Purple Palette for Murder

by R. J. Harlick

  But the steps taken to frame Eric, like the anonymous phone call and drugging him unconscious, spoke of a premeditated murder. Since it was unlikely that anyone other than the actual killer would have sufficient motive to frame someone else for a murder, Gloria wasn’t Frank’s killer after all.

  Still, I couldn’t ignore Uncle Joe’s neighbour, who had seen her running away from the body with Eric lying unconscious beside it. There was also her strange apology. Maybe she was trying to tell me that she was sorry for what she’d done to Eric.

  I could see Eric wanting to protect someone like Gloria. He would think that three years in jail would have considerably less impact on his life than it would on hers. Going to prison would likely send her into a downward spiral from which she might never recover. And there was her child. A child who would become just another statistic in the cycle of indigenous children growing up motherless.

  Although Eric would never admit it, he would view this as a way of appeasing the guilt he felt from having been given opportunities by his wealthy adoptive family during his early years, opportunities that were beyond the reach of most indigenous people of his generation, opportunities that hadn’t been available to Gloria.

  I was confused by Lucy’s death too. Two deaths in the same family suggested the same killer. But I couldn’t believe Gloria would kill her own sister. She’d been genuinely upset by her death. Moreover, the proximity of Teht’aa’s sexual assault to Lucy’s murder suggested the same culprit, which could not be Gloria. It had to be a male.

  My only other suspect was Hans. But he supposedly had an alibi for the attack on Teht’aa, and his murdering Frank wouldn’t explain Gloria’s presence.

  I was, however, certain of one thing. The purple-flowered embroidery and the sparkling purple flowers on Dzièwàdi were behind everything. Though I didn’t know how the pieces fit together, I knew I would find the answer at Florence’s camp, where all the suspects were congregating. Once I had the answer, I would have the means for proving Eric’s innocence.

  FIFTY

  Although the sun was nowhere near close to setting in this land of the midnight sun, my rumbling stomach and aching bones told me it was time to call it a day. Uncle Joe’s slumped posture hinted at the same degree of exhaustion, but with his eyes riveted on the route ahead, it didn’t look as if he were prepared to stop anytime soon.

  “When are we stopping?” I shouted over the noise of the motor.

  The old man rested his squinting eyes on me but acted as if he hadn’t heard.

  “Food. I’m hungry.” I pretended to eat.

  He pointed to the cold chest.

  Forget the beer. “Food,” I yelled louder.

  He pointed to the pack with the canned goods.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to eat cold baked beans in a freezing, wind-whipped boat.

  “I’m tired. You’re tired. Time to stop.” I pretended to sleep.

  Nodding vigorously, he pointed beyond me. I swivelled around to face forward, cinching my hood tighter to prevent it from blowing off. I tried to glean what he was pointing at, but the way ahead looked no different than the retreating view I’d been watching for the last five hours: rock, trees, and water with the occasional patch of bobbing ice pans or chunks piled onto the shore. Yes, ice. Little wonder the water was so frigid. The river had broadened into a large lake. We no longer travelled down the middle but kept the shore within shouting distance.

  He shouted, “Campsite,” and waved his hand at some undefined feature in front of us.

  At least he agreed it was time to camp, so I stopped fretting and hoped this invisible campsite wasn’t another hour away. I did wonder, though, what was so special about this distant site, when the flat expanse of rock on the near shore or the grassy knoll on the island we’d just passed looked perfect for camping.

  A short while later I noticed a shift in the boat’s direction. The bow had a tree-covered island within its sights. As we drew closer I made out a narrow band of sand. Another few minutes and I was pulling the bow onto the coarse sand. I dropped the gear onto a worn spot in the tangle of bushes that seemed intended for such a purpose. After helping him out of the boat, the two of us hauled it farther onto the land as best we could. I glanced around for a tree or rock to secure the bow rope, but with a dismissive wave, he grumbled that the boat wasn’t going anywhere.

