going to want to ask you some questions. You too, Eddie. What you told me just doesn’t tally with what we found next door.”
“What do you mean?” Eddie said.
“Broken beer bottles, lots of them. Blood all over the place. You may have conked John over the head with a wrench, but I don’t think that’s what killed him. Someone shot him at point-blank range in the chest and dumped his body at the landfill site. Know anything about that?”
Both Eddie and Francy froze. Francy was definitely coming back to life. Her face wasn’t empty anymore and a bit of colour had worked its way into her cheeks. Beth was quiet, amazingly, considering everything that had gone on in the past few minutes. Francy looked puzzled, and she turned her head to look at Eddie. She still hadn’t spoken.
Eddie had gone very pale and was staring at me, his lower lip trembling.
“I didn’t shoot him, honest. I just hit him on the head because he was hurting Francy. Is he really dead?”
“Very, Eddie.”
“Ma?” He was panicking. “Ma, you said all I had to do was tell the police I hit him on the head. You said it was going to be okay. They’ll think I shot him. They’ll put me in jail.”
Carla moved in and held him, pulling his head into her bosom and stroking his hair.
“They won’t put you in jail, sweetheart. All you have to do is tell what happened, the way you told Pauline. Somebody else killed him. Not you.” She sat him down at the table like a small child, took both his hands in hers and started to pray out loud.
“Dear Jesus, help us through this difficult time, Jesus, help the police to find the truth, Jesus, protect my boy from harm, Jesus…” in a gentle, soothing wave of sound which embarrassed me so much I had to leave the room.
I went to the front door to wait for the police.
As I stared out at the quiet road, I felt a touch on my elbow.
“Polly, get me out of here,” Francy said. “Hide me.”
Seven
Bear with me, he said
as his claws dug into my skin.
—Shepherd’s Pie
It's hard being in Ontario cottage country without wheels. When the corner store is five kilometres away and you need a pack of smokes RIGHT NOW, having a car helps. If you have to go to the post office, its a trip—an outing. The closest beer store to Cedar Falls is all the way over in Laingford, so locals either stock up or make their own.
I was auto-free—not by choice particularly. It was a money thing. So, when Francy tugged on my arm and asked me to rescue her, the first thing I did was curse the fates for not providing me with a getaway car.
If I’d had my bike, an old Raleigh I kept on the porch of the cabin with a seat wide enough for a sumo wrestler and his trainer, I could have taken Francy away by road. But I’d arrived by police cruiser, and that was not, at this point, the transportation of choice for either of us.
“You up for a hike?” I said.
“You don’t have George’s truck?”
“Nope. I came with the cops. They asked me to be there when they told you about John.”
“Oh. They’ll be here soon, I guess.”
“Very soon, Francy. How come you don’t want to talk to them? Is Eddie’s story that much of a lie?”
“Let’s just get out of here,” she said. “I’ll tell you later. Trust me, okay?”
“We’ll have to take the old logging road,” I said. “Are you sure you can make it?”
“I’m tough.”
“Is Beth?”
“Like mother, like daughter,” she said and gave me a pale smile, the first I’d seen. I didn’t argue.
We had discovered the old road by accident, the previous summer. After we had become friends, we discovered a mutual interest in herbal remedies and had spent lots of time hacking through the bush together, stalking the wild asparagus. We nicknamed ourselves the “Falls Witches” and had gained a bit of a reputation in the community for pouncing upon anyone with a runny nose, diagnosing their symptoms and forcing herbal teas down their throats. We were often remarkably successful, which is probably why Carla Schreier, who was the kind of person who went to the hospital emergency room with a hangnail, was so snide about our “herb-gathering” activities. Alternative health practices, to some people, are Devil’s spawn.
The old logging road meandered through the bush between the dump road and the Dunbar sideroad, and Francy and I often used it as a shortcut to each other’s homes. It was a favourite of snowmobilers in the wintertime and was well-marked, though a bit rough in places.
“Let’s go, then,” Francy said. Carla was still praying up a storm in the kitchen, the sibilant hiss of her “Jesuses” seeping down the hallway like holy smoke. “Now, Polly, while she’s on a roll.”
“I’ve spent the whole day sneaking around,” I said, as we slipped out the door, closing it softly behind us. I told her about the cloak-and-daggering with Dweezil, then how I took off on Becker and Morrison. “Now I’m escaping from the holy rollers,” I said. “I should have stayed in bed.”
“I’m glad you didn’t, Polly,” Francy said and squeezed my hand.
We knew the police car would be along at any moment, so we stayed on the woods-side of the ditch, keeping our ears open for the sound of an engine so we could crouch in the bushes if we had to.
“Shit. Car.” Francy said. We dropped instantly, like they do in the movies. It was kind of fun, except that I whacked my knee on a stump going down, which hurt enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I didn’t yell. Brave little me. I imagined John’s fist in Francy’s eye. That’s what shut me up. Everything is relative.
As the car went by, I risked lifting my face to see, and it was the cruiser, all right. I caught a glimpse of Becker in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead and looking like thunder. My fault, I supposed, although he may very well have forgotten all about Ms. Deacon, now that he was hot on the trail of the prime suspect.
“It was them, wasn’t it?” the prime suspect said.
“Yup. Let’s move.”
We found the entrance to the trail in a few minutes and struck right into the bush, relaxing as we got further in. Although the trees were still full of splendid gold and orange leaves, the foliage was thinner than it would have been in summer and I didn’t feel safe until we were over the first rise in the ground. That safe feeling didn’t last long. I’d forgotten. Bears.
“Hey, slow down,” Francy called, and I realized I’d been doing the Polly-trot.
“Sorry,” I said, waiting for her to catch up, “it’s that bear thing.”
“They
