A Green Place for Dying

by R. J. Harlick

  Since moving in, I hadn’t been in any hurry to replace much in the century-old house other than items that had reached the end of their lifespan. I liked the lived-in feel of Aunt Aggie’s roomy country kitchen with its white wooden cupboards, their edges rounded from numerous coats of paint, the Arborite counters with the 1950s pink and fuchsia swirls adding a touch of brightness, and of course the antique wood cookstove standing stately in chrome and grey metal against the outside wall. I had replaced the 1970s refrigerator after it broke down last year, along with the equally old stove, with basic white models that had few frills. The latest gewgaws would’ve been totally wasted on me.

  I poured hot coffee into two mugs. “I don’t have any cream. Will milk do?”

  “Yeah, it’ll do. Lots of it along with some sugar. I need it. You do like your coffee strong, don’t you?” She smiled. “Just like my father.”

  She tossed a small white object back and forth between her hands. It sparkled as it caught a shaft of sun streaming through the window. Tucking it into her pocket, she added copious amounts of milk and sugar to her mug.

  “It gets me going. That wimpy stuffy you drink would put me to sleep.”

  I piled some chocolate chip cookies onto a plate. After my long walk, I figured I could reward myself with one or two of these calorific gems made by my mother’s longtime cook. Mother had couriered them up last week from Toronto along with a few other items.

  I found it amazing that in the few months following my trip to the Far North, we’d had more to do with each other than in the past five or more years since I’d fled the big city for the isolation of this northern paradise. Before, I would’ve sent the stuff back or slammed the phone down in annoyance. Now I quite enjoyed our frequent conversations and regretted the years it had taken us to step out of our roles of chastising mother and rebellious daughter.

  “I noticed some terrific watercolours in the living room,” Teht’aa said. “Are they new?”

  “Mother sent them last week. My father painted them when I was a child. As you could probably tell, they’re scenes from around here.”

  I collected the plate of cookies. “Let’s go out onto the porch. I think it’s warm enough to sit outside.”

  Sergei followed us into the screen porch and with a deep sigh plunked his long curly-coated body down beside Teht’aa’s wicker chair. She gave him several vigorous pats, while he stretched and groaned contentedly.

  I sank into the bentwood rocker, sipped my coffee and pretended to be engrossed in the happenings on Echo Lake while waiting for Teht’aa to speak. There was no point in asking her why she’d dropped by. She wanted to give me a sermon on yesterday’s slip-up. Although I wasn’t looking forward to it, I felt I should let her get it out of her system, then we could get on with our friendship. Besides, I deserved it.

  The boat with the two fishermen had joined the other boat on the other side of the lake at the fishing hole near Whispers Island. My mouth watered at the thought of freshly caught bass sautéed lightly with fresh herbs, a meal Eric often prepared for us. I hadn’t eaten any as good since. My one attempt had ended up tasting like dried-out, overcooked parchment. Cooking wasn’t exactly one of my strengths.

  I rocked back and forth, trying to absorb the calm, while I waited for Teht’aa to begin. But when she did, she took me completely by surprise.

  “So if Dad didn’t give this to you, where did you get it?”

  She dropped the object she’d been tossing in her hands onto the round wicker table between us.

  It took me a few seconds to recognize the jagged piece of quartz. “How do you know this belongs to Eric?”

  The only time I’d studied his stone closely was when I compared it to the ones Aunt Aggie had found on Whispers Island eighty years earlier, but I couldn’t tell whether this was the same stone or not. It could just as easily have belonged to Aunt Aggie.

  Teht’aa pointed to a tiny speck of orange near the faint thread of gold. “He told me he’d found this where the mining company marked its claim on Whispers Island.”

  The speck did appear to be similar to the fluorescent paint the miners had used.

  Teht’aa continued, “He’d kept it as a reminder of what could’ve happened if you guys hadn’t stopped the mine. Are you sure he didn’t give it to you?”

  “No. I found it on the ground. He must’ve dropped it without knowing it.” I thought of where I’d found the stone. “He must’ve lost it some time ago.”

