Strange Things Done (17 page)

When they’d returned home in the middle of the night, they’d convinced one another not to go to Cariboo, fearing prosecution. They’d agreed to sleep on it. Jo found herself questioning whether they’d made the right decision. She’d only had a couple of hours sleep before her alarm had sounded. She’d woken Sally up, clattering amidst the debris in the kitchen, looking for a clean coffee cup. This time, instead of arguing about who was responsible for the disaster in that room, they’d agreed to go out for coffee.

“It’s not too late to tell Cariboo,” Jo said.

Sally swallowed hard, as though choking on her coffee. “Are you quite mad? You want to give Cariboo a reason to arrest us? You want Grikowsky to know that it was us? I mean, he might not know who it was.”

“You have a point.”

“Right on the top of my head. Helps keep my hat in place.” Sally tapped her Cossack-style headwear. The combination of the sleek fur hat and coat gave Sally the appearance of a Soviet spy, making Jo feel uneasy.
Trust issues
, Jo reminded herself. Sally was probably fine.

Besides, Jo wasn’t about to push her luck. They’d been lucky that Grikowsky had let them go: a telling fact that Jo turned over in her mind again and again, polishing it like a stone until it shone brightly. She could not put it down. “What do you think they were doing out there, though?”

Sally considered for a moment. Somewhere a raven chortled over the roar of the river. The sound was throaty and guttural, like a bargoyle after last call. “Trying to sluice up before freeze-up?”

“Sluice up?”

“It’s a kind of dredging.”

“Oh.”

Jo looked toward the water, where jagged shards of ice rushed ceaselessly forward, but her gaze was unfocused. The air was bracing and carried with it the scent of pine. She jiggled both legs to keep the blood flowing.

Sally nodded toward the river. “That’s it, then,” she said. “You can forget about canoeing out. It’ll be frozen solid in a day or two.” Sally sounded slightly amused by her own demise.

“Well. There goes
my
escape plan,” Jo said. “Good thing there’s still an ice pick under your bar.” A smile flickered briefly on Sally’s face, like fluorescent lights before they dim.

The spreading slabs of ice filled Jo with dread. It was actually happening now. The tourists had fled. The river was freezing solid. The roads were snowing in. Soon the airport would close too, if it hadn’t closed already. Jo was either about to miss her last opportunity until spring to escape, or she’d missed it already. Dawson would be cut off from the rest of the world. Jo thought about the shots ringing out in the darkness, and wondered who would be shut in with her.

The ice swirled and eddied in the river: a great, seething cauldron of fate. Jo felt like a passenger on the
Titanic
: as though she were sitting back, putting her feet up and listening to the violins play as the ship sank. She quickly recapped her expenses in the last month, and calculated—again—how much room might be left on her credit card. Could she leave once the story was published on Friday, and Dawson had been warned? If she could scrape together enough credit for a plane ticket out … if the airport hadn’t already closed … but what then? How would she earn a living in the South? It was a moot point.

Then there was the issue of what to do about the
Dawson Daily.
The
Daily
couldn’t—or wouldn’t—go to print until Friday. Two days. Jo had to find a way to warn the town that the RCMP were now investigating Marlo’s death as a possible murder.

Jo considered leaking the story to Kevin Kessler, but Dawsonites didn’t read the
Vancouver Sun
. She had to be certain that her voice was heard where it mattered the most. And she had to be absolutely sure that she was right. But at this point, what did she really know?

Jo glanced at Sally and cleared her throat. “The morning after Marlo died … ”

Sally turned her cat-like eyes on Jo. Her expression seemed interested. Not wary. “Yesss?”

“Why did you call Byrne?”

“Oh that.” Sally’s tone was nonchalant.

“Yes. That.”

“Because he asked me to.” Her expression, too, was unapologetic.

“When?”

“The next day. He called from the pub and said that you’d had too much to drink the night before, and he was worried that you might get the wrong idea. That he’d taken advantage.” Some emotion tugged at a corner of Sally’s mouth, but she drowned it with coffee and whisky.

“Do you think he would? Take advantage, I mean?”

“I have no idea. I only know that I saw you get into his pickup outside Gertie’s, and later his truck was parked out front of my house. And the next day, he was concerned that you know that he hadn’t done anything … ungentlemanly.” She smiled a strange smile.

“Did he mention that we were up on the Bluffs the night Marlo died?”

“
Were
you?” Sally appeared to be more intrigued than horrified.

Jo nodded. “According to Cariboo.”

“The plot thickens.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that Christopher Byrne had called you and asked about me?”

“Because at the time, I didn’t think it was all that important.”

Jo placed her numb hands under her arms. “Do you think he did it? Could he have done it?”

Sally considered for a long moment. “I wouldn’t have pegged Byrnie as the type, no. But you never know what someone might do when they’re really pushed. God help anyone who pushes me hard enough.” Sally bounced both knees and leaned forward over her open canteen. A veil of steam screened her face.

The dull rumble of water and ice was ubiquitous, permeating the landscape. Jo watched a lone snowflake land on her glove and cling there for a moment, unique and perfect. Sally’s answer had seemed honest enough.

“We need to go back to the mine,” Jo said. “Find out what they’re mining for at night. Have another look for May.”

Sally shook her head and took a slug of her Irish coffee. “If we’re caught at the mine again, Grikowsky will prosecute us for trespassing.”

“Claim 53 is a gold mine, right?” Jo said.

“Yup.”

