In Too Deep

by Andreas Oertel

  “Sure,” she said. “That sounds good. But we still have time to shine him up.”

  Eric and I scrounged around the shed until we found a bottle of spray cleaner and some rags. Rachel was already enthusiastically knocking off dried chunks of dirt.

  “I’ll start with the head,” I said, handing her a cloth. I gave the bronze face a blast of cleaner and passed the bottle to Rachel.

  “And I’ll start by getting some snacks,” Eric said, leaving the shed. “We’re not going to have time for a proper lunch later.”

  When Eric was gone, Rachel said, “I wonder how they make something this big?” She sprayed her rag and gently polished a shoulder, as though it were made of crystal and would shatter with too much pressure.

  “I think they use wax and then melt the wax,” I replied. I twisted the rag and wedged it into an eye socket to get out the crud.

  “Wax?” she repeated. “How do you mean?”

  I stopped what I was doing to explain. “Well, they make a sort of rough statue of the guy out of clay, trying to get his features more or less right.” I paused and Rachel nodded. “Then they slap on a layer of wax and sculpt it the way they want the final statue to look.”

  “Okay, and then what?”

  I had her full attention. “Then they cover the wax with another coat of clay. And finally—”

  “They pour the liquid bronze between the two layers of clay and the wax melts,” Rachel cut in, pleased that she’d followed the logic.

  “Exactly. The wax melts, you break away the outer layer of clay, and you’re left with a bronze statue.” I rapped the chest for effect with my knuckles. Ouch.

  “But what happens to the wax?”

  “The wax drains out on the bottom. That’s why it’s called ‘the lost wax method.’”

  “You sure do know some weird stuff.” She was teasing me now, laughing.

  “I think I read that in a library book,” I said. Then, to really impress her with my weirdness, I added, “The Chinese have been doing it that way for thousands of years. You know, making bronze Buddhas and stuff. Artists everywhere still do it that way.”

  Rachel nodded and continued wiping the statue. It was actually easy to clean. Most of the stuff just wiped off. And it wasn’t damaged at all. Sure, there were a few scratches on the surface, but all in all, it probably looked the same as the day it was made.

  “Hey, look at this, Cody.” Rachel had been polishing the left leg, and now she pointed at the heel.

  “Look at what?” I leaned forward, my head next to hers.

  “This.” Her hand touched the heel. “It looks like some sort of cover.”

  I bent closer, trying hard to see what she was pointing at. Then I saw it. “I think you’re right.”

  Both heels had a brass plate on them that was about the size of a playing card. The plate was flush with the rest of the boot, and unless you knew it was there, you’d never see it.

  “Maybe it comes off,” she said, jumping up.

  Rachel rummaged around in an old toolbox until she found a screwdriver and a hammer. She passed the screwdriver to me, and I pushed the flat edge of the screwdriver into one of the seams. I held the tool steady, and Rachel tapped it in with the hammer. I pried the screwdriver back.

  Clang. The brass plate popped off and hit the floor.

  I leaned forward to take a look, but Rachel’s head was already investigating the opening.

  “There’s nothing in it,” Rachel said, sounding disappointed, as though she thought it would be crammed with diamonds.

  I peered inside too, and then felt around with my hand. “Well, I can feel two holes in the bottom of the boot—one at the ball of the foot, and one under the heel. I think the mounting bolts must go through the holes. And then they’re tightened up from the inside through these openings in the heels.”

  “And then the covers get popped on again,” she said.

  “Yeah. I think so. I can’t see any other purpose for the covers—or the holes.”

  Rachel picked the bronze plate off the floor and gave it to me. It was heavy for something so small. No wonder we had such a hard time hauling the statue out of the lake. I was about to tap the cover back into place when Rachel snatched it from my grasp.

  “Wait!” she cried. Wiping the inside surface, she held it up for me to see. “There’s writing on it.”

