Up and Down (44 page)

“ ‘… must be the truth,’ ” replied Landon, finishing the sentence in a dismissive tone. “Yes, yes, I know the line. It’s from
The Sign of Four
. I read it again only this morning. It’s one of the most oft-quoted lines in the Holmes canon. What about it?”

“Well, I don’t know quite how to put this, but I think I know where your father’s plane is. I think I may have figured it out.”

Her eyes widened and she leaned forward, but said nothing. I opened the leather logbook and scanned several pages to check on Hugh Percival’s attention to punctuation. It was as I’d expected. Then I turned to his final entry.

“What do you think he meant by ‘Damn
EW
today!’?” I asked.

“Clearly, he was not happy that Earl Walker needed to finish his roof that afternoon,” Landon said, as if there could be no debate about its meaning.

“I think it means something else,” I began. “Flipping through the logbook, it seems your father wasn’t a big fan of the comma. I think he meant that line to read ‘Damn,
EW
today!’ ”

“You’ve lost me,” she interrupted.

“Hang on, I’m almost there,” I said. “I don’t think ‘
EW
’ means ‘Earl Walker.’ I’m now convinced ‘
EW
’ means ‘east wind.’ ”

She shook her head and sat back.

“David, I’ve been here nearly all my life and I’ve never once seen an east wind. The prevailing west wind is as constant as the North Star. You should have just called me.”

I opened the file folder and pulled out the printout of the federal government’s official meteorology report for northern B.C. for the fateful date and handed it to her.

“October 17, 1970, was one of only three occasions in the last sixty years when there was an east wind in this area. And it was very strong that day,” I said.

Landon read through the meteorology report and then set it back down on the pine box.

“Okay, there was an east wind that day. So what?”

I picked up the empty pill bottle.

“What if it happened like this?” I started. “Your father wasn’t feeling well that day. He says so in the logbook entry. He’d already
run out of his heart pills. He loads up the plane and heads out onto the lake. Because of the rare stiff east wind, he has to take off from the other end of the lake back towards the cabin.”

Landon suddenly stood up, looking past me out the window to the lake, but I continued, just to get my theory out in the open.

“What if, just as he was lifting off the surface, he suffered a heart attack and pushed the stick forward? The plane would have nose-dived into this end of the lake, where the water is deeper. So deep that a plane would stay hidden there.”

I paused. Landon was still standing up, her eyes on the lake, but she was very slowly nodding her head.

“Landon, you’ve spent decades scouring the landscape wherever he might have gone down and have found nothing. Not a trace. So the deep end of the lake is not just the only possible crash site you haven’t yet searched, but now that you know there was an east wind that day, and that your father wasn’t feeling great, it actually makes the scenario plausible.”

“I am such an idiot!” Landon snapped and darted out the door.

She grabbed her bathing suit from the railing as she descended the stairs towards the dock. She stopped beneath the veranda and smoothly hoisted the canoe onto her thighs. I offered to help but she waved me off and slid the canoe into the water. She handed me the rope attached to the bow.

“Hold this and look away, young man,” she directed.

I took the rope, turned my back, and looked out on the pristine lake nestled amidst the mountains. I could hear the faint
sounds of her slipping out of her coveralls and into her bathing suit. Then she hustled back up the path to a wooden door beneath the veranda that opened into what seemed to be a storage area. I could hear her rummaging around.

“Eureka!” she shouted.

When she emerged, she had an ancient brown diving mask perched on her forehead. It was clear where this was going.

“Landon, it’s October, the water is freezing. I know, I was soaked in it and thought I felt the first signs of hypothermia,” I said.

“David, I swim every day until early November. It’s why I look so young and have such beautiful skin,” she quipped.

Ten minutes later, I was paddle-less and seated in the stern facing Landon, who paddled from the bow seat. Landon explained that when there’s only one paddler in a canoe, you’re supposed to sit in the bow seat facing the stern. It makes it easier to control the canoe against the wind. With only a few powerful strokes, she had us a couple of hundred feet off the dock. She coasted for a time and looked first out towards the western end of the lake, and then back towards the cabin. This routine continued for a few minutes, before she paddled the canoe a little closer to the southern shore of the lake.

