stroking her mother’s bright cheek, which shone with youth. She looked the same age as Holly, but she must have been older, because the hair had grey streaks. When had she posed? Or had the portrait been done from a photo? The glimpse into her mother’s other life frightened her.
“I loved her, you know.”
“You think you did.” She was still smarting about his comments about her dad. To many who didn’t look deeper, Norman was the quintessential professor, no mystique, no romance, just a dusty cypher.
He turned with a vengeance. “You know nothing of this. She and I were to be married.”
Standing abruptly, Holly mouthed the words like a death sentence. “Married. I don’t believe that.”
A desk drawer opened, and Gall lifted a pack of letters tied with a blue ribbon. “Here’s proof. She didn’t want to hurt your father, but by the time you left for university, our relationship had become serious. She was waiting for the right time to tell him. And she would have, except that...” He took a deep breath, then exhaled as if it were too painful to continue. “Anyway, I thought you were studying Botany, becoming a useless collector of information like the Professor.”
“I changed my mind, and you can imagine why and when.” She shot a finger at him. “So just before she disappeared, she was supposed to have told him?”
He cast down his oyster eyes, heavy with pouches, but creased at the corners from staring life in the face. The price of hard work, dissolution or genetics? “Does make you wonder, doesn’t it?” Then he gave a dismissive gesture, and a long ash dropped to the tiled floor. “She and your father had nothing in common. I don’t understand why the marriage lasted so long.”
“I can’t speak for either of them. But he would never have harmed her.”
“And you know that I didn’t. I was cleared from the start...unless you think I had a body double to speak in Calgary that week.”
“Move on with your life. I have.” Or had she? The past was returning to bite her on the neck like a loving vampire.
“Have you? I think about her every day, and if you’re the daughter she deserved, so do you.” He stubbed out the cigarette, punishing it until the paper separated from the tobacco. But though he said nothing, his eyes glistened.
“You said ‘deserved’. Why the past tense?”
He barked out a laugh and coughed a cloud of smoke. “Oh, come on. You’ve been watching too many of those old movies with your father. Don’t start living in other decades like he does. Christ have mercy. What a useless dreamer.”
She ignored the gibe and took out a fresh notebook brought for this purpose. Hers alone, off the clock. “Tell me about that last week. Where did you see her? What did she say?”
He remained silent for nearly a minute. Then he firmed his lips. From under his shirt, he pulled an ornament that glittered as a shard of light punched from behind a cloud. “Recognize this?”
Holly tensed, steeled herself from reaching forward. She didn’t want to appear weak, so she forced her trembling grip to the chair arms. The rawhide cord held a round silver image of a raven with the sun in its beak.
A corner of his mouth rose at her reaction. “I see you remember it. Your mother probably told you the story. It’s one of my favourites, perhaps because of her.”
Raven the Trickster was one of the most popular figures in native mythology across North America. Suddenly Holly was back in her childhood bedroom in that dark East Sooke property. The papery leaves of the eucalyptus whispered prelude to the croaky warble in the night. Her mother was explaining that when the world was in total darkness, Raven was tired of bumping about. He learned that an old man who lived in the woods with his daughter had a secret treasure, all the light in the universe packed into a tiny box. Spying on them as the girl was dipping her basket into the water, Raven turned himself into a hemlock needle. When she swallowed the needle, it grew into a human baby. She gave birth, and crafty Raven set to work coaxing his “grandfather” to let him hold the light. Losing patience, the old man threw the sphere to the child. Retransformed into a bird, Raven caught the light in his beak, flew out of the smokehole and escaped to bring sunshine to the world.
Suddenly she felt a squeezing in her chest. Was he admitting guilt by showing it to her? No one would be that stupid, or was it a clever ruse? “When did she give this to you?” It hadn’t always been in her mother’s life, though often it was unseen, nestled between her breasts to “keep it warm.” Had Holly noticed it first around the time she left for university? A milestone? The end of her dependence on the concept of family? Did that ever end?
“I brought it back from a trip to the Queen Charlottes and gave it to her. It’s Haida, a talisman. Very old. A hundred years, the seller said. It was tarnished when I found it, but I polished it. Cleaned up nicely.” He gave an ironic shrug. “Little good it did her.”
“And she gave it back? Why?” His alibi was solid. What did this mean?
“No. I found it.”
“How do you know it’s the same one?” she asked. He hadn’t answered her question about “when,” but she’d figured it out.
He pointed to a small scratch on the sun. “As I told you, it was an old piece. We thought that the flaw added character, a story within a story.”
He was right. Her mother had postulated that Raven had bumped into an overhanging branch as he left the house. Suddenly her eyes felt wet, betraying her, and she blinked. She leaned forward, and he sat back, splaying his large hands on the desk. Clearly he had no intention of removing it. “Then how did you get...when did—”
One of his stubby fingers waggled at her. “Not so fast. Here’s what happened.” He lit a fresh cigarette and opened the window. “Thank god there are no smoke alarms in here...yet. Damn nicotine Nazis.”
Holly felt pressure build behind her temples. Gall owned some precious part of her mother. She wanted to throttle him, to wrench the necklace from his chest. Bridge the gap to her mother with something intimate and palpable.
“She saw the rawhide getting thin. You can buy replacement strips at craft stores.”
A flame long guttering sprang to life. “So then what?”
He sat back in an odd reflective mood as if puzzling out the situation step by step. “That’s the funny part. I do some family counselling for the CASA in Sooke. They gave me clothes to take to the St. Vincent de Paul depot. That’s when I saw it. Must have been a couple of years after she...left.”
“Someone was wearing it?”
“No. It had been attached to a fresh piece of leather and was in their jewellery display. Costume junk for kids and teenagers.”
It might have been there for a while. She knew the cramped little building that provided cheap clothes, bedding, furniture, the occasional toy or bike for those with meager resources. “Did you ask where it came from?”
“One of the part-time clerks at the depot washes cars at Westcoast Collision. Got sucked up in the vacuum, he said. He heard a funny sound but didn’t think anything of it until days later when he changed the bag. The occasional spare change turns up. There was the amulet. The leather thong
