, before that. And I couldn’t ever, ever betray Elias. He may have saved my life. The least I could do was protect his privacy. But what if I’m wrong, and he was involved?” Grace paused. “And what awaited him, if he was found?”

  Grace looked up at Adam with angry, tear-filled eyes.

  “Now we know.”

  Chapter Seven

  At four in the morning, Adam persuaded Al Simpson to grab some sleep in the tiny third bedroom off the living area. Simpson had assembled a search party, filed a report, alerted his superiors by phone and now had to wait through at least two more hours of utter darkness.

  “Nothing’s going to happen until dawn, Al. You might as well try to have a nap. You’ll be a piece of crap in the morning otherwise.”

  Al capitulated. Adam returned to the bedroom he shared with Grace, tugged off his jeans and pulled her down into the quilts. He rubbed her back and tried to get her to calm down.

  “This is going to be a shit storm. Isn’t it.” She wasn’t asking.

  “Yeah. Try to sleep, Grace. Chaos arrives in a couple of hours.”

  Adam didn’t think he would be able to sleep, and doubted Grace would, either; yet comforted by the warmth of each other’s bodies, exhausted by the long and bizarre night, they slipped into a dreamless, brief oblivion.

  Until chaos did, in fact, arrive.

  At six-thirty, uniformed men and women swarmed into the Rampling cabin. Adam awakened at the slam of the first car door. He rolled out of bed, pulled on jeans and a shirt and slipped out of the bedroom in seconds, closing the door behind him to shelter a naked Grace from the churning group of officers.

  But two minutes later, Grace was dressed, unruly hair pulled into a slightly crazy ponytail, pale face as composed as possible, and out in the living area.

  “Food,” she said, finding Adam in the throng as she nodded politely to the other officers. “Do they need food? Coffee?”

  “They might. Al will, and the officers who came with him last
night. We certainly do.”

  “Okay. Can you put the coffee pot on? I’ll run over to ask Tillie for supplies. Eggs, bread, whatever she has. We definitely don’t have enough for this crew.”

  Grace plunged her feet into well-worn deck shoes and fled out the door, craving a few moments away from the rapidly developing madness. Adam watched her go; saw her stop, briefly, when she reached the lakefront; saw her look out over the water to the right, tilt her head to one side; saw her look down.

  “Aw, Babe,” he whispered under his breath.

  Then she lifted her head and hurried down the path toward the Allbrights’ cottage. Tillie met her before she knocked.

  “What is going on, Grace?” she said, dispensing with a greeting. “This is pretty frightening.”

  “I don’t know how much I can say yet, Tillie. I think whatever happened wasn’t random.”

  “It was the Hermit. Wasn’t it?”

  Grace nodded.

  “I didn’t tell that salesman, Grace. I didn’t tell him anything.”

  “I know, Tillie. It’s not your fault, I know it isn’t. But whoever he was, that salesman, we have to find him. The RCMP are going to ask you a lot of questions. Are you ready for that?”

  “Hell yes. Bring it on.”

  “But Tillie, I didn’t come over to talk about it. I don’t have time. I also don’t have enough food. Could I borrow some eggs, maybe? Do you have any bread, juice, anything you can spare? I have something like ten or twelve cops in my cabin right now. At least four of them, not to mention Adam, are very hungry.”

  “You’ve come to the right cabin, my dear. And I’ll come help you.”

  “I promise to replace the food, Tillie. I’m so sorry to have to ask.”

  “Forget about it. Let me find the cooler and we’ll fill it up.”

  Moments later, Grace and Tillie were carrying the big cooler between them by its handles; it was heavy, laden with eggs, bread and butter, fresh muffins, orange juice and a coil of farmer sausage.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” said Grace, huffing a little as they hoisted the cooler up the deck stairs.

  “You can tell me what on God’s Earth happened,” said Tillie, breathing hard. “That’s how you can thank me enough.”

  A cheer greeted the two women as they came through the door. Adam started the barbecue and prepared to cook the sausage. Grace scrambled three dozen eggs and melted Swiss cheese on top. Tillie made whole wheat toast, laid out the blueberry muffins and mixed the orange juice. Paper plates were filled and refilled with the savoury and sweet breakfast foods; juice and coffee were poured into plastic and pottery cups. Police officers sat on the couch, the chairs, and the deck to eat on their laps. Half an hour later, not a crumb remained.

  “That’s how we do it at Ferguson Lake,” announced Tillie, accustomed to cooking massive meals for cottagers’ meetings.

  “Well, thank God it was we and not just me,” Grace said, dropping into a chair.

  Al Simpson took the opportunity to come and sit beside her.

  “Thank you. I sure appreciate it, Grace. And you, ma’am,” he said to Tillie, nodding at her. “I need to have a quiet chat with you now. Adam?” he called across the room, where Adam was chatting with the officers. “Want to join us on the deck?”

  “You bet.”

  Settled in a far corner away from the buzz, Al sat across from Grace and Adam with a notebook and asked, “Who was Elias Crow? How did you know him, and why did you care enough about him to race across the lake in the middle of the goddamn night?”

  “He may have saved my life.” Grace wondered, by the way he asked the question, if he thought Elias had been her lover. “I owed him the same. It’s a long story.”

  “Give me the short version. We can talk more later.”