Jo hesitated only for a second. She had to trust someone in Dawson. “So why would they be looking for uranium in a gold mine?” Jo asked.

“Pardon?” Sally raised her artfully crafted eyebrows. This might have been the first time Jo had caught her off guard, and she could tell that Sally didn’t like losing the upper hand in a conversation. Or losing at anything, for that matter. Doubtless it was a rare occurrence.

“I need to get back to the mine, into that trailer …”

“Shhhh!” Sally grabbed Jo’s arm, startling her.

Jo was positive that something terrible was about to happen. “What?” she gasped.

“It’s showtime.” Sally nodded to the horizon, where a petulant sun had begun a spectacular display. Jo watched, transfixed by the fiery burst of colour that created at least the illusion of heat.

It occurred to Jo later, as she listened to the steady drip of the
Daily’s
coffee machine and the dry hum of the heaters, that Sally hadn’t asked for an explanation about Jo’s uranium theory because she couldn’t stand to have to ask. By contrast, Jo couldn’t stand not to question. She was only fascinated by what she couldn’t understand. She had to know. Then, once she’d figured it out, she lost interest. Probably one of the reasons her boyfriends never lasted. Maybe that was part of the appeal of Christopher Byrne. There was something ineffable, some kind of mutual understanding between them, that prevented Jo from thinking that he had anything to do with what had happened to Marlo. But she had to know for certain. In the back of Jo’s mind, she had to consider the possibility that Byrne was using her.

Jo dialled the number May had left her again, thoughtful as she listened to the empty ring tone that she now knew was the phone in May’s kitchen.

She glanced at her watch. May had been missing for almost twenty-four hours. Her boutique, The Gold Digger, was supposed to open at eleven. Winter hours. Would Dawsonites believe that May was missing when she didn’t turn up for work again? Jo might have to confess to Cariboo that May had asked to meet her at The Gold Digger and not shown up. It was the only way to show intent. Jo would also have to admit to Cariboo that she had withheld information in her last interview. Not a pleasant scenario, especially since May had asked her not to tell anyone about the phone call. There was something else Jo couldn’t help thinking about.
Alice Wolfe.
Johnny Cariboo’s fiancé
had disappeared. That made made Marlo the second woman, not the first, to come to a tragic end in Dawson City. And Johnny Cariboo had a connection to the first.

Jo chewed on the end of a pen. The cold plastic made her teeth ache. She pulled out a pad of paper and slapped it down on the desk. She wrote the name Marlo, and drew a circle around it. Then, like planets rotating around the sun, she wrote down the names of others in town, forming a circle around Marlo’s name. Christopher Byrne. Sally LeBlanc. Sergeant Cariboo. Caveman Cal Sanders. May Wong. Jack Grikowsky. The Mine. Doug Browning. Then she wrote down her own name, in the middle of a circle that overlapped with Christopher Byrne. Next she made lines to connect the circles to one another and to Marlo. What Jo came away with was that one circle in particular had the most connections to Marlo and May Wong: the mine. Marlo had fought against the mine. Grikowsky managed the mine. May owned the mine. Cariboo’s family had worked in the mine. Doug seemed to be protecting the mine.

Byrne’s offhand remark about workers at the mine had lodged in her brain; he had said that many of the miners became ill. If they were surreptitiously mining for uranium, surely that would have a detrimental impact on the water in the surrounding areas. If she could find any evidence that something illicit was going on at the mine, and might have been factor in Marlo’s death or May’s disappearance, Jo had until tomorrow evening to support her theory. The
Daily
was printed Thursday nights and distributed on Friday mornings. Jo had to warn the town before someone in Dawson killed again.

If her theory about the mine were correct, Jo knew the story could gain national coverage—and she might find some redemption in the public eye. Perhaps she could even leave Dawson and find work elsewhere. More importantly, if she got it right this time, the nightmares might end. But first, she’d have to find a way to see it printed, despite opposition from those who wanted to keep it quiet: Doug, Grikowsky, and the RCMP.

She rubbed her dry eyes as the
Daily
’s
dusty baseboard heaters clicked and whirred. What would happen if she couldn’t find enough support for her story to convince Doug to publish it? She could wait until after Doug’s retirement party when, presumably, she could publish anything she wanted.
No
. She couldn’t sit on a story like this again. She’d have to find a way to warn Dawson’s citizens that Marlo’s death was not an accident—and that May Wong was missing—even if it put her already lacklustre career on the line. Even if the story was based on unsubstantiated allegations.

Impatiently, Jo pushed around copy for the retrospective on Marlo’s life. She’d do the story the way Doug wanted it. But she’d also find a way to expose the truth.
She’d start by looking into what kind of public health records Dawson maintained.

The morning was bitterly fresh. Sunlight reflected off turbulent water, where great shards of ice still rushed ceaselessly northward, making the riverside walk along Front Street even more breathtaking. Jo glanced at her watch: city hall would open at ten.

She stopped cold just before Queen Street. A new art installation had been erected. Two larger-than-life lovers, clothed only in snow, were engaged in a heated kiss. The male was taller and wore some kind of bird mask—possibly a raven. Huge wings were attached at his back, Icarus-style. He had one oversized hand on the woman’s cheek, while the other hand gripped the small of her back, just below where her own wings unfurled. The woman also wore a beak and feather mask. Something about the art moved Jo; the scene looked strangely familiar. She brushed the snow away from the gold plaque at the bottom of the statue, which read: