Forever Dead (2 page)

He reached out his hand for the comfort of the little cat and stiffened. There was no warm, friendly little body curled up next to him.

“Paulie?”

His voice hit the quiet of the woods like a hammer on granite, hardly denting or scratching the silence all around him. It sounded dead, flat, alone.

“Paulie?” he called again.

There was no familiar scrambling of little feet, no warm, wet snout nuzzling his hand, no purring, nothing. Diamond felt around with his hands, sure Paulie must have rolled away from him in her sleep. No Paulie.

Slowly, carefully, he reached for his flare gun, silently groping in the darkness for his running shoe. His hand gripped the familiar outline and followed the sole along to the tongue. The shoe was empty. He groped all around, like a blind man, tapping his fingers amongst the carpet of cedar twigs, but there was nothing.

“What the hell?” he whispered, jerking his head up to scan the woods around him.

A twig snapped nearby, then there was a slight rustling in the trees. Diamond turned to face the sound.

“Paulie?”

For an instant the moon came out from behind a cloud, and in the woods beyond him it reflected off something shiny before skidding back behind another cloud. He stared after it, willing his eyes to see, and slowly he picked out something on the very edge of his vision, a darker smudge staining the blackness of the night, standing in the shadows of the trees, barely perceptible, upright. Too small for a bear. Human? He felt the goose-bumps rise all over his body, a cold prickle of fear rapidly building into a crescendo, overwhelming in the suddenness of its vicious grasp, rearing out of his grogginess like some nightmare. He struggled to his feet, his heart racing like the rapids, and cried out in frustration as his sleeping bag entangled his legs. When he looked again there was nothing. He waited, head cocked, listening.

“Who's there?” His voice was caught by a gust of wind and flung into the silence, as if to the wolves. He could taste the fear now, like some unwanted sickness, clammy, unhealthy, rising like bile. He stood there scanning the trees and called out again and again, in an odd, strangled mixture of fear and anger. Nothing. Only the shadows playing tricks on him.

Too late, he sensed movement behind him and whirled. In the split second it took for the horror of what he saw to surface, he raised his hands to shield his head. The impact of the blow across his chest knocked the wind out of him and sent him sprawling onto a rock outcrop, his head glancing against the rock and stunning him as he lashed out with his arms. He felt his mind spinning out of control, weaving in and out of consciousness.

A grisly, high-pitched scream careened through the forest. He felt a sudden overwhelming weight on his
chest, pushing out the air he tried to breathe in, and he knew, in a spiralling crescendo of fear and terrifying clarity, that the scream had been his.

The dull roar of the rapids merged into a roaring in his head. His mind fell into slow motion, tumbling over memories and daydreams, and the pain, the violent jabbing pain, was followed miraculously by a delicious feeling of overwhelming calm that enveloped him. Its fingers gently probed the recesses of his mind, easing the pain until, quietly, gently, like wind whispering through trees, Jake Diamond was gone.

“I wanted to kill him,” I said, as I scrambled out onto the rocky shore and steadied the canoe. I waited for my brother to respond, but he just grimaced at me as he slowly unwound his six-foot frame and stepped out of the canoe. The water lapped gently against the gleaming silver hull, safe now in the eddy, as it nudged the rocks where I squatted impatiently. Out beyond the eddy I could see the smooth, luminous sheen of the water, stretched like cellophane almost at the ripping point, as it gathered speed and funnelled between the two tree-lined rocky shores. Somewhere around the corner and out of sight it would rip apart and splinter into thousands of ragged shards of white boiling water — just as my life sometimes threatened to do, I thought.

The canoe suddenly jerked toward me as Ryan hauled out the first of our packs and, grunting, dumped it unceremoniously on the rocks beside me.

“Leave it alone can't you, Cordi?” he groaned. “You're like a dog with an old bone, slobbering and chewing on it even though there's nothing left.” When I didn't answer he sighed and said, “We've gone over it a thousand times. So he's a jerk. It's past. Over. Done with. Finito. For God's sake, let it die.”

