by Lou Allin
Marilyn stood slowly and walked to the mantel, pointing to a silver-framed graduation picture of Shannon. An old-fashioned nursing cap framed her face like the angel of mercy she had been. Marilyn lifted it like the holy grail. “Was it worth it?” Then she turned. “She felt no pain. I am quite sure she felt no pain.”
Holly blinked and took a deep breath. The atmosphere was close, like a vacuum. If she didn’t get some air… “Shannon?” And then in Marilyn’s pooling eyes, she saw another depth like a mirror reflecting mirrors. “You mean your mother. Clare.”
Marilyn’s fist pounded the chair back, and tears of rage lit her eyes. “Other people’s misery was his happiness. A user with no conscience. Then…later…he took off, leaving poor Judy in the lurch. Thank god he never got his hands on that son of his.”
Marilyn could have blamed Joel. Dead men make the best villains. “So you killed him.”
Marilyn tossed her head back like a warhorse summoning its last strength. Her wild curls rearranged themselves in defiance, and the veins in her neck stood out. “He took that Fentanyl himself. It was in the medicine cabinet. That’s the first place addicts look.”
Or did you put it in the 007 case that night he stayed over and wait for his addiction to take its course? “A bit of luck for you.”
Marilyn’s voice rose. “It was about time. Joel deserved what he got. Death by his own selfish hand. I’m not sorry it happened.”
“But listen to yourself. Years of atonement show that you must regret what happened to your mother.”
Marilyn folded her arms as her muscles went rigid. “You say you know. Let me call your bluff.”
“I saw the nail holes on the stairs. Had the filler analyzed. I took pictures. Explain that away.”
“She was dead drunk every night. Animals have more caring mothers. And besides, the house is gone. Pictures won’t prove anything. It could be anywhere.”
“What?” The room was stifling. Something smoky met her nostrils, and she thought she heard an ominous crackling despite the roaring winds.
“Demolition finished today. They set charges to defeat those old fir beams. It collapsed like a pancake. For a moment I felt like applauding. All these years it’s sat there like a reproach. A tombstone. I sang our anthem.”
“Your anthem?”
Marilyn began in a clear soprano. “Stronger than Spain and France, Queen of the Renaissance. God save the Queen. Long may her banners wave, o’er nobleman and knave, but never passion’s slave…” Her voice trailed off.
In the middle of an opera, Holly felt a surge of heat rush through her spine and into her chest. She touched her pocket where the tiny recorder hummed, picking up human voices. “I still have the play fragment back at the office. And this tape.”
The fragile skin around the corners of Marilyn’s eyes revealed her age, despite her musculature. No matter how hard the deed, she was still soft inside. The fact that she and Shannon had dedicated themselves to a life of service proved that. Holly was already trying the case. A kind of self-defense. With the mitigation of her youth. Only fifteen.
Suddenly the lick of a wild grass fire streaked across the picture window and lit up the room. Embroiled in a brutal conversation, they had been oblivious to what was happening outside.
Marilyn ran to the front door, opened it as a wave of heat pounded in and slammed it. The yard was on fire. “A lightning strike. We can’t go this way,” she said with a hint of panic in her voice.
White blaze surrounded them as they exited a side door to meet a vortex of vampiric winds. Holly shouted, “The debris around your property is going up like tinder. We’re trapped in a fire ring.”
Marilyn wiped her forehead. Faced with losing everything, she seemed preternaturally calm. “Bobber Creek. There’s a boat. A canoe.”
“Then for God’s sake, move.” Holly shoved her shoulder, and they took off running down a narrow path. Behind them trailed the hissing of the fire and the snap of vegetation exploding. Looking back made no sense. Why stare death in the face until the last moment?
