Belle Palmer Mysteries 5-Book Bundle

by Lou Allin

  Belle scanned the small cabin for whatever might aid the journey. If . . . when she reached civilization, she’d pay the owner for their life-saving bed and board. She poured the water in the kettle into a plastic juice bottle and added it to the pack. The lighter and a bone-handled knife on a belt rode along. Two brown, durable canvas jackets hanging on the wall attracted her eye. They’d make good overcoats.

  Micro returned, passing a hand over his wet forehead. “It’s snowing.”

  She looked outside. “Only moisture in the air when the dew point freezes. See where the blue’s coming back? Enough to make a Dutchman a pair of trousers.” How many times had her father said that? Would she hear it again?

  They went to the lake for a wake-up splash, kneeling as they cleaned their faces, arms and hands, laughing at their painted iodine streaks. Back inside, while she pored over the map, they munched the cakes she’d set aside. She moved her hand down many squares to a long, thin lake intersecting the pole line at the southern end. Slowly she counted, each half inch a punishing demand on their energy banks. “Thor Lake’s getting closer. We’ve done thirteen kilometres. Twelve to go.”

  “I rode three times that on the railbed.” Micro pointed to the dense, sculpted lines across the route. “What are those?”

  She gave a rueful smile, fingercombing her hair, in need of a wash like the rest of her. Would she rather be fed or clean? No contest. “Height indicators. We have more climbing today. How’s your foot?”

  He pressed the heel with cautious fingers. “It’s way better now.”

  Wait until you start walking again, she thought.

  Finding a pencil and a paper bag, she left an apologetic note on the table and secured the cabin door by looping twine from a utility drawer around the handle and tying it tightly to a nail. The door would stay shut, protecting the interior. They buttoned the bulky canvas jackets and set off, led by the giant towers which marched across the landscape like Quixote’s windmills. Stuffed with bannock, she felt more like Sancho Panza.

  Over the next hour, the day brightened as the clouds parted to reveal a pale cerulean sky. Minus 10°C at a guess. Easy breathing, no catch in the nose or throat. Thanks to the double coats, they stayed toasty.

  “I’ll take the pack,” Micro said, hoisting it at the next rest stop, a rocky outcrop which resembled giants’ chairs.

  The heavy frost made the leaves crackle as they walked, their breath puffing in the cold morning air. In a customary game from her hikes, Belle closed her eyes on a level spot. She could identify the leaf by its crunch. Thin poplar and birch were louder than thicker maple or leathery oak. From a spruce grove, Buffalo flushed a pair of clumsy, flapping grouse, which fluttered into the high branches. Their white, chickeny meat made Hélène’s grouse fingers one of Belle’s favourite treats. The bush was an endless party for the dog, accustomed to walking city streets, but it frustrated Belle to see food escape her useless hands.

  As they advanced down the line, she wondered if her decision to leave the cabin had been wise. The land was open enough that they could have built three small fires in the universal distress signal. No one was looking for Micro here, but had her absence triggered the OPP into aerial action? No signs of a yellow rescue helicopter reached her ready ears.

  On they plodded, up to a bald knob, down across creeks, around a smooth mound of rock. She pointed out the glacial grooves across the dark basalt.

  “I heard about those. A couple miles high, my teacher said.” He followed the striations with his eyes. “North to southwest, right?”

  As they approached a meadow, three deer foraging on dry grass sprang towards safety into the woods, lithe and sleek with white tails, facing a winter which would thin their herds and leave Darwin’s best. Where would she rank at the end of the day? While she planned no Palmer additions to the gene pool, Micro deserved a chance.

  They hiked through an old burn of jack pine skeletons, witness of a lightning bolt. Fireweed, pin cherry and other sun-loving plants had begun to reclaim the territory. Burns were part of nature’s clean-up. Otherwise these species couldn’t prosper. Only when man encroached and the sacred word “property” came under threat were the blazes perceived as bad. Every summer she saw thin wisps of grey in the distant hills framing Lake Wapiti and smelled smoke on the wind. Once a filigreed, blackened birch leaf had dropped from the sky into her hand, an eerie postcard.