  Muttering, “Too tired. You bring,” he waved in the direction of the gear before picking up his rifle. Not waiting for a response, he turned and shuffled up a low incline toward a break in the trees that I sure hoped was our campsite.

  Intent on doing only one trip, I hefted the pack onto my back and picked up the cooler. Deciding the combined weight was manageable, I lumbered up the trodden path Uncle Joe had taken through sedges and low shrubbery and sighed with relief when I saw the familiar clearing of a campsite tucked into a stand of stunted birch, aspen, and bottle brush spruce. The old man was resting on a large boulder, one of several scattered around the site. I gratefully dropped the gear onto the ground and joined him.

  We were sitting at the clearing’s edge next to a fire pit formed by a circle of blackened rocks with scavenged branches neatly stacked beside it. Though the trees were barely higher than a bungalow, they were dense enough to keep us from being buffeted by the wind that helped lessen the fury of the bugs.

  From our perch we had an unobstructed view of the way we had come. I scanned it carefully, something I had been doing for much of the trip. I was hoping to catch sight of a boat that would tell me the cops were on their way. But the lake continued to be as empty as it had been the entire trip. Nonetheless, I wasn’t yet ready to give up. I still held out hope that Uncle Joe’s neighbour had alerted Kirk.

  “Best camp spot on lake,” Uncle Joe declared. “Bears no visit in the night.” He chuckled. “Is traditional Bluegoose camp. My ancestors use it since time of Yamoria.”

  “Yamoria?”

  “Medicine man. Prophet. Lawmaker. He live many, many years before you people come. Our stories say he come from another place, lived with us, and went away. He had much medicine power. He made our world safe. Give us laws. We use them today, like share what you have, help each other, be respectful.”

  A saviour, like other religious figures, I thought.

  Though it was close to eight thirty, the sun had a ways to go before it sank below the low hills of the western shore.

  “How far are we from Florence’s camp?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  Not what I wanted to hear. It could jeopardize catching the Saturday flight back to Yellowknife.

  “You think this long time. In old days, it take a week by canoe.”

  “How long do you think we’ll be staying?”

  “Until it done. Why hurry? You in Tlicho land. You follow Tlicho time.”

  “But I need to get back to Yellowknife. I don’t want to leave Eric alone for more than a day after his release.”

  He grunted. “He big boy. He okay without you. He go see Teht’aa.”

  But I wasn’t okay without him. “I thought you wanted to get to the camp as fast as you could to protect your sister from Reggie and Hans.”

  He continued surveying the empty expanse in front of us. A slight upturn of his lips was the only indication that he might have heard my question. Maybe he wasn’t worried because he’d discovered Reggie and the others weren’t going to his sister’s camp.

  “Sergeant Ryan said Reggie’s camp is somewhere along this route. Is it far from here?”

  “It back there.” He waved his hand toward the end of the lake. “I check. Camp empty.”

  “Do you still think he’s going to Florence’s camp?”

  “Yup.”

  “When will they reach it?”

  “Late tonight. He don’t stop.”

  Despite my body telling me it needed slee
p, I suggested, “Maybe we should only stop long enough for dinner. I don’t think you want your sister spending more time than necessary alone with them.”

  “Florence tough.”

  Like you, I thought.

  He continued, “Malcolm make sure nothing happen. He don’t stop. Get there when sun come up. He got faster boat than Reggie.” He let out a loud guffaw, then stood up with more vigour than when we’d arrived. “Time to catch dinner.”

  fifty-one

  The fish was delicious, a lake trout large enough to feed the two of us with leftovers for breakfast. Considering it was fried in lard in a blackened aluminum frying pan over an open fire without seasonings other than smoke and ash, it would rival any of the tantalizing fish dishes Eric prepared.

