by Ingrid Betz
2.
A COUPLE OF FLY-FISHERMEN FROM MICHIGAN brought in the injured woman. Paul St. Denis, opening the day’s mail at his desk under the window of the cramped small office that smelled of coal-oil and oakum, had noticed their canoe on the lake earlier. Light glinting off the red bow caught his eye as the morning sun eased itself over the tops of the trees. Overnight, a fresh breeze had blown up from the west, making the water choppy. Bound for the public dock, he supposed, the canoe looked overloaded and the two men in it were being forced to paddle hard to make headway. Since it was not one of his rentals, he hadn’t paid much attention. Along with the usual raft of bills and a summer sales catalogue from Outfitters’ Supplies, there was a letter from Yvonne. St. Denis’s gaze strayed to the shelf where a framed photo of Danny, laughing, stood next to the coal-oil lamps and the battery radio he kept for emergencies. A good-looking boy, he took after his mother in that respect—or, he would, once they removed the braces from his teeth.
She’d promised to let him fly up and spend part of his summer holidays at the lake, but when had Yvonne ever kept a promise? Vindictive, manipulating bitch. Frowning, St. Denis relegated the familiar blue envelope to the bottom of the pile. What would the excuse be this time? An appointment with Danny’s orthodontist she’d forgotten about—and just so he knew, she’d need extra money to pay for it? Swearing under his breath, he worked a blunt thumb under the flap of the hydro bill. It wasn’t as though he had cash to spare after the child support cheque went out. Hydro rates had risen again, he noted. If the tourist season didn’t pick up soon, he’d have to hit the bank for a loan. Might as well step in quicksand.
A shout from the lake brought his head up sharply.
Bobbing in the waves at the end of his wharf was the red canoe. St. Denis watched as the men manoeuvered the craft alongside the wooden decking. One of them waved an arm and shouted again, something about needing a doctor. Grabbing his mobile phone, he scraped back his chair and headed for the door. Slumped in the canoe against the backpacks and the camping gear was a female figure half hidden under a sleeping bag. He pushed open the screen door and let it slam behind him. Jim, who’d been in the equipment shed doing repairs, was already loping down the path ahead of him, his black ponytail swinging.
“What happened?”
The older of the two men, the one in a Tilley hat, looked up. He braced the flat of his paddle on top of the wharf to keep the canoe steady. “Found her on the portage at Blueberry Lake. She’s in rough shape. Looked like she’d been there a while.”
Between the four of them, they managed to lift the woman onto the wharf. She lay without moving, eyes closed and hair spilling in a copper-coloured tangle over the weathered planks. St. Denis recognized the hair: it was a colour you didn’t forget. She had an out-of-the-way name, too; it would come to him in a minute. He knelt beside her, feeling her neck for a pulse. The men from the canoe straightened up, clearly relieved to be shifting responsibility for her onto somebody else.
Sunlight winked from the trout lures hooked to the crown of the Tilley hat as the older man glanced up the slope at the brown log structure housing the office and a store. ST. DENIS OUTFITTERS proclaimed the sign painted above the door in white block letters large enough to be visible from halfway across the lake. “That you?” the man in the hat asked, gesturing.
“Yeah. Paul St. Denis. Jim?” He tossed him the phone. “Call Medical Emergency. Tell them we’ll need transportation to the hospital. She was like this when you found her? Unconscious?”
“No. Conscious. Just. Like she was making an effort. Leaned up against a rock with a Swiss Army knife in her hand. Talking crazy. Wouldn’t let us come near at first. Whatever happened must’ve scared the hell out of her. I’m Ed Dyer, by the way. Retired hardware rep from Lansing, Michigan. This here’s my son-in-law, Bill Kravitz.”
