by Ingrid Betz
Peter followed the signs to Highway 11 south and after the usual start-up businesses and car dealerships on the outskirts of town, followed by some patchy farmland, the Ontario bush resumed as though it had never been interrupted.
“Peter?” She hated it when they argued. She didn’t like having people angry at her. Sometimes, when things were going well at the Lab, he called the two of them a team and that’s when she was happiest. “You know I’m grateful. But you didn’t need to drive all the way up here to pick me up. With the Lab so busy, I could’ve…”
“What? Taken the bus back to London? You don’t honestly think I’d let you.” He fiddled with the temperature settings. The Corvette was second-hand, but like everything else Peter owned, it had all the bells and whistles. He let out an explosive breath. “Damn it, Mar. I had no business saying what I did just now. Not after all you’ve been through.” He patted her arm, as far as he ever went in touching her. “Friends?”
“Friends.”
He nodded, his face clearing. “Anyway, I wanted to come. Get a feel for where it happened. Since I got your call from the hospital, I’ve been checking into a few things online.”
Marigold looked at him with a twinge of unease. “What things?”
“Those guys in the Park? The poachers? I’ll bet any money they’re part of some organized commercial operation. Nets. Rifles. That was no one-time event you witnessed.”
“MacCrae said…”
“Let me finish. The way I figure it, an outfit that doesn’t balk at shooting innocent bystanders is playing for high stakes. By the same token, it’s an outfit that wouldn’t be averse to paying a little hush money.”
“If somebody blackmailed them, you mean?”
He tut-tutted. “You know better than that, Mar. Blackmail is illegal and it could backfire. I’m talking if somebody offered them a useful service, say, in exchange for keeping things quiet, they’d be inclined to accept.”
“A service?” She had no idea what he was talking about. She huddled deeper into her Gortex jacket. “Peter, these are not people you want to get mixed up with. Besides, how do you know who they are? The police haven’t released any information.”
“Chinese, weren’t they?” He gave her a narrow look. “You didn’t dream up that bit?”
“Of course not. Why would I? Watch it, there’s a bus ahead.”
He picked up speed to pass it. Windows with faces in them rushed by with a whoosh of sound. “You did sustain a head injury.”
“That was after I saw them, not before. There were five men and at least three of them were Chinese,” she said stubbornly. “Ask Constable MacCrae. He believed me.”
“Don’t get in a huff. You never actually saw their faces, did you? Weren’t they wearing black hoods or masks or something?”
“Balaclavas. Balaclavas don’t hide the eyes. Plus, I heard one of them shouting orders.” To the men with sticks thrashing the bushes. He was the one who’d yelled at her and Lynn, just before he’d raised his rifle. She could still hear the shouting; terror had imprinted the phrases on her brain. Marigold shifted in her seat, trying to escape the bruises from where she’d fallen on the rocks. “Chinese, Canada—what does it matter? They’re criminals. Thugs.”
“Don’t be dense, Mar. Of course it matters. Who they are will tell us why they’re out there poaching bears. And how somebody could put the screws on them as a result.”
“For heaven’s sake, Peter! If you think you know something useful, tell the RCMP.”
“I don’t do favours for the police,” said Peter coldly. “Anyway, I got most of my information in the strictest confidence. From Kim Wu.”
“Kim!” She stared at him. “Information about the men?”
“About the bears. What these people may want them for.”
“How would he know that?”
Kim Wu ran the pharmacy next door to Cormier Labs in the strip mall they shared with a dry-cleaner, a florist, and the Tim Horton’s where he and Peter sometimes met for lunch. He was a friendly man, thirtyish, with bottle-glass spectacles and a pudding bowl haircut, who grinned a lot and came to work on a bicycle. Marigold couldn’t think of anyone less likely to be knowledgeable about bears.
“He has connections, that’s how. His uncle runs a store in Toronto’s Chinatown that sells Chinese medicines.” Peter gave the side of her head a speculative look. “The scar hardly shows, by the way. You should wear your hair loose all the time.”