Marilyn’s arms pumped as they sprinted to the edge of the ravine, then skidded down what looked like a game trail. It had been years since anyone had chopped at the creek access, and a thicket of brambles, willows and scrub bushes impeded them. Creatures normally unseen in their camouflaged habitat burst forth in a primitive urge to escape their fates. A rabbit screamed as it bolted for the creek. Songbirds darted upward from the flames, and above, a raven soared straight through the boiling smoke, its shrill awk-awk a clarion call. The winds that hurried the flames also dispersed the choking clouds so that sometimes breathing was safe, sometimes impossible. In her hurry, Holly lost her hat to a gust which carried it over the creek into a tree. She yanked the mask from her pocket and pulled it over her head, leaving her nose free for the moment. She needed all the oxygen she could get.
Coated with dust, their faces streaked with soot, they reached a narrow run of water about a foot deep. In shallow places, it dabbled over rocks in a boulder garden. Holly had been naïve to think that they could have charged into the boat and floated to safety downstream like in a Grade D movie. While she could, she took huge gulps of air fast disappearing as the flames sucked oxygen. Marilyn dropped to her knees, her face contorted with fear.
“We can wade across, Marilyn, but what’s the purpose? In these winds, the flames will leap from crown to crown. This isn’t substantial enough to be a fire break in the dry season.” Why did she imagine that Marilyn would think straight after facing a desperate past? She had allowed herself to be led into death’s hot mouth. Remaining in the house might have been a better idea. Grass and brush fires burned themselves out fast. With its huge logs, the house might have withstood death’s whispers.
Marilyn stood and turned slowly. They looked at each other like ruined lovers as a holocaust of flames roared up behind them in curtains of fiery lace. “The water’s a foot deep. There’s a small aluminum canoe for the rainy season when the water is high. We can overturn it and stay below until the blast passes.”
Holly was wringing wet from perspiration and exertion. Her thighs were screaming from lactic acid. “That doesn’t sound much like a chance,” she yelled.
“It’s the only one we have. You can’t outrun a fire.”
At the bottom of the ravine, the shrunken creek was about twenty feet wide with overhanging alders and bigleaf maples. Marilyn pointed to a metal prow, and with mutual grunts, they pulled the old aluminum bathtub of a boat, crusty with decades of green mould like any stationary object in the temperate rainforest.“We’ll haul it out, hunker down, and hope for the best,” she said. Was this the way stupid people died, Holly wondered? But she had never imagined the speed and quixotic nature of a forest fire spawned by unlucky blasts of lightning.
Together they urged the light craft toward the water. The tape recorder dropped from Holly’s pocket, tramped by her boot in the shallows. Her brain spun at warp speed, estimating time and space. Vegetation was sparse. Marilyn’s assessment might be right. The water wouldn’t evaporate. The flames would pass over or die, depending on the capricious wind. At any minute it could shift and leave them safe.
Just as they prepared to drop to their knees in the water under the craft, Marilyn stopped and groaned. Determination overtook the look of stress as a blue vein pulsed in her temple. “Our book. I have to go back. It’s all that’s left of Arcadia. I can never…I would never—”
“That’s crazy,” Holly screamed as her face flushed with the heat of the advancing flames. “You have no choice.”
“Oh, but I do. Use the canoe. Save yourself.” Marilyn dropped the boat and splashed to the edge of the stream, stumbling twice but rising as if jolted with adrenaline. Each step seemed to give her renewed strength. “And if I’m not…” she added and gave a salute. It was the bravest gesture Holly had ever seen.
“Come back. It’s suicide!” As Holly struggled to hold onto the boat, the woman disappeared into the
burning alders as if parting the Red Sea. Flames licked at her soaked clothes as her head disappeared over the ridge. Would that moisture give her momentary protection? It was a fool’s wager.
Holly shivered in the cold water, despite the rising heat and stifling air. No sane person would follow that exit. Marilyn had judged herself and passed sentence. With a resigned sob, Holly sank into a sitting position and urged the small boat over her head, turning the prow alongside the negligible current, allowing the water to slide by. It was dark beneath with only the light diffused from the water. Bracing herself on the strut like doing pull-ups and submerging herself to her nose, she waited for eternity to knock. The boat wouldn’t melt at this temperature, but if it got too hot, it would resemble an oven.
