Cold Girl

by R. M. Greenaway

  He thought of Mercy Blackwood. For all her hospitality, she wasn’t nice. It wasn’t just the way she blew off the death of her dog. It went deeper than that. She was worse than not nice. She was just like him, bloodless, heartless, and cold to the touch.

  Sixteen

  Thaw

  LATE MARCH, AND THE GROUND was still frozen, but the snow was on the wane. Spring break-up was washing over the central interior, and 90 percent of logging operations had shut down to ride it out. When Leith arrived at the Law home the sky was pelting rain and the midday light was muted to a premature dusk. Frank Law had been released pending his remand hearing but hadn’t been home more than a week before he’d screwed up badly, caught drinking and driving, and was sent back to the slammer. In Terrace. So much for reprieve. The youngest bear, Lenny, opened the door to Leith’s knock and directed him out back to the fleet of oversized Tonka toys in the yard, in particular to what he called the grapple-skidder. Leith had no solid idea what a grapple-skidder was, so he walked between the half-dozen machines until he found one emitting a clanging noise. He climbed the rungs and looked in to find Rob lying sideways on the operator’s seat, wrestling at something within the manifold with a wrench in each hand. His bare arms were striped with grease and his face contorted. He glanced around irritably when Leith rapped his knuckles against the mud-spattered, projectile-proof glass.

  “Need to talk,” Leith shouted.

  He waited between the machines until Rob came to earth with a thud and asked what he wanted.

  “Charlie West,” Leith said. “Where exactly did she go when she left?”

  “Charlie? Went north, I thought. But now I’m hearing she went south, so I’m guessing Vancouver. I told you, the lawyers said not to talk to you guys.”

  “Thing is, she didn’t get to Dease Lake. Her sister hasn’t heard from her since last September, around the time she left you. No news of her showing up elsewhere either. With that in mind, d’you have any suggestion where she may be now?”

  Rob shook his head, eyes squinched with fatigue or impatience, or both. He gestured at the house. “Gotta go clean up, get out of the rain.”

  Leith followed him across the yard. “Has Frank been in contact with her since she left?”

  Rob’s voice was dispirited. “Why should he be in contact with Charlie?”

  “Why d’you think?”

  They were inside the house, in the kitchen now, Rob running hot water, dousing a rag in soap. He didn’t pursue the why, and that said it all. He shrugged and spoke to the soap. “Seems to be a rumour Frank was screwing around with her. No clue why. He wasn’t interested in her whatsoever. Doesn’t matter. He’ll get his trial next month, and then he’ll probably go away for a long time. We got other things on our minds. She’s gone, hell knows where, and the last thing we need —”

  “We’re concerned about her,” Leith said. “I understand you don’t want to hear this, but she’s missing, and I plan to find her, and you’re my best lead. Okay? So help me out.”

  Rob made a noise, part disgust and part defeat. He said, “I’m having a beer. Want one?”

  Leith said no to the beer but followed him into the living room, where Rob in his dirty coveralls sat heavily in an armchair, leaned back, and closed his eyes. The can of Labatt’s dangled in one hand, popped open but untouched.

  The silence stretched until Leith broke it, putting to words what had bothered him since the last round of phone calls with the girl’s hometown. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Dead,” Rob said, still slumped in his armchair. “Why should she be dead?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You tell me. You might as well, because I’m going to dig up the Hazeltons till I find her.How did it happen, Rob?”

  Rob gave him a hard look. “She left in September. We never should have got together, me and her. Nothing in common. But no, I didn’t kill her, and Frank didn’t kill her. You’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  Leith set his mouth, depressed at the odds against finding her. The land here was too broad, too hostile, too easy to vanish within, dead or alive. “Tell me again how you met Charlie.”

  “Wesley Logging had equipment to sell,” Law said wearily. “I went up to take a look. Met Wesley’s niece, Charlie, we partied, thought we’d party for the rest of our life together, and came back to Kispiox. Didn’t turn out quite that way. Didn’t even last a year.”

