Forever Dead (29 page)

“The stuff in the freezer. Did you see it?”

“So the loggers like corn. What of it?”

“Corn?” Martha said her mouth opening in a grimace and her eyebrows struggling to meet her widow's peak.

“Frozen corn,” I said, and Martha's features crashed down in bewilderment as I took her by the arm and led her out of the alley.

“No fish?”

“No fish. Now why don't you tell me what the hell is going on here. What's all this about fish anyway?”

I made for the path Ray had pointed out to me, dragging her along with me.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to see the lake.”

Martha dawdled and picked her way around rocks and branches most people would have stepped over. She doggedly pursued her latest theory.

“The cook really liked my dress, so when I told her I'd made it she asked me to send her the pattern.” Martha looked sidelong at me. “She's a little bigger than I am, and it's not always easy to find things to fit. Anyway I agreed and she took me into the kitchen for a bite to eat. She was cooking up a mess of fresh fish for the men and it smelled so good I asked her where it came from.

“‘Just down at the lake here. They bring 'em in by the barrelful,' she said to me, and I swear she winked, but I wasn't sure. But that's when I got suspicious. They were having trout, Cordi, and I'm pretty sure it's out of season.”

I stopped in my tracks and looked open-mouthed at Martha.

“How would you know if it's out of season, Martha? You hate the outdoors and anything to do with it.”

“Ah, but Cordi, I love fish, fresh fish gently sautéed with a bit of lemon and garlic.” She closed her eyes and licked her lips. “Anyway, even if it is in season I'm sure they must have been way over their limit. Besides, the cook said they had a whole freezer out back that they kept stocked full of the stuff. Then I swear she winked at me again.”

“Did she say anything about bears?”

“Yeah, that was really curious. She said Cameron came into camp a while back all clawed along his arms. He'd been across the lake and said a bear had mauled him after he'd spilled a can of tuna fish on himself. Then that zoologist turned up dead and Cameron and his buddies told the wildlife guys that they'd shot the beast. The cook didn't think they had, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because they always give her the pelts or the fish to clean. She gets paid extra under the table. But there was no pelt, she said. I suppose if she knew they were poaching fish she'd just keep quiet so that the extra money would keep coming in. She stopped talking after that because I think she knew she'd told me too much.”

“Did anyone else know about this rogue bear?”

“All the loggers, she thinks, but she wasn't sure if they had told any of the biologists. They weren't really on speaking terms, after all, but she figures it was only the decent thing to do. Although they all hated Diamond so much they may have practised selective amnesia with him. Served him right that he got killed by it anyway, was what she said. But she wasn't supposed to talk about it. The loggers didn't want the wildlife officers up here. One can see why if they were pilfering trout out of season.”

Martha paused and then in excitement said, “Maybe that's the motive for moving the body. Maybe Diamond knew about the poaching and so they killed him. They moved him because they were afraid it would be discovered, either when the cops came out for a peek or when the wildlife guys came up to shoot the bear. They moved the body and then shot the bear to make doubly sure their secret would stay a secret. And maybe they tried to kill us just now to keep it all under wraps.”

“They'd go to all that trouble for a bunch of fish?”

“Maybe it's something else besides fish. I've suggested it before. Maybe they have a still in the woods, or they've been making hash, or they've kidnapped some wealthy Arab prince. Maybe they've set up a trade in bear gall-bladders. There's a lucrative market for those. I don't know what it might be, but a dead body turning up near any nefarious doings would definitely cramp your style. You'd have to move it. Or maybe they baited him, just as
you said. You heard Cameron earlier. He hunts bear, knows how it's done — even spilled fish oil on himself and lived through the result. They save their logging jobs and their still, or their poaching, or whatever. Double motive.”

I was mulling over Martha's latest theories when we finally broke out into a small clearing. The land sloped down to a pebbled beach and the lake stretched out before us. I took out my binoculars and scoured the shore on the far side.

“I got the gossip on Raymond and his wife,” Martha said.