  The key to this campsite was the excellent fishing. Uncle Joe had fond memories of this island, which was named Inooda after the lake trout that lived in the surrounding waters. He recalled catching a very big one that was almost as big as he was when he was a young boy. The best spot was on the rocky side of the island, where a granite cliff plunged to the kind of depths lake trout liked.

  Using fishing rods stored under a pile of spruce boughs, the old man caught four good-sized trout. Amazingly, with plenty of tips and encouragement from him, I caught one of equal size. If only fishing were always this easy and quick, I might be convinced to take it up.

  He had me store four of them in the cooler, which I discovered didn’t contain beer, but frozen haunches of moose. He was taking them along with quantities of tea, flour, and other goods to his sister’s camp to add to her food supply in case her unexpected visitors consumed most of it.

  I silently patted myself on the back after he complimented me on the bannock I cooked under his critical eye. The pairing of beans and bannock, along with the trout, made for perfect camping fare. We finished it off with hot tea and chocolate-chip cookies from the box I’d snuck into the pack. While he made the tea, I washed the few dirty dishes at the water’s edge using sand to scrub them clean.

  With mug and cookie in hand, I returned to the boulder. I wrapped the red blanket snugly around my body and sat down to watch the transformation of the land into night, or what served as night at this time of year; a soft purplish-grey twilight. The last orange remnants of sun rippled across the lake, igniting the hills on the eastern shore. I could feel a chill I hadn’t felt before. I snuggled further into the blanket and hoped it would keep me warm enough overnight. I cast an eye at the cold ground and hoped I was tired enough to ignore its hardness. I doubted the old man had a Therm-a-Rest hidden inside his pack.

  “Denendeh. Dene land. Beautiful, eh?” Uncle Joe slumped down beside me. Like me he had a cookie in one hand and a mug of hot tea in the other. But he hadn’t bothered with the blanket.

  A stillness descended with the dying of the wind. I swore that if a mouse stepped on a twig, I would’ve heard it, so quiet had it become, apart from the whine of mosquitos, which were starting to discover us. We were alone, just Uncle Joe and me, in this vast, silent, empty land. Until a wolf’s howl in the distance reminded me we weren’t. I wondered if wolves could swim.

  “Diga.” Uncle Joe jerked his head in the direction of the howl.

  “So deh must mean river.”

  He nodded, then without preamble began to tell me about his sister.

  “Florence special. She older. Six or seven years. Don’t know for sure.”

  “That would put her in her early eighties. I’m surprised she’d be out on the land at that age.”

  “She with Angus, Malcolm’s boy. But she tough old lady.” He slurped his tea before continuing. “In old days, families live on the land. Priests visit families and mark down new babies in book and bring them to God’s family. Priests don’t come often. They guess dates when babies born. My brother is two or three years older than me. My mother had more babies, but they died. Hard living on the land.”

  “I imagine it would be, especially during the long, dark days of winter.” I tried to picture myself huddling in the dark in a tent with nothing but caribou hide to protect me from the fierce Arctic wind, but couldn’t.

  “But it was good times too. We Tlicho were strong. Knew how to live on the land. We followed the caribou. Herds cover the land. Today caribou gone. We not strong. Too used to modern stuff. Look at me with my big motor.” He flicked his hand in the direction of his boat. “We forget how to live on the land. Our kids spend too much time on fancy phones and watching TV. They don’t want to go out on the land. Florence don’t like new life. She don’t like how it change our people. She spend more time on the land than in Digadeh.”

  A rustle in the underbrush had us both turning around. I half expected to see the wolf and instead saw the long bushy tail of a fox sneaking up on the cooler I’d forgotten to close. Behind her scampered four little ones, their bright eyes gleaming in the light from the dying fire. They scurried after their retreating mother when I rushed over to close the container. But I doubted they’d gone far, so I set it on the ground by our feet.

  Uncle Joe chuckled. “That’s Dek’oo. Means red in Tlicho. She live on the island. When she look for a boyfriend, she swim to mainland.” Another chuckle. “She want fish. She like it. Give her a piece and she be happy.”

