Forever Dead (31 page)

Ray turned back then and called out, “Cameron and some of the loggers are out on the lake checking out some stuff for me. If you see him, would you ask him to get the hell back here? We need the outboard motor pronto.”

I nodded and absently swatted at some mosquitoes hovering around my ears. I hauled out my pack and paddle and headed down the woods road to the lake to see if the canoe Ray had offered was okay to use. The air was fresh and clear with a mounting wind, but somewhere off to my left I could hear the buzzing of a chainsaw that neatly eviscerated what would have been the deep, calming quiet of a wilderness morning.

I came out onto the pebbled beach and saw Cameron and two other loggers helping Leslie hoist the last of some big boxes into the back of a rusty old pickup truck. The outboard was pulled up on the beach behind them. I walked over, and after saying “Hi” I told Cameron what Ray had said, and he and his friends dropped what they were doing and headed up to the cookhouse. Ray may not have seemed like a leader, but apparently his requests were not treated lightly.

When they had gone I turned to Leslie and said, “I thought you and the loggers were at loggerheads, so to speak.”

Leslie gazed at me, a quizzical expression transforming her face.

“Cam and the others, they're good hardworking men. Who am I to criticize them for wanting to make a living? I sympathize with their plight; I may not agree with their line of work, but I sympathize and they know that. They help me out a bit.” She paused. “What brings you up here so early?”

“Just following up a hunch. Ray offered me a canoe to go over to the other side here and snoop around a bit. Does it matter which one?”

Leslie looked surprised. “You going over there? Now? To the campsite? The one the loggers use sometimes?”

“You mean the big cliff?” I asked.

She nodded, looked pensive, and scratched her chin. “This is terrific. Would you mind giving me a lift? I promised Davies I'd pick up Diamond's spare canoe at the end of the portage across from here. I was going to get someone to paddle me over tomorrow from Diamond's permanent site near the biology station, but this would suit better, since you're going over there anyway. You can solo this one back again. That way I can paddle over and help them at Diamond's camp, and then they can drive me up to get my own gear when we're through.”

I looked at the choppy waves and felt the wind strengthening. It would make the paddle over a lot easier with a second paddler, even if it meant I'd have to make small talk with her. I waited while Leslie scrounged around in her truck and got out a small pack, a fishing rod, a paddle, and a lifejacket. Without hesitation, she headed for the stern. I shrugged, changed direction, and headed for the bow.
What the hell
, I thought. It was more work to stern in this weather anyway. As we lifted the canoe down to the water I asked her why Diamond had a spare canoe at the portage.

“Sometimes he had a spare canoe at either end of the portage so he could move through some of his study area without having to portage a canoe,” said Leslie. “He could have taken out here and saved himself a lot of trouble, but he refused to do that. He liked to fish at the base of the rapids there, too. It's a great spot and close enough to his camp for him to fish for breakfast. Now that he's gone, nobody uses the canoes and Davies
wants them back. He and Patrick and Roberta are out near the bio station sorting through Diamond's gear and divvying it up. Gives me the creeps.”

“Has there been any word yet about Don?” I asked as I threw my pack in, grabbed the gunnels with both hands, and crab-walked up to the bow.

She didn't answer, and I looked back over my shoulder at her. She was staring out across the lake, her eyes unfocused, far away in some other part of her mind.

“Is he a good friend of yours?” I asked gently.

She started, and I watched as her eyes came back into focus, thoughts dissolving as others coalesced, like milk swirling in coffee.

“Don?” She smiled. “He was, I guess.”

“Was?”

Leslie grunted as she clambered into the canoe and pushed off.

“He's a harmless sort of guy but clingy. He was really nice to me when I first arrived on campus, introducing me and all that stuff — a real friend. But then he started trying to horn in on my research program, steal my students. I guess he thought it would be easier to do with a woman than a man, but he chose the wrong woman. We haven't been close for a long time.”

“Since his wife died?”