St. Denis grunted acknowledgment. Dyer was making sure he established his credentials as a responsible citizen. Even without the accent, the Stars and Stripes flag emblems sewn onto their life-vests would have established the fact that they were Americans. He pushed aside the sleeping bag and ran his square-tipped fingers over the woman’s ribs, arms, and legs in the yellow Gortex jacket and dirt-stained cargo pants. No broken bones, at least. She looked younger than he remembered. Sunburned under a spatter of freckles, with the kind of scratches and smudges and bug bites that came from spending time in the bush. He leaned closer. A crease of blood had dried under her hair, just above the right temple. The skin around it looked angry and inflamed. He waited until Jim had finished on the phone. “They get hold of the doc?”
“He’s in Cedar Cove. Should be here in ten minutes. The nurse said move her as little as possible and keep her warm.”
St. Denis nodded. “Call MacCrae too, will you? He needs to see this.”
The Americans, who had been talking together in low voices, stopped and looked at him, alerted by his tone.
“Local police,” he explained. “The Mounties. The wound on her head is the kind you get from a rifle shot.”
The waves slapped against the side of the canoe while Jim punched in the number. Ed Dyer bent down for a closer look and let out a shocked grunt.
“Son of a gun. You don’t think… ”
“No sign of anybody else at the portage?”
“The guy who did it, you mean?”
“He’d be long gone. I mean another woman.”
“Another…?”
“They came through here last Sunday—two women.” They’d rented a canoe, a tent, a Coleman stove, and bought freeze-dried food—the works. St. Denis remembered they’d giggled and called themselves babes in the woods, making a joke of it but nervous, too, he could tell, because it was their first time in the bush. The other woman, the missing one, must have read the misgivings in his face, because she made a point of emphasizing they could take care of themselves. She had a certificate in one of those self-defence courses, Karate or Taikwondo, she said. She’d been aggressive about it, the challenge in her hard blue eyes informing him that she was aware his opinion of women was not high.
Ed Dyer’s features under the canvas brim looked pinched. “We’d have seen if there was somebody else.” His Adam’s apple worked in his skinny throat. “Or a body. Wouldn’t we, Bill?” He turned to the younger man for confirmation. “Not much cover on that portage,” he went on to explain. “It’s mostly rocks and blueberry bushes. We checked around for her gear. A pack or something. There was nothing.”
St. Denis nodded.
He slipped his hand into the pockets of the Gortex jacket and came out with a wad of tissues, a creased topographical map, and a box of waterproof matches. Nothing in the way of ID. Her name hadn’t come back to him yet, but he’d have it on file in the office along with her address and next-of-kin to notify. He insisted on that—insurance made it mandatory.
“She had a knife, you said?”
“Right.” Ed Dyer fished on his person and handed it over. No bigger than a glorified nail file, it made for a pitifully small weapon to be used in self-defence.
“We thought it kinda odd. Her bein’ on her own.” Bill Kravitz’s soft tenor belied his football linebacker’s girth. He had a boy’s round face and he looked scared. Under the vest, his T-shirt displayed the words, My Country, Never Wrong. “She never said nothin’ about another woman. Just kept spoutin’ weird stuff about bears. Right, Ed?”
“Bears?”
“Yeah. Bears,” confirmed the older man. “Cubs, in particular. Guys wearing those balaclava things scooping ’em up with giant nets. Sounded like something out of a movie. We figured she’d been scared by a bear. Maybe even attacked and the shock had her seeing things.” Ed checked his watch, not for the first time, and gave St. Denis an embarrassed look. “Any chance we could make it to the public dock by ten? We got a cooler full of trout and seats on the one o’clock plane out of Bracebridge.”
<
br /> St. Denis shrugged. He had no authority to hold the men. He would have once, in another province, but the days when he was a sergeant in the Sûreté du Québec were past.
“MacCrae will want a statement. It shouldn’t take long.” He turned. “I think Jim could get us some coffee while we wait. Jim?”
St. Denis watched Jim’s wiry figure move up the path on moccasined feet.
Bears. Hunting bears was illegal in August. It had to be poachers, who operated pretty much whenever they felt like it. Guys looking to stock a roadside zoo. Or worse: the ones who killed to supply the Asian demand for bear parts. Gall bladders, paws, and testicles, with the mutilated carcasses left behind as waste to rot. But wearing balaclavas and scooping up live cubs in nets? That was a new one on him.
