Valley of the Lost

by Vicki Delany

  “Well, uh, I’d rather not. I’m kinda busy.”

  “It sounds like you have information I need.”

  “Well, I guess. I’m at Mike’s Movie Mansion. I’m Mike.”

  “I’ll be there in ten. Don’t go anywhere, Mike.”

  ***

  Before going to George’s for breakfast, Molly Smith put five quarters into a sidewalk box and took out a copy of the Trafalgar Daily Gazette. The popular restaurant was almost empty, breakfast rush finished, lunch crowd still to come. She took a table at the back, away from the windows, ordered coffee and scrambled egg hash, and flipped the paper to the back section. The classifieds.

  ‘Shared accommodation. Female, N/S, N/P, Private bath. Riverside.’ And a phone number. Smith dug in her bag for a pen and came up empty. On the job, she kept herself well organized: her personal life was another matter.

  “Sorry,” she said to the vaguely-familiar waitress who brought her coffee. “Do you have a pen I can borrow?”

  “Sure, Moonlight. How’s things?”

  “Good.” Smith struggled for the girl’s name. Inconveniently she wasn’t wearing a name tag above her right breast. “How are things with you?”

  The waitress pulled the stub of a pencil out of her shirt pocket, handed it to Smith, and shifted one hip to take a rest. “Jimmy’ll be seven next month, and Rachel’s five. Time flies doesn’t it? I read about you in the paper sometimes, Moonlight. Sounds exciting, what you do.”

  “Naw. Deadly boring most of the time.” Helena, that was the woman’s name. Helena. She’d run with Meredith Morgenstern’s crowd in high school. “Thanks for this.” Smith indicated the pencil, and turned her attention to her open newspaper.

  Helena leaned close, holding the coffee pot. “What really happened with that Ashley girl? Some of the customers are saying she was murdered, but the paper’s saying nothing.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. I don’t remember her ever coming in here. Just wondering.” She lowered her voice. “I won’t tell anyone. Honest”

  “I’m just a constable, Helena, still on probation. I don’t know anything more than the paper does. Sometimes less.”

  Helena lifted the coffee pot and walked away.

  Smith began circling ads. Sharing a flat with someone might not be too bad. She leaned back to allow Helena, no longer interested in engaging in chitchat, to place her breakfast on the table and top up the coffee.

  Or she could look for a room in a house, like Julian Armstrong had. She stirred cream into her coffee. Armstrong. He had to have something to do with this. He arrived in town only a few weeks ago. He’d set himself up in practice as a drug counselor, and worked at the Mid-Kootenay Methadone Clinic. Ashley Doe had died by heroin overdose. Methadone was used as a substitute drug—it supposedly helped junkies get off heroin. Armstrong would meet plenty of hard-core users at the clinic. What better place for a dealer to find his customers? Conveniently, Julian also helped out at the Women’s Support Center. Where Ashley sometimes showed up.

  Smith poured ketchup onto her hash and stirred eggs around the plate with her fork.

  Ashley had told Amy that Armstrong was the key to her future. Or some such garbage that at the time Smith assumed had dreamy romantic implications. But was she saying instead that Armstrong and she would make a financial partnership?

  Smith swallowed most of the hash, not noticing how it tasted. She left the newspaper on the table for Helena to clear away with the dirty dishes.

  ***

  The site of the proposed Grizzly Resort was situated about ten kilometers outside of Trafalgar, off Number 3 highway, heading north on the way to the town of Nelson.

  John Winters took the department’s unmarked van, and had barely left the town limits when his cell phone rang. He pulled over, mainly because cell phone reception would die in another kilometer or two.

  “Winters.”

  “Hi.” Eliza. “It’s me. Time to talk?”

  “Sure. What’s up?” He pushed his sunglasses onto the top of his head. He switched off the car, hating to kill the air conditioning, but simply talking on the phone to Eliza would make him feel guilty if he left the engine idling.

  “I’ve just hung up from Barney. She said they want me, very much, and have upped the offer. Considerably.”

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “Well, yes.”

  “You don’t sound too sure. Still worried about what the townspeople will say?”

