by Henry, Sue
“Secondhand information—you didn’t see these two men, right? Then he disappeared sometime during that night.”
“He left a thank-you note,” Maxie volunteered. “But it went out with the trash.” She repeated its brief contents.
Webster, who had been watching the exchange, turned slowly toward Jessie, leaned one elbow on the table, centered on her alone, and carefully asked what had been on his mind for two days.
“Something was bothering you at Kiskatinaw. Will you tell me what it was?”
She stared at him for a long minute, hesitating, and felt a lump of guilt rise in her throat that had to be swallowed hard before she could speak—sorry now, as she had been afraid she would be, that she hadn’t voiced her confusion and suspicion at the time.
“I think the dead man was wearing his jacket,” she said simply and felt immediately relieved. “I didn’t tell you then because I had decided it wasn’t, but at first I was afraid it was Patrick.”
“Why would you think so?”
“The jacket was the same—and there was a maple leaf pin on the collar that I recognized—or thought I did. He was wearing one like it at Dutch Creek.”
“But you changed your mind?” He had not taken his eyes from her face, not jotted a note in his book.
“Yes—after I checked and saw that the dead man’s hair wasn’t red—it was brown.”
The horror of lifting the jacket’s hood came suddenly back to her. She shuddered slightly, and though she turned her gaze to the waters of the lake beyond the window, she saw none of it, her inner sight focused on what she disliked remembering. “But I think that jacket was his. I’ve seen a lot of those pins, but how many could there be, worn in exactly the same place on a similar jacket?”
There was a moment of silence as they all considered the complexities involved in the puzzle. Then Maxie told them about finding the bottle of brown hair dye in the Jayco at Steamboat, got up to get the bottle she had saved, and set it on the table. “This is what made us wonder if Patrick had dyed his hair—made us decide to tell the police what we’d found. We were afraid that…”
“…the dead man could have been him after all,” Webster finished for her.
“Yes.” She sat back down.
Turning the bottle over in his hands to read the label within the plastic bag, Loomis said to Webster, “This is interesting, considering the other one. Same brand.”
“What other one?” Maxie asked sharply.
But before either man could answer, Jessie’s original fear got the better of her and she turned to Webster, deep disquiet in her voice as she asked, “Was it Patrick—under the bridge, I mean? Please—was it?”
“No, Ms. Arnold,” the inspector told her. “I can assure you that it was not Patrick Cutler. But it was one of the two boys who were looking for him on the Icefields Parkway.”
Hardly hearing the rest, Jessie sat back with a sigh of relief, feeling tension melt from her whole body as she realized just how much she had wanted it not to be Patrick. How odd that seemed, when at first she had resented the interruption of his presence to the point of anger. This had certainly not turned out to be the calm, pleasant trip she had envisioned.
Maxie, on the other hand, forearms on the table, was leaning toward the two men with more questions.
“What other bottle?” she asked again, directing the question to Loomis. “And who are, were…oh, hell—who were the two on the parkway? Why were they looking for Patrick?”
Loomis glanced at Webster, and she could see that the two officers were agreed in their disinclination to divulge information about their investigation.
“Ms. McNabb,” Webster began, “we really can’t—”
“Look,” she said in a determined tone that told him she had little patience with foolishness and considered his close-to-the-chest attitude in that category. “I understand your reluctance to tell us everything. You don’t know us, but we’re not total ningnongs, and there’s a lot going on that seems to keep catching us up in it. It’s clear as a crow in a bucket of milk that Patrick was running from something he wouldn’t talk about—something that frightened him badly. It bothers me that he disappeared so suddenly, with nothing more than a note, that Jessie was accidentally involved in finding a dead man that you say was someone who was looking for Patrick Cutler, that this wagon was broken into in Prince George, and that Jessie was conked on the head yesterday when she was chasing someone who might have been Patrick. All you do is ask questions. How about some answers? I think we deserve to be trusted with a little more about whatever the hell is going on. We might even be able to help you with some of it.”