Leslie turned the canoe with an expert J-stroke, aimed it toward the narrows leading to the lake, and said, “Who told you about that?”

“Roberta. She said he was devastated, that his work really got quite shoddy after that, and there were rumours of data falsification.”

“I wouldn't know about any of that, but if he was faking data, God help him.”

“Any theories on where he might have gone?”

“No idea. The police have been prowling around
campus all week getting the lowdown on how depressed Don was. They think he might have just run away from it all. Maybe he couldn't take the responsibility anymore, so he just kind of disappeared. Poor Don.”

I remembered how the police had grilled me about Don and his kid. How I'd tried to find out if my disks had been found at his house, and what a load of questions I'd gotten over that. But in the end they hadn't been interested in my disks and said there was no evidence that Diamond's death had been anything but accidental. They did ask me to call them if anything changed though.

“Do you agree with them about Don being depressed?” I asked.

“Yes and no. There's no question that he had a lot of problems and pressures. I don't even know half of them, but even if the rumours of data falsification are wrong, he had his poor daughter and Dean Davies on his back. He was very depressed when I last talked to him. I'm worried. What more can I say?”

“You mean suicide?”

“It's a possibility in his frame of mind, but somehow I can't imagine him abandoning his daughter like that. But I guess everyone can reach breaking point, and Don had more reasons than most. It's amazing he's lasted as long as he has. Some people get no luck.”

We moved through the narrows of the bay and turned into the wind and talking was made next to impossible. We paddled in silence, the wind lapping at the waves against the boat as we beat into it. I was thankful that I had company. Paddling solo would have been a grind.

The sun was still quite low but the clouds were scudding across the sky like scared rabbits. The wind was warm and the water splashing against my hands was tepid as I carved my paddle through it. The air smelled the way it felt — warm and free. The wind snuffled my
hair and the gentle slap of waves against the canoe almost made time stand still. The cliff reared up out of the water like some prehistoric beast, and I wondered how many natives had paddled this self-same lake hundreds of years ago to paint their stories on the face of that imposing cliff.

I shivered as time suddenly pummelled me with its aloofness, its cold, inexorable, relentless need to move on, inexplicably changing some things but leaving others virtually untouched after centuries. At moments like this, I thought, time telescopes upon itself and the past becomes one with the present. It was as close to immortality as I'd ever come, and I felt an almost physical wave of sadness sweep through me as I saw the past millennia, tantalizingly close yet inaccessible, stretched out behind me.

I squinted into the sun, looking ahead at the shoreline, shoving the sadness away to some hidden corner of my mind. I didn't want to be sad, but it was hard shaking it off. Not that it was ever easy.

The cliff thrust a good sixty feet up out of the water, its weather-beaten face jagged and rough from the wind and rains that had blasted and stained it for many millennia. Slashing down its face like a knife wound was the deep rust red rocky vein that I had seen from the logging camp the day before. Even though the sun had not climbed high enough to wash the face with light, it stood out like an angry red scar against the nondescript grey granite of the rest of the massive rock. Here and there, small cedars had grappled for their meagre place in the sun, growing stunted and twisted in places that seemed impossible for even a single root to take hold.

The canoe leapt and danced through the waves like a ballerina as Leslie skillfully steered it in toward shore. I could feel the pull of the current and the roar of the rapids around the corner to our right. Leslie turned the canoe when we were some ten feet from shore and then
we hugged the shoreline. The canoe picked up speed, and Leslie yelled at me to get ready to jump out at the beginning of the portage, which I remembered was alarmingly close to the beginning of the rapids.

I could see the deep black of the water pale as the water became shallow and rocks and sand came looming up. There was a small pebbly beach and smooth rocks that sloped up into the trees, but there wasn't much between it and the start of the rapids. It wouldn't do to dump here. As the canoe ground against the sand, I leapt out and pulled it out of the strong current. While Leslie clambered out and got her gear, I secured the boat to a small tree and turned to look around.