A roar and a rush moved her metal carapace. The frets grew warm, then hard to hold, even with the cold water. She could hear the hissing of steam as vegetation fell into the creek. How many cubic feet of breathable oxygen did she have? Her lungs were beginning to ache. Was this the beginning of the end? Had she done those things which she ought not to have done and left undone those things which she should have done?
Suddenly there was a giant boom, and the canoe shook like a dying dog. The aluminum was scorching her fingers. She exchanged one hand for another to hold on and keep her shell in place. Panic shot through her like an arrow. She was going to roast alive. If one animal was a worse totem than the deer, it was a turtle. She coughed a grim laugh. Then another explosion rattled the canoe like the knock of death. The end of the world. Soon she’d pass out, drop the canoe and drift into history. Who could explain to her father why she had abandoned him just as they had become a family again, just as the enigma of her mother began to reveal itself? “Noooooooooo,” she called, only to have her ears blasted by the hollowness. Despite her will, she began to hyperventilate, exhausting what little air remained.
Marilyn would not return. Even with her soaked clothes, if she’d reached the house and her lost dream, even if by some miracle the wind had shifted…the propane tanks had exploded. At one with the boat, Holly felt something fall overhead. A small flutter echoed in her ears. Pat, pat, patter, pat. The tiny casket cooled. The rain had arrived. Her breathing slowed.
TWENTY
Her watch had conked out in the creek. What time had elapsed Holly couldn’t guess, but it was getting stuffy and cloying in her prison. She weighed her options, knowing little about physics. Perhaps the remaining hot air would suck out the canoe itself, leaving her scorched and her lungs fried, if she didn’t die from smoke inhalation. But slowly she felt the heat dissipating. Where it had been unnaturally bright for a moment through the reflections of the water, it was now darker. Had the fire passed?
She dared a peek and saw only cooling smoke blowing back toward the sea. The wind had turned. Coughing, she shoved aside the canoe and looked around. As quickly as it had rampaged, the fire had left only smouldering bushes and grass. Her face felt greasy, and she wondered if her hair and eyelashes had singed. She pulled off the mask and squinted through stinging tears. A path led down the creek, perhaps bypassing the worst of the fire. Marilyn had chosen her fate. No one could have survived that blast. Holly shivered from relief as well as cold. It wasn’t just raining. It was pouring. This coast held the record for most rain in Canada in a twenty-four hour period.
Holly edged her way along the creek. The flames hadn’t reached this area, and where erosion had spilled down the banks, the vegetation was sparse. In a few hundred yards, she was able to crest the hill. As she had expected, the durable log house had escaped the fire damage, but one wall had been destroyed in the blast. Pieces of the propane tanks had scattered like shrapnel into the other buildings. A still, bloody form, clothes tattered but intact, lay in the burned grass stubs. Though the woman was long beyond help, Holly trudged forward, her boots hot from the ground, steaming from the rain. She couldn’t feel her palms, but she knew they would hurt later.
Marilyn was fifty feet from the house, facing toward the creek, as if felled in completing her mission. Many things could have killed her. Smoke inhalation, the flak from the exploding tanks. She lay on her stomach, fists clenched but her clothes barely scorched and her hair flecked with ashes. She seemed to be protecting something beneath her. Did the book mean more than life itself?
At a painful trot, Holly headed back down the lane toward the fence where she had left the Suburban. The wind from the south had carried the lightning strike towards the house. This area was untouched. Nature had toyed with the scene, like the patches of Hawaiian jungle left by lava flows which oozed around them and into the sea.
In the truck, she tried the radio. No luck. In the distance a helicopter droned forward as if on reconnaissance. She flailed her arms in the usual distress gesture and watched it swoop down in an untouched part of the field to the south. A man in a grey uniform got out and walked toward her. He carried a small pack.
“All right, officer? We just got word on the fire from a passing tourist who called us from Rennie.” He looked her up and down, then at the car. “Were you back there in the fire? You should have been dead, from the looks of this.”
She shook her head and blinked back salty tears. “There was a fatality. The lady who owns the property.” Why get more complicated than that? “The propane blew.”
He rubbed his rough jaw, probably on call for the last twenty-four hours. “Holy crap. It looks like a bomb hit. How in hell did you make it out?”