  When they stopped at noon for lunch, Belle reopened the map, creased and beginning to tear from hard travel and moisture. Pray God they wouldn’t need it much longer. “I’m thinking we’re here,” she said, tapping a square. “Another two hours and safe at last.” And surely they would be. Yet how many times had an adult lied to a frightened child to make him feel secure? She remembered her ruse en route to Silver City with Chris about the use of the word “retard” and decided to come clean.

  “I have a confession.” She told him about her fabricated cousin.

  “That’s okay. You taught us some better words. The substitute teacher had to look up ‘bumpkin’ in the dictionary.” Micro munched his bannock, portioning some for the hungry dog. Buffalo had lapped at each creek, but their water was nearly gone, and the food was salty and dry.

  “We’re crossing into Lampman Township from Frechette. That’s Harrison Lake,” she said from the promontory, exposing unbroken wilderness in all directions. “Avery Lake’s over there.” She pointed east to a large body of water with jewelled islands.

  “All these places have names, but no people?” he asked, a flash of wonder raising his neat eyebrows like tildes.

  She pictured the last hundred and twenty years of the region’s history: hunters, trappers, loggers and government mapmakers. “I guess someone walked in and planted a name on a hill, a creek, a lake. I do the same thing in my territory. Remember Surprise Lake?” She laughed. “Of course, it’s not official.”

  “It should be,” he said, considering the map with a serious expression and spreading two lithe fingers like a compass. Before she could grab him, with an impish grin he scrambled a few feet up the metal hydro tower and pointed northwest to two azure pools as he hung like a chimp. “There’s Belle Lake and Micro Lake beside it.”

  “I’m the round, fat one, eh? Get down, you rascal, before you break a leg. I’m not pulling a travois, let alone constructing one from my clothes.”

  At three o’clock, they glimpsed the upper end of long, narrow Thor Lake. The last few kilometres took them along the shimmering water’s east side. “Do you see anyone?” Micro asked, a trust in his voice which opened fresh wounds in her heart.

  His gait had slowed, and he was limping again, as she’d feared. She cleaned her glasses, blurry with sweatfog. Far across, she imagined small buildings, but the trees were thick. Was that a movement near one shape or a trick of light? Her nostrils flared at the ever-so-faint aromatic cedar perfume of woodsmoke, a quick and easy fuel in early fall. To add to the fun, intermittent cramps niggled at her belly, a twenty-four-hour warning of her monthly biological clock. Men had it lucky. She shuddered at the thought of scratchy moss in her pants.

  At the lake’s terminus, they left the pole line, Belle kissing her hand in thanks, and crossed the narrow Vermilion River on a rustic bridge. From there they began hiking a well-established trail along the west side of Thor. Her muscles were screaming from lactic acid build-up. They were both an hour beyond the end of their resources. If the place was deserted, she was determined to drape herself over the tracks Perils-of-Pauline style and wait for CN. What if the trains ran only once a week?

  Then she heard a melodious sound, silver in the air, rising and falling like a symphony. The guttural snarl of a chain saw. Picking up the pace on the magic of sheer grit, they followed it through the woods like Looney Tunes characters floating inches above the ground, past several cabins into a clearing. Beside a woodpile, dressed in lined jeans, a red wool checked shirt and pink knit cap with ear flaps, a familiar figure was chunking up a huge cedar log.
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br />   Belle made a wide circle to move slowly into his sight. She didn’t want a Texas-style massacre if she startled him and he lost control of the machine’s formidable twenty-inch blade. “Hello. We meet again.” She bent to brace her arms on her shaking knees.

  At first, his tanned, creased face registered confusion. Then he broke into a roar of laughter, switching off the motor and putting down the saw. Reaching under his hat, he scratched one ear. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph on a snowmobile. You followed me after all, or are you on some survival exercise?” He looked at the panting dog. “That’s a herder, not a retriever, so you can’t be hunting.”

  Sitting on a chopping block while Micro, once again a curious boy, wandered to the water’s edge with Buffalo, Belle told him about their trip. Telesphore Rochette, Ted, extended a beefy hand, which she shook with more delight than meeting the Queen.