As if to underline his words he stooped and flicked the bow painter at me, then went to secure the canoe with the stern line. He was right, of course, but I couldn't get it out of my mind because I knew I should have said something to the suave bastard. I'd been checking the glass tanks that housed my frogs in the zoology building where I worked as an assistant professor when Jim Hilson quietly materialized behind me and curled his hands around my hips and squeezed. “Cordi, my dear, have you heard the news?” I elbowed him in the gut, and he let me go as I turned to face him. He held up his hands in self-defence and with an ingratiating smile said, “I just thought you should be the first to know.”

“Know what?” I asked, marvelling that such a handsome face, with its burnt umber eyes, thick straight shaggy brown hair, full lips, and a button nose, could be so irritating. We'd worked together as partners on and off on some research projects, and he always, without fail, seemed to come out on top, with his name front stage centre and mine trailing behind. Why I kept co-authoring papers with him I could not fathom. He was so irritating.

“I think you might be out of a job,” he said, pulling a long face, but the cheery tone of his voice revealed his real feelings. He didn't say anything more, forcing me to ask why, which irritated me even more.

“You didn't make tenure.” I didn't say anything at all, fighting back my anger and disappointment as he stood there peering at me solicitously. I had been so sure I'd be considered for tenure.

“How do you know that?” I asked in anger.

He smiled knowingly and said, “Poor little Cordi. You have to know the right people to get the information you want.” Which translated into he did, and I didn't. “That's why you have such a hard time getting ahead.” I bit my tongue hard and tried to think of all the devastating retorts I could say, but all I could think of was “Go to hell,” which wasn't exactly imaginative.

“I could help you, Cordi. You and me — we make a great team,” he said, sidling closer to me. After two years of this I was getting sick of Jim's game. I backed away and ignored him.

“Don't you want to know?” he asked, moving closer.

“Know what?” I asked, and backed away again.

“If I got tenure?' He waited for my response, but I just stared at him.

“You'll be sorry to know that I didn't,” he said. But of course I was glad, which made me feel a bit guilty, but only for a moment.

“It's just you and me now, Cordi. And one of us won't be here this time next year.”

I looked at him and said, “Would you please get to the point.”

“I also heard that an assistant professor is on the chopping block, come spring,” he said, “and I think it's going to be you.”

He smiled again and shrugged, holding out his overly muscled arms to me, inviting a hug. I moved away, saying nothing, too afraid my voice might crack, furious at myself for not being able to come up with some witty remark.

“You know why it won't be me, other than the fact that I've published more papers?” he crowed.

When I didn't answer, his face suddenly twitched in annoyance and he abruptly answered his own question. “Because for your last year here they're saddling you
with the perennially unpopular entomology taxonomy course, now that Jefferson's heart problem has sidelined him.” He sighed. “I'm really sorry, Cordi, but it sure won't be easy to impress the tenure committee with an insect taxonomy course, not that that's a prerequisite or anything.”

He shook his head in commiseration, grinned suggestively, blew me a kiss, and turned to leave, but then couldn't resist a final jab. Did he know the damage his words were doing, or was he biologically incapable of comprehending?

“I've had two papers accepted, you know, and I drew Jefferson's animal behaviour course this year — hard to make a course like that bomb out, eh? But who knows? Maybe you can do something with the insect taxonomy course that will blow us all out of the water.” He disappeared down the hall, leaving me shaking with frustration at myself for letting him see my shock and the stinging tears in my eyes. At times like this I felt like a real loser even though I knew the jerk was exaggerating. I was good at what I did. I just had to convince myself of it somehow.

I tried to shift my focus away from my depressing thoughts and glanced at Ryan, who was securing the canoe. He had a million new freckles on his arms, legs, and face from the endless days of sun, and the rusty red baseball cap that hid his unruly red-blond hair seemed to have done little to prevent the sun from bleaching most of the red out. I smiled and remembered trying to count all those freckles once when we were kids on the farm: it had been like counting the grains of sand on a beach. We were so different, he and I.