  I cut a generous portion and laid it down on a flat rock at the edge of clearing where she and her children had disappeared.

  Within seconds of returning to the boulder, I heard a rustle, a scrape, and then silence. When I looked over, the fish was gone.

  But foxes weren’t the only ones who liked fish. “Won’t it attract bears?”

  “You scared of bears?”

  “I don’t fancy waking up to a grizzly smacking his lips over me.”

  “I have bear alarm. When it make big noise, I wake up and shoot him, okay?” He grinned and waved his rifle in the air, which I realized was never far from his reach, even when he was cooking.

  I laughed nervously. But I was thinking our island location was likely protection enough, until he asked me to take the cooler down to the boat, a goodly distance from where we would be sleeping. I kept my ears peeled for strange sounds all the way down to the beach and all the way back. I only relaxed when I was sitting safely beside him.

  “Florence look after me and my brother,” he said, continuing the story. “At Saint Anne’s she make sure priests don’t beat us too hard. My brother tell me she have a bad time there. But she never talk about it. After school, she come back to Digadeh and never leave. She never go to Yellowknife, not even when she have babies. She marry, but her husband die in a hunting accident after girls go to school.”

  “Besides Charmaine, Claire, and Connie, are there other children?”

  He stared thoughtfully at the shimmering lake in front of us, where the moon was lighting a path through its purple darkness. “Pretty, eh?” He paused again. “It hard for Florence with her girls dead and two grandkids dead too. But she got Gloria’s girl, Anita. Pretty little thing. I call her Gòmoa, Butterfly. She dance like one.” He flutters his hands like butterfly wings.

  “When her girls little, she didn’t want them go to Saint Anne’s. She afraid. She want them live Tlicho way. Her and her husband hide them from Indian agent. They travel many, many days on ancestor trail to hozìi, where nobody go. Barren Lands, you call it. No trees grow there. Bear attack Connie and hurt her real bad. Florence had to make tough decision. Let her daughter die or go to a doctor? They go to Deline on Sahtu, Great Bear Lake. Connie get better, but RCMP take girls away and send them to Saint Anne’s.”

  “The school where Father Harris taught.”

  “Yup.”

  “Since you are both the same age, he wouldn’t have been at Saint Anne’s when you were there, so why do you dislike him so much?”

  “I hate all priests. They treat us Indians like we shit at Saint Anne’s.”

  “Did they
sexually abuse you and the other kids?”

  He fidgeted with his empty mug. “No one talk about it. We only started talking about it at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

  I sensed a reluctance to talk about himself, but I thought he might be more forthcoming with the next generation. “Do you think it could’ve happened to Florence’s girls?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I never ask. But I see things. Make me think maybe. Claire never settle down. She back and forth between Digadeh and Yellowknife. She drink too much, got into fights. She with many men. They beat her up. Authorities try to take away her girls, but Florence look after them when it not going well for Claire.”

  “What about Teht’aa’s mother, Charmaine?”

  “She don’t talk much when she live with me and Mary in Medicine Hat. She good girl. She don’t drink. She never talk about Saint Anne’s. But she never go to church.”

  “And Connie, Frank’s mother?”

  “She try to live on the land with her mother, but it too hard. She too used to living like white man. She lived in Digadeh. Her man was good to her. They didn’t have any kids. Maybe why they took on Frank when his mum died.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled, feeling the insignificance of the words, when it was my people who had caused the harm.

  “It been hard on us, but better now. With self-government, we have more control over our people and our land. We run our own schools. We teach both Tlicho traditions and the white man ways. The kids born today will do better job of living in both worlds.”

  “Was Father Harris teaching at Saint Anne’s when Florence’s girls were there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you think he was involved in the abuse?”

  He spat on the ground.

  “I take that as a yes. So tell me, why is he going to your sister’s camp?”