sure as hell they trade any of their duds, those bozos’ll win the Cy Young award for their new team. Maybe it’s the coaches’ fault, who knows?”
Nearing eighty, the small and wiry Paolo was developing a bow to his back, and he moved with slow deliberation. Derek had come along when he had been well into his fifties. Last time he and Belle had met, he had wiped tears from his eyes as he thanked her for helping his son get the Snopac job. “I want to die the day before I go into a nursing home, and the day before Derek ever gets in trouble again,” he had confessed privately as his wife Gerda boiled up some potatoes. Yet tonight Paolo seemed full of fire. “Jays got power to spare. Let ’em get five runs in the opposition, these boys’ll bring ’em up. You ain’t got no trust at all. Don’t you know baseball’s a game of faith?” Belle moved forward to catch Tom’s eye.
“Belle? I haven’t seen you in months. Too busy grubbin’ real estate to talk with old pals?” With a friendly wink, he nabbed an extra chair from the next table and patted it. “Now how’s my Freya?” He and his short-haired pointer Duke loved to go birding. Three fat partridges that he had dropped off last fall, ivory breasts more succulent than chicken, had made a memorable stew.
Paolo took her hand and squeezed it wordlessly as he met her eyes. She signalled the waitress for a beer by hoisting Tom’s bottle. “Good, for all of her ten years, but getting on like her mom.” She nibbled at a wing he offered. “Yow, hot stuff. Listen, I need some information from you, some mining expertise.”
He roared into high gear, flexing his masculinity and nudging his friend. “The Midnight Prospector strikes again. And you said I was over the hill.”
“Stop showing off, you old coot. I need to know about gold north of Wapiti, the Bonanza area maybe. Is anything still there?”
“Up where the new park’s goin’ in? Nah, she’s all played out. Bonanza. Some joke, that name. Never did find nothing much, though they thought at first they had another boom like Cobalt. ’Course, that was long before my time. Closed up about a hunnert years ago. Nothing left now but a couple of filled-in shafts and rubble.”
“That’s it? You mean the quartzite piles at the top of the hill? I’ve taken some pieces for my rock garden. White and brown.”
“It’s pretty stuff. The brown’s siderite, a crystalline carbonate. That one heap’s all most people ever see. Couple other shafts a few hundred feet farther into the bush. Pretty dense and overgrown. Could be flooded, too. Dad said they were almost ninety feet down. Tanned me once as a kid when he thought I’d been fooling around there. Say, listen to me rattling on. What do you want to know about that played-out claim for? You don’t want to poke around those rotting timbers. The gasses are toxic. Methane, for one.” He gave her a serious look which spelled worry.
“Could there be any gold left?”
“Well, the companies gave up and never went back. That tells you something. Odds are against it. They mined out any veins as far as they could.”
Belle narrowed her eyes and tapped his wrist gently. “But if someone found a streak, even a smallish one. Don’t ask me how; I never took geology. Why would they keep it quiet? Why not cash in?”
“Are you kidding? Someone still owns rights to that land. And it would be ‘thank you very much, buddy. Now get lost.’ Except it probably wouldn’t be worth the company’s money to pursue a peanut find even with high tech. Cost them five million to get in, they’d need to make fifteen. This isn’t the Klondike of 1898, girl.”
“So how could anything be retrieved profitably?”
“Well, hell, you could blowtorch it out,” he boomed and gulped his beer with an approving belch. “A rich little vein, pocket gold mine. Drip her into what we call ‘buttons’. Ounce or two. Easy to carry. ’Course, you’d have to sell on the black market at less than half the price. Be worth it, though, damn government taxes. Lots of fun, too.”
Paolo had been listening with interest, nodding at the excitement as he tried to get their attention. “You know, that could be. A chum of mine, after he retired, used to spend weekends loading tailings from an old site in Kirkland Lake into his pickup, take it back to his garage to crush. Called it the Lost Deutchman Mine. And you know, he made hisself enough to live on a good ten year. And good for him, I say. Pensions weren’t worth nothing back then.”
Belle placed Jim’s drop in front of Tom’s bottle. His eyes widened, reflecting the yellow flame of the table’s light as he touched it lovingly, rubbed at the sheen. “That’s the ticket. The real thing, as they used to say before that there cola.”
“Could this come from that method you describe? Dripped off? It sounds so primitive.”
“Nothin’ more simple and more valuable than gold. Whoever made this has a pretty little girl for sure. Lucky devil.”
Belle pocketed the drop as a baby Jay belted a lead-off double to galvanize the crowd. What had Omer said about the drop having blood on it?
NINETEEN
The sunrise had a definite MGM lock on the pastel lavender of Liz Taylor’s eyes as Belle refilled her bird feeder on the frosty deck. She was getting jumpy and frustrated at the confusing trails surrounding Jim’s death, the widening circle of ripples. Someone waited at the centre, sure of safety or anxious of discovery, deadly in any case if the smokeout were an indication. The sudden ring of the phone made her spill her self-righteous decaf all over the table. “It’s Geoff Garson. Pardon the violation of netiquette. I had to hear your non-electronic voice, Belle. E-mail is so cold and mechanical.”
“And I got your information. The picture came through showing every brick. Top notch sleuthing. But don’t tell me that you uncovered more?”
“My housekeeper’s son’s friend, I will spare you the nepotistic connections, is an orderly at Forest Glen. From his report, and I know you will handle these facts with discretion since I wouldn’t want to get the lad in trouble, your Eva came there about a year ago. She had been through some trauma, possibly sexual because her psychiatrist specializes in rape, incest, abortion, sad dysfunctions from A to Z, or your Canadian zed. Rather a Dr. Ruth of the Dark Shadows.”
“That would have been a show to remember. Any visitors?”
“A brother comes every month or so, only recently with the mother. A breakthrough maybe.” He emphasized words with delicious drama, Clifton Webb as Waldo in Laura. Of course, he could be a quarter-ton Marlon Brando, for all Belle knew.
Her notepad filled as Geoff continued. “My source is only an orderly, but those seen-and-not-heard types know the inside gossip. Like the servants in a Victorian household.”
“Right, Upstairs, Downstairs. A fortunate choice.”
Geoff pressed forward, not at all shy at inventing a scenario. “Playing amateur psychiatrist, Belle, is this a case of molestation or an unreported rape? What do you know of her family?”
Belle doodled idly as she recounted the visit to the island, the curious saint in her shrine. “Hard to figure, Geoff. The father’s dead years ago. The girl was a lonely figure. No friends, no interests outside her studies. Her brother is beyond reproach, in my opinion. The mother seems loving and warm. It doesn’t make sense.”
“What was that saint you mentioned? Dymphna, was it? Never heard of that exotic lady; so many have been
