showing no hard feelings. The lodge owner glared her way, whispered to Nick, and arced his cigarette onto the asphalt as they drove off. Belle braced for an explosion, but it snuffed out in the slush. Nothing like upping the ante. Now Brooks would know that she was pursuing the drug connection. Steve would have her head if anything sabotaged the raid.
After another fill-up at the liquor store, she reached home in time to throw the ball for Freya and use the leftover taco mix for a tomato soup and macaroni casserole. A can of precious hominy bought in Buffalo added a southern touch. To her surprise and delight, Melanie called to report that she was dropping her roommate off at the airport around noon the next day and wondered if she could visit.
“It’d be great to see you. Bring a Toronto Star. We don’t get delivery out here” was Belle’s answer.
What was on the Nostalgia channel, she wondered, spooning into the food? W. C. Fields in The Dentist. A Slim Jim in this early talkie, with his bulbous nose in training, he grabbed the giant block of ice from the delivery boy and set it absentmindedly on . . . the stove! When he returned, it was an ice cube, which he shrugged off as perfectly natural, scissoring it up with the tongs, and depositing the tiny piece back in the ice box. Of course, the film was a minefield of ethical blunders. He treated his daughter like a slave, locked her in her room, threw tantrums on the golf course, thrashed caddies and gyrated ham-handedly over helpless women in his dental chair while he pumped the pedals with abandon.
Still chuckling, Belle cranked open her bedroom window, amused to find another ladybug. Warm weather in September had sent hundreds clustering around her patio doors in an unusual infestation less bothersome than mosquitos or biting flies. She inspected the creature to see whether it had two spots, nine or none, then dropped the bright little memory of summer onto the thick branches of an aloe plant on the sill. “Flying home is out of the question, ladybug. You’ll have to stick it out until spring. Now find an aphid and behave.” The oblique reference to fire led her downstairs to check on the woodstove. It never hurt to be too careful. She assured herself that the damper was up, stood in front of the stove, gripping the wood-tipped handles, and said, “Check, double check, triple check” chanting as far as “octupal” in an effort to make sure that the round spinning “keys” were adjusted properly. Obsessive-compulsive, or just plain cautious? Just the other day a family in Chelmsford had gone to town while the stove roared, worked itself into a chimney fire and turned the house into ashes. She recalled her father balancing back and forth in front of the gas range when she was a child, looking, leaving, looking, leaving, never trusting his eyes. But then again, his aunt had died in a gas leak.
Finally she climbed into bed, prepared for a shudderfest over the latest Cornwell novel. The sleuth was a pathologist whose diehard fans ate gruesome realism by the pailful. A few graphic chapters taught Belle to slice a Y incision, pull out assorted organs, weigh them and set aside the stomach contents for analysis. She began to grow queasy and took a large slug of Scotch to disguise the reek of formaldehyde. No more Cornwell before bed. Something refined, Ngaio Marsh maybe. She rattled through assorted prayers for people she hadn’t seen in forty years, then surrendered to a deep sleep, imagining the faithful loons calling in their mating dance. But they wouldn’t be back yet, skating on the ice. Once she and Jim had seen a nest with a loon’s egg clinging perilously on a tiny atoll hardly bigger than their boat. Perhaps the human proximity, quiet as they had tried to be, had disturbed the parents, because a few hours later, the prize had vanished! To a safer place, or the stomach of an otter?
She woke in shallow awareness as her clock read two a.m., smelling a light, comforting smoke drifting in the window. A few snuffles and snorts sent her back to sleep, only to wake more fitfully with a pounding headache. A change in weather? Sinus problems? In her stupor she debated chugging aspirins, but decided to wait it out.
Such pleasant time passed while she and Jim hunted for the egg, yet what kept dragging her from the dark and quiet river passages which led past the cherished pictographs? Jim was cozying the canoe against the cliffs, bracing with his paddle so that she could take pictures of the red ochre figures which seemed to be distorting despite her efforts to focus the camera. Slowly she became aware that Freya was coughing and whining and licking at her. And the dog had never, ever, asked to go out during the night. Belle rubbed her eyes, burning with something more pungent than sleep, and forced herself up to hit the light switch. The room seemed to be blurry, foggy.
Suddenly all too awake, she felt the marrow freeze in her bones, despite the blood temperature of the water bed. Smoke was seeping through the ventilation panel cut to the living room. A fire, with her trapped on the second floor, the worst nightmare! She clawed free from piles of bedding, dropped to the rug and crawled to the patio door to rip into the plastic sheeting taped inside to conserve heat loss and shove the door open. The frigid air cleared her head momentarily. Fearing that the lights might go out at any moment, she retrieved a flashlight from the dresser. The bedside water glass doused a T-shirt, which she wrapped around her face. Freya stayed behind her, sneezing and hacking.
Yet the door to the downstairs was cool. Fire or no fire? Belle cracked it slowly against the thick smoke which followed the draft, backing down the stairs on her knees, blessing the thick broadloom that had cost her a trip to Curaçao. Why didn’t she have a contingency plan, a rope ladder from her balcony? Ed had always teased her about it. Like a scorched worm, taking a gulp through the soggy shirt, she flashed a teary look at the living room stove. Smoke was billowing out of the keys. Something must have blocked the chimney from above. Holding her breath until her lungs ached, Belle tightened the keys and turned the damper to shut down the blaze.
As her lungs finally rebelled against her brain and opened wide, she pushed outside with a gasp into the softly dropping snow, oblivious for a moment that she stood only in T-shirt and underpants, standard bedtime attire. Spasms of coughing punished her shoulders and back as she braced against the deck post. “Wow!” Belle yelled, lifting her feet one after the other like a phony fakir on burning coals. Holding her breath again, she reached inside to the hall closet to grab her snowmobile suit, boots and mitts. Could a squirrel have fallen down the pipe? There was no protective mesh at the top, couldn’t be because of creosote build-up. But no roast beast smell filled the air. Shivering more from fear than cold, Freya stopped hyperventilating as Belle hugged her and stroked her fur. “Breathe on your own, girl. I just couldn’t do CPR on that hairy mouth.” Safe now, the air clearing inside with the door open, she debated whether to put out the fire with water, or climb to the roof and stuff down the chimney brush. The smoke damage would be horrendous.
Breakfast and some creature-comforting noises in mind, Belle walked down to Ed’s, blowing her lungs clear as the sun’s red eye backlit the trees. Sailor take warning? As she trudged, she missed the amenities of socks and long underwear, but blessed the fleece-lined moosehide mitts that did the job at any temperature. Northerners knew what was important.
She hated to wake her friends, bang into their morning stillness, but what were pals for? “All right, you slackers, everyone out for volleyball,” she called, pummelling loudly at the back door and causing fearful yelps from Rusty, asleep in the mud room.
Thumps and bumps came closer as lights flashed on in sequence through the house. “What the hell?” Ed said. “Are you crazy? Say, what’s all over your face?“ He sniffed at her as he pulled her inside. “Were you smoking in bed again?” He fastened his robe as Hélène shambled in from the bedroom, her eyes puffy with sleep.
“It’s safe enough on a waterbed. I got smoked out. My chimney is plugged at the top. There’s no fire. I shut the stove down, but can’t do much more until daylight. Can I get warm here?”
“Thank God you’re OK, Belle,” said Hélène, giving her a firm hug and passing her a tissue for her face.
“Thank Freya. She warned me, saved my life. I was too groggy to know what was going on,” Belle added. She availed herself of their