  Leith knew the name well. “Wesley Logging, run by Norm Wesley?”

  “That’s the dude. Ended up spread eagle in the mud flats last September, as I hear it, full of buckshot.” Law didn’t look hugely affected by the loss, just a little disappointed. “Never got any equipment off him in the end. It was standing shit and rust, that’s what.”

  * * *

  The killer of Norman Wesley had never been found, Leith knew. It occurred to him that maybe they had a suspect at last. Wesley had a bad reputation in the community as a child molester and wife beater, and maybe Charlie was a victim. It was an interesting enough idea that he made the two-hour drive to the Terrace remand centre to visit Frank Law. Frank was brought to the interview room, where he reiterated without spirit that he wasn’t going to say anything. Not because he’d done anything wrong except try to protect Scottie, but just he wasn’t supposed to talk.

  “Sure, I understand,” Leith said. “But this isn’t about Kiera or Scott Rourke. This isn’t even a formal statement. I’m talking to you right now as a regular witness. It’s about Charlie West, your brother’s ex-fiancée.”

  Nothing glinted in Frank’s eyes except irritation. “What about her?”

  “I asked you about her before, and you wouldn’t talk. But I’m here asking you, if you care about her at all, to help me out. Nobody’s heard from her since September. Her own sister Charlene hasn’t heard from her. Charlene’s worried.”

  More than worried, Charlene was frantic, on her way down to the Hazeltons to spearhead a search that would probably end up being quite the solitary march.

  Frank said, “If I could help you, I would. I can’t. Sorry.”

  “What do you know about Norman Wesley?”

  The name was familiar to Frank. Somebody Rob had dealt with up in Dease. Leith said, “It’s her uncle. She didn’t mention him before she left?”

  “Nope,” Frank said.

  Leith worked at filling the other gaps that riddled his case. “You were close to Charlie, weren’t you? You took her to William Lloyd, a Nisga’a translator, to help her get language lessons. Why?”

  “I wasn’t close to her, but we needed her, to write our songs. She was a great songwriter.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “She lived with us, was going to marry Rob. I guess Lenny had a crush on her. Never realized that, but it makes sense. They’re closer in age and both quirky, and Lenny spent a lot more time with her than Rob did, so I can see how they got friendly. More than that, though, and you’re probably thinking sex, but it wasn’t. I come home one day and hear a girl singing. Snuck down to the studio and couldn’t believe my eyes. Charlie was singing, using one of my acoustic guitars, and Lenny was at the mixing boards. She wasn’t too great on the guitar, but the song was, wow. Totally self-taught, I could just tell, and totally original. They didn’t see me there till I clapped and whistled.”

  He half smiled at the memory. “For sure they were hiding something from me, the way they stopped and Lenny jumped up. Probably he was using the equipment to record her, which is no big deal. Don’t know why they were so secretive about it, but maybe that’s just Charlie being shy.”

  “Any idea where that CD is now?”

  “No. Lenny said he didn’t burn one, and he’s a bad liar, but I wasn’t going to push it. But I did tell Mercy in the next day or so how Charlie’s this fabulous diamond in the rough she’s looking for, and she came right over and tried to get Charl
ie to show us what she could do, but Charlie just clammed up. She did show us the lyrics, though, and Mercy loved ’em. Mercy had this idea that Charlie would write for us. Me and the others had mixed feelings. I was cool either way. Kiera didn’t like it at all. She tried singing one of Charlie’s songs, with Charlie’s help, but couldn’t make it work. I’m not much of a singer, but I gave it a try, and it fit me like a glove. The song, I mean. Everybody said I’d got it just right, including Charlie. But didn’t matter in the end, because Charlie herself, well, I found out she had other ideas altogether. Like I said, she’s shy, not a big talker, and I had to figure it out myself, reading between the lines, how she wanted to go after her roots, write for her own people in her own language. So there she was teetering. Mercy wrote a big fat cheque to show Charlie how profitable it would be staying with us. Charlie almost took it, almost signed Mercy’s contract. But something got fucked up.”

