Smokescreen

by Nancy Hartry

  Text copyright © 2013 by Nancy Hartry

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  One Toronto Street, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M5C 2V6

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York, P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012949903

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hartry, Nancy

  Smokescreen / by Nancy Hartry.

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-406-0

  I. Title.

  PS8565.A673S56 2013 jc813′.54 C2012-906502-1

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Ontario has no Department of Forestry and Parks. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover designed by Terri Nimmo

  www.tundrabooks.com

  v3.1

  For Kathy,

  who knows that anything can happen

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part 1: The Bunkhouse

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part 2: Base Camp Number One

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 3: Base Camp Number Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part 4: Truth or Bear

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many generations of black bear were born during the time it took to make this book. And many trees were pulped. There are so many people to thank.

  First and foremost to “the goup” — Susan Adach, Ann Goldring, Loris Lesynski, Teresa Toten. Thank you for hanging in through many renditions and cheering me on.

  Thanks to my readers: Maxine Hartry, Doug Hartry, Lesley Marshall, Susan Foley and Carol-Faye Petricko. Particular thanks to Beth Pollack and Louise Pyne for their insightful criticisms and encouragement when I needed them most. Jocelyn Burke — you are a talented editor and thank you for your voice and your inspiration. Many thanks to Denis Durocher for making sure my French is correct, for your editorial suggestions, and your input into the cover.

  To Jennifer and David Coulter who opened their home to me at least twice, giving me a quiet and nurturing place to work.

  Thanks to Yvonne Thompson for being my ‘cloud’ before that was a concept.

  Many thanks to my technical experts — to T.M. for his fire fighting expertise; to Brian Jones, bush pilot and retired Air Canada pilot for solving my plot problems. It would have been a very different book without your help. Finally, to Kathy Thom — between the two of us, we managed to come up with one coherent memory.

  To my teachers — Peter Carver, Kathy Stinson, Paula Wing, Barbara Greenwood and Sarah Ellis, and all their students who helped workshop this book. It took a city.

  For their editorial support — Kathryn Cole, Sue Tate, Tara Walker, Samantha Swenson and in particular Gena Gorrell for bear wrestling Smokescreen into shape.

  Finally, to my children, Gaelan Burke and Jocelyn Burke, and my husband, Frank Burke for enduring my inattention and glazed looks while I hitched a ride with Kerry and Yvette as they bombed the lakes and rivers of northern Ontario. One day, I hope to share them with you.

  PROLOGUE

  A hot wind blew and there was a whispering across the island and the lake. The round leaves of the poplar trees twisted, making soft clapping sounds, as if the bush knew.

  Clap. Clap. Clap.

  Something must be coming.

  Something must be coming.

  Two loons, wings a blur, skimmed the water, fleeing because they could.

  The first lick of fire was a tendril of smoke from under a mat of birch leaves and pine needles. Poof!

  The flame spread along the ground, an orange flare as small as the flick of a cigarette lighter. In seconds there was another and another, until a jack pine, its resin oozing in the heat, sparked like a Roman candle. Flames licked up the bark, along the lowest limbs, to be handed off to the outstretched arms of the pine’s nearest neighbor.

  Up, up, up the fire climbed to the crown and skipped from tree to tree.

  There was a roar as the oxygen was sucked out of the forest. The crackling of debris and the thud of branches plummeting to the forest floor masked the frantic cries from the birds and animals. The whisperings of the fire, the popping of seed pods, told every living creature to run for its life.

  One tendril of smoke. One flame from a Bic lighter. And clap, clap, clap … there she goes.

  PART 1

  The Bunkhouse

  June 27–28

  CHAPTER 1

  A line of blood leaked from a puncture just below Kerry’s knee. She hadn’t felt the bug bite until the dribble of blood tickled her skin. When she swatted her leg at yet another fly, her palm was smeared red. Kerry spit on a tissue and began erasing the bloody smudge where a tiny blackfly had neatly taken a chunk out of her, leaving her leg itchy and throbbing.

  Kerry had been sitting on the bunkhouse steps for three hours, ever since her exasperated supervisor had dumped her there to wait for her “partner in crime,” as he put it. Her prospective partner for the summer hadn’t shown up for work yet, and the boss said he was damned if he was going to do the orientation twice. “Over my dead body, no matter what those idiots in charge of the Student Employment Program have to say about it,” he grumbled, and drove off to his office in town.

  Frustrated, Kerry kicked the duffel bag she’d so carefully packed just yesterday in Toronto. She’d taken a checklist of camping essentials off the Internet and followed it exactly, but the bug spray that was so highly recommended seemed useless against the bloodthirsty blackflies of Northwestern Ontario.

