Up and Down

by Terry Fallis

  Diane picked up a stack of pages stapled in the corner and slid them over to me without saying a word. My heart rate kicked into a higher gear. I picked up the document and started reading. It wasn’t good. I was holding a copy of the lengthy email I’d sent to Sarah Nesbitt at the Vancouver Sun. I quickly flipped through all of the notes I’d taken during my initial visit to Cigar Lake and painstakingly cut and pasted into the body of the email to Sarah. My email also outlined in excruciating detail the plan I’d laid out for Sarah and that she’d honoured. Without her initial exclusive story, I’m quite convinced Landon Percival would never have been aboard the Aeres.

  “How did you get this? This was not sent on my TK email. Did you hack into my personal Gmail account?”

  For some reason, I was more concerned with how Diane had gotten her hands on my private email than I was with my quickly dimming prospects for continued employment.

  “David, you’re not thinking clearly. And you obviously weren’t when you sent that to Sarah Nesbitt,” Diane said. “Yes, you used your own Gmail account, not your TK email. But you had already routed your Gmail through your BlackBerry so that you could receive your personal email as well as your TK email on your handheld, regardless of your location. When you routed your Gmail through your BlackBerry, you actually routed your Gmail directly through the TK servers. So while we don’t have your original outbound message to Sarah, her return acknowledgement, which included your earlier email to her, came to my attention earlier this week.”

  I was in deep. I looked at my still-pink hand, tender from all that high-fiving a few minutes before. How fitting. I was caught red-handed.

  “You lied to us and freelanced the story underground. I don’t care that it all worked out so well. You didn’t trust your team. In most instances, when a TKer goes rogue, they get fired. Case in point, Crawford Blake. You remember him, don’t you?”

  I had nothing. I was already mentally clearing out my desk and dusting off my resumé.

  “Diane, I’m sorry. I did what I thought was in the best interests of the client, the program, and the firm. I tried to convince you and Blake, but I was shut down. If I hadn’t reached out to Sarah, we would have picked a new winner and Landon Percival and what she’s achieved for NASA would never have happened. You know that. Crawford Blake told us in no uncertain terms to shut her down, and we would have if that Vancouver Sun story hadn’t broken.”

  “David, you were a week or so into the job. We didn’t know you. We didn’t yet fully trust you or your judgment. In hindsight, Landon Percival was a brilliant choice. But back then it wasn’t so obvious,” she explained. “Knowing you as we do now, if it were to happen all over again, we’d probably have gone to bat for you and Landon with Blake and we might have made it happen. But either way, you just don’t cut out the team and backdoor it on your own. That’s just wrong. We can’t have that in the firm, regardless of how well this has all turned out.”

  I rose from my chair.

  “I’m really sorry that it’s all unravelled like this. I understand the firm’s position and that what I did was wrong. But I still believe that morally, I made the right call.”

  “David, this is a PR firm, making the right call, morally, isn’t part of the equation.”

  I nodded and started towards the door.

  “I’ll clean out my desk.”

  “Yes, and when you’ve got your stuff, move it into the vacant office three down from Amanda’s. You’re now an account director,” she said. “Bob the IT guy and I are the only ones who know about your little Gmail escapade with Sarah Nesbitt. Let’s keep it that way. It’s a good thing I didn’t find out about all this until after you distinguished yourself on the account or this might not have been such a happy ending. No more freelancing. Clear?”

  “Clear. And thank you, Diane. It’s all about the team from now on.”

  “By the way, I was just kidding when I said making the right call, morally, doesn’t matter in a PR firm. You know that, right?”

  I nodded again, somewhat relieved.

  “And nicely played with Sarah Nesbitt. I couldn’t have cooked up a better plan myself,” Diane said.

  I turned, and was almost out the door when she spoke again.

  “Oh, one more thing. You’re no longer reporting to Amanda. She told me you two have recently become a little more than office colleagues. So as of right now, you’ll report directly to me. I’m very happy for you both, but don’t let it get in the way around here,” she said.