Marigold nodded, feeling numb. Peter had a thing about her hair. He called it her best feature and said it made up for her freckles. And her figure, which was admittedly generous and in his opinion the reason why at twenty-eight she didn’t have a boyfriend. His Darlene was stick-thin; for all the joy he had of her. Marigold had put herself through college to earn a diploma as a lab technician and she was as hard-working and reliable as the day was long, but at times she had the feeling that what Peter valued most about her was her compliant nature and her abundant auburn hair. Men were like that, in her experience, hard-wired to respond to all the wrong signals.
“It’s big business in North America, Chinese alternative medicine. I’ve been reading up on it. Highly lucrative and growing. Kim Wu jokes about it sometimes. How maybe he should get out of dispensing western pills and join his uncle.”
“But where do the bears fit in? I don’t understand. Aren’t Chinese people all about herbs and teas… ”
“Are they? Think about it, Mar. You’ve heard of shark fin soup? A delicacy at Chinese weddings. Bear paw stew? Tiger penises used to make aphrodisiacs? Then there’s bile. For centuries they’ve been killing bears to harvest their gall bladders…”
Marigold felt sick. “Stop…”
“You wouldn’t believe all the things bear bile is used for. It started out as a purely medicinal remedy. Nowadays there’s hardly anything that can’t be improved by adding bile. Back in the 1950s, Korean entrepreneurs came up with a primitive way to milk the bile of live bears. Now bears are being factory-farmed all over China and Vietnam…”
Marigold threw up her hands and squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop! Just stop!” Behind her eyelids, a trio of cubs skittered over the rocks. Whimpering as they tried to double back to the bloody black carcass sprawled beside the river, they looked more like animated stuffed toys than the real thing. “Say one more word and I’ll scream.”
Peter shrugged. Obligingly for once, he dropped the subject and Marigold tried to concentrate on the scenery. Now and then a clearing opened up, revealing a cottage wrapped in a screened verandah tucked amid the trees. On the outskirts of a town they came upon a combination gas stop, bait and tackle shop, and diner. Parked in front was an Ontario Hydro repair truck.
“Stop for coffee?” said Peter placatingly.
“Please.” It would be a relief to get out and stretch. Marigold’s head was aching from Peter’s reckless talk, and where it might be leading and even more, from the disturbing scenes it had reanimated in her brain.
The diner was pine-panelled and smelled of bacon and french fries. A country singer wailed plaintively from a radio in the corner. Next to the window, the hydro repair crew was eating an early lunch. Peter sauntered past them, aware of the admiring looks being garnered by the Corvette. He ordered a couple of coffees from the woman behind the counter, and sent an inquiring look over his shoulder.
“Want a sandwich with that?”
Marigold studied the offerings posted on a blackboard.
“Egg salad?” she said, and felt immediately guilty. It was barely eleven-thirty but her body seemed determined to make up for the days she’d gone without food. She had lost seven pounds and she certainly didn’t want to put them on again, but she was hungry all the time. That, too, was normal, the doctor assured her. With her mug and a sandwich, she followed Peter to a table near the front where he could keep an eye on the Corvette.
“Did what?”
“Capture the cubs. They used nets, you said. Not their bare hands.” He grinned and held up his palms. “Bear hands, get it?”
“It’s not funny, Peter.” She bit into her sandwich. She didn’t think she ought to be telling him any more. It wasn’t as though he cared about the bears. If he asked questions it was only because he was hoping in some devious way to capitalize on the answers.
“One thing I don’t get, Mar.” He hooked an arm over the back of the chair and considered. “All that bush around. Why didn’t you make yourselves scarce as soon as you saw what was going on?”
Typical of Peter to make out they were somehow at fault. Marigold felt a stirring of resentment. “It’s not so easy out on the water. When we first heard shots, I wanted to turn back.” She lowered her eyes to her plate. “But Lynn was braver than me. She figured it was somebody hunting out of season. If they saw us, they’d stop and it would save an animal from getting killed.”
“So you kept going.”
“It was like a movie. It didn’t seem real. We paddled around a bend and there was this heap of black fur all bloody lying on the rocks, and men were beating the bushes behind it with long sticks. They didn’t notice us at first.” She laced her fingers around her mug so tightly the knuckles stood out. “Then the cubs burst into the open and the men flung these black nets over them.” Like giant bats, the nets had swooped down through the air. Marigold swallowed. “I thought it was because they didn’t want to leave them to starve.”
Peter rolled his eyes.
“Well, that’s what I’d hoped anyway. Until one of the men picked up a rifle and started hitting a cub on the nose with the butt. To stun it.” She looked Peter in the eyes. “Have you ever heard bear cubs cry? They sound like babies. Human babies.”
His forehead crinkled. “Marigold…”
“It’s all right. I am not going to start weeping again. I’m just telling you so you’ll understand. Lynn shouted at him to stop and that’s when they looked around and saw us.”
Guffaws of laughter went up. The repair crew was joking with the woman who’d come out from behind the counter with the coffee carafe. Marigold frowned.
“The man yelled something in Chinese. He pointed the rifle at us and we started to raise our hands. But not quickly enough… ”
Her voice trailed away and she stared across the road, where a lone white birch stood candle-straight amid a stand of cedars.
“Eat your sandwich,” said Peter. Obediently, she lifted it from her plate, but now that she’d summoned them, the images wouldn’t stop coming. Lynn in the bow of the canoe, her body jerking forward, her paddle splashing into the water. Herself, instinctively ducking and being knocked sideways by what felt like a bee sting on the temple. Grabbing at the gunwhale just before darkness sucked her under.
“When I came to, I was lying half in the water and half on the rocks.”
“And the men?”
“Gone. Lynn and the canoe, too. And the bears.”
“God, Mar. You were lucky. They must’ve thought you were dead.”
At first she hadn’t known where she was or what had happened. The only sound she’d heard was the murmur of the river current. The side of her face felt sticky and when she touched it she saw blood on her hand. That was when it all started coming back to her.
The door of the diner opened and she held her breath. A sixtyish couple in matching spandex bicycle outfits came in and her shoulders dropped. Peter was watching her.
“You’ve got them on the brain, haven’t you? The guys in the balaclavas.”
She gave him a helpless look.
“I kept thinking they were coming back to finish me off.” She had crawled out of the water and spent the first day and night under some bushes, hiding. She’d blacked out a lot, a blessing because it made the time pass.
The Hydro repair crew was leaving. One of them, a big man with a curly black beard, winked at Marigold as they tramped past in their steel-toed boots. “Talk is cheap, Red,” he said softly. “Get it in writing.”
The others chuckled and Marigold didn’t know where to look. Peter half rose in his chair but thought better of it. His furious glare followed the men out, daring them to lay a finger on the Corvette as they filed by, but they didn’t. He waited until they’d piled into the truck and rumbled off in an eddy of dust.
“Time we hit the road,” he muttered.
Marigold nodded and got to her feet. She’d only eaten half her sandwich, but she wasn’t hungry anymore. Back in the car she pulled her seat belt tight. “Will Darlene worry if you’re late?”
“Will she heck! I’ll be lucky if she’s home.” Half the time Darlene was out when he got in. Working late or stopping for a drink with the girls from work. So she said. Peter sat with the key in his hand, frowning. “It never occurred to you to start walking back?”
“Through the bush?” She shook her head. “I was so dizzy I could hardly stand. Besides, I wasn’t sure anymore which direction we’d come from. I thought if I stuck where I was, sooner or later somebody else in a canoe would come along. I had water to drink and the blueberries were starting to ripen.” Apart from the bugs and the cold at night, the worst had been the dark—wondering what was creeping up on her. Or who. When some fishermen stopped to rescue her, she tried to fend them off with her Swiss Army knife. So she was told, by then she couldn’t remember.