  “By God, the radio’s been talking for weeks about that boy. Heard something this morning on the short wave about a woman missing up by Shining Tree. Picked up by a stranger, they thought. You came all that way?” He put his hands on his hips and stared at her until she wondered if her face were dirty as well as striped with iodine. Probably. And who cared? She’d earned her smudges.

  “Every motherloving kilometre.” She rubbed her sore legs, the muscles stiffening. Steve would have relayed the news to everyone. But not her father, not yet. He had more savvy than to panic an old man.

  “So you broke into Jon Saari’s camp? He’s a good guy. Lives in Coniston. Buy him a bottle of rye.”

  “He’ll get a case of Gilbey’s finest.” She pumped her fist.

  He looked down to the lake, where Micro was skipping stones. “The lad’s a fine one. Yours?” In an old-fashioned gesture, he cut his eyes to her ringless hand.

  “Just friends.” So much more than that. They’d been to hell and back together. Belle heard a chattering and noticed a metal pest trap holding two furry babies. She gave him an ironic smile. “Are squirrel coats back in fashion?”

  He shook his finger at her joke. “Meet Abbott and Costello. Their nest was destroyed when this rotten cedar fell. Killed the mother, too. They can’t live out the winter on their own. I’m taking them home for my granddaughter to bottle-feed until spring. Do they ever like canned milk.”

  So the trapper had a soft heart, another human contradiction. Barbecuing Elsie, Babe and Chicken Little, who was she to lecture?

  “Hey, Micro,” she called. “Come look at this.”

  He returned from the water and stopped Buffalo from nosing the cage. “Wicked!” he said, reaching toward a squirrel head poking through the wires.

  Ted and Belle exchanged eyerolls. “Watch your fingers, son. They bite, and they’re covered with fleas. Gotta dose them with powder from the pet store.”

  Ted took them into a nearby cabin, where he had a pot simmering on a cast-iron cookstove. Placing them at a table, he served that morning’s beaten biscuits with a tasty rabbit stew. She noticed with a smile that Micro abandoned his vegetarian principles to dig in faster than a starving tick. She couldn’t have pried him from the plate with a crowbar.

  Ted poured himself a coffee. “I’m getting picked up tomorrow. Train only runs south three days a week. Got my quota, and I’m taking the wife to Victoria, where her sister lives. She’s been bitching at me for years. Would you believe that it hardly snows there? Damn bulbs come up in February. Close as you get to Florida in this crazy country.”

  Before dusk fell, she and Micro grabbed bars of soap and towels, and headed for the lake, scrubbing off their well-earned sweat on either side of a rocky point. From his kitbag, Ted had managed to find clean shirts for them. Belle didn’t think she’d ever wear that fragrant sweater again. Or maybe she’d frame it.

  The trapper offered them his cabin with twin beds and made sure the stove was set for the night. “Sleep well, explorers. I’ll bunk next door.”

  The next morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal laced with brown sugar and canned milk, Belle was outside with Micro showing him a small velvety mass on a maple tree. “It’s a rare Hebrew moth egg case,” she said, stroking it gently. “In the spring, it’ll hatch. The markings look like letters.”

  Coming up behind them, Ted laughed like a loon and slapped his leg. “Never thought I’d find someone fond of tent caterpillars,” he said, pointing farther up to cottony black masses in the branches and the desiccated remains of an army glued to the trunk.

  “Ick,” she said, wiping her hands. Nature loved to play tricks.

  Around ten o’clock, the conductor of the Budd car, an independent engine unit used in remote areas, was amused as Ted loaded his seventeen-foot aluminum canoe, squirrel cage and packs of pelts into the baggage car, along with Buffalo. Two other people had arrived from a “stroll,” he said with a wry wink as he peeled off a few twenties for their fare.

  In the passenger car, seating two dozen, they made themselves comfortable along with a group of unshaven but jolly canoeists for the hour-long trip to Capreol, north of Sudbury. For those who couldn’t afford a bush-plane flight, this no-frills railroading was a cheap and convenient way of reaching the wilderness. While Belle and Ted sipped from a thermos of coffee, Micro stroked the rabbit pelt that Ted had given him for a souvenir.