  “Understood. I didn’t really want to report to her anyway,” I replied. “Too complicated. And she can be mean sometimes.”

  “Well, I for one am glad she now has more than just her clients and colleagues in her life. She needs you.”

  It took me about five minutes to clear out my desk. I was about to close my laptop for the walk to my new office when an email bonged in my inbox. It was from my contact at Environment Canada. I’d totally forgotten about it. The message simply said, “Hope this is what you were looking for.” I clicked open the attachment and read it through, twice. Then I read it carefully yet again just to make sure. I picked up the phone, called Air Canada, turned on the charm, and cashed in nearly all of my frequent flyer miles to book a flight for very early the next morning. Amanda would understand.

  PART 6

  CHAPTER 17

  The early afternoon sun lit up the trees below, their leaves starting to turn in the October chill. Chatter Haney had finally managed to replace the blown oil pump on his Cessna 172. The flight from Mackenzie was uneventful, if you call flying without a passenger door uneventful. You couldn’t fly a Cessna without an oil pump. But apparently it was completely acceptable to make the trip with no door. A passenger earlier in the day had snapped a seized hinge clean off while attempting to disembark. Then, while trying to undo the damage, the guy bent the one remaining hinge sufficiently to shear it off too. I don’t think Wilderness Charters granted him any frequent flyer miles for that trip. But I was so eager to get to Cigar Lake that I climbed in and buckled the seat belt so tightly that only shallow respiration was possible. Then as the time for take-off approached, I just tried to focus on something other than the open space right next to me. You know, mind over matter. Or in my case, mind over paralytic terror.

  Float planes are loud to begin with, but with no door, the noise was almost unbearable. The headphones offered little in the way of protection, so my head was already ringing by the time we taxied out into the lake. As Chatter hit the throttle to get us up to speed, the water hit me. Yes, the pontoons kicked up a fierce spray and I was sitting in the slipstream. I got completely soaked sitting in that doorless Cessna during take-off.

  “Don’t worry about the water,” Chatter barked. “The wind that’ll be whipping in here when we’re airborne will dry you out in no time.”

  And he was right. I was dry in about fifteen minutes, and nearly frozen solid. It was a beautiful and warm fall afternoon, but at twelve hundred feet and a hundred miles an hour, it felt like I was entombed in a glacier. Chatter reached behind him and pulled out a moth-eaten Hudson Bay blanket. He dropped it in my lap. When I could work my arms sufficiently, I somehow managed to wrap the blanket around me against the wind.

  For most of the flight, Chatter lived up to his name, talking nonstop. After the first five minutes or so, I discreetly turned the volume knob on my headset down to zero, and concentrated on staying warm. Eventually, I recognized Cigar Lake below us. Chatter Haney banked sharply first to the north, and then back to the west to line up our approach. If you’re keeping track of the geography, banking sharply to the north really meant banking sharply to the right. For the few seconds of that stomach-churning right hander, the only thing separating me from the forest several hundred feet below was my seat belt and centrifugal force. Chatter told me later that I screamed during the sharp turn. I don’t really remember that. As we passed over her cabin, Landon, clad in coveralls, stepped out onto her front veranda and looke
d up.

  When the floats hit the light chop on Cigar Lake, the cold water hit me, again. It was like driving through a car wash in a convertible with the top down, but without the cleansing benefit of soap. As we made the long taxi back to the east end of the lake, Landon made her way down onto her dock. I wrung out the blanket as best I could before wringing out my shirt as best I could. My pants would have to wait. Chatter manoeuvred the Cessna into the parking space at the dock so that he was nose to nose with the larger Beaver. I unlatched the seat belt, grabbed my bag, and in one less-than-smooth motion stepped onto the pontoon below and then onto the dock. I made it without falling this time, even though I was wet, stiff, and half-frozen. Landon was not pleased when she saw the wide open space where the passenger door was traditionally installed.

