by Lou Allin
Holly grinned and pointed to the ceiling, letting her fingers flutter down. “We are the people who fell from the sky.” Their culture was oral. Though little remained for long in the wet climate, continuous settlement dated from at least five thousand years earlier, and middens from two millennia demonstrated a fondness for shellfish, especially littleneck and butter clams. Weirs were established on the major rivers, and deer traps woven from cedar bark. Of all the places in North America, the coast was one of the richest for foodstuffs due to the mild climate and marine location. No roaming Anasazi these, ravaged by droughts, but a people whose meat came easily to the table. When the government had banned the potlatch in 1870, a feasting tradition involving much gift-giving, Salish culture had gone underground for more than two generations. Now legalized since World War Two, it was returning with renewed pride.
The rocker creaked as Stella continued her questions. “Do you remember the twelve names?” Long before the Great Flood, a dozen separate human beings had fallen from the heavens, bringing different gifts.
Holly took a deep breath. Stella always asked her that. The names were difficult, but she retained their phonetic memory if not the spelling in the Hul’q’umi’num language, with its disconcerting apostrophes, a dictionary created in the last century. The Warmlands, or Quw’utsun, was the alternate spelling for Cowichan. The land bore the history inscribed upon it. The huge boulder left on top of Mt. Prevost, aka Swugus, had saved people in the Great Flood. A giant boulder near modern Mt. Roberts had been flung by a chosen warrior to kill a monster octopus.
The Salish occupied a territory that stretched from Washington State to Alaska. It contained seven peoples, including the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Northern and Southern Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Nootka, and the farthest south, the Coast Salish. Bonnie Martin, nee Rice, had belonged to the Cowichan band around the big lake. She had won scholarships to university, where she’d met Norman in Toronto as she was finishing a law degree at Osgoode Hall. An odd couple, they had connected in the first blush of their twenties before their personalities were firm and while they still bathed in romantic ideals.
“I thought you would become our medicine woman,” Stella said with a mock pout, her tangled steely eyebrows warring. “You were so interested in our plants, learning all the time from those books your mother gave you. Every time you came, I took you into the woods to gather the sacred herbs, roots and flowers. Teas and tonics for stomach, eyes and arthritis. How to tell the death camus from the nourishing blue camus.” Patches particular to families were as close as these people came to owning property. They hadn’t understood why the white man wanted to cut down the riches of the land to plant his demanding crops in their stead, when hunting and gathering filled the belly.
Holly put an arm around her. “And you taught me how to make a horizontal cut and pull the red bark from the Tree of Life to make baskets and mats. Or reap the yellow cedar with its waterproof pitch for robes and hats.”
“The cedar is our mother. It gives us everything. Wood for warmth and building. Bark for cloth and baskets. Women used to chew the green cones as a contraceptive.”
“Maybe it worked. I don’t imagine cedar breath is attractive.”
Stella paused and settled her hands in her lap. How knobbed from arthritis her knuckles had become, but they would never rest until her last heartbeat. She pointed at the flames licking at a driftwood fire some boys had made on the beach. “Cedar warms us, too, even now when our hydro goes down in storms.
And when the white man came and saw our huge, fine houses, he could not believe that we had hewn wooden planks with only stone tools. Cedar is soft but durable. It can be split easily, a willing wood.”
Then Stella grew silent and seemed to be thinking. Her creased lids fluttered shut, and she began humming a melody as old as her people. The “Slug Song” was Holly’s favourite. “Imush q’uyatl’un,” it began. “Walk, slug.” Then “What is wrong, slug? Smile, slug. Speak, slug.” By that time Holly would have fallen asleep, slow as the invertebrate.
The venerable old woman gave a deep groan and let her knitting drop onto her lap. “Your mother. It is not good. She doesn’t rest.”
There it was. The reproach Holly had known was coming. Did she mean this literally? That without a body, the soul wandered? “You believe she’s dead? You said that about Mimi, too.” Her mother’s rowdy older sister had left the island at eighteen, stealing her auntie’s purse and going east with a drifter. To their increasing shame, word of her felonies and scams had reached the family, but no one had mentioned her for years.
