Beacon Hill Park, managing to squash rare flowers. In a renewed game of push and shove, the city responded by counter-ruling that no fires would be tolerated and that tents had to be taken down by seven each morning. The issue of impromptu bathrooms went unmentioned. In the moral outrage and confusion that followed, suddenly another forty-five shelter beds materialized. Out here, far from civilization and away from most eyes, things were different. As long as they kept relatively out of sight, cleaned up their mess, and remained peaceful, people were left alone. They weren’t displacing lawn bowlers or frightening carriage horses in front of the legislature.
“Thanks...Bill. I appreciate your honesty and sense of responsibility,” she said, shaking his hand. “But there is one final important thing.” Timing was critical in policing, and she had learned this technique from her father’s Columbo tapes.
His light green eyes crinkled in suspicion. “What’s that, officer?”
“The dry season is well underway. You’ve seen those signs prohibiting open burning. Even in provincial parks, fires aren’t allowed. We may be rainforest, but the undergrowth gets like tinder. A cigarette butt tossed out a car window can do it. And with those winds off the strait...” She gestured to a colourful para-sailor skittering down the bay.
He gave a cooperative nod. “I hear you. But we gotta boil our water, like for coffee. We don’t want to get sick. It’s hard to haul plastic gallons around. We don’t exactly get deliveries from Culligan.”
“Understandable. Just keep it under the bridge and very small. Leave plenty of clear space around.” As cars whizzed overhead, she looked up at the noisy belly of the bridge. “Sparks won’t travel far under here. A small propane stove would be easier for cooking, though.” She wondered about the black eye but didn’t want to press her advantage. Men were more likely to let the hormones surge. Women had their ranks among the homeless, but they wouldn’t strand themselves so far from services and safety. Even so, in Vancouver during a savage winter, a woman had burned to death trying to light candles for warmth under her overturned shopping cart.
She left him with a card. “Not that you have a cell phone handy, but any problems or questions, we know each other now.” “Have a good day” wasn’t a phrase she could tolerate. “Glad we could talk” made more sense.
* * *
Her shift over, Holly continued east, passing Gordon’s Beach, a thin strip of land with a dozen tiny properties on limpet lots, from tumbledown shacks to half-million-dollar Hobbit houses with rounded doors, mullioned windows, and driftwood sculptures. The Beach Box. Four hundred thousand dollars worth of cute. She turned up from West Coast Road onto Otter Point Road then turned left again, climbing into the hills. In the nineteenth century, nearly every acre of the island had lain under timber-company rule, one western god of commerce. Then came the settlers with their agriculture. Only twenty years ago, the street had been farmland, parcelled off in lots of a third of an acre. One bonus was that everyone on the dead-end road knew everyone else’s business. When the police blotter in the weekly Sooke News Mirror listed action, Otter Point Place never made the Hall of Shame. She passed a llama farm, a pottery, and several B&Bs before slowing as two horses clopped down the narrow verge, their young riders wearing equestrian helmets. Some kind soul usually arrived with a shovel and biffed the road apples into the berry hedges as fertilizer.
At a time when she had recently tasted independence in her seven years with the force, Holly found herself living at home, a modern reality for which she made no apologies. With housing prices skyrocketing, few rental opportunities, and relocation every three or four years, she had little choice but to move in with her father. Paying him a nominal fee for bed and board eased her conscience. As well, she mowed the lawn and took out the recyclables and garbage. He cooked. She cleaned. Fair trade.
She parked next to his sassy blue Smart Car in the driveway of the white-sided villa. Except for its cedar-shingle roof, it would be more at home in the Aegean than overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The mighty peaks of the Olympics faced her, snowpack still spilling from the uppermost ranges like vanilla ice cream onto the purple peaks below. From eleven to seventeen kilometres wide, the strait was a living creature whose face changed with the prevailing winds. In summer, with the warmer water, fog banks began the morning, first on one side then the other, clearing to blue skies in the afternoon. “It must be June. I can’t see the street,” her father joked.
Floppy-leaved banana plants nearly seven feet high grew by the house. An irrepressible and stinky kiwi climbed its hairy way to the front deck. In the side yard next to a vacant lot overgrown with alders and the occasional bigleaf maple, muscular canes of Himalayan blackberries began to snake over the fence. A hot tub with a gazebo and purple and pink clematis vines completed the spa image, but summer was not its time, rather an icy January when a few snowflakes melted on your head as steam rose around you.
The family hadn’t always lived here. It had been her father’s surprise as she entered high school to move them from dark, secluded East Sooke to this sunny hillside. But it hadn’t helped the rocky marriage. What had brought Bonnie Rice and Norman Martin together in university hadn’t lasted the decades as their personalities diverged with a vengeance. Bonnie had been gone ten long years. The tiny holly bush she had planted for her daughter by the kitchen window now bore eight feet of shiny, prickly leaves, awaiting its star turn before Christmas. Did its growth seem like a reproach to them both?
Holly let herself in and was immediately greeted by a black-and-white forty-pound jumping jack, a streak of “paint” down his face. “Hello, Shogun,” she said to the two-year-old border collie, his gay tail held high and his soft muzzle shovelling her hand. As a rescue, he’d been Hogan then Logan, answering to anything as long as he wasn’t called late for dinner. The dog gave her father a focus other than his consuming research. He had taught Popular Culture at the University of Victoria for the last thirty years and had published countless journal articles as well as a book on Victorian children’s board games.
Shucking off her boots in the foyer, she took the circular oak staircase to the master suite he’d given her, retaining for himself the other two bedrooms and bathroom. Or was it because he didn’t want to remember the king-sized marriage bed and its six-piece matching cherry furniture? At first she felt awkward lying where her parents had once slept like knight and lady on a tomb, but sometimes when Shogun and his jittery feet joined her in the night, she welcomed its space. A small balcony gave the house’s best view, though all of the front rooms, including the kitchen, overlooked the water.
“Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,” drifted from the CD player in the solarium. She searched her memory, the quiz games she’d played with her father. Now he was in the Seventies, one of the best periods for food, television and music. He submerged himself in the decade he was teaching. Last fall it had been the Fifties, too far removed from her mind set. She took off her duty belt, placed the Glock in a drawer and put on shorts and t-shirt. Free from the Kevlar corset, she flexed her shoulders.
In the kitchen, she saw her father gazing out the window across the strait to Washington. Though no individual houses were in sight at such a distance, she felt mirrored by the Americans. The population was smaller, and a great chunk of the land was protected in the Olympic National Park by a country which had greater foresight. Across Puget Sound lay the shopping and airline metropolis of Seattle. Waves were bobbing the fishing boats on this sunny day. Great loads of shrimp, halibut and salmon would fill the nets. Far out, a container ship headed out to sea. She picked up the field glasses and read “Hanjin”.
“What’s up, old pal?” she asked. Norman Martin, never Norm, turned his cool, azure-eyed gaze to her. He topped six feet, and he was slim, his silvery blond hair trim and smooth. Lately she thought she’d imagined a slight stoop, though the adjective courtly fit him well. He scorned bad language and tsked at her occasional “fuck”. Social-services lawyer