He took off his cap, and ran a hand over his bristling salt-and-pepper hair.
Borrowman down in London would be interested. He had bears on the brain, ever since he’d returned from a trip to China last spring. Apparently he’d seen things done to them that belonged in a horror movie. John Borrowman was a university professor who ran an undercover animal activists’ group. A Cell, he called it, like they were some kind of spy outfit. A few years back, he’d offered St. Denis a small monthly retainer to be his eyes and ears up north. He’d give Borrowman a call later. Assuming the injured woman stuck to her story and it rang true.
Beside him on the wharf, she groaned and stirred. Green, that was her name. Marigold Green.
Marigold was a crazy name to lumber a girl with, but when you looked at her hair, you could see why her parents might have picked it. Her eyelids, with lashes thick and curling like one of those old-fashioned celluloid doll’s, fluttered, and he looked around for the bottle of water one of the Americans had put down.
She was coming to.
3.
JOHN BORROWMAN SWIVELLED HIS CHAIR around to face the blown-up topographical map of Algonquin Park that extended across the wall behind his desk. His moss-coloured eyes were thoughtful. “What makes you so sure these weren’t your common garden-variety poachers?
“Couple of things. The nets. The balaclavas. And scum like that doesn’t usually fire on tourists,” volunteered St. Denis. “Not with a high-powered hunting rifle.”
“Is that what they used?”
“According to the doctor who patched up the woman they shot.”
At the front of the house, his daughter Elaine’s two o’clock piano student was taking a third run at “The Hall of the Mountain King.” It was one of those old war-horse pieces that surfaced every August and signaled the approach of the fall recital season.
“Where is she now? The injured woman?”
“In the hospital in Huntsville. MacCrae says they’re keeping her a few days. I thought you’d want to know. Seeing it was bears they were after.”
Borrowman fingered his moustache, aware of a nervous excitement building. “Definitely. You talked to her yourself?”
“Once, when she came to, and again in the hospital.”
“She was certain about the men being Asian?”
“Slant-eyed and jabbering in Mandarin. So she said.”
Borrowman grimaced but begrudgingly let the racial slur pass. “She recognizes Mandarin?”
“Apparently. Seems her boss is friends with somebody from Hong Kong. Guy who runs a pharmacy in the same strip mall as his medical laboratory.”
“And that’s here in London, you say.”
“Right. The Cormier Lab. You know it?”
“It was in the news a while ago. Some trouble over their license. Late payment of fees, if I recall.”
The woman was a lab technician in her late twenties, St. Denis said. Her name was Marigold Green. She’d been canoeing in the park with a female companion who was now missing and presumed dead. Drowned, or shot by the same men who’d left Green for dead. A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to MacCrae, the local Mountie As St. Denis talked, Borrowman leaned forward and activated the LED lights that illuminated the map from behind, making the waterways of Algonquin Park stand out like black veins in a green leaf. He located the site of the portage where the woman had been found.
“They captured the cubs live, she said?”
“Her story was pretty graphic on that point.”
“And you believe her? Head injuries are funny things, and so are shock and five days’ hunger and isolation in the bush. She could have been hallucinating.”
“Would I be wasting your time with a call if I didn’t?”
“No.”
Borrowman was used to Paul St. Denis’s take-it-or-leave-it manner, but it still grated. In the background he heard the slam of a screen door and the rise and fall of voices. It was the Civic Holiday weekend and camping season was getting into high gear. Last year he might have been up there himself; hard to believe he never would be again.
“Paul? See what else you can find out. Listen around. Was this just a one-off, or part of a larger operation? Somebody must know something. They’ve got to be taking the bears somewhere. And call me the minute MacCrae issues a statement, will you?”
“You realize it’s my busy time of year.”
“I’ll make it worth your while.”