  “Nope, I don’t think so. I remember seeing it in mid-July at a smudging ceremony in the Council Hall, when he laid it out with the other sacred items from his medicine bundle.”

  Mid-July … about the time Fleur and Becky disappeared. I felt a chill of dread creep over me. Should I tell Teht’aa where I found it?

  “Did he mention that he’d lost it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe he gave it to someone and they lost it?” I thought of Fleur. But no, she’d left the reserve at the end of June, a good two weeks before the ceremony.

  “I doubt it. It would have to be someone very special. And as far as I know, there is no special person in his life at the moment.” Her ebony eyes bore into mine before turning back to the lake.

  I squirmed. What was she trying to do?

  She took a sip of coffee before continuing. “Maybe he came here when you were up north and it fell out without him knowing.”

  So … she thought I’d found it on my property. I hesitated about correcting her and then decided not to, not yet. There had to be a simple explanation for its presence in the parking lot close to where Becky’s body was found. I’d like to be able to give her this explanation, rather than have her go through the dread of wondering what connection, if any, her father had to Becky’s death.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  I was so worried about Eric and the implications of the stone that I tossed and turned most of the night. And my nightmare of a man looking a lot like Eric being dragged to a noose hanging from the branch of a pine tree didn’t help my sleep either. So by the time the grey light of dawn finally seeped through my bedroom windows, I felt as if I’d been trampled by a herd of moose.

  No matter how hard I searched for a different answer, I couldn’t come up with a logical explanation for Eric’s stone ending up in the parking lot other than he was the one who’d lost it. But if he had, what was he doing there? The parking lot was intended for users of Gatineau Park, such as hikers, mountain bikers, and city dwellers wanting nature’s relief from urban stress. I’d never known Eric to hike, and he certainly didn’t ride a mountain bike, although he did love his Harley. And of course he had no need to go elsewhere to enjoy a forest. He spent his daily life living and breathing in one.

  And as Teht’aa said, her father wouldn’t give away an object he considered a gift from the Creator, from kije manidu. In fact, it was so special that he wore it around his neck, along with other sacred items, inside the beaded deerskin amulet his grandmother had made for his grandfather. Which raised another point. How did the stone get out of the amulet?

  Eric wouldn’t just throw it away, not without a very good reason, particularly in a place as meaningless to him as a parking lot. I could see him returning it to Whispers Island, but he would do that with a small ceremony, like sprinkling tobacco and chanting a few words to kije manidu.

  The amulet was old, the deerskin paper-thin. I supposed it could’ve come apart and its contents fallen out. But surely Eric would’ve noticed. And he would’ve retrieved the items, all five of them, each with a special and sacred meaning to him, like his grandfather’s tiny carving of a fisher, his family’s namesake, for odjik means “fisher” in Algonquin.

  As reluctant as I was to speak with him, I knew the only way I was going to learn how the stone had ended up in this isolated parking lot would be to ask him when he finally got home. And once I learned the truth, I would no doubt be shaking my head at my useless worrying. Clearly it would
have nothing to do with Becky or her death.

  I’d also lost sleep over Marie-Claude. Yesterday Teht’aa had remarked how terrible our friend had looked when she’d run into her at the Migiskan General Store. Apparently her hands shook so much, she could barely extract the money from her wallet at the checkout counter. Her hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed since she’d gotten out of bed that morning, and her clothes were a crumpled mismatch of odd items. Although Marie-Claude generally looked unkempt, Teht’aa thought her appearance was scruffier than usual.

  And when Teht’aa had asked if she was all right, Marie-Claude had barely acknowledged her presence, let alone responded to the question. Teht’aa had left her alone, but after seeing Marie-Claude’s erratic driving as she left the parking lot, she’d followed her home to make sure she arrived safely.