There were cedars here, all right. Massive mothers of another time, they soared overhead in a logger's dreams, growing in the wet moist shadow of the cliff, giant younger cousins to those on the exposed cliff face. I turned and saw Leslie watching me. She had donned her small backpack, picked up her paddle and lifejacket, and stood as though waiting to say something, but before she could make up her mind we heard the roar of a motor-boat as it came around the cliff behind us, heading up to the head of the lake. Leslie galloped up to the top of the rock to get a better view of the boat. I followed at a more sedate pace. She shook her head as the first of the waves from the boat crashed against the shore.

“I wish they wouldn't allow motors up here — they wash out the loons' nests, but the loggers swear they need them to check out the land on this side of the lake.” She suddenly turned and looked at me.

“What are you interested in over here, anyway?” It was asked casually, as if she didn't really care, but the intensity of her eyes made me wonder.

“Just a hunch that maybe Diamond was here,” I said.
He has to have been
, I thought, looking at the
cedars. I didn't want to think about the fact that it might be just a wild goose chase or something my imagination had magnified into something it wasn't.

Leslie chortled, which didn't help my confidence.

“Of course he was. He came here sometimes, just as we all have. If you don't want to shoot the rapids, it's the only portage. It's a nice ride in an empty canoe, but fully loaded it can be difficult. But as far as I know, he seldom used it when passing through to his study site or to fish — that's at the other end.”

She smiled and patted her rod. “Maybe I'll paddle over in the morning and catch me some fish for breakfast. It's a great fishing hole, but this end of the portage was too popular with the loggers for Diamond to want to use it often, and there's nowhere at the other end to pitch a tent. It's a rock garden down there.”

She stared at me as if I had egg on my face, then shrugged and said, “I hope you find what you're looking for.”

Irubbed my face and watched Leslie disappear into the woods in the direction of the portage. I turned to survey the area around me. It was a beautiful campsite with lots of open rocky areas and smooth flat granite sloping down to the river and the lake. The amount of garbage strewn about — from tins to beer bottles to the carcasses of fish — was alarming. Easy pickings for a bear. Instinctively I felt the pocket of my pack to make sure my bear scare was still there and then hauled the pack onto my back.

The smell of cedar was strong. I climbed up the rock and walked in among the cedars. The ground was bare beneath the towering trees with evidence that it had been used and misused many times as a campsite. I counted three different fireplaces, and there were rings of rock and flattened brown cedar boughs in two places where people had pitched their tents. Someone had left a laundry line strung up between two trees and a ratty old blue
sock hung limply from it. I absently kicked a couple of charred tin cans lying by one of the fire pits and the noise startled a crow. I saw with some annoyance that the loggers had posted a brand new “no trespassing” sign.

The cedars blocked out much of the sun here and it was cool and dark, but where the sun filtered down through the trees the sunbeams danced near the base of the cliff as it angled inland and struck something in the near shadows that gleamed. I looked up and saw that the moss, which had covered one side of the massive rock that had whelped from the cliff behind it, had been stripped off fairly recently, almost as though someone had slipped and fallen from the top of the fifteen-foot rock.

A twig snapped nearby, and I looked up quickly, but there was nothing except the gentle wind causing the tree's shadows to blow the sunbeams all over the forest floor. What I did see were several long, deep scratches streaking down the trunk of a cedar where the bark had been ripped away and the new wood laid bare, glistening and vulnerable. The bear that had made them had made them recently.

With mounting alarm I turned and scanned the trees and found one other with claw marks. Although I had hoped to find signs of bear I hadn't counted on the signs being recent. After all, the bear had been killed more than a month ago by the loggers, and on the other side of the river. Hadn't it? These markings were new. The place was crawling with bear sign, but that wasn't all. Poking out from under a rocky overhang I saw what looked like a piece of leather. When I stooped and picked it up I saw that it was a small collar, sliced in half, but with the buckle still fastened tightly. I turned it over in my hand. There was a tag dangling from the buckle, and when I wiped the dirt and muck from it, the name jumped out at me: Paulie.