Grave Concern (15 page)

Kate quickly considered the question of privacy. Strictly speaking, she was no professional, so no professional ethics involved. “Yeah well, he's been AWOL every Friday night, and Hille's got it into her head he's having an affair. We're going to do some investigating.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Wanna come?”

“Why not?”

At six o'clock sharp, Hille pressed the doorbell, and soon thereafter Mary arrived, bearing an adorable, if gargantuan, stuffed wolf. “Couldn't resist. They're all over Banff. Moose and bear and beaver taking over the place. Anyway, I thought this would bring back fond Western memories, even if it was made in China.” She thrust the wolf into Kate's arms.

Kate hugged the exquisitely soft toy. A stuffy like this was not cheap, especially in Banff. “Thanks a ton, Mary. I love it.”

“Sorry, Hille, if I'd known you were coming, I'd've got you one, too.”

Within minutes, the three women were sitting in Kate's car down the road from Croker's Motors, peering in Hille's several makeup mirrors (who carried compacts anymore, let alone more than one?) for any sign of Ron. At 6:15, an oversized pickup roared out of Croker's lot and turned up the road behind them.

“That's Ron!” shouted Hille.

“Geez, nearly missed him,” said Kate, and Hille gave her a funny look. Kate started the car and pulled a U-ey. The pickup, meanwhile, had crested the hill and gone. Kate leaned on the accelerator, and as they swung over the hill, managed to catch a glimpse of his tailgate rounding a corner. Kate tried to keep a steady distance without drawing Ron's attention. It wasn't easy. Ron was an erratic driver, the kind that floors it between stop signs then screeches to a halt. Nevertheless, it soon became clear where they were going.

When Ron turned off the highway onto Cemetery Road, Kate drove right on past, assuring her protesting companions there was another way in.

When they got to the far end of the High Road, Mary groaned. “Kate, you can't drive on that. It's springtime! A sucking mudhole, dear. Not even considering that no one in living memory has survived to tell about it.”

“That's why we're getting out here,” said Kate, gunning the Chevy into a gooseberry bush. “You brought your walking shoes, I hope.”

Hille and Mary exchanged looks as Kate shouldered a small pack into which she'd put water and snacks. “C'mon, it'll be just like Girl Guides!”

They traipsed through the bush beside the abandoned, disastrous end of the High Street for a while, then cut back through the woods toward the graveyard. Hille proved unexpectedly resilient, walking logs and scaling slippery stream banks without complaint. As they drew nearer their destination, a shout was heard. Then another. The three women stopped just inside the fringe of trees, watching and listening. There was another shout, and Hille burst out, “That's Ron!”

“Shhhh! We have to keep it down. Are you sure?” said Kate.

“Absolutely. It's him for sure,” Hille whispered.

And then he appeared, on the opposite side of the cemetery clearing, in a dark green jacket and rubber boots, walking toward the town workers' maintenance shed. Someone appeared from behind the shed, walking toward Ron. Bill Chambers, Kate's landlord. Carrying what looked like —
was —
a rifle. Then, from parked cars on the road, came Prakash Gupta, the man Kate had met in the bar, and Foxy Raymond. More rifles. For the longest time, the men stood in a loose group doing nothing. Waiting for something or someone. Occasionally one would flout the silence, to be joined by the others, discussion Kate couldn't make out, punctuated now and then by a gruff laugh. Then a ragged decrescendo to silence again.

After a few minutes, a clean, white, unmarked pickup pulled up on the road. Someone climbed out.
Oh no
… . Kate's heart sank — was it … it
was
Nicholas Enderby, in a mud-coloured, button-up shirt, working a distinct park ranger vibe. Park ranger — was that the “government job” she'd heard about? Nicholas strode over to the other men, who were standing, as it happened, just metres from Nathan Niedmeyer's grave. They exchanged a few words, too quiet to make out. Then there were louder words, tempers flaring. Kate still couldn't hear anything definite. More talk, a conciliatory hum, and the men separated, each moving outward toward roughly equidistant stations around the graveyard's perimeter. When Foxy Raymond came toward the women, they retreated further into the bush, praying fervently he wouldn't hear the crackling of the underbrush. Kate remembered that Foxy was in fact deaf in one ear and privately thanked whatever twist of fate had been responsible.

