A Green Place for Dying

by R. J. Harlick

  After he confirmed with Moineau, we set out, he on his Harley and I in my truck with Sergei. I didn’t want this guy coming back to my place.

  Chapter

  Nineteen

  Throughout most of the drive to Moineau’s friend’s house, J.P.’s motorcycle was a wavering dot of red light. I tried to keep up with him, but my ancient rust bucket of a truck was no match for his Harley. At one point I thought I’d lost him when his light vanished into the pitch black as we wended our way along one of the more convoluted roads of the reserve, but on rounding the next curve I almost collided with his bike stopped in the middle of the road. With an impatient fling of his arm, we continued at a more leisurely pace until we stopped near the entrance to a driveway.

  As I stepped onto the road, I spied the sudden glow of a cigarette and the pinprick of another coming out of the darkness. From the direction of the driveway, I could just make out the lights of a house twinkling through the gaps in the dense bush. But that was the only light penetrating the night along this stretch of road. If there were neighbouring houses, the residents had either gone to bed or were away.

  “Moineau, that you?” J.P. shouted in French as he walked towards the glowing cigarettes.

  Leaving the dog inside the truck, I followed. But I left the headlights on to provide us with a modicum of light. The slim height of Moineau and the shorter and plumper figure of another teenager with purple streaks in her spiked black hair stepped into the light. While her friend had put out her cigarette, Moineau sucked on hers with the aplomb of an accomplished smoker and the challenging attitude of a teenager intent on doing something forbidden, which it no doubt was. I knew Marie-Claude would be mortified if she could see her daughter now.

  The girl and her uncle bantered in joual for a few seconds before she turned to me and said in English, “My sister told me you wanted to know if we’d heard from Fleur after she left home.”

  “That’s right. Have you?”

  She took another deep drag on her cigarette before answering, “Yeah, she called, but don’t tell maman, okay? She’d get really mad at me for not telling her.”

  “At this point, I doubt she’d get mad. I think it would do her a lot of good knowing that your sister had called, but I won’t tell her. I’ll leave that up to you. I gather from your uncle that she called on your birthday during your visit to your grandmother.”

  “Yeah, we always have birthdays together. So this was the first time she wasn’t there. She felt real bad she couldn’t be with me.”

  “Did she say where she was calling from?”

  Her long, satiny hair rippled as she shook her head. “Nope, but I could hardly hear her for the noise. It sounded like a lot of people laughing and talking.”

  “Any idea where this could be?”

  “I figure she was at a party.”

  “Did she at least say if she was calling from Ottawa?”

  “Nope, but I know she wasn’t in Ottawa,” Moineau said succinctly before taking another drag. “She was at the rez.”

  J.P.’s face bore the same startled expression mine no doubt did. “How do you know this?”

  “From her telephone number. It had the same area code as the rez, 819.”

  I was about to ask her how she knew the number, when I realized. “You saw the number displayed on your cell, didn’t you?”

  “It was on grand-maman’s phone. That’s the number she called. When I picked up the phone, I didn’t know who was calling. It wasn’t her cell. And it wasn’t my parent’s number or any of my friends. So she kinda took me by surprise.”

  “Did the number look at all familiar?”

  “Not really. It didn’t have 986 like I’m used to seeing with the rez numbers.”

  “Unfortunately I think the 819 area code covers pretty well most of western Quebec, so the only thing we know is that she was in Quebec when she called. Can you remember what this second set of numbers was?”

  “Not really. It mighta been 243, but I’m not sure. Sorry, I didn’t pay much attention.” She chewed nervously on a strand of hair.

  “It’s okay. You were just glad to be talking to your sister.”

  “Yeah. I miss her.” She smiled wistfully. “Do you think she’s ever coming home?”

  “I sure hope so. Do you think she’s staying away because she doesn’t want to come home?”

  “I know she was real mad at maman. That’s why she went away. But I don’t think she’s mad any more.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, when I was talking to her, I asked her when she was coming home. She said she wanted to, but for the moment she can’t. Then she started to cry. Then I heard some man’s voice and she hung up.”

  “What did the man say?”

  “I couldn’t hear that well with the noise and all, but I think he told her to get off the phone.” She shrugged. “He kinda said ‘Get the fuck off.’ He didn’t sound very nice.”

  Shit. I didn’t like the sounds of this. I glanced at J.P. to see if he was also worried, but his face was mask of inscrutability.

  “Moineau, I think it’s crucial we let the police know about this phone call. They might be able to trace the number from your grandmother’s phone records and find out where Fleur is or at least where she was.”

  She shook her head as the tears began to cascade down her cheeks. “I can’t. Daddy will kill me.”

  I started to ask her whether it was more important to avoid punishment than to save her sister’s life when her uncle cut in with a barrage of joual, which caused more tears. At the end, she turned to me and whispered. “I’ll do it. But … but can you take me?” She bit her lower lip as she cast her gaze to the ground. “I don’t want Daddy taking me.”

  Her eyes had taken on the same fright I’d seen in her mother’s eyes, which made me wonder what this man was doing to his family.

  “Okay, I’ll take you. And I’ll see if we can get Chief Decontie to agree not to tell your parents, all right?”