“Um, what exactly are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m trying to determine the takeoff path my father would have adopted in the event of an east wind. I figure it would be tight to the shoreline so he wouldn’t have to fly directly over his cabin. That would mean right about here.”

“But I can still see the bottom here,” I said as I looked down over the canoe’s gunwale into the water.

“You have to be systematic about it. I’m just setting our eastern boundary. The drop-off starts right here, so that’s where we’ll start.”

It’s hard for one person to leave a canoe without dumping the other. But somehow Landon managed it. When she’d spat into her mask and cleaned it to keep it from fogging up, she pulled it down onto her face. It was all I could do to keep from laughing when she looked my way. It wasn’t a modern and sleek black scuba-diving mask. Rather, it was quite a large brown rubber concoction from the forties with what looked like a big pane of glass on the front. And it looked ridiculous on her. I returned her thumbs-up as she put one leg on each gunwale, then inched her way backwards towards the bow. I could feel the canoe vibrating with her effort as she tried to keep her weight centred. Finally, with her hands gripping the gunwales, she lifted herself up and pushed back, clearing the canoe and landing in the lake. It was quite impressive. I rocked a bit but took on no water. I grabbed the paddle and tried to stay close to Landon as she began a series of exploratory dives in search of a lost plane and a lost father.

There was quite a bit of ground, er, water, to cover. Landon kept lining herself up with a landmark of some kind on shore. Sometimes it was a tree, other times a rock. She obviously meant it when she’d talked about searching systematically. I found that she could hold her breath for quite a long time. She would dive about eight or ten feet beneath the surface so I could still see her
hazy form. Then she would seem to hover there scanning as much of the bottom as she could, before surfacing. And she did it over and over again.

I looked at my watch. It was nearly 3:30. Landon had been diving for almost an hour.

“You must be frozen. Why don’t we take a break, warm up, and try again later?”

She bobbed next to the canoe with her mask pushed back on her head, revealing a red ring it had left encircling her eyes and nose.

“It’s getting deeper now, but I thought I saw something down there that didn’t quite match its surroundings. So sit tight for one more look,” she said before hauling the mask back down over her face.

She took a few deep breaths before holding the last one and heading back down. She seemed to go deeper this time and stay longer, hanging weightless in the water. Finally, she rose.

“Mark this spot well. Triangulate with something on the shore. We’re coming back.”

I did what I was told, lining up our position with a tall dead tree and a large outcropping of rock.

“Okay, I need you to lean over the far side of the canoe while I pull myself in over this side.”

“You sound like Lucy inviting Charlie Brown to kick the football before she yanks it away and he breaks his back in the ensuing acrobatic fall,” I replied.

“Trust me and let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”

I actually did it, and stayed dry. It was close, but she managed to flop back into the canoe while I leaned precariously over the gunwale to maintain our equilibrium. There was lots of rocking, but no tipping, and no water on board. I was quite proud of us.

Landon huddled in the bottom of the canoe wrapped in a towel while I attempted to paddle us back to the dock. While the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the canoe had a different theory.

“I could see something down there. It was too deep to make it out, but there was a kind of shimmering shape below that didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the scene. It’s probably a different shade of rock but the edges of the shape were quite straight. It’s just too deep to see it clearly.”

I nodded, concentrating on keeping the canoe pointed towards the cabin. We made it back, following a somewhat meandering route. As soon as we touched the dock, Landon was up and out of the canoe before I’d even laid my paddle across the gunwales.

“Stay put. I’ll be right back,” Landon instructed.

I held on to the dock as she disappeared back into the storage room beneath the veranda. There were more sounds of debris being overturned as she searched. Then she was back out the door, labouring under the weight of what looked like a deflated inner-tube with a lawnmower engine in the middle. She made it down to the canoe and, with care, laid down her load.

“What is that?” I asked, getting a closer look at it.