“Mimi became a ghost to us when she harmed others, but your mother lives in our hearts.”
Holly bowed her head. Passion denied it, but her mind had accepted it long ago.
“I know it, child. I feel it here.” She tapped her great bosom. Sadness pulled at her face like gravity as she gave the sigh of ages.
“But what can I do, Auntie Stella? Ten years have passed. I’ve tried through official channels, and there’s no…” She didn’t know how she could communicate the frustrations of a bureaucracy to a woman who thought with her feelings and never respected a door closed against justice.
Stella smiled and pulled at one long brown earlobe. “Did you ever wonder why you didn’t follow the medicine? There was another purpose for you. Find her. And when you do, you will understand why she left us.” She ran a finger along a string of yarn. “Seek the thread and follow it to its origins. You must be as patient as a spider and as powerful as the ladybug that drank up all the floodwater.” She stabbed the ball of yarn with the needles, as violent a gesture as she would ever make. “Your mother and I have waited long enough.”
Holly nodded as she stood and looked out at a giant hulk listing on a sandbar in the harbour. Once a proud tugboat, then abandoned, it had caused a ruckus in the small town. Jurisdiction was murky. There was something about appealing to the Minister of Wrecks, but only after two years. Meanwhile, it lurched in large reproach. “Take care of me,” it seemed to say, a metaphor for Holly’s burdens.
When Holly got home, Norman was on the phone, an irritated look on his face. He beckoned to her as he closed a hand over the mouthpiece. “Can you take Shogun to the vet for his shots? This call just came in, and I have to deal with it.” He was talking to the dean about a problem student whom he had failed. “Says he’s going to sue the university. Big shot athlete. But he plagiarized his paper on Lincoln Logs. I caught it with Google. This old man is not behind the technology door.”
Holly gave him an okay sign and grabbed the leash. Minutes later at the vet’s in Sooke, she saw Marilyn hurrying from her Audi, the little old Maltese cradled in her arms in a blanket, only its black nose and grizzled muzzle in sight. “Something wrong?” she asked, opening the clinic door and keeping Shogun close as he struggled to smell the other dog.
“Brittany’s in too much pain. She can’t even walk now. Or won’t. It’s cruel to make her go on. Dogs know when they want to leave. She overstayed her time because of us.” She wiped away tears as her voice trailed off in despair.
Holly swallowed back a lump in her throat. What a second blow for the woman, and yet how often life worked like that. “So are you…” She inclined her head toward a door to the back area. From the sympathetic look on the approaching tech’s face, she suspected that animals in distress were rushed with discretion and dignity to that room, a place of merciful release into the afterlife.
“Dr. Joe is very gentle. In a few minutes she’ll be running free at Rainbow Bridge.” In the waiting room, an older man sat with a King Charles spaniel pup cupped in his hands. The old generation giving birth to the new.
Perhaps that bridge was a childish concept, but it had helped Holly over the death of her two shepherds. Her mother had told her the story about old and sick pets becoming young and strong and helped her write a poem as a memorial message. Their graves in the backyard had gradually surrendered to moss.
With quiet effi
ciency, the vet tech led Marilyn into an inner office. Minutes passed with no sounds. Even the waiting room 100 was dead still. Then Marilyn emerged. Her eyes were red, but she looked at peace, as if she’d made the decision a long time ago and had been in denial. Behind her, the vet tech carried a small plain cardboard box. “Can you put…her in the back seat, please?” Marilyn said. “I have a lovely place already picked out at home. Overlooking the strait and the sunset. Brittany always loved to sit with us at the end of the day.”
Holly held the door for the tech. Shogun was being unusually well-mannered, as if sensing the solemnity. Then again, a vet’s office wasn’t an animal’s favourite venue. With a bittersweet smile, Marilyn stroked him. “Lovely coat. So this is Shogun, the big barker?”
