Forever Dead (37 page)

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. His eyes were glinting like daggers at me and I backed up.

“You gave Leslie Anderson the keys to this building,” I said.

He looked at me uncertainly, and I could clearly see his lack of courage surfacing like a methane bubble from a swamp.

“So what?' he said. ‘She's a friend. She asked me for a favour.”

“She's a dead friend who just happened to kill two people and steal all my disks,” I said.

He stared at me in stone cold silence. He was struggling to hide his sudden fear, darting his eyes around looking for an escape route, but he couldn't find one.

“You gave her the key, and she fumigated my insects and stole my research,” I said.

“That makes you an accessory after the fact,” I added.

He just stood there, at a loss for words, and in I went, straight for the jugular. “It's official. The Dean has fired you and the cops are probably up in your lab right now.” He looked at me, his head at an angle like an owl, his face sagging into itself like a leaky balloon. We said nothing and as the silence lengthened I wondered what was going through his head. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“Know about everything, Leslie and me, everything.”

“You really want to know?”

He nodded, and for the first time in my life I'd felt sorry for Jim Hilson — but not that sorry.

“You just have to know the right people,” I said, and then I blew him a kiss and left him standing there, stewing in his own words.

I was brought back from my reverie by Martha.

“What will happen to Don's daughter?” she asked out of the blue, breaking the spell. No one said anything, just let the crickets take over our silence, because nobody knew.

“And what about the will? Did Shannon ever find it?”

I looked at Martha, wishing she'd just be quiet. I hated not being able to answer questions. “The police never found out who ripped out the pages from the black book,” I said. “Maybe there never was a will. Maybe Shannon lied. We'll never know.”

I could see the moon starting to rise over the escarpment and felt content for the first time in weeks. It was a good feeling. “Who's going to take over the cougars?” This time Duncan broke the silence.

“Patrick is,” I said and actually squeezed his hand.

He squeezed back a lot harder and said, “I'll set up surveillance up there, and I'm working on a paper based on some of Diamond's notes and some of my own stuff as well.” I thought about how Patrick had sold his share of the mill just before the discovery of the cougars broke out. The company that bought the mill had been livid, but it had been sold in good faith. I felt kind of rotten about it, even though the cougars would make Patrick's career and halt the logging.

“Of course Diamond will get the credit for the discovery,” continued Patrick, “but he's given me a giant career boost. I have a research grant to study Sian — that's the name Diamond gave her, apparently — and her cubs, and try to locate others in the area.
We know there has to be at least one male in the neighbourhood — Sian's mate — and hopefully more. It's wild country and they're secretive cats, so it's not such a long shot to hope that a viable population may exist up there.”

His words rang like a gong through my head, moving from room to room in my mind, sounding an alarm like a town crier. Something to do with Sian. What the hell was it? It had bothered me at the blind but the uneasy suspicion now forming in my mind had been scared away first by the boulder, then by all the revelations Leslie had told me, and later by the police.

When Duncan and Martha finally left, I had to nudge my protective brother out of the house. Before Patrick could immobilize me by taking me in his arms, I grabbed his hand and said, “I have to check something in the barn.”

“Said the spider to the fly?” quipped Patrick as he allowed himself to be led to Ryan's office.

I flicked on Ryan's computer and the screen came to life. I sat down in front of it, waiting impatiently for all the things to mount before I located Diamond's folder, and opened “lynx” with the password Leah22.

“What is it, Cordi?” asked Patrick as he draped his arms over my shoulders. I had to make a conscious effort to forget he was there as I keyed in a word search for Sian in the documents in the folders. And suddenly, there it was staring out at me: Dana, Simba, Sian, and Myth, the four cats Diamond had bred in captivity.

The prickle at the back of my neck grew as I began to tease around the implications of what this meant. Of course he could have given two cats the same name, but I knew, even as the thought flitted through my mind and I searched through his files, that it wasn't true. No scientist
worth his salt would risk mixing up two study subjects by giving them the same name. Sian and the sixth cat that Diamond had radio-collared were one and the same. And that could mean only one thing.

“Jesus,” I whispered, leaning back, staring up at Patrick. “Diamond's cougar was artificially inseminated.”

“What?” said Patrick, taking his arms away and reaching for the mouse. Together we looked at the locked folder labelled “wild card,” sure it held the key to everything. I started keying in Sian followed by numbers from 11 to 99. Nothing. Patrick suggested a number of passwords too, but nothing worked. We were close to giving up in exasperation when suddenly I remembered Shannon's sign and Paulie's pathetic little collar in my hand, the name glinting in the early morning sun. Paulie, not Polly.

It opened at Paulie22, and there it was in black and white. Detailed information about Sian's life. I sat back and stared at Patrick, who had sat down rather abruptly on the sofa. The whole thing had been an elaborate hoax right from the start.

“You've got to be kidding,” said Patrick, but it was all there.

“According to this,” I said, “Sian was one of the cubs that Jeff brought back from New Brunswick, along with her brother. It says here that Jeff had been looking for a breeding kestrel, and while making the deal some hunters came and told him about some half-dead cubs they'd found. When he realized what they were, he questioned the hunters trying to get more information, knowing that New Brunswick cougars were rare too, but they wouldn't talk. Jeff smuggled them out, flew them back to Quebec, and called Diamond, who convinced him to sit on it for a while.”

“What did they do with the cubs?”

I scrolled through the document, scanning the entries.

“It appears that Jeff installed the cats in two separate compounds once they were old enough to be on their own. Diamond wanted them as wild as possible. Jeff was in the process of breeding some fox for reintroduction to the wild, and Diamond persuaded him to take on the cougars.”

“So they worked on it together?”

“Seems that way. They must have hatched the plan to release a pregnant female cougar in order to stop the logging. When the female got pregnant, they radio-collared her, released her near term, and then followed her until she found a den and holed up. Jeff flew Diamond in now and again and he spent the last three weeks there before blazing a trail out when he was ready to tell the world. He had to make sure she would stay, and the cubs would be all right, before he could let the world know.”

“No wild cougars,” said Patrick. “That means that three people died for nothing.”

I went over to him then and snuggled beside him on the sofa, wondering what he was thinking, feeling my own dark thoughts swirling inside me, just out of reach.

Maybe, just maybe, with him by my side I would finally beat my autumn darkness forever. Or was it really that simple? Was anything really that simple?

“Ironic, isn't it?” he finally said. “Leslie and Don thought they had stumbled on the discovery of their lives, and so Diamond was killed for something that wasn't real. They all died for something that wasn't real. At least Diamond got what he wanted though. The logging's been stopped.”

“But for how long?” I asked. “As soon as word gets out that it was all a hoax, the chainsaws will be back in force.”

“Who else knows about it, except you and me?” he asked quietly, the meaning behind his question slinking into the darkness of my night and leaving me wondering what I would do.