  Affixed to the bronze surface was a five-centimetre-square metal label. It said:

  WESTERN CANADIAN BRONZE

  Calgary, Alberta

  No. MCC-04-28-0042

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said.

  I agreed. “All we have to do now is phone Western Canadian Bronze and ask them who ordered this guy. Then we can call him or her and give it back. And like Eric always says, maybe we can even collect a reward.”

  “Let’s call them now!” Rachel said. She was just as excited as I was.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you might have some explaining to do when your mom gets the phone bill.”

  Rachel sprang from the ground and took off for the house to get the cordless phone. I continued wiping down the statue, finishing just as Rachel returned.

  “Eric’s making us sandwiches,” she said, passing me the phone. “You do the talking.”

  I dialled directory assistance for Alberta and waited. Rachel leaned over and pressed the speaker button on the phone so she could hear too.

  “Welcome to Telus. Directory assistance for what city, please?” a female recording asked.

  I held out the phone to Rachel. “Calgary,” she said. I got a playful punch on the arm from her for putting her on the spot.

  “For what listing?” It was a real person now—a male.

  “For Western Canadian Bronze,” I said.

  “Western Canadian Bronze,” he repeated. “I have no listing.”

  Rachel groaned.

  “What about Canadian Bronze?” I asked.

  “I have no listing for Canadian Bronze,” he said, sounding kind of like a robot too.

  “Can you look for any businesses that make bronze statues?” I was getting desperate.

  “One moment, please.” We heard the faint clicking of a computer keyboard as he searched. Five seconds later, he said, “I have ‘Jerry’s Genuine Bronze Trophies.’”

  I was pretty sure we weren’t looking for Jerry, so I thanked the operator and hung up.

  “Oh, well, it was worth a try,” I said.

  “Maybe they went out of business or something,” Rachel suggested.

  “That’s what I was thinking too,” I said. “I’ll search the Internet a bit when I get home.”

  Rachel took three lawn chairs down from hooks on the wall and passed them to me. I popped them open and placed them on the ground around the statue.

  Rachel sat down and said, “He looks good.”

  I nodded and carefully sat on the brittle-looking nylon straps of my chair. “What about those numbers?” I wondered out loud.

  “The ones on the label?” she said.

  I extracted myself from the chair and looked at the identification tag again—the one inside the boot. “MCC, zero-four, two-eight, zero-zero-four-two,” I said, reading the letters and numbers out loud. “Must be the identification of the statue.”

  “Or some kind of coding for a date.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Like the day they cast it, or shipped it, or something like that.”

  “You know,” Rachel said, “he could have been at the bottom of Smoke Lake for decades.” She leaned back again, like she had to accept that herself.

  “Now he’s out.” I sat down beside her again.

  “Couldn’t we just ask around town if someone lost a statue in the last five years, ten years, or fifty years?” she said.

  I shook my head. “No, we can’t. I don’t think we should let anyone know we have it—at least, not yet. Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide him, and I wouldn’t want that person to know we have him. Plus, if we told
people we had it, they’d want to know where we got it. And then we’d be in deep trouble.”

  “Why? It’s been sitting at the bottom of a lake. Isn’t there some kind of a ‘finders keepers’ rule?”

  “I don’t think that rule applies,” I said, “when you have to break the law to do the finding. Remember, Scolletti specifically told us we weren’t to go there. We ignored him, we trespassed, and then we stole something from private property.”

  Rachel considered that for a minute, then said, “So we can’t even say that we didn’t know it was private property.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And whether he’s involved with this statue thing or not, I think Scolletti is mean enough to do it—to call the police on us.”

  “So what can we do, if we can’t tell anyone?” she said, sounding frustrated.

  “We’ll have to snoop around on our own . . . carefully.”

  “Like we always do, I guess.”

  At that moment, Eric walked in carrying a plate of sandwiches. He strolled over to the bronze and circled around it, never taking his eyes off the shiny surface—like he was checking out a used car. “You guys have been busy,” he commented. “This is definitely an improvement.”

  He took a peanut butter and jam sandwich from the plate and passed the plate to me. Then he pointed to the brass cover I was still holding. “What d’you got there?” he asked between bites.

  “Well, Mr. Summers,” I said, doing my Sherlock Holmes bit again, “in your absence, and with the kind assistance of your sibling, we have deduced two things. First, we have concluded, through detailed analysis, that the statue before us was cast by a company called Western Canadian Bronze.”

  Rachel laughed.

  “Pray continue, Mr. Lint,” Eric said, getting into the spirit.

  “Second, we have further assessed the evidence and have come to the conclusion that this magnificent piece of art was produced in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.”

  “Really?” Eric looked astonished. “How could you possibly know that?”

  CHAPTER

  8

  RACHEL AND I spent the next five minutes informing Eric about our discovery, and also about our unsuccessful phone call. If we didn’t have the ID plate to show him, he wouldn’t have believed a word of it—and who could blame him?

  I reminded Eric about our promise to look for Mr. Provost’s Rolex. “So maybe on the way back from Clearwater Lake,” I said, “we can stop at my house and do some Googling.”

  Eric seemed to not hear me. He was standing over the statue, staring intensely down at the bronze face. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers. “That’s it!” he cried.

  Rachel jumped, startled. “What’s ‘it’?” she asked.

  “The bronze,” Eric said, pointing at the statue. “I thought there was something familiar about it this morning. But now that you guys have him cleaned up, it’s more obvious.”

  I got up and stood next to Eric. “What’s obvious?” I asked, looking down at the face.

  “Well, maybe it’s just me,” Eric said, “but don’t you guys think he looks a lot like Mr. Ghost-Keeper? You know, the elder we met five hundred years ago?”

  Rachel came over and stood on the other side of her brother.

  I squinted at the face, trying hard to recall the old storyteller we had met earlier that summer when we had accidentally time-travelled through a wormhole.

  “He could be a descendant,” Rachel finally said. “The nose, the mouth, the cheekbones—they really are very similar.

  Eric nodded. “Yeah, I’m not saying this is him—Ghost-Keeper—but he sure looks a lot like him.”

  “It’s certainly possible,” I said, “that his features were passed on to his kids and grandkids. And he did live in the area.”

  “Wow!” Eric said. He pulled up a lawn chair and sat down. “This is almost like destiny or something.”

  “How do you figure that?” Rachel asked.

  “Well,” Eric said, “when we were stuck in the past, Ghost-Keeper and the Cree helped us get back here. And now we’ve stumbled upon this likeness of Ghost-Keeper, and we’re going to help him get back to wherever he belongs.”

  Rachel looked at Eric and said, “That’s a nice way to look at it, but the resemblance could also be a coincidence.”

  “We’ll see,” Eric said. “We’ll see.

  Ten minutes later, we were getting ready for our Clearwater Lake assignment. We crammed one wetsuit, one mask, and one set of flippers into a backpack. Then, before we left, we quickly covered the statue with an old tarp and closed the shed door.

  We pedalled east out of town. When we crossed the bridge over the river, we spread out and rode side by side. Cars were infrequent, so it was okay to hog the road. We reviewed what we knew and what we didn’t know. We knew who had made the statue, and where. And we knew it was a likeness of a North American Indigenous person—probably Cree, and possibly a descendant of our friend Ghost-Keeper. But we still didn’t know who owned it, or why it had been dumped in Smoke Lake.

  But that was all about to change with one clue. I just wish that clue hadn’t included my family.

  Mr. Provost lived on the south side of Clearwater Lake, a small lake three kilometres from Sultana. When we pulled into his paved driveway, I understood how he could afford an expensive Rolex. The house was a two-storey log cabin—built with real logs, not log siding—and it was massive. To call it a “cabin” was crazy. It was bigger than any house in Sultana.

  Mr. Provost stood in the garage as we rolled to a stop. It looked like he was tinkering with a chainsaw. He was skinny, suntanned, and wearing only shorts. And he was really old—in his eighties for sure.