“That he is. I’m glad my dad adopted him as a rescue.” A thought occurred to her. “Say, maybe you might want—”
Marilyn’s eyes filmed with moisture. She shook her head as she heard the car door shut outside. “It’s too soon. Much too soon.”
Holly flushed and ran a hand over Shogun’s silky head to calm herself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”
Marilyn gave her a hug, still redolent of lavender. “You mean well, and that’s what counts.”
*
Back at the office late that afternoon, Ann reported that nothing had turned up on Joel Hall. “But we know why now. The prints belong to a man called Rick Fagin, aka Jim Hickok and Jeff Custer.”
“That’s a comedy in itself. Couldn’t he choose more normal aliases? What’s his rap sheet like?” Holly poured herself a coffee and took one of the oak chairs across from Ann’s desk. “Are there any threads to follow which will give us his real name?”
Ann leafed through it. “It goes way back. First he turns up in Winnipeg in juvie court at sixteen, or so he claimed he was. Shoplifting. Couldn’t find his family through the names he gave. Maybe he was just stubborn, or maybe he didn’t want anyone to know how he turned out. They put him in a foster home on probation, and according to them, a minister and his wife, he was an ugly customer. They weren’t sorry to see him leave a year later when he tried to seduce their daughter.”
“Nice. What else?” She looked at the mug shots. He’d been a good-looking guy in his youth. She recalled his face in death. The bone structure was there, despite the hard life. Bill had said that he could still attract women on his own level. Clearly family meant nothing to him. Perhaps he’d even been abused. Bonnie had often said that some people were too broken ever to be mended. She had been a pragmatist. She left romantic notions to Norman.
“Let’s see.” Ann turned a page, then another, then another. “What didn’t he do on the way up the ladder as a career criminal? Break and enter. Selling stolen goods. A couple of assaults. In and out of jail like a revolving door. Isn’t that pathetic? Over fifty, and he spent most of his life behind bars. With the three-strike rule in the U.S., he’d still be in a cell. Some people never learn. I just hope he never married some unsuspecting woman. That would be a mess. Not to mention passing on these genes.”
“What’s the last sign of him?” Holly asked. If someone was going to put out this much effort, they should have a fortune to show for it.
“Outstanding warrants in Toronto, but you know what happens when these guys cross provincial lines. Once they’re out of a jurisdiction, it’s too expensive to get them back. Unless they’re wanted for murder.”
“Con Air has only so much cash.” A recent hotly-contested campaign had begun in Vancouver where businesses made contributions to fly the ne’er-do-wells back to where they came from to face warrants. Running them out of town wild-west style. Legal processes had threatened to derail the plan.
Ann flipped to the past page. “Then he got into drugs as an independent. Made himself a chunk of change until he started bothering the competition in Windsor and dealing across the river. The big boys in Detroit gave him a royal beating. He was in the hospital with a concussion, a broken arm and jaw. Left the hospital and never showed up for his trial. Since then, two years ago, he hasn’t turned up in the system.”
“Lying low, or too old to run with the young dogs. Wonder what brought him here?” She told Ann about Bill’s idea that the dead man had a general familiarity with the area.
Ann looked out at the fog rolling across the strait. “The perfect climate?” They both shared a laugh. “Anyway, about that theft at the McNair B&B. I called all of the pawn shops in the Capital Region. Nothing recent. But what about trading posts or junk shops like Diesel Debbie’s. If he didn’t have a car…” Her voice trailed off in the obvious question.
Holly shot her a finger pistol. “Good thinking.”
“And that guy you told me about who ‘won’ the camcorder. Coincidences like this bother me.” Ann turned back to her keyboarding. “Can you find him, Holly?”
“He’s a guest of the province.Remember that broken window at BC Liquors?” Ann’s was a well-known face at that venue. Neither of them pretended that she was on the wagon. What she did on her own time was her business. It was healthier not to tiptoe around her taste for a drink. It was the painkillers that Holly worried about. Since she’d started the exercises, she seemed to be improving.
