Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle

by Lou Allin

  Her father shovelled in some coleslaw with a shaky hand, chewed for a pensive moment with his eyes closed, then beamed as if he had just scratched a lottery winner. “Easy. Greed. Don’t you remember that movie? Longest silent ever made! Got me interested in the fillum business. I was only a kid but knew right away the job was for me.”

  “What do you mean? What greed?” She drew her chair closer and turned down the disco trash from the exercise show on television.

  “Think, girl! What was the motive? Gold. That big tooth, Zasu Pitts lying on a bed of shiny coins.” His eyes glittered as if the curtain had lifted on a favourite picture long faded to shadows. “Aren’t we in Northern Ontario, where gold sits under every tree? Old Sir Harry Oakes died for it. It’s gold all right, always was, always is. You’ll see. Just keep your peepers peeled.” He munched his last French fry and reached for the container of pie.

  When the local news started, Belle cleaned away the lunch debris and unsnapped the prison of his lap table. “How about a walk down the hall?” she asked. It was crucial to get him back on his feet to juice the circulation. The nurses had reported that he was not cooperative during his exercise periods. Perhaps extra motivation would help. “You’ve got to get practising again if you want to go back to the restaurant when the weather gets better.”

  A smile broke out on his face as he looked up like a trusting child. “Really? OK, let’s give it a try. Where are my shoes?” He shook one red plush bedroom slipper, all his swollen feet could wear. Belle searched the closet, peered under the bed, even plowed through his underwear drawer. How could a large item vanish from a private room whose sole occupant barely tottered down to meals each day? Yet some of the more mobile female patients roamed the halls “cleaning house” in their cobwebbed minds, collecting loose articles and driving the nurses crazy when they had to sort out the belongings.

  “Never mind. We can slog along with one. Come on.” She hoisted him up, gripping his wasted arm. Even five years ago, his biceps and calves had bulged, huge bunches of muscles due to genes more than exercise. They used to strike poses together, their arms and legs and faces identical DNA maps. A purposeful grunt helped him to stand, leaning perilously, then shuffling forward, all 170 stomachy pounds. They inched into the hall, past dim rooms with heads lolled back, toothless mouths agape, or worse, quiet bundles of blanketed shapes forever dreaming of a precious time far and away.

  “Take the hand rail,” she told him, as they rocked along. Only thirty feet to the nurses’ station. Suddenly he stopped and looked down. Her gaze followed. His other slipper! “It dropped out of your pant leg?” Their laughter echoed down the silent hall. “A miracle! Didn’t you feel it? What else is up there? No, I don’t want to know!” Belle put the shoe on him, and they rounded back to the room in time for the weather report.

  As she left by the front desk, Belle had a word for Cherie, the nurse on call. “He looks good. Thanks for the extra effort in dressing and grooming him.”

  “Sorry we didn’t get to his shave. All hell broke loose in the kitchen. Dishwasher overflowed. Oh, by the way,” she coughed delicately, and swivelled her head to see if they were being overheard, “that doctor we were discussing the other day?” Belle nodded. “Rumour says that he was involved in abortions a few years before the hospital started providing them without hassles. No charges were ever laid, though. He’s a slick one.” Her eyebrows arched knowingly. In big cities like Toronto, abortions were available if a woman had the nerve to brave the gauntlet of pro-life pickets. In smaller towns and solidly Catholic areas, the procedure could be difficult to arrange.

  Belle left the building, still trying to sort out the tangle of clues, hunches and tips revolving in her brain. Something was trying to take shape, to drop out of a pantleg. Although she had latched onto it as a tempting possibility, less and less did the drug angle look viable. Brooks’ gang was rounded up, squealing like shoats (or was it stoats?) for legal aid, but nothing about Jim had been forthcoming. Steve would have told her. Maybe she should speak to Brooks directly; surely he was out on bail by now. And the gold? Perhaps not the romantic dream of an old man at all. Jim’s drop haunted her, the last tangible reminder of her friend. As Omer had said, the area was full of treasure hunters searching new places yet undreamed and old places long played out. The generous meteorite which had blasted the Sudbury basin had planted many precious metals, gold and palladium among them.