  The toy train stopped at the Capreol depot. From the siding they watched a gleaming Via Rail express bound for Vancouver roar by, complete with luxury dining car, bedrooms and bubble-topped viewing car. She wouldn’t have traded a place on it for the quick phone call she made to Hélène, setting a record in speed talking.

  In Ted’s truck, the canoe on top, Buffalo in the cap with the gear, Belle found herself jammed between the “men,” so she made room by resting her arms on the back of the bench seat, knitting together a strange family. “I don’t approve of your killing anything but beaver, Ted, but I owe you more than train fare. Come for dinner the next time you’re in the neighbourhood. Champagne and steaks are on the menu.”

  “I won’t be working out that way. Some sneaky bugger springs my traps.” His craggy face broke into a smile. “Happy to be of service, madame. What goes around comes around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He made the turn toward Radar Road and set an even eighty klicks across the flat farming area. “When I graduated high school, I tried to kayak the Albany River by myself. Broke up in a Class Five rapids. More nerve than brains. Stumbled into a native fish camp after a week. I lost twenty pounds.”

  They reached Edgewater Road by one o’clock. Belle leaned over and honked the horn the last hundred feet to the DesRosiers’ drive. Hélène rushed out, her face flushed with tears and smiles.

  “Dear Lord,” she said, as Micro ran to her arms. Buffalo and Rusty started sparring over an old soup bone. Stumping down the steps, Ed gave Belle a bear hug which took her breath away. He smelled of bacon. Then she knelt to bury her face in Freya’s familiar fur. “Home again, girl. I think you should put me on a leash.”

  After introducing Ted, they went inside for coffee royales, though the sun wasn’t within a mile of the yardarm. Hélène took her aside in the kitchen as she pulled out the Seagram’s. “Let’s not mention Dave and the whole mess. Micro’s been through enough. This is a celebration.”

  “So as you said on the phone, Bea wasn’t the third victim of a serial killer,” Belle said. “Did they—”

  “He’s in custody. A young handyman who worked for cash, scoping out opportunities. No records or receipts. Then he’d return like he was making a flower delivery. Psychic Paula gave the police the crucial tip about his license plate. They found some of the stolen items at his apartment. Everyone in town’s breathing easy, I can tell you.”

  Belle took one sip of the potent coffee and picked up the phone to dial the police. “I’ve been waiting long, uncomfortable nights to do this.”

  Hélène added with a frown, “If you left your wallet and cards in the van, you’d better call VISA, too.”

  “And I need some . . .�
� She doubted that Hélène, a hysterectomy in her past, retained any supplies, but her daughters-in-law often visited.

  Detective Sumner got on the line through a patch, wasting no time. A fortified OPP unit would be assembled at Shining Tree to raid the brewery. Police were issuing all-points bulletins for the men, starting with Dave and Len in town, she told them when she returned to the group.

  Micro was tapping at his computer, catching up on games. She could hear muffled beeps and bangs from his room. Ed and Ted relaxed in conversation in the recliners by the stove. “So you’re a trapper. I was a plumber, but that outdoor life always . . .”

  After Hélène pulled her famous manicotti out of the oven and poured glasses of knock-three-times black-market wine, Belle was glad to get home to her waterbed. She noticed with a smirk that Dave had left several worried messages on her answering machine, setting up another alibi. She hoped he would soon get an intimate view of Sudbury’s free civic housing.

  EPILOGUE

  Steve relaxed on the blue leather sofa in Belle’s living room, shoes off and his size tens up. Her van had been located in a sidewalk car lot in Montreal and would be on a flatbed coming home tomorrow.

  Between sips of coffee, he gave her chastizing looks beneath his black brows. “Why in the hell did you go alone to that brewery? You should have called 911 first. One of these—”

  “Stop the lecture, Mother. Would they have taken me seriously? How much time would have been wasted? If I hadn’t checked out Aikenhead on that very day, Micro would have been wearing a toe tag instead of moleskin.” She rapped her head. “I felt like such a fool not realizing what he had said on the phone. Guess I listened to my emotions, not my brain.”

  “What’s new? You’re damn lucky Rochette was at Thor Lake. Big strong man saves your butt.”

  “Hey, I had to get there. Two days in the bush living on bannock. Give me credit.” She tossed him a mischievous glance. “What’s the news on the rat pack?”