  Frank’s lip had curled at the word contract. “What got fucked up?” Leith asked.

  The curl was gone, and Frank’s face lit up with something close to humour, maybe even happiness. “Probably Lenny. He never liked Mercy, or the direction she was taking us, and I think he told Charlie to dump us all and follow her dreams. Whatever. Charlie came to me, said she was sorry, but she had to do what she needed to do. I said don’t worry about it. I even gave her a ride to see the old Indian guy. And once I was there, seeing her talking to him, I knew Lenny was right. She should go her own way. We’d just mess with her mind. I bet she’ll end up with big pots of money anyway, once she shows the world what she can do. I told her so, too. I said forget the translation for now, you can do that later. Go to Vancouver and wow the studios. She just laughed. But maybe that’s what she did in the end, went south. And power to her.”

  A word in Leith’s notebook reminded him of the mystery word of the day. He said, “When you took Charlie to see William Lloyd, he overheard you talking to her about forgiveness. What was that all about?”

  Before Frank could say hell if he knew, it came to Leith in an epiphany. The word had simply been lost in translation. He said, “Could it be mercy, not forgiveness? You were telling Charlie about Mercy Blackwood?”

  “Oh, ah-ha,” Frank said, dully. “That’s it. I told her Mercy wanted her to stay, write songs, and be our magic money-making machine. I said, ‘You better go break it to her yourself, because I sure don’t want to.’ I also warned her to stand firm, because Mercy can be damned persuasive.” His mood shifted now into a sulk. “I should know. She’s got me on the hook so good. We’d have to sell at least one album, and it better be successful, because if we don’t, we’ll have to pay her back, all the money she sunk into us. And there’s lots. A helluva lot more than I expected. It’s all there in the fine print.”

  Leith raised his brows.

  Frank nodded. “I know, why did we go signing shit without thinking? It’s because she had us believing we would make it big if we hired her. No money up front. Great deal. Now look at me, stuck in a vice. If I get out of jail, I have to work for the bitch for the rest of my life and make her rich. If I don’t, she’ll go after me for all I’ve got. I can sell the equipment and the instruments, but it won’t be anything near what I owe her. Professional photographers, posters, web design, all the studio gear and instruments, she covered it all. I used to wrap my shitty second-hand guitar in a sleeping bag when we went on the road. Now I have a top-of-the-line Gibson with its own coffin. Velvet-lined. I wish I could go back to my sleeping bag, man. I really do. Me and Kiera, hitting the road, happy as fleas.”

  Leith’s brows were still up. He said, “That’s no contract. You should have taken it straight to a lawyer. Any first-year law student would have it in the shredder in no time.”

  Now Frank’s brows were up too. “Really?”

  “Really. But we didn’t find any contract in your papers.”

  Frank looked embarrassed. “I ripped it up after our CD fell through, flushed it down the crapper. Pretty dumb, I guess.”

  And childish. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it would add complication to Frank’s efforts of extricating himself from a bad deal. Leith sighed and went back to the point of this meeting, Charlie West, a spirit that was both meek and willful. “Did Charlie tell Mercy she was leaving?”

  “Nope. She told me she’d think it over, go walkabout, but she never showed, never called. Mercy was super ticked-off about it.” He frowned. “I was playing in Smithers last summer, thought I saw her, Charlie returned from her walkabout, passing by the stage. I thought she’d come to tell me what she decided. But must have been somebody else. Sorry I can’t help you. I hope she’s okay.”

  “Didn’t any of you try to contact her?”

  “Only girl in the world without a cellphone.”

  “How about calling her sister in Dease Lake?”

  “No. Why would I go chasing her down?”

  “You weren’t worried about her?”