  “Chatter, why did you bother landing at all,” she yelled into the plane. “You could have just unlatched his belt, banked, and dropped him in the lake just off the dock. He wouldn’t be any wetter!”

  He looked away as if thinking and nodded his head.

  “That could’ve worked, I guess. Would’ve saved some fuel, too.”

  “You should have flown from the starboard controls so David could at least have had a door on his side.”

  “Well, the way I figure it, if I’d sat there instead, I’d be the one soaked right now and I don’t much like being wet,” Chatter replied, apparently seriously.

  Landon just shook her head as she pushed on the wing overhanging the dock to angle the Cessna clear of the Beaver and back out onto the lake.

  “I’ll fly him back. You go and fix that door!” she shouted.

  Chatter waved, restarted the engine, and headed back onto the lake. He throttled up and was in the air inside of a minute. When I turned back from watching the take-off, Landon was staring at me with her hands on her hips.

  “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.”

  She stepped forward and gave me a hug, despite my saturated state.

  “Come on up and get out of those wet things,” she said, taking my bag off my shoulder and slinging it on hers. “I hope you brought a change of clothes.”

  “Well, I travelled light this time, but I packed enough to be dry and decent.”

  Despite the hair-raising trip, I was appreciating the beautiful fall day with barely a cloud in the sky. It felt good to be back. I could hear Landon bustling about in the kitchen as I changed into sweat pants and a T-shirt in the same bedroom I’d slept in nearly four months earlier. I hung my wet clothes over the railing of the veranda. When I stepped back into the cabin, Landon handed me a mug of soup.

  “Minestrone,” she said, nodding towards the soup. “You’ll like it. Now come sit. I thought when I saw the Cessna that my guest had arrived a week early.”

  “You’ve got company coming?” I asked. “Who?”

  “Sam is flying in for a visit. I haven’t seen her since she bailed out shortly after my father disappeared.”

  “That Sam is coming? The Sam? That’s fantastic, Landon!” I said. “I’m happy for you, for you both.”

  “Well, no cause to celebrate just yet. It’ll be nice to see her, but a lot of seasons have come and gone since we were together.”

  I set the soup down on the pine box and zipped back into the bedroom to grab a file folder from my bag before returning to the main room. I gently lifted Hugh Percival’s weathered leather logbook from its traditional resting place on the mantel and laid it on the pine box. Then I snagged the empty bottle of nitroglycerin pills and placed it next to the logbook. Landon watched from her chair but said nothing until I’d settled in mine.

  “Are you all set, now?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  “Okay, then, we can start. What on Earth are you doing here? Did you miss seeing my stunning face every day?”

  “For the whole trip out here, except perhaps during that last leg, I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you something important. But I really haven’t come up with anything.”

  Landon looked troubled all of a sudden.

  “Please don’t say you can’t live without me – I drive on the other side of the road, remember?”

  I was pretty sure she was joking but I chuckled anyway to set her mind at ease, just in case she was actually serious. I noticed the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of Four, opened on the arm of her chair, as if she’d been reading it when the Cessna came in. And in an instant, the way in to my news came to me. I put my hand in the air to claim the floor.

  “ ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable …’ ” I paused.

  “ ‘… must be the truth,’ ” replied Landon, finishing the sentence in a dismissive tone. “Yes, yes, I know the line. It’s from The Sign of Four. I read it again only this morning. It’s one of the most oft-quoted lines in the Holmes canon. What about it?”

  “Well, I don’t know quite how to put this, but I think I know where your father’s plane is. I think I may have figured it out.”

  Her eyes widened and she leaned forward, but said nothing. I opened the leather logbook and scanned several pages to check on Hugh Percival’s attention to punctuation. It was as I’d expected. Then I turned to his final entry.

  In a rush to deliver tar paper and shingles to cranky Earl Walker on Laurier Lake. He needs it today so he can fix his damn roof and beat the rain. Damn EW today! Not feeling very well. But tanks are full. Gotta fly now. 2:17 p.m. HP

  “What do you think he meant by ‘Damn EW today!’?” I asked.