I continued looking through the binoculars scanning the far shore. I thought I could make out a few cedars near the cliffs of the escarpment, but it wasn't easy from this distance to see any detail. What was frustrating was that it wasn't a small pocket of cedars but as Ray had said a fairly extensive forest. I had had vague hopes of finding a cedar forest of a couple of acres in size and being able to comb it and find out where and why Diamond died. It didn't look good, and I knew I'd been incredibly naive in hoping otherwise.

“And?”

“Happened more than ten years ago, and apparently Ray has never forgiven Diamond.”

I lowered the glasses and eyeballed Martha.

“So Cameron was right?”

“Looks like it. Apparently she and Ray were an item and already married when he and Diamond were at university. Ray introduced them at a party and lost his wife a month later. Ray was beside himself with jealousy and threatened to kill them both. Can't blame the poor guy, can you? Gives him a motive for murder though: jealous husband gone berserk. Held it in all these years, the bitterness growing like some cancer until it strangles his reason. Lots of those around.

“So he went up to kill Diamond and saw the bear, and made use of the bear to do it for him. The perfect murder, if the bear cooperates. It'd be awfully dicey though. Maybe it happened on the spur of the moment. Diamond's sitting there watching his killer eat sardines when suddenly his killer sees the bear heading toward them. The killer throws the oil at Diamond and takes off, coming back when Diamond is dead to move the body. Or maybe they drugged him and dumped sardine juice on him in the area where the other guy got mauled.”

I swung the binoculars along the far shoreline and then scanned the area of the cliff face. Martha continued jabbering away, but I wasn't listening anymore. My mind was racing a hundred miles an hour as I stared at a huge cliff soaring skyward. I adjusted the binoculars, focusing in on it, and there, on the full face of the cliff, glinting in the sun, was a livid jagged slash of rust red streaking diagonally down its face, like a huge red welt.

On the way home Martha rummaged around in her bag and took out a CD and inserted it into my CD player. I was expecting something musical like the Rolling Stones or even Elton John but what came blasting out was the play-by-play of a hockey game. I stared at Martha open-mouthed and then said, “What in heaven's name are we listening to a hockey game for? Or hadn't you noticed it's summer.”

“But, Cordi, this is the Montreal Canadiens. Just because it's summer doesn't mean we fans go to sleep.” She wasn't kidding. Martha was not exactly reticent about where she stood when it came to the Habs. All the way home we listened to the Montreal Canadiens getting thrashed by the Florida Panthers, while I chewed over in my mind the significance of what I had learned so far. I wasn't sure what I'd found but I was on the verge of something, I just knew it. Something in the
back of my mind was screaming to get out — it just couldn't find a route.

I was so lost in thought that when Martha suddenly bounced up and down on the edge of her seat and screamed, “Go Habs!” I nearly lost control of the Land Rover. When I finally wrestled the beast back onto the road I marvelled that Martha had been so engrossed in an old game that she hadn't even noticed the Land Rover and the side of the road making intimate eyes at each other. I listened to the game, my mind now frayed from too much thought to want to do anything else. It sounded bad for the Habs. I glanced over at Martha, wondering why she'd want to listen to a losing game.

“I brought the wrong CD,” she whispered as the Habs went down in a shootout.

Martha was deathly quiet and the announcers from the U.S. channel were having a field day. “The Panthers have won it!” they yelled. “The Florida Panthers kick butt. The stealthy cats came out soft-footed and strong.” The game swirled into my mind, infecting my thoughts, and suddenly I knew what Diamond had been doing up in those woods in the weeks before he died.

The sun was dripping off the escarpment like gold as it moved toward dusk when I finally wheeled the Land Rover into the farmyard. The smell of freshly cut hay was heavy in the air and the indolent mooing of the cows out in the paddock indicated that it was getting close to milking time. I could see Mac in the paddock and waved at him as I saw Martha into her little Volkswagen and watched as she bounced down the road toward the highway. Ryan's motorbike was parked outside his office, and I raced upstairs two at a time to his loft. He was reviewing some photos by the skylight as I came in and wound
my arms around him from behind. He stopped as he saw my face splitting in a grin from ear to ear.