St. Denis grunted and spoke briefly to someone over his shoulder. “Got to run,” he said. “Don’t forget, those guys were wearing balaclavas. So don’t hold your breath on them being identified any time soon.”
Borrowman disconnected and pushed back his chair. Elaine’s student had moved on to Dance of the Happy Shades, the same as every year, and one of the chords was off-key. A familiar pain started to make itself felt in his abdomen.
An odd duck, Paul St. Denis. He’d been a dog handler in the Sûreté du Québec, headed for a top post in the canine division until he was let go for reasons of insubordination never made entirely clear. Shortly after, he’d moved to Ontario and set up an outfitting service in Algonquin Park, which was how Borrowman had met him. Nobody would describe their relationship as warm and friendly, but the two men understood each other. An affinity for nature and a concern for animals were not the only bonds they shared. Neither of them had been able to hold on to their wives. St. Denis had an ex-wife in Montréal who’d sued for custody of their only child, now a boy of twelve, and the experience had soured him on women. Although it didn’t appear to have coloured his assessment of the victim. What was her name? He’d jotted it down somewhere.
Shuffling the papers on his desk, he scanned the bird-tracks that constituted his handwriting. He was fifty-seven years old and over time he’d noticed his writing becoming more compressed and enigmatic, as though the need for secrecy were taking over every aspect of his personality. Marigold Green—there was her name in the margin of a notice regarding a rise in university parking fees. It sounded made-up, like the names of the pop-stars papering the walls of his younger son’s bedroom. St. Denis had laughed at the suggestion and said it better not be; the name was on the credit card she’d used to pay for the women’s equipment rental.
The pain was burrowing deeper. He got to his feet and started to pace, a tall coat hanger figure in shapeless corduroy slacks. A glance at his watch showed his medication wasn’t due for another hour.
Eating the tomato soup at lunch had been a mistake. Something about tomatoes—the acid, he supposed. Only Elaine took it as an affront whenever he didn’t eat what she put in front of him. It set a bad example for Donny and Raymond, she said. Not that either of his sons ever paid a blind bit of notice to anything he did, or for that matter, said. Elaine was the eldest of his children, old enough at twenty-four to be told the truth about the cancer gnawing at his gut, but so far he’d kept her in the dark. Just as he kept her in the dark about some of the activities of the Cell. It seemed easier that way.
His steps took him the familiar route from the desk to the leather sofa and the
n on a tangent to the bookcase and back. Elaine, on one of her periodic forays into the room with a vacuum cleaner, swore she could see the path he’d worn into the blue and burgundy Persian carpet. Burying his hands in his pockets, he stopped in front of the framed print that hung over the bookcase. Fenwicke Lansdowne’s Great Northern Diver had been a gift from the students and staff at the University of Western Ontario on the occasion of his twenty-fifth year of teaching zoology. Gavia Immer, the Common Loon, was a bird that had existed for eight million years, longer perhaps than any other on the planet. How many years were left before the encroachment of man destroyed the last of its wilderness habitats? The life-sized print depicted a loon about to break free of the water. Sometimes when he looked at the beating wings and the open, up-thrust beak of the bird, he thought he could hear its despairing, ululating cry.
Although, lately it had become mixed with the groaning of moon bears, a sound that hadn’t left him since his trip to China in April.
For years, companies in China had provided Canada’s wilderness parks with an illegal market for dried bear paws and gall bladders. But their poaching of live animals was a new and more sinister development. It appeared to confirm what he’d heard in Chengdu and Zhuhai, that China’s bear bile industry was looking to the west for a fresh source of bile. Where better than Canada, a country that supplied them with so many of their other resources, and specifically northern Ontario, with its thriving population of black bears?
It was at times like this that he missed his son-in-law the most. Asher Curran had been the Cell’s first recruit and top strategist.
They would sit up late together, thrashing out the implications of the latest outrage perpetrated against animals and coming up with what-if scenarios of protest and opposition. Starting after supper with the grand and unworkable, by the small hours of the night they’d have narrowed their options to the practical and possible.