  “Clearly, he was not happy that Earl Walker needed to finish his roof that afternoon,” Landon said, as if there could be no debate about its meaning.

  “I think it means something else,” I began. “Flipping through the logbook, it seems your father wasn’t a big fan of the comma. I think he meant that line to read ‘Damn, EW today!’ ”

  “You’ve lost me,” she interrupted.

  “Hang on, I’m almost there,” I said. “I don’t think ‘EW’ means ‘Earl Walker.’ I’m now convinced ‘EW’ means ‘east wind.’ ”

  She shook her head and sat back.

  “David, I’ve been here nearly all my life and I’ve never once seen an east wind. The prevailing west wind is as constant as the North Star. You should have just called me.”

  I opened the file folder and pulled out the printout of the federal government’s official meteorology report for northern B.C. for the fateful date and handed it to her.

  “October 17, 1970, was one of only three occasions in the last sixty years when there was an east wind in this area. And it was very strong that day,” I said.

  Landon read through the meteorology report and then set it back down on the pine box.

  “Okay, there was an east wind that day. So what?”

  I picked up the empty pill bottle.

  “What if it happened like this?” I started. “Your father wasn’t feeling well that day. He says so in the logbook entry. He’d already run out of his heart pills. He loads up the plane and heads out onto the lake. Because of the rare stiff east wind, he has to take off from the other end of the lake back towards the cabin.”

  Landon suddenly stood up, looking past me out the window to the lake, but I continued, just to get my theory out in the open.

  “What if, just as he was lifting off the surface, he suffered a heart attack and pushed the stick forward? The plane would have nose-dived into this end of the lake, where the water is deeper. So deep that a plane would stay hidden there.”

  I paused. Landon was still standing up, her eyes on the lake, but she was very slowly nodding her head.

  “Landon, you’ve spent decades scouring the landscape wherever he might have gone down and have found nothing. Not a trace. So the deep end of the lake is not just the only possible crash site you haven’t yet searched, but now that you know there was an east wind that day, and that your father wasn’t feeling great, it actually makes the scenario plausible.”
>
  “I am such an idiot!” Landon snapped and darted out the door.

  She grabbed her bathing suit from the railing as she descended the stairs towards the dock. She stopped beneath the veranda and smoothly hoisted the canoe onto her thighs. I offered to help but she waved me off and slid the canoe into the water. She handed me the rope attached to the bow.

  “Hold this and look away, young man,” she directed.

  I took the rope, turned my back, and looked out on the pristine lake nestled amidst the mountains. I could hear the faint sounds of her slipping out of her coveralls and into her bathing suit. Then she hustled back up the path to a wooden door beneath the veranda that opened into what seemed to be a storage area. I could hear her rummaging around.

  “Eureka!” she shouted.

  When she emerged, she had an ancient brown diving mask perched on her forehead. It was clear where this was going.

  “Landon, it’s October, the water is freezing. I know, I was soaked in it and thought I felt the first signs of hypothermia,” I said.

  “David, I swim every day until early November. It’s why I look so young and have such beautiful skin,” she quipped.

  Ten minutes later, I was paddle-less and seated in the stern facing Landon, who paddled from the bow seat. Landon explained that when there’s only one paddler in a canoe, you’re supposed to sit in the bow seat facing the stern. It makes it easier to control the canoe against the wind. With only a few powerful strokes, she had us a couple of hundred feet off the dock. She coasted for a time and looked first out towards the western end of the lake, and then back towards the cabin. This routine continued for a few minutes, before she paddled the canoe a little closer to the southern shore of the lake.

  “Um, what exactly are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to determine the takeoff path my father would have adopted in the event of an east wind. I figure it would be tight to the shoreline so he wouldn’t have to fly directly over his cabin. That would mean right about here.”