Season of Storm (24 page)

Sergeant Rice's silent partner flipped open a notebook. "Would you mind telling us just where you were?" Sergeant Rice asked.

"I can't tell you
exactly,
because I wasn't navigating." She smiled. "I was on a sailing holiday with friends. We sailed around the Gulf Islands."
 

"You were on a friend's boat, your father tells me?"

"That's right."

"You were there voluntarily?"

She smiled again. "Entirely voluntarily."

"What's the name of the boat, miss?" Sergeant Rice opened his own notebook.

She looked at him, "I'm sorry, Sergeant. I don't want to bring my friends into this."

"All right," said Sergeant Rice, nodding. "If you'd just like to tell me their names I'll make sure — "

"I'm sorry, no."

His expression hardened slightly. "Any particular reason?"

"I don't want them involved. It was a perfectly harmless trip. If it hadn't been for my father's heart attack nobody would ever. ..."

"There's also the little matter of the ransom demand," he said softly, and she had the feeling Sergeant Rice was watching her very closely. "Did you know about that?"

"I heard it on the radio this morning, and my father told me about it."

"How do you account for it, Miss St. John?"

Careful,
said the voice.
Take a deep breath.
She shrugged.
 

"I'm afraid I can't account for it. An opportunistic move, perhaps?"

"Were you aware of your father's intention to start cutting trees in Cat Bite Valley?"

"What has that got to do with it?" She allowed annoyance to creep into her tone. "I didn't, as a matter of fact. I've been in Europe for a year."
As if you didn't know,
she wanted to say, exactly as she had said to Johnny a week ago.
As if you haven't read your file on me....
 

She closed her eyes in sudden confusion. Was this how it worked? A week ago the police had not been her enemy, had not filled her with suspicion and hostility. Was Johnny Winterhawk right about them, or was this a symptom of whatever had allowed her to believe she loved him?

"So you didn't know about it before you were kidnapped." Sergeant Rice didn't seem to notice her confusion.

"No, I have nothing to do w—" She broke off, schooling her dismay, turning it into faint irritation. "My father had not discussed it with me, nor was I aware of his plans regarding Cat Bite Valley before I
went on holiday,"
she said levelly.
 

"What's your opinion on the dispute?" he asked calmly, nose in his notebook.

"That's my private affair," she said. He looked up. "You do believe in freedom of thought, don't you, Sergeant?" she asked brightly.
Steady,
the voice advised her, but Smith knew she was losing her calm.
 

They stayed over half an hour. They were never hostile; they never attacked. But they were chipping away at her story with every question. "When we came to the house, your bed had been slept in. It looked as though...."

Their housekeeper had quit a couple of weeks earlier. It must have been that way since the Friday night. She had left late Saturday. She wasn't used to keeping house, Smith told them with a self-mocking shrug.

"You left your father to look after himself even though he was recovering from a heart attack?"

Unanswerable.

"Your watch and handbag were beside your bed." She hadn't needed such a large handbag, and she hadn't wanted her watch. It was a holiday.

"Your credit cards and money were in the purse."

Not all. She had taken what she needed for the week.

"Your father seemed fairly certain you were in the house the night of his heart attack." All in a tone of Just Asking a Question, Ma'am, that she could not challenge.

He was mistaken. She had said goodbye to him that evening. Perhaps the heart attack had made him forget.

"Who do you think the men in balaclava helmets were?"

She had no idea. Is it possible her father had had a sort of hallucination? That did happen with heart attacks sometimes, didn't it?

But then who had made the phone call summoning the ambulance? Did her friends own the old van that a neighbour had noticed parked on the street sometime that night, that was gone in the morning? Why hadn't she informed the office or her secretary of her forthcoming holiday?

On and on until she was dizzy with the effort of trying to keep her head. Sergeant Rice never triumphantly followed up a hit that had left her floundering. Never hammered a point home like a Crown prosecutor. He just asked and asked, and it never seemed to matter whether the question was obvious or unanswerable, his reaction was always the same—he asked another.

Johnny,
she thought in despair,
look what you've abandoned me to. If we'd come back as husband and wife this wouldn't be happening, and you'd be here to make it all easy.... You and your Indian heritage,
she thought forlornly, temporarily forgetting her own realization that getting married had been madness. She felt bereft.
 

When the policemen got up to go, she knew that what Johnny Winterhawk had tried to tell her was true: protecting him from the police was going to cost her.

***

"They tell me you're not cooperating," her father said later that evening when she visited him again. "What do you hope to gain by it, girl?"

Smith sighed angrily. After the police visit this afternoon, and reporters dogging her footsteps, she did not need this. "What do you want—blood?" she demanded. "I've told you and I've—"

"Yes, I want blood," returned Cordwainer St. John evenly. "I want the blood of every one of those bastards, and I intend to get it—one way or another."

She couldn't remember ever feeling so angry with her father. "I wish to hell you'd leave this alone, Daddy!" she said.

"You know me better than that."   

"That's right!" she snapped. "I know better than to think concern for me could ever come before your honour or your money or whatever happens to be your buzzword of the moment!"

He looked thunderstruck.
"What?"
he demanded. She stared at him, surprised herself. She'd hardly shouted at her father in all her life before. "My God, what do you think drives me, girl, if not concern for you? What else have I got?"
 

"You've got St. John's Wood, Daddy," she returned dryly. "And you've got your memories of my mother, and you've got your—you name it, it comes before me on the totem pole."

"Is that what you think? What you really think?"

Smith didn't answer. "Please leave it alone," was all she said.