  One of Belle’s favourite summer haunts, Bonanza Lake north of Wapiti, had been mined briefly around the turn of the century. Since it was accessible by old logging roads, Belle and Freya beat through undergrowth to climb the steep trail to its hills once or twice each summer. Not only were the blueberries spectacular, but the pellucid green lake attracted wise loons, who knew well ahead of the scientists that the PH of the troubled waters had been slowly improving. True, the only mine shaft she had actually seen had been filled in with rubble and ringed by rusted scraps of a fence, but she had traced along the walls of the water-filled excavations the petering-out of the quartzite. Aside from picking up a few specimens and taking a swim in the lake, Belle never ventured further into the dense bush, rife with bloody-minded flies and festooned with poison ivy.

  Tom Beardley would know. A retired chemist, he played prospector on the weekends, ferreting out tiny mining claims more for fun, boasting that he was an explorer, not a gold baron. A lucky find near Timmins had netted him twenty thousand dollars once, which he had blown quickly on a new Bronco, but that had been his only major discovery. Now and then Tom taught a night course in metallurgy at Nickel City College; Belle had met him there in the cafeteria on a break from a real estate seminar.

  Tom’s wife Dorothy answered Belle’s call. “Tom? Sure, he’s back from Wawa today. Never misses the Jays on television. No sooner unpacked than he’s rushed down to the Diamond Pipe to meet some of his gangster friends. Tell him for me he’d better not be home later than fifteen minutes after the game. And I’m listening.” The radio warbled in the background. Belle knew that Dorothy’s jocular threats held little sting. Tom had nursed her through several breast cancer operations and made sure that they escaped every February to the Portuguese Algarve, a favourite Canadian destination because of its bargain villas.

  The Diamond Pipe on Bathurst Street was jumping as Belle strolled in shortly after seven, so as not to interrupt the game. Her friend sat with Paolo Santanen, demolishing a platter of Buffalo wings. Tom, a huge man with a matching gut but strong as a Terex truck, looked as if he had not only pounded in the last spike of the Trans-Canada railway single-handedly, but all the others as well. He clapped his massive paws on the table and set his unshaven jaw in Paolo’s milk-mild Finnish face. “They’ll never make the grade without another couple of pitchers, my son. And sure as hell they trade any of their duds, those bozos’ll win the Cy Young award for their new team. Maybe it’s the coaches’ fault, who knows?”

  Nearing eighty, the small and wiry Paolo was developing a bow to his back, and he moved with slow deliberation. Derek had come along when he had been well into his fifties. Last time he and Belle had met, he had wiped tears from his eyes as he thanked her for helping his son get the Snopac job. “I want to die the day before I go into a nursing home, and the day before Derek ever gets in trouble again,” he had confessed privately as his wife Gerda boiled up some potatoes. Yet tonight Paolo seemed full of fire. “Jays got power to spare. Let ’em get five runs in the opposition, these boys’ll bring ’em up. You ain’t got no trust at all. Don’t you know baseball’s a game of faith?” Belle moved forward to catch Tom’s eye.

  “Belle? I haven’t seen you in months. Too busy grubbin’ real estate to talk with old pals?” With a friendly wink, he nabbed an extra chair from the next table and patted it. “Now how’s my Freya?” He and his short-haired pointer Duke loved to go birding. Three fat partridges that he had dropped off last fall, ivory breasts more succulent than chicken, had made a memorable stew.

  Paolo took her
hand and squeezed it wordlessly as he met her eyes. She signalled the waitress for a beer by hoisting Tom’s bottle. “Good, for all of her ten years, but getting on like her mom.” She nibbled at a wing he offered. “Yow, hot stuff. Listen, I need some information from you, some mining expertise.”

  He roared into high gear, flexing his masculinity and nudging his friend. “The Midnight Prospector strikes again. And you said I was over the hill.”

  “Stop showing off, you old coot. I need to know about gold north of Wapiti, the Bonanza area maybe. Is anything still there?”

  “Up where the new park’s goin’ in? Nah, she’s all played out. Bonanza. Some joke, that name. Never did find nothing much, though they thought at first they had another boom like Cobalt. ’Course, that was long before my time. Closed up about a hunnert years ago. Nothing left now but a couple of filled-in shafts and rubble.”

