by Caron Todd
“Give him a break.”
“It’s all instinct or wishful thinking or something. He doesn’t have evidence. Not real evidence.”
“He knows the people involved, understands their motivation. After twenty-six years that might be the best we can do.”
When they reached the end of the field Emily looked into the bush ahead of her, then turned and looked back at the caboose. Trees, grasses, rocks. More trees, more grasses, more rocks. She slapped her neck. And more blackflies.
George grumbled, “I know he’s your uncle and he was a fine cop in his day, but this is really pissing me off.”
“There.” Matthew pointed to the other side of the field. “Maybe twenty feet south of the caboose, going east—do you see that swath of trees that’s shorter than the rest?”
George and Emily looked.
“Kind of curving,” George said.
Matthew nodded. “We’ve got a twelve-foot band of twenty-year-old trees in the middle of a hundred-year-old forest.”
George smiled. “An old winter road. Turning off the main branch. Wonder where it goes?”
“I’ll bet my uncle can tell us.”
THEY TOOK TO THE AIR again. The line of young trees wound deeper into the bush until it met the Grey Lake mining road, grown in, too. They flew over the lake, deep and clear, and landed near an abandoned town on the other side.
“We’re going to visit Frank’s house,” Daniel said, leading them along a dirt path.
George muttered, “Here we go again.”
“There used to be gold mines here. The last one closed near the start of the Second World War. I’m told some people stuck around for twenty years after that.”
Above them, a huge bird soared. A bald eagle, Emily realized, with a sense of wonder. A wall of rock rose beside them, split into pillars that looked constructed, more like a neolithic ruin than a chunk of Precambrian shield worn down by nature.
They passed buildings with roofs and walls fallen in, tattered shacks, furniture and tools sitting as if someone had just put them down, except the furniture was falling to pieces and the tools were rusted. Emily almost expected to hear voices, doors opening and closing, bells on bicycles, but there was only the sound of water lapping against the shore and the buzzing of bees.
“This one,” Daniel said, walking faster toward one particular wreck of a cabin. Inside was mostly dirt and moss, and grass coming through the floor. Smiling, he held his hand out to what Emily thought was a potbellied stove.
“Well,” Matthew said. “Would you look at that. A forge.”
GEORGE POINTED OUT there was no conclusive evidence that Frank Carruthers had anything to do with the forge. Yes, it could be used to resmelt gold bars before smuggling them out of the country for resale to people who wouldn’t look too closely at things like refiner’s stamps. But an old forge wasn’t a surprise in what used to be a mining town.
“And that’s why he chose the location,” Daniel said.
“That’s why you think he chose it.”
“Granted. I appreciate your skepticism, George. Keeps me on my toes.” They each picked a boulder to sit on and Daniel opened a bag of sandwiches to pass around. “Puzzle piece one—an experienced pilot disappears without trace in spite of having a radio he can use to call for help. Two, he’s carrying triple the number of gold bars as usual.”
Matthew interrupted. “And he’s been heard to say he might fly off with his cargo one day.”
“Three,” Daniel went on, “when the Beaver was found the level of damage wasn’t consistent with a crash. Four, he’s not in the wreck. Neither’s the gold and neither’s his survival gear. Five, a winter road passes not too far from the so-called crash site and not too far from a cat train caboose.”
George started to nod. “And survival gear’s found in the caboose. And at the end of another winter road is an abandoned cabin with a forge.”
With an apologetic glance at Emily, Daniel said, “I’ve lost track of how many puzzle pieces that is, but let’s call this one six. A cat train driver is gone from his crew and his route for a few days before and after the aircraft disappears.”
Emily couldn’t sit listening. She paced away from the boulders, clutching her sandwich half. Daniel’s thirst to solve this thing seemed stronger than his feelings for his two old friends. Or for her.
She heard Matthew say, “Do I give this a number? Seven? McNabb and Carruthers were friends. McNabb’s son remembers them talking, making beer-soaked plans. Money-making schemes. Carruthers told Jock he’d get him a snowmobile one day. He was prone to talking big like that, but Ross remembers going for rides at the dealers’. So it went past talk.”
“You’re thinking it was a real shopping trip?”
“They buy the snowmobile, Jock keeps it at his cabin until Frank needs it—”
The ether, Emily thought, for starting cold engines.
“—and when Frank is done with it he gives it to his friend, as agreed,” Matthew continued. “So maybe Graham’s out of it after all. Frank could have used a snowmobile all the way from the airplane to this ghost town.”
“He’s not going to ride all those miles on a winter road on a snowmobile,” Daniel said. “He’ll be seen. Anyway, Ross told me the same story, but he said his dad never got the snowmobile.”
“Read all about it,” George said. “Crook goes back on word.”
“Here’s where the snowmobile comes in,” Daniel said. “Frank uses it to get from the wreckage to the main winter road. A cat train picks him up there, along with the snowmobile, so he can stay out of sight. The cat train takes him as far as the caboose and leaves. After all, Frank doesn’t want anyone to know exactly where he is while he’s smelting. Not Jock, not Graham. This little forge? It’s going to take a while. What if they’re picked up and talk to the cops? So the snowmobile is important on the last leg of the trip.”