A momentary silence followed her outburst. Then Loomis’s sense of humor surfaced again—lightly. At least he smiled, if a bit grimly.
“That’s two things we didn’t have on our list—a breakin and an injury,” he said to Webster. “I think maybe she’s right, and we’d better barter some parts of our information for theirs.”
Inspector Webster nodded slowly, the corners of his mouth twitching with a smile he couldn’t quite suppress. “You don’t have a tendency to say what you think, do you, Ms. McNabb?”
Startled, Maxie stared at him for a moment, began to grin, then threw back her head, and the richness of her uninhibited laughter filled the confined space of the motor home so completely that any remaining tension was dispelled and they all had to chuckle with her.
By the time a second pot of coffee was made and gone, the two men had been told everything they didn’t know before they arrived—in exchange for some background information of their own.
“A woman was killed in Cody,” Loomis had begun.
“Patrick’s mother,” Maxie stated flatly.
“How could you know that?”
“He mentioned her once when he was riding with me that day. There was something in the way he spoke—something painful in his voice. But he changed the subject very quickly.”
She and Jessie then learned that not only Patrick but two of his friends and his stepfather had disappeared in Wyoming. The dead man at Kiskatinaw was one of those friends, a nineteen-year-old named Lewis Jetter. The two had evidently run off after Patrick intending some kind of help, found him, and continued north on the highway in their pickup. Webster and Loomis didn’t know who had dropped Jetter from the bridge. The other boy, Kim Fredricksen? Patrick himself? The stepfather, McMurdock? Someone completely unknown?
“But we think, from what you’ve told us—and from this, of course”—he lifted the dye bottle in its plastic bag—“that Patrick may have dyed his hair brown, as you thought, and that Fredricksen may have dyed his red. He must have lost this under the table and not noticed when he left. But he could easily have bought another. We found another bottle in the abandoned pickup in this campground. It had been used, and the remains of the dye in it were red. By switching personas, they may have thought that young Cutler would be safer. Wouldn’t work for long, or up close, with anyone who knew them both. But if no one was looking for Jetter and Fredricksen, and they crossed the border legally…”
“You thought you saw Patrick yesterday?” Webster broke into the tale to ask Jessie. “Before you were hit?”
She closed her eyes to concentrate on what she had seen. “I saw a red-haired man on the passenger side of a passing pickup who was about the right age, but I didn’t see his face.”
“So it could have been Fredricksen—or someone else entirely?”
“Yes, I guess it could. They left the pickup and took off on the hiking trail. I never got close enough to see them.”
“And you didn’t see who hit you?”
“He ran up behind me,” she told him, raising a hand to the lump on the back of her head and fingering it gingerly.
“May I look?” Loomis asked.
He lifted the bandage carefully and peered at the cut. “Hmm, something with an edge from the look of this. I’ve seen handguns do this kind of damage. You may have been lucky, Jessie.” He l
aid a hand on her shoulder. “It could have been a lot worse.”
It could have been, she thought later, as she drove away from Summit Lake. It was good to be traveling toward Liard Hot Springs, and she was relieved to be leaving the campground, policemen, lost boys, and she hoped, confusion. She’d had enough—had never asked to be involved in any of this unexpected and unpleasant situation.
Glancing in the mirror, she could see Maxie’s Jayco behind her coming out of the campground and was not unhappy to have company, but a low-key depression clung stubbornly to the edges of her thoughts. She could hardly wait to arrive, get settled, and hike the long boardwalk out to the pool at the hot springs, where she could immerse herself up to the neck in hot water and let the tensions of the last few days float away.
What she wanted was for all the excess people and problems to go away and leave her alone. What she needed was some calm, peaceful solitude.
What she couldn’t know was that she wasn’t about to get calm—and definitely not solitude—and that some of the people with whom she was about to come in contact would be most unwelcome company.
16
JESSIE LED THE WAY AS SHE AND MAXIE TURNED ONTO the highway and soon passed the spot where the slide had buried it so successfully—twice. The pavement was still coated with mud, and large rocks falling from the cliff had broken it in several places, but a crew was already at work repairing the damage. A workman in rain gear leaned on his shovel and saluted Jessie with his hard hat as she steered the motor home slowly past him, rocking over the rough road.