  Right after Teht’aa had left, I called Marie-Claude. Unfortunately, Jeff answered and said she was resting and couldn’t be disturbed. In what I was learning was a typical response for him, he dismissed any suggestion that all might not be well with his wife. He was equally abrupt when I asked about the search. He merely said the police were doing all they could and hung up before I had a chance to ask anything else.

  I was surprised by Jeff’s behaviour. Although I’d only met him on social occasions, he’d always been friendly and quite willing to chat. Not now. I sensed this hostile abruptness was his way of dealing with his daughter’s disappearance.

  The day was turning out to be a dreary, rainy fall day, not the kind to spend outside, as I’d hoped to. Last night I’d decided to spend the morning surveying the maple forest. I figured before going further with the idea of resurrecting the sugar bush operation, I needed to get a good idea of the state of the trees. No doubt some had died over the past twenty years or so since Aunt Aggie had stopped the operation, while others would’ve grown large enough to be good sap producers. But I didn’t feel up to slogging around in the rain. Given Sergei’s sedentary state in front of the kitchen’s hot woodstove, he didn’t either.

  I found myself at a loss for something to do. I could clean the house — it always needed it. But vacuuming and the like wasn’t exactly my thing. Besides, it needed to be really dirty before I felt compelled to do something about it. And since I’d cleaned a week ago, I considered it still clean.

  Many women baked on rainy days, but since this wasn’t my thing either, I didn’t even consider it. However, I did like painting. I enjoyed the mindless rhythm of running a paintbrush or roller up and down a wall. And the kitchen was in need of a fresh coat to cover the scrapes and marks I’d been pretending didn’t exist. In fact, I had wallpaper I’d bought in a burst of energy in the spring but had as yet done nothing with it. All I needed was some matching paint for the wainscoting and trim, and my day was set.

  I clipped a piece of the wallpaper with bright yellow lemons to take with me. I was tired of the basic white motif of the kitchen and thought a matching shade of yellow for the wainscoting would liven up the room nicely. But I would keep the cupboards and trim white. After letting Sergei out for one last pee, I headed off to the paint store in Somerset, the closest town, a good forty-five-minute drive away.

  As I reached the section of the main road where the gravel changed to asphalt, I was passed by a grey van whose driver I recognized immediately. It was Jeff. And he was in a hurry to get somewhere. Probably Somerset. Possibly Ottawa. But either way, he would be gone for at least a couple of hours. I turned around and headed back, towards the Lightbody house.

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  Marie-Claude's dark blue Honda with the familiar dent in the front bumper was parked next to her two-storey frame house. Although I didn’t see light coming from any of the facing windows, I assumed she was probably in the kitchen at the back of the house.

  Bracing myself for the deluge, I flipped up the hood of my rain jacket, hopped out of the truck, and splashed through the puddles to the side door, not caring whether my feet got soaked or not. I knocked on the cold metal door, at first lightly, then more vigorously when she failed to appear. I peered through the side windows, and seeing no sign of her, I walked around to the back and checked the kitchen windows. Though the overhead light was on and breakfast dishes had not yet been cleared from the table, the room was empty. I banged on the window, hoping the noise would get her attention, but after several attempts, I gave up. I even shouted her name. Surely if she was somewhere in this house, she would’ve heard the ruckus by now.

  I thought it unlikely that Marie-Claude would’ve gone to visit a neighbour, given the distraught state Teht’aa had found her in yesterday. Besides, she wasn’t the most active person I knew. She would’ve taken her car.

  There was one other possibility. She’d gone to the camp. By now my sopping pants were clinging to my legs and my feet were soaked, but I felt it was more important to ensure Marie-Claude was all right than to escape back into my truck. I splashed along the winding path through the woods to the birch grove, where I could just make out the Quonset-like outline of the birchbark wigwam through the trees. I checked for smoke rising through the hole in its roof, for surely on a cold, damp day like today a fire would be needed, but I didn’t see any. Nor did I smell any, only the earthy dampness of the rain. There was also no smoke rising from the sweat lodge, which might have offered the healing peace she no doubt was seeking. And the workshop appeared equally unoccupied.