The men waited. Just stood and waited, guns pointed at the ground. The women waited, too, wondering what for. Kate and Mary had an idea, of course. What bothered Kate was the secrecy. Why was this venture so under wraps? If some dangerous bear or wolf were at large, as the presence of the “CO” (whom she now understood to be Nicholas) would suggest, why wouldn't they just ban everyone from the area, send in a bevy of park rangers, and do what had to be done?

The women stood in the forest without moving for nearly half an hour, watching Foxy above them on the slope. Someone shifted a little too much. A small branch snapped. Foxy raised his gun and walked around a bit, craning to see past the underbrush into the murky woods. The women held their breath. After a while, Foxy seemed to decide it was nothing and took up his earlier post.

An hour passed. Kate's legs were beginning to feel like half-rotted stumps. She was desperate to pee. The other two were making violent gestures indicating similar discomfort and a strong desire to leave. Kate waved them off, but had to admit her project was disappointing. Still, how would they escape without attracting deadly attention? Kate hadn't reckoned on guns. What if, hearing something, Foxy or one of the others just shot blindly into the woods? True, the women could shout out their presence now, before something untoward happened. But that would blow their cover, and severely limit future research.

Her friends' gesticulations rose to new levels of impatience. Kate nodded
in a vaguely conciliatory way and put her finger to her lips. She had no idea what to do next. At that very moment, by stroke of good fortune, Foxy began to pace. He paced back and forth along an invisible line, alternately peering into the forest and glancing back across the cemetery. At one point, he walked straight into the bush toward them and stopped five metres from where Kate stood. Checking that none of the men was looking, Foxy unzipped and peed into a raspberry bush. Having failed in her Grade 3 mission to reveal Foxy's private parts, and having now seen them twice in the past week and a half, Kate had to wonder what it all meant.

Finally, Foxy finished up and moved back out on the grass and continued his patrol hither and yon. By sign language, Kate conveyed to the others her plan. At one of Foxy's yons, Kate signalled —
Now
! And the three women began a slow retreat.

Kate was just thinking how crazy it was to be walking backwards through the undergrowth, and at the same time feeling strangely light, when something stationary caught her calf. As Kate plunged backward, her first thought was of her tailbone, then her head, then — most alarming — the coming crash. Back in high school, Kate had had some success on the box horse in gym. So now she attempted to swivel around, thinking she would land on her hands and thereby mitigate noise and pain. But those heady days of flying twists and controlled completions were long past, and Kate's forty-nine-year-old body, replete with life experience, failed to yield up the required finesse. She clamped her mouth shut as she crashed, swallowing a cry of pain. For a split second, things went black.

Mary whispered over, “You still alive?”

“Barely.”

When the worst had subsided, Kate peeked from her new ground-level perspective back up the slope to where Foxy stood in the falling dusk, now barely visible through the undergrowth. He appeared not to have heard the commotion. When Foxy paced away again, Mary tiptoed over. She prodded Kate here and there, asking where it hurt. When they'd determined the damage was not life-threatening, Mary helped Kate up, gently slid her pack off and sat her up against a tree. Pain shot up and down Kate's torso. It hurt to breathe.

“Busted rib, I'm guessing,” whispered Mary. “Nothing we can do about it, but maybe we should call the ambulance.”

“No, no,” Kate pleaded. “No ambulance!
Please
.”

Mary looked perplexed, and Hille groaned. Foxy paced back to his spot, but this time he didn't stop. He continued the other way and out of sight.

“Okay then, dear. Here's our chance!” said Mary, and beckoned Hille over to help.