  “To tell the truth, I haven’t thought about her till now, you asking about her. She’s not somebody you worry about. She’s one of those super-independent types. Goes for long walks all by herself, used to stay out all night sometimes in summer. She’s the kind of girl you can imagine building a cabin from scratch and living off the land. Anyway, she’d burned her bridges with us, leaving in September like that. Once she left Rob, he didn’t want to hear her name, so ‘Charlie’ became a taboo word in the house. Mercy got over it. She says I’ll just have to write my own hit tunes, like it’s easy as picking apples. Well, it isn’t. Especially when your life’s gone down the shithole. Know what I mean?”

  Leith said he knew, and then sat in silence. He’d learned a lot, and none of it was useful. Frank sat motionless too, lashes down, a promising young man whose fabulous future was falling away fast. Leith considered the long drive back and the coming night. He was shifting out of his chair, ready to call it a day, when Frank said calmly, “I killed her.”

  Leith stared, but not for long. He eased back into his chair and blanked his face, not to spoil this fragile moment. But it hardly mattered, since Frank was still looking down at his hands or the tabletop, mute now. Leith said gently, “You killed Kiera, Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  Leith brought from his wallet the little card, which had printed on it every detainee’s constitutional rights, to be followed by a repeat of the Brydges warning, advising of access to free legal counsel. Somewhere down the road a lawyer would be grilling Leith about this moment, over and over, ad nauseam, whether Frank understood what he’d just done, whether the confession should stand.

  Leith believed it bloody well would. Frank Law hadn’t been bullied into this disclosure. He’d come to it on his own. Just plain ran out of steam.

  * * *

  Over the next hour and a half, Frank talked, of how Kiera had arrived at the house on Saturday morning cold and angry. He had asked her what was wrong, but she wouldn’t say, because Chad and Stella were going to show up at any minute. “We’ll talk later,” she told him. The others arrived, and they played through a song six times, more like random noises, before they all knew it was a write-off. Frank put some food out, but nobody ate, and when he could stand her cold shoulder no longer, he told Kiera to step outside and tell him what was bothering her.

  They did, boots on but too wrapped up in themselves to think about coats. Oblivious to the cold, they walked away from the house, down the path to a low bluff over the river, and here they argued. Her rant was so chaotic that he couldn’t pin down what she was accusing him of. He was conspiring against her, fucking other women, wanted to dump her, and she never wanted to see him again, it was over, and damned if she’d bang a tambourine in the background for him and that bitch. He tried to get her to calm down and speak clearly, but she was thumping her fist on his chest, threatening to hit him across the face. “I saw the proof,” she told him, and called him a cheating bastard, an
d she’d gone for his face again like she wanted to rip it off, and he’d grabbed her wrists. She tried to knee him in the groin, and he’d pushed her. Backward. Forgetting they were on a bit of a rise there overlooking the riverbanks, and there were rocks below.

  He’d scrambled down to where she lay, hoping she was just dazed, but she was so still, eyes closed. He’d carried her up, laid her in the snow, knelt down and tried to rattle her back to life, but she didn’t move, didn’t breathe. There was no blood, that he could see, but no pulse either, no heartbeat. He stood in the falling snow, stunned, and gradually it had come to him like a vision, all that would now happen, the arrest, the trial, prison. He imagined Rob being left alone. Rob was a tough guy without much of a life, and all he had for a friend was Frank. Lenny was just a kid, and needed him even more. Frank was brother, mom, and dad to Lenny. Leaving these guys just wasn’t going to happen.

  He took Kiera’s keys, jumped in her Rodeo, and drove it around back to the equipment yard. Then he went back inside and told Stella and Chad that Kiera had taken off. He called Tex and told him to pick up Lenny, take him to Prince George for a few days, have some fun. Then he ushered Stella and Chad out the door, saying he was tired. Tex picked up Lenny, and now, alone, he called Scott Rourke, who was always on hand to help out in a crisis. Rourke was over within minutes. He worked on reviving Kiera, applying his CPR skills and everything else he could think of, but it was futile. Rourke told Frank to go back in the house and forget this happened. He should stick to his story that Kiera left in her Rodeo. He, Rourke, would deal with the body.