“What's up?”

I turned on the computer before even sitting down, barely holding in my excitement, and said, “I'll show you in a minute, I hope.”

Ryan came and peered curiously over my shoulder as I inserted Shannon's disk and then opened the files for each of the six cats Diamond had been monitoring that spring. I moved the cursor, looking for their vital statistics. There were no vital stats for the sixth cat, but I knew Diamond must have recorded them somewhere. I looked up at Ryan, who was now standing beside me wondering what was up. I pointed to the files for the other five cats.

“Look at this, Ryan. For each cat Diamond has recorded their weight, length, and other physical characteristics, how often they had travelled, and how far.”

“So? Isn't that standard information anyone would gather?”

“Exactly,” I said excitedly. “No biologist worth his salt would track an animal and then not weigh and measure it. He's done that for five of the cats.”

“What are you getting at, Cordi?”

“The sixth cat has no physical characteristics recorded.” I clicked the window and pointed to the computer screen. “He's recorded movement and activity and general location in western Quebec, but no physical characteristics at all.”

“It must have been accidentally deleted.”

“Does this word processing program have hidden text capability?” I said, trying to contain my growing excitement.

Ryan looked at me curiously and nodded. “Yeah, sure it does. Move over and I'll see if I can bring anything up.”

Ryan keyed in some commands and suddenly the text of Diamond's sixth cat doubled in size. I grabbed the mouse from him and scrolled to the beginning of the document, and there it was. Height. Weight. Length. My heart was beating like a bloody racehorse at the photo finish.

“Take a look at the weight, Ryan.”

“Fifty kilograms. What of it?”

“That's a hell of a size for an adult Canada lynx.”

Ryan looked at me, and then clicked on all the other file windows. Not one of Diamond's adult lynx weighed more than ten kilograms. Not surprising, since female lynx average about 8.6 kilograms.

I looked at Ryan, blowing out my cheeks in excitement. I pointed at the computer screen. “This cat's at least five times the weight of an adult lynx. There's only one cat in Canada that big.”

I let the words hang in the air for effect. This was my moment of triumph and I wanted to savour it. Ryan looked at me expectantly.

“It was a cougar, Ryan. Diamond was monitoring a pregnant cougar!”

Ryan stood looking at me, uncomprehending, my dramatic little revelation having had no effect on him.

“So what? Even if he was studying a cougar I don't see what that has to do with Diamond's death. He was a cat man. He studied cats. What's the problem?”

“Cougars haven't been found in Western Quebec for generations.”

Ryan let out a long, low whistle and said, “You're joking. Are you sure?” Ryan's shift from boredom to excitement was palpable, and I spoke quickly.

“Of course I'm sure. Lots of people have claimed to have seen them over the years but there's been no believable evidence. Most biologists think they are extinct,
gone, vanished, forever dead here in Quebec, but they are officially listed as endangered in eastern Canada because there have been so many unconfirmed sightings over the years. Recently someone found a small population in New Brunswick. If Diamond really had found a cougar, it would be dynamite. Logging would stop on the instant. The spotted owls in the old growth on the west coast forced the loggers to stop out there not too long ago.”

Ryan heaved out of his chair. “I'm famished. Let's celebrate with something from your fridge.” Ryan was going to eat me out of house and home before Rose and the kids returned from her parents' cottage. Still, it was nice to have him around to myself every night to talk things over. I knew I'd miss his nightly company when Rose got back. Oh sure, I'd get my fill by visiting them as I always had, but it wasn't the same. I wouldn't have his undivided attention. I thought of Patrick then, as Ryan and I linked arms and walked across the farmyard and down the road to my house.

The sun was spilling its guts all over my porch when we got there. I threw some steaks on the barbecue and Ryan made a salad. The crickets serenaded us as we continued our conversation on the porch.

“How the hell did you make the connection?” he asked.