“I gather it’s called a Scubuoy. A neighbour gave it to my father I think in the late sixties. We’ve never used it. It’s supposed to be a floating air pump but the inner-tube is shot.”

“I don’t quite get it,” I said, puzzled.

“You will,” she said before disappearing up the path and back under the veranda.

Five minutes later she returned with a small gas can, a roll of duct tape, some tools, and a long hose.

She shoved one end of the hose onto a spigot of sorts protruding from the Scubuoy unit and tightened a hose clamp to secure it. Even to me, it was starting to become clear. I noticed that attached to the other end of the hose was a mouthpiece.

“Jacques Cousteau would be proud,” I said.

“Well, we got to get it working first,” she replied.

“The hose has split down near the motor,” I said, pointing to it.

“That’s the very reason duct tape was invented.”

She carefully wrapped the hose in the sturdy grey tape, starting before the split and ending well beyond it. By this time, I’d managed to get out of the canoe and tie the rope to the dock ring. While Landon smoothed out her tape job, I grabbed the red gas can and filled the small tank on the Scubuoy.

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You don’t need to wear a big scuba tank on your back, you can just rev up the old Scubuoy and it’ll push air down the hose directly into your mouth?”

“That’s it. But you’re limited to the thirty feet or so of hose.”

“Right.”

Landon pointed to the engine.

“Shall we?” she asked

“By all means,” I replied, stepping over and grabbing the pull cord.

I pulled and pulled and pulled, generating nothing more than buckets of sweat, an aggravated rotator cuff, and a series of anemic gurgles from the engine.

“Hold your fire!” Landon said before reaching down and connecting the spark plug lead to the spark plug. “Sorry, try it now.”

The next pull produced a major backfire, a large puff of very black smoke, and the fleeting but very encouraging sound of the garden variety internal combustion engine. I pulled once more, and it not only started up, it kept running. It sounded a bit rough, but it was working. Landon set the throttle to what we both thought sounded reasonable, then she inserted the mouthpiece where one usually inserts mouthpieces. She pinched her nose and was definitely still breathing. About thirty seconds later she pulled it out.

“Well, it sure doesn’t taste great, but I’m pretty sure it’s air.”

Good enough for me. Landon made one more dash to the storage room and returned with a big flashlight and a tired and faded wetsuit with Scubuoy emblazoned across the back. She pulled it on over her bathing suit, though it was a little big on her. I used duct tape again to seal a tear in the rubber on her
left elbow. She had me tape the suit up at her ankles and wrists to prevent water from flowing in. The neck seemed tight enough with the zipper pulled up. Then she held the canoe tight against the dock as I lowered the Scubuoy onto the cedar ribbing on the bottom. She grabbed the hose and mask and settled into the bow seat again. We were both pumped up now. I navigated as Landon paddled us back out to the spot.

“I think you’ll have to equalize for the pressure as you go down,” I said. “But I’m not certain how you do that. I think you have to pinch your nose and blow, or something like that.”

“Yep. I think you’re right. Well, start her up.”

So I did. Two pulls on the cord and we were in business. Landon used the same technique as before to get back in the water and once again, the canoe stayed upright. She treaded water beside the canoe and pulled her mask into position. I handed her the mouthpiece, which she promptly put in her mouth. Then I loaded the big flashlight into the large Ziploc freezer bag and sealed it. She floated there for a moment, then put her hand out. I passed her the improvised underwater flashlight. She couldn’t speak with the mouthpiece in, but she nodded to me before starting down.

I watched her descend slowly, pinching her nose periodically as part of equalizing the water pressure in her ears. I could barely see her at twenty feet, but there was a glow when she fired up the flashlight. As she faded from view into the dim glow, I realized I should have tied a line to her so I could pull her back up
if something went wrong. I held the last coil of hose in my hands so she couldn’t pull it off the motor trying to get a little deeper. She was down as far as she could go without dragging the canoe under. It was unnerving to have her down so deep, beyond my view. She’d agreed to tug once on the hose every few minutes or so to confirm she was okay and she was pretty good at sticking to the schedule.