  More than once, she’d slipped the straps of her pack over her shoulders and made to leave for home. All she had to do was walk down that gravel lane hemmed in by evergreen trees to the Trans-Canada Highway, turn right, and go directly to the Greyhound bus depot in town. Do not collect five thousand dollars for a summer job as a cottage development technician with the Department of Forestry and Parks, whatever that meant.

  But Kerry wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction of seeing her fail. It was unbelievable how her mother had schemed and pulled strings to get Kerry this job. “Well, you could have pulled harder and found me something better!” Kerry said, and then covered her mouth and look
ed to see if anybody had heard her. There were only the bugs and the birds and the trees, of course. So many types of evergreens.

  The living compound for student employees was almost surrounded by bush. A long gravel laneway extended north from the highway through the woods and ended in a circular parking lot bordered by white clapboard buildings. On the north were a construction trailer and a separate cabin that housed a washroom. On the east was the cookhouse, complete with screen door and windows outlined in forest green paint, and on the west, where Kerry had been told to stay put, was the “boys bunkhouse.” It was reserved for fire crew, parks staff, and conservation officers.

  “It’ll be just you two girls over on that side,” Buzz Harcourt, the supervisor, had said. “We thought we’d put you up in the construction trailer because it’s close to the washroom. We were told to build a separate washroom just for you, and I don’t mind saying it blew my budget. I hope you like it.”

  Kerry knew what he was really saying was “You’d better appreciate it,” but she didn’t know how to respond so she said nothing at all.

  She’d visited the washroom three times in the past hour and there was nothing special about it. There were two sinks and two toilet cubicles partitioned by plywood that had been hastily primed, the floor was of sheet vinyl, and the lighting consisted of two bare light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling. She’d checked three times but found no lock on any of the doors, not the outside door, nor the cubicle doors. The metal shower stall tucked in a corner had a clear plastic shower curtain, but there was no covering at all on the window.

  Kerry blew her bangs off her forehead, trying to calm herself. How was she going to survive in this nowhere camp? And what did she know about being a cottage development technician? Nothing! As she sat down on the ground and put her head between her knees, slowing her breathing to avoid a full-blown panic attack, her brain seized on one little detail the boss had mentioned about her partner: she’d grown up in a construction camp in Labrador. Thank you. She has experience. She’ll show me how. “Come on, you can do it!” she said out loud. She found herself saying this daily, since bombing out the month before in the biggest Irish Dance competition of her life. It should have been the pinnacle of fourteen years of practice. Instead it had ended in an embarrassing fall, and she’d been carried off the stage. My body betrayed me. Correction, my mother overtrained me. And now I have shin splints! Stress fractures, according to the doctor. Nice move, Mother, packing me off to this place in the middle of nowhere, so I’m out of your sight. If I can’t dance, I’m nothing to you.

  For the twentieth time, Kerry tried texting her dance friends and got a “no service” response. Long distance is probably a fortune from here, she thought, but tried calling anyway. No luck. Maybe if I change locations. She walked down the strip of grass between two gravel ruts leading from the camp to the highway. Out of nowhere, a cloud of blackflies swarmed her head, invading her ears and lungs. She broke into a run to elude them, and when she reached the highway she bent double and flipped her long hair over her forehead, scrubbing her scalp with her nails to drive the bugs away.

  As she stood up again, Kerry was startled by the air brakes of a Greyhound bus stopping not far from her. The door opened and an enormous backpack and fluorescent green day pack flew out onto the shoulder. A girl wearing four-inch black wedges and carrying a Holt Renfrew shopping bag came down the steps. Kerry saw her laughing, probably at something the bus driver was saying. The girl turned and pouted, then blew a kiss in the direction of the open door. Only when the door closed and the bus pulled away did she deal with the equipment at her feet.

  Damn, just a hitchhiker, and not my missing partner. What kind of idiot wears heels like that in the bush? Kerry turned toward the compound, steeling herself for the run back through the woods.

  “Yoo-hoo, I can take some help here, please. Hello, hello! You think I’m talking to the trees?”

  The girl looked as if she’d walked straight off the cover of Vogue magazine. Her v-necked salmon pink shirt was silk, and it matched shorts barely covering her butt. Her fingers and toes were painted the same color, all except the big toe on each foot, which was a bright, metallic blue. Kerry couldn’t see the girl’s eyes because they were concealed behind wraparound Gucci sunglasses, but she sensed that she was being checked out in turn.

  “You like that color on my toes, eh? Me, I think it works.”

  “It’s nice,” said Kerry. “You shouldn’t have any trouble getting a ride into town. It’s only about a mile and a half, and there’s lots of traffic along this part of the Trans-Canada.”

  “But I’m already here. This is the Department of Forestry and Parks, non?”

