I hesitated. “I didn’t kill her.” He coughed again. I supposed it was the anguished tone of his voice, not the actual words, that made me grasp his hand. I found myself standing up, looking into his tormented face. His usual cocky assurance was gone.
“I don’t know what to do,” he muttered. He touched her long blonde hair and ran his fingers through its looping waves. “So pretty, like a movie star.” His eyes locked on her brutalized sex, while his hands hovered above the open wounds, almost as if he wanted to close them up. “Such anger. Who could do such a thing?”
He knelt by her bedside, his back braced with his despair. He scattered what I recognized to be tobacco around her head. Then he reached under the bed for the ashtray, dumped the contents on the floor and replaced them with more tobacco. He lit it. As the smoke wafted over her lifeless body, he closed his eyes and chanted softly in Algonquin.
Confused by his words, this unexpected ceremony, I watched and debated what to do. I knew I should make my escape while he was distracted. I could head back down the trail in the hope of running into Eric and the police.
But the solemnity of his actions made me hesitate. There was no violence here. No desire to harm me. And his words, voicing my own thoughts, were hardly those of a killer. So I remained standing at his side. I clutched Eric’s healing stone and felt a faint tingling warmth. Finally, he leaned forward, kissed her softly on the marble forehead and bid her goodbye in Algonquin, “Màdjàshin.” He stood up. “The harmony of her spirit has been restored.”
I sat across the table from him. The lamp’s glare etched the torment on his face, deepened the hollowness of his cheeks, a hollowness that spoke of more than despair.
“You’ve been sick, haven’t you?”
Another spasm of coughing was his answer. He shivered. I suspected as much from a fever as from the cold.
I glanced at the blanket lying partially underneath Chantal, but knew I shouldn’t move it. I removed my outer Gore-Tex jacket instead. “Here, take this. My fleece and long johns will keep me warm.”
Not caring whether it would be destroying evidence or not, I lit a fire in the cast iron stove. When finished, I resumed my seat. “Tell me what happened.”
He remained silent, staring at his trembling hands. Then with a deep sigh, he spoke. “She said she loved the bush, the wild animals. She never got to see any in the city. I told her I’d show her the deer that yard in the cedar swamp downstream. So I brought in supplies and waited until our last day on the trails. I figured we’d have a good couple of days to ourselves.” He twisted the beaded choker around his neck. “I was afraid she wouldn’t show. A couple of months we been seeing each other, but I seen that look in her eye like she was ready for a new man.”
I looked at his cleft chin, the high cheekbones and the amberbrown eyes that normally sparked with energy, and wondered how any girl could turn him down. But Chantal would’ve, for the simple reason she’d been the kind of woman who was more interested in the conquest than the relationship itself.
“But sure enough, when I got here, she was waitin’.”
“Are you saying she got here by herself? How could she? She didn’t know the area.”
He shrugged. “Was no big deal. Drew her a map.”
“But why didn’t you come together?”
“She didn’t want to.” He shrugged again. “Said she didn’t want people knowing where she was going.”
“You mentioned something about the last day of trail clearing. Was that the day you came?”
John-Joe nodded yes.
I glanced around the unusually tidy room, trying to imagine two people living here for the last five days. “Are you always this neat?”
For the first time he seemed to notice more than Chantal’s body. As he cast his eyes around the room, his eyebrows arched with surprise.
“What did you do with them?” he asked.
“With what?”
“The glasses, the bottle.”
“Nothing. They weren’t here when I arrived.”
“Then someone’s been here. No…wait a minute, maybe I cleaned up. I forget.”
“When did she die?”
He closed his eyes, swallowed hard and said, “Few hours after we arrived.”
“What? You mean she’s been lying here dead for five days?” He didn’t bother to answer, just turned his head towards the cracked window. Snow from his woollen hat dropped onto his face, but he didn’t notice.
“How did it happen?”
He continued staring out at the whirling white. I waited. The flakes rasping against the window were almost a welcome distraction.
Finally, he turned tortured eyes towards me. “I don’t know. Only remember lying beside her on the bed. I musta fallen asleep. When I woke up she was dead.”
This was worse than I thought. “Are you telling me that you slept through a vicious stabbing taking place right beside you?” He nodded bleakly.
“No one will believe you.” I found I barely could, and I felt I was looking at a young man who’d gone beyond lying.
“I know, that’s why I ran.”
“So why did you come back?’
But his answer was stopped by the roar of skidoos.
eleven
Eric tramped up the stairs, followed by the bulk of Police Chief Decontie, the pencil-stick height of Corporal Whiteduck and another, much younger policeman I knew only by the name of Luke. They were three of the eight member force of the Migiskan First Nation Police Department, or the MPD , as most people called them. The blizzard had dwindled to a few floating flakes.
“John-Joe’s here,” I said from the open door. Eric’s eyes clamped onto mine. “You okay?” Behind him, the three policemen reached for their guns. “You won’t need those,” I said. Then I heard the metallic clink of a rifle behind my back. I turned slowly around. John-Joe stood in front of the bed as if guarding Chantal’s body, his rifle pointed directly at me.
For several agonizing seconds I stood frozen, wanting to believe he wouldn’t shoot, yet not entirely convinced. Then I felt a bolstering tingle from Eric’s rock. “Put it down, John Joe. You’ll only make things worse.”
He stared back at me, his eyes filled with fear. Behind me, boots thudded on the outside stairs. I heard the soft click of a gun being armed.
“Stay back,” I cried out to the men and walked slowly forward. “Please, John-Joe, put the rifle down.”
He backed up closer to the bed. “No choice,” he whispered. “No one is gonna believe me.”
“I