Tank sat up to look out the window from his place in the passenger seat. She reached across and gave his ears a quick rub.
“I’m glad I brought you along, guy.”
She caught a last glimpse of Summit Lake in the rearview mirror as she started down the other side of the pass. The highway went around several bends, where smaller slides had brought rocks and mud to the edge of the pavement, then to the north a group of erosion pillars—hoodoos—appeared in the distance, just visible through the rain. Below them, near the road, a solitary caribou picked its way across an open space with no regard for passing vehicles.
The highway wound down into a steep limestone gorge, and four miles from the summit she drove into a turnout, leaving room for Maxie’s rig behind her, and stopped for a minute to watch a small herd of stone sheep meander along the rocky hillside until they disappeared over a ridge. Back on the winding road, she was soon looking down into the broad expanse of MacDonald Valley, where the creek of the same name snaked its way in loops and bends along the flat bottomland. She passed 113 and 115 Creeks, named for their distance from Fort Nelson, which had been Mile 0 when the highway was begun.
Twenty miles from Summit Lake, the road ran into a narrow valley with spectacular cliffs of folded sedimentary rock. She drove beside the Toad River and was pleased to see some sunshine light up its unusual blue-green water like turquoise. The valley began to wind upward, and the sunlight seemed to follow along until, leaning out to look up, Jessie saw that half the sky was clear. Some of her depression began to roll away with the clouds that were moving swiftly to the east, and she noticed that the rain had washed the windshield as clean as the world outside, which was now Technicolor instead of gray and white. Before she was ready for it she was headed down into the Muncho Lake basin and onto a section of the highway cut into the steep cliffs looming over its eastern shore, so close to the water that it almost seemed to float. Copper oxide leaching into its waters gave the lake a color so deep and intense that even the ice that froze over it during the winter months was green. In the sunshine it shone like an emerald in a perfect setting of dark conifers that clung under towering gray stone cliffs and ridges.
At the far end of the seven-mile lake and up a steep hill, Jessie stopped in the large parking lot of a viewpoint for a last look at the lake far below. She and Maxie took their canine friends for a short walk and watched the shadows of a few tardy clouds crossing over the green water, which glowed again as they floated away and disappeared over the hills.
A red pickup was parked to one side of the lot, and two men sat on the guardrail eating sandwiches and passing a bottle of water back and forth between them. One of them turned his head to watch the two women pass with such different dogs. He nodded a greeting and grinned as Tank paused to sniff at a guardrail, then trotted back to his place at Jessie’s side, forcing Stretch to scamper after him, working his short legs so fast they were hardly visible. The other man stared out at the lake and ignored them completely.
“Lunch?” Maxie asked as they headed back to their respective rigs. But Jessie elected to wait until they reached the hot springs and could relax over food. “It’s only another thirty miles.”
The rough military road that had been punched through to Alaska in eight short months had been possible to drive on in 1942 but not in regular passenger vehicles. Later it was widened, sections of it paved, and though hair-raising tales of nightmare trips littered with flat tires, shattered windshields and headlights, broken axles, and window-deep mud kept most from attempting its length, courageous people were drawn to see for themselves the wilderness through which it passed and began to return with glowing accounts of the country, if not the treacherous roadway.
The section of the winding road that followed the Liard River from Muncho Lake to the Liard Hot Springs and then continued for a few miles north was one of the last to be modernized and was still under construction, so it was slow going for a few miles until Jessie reached Liard River and the only remaining suspension bridge on the highway, crossed it, and was soon turning into the provincial park where they would spend the night.
French-Canadian voyageurs had named the area for the poplar (liard) trees that lined the banks of the river, which the highway parallels for another 135 miles, as far as Watson Lake. The provincial park campground was spread around a large loop, parking for RVs and tents placed well apart with plenty of trees and brush between them, giving most of them an agreeable degree of privacy and a feeling of camping in a grove of pine, poplar, paper birch, and trembling aspen.
