into Eric’s eyes and saw the open honesty I’d come to know was him. And I saw something else.
“Okay, I believe you. But her running away won’t help her cause, will it?” I asked quickly, afraid to trust the hint of affection.
“She’s like a scared rabbit right now,” Eric answered. Then he smiled and patted the back of my hand, “Please, don’t worry, Tommy will bring her back.” The pat merged into a lingering caress.
I jumped up as all thought of Marie fled from my mind. “Time to get back to work,” I said and slipped my work glove over my burning hand.
Eric gave me a searching look, then said, “It’s okay, Meg, I understand, I’ll go slow.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing and walked back to the pile of sawed branches. Maybe Marie wasn’t the only scared rabbit.
I grabbed a branch and dragged it along the well-worn path to the woodshed, while behind me Eric’s chainsaw leapt into life.
TWENTY-FOUR
After removing all the branches from the trunk, Eric and I tackled the broken ones scattered along the fall line of the giant tree. By this time, my back was complaining in earnest over the constant bending and pulling. I decided it was time for lunch, and no sooner did I have the words out than Eric, rubbing his own back, had his saw turned off and was lying on the ground. I wasn’t such a wimp after all.
“Meg, you missed one hell of a day yesterday,” Eric mused a little later as he sipped a steaming hot mug of soup.
We sat with our backs against a sun-warmed timber wall, out of the wind that the storm’s demise had ushered in.
Drawing an obvious conclusion, I asked, “What’s CanacGold up to now?” I cupped my hands around my mug to keep them warm.
“Get a pair of binoculars and have a look at the northern tip of Whispers Island,” Eric replied grimly.
With the naked eye, I could only see a line of dots, but with the aid of the binoculars, a military camp sprang into view. Except in this case it was a mining camp with a large red and gold flag flapping from a pole and a row of neatly staked white tents, which covered a strip of land where yesterday trees had stood.
“How did they get there?” I shot back in dismay. “I thought we’d blocked CanacGold’s access to the island.”
“That’s all they managed to get onto the island,” he replied. “And then we stopped them.” Two dimples erupted as he began telling the story.
“I was checking out one of the fishing sites early yesterday morning, when this plane landed so close to me it almost capsized my boat. Once I saw the name CanacGold, I knew something was up, so I followed it to Whispers Island. While I waited to see what was going on, another one landed and taxied up beside the first.
“Soon they had a couple of Zodiacs running back and forth to the island carrying what looked to be equipment and supplies. By the time I was heading back to the camp to see how I could stop them, another plane landed. Looks like your ex didn’t waste any time in coming up with another solution, eh?”
“Yeah, well . . . what can I say. But since I don’t see any planes today, it looks as if you did succeed in stopping them.”
“That we did, but not the way you think.” Eric chuckled in that deep-throated manner I was beginning to realize was his way of facing life’s challenges. “It was John-Joe’s idea. Keep the buggers from landing. And that’s when the fun began.
“Figuring what did we have to lose, John-Joe and I and several others spread out across the lake to wait for the planes’ return. I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to do it, but when the first plane began its descent, John-Joe put his boat directly in its path. Next, all of us were buzzing over the water in ten different directions in an attempt to scare the pilot from landing. We circled around and around, going back and forth, almost hitting each other.”
Laughing, Eric flung his arms around to show the motion. I laughed with him.
“And we succeeded. The plane didn’t get within a hundred feet of the water before the pilot climbed back into the sky. He tried again, and so did the other plane, but each time they chickened out. It was very exhilarating, especially for an old guy like me. I haven’t had so much fun in years.”
“Nothing like trying to get yourselves killed,” I hazarded, thinking no one could pay me enough to be out there in a tiny boat with several tons of plane zooming towards me.
“John-Joe almost did,” Eric continued. “The pontoons of one of the planes barely missed his head when the pilot changed his mind at the last minute. It was touch and go whether the guy was going to keep the plane in the air, but he succeeded. The CanacGold guys tried to chase us away in their Zodiacs. But they only made it worse. Just added more boats to the fray. After that, the planes gave up and flew away.”
“Terrific! But what about today, and the next, and the next? Gareth won’t give up that easily,” I said.
The sound of a chainsaw drifted on the wind. I looked towards its source and saw a tree tumble close to the tents on Whispers Island. The rape had begun.
Eric turned his gaze in the same direction and nodded grimly. “Yeah, I see it. Hopefully they don’t have enough supplies to keep that up for long. We’re going to live on that damn lake. The moment a plane tries to land, we’ll do what we did yesterday. I’ve got five boats on the lake right now. If I need more, I’ll bring in more. See, there’s one of them now.”
He pointed to a large aluminum outboard emerging from behind the cliffs of Indian Point. I noticed two others in the middle of the lake, one with John-Joe’s bright orange cap. But, thankfully, there was no droning speck on the horizon to gear them into action.
“And where was Charlie Cardinal while all this was happening?” I asked.
Eric shrugged his shoulders. “Haven’t heard a peep from him, but I did get a nasty call from your ex. He threatened to send in the police, if we didn’t let them land their planes.”
“Sounds like his approach, call in heavies to do his dirty work.”
“Up to a little action, Meg? Why not join us tomorrow?”
“You’ve got to be kidding?”
“Why not? As dangerous as it might look, I’m convinced it’s safe. This is like the Oka blockade. If CanacGold injures or even kills one of us, the company would have a bigger problem on its hands than just trying to get supplies in.”
“You don’t know Gareth.”
“Sure I do, he’s like Charlie, a bully. Call his bluff, and he runs. So what do you say?”
“Okay,” I said, thinking I’d even pay to see him run again. “And speaking of Gareth, he’s got something else up his sleeve.” I told Eric about seeing Gareth with Senator Cannelli and the words I’d overheard in the parking lot.
“My instinct tells me these documents he mentioned are the missing registry files. And the fact they want to destroy them says they’re bad news for CanacGold. I see this as further evidence Whispers Island