  “That’s part of it. You know I don’t care about the money.” That, he knew, was true. Before she’d even finished high school, Eliza had been a top-of-the-line runway model. She’d hated it with a passion, and decided that if she was going to do something she hated as a career, she’d make sure it paid off in the long term. She took courses in finance, and read everything she could get her hands on. Winters still smiled when he thought of what a stir the eye-poppingly gorgeous teenager would have made in classes of middle-aged men trying to brush up on their investment skills. The result, almost thirty years later, was that Eliza Winters was a wealthy woman who only took work that interested her.

  “You see, John, well, it’s nice to be wanted. Frank told Barney that I was so perfect for their campaign they’ll pay whatever I ask.”

  “I’m surprised a hardnosed businessman like Frank Clemmins would put all his cards on the table like that.”

  He could almost hear the shrug of her thin shoulders. “I suppose he doesn’t know anything about dealing with temperamental artistic types.”

  Anyone less temperamental than Eliza would be hard to find. “Are you going to take it?”

  “I think I am, John, I think I am. But I want to know what you think.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course, you, silly.”

  “Well, if you’re asking for my advice: take it. Chances are no one will recognize you in the ads, anyway. Half the time I don’t even recognize you in print.”

  “Okay! I’m going to do it.” Her voice was tinged with pleasure. “I’m calling Barney. Right now. Love you.” She hung up.

  He started the engine, and turned the fan up a notch to give him a good gust of air conditioning. She was going to call Barney right now. If Barney was available, and considering that she had been one of the first people in Vancouver to get a Blackberry and a Bluetooth, chances were that she would be, Barney would be contacting Clemmins at the Grizzly resort, right about… the time Sergeant John Winters arrived on police business.

  Small towns.

  An RCMP vehicle came toward him, heading into town. The driver slowed down, recognizing the TCP’s van. Winters gave thumbs up and the driver nodded and sped away.

  It was a different sort of policing here, to be sure, from the streets of a city like Vancouver. Winters had been in the grocery store with his wife one day last week. While she struggled to decide between organic tomatoes from the coast or non-organic locally grown ones, Winters spotted a man he’d arrested for masturbating in an alley behind Front Street in the middle of the afternoon heading toward them. Winters edged away from Eliza and prepared for a confrontation. Instead the man greeted him heartily, and even introduced his own wife, a tall buxom redhead who laughed like a horse. With a cheery ‘see you next month’—presumably in court—the man continued on his way, pushing a cart piled high with meat and frozen foods.

  Eliza’s professional life had nothing to do with him, or the Trafalgar City Police. He pulled his sunglasses down, checked his side mirrors, and pulled onto the highway.

  There were no protesters at the entrance to the resort site, and the sign was un-defaced. The chassis of the van and Winters’ back teeth shook as he maneuvered the vehicle, slowly and carefully, down the gravel road.

  Hoping to catch Blacklock in the office without warning, he hadn’t phoned to say he was coming. There were three cars in the parking area beside the site office trailer: an ancient Toyota Tercel, a black BMW convertible, and a black Ford F150 so clean that it
must have been washed moments after coming down the dirt road.

  Bernice, the company secretary, sat behind the reception desk. The doors to the partners’ small offices were closed. Architects’ drawings, blueprints, and site-plans were pinned to the walls. Disconcertingly, a large picture of Eliza and José, posing with the river behind them, hung behind Bernice’s desk. Eliza smiled up at the male model, her face radiant, full of happiness and, if one looked closely, sexual desire. It was, of course, her professional face. But John Winters still didn’t care for that José character.

  “A pleasure to see you, Sergeant Winters,” Bernice said. “How can I help you?”

  “Is Mr. Blacklock in?”

  “He’s just arrived. I’ll check to see if he’s free.”

  “I’m free.” The door to the left opened and Blacklock came out. He crossed the room in three strides, hand outstretched. “How about some coffee, Bernice? Come on in, John. It was nice to meet you the other evening. How’s Eliza? I hope she’s considering our offer. My wife insists that absolutely no one else will do.”

  “She’s well,” Winters said, wishing the conversation hadn’t started on such a personal note.