“Can we leave now, please?” she said. Not that she had anybody waiting for her at home. Only Big Red, looking for his dish on the windowsill. Peter had called her landlady and let her know she’d be gone a few extra days. “Mrs. Patel didn’t say anything about a stray cat hanging around?”
“No.” He started the engine. “You asked me that already.”
“Sorry.”
The Corvette nosed out onto the road. After they’d left the town behind, Peter switched on the CD player. A band came on playing music with a Latin beat that made Marigold think of sunshine and warm sand. She leaned her head against the crook of her arm. The lakes were coming into view now across open fields, with their Ojibwe names and their bright blue glitter stretching to a tree-lined horizon. Lake Muskoka and Kahshe Lake, and in a while Lake Couchiching edged by a necklace of little summer places with names dreamed up by white men, like Buena Vista Park and Happyland. Marigold’s eyes drifted shut. Sleep was another thing she was starved for. In the bush she’d been too scared to do more than doze, and in the hospital it had mostly been too noisy.
At the first rest stop past Toronto, Peter pulled into the parking area and found a space off to the side where his fenders weren’t likely to get dinged. He needed the washroom and another coffee to clear his head. Driving the 401 was no picnic, even in the Corvette. In fact he had the impression it made him a target for bored drivers. The guys in Audis who wanted to race. The truckers with crossed Canadian and American flags on their oversized rigs who took up half his lane when they went barreling past; them he trusted least of all. His stomach was beginning to play up the way it did when it was empty and no wonder, the dashboard clock read after two. He looked at Marigold.
She had slept through the worst of the traffic as they skirted Toronto and its sprawling environs. Her face, soft and rounded as a child’s, lay half-hidden under that fantastic fiery waterfall of hair. Be a shame to wake her, he decided. He took care to close the car door without slamming it.
The sun had gone behind the clouds when he returned. A chill breeze plucked at his thinning fair hair as he crossed the lot. He carried an extra coffee and a carrot bran muffin he’d bought for when Marigold came awake. The Tim Horton’s counter had featured blueberry but he didn’t think that was a taste she’d want to experience again any
time soon. She hadn’t moved. Her bronze eyelashes curled like feathers on her cheeks. He wrapped the muffin in a paper napkin and stowed the plastic cup in the holder between the seats. He didn’t mind the silence while he drove. He had plenty to think about.
Say, just for the sake of argument, the poachers really were Chinese, and his theory and everything he’d read and heard was right and they were indeed after bile; it stood to reason they’d need a way to process the stuff. Even if they set up their own lab, which was likely, they might welcome the cover of a licensed Ontario laboratory to lend their product legitimacy in the North American market. Peter expanded on this line of thinking. He would make them an offer they couldn’t refuse—his silence about what had occurred in Algonquin and a modest share of the profits—in return for their use of the Cormier name. Kim Wu’s uncle probably sold the stuff under the counter; he’d know how to get word to them.
Marigold would have to be talked around, but that was the least of his worries. It wasn’t only the bank loan falling due that was making him put aside his scruples. Last night when he’d reached for Darlene in bed, she’d told him if he couldn’t book her the cruise she had set her heart on for the fall, she knew a man who could. The guy had already offered, and all she had to do was say yes.
9.
HE SHOOK ONE OF THE LITTLE ORANGE capsules into the palm of his hand, brought it to his lips and washed it down with the tepid tea he’d saved from supper. Leaning his head back against the scuffed leather padding of his chair, Borrowman waited.
“The relief should be faster with these.” Alex Wong’s eyes behind the oversized wire-framed spectacles had been more speculative than usual today. “Told the family yet?”
“No.”
“Or the university?”
“What do you think?” He’d smiled, but he knew Alex wasn’t fooled. “I still need my job.”
“You can’t put it off much longer.”
“As long as you keep coming up with stronger pills.”