Emily turned around. “Where is he, then? Some tropic isle, like my Uncle Will always thought?”
“That’s the question,” Matthew agreed. “Did he use the forge and ride out of here to sell his newly smelted gold?”
“I kind of hope so,” Daniel said.
George looked at the sky. “Oh, brother. After all this?”
Matthew pulled out his map. The abandoned town at Grey Lake was accessible by plane, boat in the warmer months, snowmobile in winter. On every side of the lake were miles of bug-and bear-infested bush and muskeg. It was hard to get to, but if you could, it was a very good place to hide.
“In the middle of March, when Carruthers’ plane went down—aren’t winter roads nearly finished by then?”
“Unless it’s been a really long, cold winter,” George said.
“So the blizzards that delayed Frank’s flight a couple of times would have made the roads last longer?”
“Could be the opposite. Too much snow can insulate the ice, soften it.”
For the first time, Matthew began to feel sorry for Frank Carruthers. “And the Grass River runs through Grey Lake, doesn’t it? The current would thin the ice even more. Take a heavy Bombardier snowmobile filled with nine hundred pounds of gold…”
Daniel muttered something under his breath.
“What’s that?” George asked.
“Impulsive. Frank. I always had to make him slow down and think.”
THEY HAD CHOSEN two possible routes over the lake from the winter road on the opposite shore. One to the old town’s main boat dock, the other ending near the cabin with the forge. For the past hour, George had been diving to check under the first route; Matthew the second. This wasn’t a southern mud-bottom lake. It was as clear as drinking water. If Carruthers had gone through the ice they should have found something by now.
Matthew sat on a slab of granite to let the sun warm him. A breeze rustled the trees. Not enough to move the jack pines, but he could see the changing shade pattern on the water as the aspen and tamarack nodded.
He stared. One of the shadows didn’
t move. He stretched out on his stomach to look closer.
It wasn’t a shadow. Could be a stone. Twenty feet down, maybe.
George was by the dock warming up, too. Matthew waved and pointed at the water in front of him. Pulling on his shoes, George called to Daniel and they both started over to him, going at Daniel’s pace. Emily stayed where she was, stiff, arms protectively around her middle.
Matthew decided not to wait. First he did a surface dive to check for hidden rocks. The rock wall seemed to go straight all the way down. He climbed out and back up the hill. He took several deep breaths, held it, leapt.
He struck the water and went deep, pulling with his arms, getting closer to the thing that wasn’t a shadow. His ears soon began to feel the pressure. He could feel the current where the river flowed, stronger than expected.
Not a rock, either. Something resting on a rock.
He touched it. Metal. Long, thin. A runner.
He reached the lake bed. Wood? Collapsed, covered with sand and something green. He tugged at a piece. It came apart like wet cardboard. Underneath he saw scattered rectangles, like a bunch of sandy shoe boxes. He rubbed silt from one. It gleamed.
His chest was bursting. He turned and began to reach upward. The water warmed, sunlight glistened. He broke the surface of the water and breathed.
THE NEXT DAY police divers started recovering what was left of Frank Carruthers and his haul of gold. Matthew and Daniel wanted to be there, so Emily went, too. She didn’t stay near shore with the others—that clear a view of what the divers brought to the surface was more than she wanted. Glad of a breeze that kept bugs away, she walked back and forth on a path that had once connected the little town to the beach. She tried to influence whatever it was that had already happened by hoping, hoping as hard as she could, that the police would find something to erase their suspicion of her father.
Matthew left the group by the water and started along the path to join her. They’d had no time alone since the night in Flin Flon. The breeze had tangled her hair, and she found herself afraid that he would take one look and wonder why he’d ever wanted to be close to her. She pressed her hands on top of her head, holding her hair flat.
“How’s the recovery going?”
“It’s a bit grim. I think Daniel’s saying some kind of goodbye.” He took her hands and pulled them away from her head. “There! The natural look. Windswept.”
“A while ago Martin told me I looked like Einstein. You know those posters that exaggerate that mane of his—”
“Martin’s an idiot.” Matthew checked his pocket. He found an elastic curled up in a pile of paper clips, matches and loose change. “That any use to you?”
“Thanks.” She pulled her hair into a ponytail and twisted the elastic around and around.
“I have to admit I don’t think of aging physicists when I look at your hair.”
“No?”
“I think of it draping across your face while you sleep. Hiding you from me. Until I brush it the other way, behind your ear and over the pillow. And there you are. My beautiful Emily.”
She was too surprised to say anything.
“I found some gold.” He held out a rough, dull stone and tilted it so that here and there metallic flecks caught the light. “Will you marry me, Emily?”
She ignored a pang and managed a small laugh. She didn’t know if he meant it. “If it fits.”
He put the stone in the palm of her hand and closed her fingers around it. “Perfect fit.”
He did mean it.
“You’d like Ottawa. You can see the Peace Tower from my living room window. In winter, you can skate on the canal. And Stratford’s not far.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Your mother?”
“She can’t go to Ottawa. Not at her age.”
“With time, she’d adjust.”