  He turned from his workbench and eyed us with suspicion. The garage was doublewide and complete with “his” and “hers” signs swaying gently over each half. The “hers” vehicle was missing, and the “his” was a red sport utility vehicle. The far wall was stacked with newspapers all the way up to the roof; I had never seen so many in one place.

  We dropped our bikes and approached the garage.

  Mr. Provost dropped his screwdriver on the bench without taking his eyes off of us. It reminded me of a Wild West showdown. I could just imagine what he was thinking: Crazy teenagers, what the heck do they want?

  “Hi, Mr. Provost,” I said, thinking I’d better break the ice before he got his shotgun. “I’m Cody. You mentioned to my dad that you lost your watch.”

  No response.

  “You told him that you dropped your wristwatch in the lake?” I tried again—louder this time. He could be hard of hearing, like most old people. “You wanted us to find it?”

  Still nothing.

  Never mind deaf, maybe he is Alzheimering.

  “Ohhh,” he said, realizing at last that we weren’t there to steal his lawn ornaments. “I’m sorry. Please forgive my manners. I was expecting someone much older. You kids look too young to be divers.”

  I quickly explained that we would be snorkelling, not scuba diving. Then I introduced Eric and Rachel, and everyone shook hands. He cheered up even more when Rachel said he had a beautiful place. Grabbing her hand, he led us around the yard like a tour guide. The tour ended at his dock—a dock that seemed more like a public marina.

  The lake was called Clearwater for a good reason. On a sunny day, the visibility underwater was five metres. And on a lousy day, you could probably still see farther than in any other lake in the area. The local lodge operator proudly told tourists that it was one of the three clearest lakes in the world. I’m not sure if that’s true, but believe me, it was pretty clear—and super cold.

  Standing at the end of Mr. Provost’s dock, I knew today was a good snorkelling day. Only the slightest ripple tickled the surface of the lake, and the water was a great colour—nothing but blue. Greys and greens often meant waves had stirred up the bottom, making a mess of the visibility.

  “Perfect,” Eric said, reading my mind.

  I nodded. “Where did you l
ose the watch, Mr. Provost?” He was pointing out a small lake trout to Rachel, at the side of the dock. He didn’t seem all that interested in finding his Rolex.

  “Huh? Oh, right, the watch.” He walked over to the end of the dock, stuck his arm straight out and pointed down with his thumb. “If a fish didn’t take it, it’s here.”

  Eric and I looked at each other, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. Yeah, right. When someone says the exact location they lost anything, you have to be suspicious.

  “How deep is it here, sir?” Eric asked, staring over the edge.

  “Four metres.” He turned to Rachel. “Come on up to the house. We’ll have some lemonade. Let’s let the boys work.” He grinned at us like it was all a practical joke and started back down the dock toward his mansion.

  Rachel shrugged her shoulders and followed him.

  When they were gone, I turned to Eric. “Well, how do you want to do this?”

  Eric said, “Just do your thing.”

  Doing “my thing” was holding my breath (also known as freediving). And like I said earlier, I was getting really good at it. “Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I was thinking.”

  There was no point in Eric going down, because we both knew I could hold my breath twice as long as he could. My record of two minutes and ten seconds wasn’t even close to the fifteen-minute times professional free-divers were capable of, but still, I was pleased with my unique ability to stay underwater for a long time.

  “But what if he’s wrong,” I said, continuing to gripe, “and it’s not right here? Or what if he’s senile and only thinks he dropped it here? Or what if a—”

  “A fish ate it?” Eric interrupted. “Just hurry up so we can go to the beach. I want to cool off.”

  “Then maybe you should get in the water and find the watch.”

  “I’m hot and sweaty,” Eric said, “not stupid.”

  “I hate to tell you, but the water at Sunset Beach is just as cold as it is here.”

  Eric laughed. “Okay, maybe I’m stupid. But you’re still getting the watch. I’ll be your helper.”