She explained the scheme with the creek as he handed her a bottle of water. “You were lucky,” he said.
While the pilot radioed back to headquarters to send an ambulance, Holly sat in the Suburban. Her eyes were raw coals of pain, and she felt feverish, as if she had sustained a serious sunburn on her face and hands. The officer brought their first aid kit and dabbed an antiseptic lotion on her exposed skin. His hands were gentle. For some reason she felt cold and went behind the vehicle to retch what was left of her lunch.
Assuring the officer that she was well enough to remain, she waited for the ambulance. It took a mere half hour from Vic General, a record time for the area. Boone Mason stepped out, his trademark hobble easy to recognize from afar.
The furious force of the rains had passed, leaving the fields black and smoking. In only a few weeks, grass would spring up where char had been. The force through the green fuse would be obeyed. Across the strait, the sun was surrendering in the west amid diffusing clouds and particulate. An apricot haze was streaked with crimson and purple. The day was going down on Marilyn’s dream. Holly hoped that she had passed quickly and joined her one love.
Gauging her emotions, Boone made few observations, just patted her back with his ham-hock hand and got to work with Marilyn’s remains. Then he called in the stretcher bearers with their heavy plastic body bag.
She could hear them muttering discreetly over their task. Mason came over with a silver flask. “Drink up,” he said. “Settles my stomach.”
She took a deep draught of the rye and wiped her mouth old-west style. “Thanks,” she said.
He looked at her with skepticism. “How come you’re still here talking to this old man?”
“It’s a long story. Got a few hours?”
Mason stuck his corn-cob pipe into his mouth and sucked audibly. They were doing their duties with tenderness and dispatch. As the men slipped on latex gloves and began to move Marilyn, one said, “Hey, look at this.”
“Yeah, some kind of a fancy book.”
Holly moved forward. “I’ll take it. It was hers.”
“And she gave her life to save it? Was it, like, rare or something?”
“You might say that. One of a kind.”
It was charred and still warm. As she opened the pages, they began flaking, carried away by the wind. The words folie à deux came to mind. Clare Clavir had paid dearly for trampling the dreams of impressionable and sensitive young spirits. Marilyn seemed to show little if any remorse for having taken a life. Shannon was a cyph
er, her thoughts lost in death. They had kept their secret so well. Was there atonement in delivering thirty-five useful years? The question was now academic, little point in even revisiting the unprovable crime. Holly wondered if her own sheltered upbringing had prevented her from understanding the depths and heights of human motivation. She could but try.
EPILOGUE
Holly sat with Great Auntie Stella as the parade began to kick off the Indigenous Games in Duncan. Down Canada Avenue over 4500 young athletes marched proudly with banners. From all over the country and even part of the States, twenty-three teams representing at least that many tribes had come to compete with the best and brightest. Before passing through the symbolic red gates at the Si’Em Le’lum Field, the leader of each team asked permission from Cowichan Tribes Chief Lydia Hwitsum in order to enter the territory. This was the seventh event in a tradition started in Edmonton in 1990.
Stella had brought lawn chairs and a cooler of iced drinks, and they sat close to the field, thanks to her position of respect in the small community. A crowd of about twenty thousand waited for the festivities to start. This was the first time that a tribe, the Cowichan, had hosted the event instead of a city. Spirit drummers sounded from every direction. Even the Premier of British Columbia appeared at the festive opening ceremonies.
“Look at our spirit pole,” Stella said as it was raised in pride with the same significance as the Olympic torch. It had travelled all over the province, and over ten thousand people had helped symbolically with its carving. A frog, salmon, wolf and eagle took their places on the fabled log of traditional Douglas fir.
Holly rose in salute to a common purpose and proud heritage. The fact that the crowd was demonstrably multi-ethnic made her even happier. Everyone was sharing in the spirit of friendship and accomplishment. Several of her distant relatives, second and third cousins, were participating in the lacrosse match. One was expected to win the archery contest. Canoe racing and rifle shooting were among the hottest tickets. Best of all for her, strong young women were taking places of pride, something her mother would have championed.