him a quick, powerful hug then ran down the path, the dogs following at his heels.
Bryan and I stared at each other for a moment, biting our lips, suspended in child/adult limbo. What was I supposed to do? Should I take him back to the Jeep? I tried to remember what it was like to be eight, although Bryan was more savvy than I’d been at twelve. He’d had a shock, certainly, but wouldn’t it be worse not knowing the outcome? No way I was doing the nanny thing, I decided. Not my style.
“Let’s go, Bryan,” I said. “Your Dad may need help. Just stay back, okay?” He looked relieved. We ran together in the direction his father had taken. Around a bend in the trail, the shallows of the falls lapped against a rocky shore. Becker was already in the water up to his armpits, hauling a motionless figure to the edge.
“Take care of this,” I said to the boy, handing him the backpack that Becker had dropped before he ran. Bryan took it mutely, his eyes wide. “If it’s too scary, you don’t have to look,” I said, then waded in to help. The guy in the water was very big.
“I don’t think we’ve lost him yet,” Becker said. “You know CPR?” I nodded. We laid him out and began, Becker doing the mouth-to-mouth yucky part and me doing the push-on-the-chest bit. We worked together as if we’d been doing it for years, like the guys on that seventies TV show, Emergency. The expression “Ringer’s Lactate” popped into my head by itself, and I heard a snatch of the theme music. (The guys on the show were always plugging their rescued victims into an I.V. drip of Ringer’s. It was kind of a catch word for those of us who watched it.) Funny where the mind goes when you’re high on adrenaline. It only took a few moments of work before the man twitched, vomited all over Becker and started coughing.
Becker and I looked at each other for a long, joyful and triumphant moment. Since we’d known each other, our eyes had met over several lifeless bodies. Death had engineered the initial introduction and continued to check in on us from time to time to see how we were doing. There’d been my friend Francy, hanged in her kitchen; there’d been Francy’s husband, shot in the chest; there’d been an anonymous drowned snowmobiler, a garotted actor and another I can’t talk about. All very horrible, traumatic and gruesome. The emotional fallout had been brutal, and it wasn’t as if we’d ever really sat down and discussed it. I’d never said “Hey Becker, how do you feel about all the dead bodies between us?” He had never asked me if I was troubled by ghosts. I was. I had nightmares sometimes.
For once, Death left the party early. Becker and I had just spent a few amazing and terrible minutes together in a place where the only thing that mattered was pumping life back into a soggy stranger, and we had done it. We had brought someone back. Oddly, this rescue utterly cancelled the other stuff out. I felt all those wispy, pathetic ghosts depart en masse like puffs of smoke, twisting in the air above us for a moment before being whisked away by the wind. I was soaked, and my heart was thumping so hard my ears were ringing, but I could feel the grin stretching my face muscles.
“Is he dead?” Bryan called timidly from his perch on the rock above us.
“I think he’s going to be all right, son,” Becker called back.
“You saved him?”
“I guess so,” Becker said. The man was struggling to sit up now, still coughing, but obviously out of danger. Bryan cheered, his young voice sounding thin against the roar of the falls.
“Bring me that blanket in the knapsack, will you, Bryan?” Becker said. The boy did so, and Becker wrapped it around the man’s shoulders.
“My camera? Where’s my Leica?” the half-drowned man croaked.
“Take it easy, Vic,” Becker said. “Don’t try to talk for a bit. You had a close call there.” Vic? Becker knew him?
“Where are the others?” the man said.
“The others?” I said, glancing around. There was nobody else to be seen.
“The Camera Club. We were all up there, getting shots of the falls,” the man said, pointing above our heads to where the Oxblood Falls cascaded down a steep incline, thundering over rocks and throwing up spray. How he had survived the descent without being battered beyond recognition, I couldn’t imagine.
“Vic’s a town councillor. Volunteer firefighter too, as well as a pretty good photographer,” Becker said to me. “Vic, this is my friend, Polly Deacon.”
Vic shook my hand. His was cold and wet. “I guess the Leica’s in the drink,” Vic said, grimacing. “Better it than me, I suppose.”
“You remember what happened?” Becker said.
“Not really. One second I’m trying to get a close-up of the spray over one of those rocks, and the next second I’m ass over teakettle in the wash cycle,” Vic said. His throat sounded raw, and he was shivering. “You know what? It’s true what they say. Your life does flash before you.”
“My son saw you fall,” Becker said. Vic turned his head to look at Bryan, who had recovered a bit of his colour and was listening to the conversation with lively interest.
“You did, eh? Lucky for me. You didn’t happen to see if I was pushed, did you?” Bryan blinked, and I felt Becker stiffen beside me.
“Pushed? Someone pushed you?” he said.
“Could be,” Vic said. “It’s kind of fuzzy, but I don’t think I slipped. I’d remember that.”
Becker gazed up at the falls, his expression doing a Polaroid transformation into grim cop-ness. “So how come the rest of your group hasn’t noticed you’re missing?” he said.
“We were fanned out all over the place,” Vic said. “We were supposed to meet down here for lunch, actually. I guess I’m a little early.”
As if on cue, a trio of retirement-age women appeared from behind a clump of bushes near the falls-side of the trail. When they saw us, they exclaimed loudly and hurried over. All three had cameras slung around their necks and camera bags over their shoulders.
“Land sakes, Victor, what happened to you?” the tallest one said. Her iron-grey hair stuck out like thatch from under her Tilley hat, and she had a comfortable, baggy face that spoke of years spent happily in the great outdoors.
“I fell in, Sophie. Detective Becker here and his friend rescued me. The breath of life, eh? Mark, I don’t know how to thank you. Sorry about your shirt.”
“We need to get you to Emerge and have you checked out, Vic,” Becker said.
“No way,” Vic said. “Hate hospitals. I’m fine. Besides, I don’t want to miss the picnic.”
“You almost drowned, buddy. You’re in shock.”
“Not half as shocked as I’ll be if you drag me to Laingford Memorial. All I need is a couple of Sophie’s lemon squares, and I’ll be fighting fit in no time.” The lady in the Tilley hat chortled.
“What makes you think I brought my squares, Victor?” she said.
“Saw them in your camera bag when you gave me that film,” he said, then grimaced. “Lost my camera, though. At the bottom of the Oxblood, I guess.”
“Oh, no, not your Leica?” Sophie