The two women positioned themselves on either side of Kate, ready to haul her to her feet. But Kate was reluctant to rise. She stared straight ahead without blinking.

“Is it the pain? Mary passed her hand in front of Kate's eyes. “You're not going to go into shock on us, are you dear?” she said.

“I might,” said Kate, trying to speak without actually having to draw breath. She held her side and stared fixedly ahead. Mary followed Kate's gaze.

“Marymotherajeezus,” she whispered, catching sight of the thing that had tripped Kate up. A self-described “pure Catholic skeptic,” Mary crossed herself so quickly Kate wondered whether she'd actually borne witness or briefly hallucinated.

Kate began to laugh, and then howl in pain, immediately clamping a hand over her mouth. Then de-clamped. “Omigod, Mary! Is this it, do you think?”

Hille looked from one to the other, wondering what it was about a filthy old wooden stake in the ground that provoked such fascination. She strode over to the thing, which looked like a fence picket half buried in the ground.

Mary let out a huge breath. “It makes sense, Kate, whaddya say? Off the High Street, near the graveyard for easy family access, far enough from the beaten path no one would stumble over it by mistake. Well, except a crazy fool who goes spying on crazier fools on a Friday night, instead of doing the sensible thing and going for a drink. Not that I'm assigning any blame.”

Was that a note of frustration Kate detected? Well, who could blame dear old Mary, who cheerfully championed this ridiculous errand, having just returned from an exhausting conference on the other side of the country?

Hille, meanwhile, had gathered a clump of leaves and pine needles and was busily brushing away the accumulated dirt of many years. “Uh, is this what I think it is?” she said.

Kate and Mary nodded gravely. Mary asked, “What does it say, Hille?”

Hille brushed and rubbed some more. “Looks like R … I … P …”

Kate shot a look heavenward — and paid with a stroke of agony. “Anything else?”

“Oh, wait a minute. Yah, there's something up a bit here. J… . P.M.”

Mary went over and hugged the astonished Hille. Kate clutched her side and expelled a soft moan.

Kate would not hear of the others driving around to pick her up from the cemetery end. The men were still lurking about, with their boots and guns, and Kate was not going to give them the satisfaction of seeing her beaten.

With her middle bound in Hille's sweatshirt for fortification, and a sturdy branch Mary found as a walking stick, Kate managed what seemed an endless trek to the car through a forest now bristling with torment. An unseen dip in the falling dark meant a hellish bone-jarring; a tiny slip in the mud, agony. In the last gasp of daylight, they reached the car. On the way home, Mary drove gently, but a host of angels could not have been gentle enough. Kate sat in the back seat, holding stiff as a granite block, clutching the door handle. With every bump, the others heard an involuntary yelp.

As Mary eased off the highway, Hille said, “You know, I remember a J.P. at St. Mary's, back in the day. I guess they were initials, but it just seemed like his name to us.”

In the rear-view mirror, Mary's eyes met Kate's.

“Yeah. Would have been around Grade 8 or 9,” Hille went on. “Before my parents switched me over to public. That's when
we
met, Kate, remember? Anyway, I never knew really knew him. Hey, you think that could have been him? The grave, I mean.”

Kate attempted a shrug, pain filtering Hille's voice as a sieve does broken glass. She could hardly bear to listen.

Hille went on. “Remember the old King's Hotel? The guy there, they called
him
J.P. Or was it P.J.? Well that guy, you know, at King's, he was a Marcotte. Remember the Marcottes, Kate? There were lots of them. Oh sorry, don't talk if it hurts.”

If Hille only knew how much. Kate wanted to weep.

Instead, she said, “Hille, you don't happen to know how he died?”

“In the fire. You must remember that.”

“Uh, I was out west. I didn't get the details.”

“Wow, not yet? They still use the Pony Express out there, or what? What happened was, those guys set the fire, just wanting to scare him. I think he owed them money. Something like that.”