It was still early in the day and there were many choices left, so Jessie parked the Winnebago in a space just across the road from Maxie’s Jayco, on the back side of the loop near a trail that would take them to the hot springs on a boardwalk. Since the park provided no hookups, there was little to do but turn on the propane and open vents and windows to let fresh air sweep through the rig. The soft breeze was now pleasantly warmed by the sun, which cast light and shadow through the bright green of spring leaves like a moving curtain. Jessie stepped out and walked across with Tank on his leash to greet her friend, who had also climbed out and stood smiling, her face turned toward the source of light like one of the sunflowers they had seen along the road.
“Ah-h-h,” Maxie said with a contented sigh. “This is more like it, yes?”
“Definitely an improvement,” Jessie agreed. A weight of worry and concern seemed to have suddenly lifted from her mind, but when she stretched to relieve an aching stiffness in her back, there was a sharp reminder of her encounter and fall on the hiking trail. She winced, and Maxie noticed.
“Why don’t you go soak some of the soreness out in the hot springs while I rustle up something for a late lunch?” she suggested.
Jessie thanked her, glad to agree. Collecting her bathing suit and a towel, she left Tank to keep Stretch company and hiked off toward the parking lot that she knew lay at the near end of the long boardwalk leading to the springs. She passed several camping spots occupied by people in motor homes and campers—one with a tent that would have held a whole family. Two children stood outside it, poking sticks at a small fire in the pit provided in each space, and waved at her as she passed. She was reminded that several trails ran in shortcuts through the brush and trees when she heard someone running on one of them beyond some bushes, but she stayed on the loop road until she reached the parking lot.
It was almost empty. By
the middle of the summer it would be full and Liard Hot Springs almost constantly busy with people coming and going from the two hot spring pools perhaps a quarter of a mile away in a woodland setting. On this early afternoon in May there were only two cars near the boardwalk, with three people standing between them talking, and a pickup parked at the other end of the lot. One of the women by the cars had wet hair, so she had already been to the pools, and the license plates were British Columbian, so they could be locals, many of whom came year-round to bathe in the luxurious heat of the sulfurous waters.
A bear warning was posted near the start of the boardwalk. There were always a few bears in the area, and park officials were careful to let campers and bathers know that they should not feed them. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” the sign read in bright red letters. In the over fifty-year history of Liard Hot Springs, there had been only one incident that involved a bear, and unfortunately it had happened at the nearest pool. The black bear that had attacked three people, killing two, had been sick and a complete deviation from the norm. Jessie knew that black bears had more curiosity and less fear of humans than browns or grizzlies, but they were usually cautious, easily frightened away, and avoided direct contact with people. Though often seen in this park, they were no real threat if you stayed out of their way and left them alone. Garbage-seeking bears were quickly darted and moved to faraway locations in the hope that they wouldn’t find their way back.
Strolling along the boardwalk was enjoyable. At first it crossed a section of swampy ground created by overflow from the springs, where the warmth of the water encouraged early grasses and small flowers to bloom before they would elsewhere and sometimes in unusual combinations. Jessie stopped once to examine a few violets and white strawberry blossoms and a perfect spiderweb suspended between two tall cattails, raindrops still clinging to the delicate strands like dew.
She went slowly, pausing again to watch a school of minnows swimming in shallow water in the shadow of the walkway, and finally, after the way led into a grove of trees, came to a bend in the walk from which she could see the bathhouse next to the lowest pool. Just before reaching it the boardwalk divided, one section leading away to the left toward a trail that would take bathers to an upper pool, but Jessie was content to use this closer one and moved quickly onto the deck that held the bathhouse and three flights of steps with handrails that descended to the pool itself. She could hear the soft rush of water falling into one end of the pool and out the other, but no voices or splashing. Great, she thought, I’ll have it all to myself for a while, and hurried into the women’s half of the bathhouse, where she quickly put on her bathing suit, and returned to the pool.