I sighed and got up to tie my line around a large
boulder at the base of a cliff that soared above us. The jumble of rocks at its base had once formed part of its face, now battered, craggy, and forlorn from years of losing pieces of itself.

The entrance to the portage trail was framed by the huge trunks of two large pine trees on a height of land. Ryan turned on his heel and disappeared into the woods to scout the rapids. I followed him down the soft earthen trail and saw him veer off the path in the direction of the rapids. We broke out of the bushes onto some sun-warmed, rust-streaked granite rocks overlooking the full force of the rapids.

“Would you take a look at that!” yelled Ryan from his position atop a huge boulder.

The words were whipped away by the wind and the thundering roar of the rapids. I clambered up beside him and looked at the roiling mass of suicidal waves at our feet. I glanced apprehensively at Ryan out of the corner of my eye. He was eyeballing the rapids with the look of someone possessed, and when he caught my glance I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

“No way, Ryan.”

“Aw, c'mon, Cor.” He gripped my arm and pointed. All either of us could see was the ominous white cauldron of water, torn here and there by jagged rocks and a fallen tree hanging out over the water. Further down I could just make out the telltale line where the river suddenly dropped from view as it plummeted over a series of unseen cliffs.

“We could canoe this far side,” said Ryan eagerly. “See? Over here. We take the route between those two boulders, veer sharply left to miss all the mess close to shore there, and then angle back to miss the shelf. We hug the shore and find a backwater just before the tree and the falls. Easy!”

“That's what you said about the last one,” I yelled, “and we nearly skewered the canoe on that godawful rock just past the mini ledge!”

“Whose fault was that? You were in the bow!” shouted Ryan.

“Don't remind me,” I said. I hated being in the bow, being the first one down into a boiling cauldron of water, madly trying to take the correct route to get us through. The person in the bow never got the respect they were due. All the stern had to do was follow the bow's lead, but the bow? The bow had to choose the right route, usually with split-second precision and twenty-twenty vision, neither of which I was particularly blessed with.

“It didn't look like a ledge when we scouted it!” Ryan protested as he looked back at the river, a look of disappointment on his face.

“You'd canoe Niagara Falls if you could,” I said, knowing there was a spark of truth to it. Ryan seemed to have no strong sense of his own mortality, but fortunately it wasn't contagious. I suffered from no such illusions of immortality, especially when it came to a wet death.

I looked at the river again, shivering suddenly, as if the water already had me in its grip. “This'd kill us,” I said, and I shivered again as the spray misted my face and left me feeling strangely apprehensive.

Ryan suddenly caught me by the wrists, shaking me out of my thoughts, and pulled me close, whispering in my ear, “Lighten up Cordi, I'm only joking.”

He jumped off the boulder then and headed back into the coolness of the woods. Of course he was only joking. I knew that, so why had I let it bother me so much?

“Come on, lazy, let's get the packs,” he shouted.

“Lazy? You call me lazy?” I yelled at Ryan's disappearing back. “The only reason you wanted to run these
rapids was so you wouldn't have to portage the canoe.”

I could just hear Ryan's answering chortle as I ran to catch up.

The sun was at its hottest, directly overhead, and the water looked deliciously cool as it gently cradled the canoe, but there was nowhere safe to swim, hot as we were. We'd just have to scout around for a good spot at the other end of the portage. Ryan's pack was now light enough for him to hoist it onto his back without my help. Most of the food from our two-week trip was gone, but my pack — with the tent, sleeping bag, clothes, and my small collecting pack — remained the same. Ryan, no doubt feeling guilty, helped me on with my pack, which practically dwarfed my 5'6”, 120-pound frame. After two weeks I'd adjusted pretty well to the heft of it, and the growing strength in my arms and legs felt good. I adjusted the wide shoulder straps and pulled the leather tumpline over my forehead to take some of the weight off my shoulders and then took off ahead of Ryan.

I padded softly down the narrow trail, the needles of the pine trees on either side jiggling in the sunlight, dancing and leaping in the wind and sending shadows skittering across the path in front of me.