  Steve Blacklock had removed all evidence of the office’s former inhabitant. The furniture, even the window coverings, was new. The desk, solid, dark wood, pretty much filled the room, leaving only enough space for Blacklock to squeeze sideways past it to reach his leather swivel chair. Pictures of luxury resorts hung on the walls. Winters recognized Whistler easy enough, but one of the others was in mountains that were probably the Alps, and the third was near a beach: palm trees, infinity pools, and azure waters.

  Blacklock gestured, and Winters took a seat in one of two armchairs. Its leather was the color of drying blood and the texture of melting butter.

  A photographic display filled the back wall. Blacklock shaking the hands of smiling people, including the mayor of Vancouver, the premier of British Columbia, and the celebrity Governor of California.

  The developer took his own seat and picked a pen up off his desk. Other than a computer monitor as thick as Winter’s credit card, but probably more valuable, and a framed photograph of Nancy Blacklock, twenty years, at least, out of date, the desk was bare, gleaming with polish.

  This was a man, Winters thought, who very much wanted to give the appearance of status.

  But a man whose office was still in a trailer.

  A small, square air-conditioning unit was set in the window. Trying to keep the heat out, it wheezed and rattled like a ninety-year old on the Tour de France.

  “How can I help you, John? Or should I say, Sergeant, as you’re here in your police role, right?” The bags under Blacklock’s eyes jiggled as he talked.

  “John’ll do.” Winters got to the point. “Your name’s come up in one of my investigations.”

  “I’m glad you’re paying attention at last, John. Those damned, pardon my French, environmentalists. I can’t keep a sign in place, untouched. Makes we worry about what’ll happen when we start building, eh? Where’s the line between spray painting a sign and burning down a construction site? Can you tell me?”

  “The RCMP will help you with any security concerns you might have. I’m with the Trafalgar City Police, and your property isn’t within town limits. Tell me about this woman.” Winters took the morgue photo of Ashley out of his pocket and handed it across the desk.

  Blacklock took the picture, and studied it for a long time. Furrows of concentration gathered in the space between his eyebrows. “Not a nice picture,” he said at last, handing it back.

  Winters didn’t accept it, and Blacklock tossed it onto his desk. It lay face up, watching them. Winters said, “It was taken in the morgue. Tell me about her.”

  New leather creaked as Blacklock leaned back in his chair and made a pyramid of his fingers. “I might have seen her around town. Girls like her,” he waved a hand over the picture, “they’re everywhere. Usually carrying a baby and dragging a toddler dripping snot by the hand, with another one in the oven. Three kids, three fathers, most of them. Why get a job when there’s welfare to collect?”

  “Take another look.”

  Blacklock shrugged and picked the picture up again. “Like I said, I think I’ve seen her around. Trafalgar’s a small town, even smaller than it looks, I’ve come to understand. Don’t tell me that you, a Sergeant, are planning to show this picture to every person in town? And then what? Through the whole Mid-Kootenays, up the Valley, then to Nelson, Castlegar? Christ, man, you’ll be a hundred and ten before you’re finished.” He slapped the picture back onto his desk.

  His point was a good one, Winters hated to admit. In a town the size of Trafalgar you passed the same people all the time, sometimes every day. You noticed them, if they looked or acted strange, or were particularly attractive or unattractive, or wore clothing out of the ordinary—which in Trafalgar in the summertime could be a three piece suit or a tailored dress with stockings and pumps. But Blacklock, who loved to pose for photographs, had been identified by Mike, of Mike’s Movie Mansion, as having argued with Ashley Doe. A pretty good identification too: before Winters even arrived at the video store, Mike had pulled out a back copy of the Gazette,ready to point out a picture of Blacklock and his partner, Clemmins, smiling and chatting with the mayor.

  “I have a witness who tells me you engaged in conversation with the woman recently.”

  The air-conditioning unit was emitting more noise than cool air. Against the leather chair, the back of Winters’ shirt soaked up moisture. Blacklock opened a desk drawer, rummaged inside and pulled out a tissue. He used it to wipe the back of his neck. “Is that so?”

  The office door flew open with so much force it struck the wall.