  “That’s it? You mean the quartzite piles at the top of the hill? I’ve taken some pieces for my rock garden. White and brown.”

  “It’s pretty stuff. The brown’s siderite, a crystalline carbonate. That one heap’s all most people ever see. Couple other shafts a few hundred feet farther into the bush. Pretty dense and overgrown. Could be flooded, too. Dad said they were almost ninety feet down. Tanned me once as a kid when he thought I’d been fooling around there. Say, listen to me rattling on. What do you want to know about that played-out claim for? You don’t want to poke around those rotting timbers. The gasses are toxic. Methane, for one.” He gave her a serious look which spelled worry.

  “Could there be any gold left?”

  “Well, the companies gave up and never went back. That tells you something. Odds are against it. They mined out any veins as far as they could.”

  Belle narrowed her eyes and tapped his wrist gently. “But if someone found a streak, even a smallish one. Don’t ask me how; I never took geology. Why would they keep it quiet? Why not cash in?”

  “Are you kidding? Someone still owns rights to that land. And it would be ‘thank you very much, buddy. Now get lost.’ Except it probably wouldn’t be worth the company’s money to pursue a peanut find even with high tech. Cost them five million to get in, they’d need to make fifteen. This isn’t the Klondike of 1898, girl.”

  “So how could anything be retrieved profitably?”

  “Well, hell, you could blowtorch it out,” he boomed and gulped his beer with an approving belch. “A rich little vein, pocket gold mine. Drip her into what we call ‘buttons’. Ounce or two. Easy to carry. ’Course, you’d have to sell on the black market at less than half the price. Be worth it, though, damn government taxes. Lots of fun, too.”

  Paolo had been listening with interest, nodding at the excitement as he tried to get their attention. “You know, that could be. A chum of mine, after he retired, used to spend weekends loading tailings from an old site in Kirkland Lake into his pickup, take it back to his garage to crush. Called it the Lost Deutchman Mine. And you know, he made hisself enough to live on a good ten year. And good for him, I say. Pensions weren’t worth nothing back then.”

  Belle placed Jim’s drop in front of Tom’s bottle. His eyes widened, reflecting the yellow flame of the table’s light as he touched it lovingly, rubbed at the sheen. “That’s the ticket. The real thing, as they used to say before that there cola.”

  “Could this come from that method you describe? Dripped off? It sounds so primitive.”

  “Nothin’ more simple and more valuable than gold. Whoever made this has a pretty little girl for sure. Lucky devil.”

  Belle pocketed the drop as a baby Jay belted a lead-off double to galvanize the crowd. What had Omer said about the drop having blood on it?

  NINETEEN

  The sunrise had a definite MGM lock on the pastel lavender of Liz Taylor’s eyes as Belle refilled her bird feeder on the frosty deck. She was getting jumpy and frustrated at the confusing trails surrounding Jim’s death, the widening circle of ripples. Someone waited at the centre, sure of safety or anxious of discovery, deadly in any case if the smokeout were an indication. The sudden ring of the phone made her spill her self-righteous decaf all over the table. “It’s Geoff Garson. Pardon the violation of netiquette. I had to hear your non-electronic voice, Belle. E-mail is so cold and mechanical.”

  “And I got your information. The picture came through showing every brick. Top notch sleuthing. But don’t tell me that you uncovered more?”

  “My housekeeper’s son’s friend, I will spare you the nepotistic connections, is an orderly at Forest Glen. From his report, and I know you will handle these facts with discretion since I wouldn’t want to get the lad in trouble, your Eva came there about a year ago. She had been through some trauma, possibly sexual because her psychiatrist specializes in rape, incest, abortion, sad dysfunctions from A to Z, or your Canadian zed. Rather a Dr. Ruth of the Dark Shadows.”

  “That would have been a show to remember. Any visitors?”

  “A brother comes every month or so, only recently with the mother. A breakthrough maybe.” He emphasized words with delicious drama, Clifton Webb as Waldo in Laura. Of course, he could be a quarter-ton Marlon Brando, for all Belle knew.

  Her notepad filled as Geoff continued. “My source is only an orderly, but those seen-and-not-heard types know the inside gossip. Like the servants in a Victorian household.”

  “Right, Upstairs, Downstairs. A fortunate choice.”

  Geoff pressed forward, not at all shy at inventing a scenario. “Playing amateur psychiatrist, Belle, is this a case of molestation or an unreported rape? What do you know of her family?”

  Belle doodled idly as she recounted the visit to the island, the curious saint in her shrine. “Hard to figure, Geoff. The father’s dead years ago. The girl was a lonely figure. No friends, no interests outside her studies. Her brother is beyond reproach, in my opinion. The mother seems loving and warm. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What was that saint you mentioned? Dymphna, was it? Never heard of that exotic lady; so many have been delisted for lack of documentation. Still, give me a moment. That was my territory at Notre Dame.”

  It turned out that Geoff was not only a retired professor, but also a Jesuit priest. She could hear him leafing pages. “Ah, the patron saint of the insane. Gheel, the Netherlands. This is getting very murky, Belle.”

  “A saint for the insane? This is exotic for a lapsed Anglican like me.”

  “Hmmm. Let’s see. There are hordes, one for every human woe. St. Peregrine for cancer, St. Apollonia for toothaches, St. Fiacre for haemorrhoids . . .”

  “Stop the rogue’s gallery! I’m quite suggestible.” Belle protested. She promised Geoff the latest L. R. Wright mystery, a Canadian favourite set on the Sunshine Coast in B.C.

  Although Belle had a gift for fishing for red herrings and clutching at hypothetical straws, and although she still found Brooks a truly odious man, dog lover or not, she could no longer consider him a serious suspect. He was home on heavy bond, minding his manners, a candidate for several years in prison after his trial. At least his daughter Brenda might get a second chance, maybe even bring those Puddingstone kids to life. Although he wouldn’t admit to the break-in, he had agreed to talk to Belle in hopes of gaining judicial brownie points. And the meeting might fill in some gaps in the picture.

  She reached the Beaverdam shortly after nine. Brooks sat slumped in front of his father’s fieldstone fireplace, oblivious to her entrance. His head sagged, giving him a bizarre chinless look. A beer sat beside him, and ashes flicked onto the handsome slate floor.

  Belle smiled at his red checked shirt; trust a man to prize an old friend too much to toss it out even if it told dangerous tales. “I’ve been looking for a spot to fit this little piece of evidence,” she said, matching the swatch to his sleeve, watching him recoil as if she’d been a snapping turtle.

  “Big deal. I’m already goin’ down far enough. Sorry about the dog, though. That was an accident. I wanted to tell you that.” He strok
ed an old raggedy collie who gazed up at him with warm, liquid eyes. “Just went over to teach you a lesson, smelling around in the business. Make it look like the place had been robbed.”

  Her savage glare backed him off with a whine. “Hey, now, missus, nothing bad. Just throw a few papers around for show. When I opened the door, and you know, you should lock your doors . . .” He cowered as Belle slammed her fist on the table and stood up to leave. “Your dog ran out and laid into me something fierce. And he’s big. Was going right for my throat when I saw the shovel. Just hit him once. Not hard. Then I heard a car and got out fast.”

  “Self-defence, no doubt. And the dog’s a she.”

  “Why, sure. That’s exactly what it was.”

  Jim’s accident had surprised him as much as anybody, and though he admitted to using small lakes north of Wapiti for transfers, the warmer weather had ended that. One plane had come close to getting stuck. “How about Cott Lake?” she asked.

  “Cott? Up by Bonanza? No need to go all that way.” He paused and poked at the fire reflectively, his voice almost avuncular. “Jim was a nice kid. Never had a boy of my own. He used to do some scut work here when he was in high school, baiting and gassing up for the tourists. One thing I can tell you, his death didn’t have nothin’ to do with drugs. I’m no killer.”

  She gave him a sideways stare, like a wary gunslinger. “No? Then why did you come back and plug up my chimney?”

  “Huh. I heard about that. Not my style. The whole week I was over in Thunder Bay selling two machines.” He drew on his cigarette and coughed. “Hey, your dog is OK, right?”