  She crowded into the front seat of my truck, with Sergei crammed in between us. Fortunately, Will was still at the police station dealing with what looked to be a couple of drunks.

  Before Moineau told her story, I got him to agree to keep the information confidential. He added the proviso, “As long as it wasn’t needed as evidence in a legal proceeding,” which prompted me to glance nervously at him. He shrugged as if to say “you’ve got to plan for the worst.” Fortunately Moineau missed the implications of “legal proceedings” and responded with a smile of relief.

  Will promised to do what he could to get the provincial police working on the trace as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it was outside his jurisdiction, but he felt this call provided sufficient evidence to show that the missing woman had been in Quebec after her disappearance. Remembering the disdain of the SQ cops at the search, I didn’t feel quite so confident.

  After returning Moineau to her friend’s house, I drove back to Three Deer Point. It was well past midnight, and I was tired, wanting only to go to bed. But the sight of J.P.’s motorcycle parked in my driveway dispelled all thought of sleep.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, not the least bit thrilled to see him sitting at the top of my stairs. As far as I was concerned, when we agreed that I would go alone to the police with his niece, he would be heading out of the area, back to wherever he came from.

  “We gotta talk.” He stomped down the stairs and stopped so close to me that I could smell the mint on his breath, which surprised me. I hadn’t expected a biker to be concerned about the state of his breath.

  Nonetheless, I backed out of range while Sergei nudged his thigh for a pat, which was promptly given. “I thought we’d done all our talking. I’m certainly thankful that you let me know about the phone call, but there is nothing more we can do. The police will handle it from here.”

  “Tabernac … the cops, they do nothing.”

  “So why did you persuade your niece to go to Chief Dec
ontie?

  “It make her think everything gonna be okay. But Fleur probably dead before they get off their ass. You, me, we gotta do something.”

  “So you think she’s in danger?”

  “Foque!” He spat. “A pimp got her, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s who you think the guy on the phone was?”

  “Bien sûr. A boyfriend don’t talk to his girl like that.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I’ll mention this to Will. Maybe he can use it to get the SQ moving.”

  He spat. “Fuckin’ cops think all Indian women are whores. They do nothing. We gotta do it.”

  “But what can we do?”

  “I know some guys I can talk to. You talk to people in Ottawa.” He paused. “Better you ask than me.” His one eye winked as if laughing at his decidedly unapproachable appearance.

  I didn’t bother to query him further about his contacts, feeling certain it had to be within his biker community.

  “I suppose I could start with the woman who saw Fleur with Becky,” I suggested. “In fact she brought up the possibility of prostitution herself. Maybe she knows something.”

  “Bon.” He strapped on his helmet. “I call.”

  He kicked his bike into an ear-shattering explosion of sound. Without another word he roared down my drive, leaving the night air vibrating.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  Two days later, as I was about to leave for Ottawa to meet Claire, Sergei ran off into the woods after a deer. When I’d put him out for one last pee, I’d seen a big buck at the salt lick at the bottom of the clearing. But since the dog hadn’t been showing too much interest in chasing deer lately — I was blaming his slowing pace on arthritis — I figured Sergei would ignore him. He didn’t. His creaky joints must not have been feeling so creaky this morning, for the minute he finished his long pee, he was off, barking and yelping, intent on the chase.

  Normally he lost interest the minute the deer vanished into the confusion of the dense forest. But this morning it was not the case. Maybe he’d discovered another critter to hassle or perhaps some enticing smells. Whatever it was, he didn’t return for a good thirty minutes. By then my voice was hoarse from calling, and I had begun to worry he’d had an accident.

  When he finally stepped out of the trees, it was all I could do not to scream at him for being such a bad dog. Instead I gritted my teeth, held out his reward for returning, and waited for him to come to me. Although he was dragging his paws, his tongue flopped out of his mouth, and bits of bark and twigs decorated his fur, he was looking as pleased as punch with himself. There was even a slight spring in his exhausted step. I guessed a morning deer chase had gotten the old adrenaline running. At least he’d be tired enough not to fret about being left alone for most of the day.

  Later, during the two-hour drive, I had another encounter with a deer, this one a little too close. As I rounded a curve, a doe jumped out in front of my truck. I slammed on the brakes, but the bumper caught her hindquarters, and down she went. I hopped out of the truck, terrified that I’d killed or badly injured her. But in a heartbeat, she was up and scrambling across the road, intent on getting as far from me as possible. Fortunately her gait showed no sign of serious injury. As I drove off, I noticed in my rearview mirror two small fauns gingerly crossing the road after her. Thank goodness I hadn’t struck one of them, otherwise it might have been a far less happy ending.

  But my hapless encounters didn’t end with the deer. On the outskirts of Gatineau, two speeding motorcycles narrowly clipped my front bumper as they wove their way in and out of traffic. I slammed on the brakes, which ricocheted into the sound of brakes screeching behind me. I braced for the impact, but the car on my tail managed to swerve into the lane beside me.

