is broke. You’ll probably get one later today.” Belle arranged the lunch she had brought and filled his glass of water from the immaculate bathroom. It always seemed as if Joyce had just cleaned. Lysol was redolent and the porcelain sparkling.
As her father enjoyed his shrimp, Belle picked at her roast pork sandwich, hardly tasting it, although the bread was homemade, the mustard piquant and the meat tender and lean. With a sigh, she wrapped it for Freya.
“What’s the matter? Not hungry? That’s not like a Palmer,” her father said, clearly “with it” enough today to notice her lack of appetite while tucking into his favourite meal.
“I’m OK. Just too many things on my mind.” She folded up the soiled napkins and set out more for the gooey pie and ice cream, sighing in resignation. You couldn’t keep things from him. She hadn’t wanted to tell her father about Jim, thinking that the report of a death might upset him. “A friend of mine was killed going through the ice on a snow machine. No witnesses. Out in the middle of nowhere. Everyone says it’s an accident, but it stinks. He was the last person who would make a dangerous mistake in the bush.” She paused to mush up the pie, chopping away the tough crust so that his last few teeth could handle the assignment. “But on the other hand, there’s no motive. He was a serious and private man, a university student and about as nice a guy as you could find. Why would anyone kill him?”
Her father shovelled in some coleslaw with a shaky hand, chewed for a pensive moment with his eyes closed, then beamed as if he had just scratched a lottery winner. “Easy. Greed. Don’t you remember that movie? Longest silent ever made! Got me interested in the fillum business. I was only a kid but knew right away the job was for me.”
“What do you mean? What greed?” She drew her chair closer and turned down the disco trash from the exercise show on television.
“Think, girl! What was the motive? Gold. That big tooth, Zasu Pitts lying on a bed of shiny coins.” His eyes glittered as if the curtain had lifted on a favourite picture long faded to shadows. “Aren’t we in Northern Ontario, where gold sits under every tree? Old Sir Harry Oakes died for it. It’s gold all right, always was, always is. You’ll see. Just keep your peepers peeled.” He munched his last French fry and reached for the container of pie.
When the local news started, Belle cleaned away the lunch debris and unsnapped the prison of his lap table. “How about a walk down the hall?” she asked. It was crucial to get him back on his feet to juice the circulation. The nurses had reported that he was not cooperative during his exercise periods. Perhaps extra motivation would help. “You’ve got to get practising again if you want to go back to the restaurant when the weather gets better.”
A smile broke out on his face as he looked up like a trusting child. “Really? OK, let’s give it a try. Where are my shoes?” He shook one red plush bedroom slipper, all his swollen feet could wear. Belle searched the closet, peered under the bed, even plowed through his underwear drawer. How could a large item vanish from a private room whose sole occupant barely tottered down to meals each day? Yet some of the more mobile female patients roamed the halls “cleaning house” in their cobwebbed minds, collecting loose articles and driving the nurses crazy when they had to sort out the belongings.
“Never mind. We can slog along with one. Come on.” She hoisted him up, gripping his wasted arm. Even five years ago, his biceps and calves had bulged, huge bunches of muscles due to genes more than exercise. They used to strike poses together, their arms and legs and faces identical DNA maps. A purposeful grunt helped him to stand, leaning perilously, then shuffling forward, all 170 stomachy pounds. They inched into the hall, past dim rooms with heads lolled back, toothless mouths agape, or worse, quiet bundles of blanketed shapes forever dreaming of a precious time far and away.
“Take the hand rail,” she told him, as they rocked along. Only thirty feet to the nurses’ station. Suddenly he stopped and looked down. Her gaze followed. His other slipper! “It dropped out of your pant leg?” Their laughter echoed down the silent hall. “A miracle! Didn’t you feel it? What else is up there? No, I don’t want to know!” Belle put the shoe on him, and they rounded back to the room in time for the weather report.
As she left by the front desk, Belle had a word for Cherie, the nurse on call. “He looks good. Thanks for the extra effort in dressing and grooming him.”
“Sorry we didn’t get to his shave. All hell broke loose in the kitchen. Dishwasher overflowed. Oh, by the way,” she coughed delicately, and swivelled her head to see if they were being overheard, “that doctor we were discussing the other day?” Belle nodded. “Rumour says that he was involved in abortions a few years before the hospital started providing them without hassles. No charges were ever laid, though. He’s a slick one.” Her eyebrows arched knowingly. In big cities like Toronto, abortions were available if a woman had the nerve to brave the gauntlet of pro-life pickets. In smaller towns and solidly Catholic areas, the procedure could be difficult to arrange.
Belle left the building, still trying to sort out the tangle of clues, hunches and tips revolving in her brain. Something was trying to take shape, to drop out of a pantleg. Although she had latched onto it as a tempting possibility, less and less did the drug angle look viable. Brooks’ gang was rounded up, squealing like shoats (or was it stoats?) for legal aid, but nothing about Jim had been forthcoming. Steve would have told her. Maybe she should speak to Brooks directly; surely he was out on bail by now. And the gold? Perhaps not the romantic dream of an old man at all. Jim’s drop haunted her, the last tangible reminder of her friend. As Omer had said, the area was full of treasure hunters searching new places yet undreamed and old places long played out. The generous meteorite which had blasted the Sudbury basin had planted many precious metals, gold and palladium among them.
One of Belle’s favourite summer haunts, Bonanza Lake north of Wapiti, had been mined briefly around the turn of the century. Since it was accessible by old logging roads, Belle and Freya beat through undergrowth to climb the steep trail to its hills once or twice each summer. Not only were the blueberries spectacular, but the pellucid green lake attracted wise loons, who knew well ahead of the scientists that the PH of the troubled waters had been slowly improving. True, the only mine shaft she had actually seen had been filled in with rubble and ringed by rusted scraps of a fence, but she had traced along the walls of the water-filled excavations the petering-out of the quartzite. Aside from picking up a few specimens and taking a swim in the lake, Belle never ventured further into the dense bush, rife with bloody-minded flies and festooned with poison ivy.
Tom Beardley would know. A retired chemist, he played prospector on the weekends, ferreting out tiny mining claims more for fun, boasting that he was an explorer, not a gold baron. A lucky find near Timmins had netted him twenty thousand dollars once, which he had blown quickly on a new Bronco, but that had been his only major discovery. Now and then Tom taught a night course in metallurgy at Nickel City College; Belle had met him there in the cafeteria on a break from a real estate seminar.
Tom’s wife Dorothy answered Belle’s call. “Tom? Sure, he’s back from Wawa today. Never misses the Jays on television. No sooner unpacked than he’s rushed down to the Diamond Pipe to meet some of his gangster friends. Tell him for me he’d better not be home later than fifteen minutes after the game. And I’m listening.” The radio warbled in the background. Belle knew that Dorothy’s jocular threats held little sting. Tom had nursed her through several breast cancer operations and made sure that they escaped every February to the Portuguese Algarve, a favourite Canadian destination because of its bargain villas.
The Diamond Pipe on Bathurst Street was jumping as Belle strolled in shortly after seven, so as not to interrupt the game. Her friend sat with Paolo Santanen, demolishing a platter of Buffalo wings. Tom, a huge man with a matching gut but strong as a Terex truck, looked as if he had not only pounded in the last spike of the Trans-Canada