Diesel Debbie’s was a ramshackle converted barn on Oak Ridge Avenue on the west edge of Otter Point. The property had a proud history as one of the first local farms. Over the years, the land had been sold off in parcels. Now the old barn with spavined roof was all that was left of a dairy flourishing in 1890 and passed down for three generations. Up and down the quiet street, ominous yards signs announced the March of Zoning Progress: condos were sprouting like mushrooms now that sewers had arrived, allowing lots to split.
Holly parked and went into the building, passing a row of pressed-back chairs, a dented washboard and a balloon-tired bicycle. Inside was a packrat’s delight as dust motes rode the warm air and a trapped sparrow flapped for release.
“Hold that door open, will you? A bird in the house is bad luck.” Debbie was sitting in a battered leather recliner, too heavy to move except for fire or the prospect of a buck. Rumour had it that she’d gained her name from having been a long-haul truck driver on the ice road over Great Slave Lake. Too many hot turkey sandwiches with fries had robbed her of her minimal mobility, and now she had a disability pension. “Hello, my favourite officer. Haven’t seen you since your dad was in here looking for Depression glass.”
“He’s into the Seventies now.” Holly watched as the bird sailed free into the air.
Debbie brightened. “Seventies. You’re in luck. Hey, I got a lava lamp.” She hoisted herself up, a woman of only forty. At hand were a litre of Coke and an empty box of Joe Louis. “Ooo.” She clumped to a table, picked up the lamp and handed it to Holly. Then she collapsed in the chair.
“You need an assistant, Debbie. A little monkey to run around for you.”
“Considering all I make is peanuts, that’s a great idea.”
Holly rotated the strange apparatus. A red lump sat at the bottom of a clear, viscous liquid. “Might make a good present. He’s hard to buy for. How much?”
A twenty pleased them both. “And it better work, or I’m bringing it right back.” Holly’s voice grew more serious. “Listen, I know you deal in…electronics.” From where she stood, she could see several televisions and more delicate instruments in a glass case. .
“Sure do. Need a camera? A nearly new Nikon D80 came in yesterday. I can do you a wingding of a deal. Discount for the trade.”
“It’s a stolen camcorder I’m looking for.” She watched the woman for a reaction, but Debbie’s plucked eyebrow barely rose.
“Stolen?” Her tone even, Debbie flicked a speck of dust from her cardigan. “I don’t mess with that. Do I look crazy?”
“Of course not. But accidents happen.” Holly levelled her eyes at the woman then softened her glance and waved a hand. “Summer is busy. Paperwork’s such a bummer.”
Humping over to a huge bound record bo
ok on a nearby roll-top desk, Debbie confirmed that two days before, a man called Steve Riordan had sold her a nearly new Sony camcorder for fifty dollars. Except for the name, the description sounded like the man Bill had described, down to the truncated finger.
“That was a good deal for you, Debbie,” said Holly. “Weren’t you a tad suspicious? Be honest, now.”
Debbie cleared her throat before walking to a cabinet, removing the camcorder and handing it to Holly. “Depends what I get for it…would have gotten. Second hand is second hand.”
“What about a Rolex?” Holly checked the serial number of the camcorder against the one in her notebook and showed the result to Debbie.
“Hell, no. This isn’t a jewellery store.” Debbie’s broad brow furrowed into lines. “What now? Are you taking me in?”
“Consider yourself on unofficial probation.” It might have sold in a few days. This was a spot of luck. “I’m not surprised that he didn’t give his real name. Did you ask for any ID?”
Debbie gave an embarrassed grin. “I had one super headache that day. Maybe I wasn’t as sharp as usual.”
“Under another name, I believe that ‘Steve’ was taken into custody for drunkenness and vandalism. If I can confirm his identity, I can tie him in with a robbery in Fossil Bay.”
“Anything I can do, ask. I always cooperate with the law. For sure.”
Holly took the camcorder as evidence and gave Diesel Debbie a receipt. “I’ll bring back a picture of this man. As soon as we get an ID from you, we’re on our way.”
“Whatever you say. The law and I are good friends.” Debbie added an icing of sincerity to this cupcake.