  Twenty minutes later, with my nerves still jangling from the near-miss, I found myself snarled in traffic as I approached the bridge that would take me across the Ottawa River into the city itself. Nothing moved. In front of me was a swarm of red lights. Behind, the lanes were equally jammed. I was too far over in the left hand lane to squeeze my way to an exit, so I couldn’t escape the slow shuffle forward. It was stop and go with the lights of emergency and police vehicles blinking in the distance. Eventually vehicles began merging into my lane, and within another fifteen minutes I was inching past fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers surrounding a jack-knifed transport trailer, its front end smashed. It was stopped at a yawning gap in the bridge’s twisted metal railing.

  A cold shiver crept down my spine. I didn’t want to look but couldn’t help it. It was a long way down to the river below. On the far shore, men clad in canary yellow were clambering into a red rescue Zodiac. Another was just disappearing under the bridge. But I would hardly call this a rescue. Nobody could survive plunging a hundred feet or more to the swirling waters below.

  The accident so distracted me that I could barely remember the directions to the restaurant where I was to meet Claire. Yesterday she’d been too busy, so we’d agreed to meet today around noon at the Dreamcatcher Bistro in the ByWard Market. And of course the accident had made me late. To avoid wasting time getting tangled up in the one-way streets that crisscross the Market, I parked my truck in the first parking lot I came across and hot-footed it to our meeting place. Although I managed to make up a few minutes, I was still a good twenty minutes late by the time I walked into the crowded restaurant. But I found no Claire waiting at a table.

  She’d obviously become impatient and had left. But the waiter’s negative response to my query and her unanswered phone suggested that she might be equally tardy, so I ordered a glass of white wine and waited. But by the time my wine was finished, she still hadn’t arrived. It was now almost one o’clock and highly improbable that she would show up an hour late. After leaving a message with the waiter, in case Claire did arrive, I set out for the Anishinabeg Welcome Centre. Either she’d forgotten about our lunch or something had come up at work.

  With the directions provided by the waiter, I easily found my way to the Centre, which was situated in an old yellow brick school building in one of the more rundown sections of east Ottawa. But given the number of native people I’d seen walking while I navigated the maze of roads, it looked to be an area where many lived, hence the Centre’s location.

  The Anishinabeg Welcome Centre was immediately recognizable from the large multi-coloured medicine wheel painted on the brick wall to the right of the front door. It added a spark of excitement to the otherwise drab façade. When I stepped onto the hard stone floor of the front lobby with its institutional green cement block walls, I felt like I’d returned to the faceless institution of my early school years.

  Scribbled bits of paper posted by people wanting jobs or places to rent filled a billboard hanging to the right of the door. I noticed with a start several sheets with the words “Missing” or “Have you seen” blazed over a photo of the missing person, mostly girls in their teens or early twenties, but there were a couple of boys. It appeared that missing aboriginal youths weren’t a rarity. No wonder the police expressed little interest in Fleur’s case.

  I found her poster partially covered by others in the upper right hand corner. The photo had been taken at the time of her crowning as Miss Algonquin Nation. With her dark braids and high, sculpted cheekbones, she seemed to epitomize the description “Indian princess.” Of the three girls, she was the one who most took after their father. Though her brown eyes sparkled with the excitement of winning, I nonetheless caught a hint of the same wariness I’d noticed in her mother’s eyes and wondered about the significance of its cause, if she was unable to forget it even in a moment of triumph.

  To provide an unobstructed view of her poster, I repositioned the others, one of which offered modeling opportunities in bold red and purple lettering. Maybe, just maybe, someone seeing Fleur’s photo would know where she was.

  I approached a rather sour-faced woman with tiny dreamcatcher earrings, who appeared to be a receptionist. S
he was sitting behind a scratched metal desk, the kind of desk teachers used when I was in school. She seemed to be admonishing an old man and woman who were sitting on two collapsible metal chairs next to her desk. The receptionist’s scowl relaxed into a welcoming smile at the sight of me. Unfortunately, she could only tell me that she had yet to see Claire today. But that didn’t mean Claire hadn’t come in before the receptionist was at her desk or while she was on lunch or in the can.

  I followed the woman’s directions to Claire’s office, which took me past the gym, where the sound of kids’ laughter filtered through the closed door, and up a flight of stairs to the next floor. While a number of people had been milling about on the main floor, on the second floor my footsteps echoed through an empty hallway, past equally silent offices, as I searched for Claire’s. I finally found her name, Claire Terrance, written in large block letters on a piece of paper that was taped under the designation “Nanabush Youth Program.” I knocked politely on the closed wooden door, but hearing no response, I opened it anyway. The narrow room contained two desks, one with scattered papers and a screen saver oscillating on the computer that suggested the person had just stepped away from her desk. The other desk looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed in days. I assumed the messy desk was Claire’s and that she’d probably gone to the washroom.

  But after waiting impatiently for fifteen minutes or so, I went in search of someone in a neighbouring office who might know where the woman was. But the offices were still empty, and this at a quarter to two, which made me wonder about the work ethic at the Centre. However, as I started to descend to the first floor, I almost collided with a group of chattering men and women coming up the stairs. They were returning from celebrating someone’s birthday at a nearby pub. And no, Claire had not been with them, although she had been at work early this morning, in fact, considerably earlier than normal.