  “Not really, the office is in town. This is just a camp.”

  “Perfect. I’m here to find cottage sites.”

  Kerry looked blank.

  “I’m the cottage development tech.”

  “No way,” said Kerry. “You can’t be. The supervisor said there are only two, and …”

  “And I’m one of them. Yvette Bernier. You?”

  Embarrassed, Kerry barely took the outstretched hand. “Kerry Williams from Toronto. How come you’re so late?”

  Yvette shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. If you don’t mind me saying so, you are very tall and thin.” She pronounced “thin” as “tin,” with a French accent, and it took Kerry a few seconds to figure out what she was saying.

  “Yeah, but I’m stronger than I look,” she answered, not making eye contact. She could feel herself blushing beet red.

  Yvette lifted her sunglasses off her face and examined Kerry as if she was a bug under a microscope. “Hmmm. If you say so. I’m not so sure.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Y vette kicked off her sandals and picked her way up the strip of grass. Kerry, burdened with the largest of Yvette’s packs, wallowed in the girl’s wake.

  “It’s really buggy in here!” said Kerry.

  “Bugs don’t like me.”

  Well, that makes two million of us.

  “Where’s my room?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. The boss didn’t leave me a key. He said we’d be in the trailer but it’s locked.”

  Yvette shrugged and kept moving toward the construction trailer. She turned the door handle of the end room right and left and pushed with her shoulder while turning hard. Open sesame.

  “Everybody knows how to do that. Those locks never work; I don’t know why they bother with them.”

  Well, I don’t know how! Kerry felt panic rise in her throat. No locks working anywhere, not even on the bedroom door! She wasn’t going to sleep for a minute in this place.

  The room was about eight by ten feet, with dark, fake wood paneling. There was a cot on each side wall, with a matching dresser at the foot, and two closets flanked the door. Yvette ran a hand along the windowsill, checking for dust, and seemed satisfied. She bounced on the blue-and-white striped mattress and the cot squeaked. “Let’s find your room. I hope you don’t snore because these walls are paper thin.” Kerry followed her outside and watched her break into the other rooms, each one bare of furniture.

  “They expect us to share the same small space for the whole summer?” Kerry said.

  Yvette frowned. In the bottom drawer of her dresser she found two sets of white sheets. She threw one set at Kerry and started making up the bed on the left side of the room. On the upper shelf in each closet was a gray wool army blanket wrapped in plastic. Yvette waited while Kerry wrestled with her bedding.

  “If we make the furniture into an L-shape, it will give us more space,” Yvette said.

  “What about asking for another room?”

  “You can if you like, but this is better than a tent, and that’s how they’ll think about it.”

  A tent? Kerry’d never slept in a tent in her life.

  For the next five minutes the girls moved furniture, leaving a space for a makeshift table at the head of Yvette’s bed. She upturned a cardboard box and cover
ed it with a piece of leopard-print fabric pulled from the Holt’s bag, as Kerry gazed on in amazement. She handed Kerry the end of a matching piece of drapery and together they stretched it along the top of the window—a perfect fit. Yvette fished around in her purse and came up with some finishing nails, which she banged into place with the heel of her shoe while Kerry held the fabric in place. They both stood back to admire the effect.

  “You could almost do a jig in here,” said Kerry.

  Yvette dove one more time into the shopping bag. She tossed one throw pillow with a leopard and zebra pattern at Kerry and placed the other where the down pillow met the wool blanket.

  “Cute,” admitted Kerry.

  Yvette lifted her shoulders and ran a hand through her cropped blonde hair. “It’s better to achieve a balance.”

  Kerry rummaged through her duffel bag for her stuffed bear and leaned him up against the pillow. “I call him Rover because he goes everywhere with me.”

  “He looks happy camouflaged against the pillow. I was never allowed to have toy bears because we lived in the bush, and my grand-maman believed they gave children a missed message, since bears are wild and dangerous creatures, not meant for cuddling.”

  “Actually, it’s ‘mixed message,’ but ‘missed’ sounds kind of poetic.”

  Each girl stretched out on her bed and looked up at the ceiling, the silence long and awkward between them. Kerry got out her phone and tried one more time. “I can’t figure it out. This thing was working just fine in Toronto.”

  Yvette snorted. “I didn’t even bring mine; the service is so bad up here. We can always go to the library to check our e-mail. They have strict rules about personal use at the department, so don’t try it there.”

  “Omigod, I’m going to go mental!”

  “There’s always snail mail. It can be fun.”

  Kerry swung her legs to the floor and sat up. “I totally forgot. The boss, Mr. Harcourt, said we’re supposed to go to the office—‘the minute she gets here,’ he said. He was pissed you were late.”