***

The next day was Monday, and she simply could not face work. She had hardly settled in again since her return from Europe, but with her father ill she wondered if Rolly would feel he couldn't do without her. Not that she was interchangeable with her father yet, but Rolly liked someone around who wasn't afraid to make hard decisions.

"Don't worry about a thing," he said when she called. "Whatever happened last week, Smith, you need a rest. Take the week off—take a month. Look, why don't you call Valerie? Go visit her—the twins are keeping her too busy to get out, and she needs some feminine company."

"I'll do that," she agreed, and got off the phone just as the tears started. Reaction, she thought. It was the concern in his voice. Physically and emotionally she had been through an ordeal by fire last week, and the worst of it was she couldn't talk to anyone about it. She couldn't get it out of her system. She had to pretend to everyone she knew that nothing had happened.

She thought longingly of Valerie. Although she was nearly ten years older than Smith the two had been close almost from the day Rolly had come to St. John's Wood. If there was anyone she wanted to talk to right now, it was Valerie Middleton.

If she told Valerie anything she would have to tell her everything. Would that put Valerie in a difficult position? Did the law require that she report her information to the police? Kidnapping was a serious offense.

Maybe she had better find a lawyer and get some answers first, Smith thought, feeling the walls of self-imposed isolation thud into place all around her. She was on her own.

It was an old familiar feeling.
I let the walls down for Johnny,
she realized suddenly.
I let him inside.
No wonder she hadn't felt like herself. No one had ever got inside before. Her heart kicked against her breast in sudden fear.
What if I haven't pushed him out?
she wondered madly.
What if my need for him is locked up in here with me?
 

***

She didn't call Valerie. She slept for three days, getting up only to eat and to go to the bathroom and sometimes to sit blankly in front of the television set while shrieking happy people won refrigerators.

She visited her father once, but didn't remember what they said to each other. The police were not bothering her, so perhaps her father meant what he said, that he cared about her. It did not seem to matter. When friends came she greeted them sleepily in rumpled pyjamas and sent them away. She silenced all three lines of the phone and disconnected the doorbell, and when the news came on television, she shut it off.

On Thursday she got up, showered and went out. Something else had replaced her in the headlines. She drove to the hospital to visit her father.

"What have you been doing?" he asked her.

"Sleeping," she replied, and he looked at her face and let it go.

"I'll be coming home soon, they tell me," he said.

"Good," she replied. "I'll find a housekeeper."

On the way home she stopped in at a large bookstore and bought every book written by or about Indians in Canada. There were not many. Johnny's stock of books had seemed much larger. As she walked to the cash register she saw a slim anthology of Canadian poetry and on impulse added it to her small stack.

She seemed to be drained of energy. She went home and lazed around the family room, her favourite room, bright and airy at the back of the house, overlooking the pool. She kept picking up the books she had bought and flipping through them, but often the style was discursive, and in any case it was too much effort to concentrate.

The poems were easier. Most were short; they did not require a lot of concentration, and they delivered a punch that sometimes made it through the wall surrounding her. There were several new young poets included at the end of the volume, and she wondered what course her life might have taken if that summer at Paper Creek hadn't happened. Would her work have been included here?

She got some paper and began to doodle lines of poetry, as she had done in Johnny's house. She felt a vague sense of frustration that she couldn't define, that might have been anger at the passage of time, the waste of years when she could have been perfecting her craft.

The world hates you

Or do you hate the world—

The way you hate me

Because you loved me?

Today again she produced nothing that satisfied her. After awhile she tried to write down from memory some of the lines she had written on the island, just to look at them, see what she thought of her work in cold blood. She had written a lot that day, under the grip of something, and had decided it was crap.

Johnny didn't think it was crap.
Your mouth is a naked flame.
Johnny Winterhawk had read what she'd written and been aroused to the point...that unbelievable madness on the beach! How had it happened? She had written it and he had read it and then they had nearly torn each other apart in their lust to get inside each other.
 

Did that mean it was good poetry? She wished she could read it now.  Wished she hadn't thrown it away. Probably the poetry hadn't been any more real than the love they'd thought they shared. Maybe it had only been a part of the false spell that had enmeshed them both....

Smith tossed the pages of her writing aside and eyed the stack of books beside her again. It wasn't just that she'd thought she loved Johnny Winterhawk. She'd bought into his worldview, too. She'd become convinced that what he told her about aboriginal rights in Canada was the true picture. Was that, too, just part of the insanity?

Or was Johnny's view of the world right?

With a new determination Smith put out a hand to the book that sat on top of the pile.
The Unjust Society
by Harold Cardinal. She straightened her back as though preparing for an ordeal, and opened it.
 

"Chapter One. The Buckskin Curtain: the Indian-Problem Problem," she read. "The history of Canada's Indians is a shameful chronicle of the white man's disinterest, his deliberate trampling of Indian rights, and his repeated betrayal of our trust."

Smith took a deep breath. It was going to be hard, she knew. It was going to be a labour of love—not for Johnny Winterhawk, but for truth.

***

It was the strangest week she had ever spent, bar none. Between long spells of reading, she sat trying to write poetry, to express something of what she was feeling. Not much of what she wrote seemed good to her, and she would drop the pages she had written and return to her reading, her emotions not exorcised.  

By Saturday afternoon she was still at it, and now she could no longer sit still. Every few minutes she would throw down whatever she was reading and pace the house like a caged lion, filled with an intensity of feeling that was almost frightening.

I've got to stop this,
she warned herself.
I've got to get control of myself. The least little thing now could send me over the edge.
 

Sometime in the latter part of the week she had put the phone back on the ringer, and now it rang.

"Smith, is that you?" asked a woman's voice. Valerie. "It's Valerie. Listen, can you come over here? We've got to talk."