  Grace gave Al the abridged version of what she had told Adam a few hours earlier.

  “He served, as I said, in Somalia, as far as I know,” she said, ending her tale.

  “What was he doing on that island?” asked Al, repeating the question he had asked five hours ago.

  “He had his fishing shack there. I never did find his main cabin. It was well hidden in the woods. Or is. I don’t know. He may have moved at some point.”

  “But what was he doing there? Why didn’t he live on the reserve? Did he live full time on the island and in the cabin?”

  “Yes, he did. The PTSD drove him away from society. Or so I thought. Maybe it was something else that made him choose to live alone in the forest. He is dead.”

  “You think he was hiding.”

  “Well, he may have been, right? In light of what’s happened.”

  “Your neighbour said something about a salesman. What’s that about?”

  “You’ll have to ask her the details. A man who said he was selling satellite dishes knocked on her door one day, a little while ago. No one does door-to-door sales out here, Al. You know that.”

  “Right. Okay. We’d better get going. It’s going to be a tough search.”

  “Grace,” Adam put in, “before we go, do you have any idea where his cabin might be?”

  “Well, I have some ideas. But they’re just ideas.”

  Grace went inside and returned carrying the large map of the provincial park that hung over the couch. She showed Al and Adam the spots she had long suspected could harbour Elias’s more permanent home, if you could call it that.

  “It can’t be here,” she said, pointing to an area south and east. “There’s a little lake right there, then the Beaver River. And it can’t be here,” she added, “because it’s too close to the fire break. Too exposed. It also can’t be here.” Grace indicated an area she knew was particularly swampy; she had tried to walk through it and around it, with no success, more than once.

  “So it’s got to be here, or here, or here.” Grace showed the officers areas mostly south and west of the islands and the bay. “I’ve noticed, a few times, bits of things when walking around there, mostly when I went looking for him. You know, things that didn’t fit — not garbage; that’s tourist spoor. But fish scales. A snarl of fishing line. A little piece of woolen fabric. No one comes out this way in the cold weather, or at least, very few people; you don’t see evidence of winter clothes very often. And fish scales? No. It had to be Elias. So my best guess is here.”

  Grace pointed to a spot south of the second island, and to the west — a considerable distance. “I was too afraid to go that far in,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay, Grace,” Adam said. “It’s okay. You couldn’t have prevented this, no matter what you did.”

  “God, I hope you’re right.”

  Al took the map, motioned to Adam, and went back inside to organize his people.

  Five minutes later, the cabin was empty, except for piles of dirty dishes, a carpet of crumbs and a huge garbage bag full of discarded cups and plates. And Tillie Allbright, up to her elbows in soapy water.

  Grace flatly refused to be left behind.

  “You will never find the path without me,” she argued. “That map won’t help you.”

  Al wordlessly held out a Kevlar vest and a helmet, and moments later she was back on the lake, bumping across the water in the early light — not to save a man, but to find his corpse for the second time.

  *****

  Three police boats roared in horizontal formation until they neared the first island; there, they slowed and proceeded single file. Grace, in the lead boat with Al, Adam and another constable, pointed with her arm to the right and turned her wrist to the left.

  Slowly, they turned around the big island, then the little one, and slipped into shore just before the bay’s opening. Grace scrambled over the gunnel, splashed into the warm shallows and waded in before Adam could stop her.

  She stood on the sandy shore before Al could take a breath. He raised his eyebrows at Adam.

  “Wait!” Adam called, as requested by those eyebrows. “Grace, you could wait for us.”

  She sto
pped. Elias was dead, after all. And whoever killed him had had hours to get away.

  “Sorry,” she said when the other officers joined her. “I’m a little anxious, apparently.”

  “It’s okay, Grace. Just stay close. We don’t know what this guy is capable of, or where he is. Let’s try not to get you shot today, okay?” Adam asked.

  “Yeah. Okay. This way.”

  Grace ducked under the low-hanging branches of the coniferous trees and plunged down a deer trail. She couldn’t remember where that path led, or where she had once turned off, but this was definitely the right outlet from the shore.

  Bless September, she thought a bit wildly, as she alternately strode and stumbled over the uneven terrain: there were few biting insects, and the weather was crisp, warm and fine.

  Moments later, she pulled up: another path, barely noticeable, led off to the right. She had never, as she told Al and Adam, followed it to the end, too frightened to be that deep in the forest alone. Being lost on the night Elias found her had not improved her nerve.

  “I think this might be it,” she said to Adam, who was right behind her.

  “Not sure, though.”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’d know better than any of us, so let’s go. We should try to be very quiet, Grace.”

  “Have I been crashing through the forest?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  Adam held up an arm and pointed to the right, indicating Grace’s change in direction to the RCMP officers following behind. Grace took Adam’s warning to heart, and crept along the path, both arms up to keep the tree branches from poking her in the face. She kept her eyes down, to avoid tripping on tree roots and to seek bits of evidence that Elias had been there.

  Half a kilometre later, she sensed more than saw the clearing ahead. The light changed from filtered to dappled; birdsong echoed instead of chirped. Fish scales glittered on the path. Bits of detritus hung from trees or littered the ground: a broken unbarbed hook, and incongruously, a pompom from a woolen hat. Like a child’s hat, but belonging to a grown man who had felt forced to remove himself from the company of others. Grace’s eyes burned.