“She grew up in my grandmother’s house and moved a mile down the road when she got married. That’s her world. I can’t make her unhappy, Matthew. She has so little.” It was almost word for word what she’d said to John when she was eighteen.
“She’s gone further than you have, Emily. And she has more. A child. A home of her own.”
“I can’t abandon her.”
He touched her cheek. “That’s one of the things I love about you. Too bad for me. But I think you’re doing the right thing, staying in Three Creeks. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not.”
A throat-clearing sound came from behind him. “Sorry,” Daniel said. “Didn’t mean to intrude.”
Matthew moved away from Emily. “That’s all right. We were just talking.”
“The divers seem to have found everything.” Daniel looked at Emily so kindly it frightened her. “They can’t account for one gold bar.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
IN SWAN RIVER she picked up her own car. The quiet was welcome. No plans, no theories, no male voices. She didn’t want to think about anything more complicated than the speed limit.
But it was a three-hour drive. Matthew and Daniel and her father were in her mind the whole time. It would take a while to sort out what she’d learned about the three of them. Three very important men in her life and they were all like icebergs—mostly out of sight.
On the way from Snow Lake to Swan River she had asked Daniel and Matthew to explain why a man who had made such an effort to resist crime would suddenly embrace it when he had the most to lose. His wife and child, his home. His freedom would have been worth a lot to him right then.
“Yes, exactly,” Daniel had said. “Graham had a lot that was worth protecting when he made his choice.”
Wrong choice, Dad.
She didn’t remember him as the conflicted person Daniel saw. She remembered him holding her hand, the two of them wearing black rubber boots with orange soles and orange trim at the top so they could wade in the marshy field in spring. When the snow first melted it was more than just marshy. It was a huge pond. He’d lifted her so she could see the flooded field from higher up.
“It’s our Hudson Bay,” he’d said, and later he had shown her a map of Canada, pointing out the big, round inland sea with James Bay reaching down from it. Their field really was shaped like that. So then she had started saying, “Let’s go to Hudson Bay,” and he had never said no. He had never said he was too busy.
That was the main thing she remembered about him now. It was actually quite a lot to remember. All those days and all those walks.
If he had worn his rubber boots the day he died, he wouldn’t have died. If it had been wet or mushy, he would have wanted his boots. And it was wet because if it had been dry the ground wouldn’t have conducted electricity from the downed hydro wire.
That had been going around and around in her head without progress. Progress was impossible if you couldn’t let yourself think.
But turning down the Three Creeks road, she remembered something. Uncle Will saying that wearing boots on a wet day depended on what you wanted to do. And at last she thought she knew what her father had done that day.
THE DOG AND CAT were their usual selves—Hamish thumped his tail and the cat rubbed against her leg, maybe a little more emphatically than usual, as if it had missed her—but Emily’s mother was different. She waited in the doorway.
“You’re back.”
“Hi, Mom.” It was a relief to see her, safe and apparently content. “How are you doing?”
“Martin brought the check.”
It was less than half what her cousins owed for rent, but enough to pay the hydro and phone bills and still have a bit left over. She smiled at her mother. “I believe I see an Egyptian book in your future.”
Julia must have, too. The catalogs were out. She hovered near the table, clearly eager to turn her attention to them.
“John Ramsey’s been and gone.”
“I forgot all about him.” Mrs. Marsh would rib her about avoiding him again.
“He came to see you. I told him you were travel
ing with a man. A tall man who knows how to build.”
“Mom!”
“It was true.”
“Well, thanks. I appreciate it.”
Soon Julia was intent on her book order. Closing the door before the cat could follow, Emily went outside and through the back yard to the meadow. She kept going in the direction she had taken Matthew when she had showed him the big creek, but this time she turned north, to the marsh.
Going to the place where her father had died always felt uncomfortable. She hadn’t been anywhere near the accident when it happened, so it wasn’t bad memories. It wasn’t even all that personal. It was more like the dread people felt passing one of those crosses on the side of the highway. The cross said an awful thing had happened right there, that someone had suffered in that spot, that someone else remembered them with pain.
A different sort of grass grew here, with sharp, thin blades and sharp, pointy tips. She passed the middle of the field, where the water sometimes splashed over the tops of her boots when she was small, and reached the edge. Willows grew here, scrubby, short ones that hid a maze of paths, some made by cattle or deer, some natural gaps.
She parted the branches and ducked under, picking up a few scratches until she found the first path. To follow it, she still had to walk bent over, taking care that twigs didn’t poke her eyes. Chipping sparrows, dainty with little rust-colored caps, fluttered out of her way, disappearing deeper into the bush.
She came out the other side of the willows, and there was the oak. It looked different than her memory of it, the first climbing branch she couldn’t reach when she was six, now so low.
She clasped her hands around it, swung her feet over, and pulled herself onto it as if it was a horse. Hands against the main trunk for balance, she stood, got one foot on the next branch, reached for hand holds, pulled again. It was so easy, not a challenge, not an adventure at all.
High on the main trunk, twelve feet up, was a fist-sized hole. When she was six she had pictured elves living there. Her father had agreed it was possible. More likely it was chipmunks or owls, he’d said.