  Nonetheless I checked inside each building. While several half-finished baskets from our attempts of a week ago remained on the worktable in the workshop, there was no other sign of recent activity. The wigwam was similarly cold and empty, as was the sweat lodge, although I was tempted to heat up the stones, remove my damp clothes and warm up in the swirling steam.

  I was about to turn away and head back to the house when I heard a faint cry. I strained to see through the veil of rain and saw nothing other than drenched vegetation. Then I caught a slight movement from the other side of the beaver pond. Something was floundering in the water a short distance from the pond’s edge. A sudden chill raced down my spine. This wasn’t a beaver or a heron or any other water animal. Horrified at what this might portend, I raced around the pond, praying I wouldn’t be too late, and arrived just as Marie-Claude’s head sank beneath the swampy water, leaving a radiating swirl of blonde hair.

  Without another thought, I waded in after her and realized the minute I was over my head that I should’ve removed my shoes and jacket. I struggled to kick off the shoes and succeeded, but the cold water made the jacket too slippery to grasp hold of. And I knew I didn’t have enough time to return to land to remove it. Taking a great gulp of air, I shoved my head beneath the surface in search of Marie-Claude.

  The water was dank and murky. I could barely see my hand in front of my face, but at least it wasn’t too deep. My feet quickly touched the soft, squishy bottom. Like a blind person, I spread my searching hands out in front of me. My heart raced as a dark object loomed into view, but when I touched the soft, gooey surface, I realized it was a sunken log. I don’t know how many times I came up for air, but each time I ducked back down determined to find Marie-Claude.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, but was probably only a couple of minutes, my fingers became entangled in the floating tendrils of her hair, then I saw her face, eyes closed almost as if she were praying. But the minute I touched her, her eyes sprang open, and she began fighting me, struggling to get out of my grasp. Unprepared for her violent reaction, I felt her slip from my grasp. Out of air, I returned to the surface, gasped in another deep breath and swam down to the spot where I’d last seen her. By the time I found her, she had stopped thrashing and no longer fought when I grabbed her arm. In fact, she didn’t respond at all. I frantically pulled her to the surface and struggled to get her ashore as fast as I could. Once I did, the lifeguard training I’d learned years ago as a teenager miraculously kicked in.

  After ensuring there were no obstructions in her mouth,
I placed her on the wet ground on her stomach with her arms raised and her head turned to the side. I began pushing into her back then releasing in the hope her lungs would give up the water they’d taken in. Thankfully, after a few pulsating pushes, water began to seep out of her mouth. Finally she coughed and began breathing. Thank God.

  Exhausted, I collapsed beside her still body. I could feel the reassuring rise and fall of her breathing as we lay side by side in a puddle of water. The rain had stopped, but at this point it hardly mattered. Finally she began to stir.

  “Pourquoi vous m’avez sauvée?” she whispered hoarsely. “Why did you save me?” she repeated several more times in French in a voice that was so low, I had to put my ear to her lips.

  I began to shiver. “Come on,” I said in French. “We’ve got to get out of these wet clothes and get warm. Can you get up?”

  I rolled her over and tried to sit her up. She neither resisted nor helped.

  “I want to die.” She kept her eyes closed and spoke as if in a dream. “I deserve to die.”

  I tried to raise her to her feet, but it was like trying to raise a dead body. “Come on, Marie-Claude, you have to help me. We can’t stay here.”

  I’d been planning on taking her to the house but realized there was no way I could carry or drag her the several hundred metres if she wasn’t prepared to walk. I thought of the birchbark wigwam, but it would take too long for a fire to heat up the interior. Instead I would use the smaller sweat lodge.

  I dragged her around the pond to the entrance of the low dome-shaped structure covered in sopping wet moose hides and plastic tarps. Again she neither resisted nor helped. I thrust aside the soggy moose hide covering the entrance, and ignoring the wolf skull guarding it, dragged her inside and set her down on a pile of freshly cut cedar boughs. Fortunately, apart from the rain that had come through the central opening, the surrounding platforms were dry.