  Winters whirled around, rising out of his seat, his hand automatically reaching for the weapon strapped to his waist. Bernice stood in the doorway carrying a tray set with a blue coffee carafe, two mugs, a small bowl, and a tiny pitcher.

  Bernice gasped. “Sorry to startle you, Mr. Winters. I keep forgetting that the hinges on this door are broken. You should get them fixed, Steve,” she scolded, arranging the coffee things on the desk. “You’ll have a little old lady in here one day, about to buy a group of suites for her whole family and pow! She’ll drop dead of a heart attack.”

  “For God’s sake, Bernice,” Blacklock shouted. “Will you shut up for once.”

  The woman’s wide, cheerful face collapsed in on itself. She took a deep breath, and her prodigious bosom rose like Poseidon leaping out of the sea. “I am,” she said, holding her head high, “only attempting to help. Reginald knew that guests appreciate coffee served properly. Call me when it’s time to clear away the tray.”

  The door closed beside her, nothing but a whisper on the warm air.

  “God, but she gets on my nerves. Acts like she’s the Queen presiding over a tea party. Never mind Reginald this and Reginald that. She’d get the sack, fast enough, if she didn’t know everything that’s happened here since the resort was a twinkle in Saint Reginald’s eye.”

  “The woman in the picture,” Winters said, tired of fencing. “Did you know her or not? Did you recently have a public altercation with her or not?”

  Neither of them bothered to serve the coffee. Blacklock studied the picture some more. Beads of sweat were building across his forehead. Winters might have taken that as a sign of a man with something to hide were his own body not perspiring. “Now that you remind me, I think I did have a run in with her. I don’t remember the day, a week ago maybe. I was heading for that coffee shop on George Street. Should know better than to frequent a hippie hang out.”

  That Big Eddie’s Coffee Emporium was also a police hang-out, John Winters didn’t bother to mention.

  “This girl approached me. I’m pretty sure it was her. She was young, carried a baby in that sort of satchel around her hip that girls here have. I stopped to talk to her. Before I knew it she was haranguing me about the resort. All that new age
nonsense about the sacred earth and protecting the environment. Look, John, Sergeant Winters, I’m not too proud of myself, okay. Instead of just walking away I tried to argue with her. The earth’s so sacred, I said, why’d she pollute it by producing another human parasite. She didn’t like that much.”

  No kidding. “And?”

  “And? And nothing. That was the end of it. I told her she was a spoiled welfare brat who didn’t have a clue how the real world works and went to get my coffee somewhere else. I never saw the girl again, and I can’t say I’m sorry about that.”

  “You hadn’t met her before that day? On any other occasion?”

  “I told you no. Sorry.” Blacklock leaned forward, picked up the carafe and poured coffee into two mugs bearing the logo of M&C Developments. “Cream?” he asked. His hands shook slightly, and his professional smile was forced.

  “Black.” Winters had learned a lot about body language, and how to read unspoken signals, in his career.

  According to Mike, Ashley had been upset at the encounter with Blacklock for what seemed to be personal reasons; she hadn’t even mentioned the Grizzly Resort. They hadn’t been friends, Ashley and Mike, so she hadn’t confided in him. She just said something to the effect of, “I really need someone to help me out, but the bastard brushed me off.” She sipped at the latte Mike bought her, and attempted to quiet the crying baby. Ashley’s face, he’d said, was red, and her fists were clenched, and, sensing her agitation perhaps, Miller cried all the harder. Mike made his escape. She was a cute chick, he told Winters, and he’d briefly wondered if he could offer himself as the one to help her. But no way, he’d said, with a shake of his head, was he going to get involved with a woman with a kid and a truckload of personal issues. That’s just asking for trouble.

  Winters accepted a mug from Blacklock, leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. It was surprisingly good.

  “Sorry I can’t help you further, John,” Blacklock said, looking as if he meant it. Drops of sweat gathered across his forehead. “The girl was opposed to what we’re trying to build here. That was her right as a citizen. She was mistaken, and I’m sorry she didn’t live long enough to realize it. She had a baby with her. Sad thing, to grow up without a mother.”