Day Into Night, page 14
She’s clearly caught between fight or flight. I put on a patient smile.
“Your fiancée,” she says, whispering. “What was her name?”
“Nina — Nina Pirelli.”
I’m not sure what meaning the name has for her but she opens the door and I step inside.
The house is immaculate. I’m standing on a plastic mat overlaying thick, green shag in her living room. Clearly, the front door is cosmetic, to be used only as a fire escape, or by strangers like me. A stone fireplace set into a cedar feature wall dominates the room. There’s a floral print sofa with wooden trim on the arms, matching recliner, magazine rack and coffee table with real fruit.
“Can I get you something to drink?” She’s kneading her hands.
I try another reassuring smile. “Water is fine.”
She goes for the water and I’m alone in the living room. I slip off my boots, walk across cool, deep carpet, examine framed pictures on the mantle; a graphic history of two converging lives. Ronnie and Linda when they were younger with their parents and siblings, then the obligatory wedding pose which I’ve already seen. Linda graduating from nursing school. Ronnie fishing. But no kids. I turn, suddenly aware that I’m being watched. A nurse stands by the entry to the kitchen, a glass of water in her hand, and for a second I have the impression she’s come to give me my medicine.
I take the water, suggest we sit in the kitchen. Clean living rooms make me nervous.
The kitchen table is polished oak, worth more than my truck. Carefully, I take a seat, set the glass of water on the table. The kitchen isn’t quite as clean as the living room; there’s an open Styrofoam package of chicken soup. Linda Hess pulls out a chair across from me, providing a wide safety zone, and for a minute or two, we just sit. I sip the water. Oppressively little happens.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say.
“You too.” Her condoling smile is a grimace. “How old was she?”
“What?” I’ve already forgotten that I told her about Nina. I’m a little nervous.
“Your fiancée?”
“Nineteen,” I say quietly. “She was nineteen.” I pause, hoping I don’t have to talk about Nina’s death, but the silence between sentences is ominous. Maybe sharing what happened to Nina will show Linda that she’s not alone, help her open up. “She was killed at a logging operation north of Fort Termination.”
Linda tucks her legs beneath her. “Yes, I remember that. It was on the news.”
More silence. I plunge on. “It happened near a feller-buncher. She was in my truck.”
I pause after each statement, hoping she’ll say something that I can use to lead into the questions I want to ask. But she’s not very responsive, just sits there, her eyes averted, her slender hand wiping imaginary dust off the edge of the table. Like a newspaper article, I continue to give her slightly more elaborate versions of what happened. When I get to the part about how it was my fault that Nina was there, it’s my turn to fall silent. Linda looks at me and I see profound loss in the emptiness of her eyes. She shouldn’t be alone right now.
“It’s so sad, Mr. Cassel. So sad.”
I nod, try to swallow a knot in my throat.
“Ronny was a good soul. He wanted kids ...”
She trails off, knotting her fingers together and staring at me with faraway eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “Maybe I should come back later.”
“You’re here now. But I’m not sure what you want.”
That makes two of us. The way I see it, there are only a few possibilities, none of which make much sense. It could just be a coincidence that Hess worked in the same area where Nina was killed. Maybe both Hess and Nina somehow came into contact with the Lorax, although how I can’t imagine. Or Hess knew Nina in a way I don’t want to think about — the possibility I find most disturbing, for more than the obvious reason. I’m not sure where it leaves me, except the only person with an identifiable motive. Maybe this is what Rachet was hinting, but since I know I didn’t kill either Nina or Hess, I’m at a loss. As I look across the burnished sheen of Hess’s kitchen table, a final possibility occurs to me, which I like even less. Hess was the Lorax and involved with Nina. After her death, he stopped the bombings, but couldn’t forget what he’d done and took his own life. This might explain the large amount of explosives used. If so, had he told his wife?
“Could you tell me what happened that night?”
The widow sighs, glances out the kitchen window. “I’ve told the police everything.”
“I know Linda, but the police don’t tell me much.”
She looks at me as if I’m crazy, wanting to hear more.
“It’s frustrating,” I say. “Trying to put it together, so it makes sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense Mr. Cassel. It’ll never make sense. Why go over it again?”
“Just briefly. Please.”
She hesitates then takes a deep, steadying breath, tells me what she told the police in a way that makes it clear she’s had to repeat this more than once. “Ronny went to work just after midnight, but I’m not sure of the exact time because I was working at the hospital. Our shifts overlap. He wanted to watch some movie on Fox before he went, so I think he did that. The last time I saw him was five o’clock that evening. I got the call at three minutes to three in the morning,” she says wistfully. “I remember looking at the clock.”
“Was he acting strangely that night? Anything unusual?”
She shakes her head.
“Did he have any enemies? Anyone who might be capable of something like this?”
A deep sigh as she looks at me, insulted that someone would ask that about her husband. But it’s been asked before. Asked and answered. “No, Ronny didn’t have enemies. He got into the occasional fight at the bar, you know, like all men do. Adolescent stuff mostly and it didn’t happen often. He knew I didn’t like him doing that.” She’s on the verge of tears. “He was a gentle soul at heart. He got along with everyone.”
I wait, hope the tears don’t come.
“Linda, when you were living in Fort Termination, was there anyone that you and Ronny knew who struck you as a little strange? Someone with strong environmental beliefs or someone who might have seemed very quiet when the topic came up. Someone Ronny might have run into because of his work?”
For a minute or two, Linda looks thoughtful. A new expression passes across her face, an uncomfortable mixture of hope and suspicion, a desire for revenge I’ve seen in the mirror. Then her features go slack, settle once again into the drained, neutral expression.
“No,” she mutters. “They were all a little strange.”
I take out my wallet, fumble it open, try to extract a photo of Nina but the plastic pouch is taped shut so I slide the wallet over to her, like an open book. She leans forward, looks at Nina’s picture without touching the wallet.
“Do you remember seeing her before?”
Linda frowns slightly. “This is her, isn’t it? Your fiancée?”
“Yes. Have you seen her?”
“She was very pretty,” she says, her eyes still on the tiny picture. “I used to see her on the street and in the stores every once in a while, although I don’t think we talked much. A little, you know, like people do when they see each other in the same places. It was a small town. And she came into the hospital once, with a broken ankle. She was in a lot of pain but she never cried.”
I remember Nina telling me about this. It happened shortly before I knew her. She’d been riding Arthur’s old three-wheel atv and had put her foot down at the wrong time. The back wheel had climbed up her leg. Her ankle broke. Naked, you could see her one leg was a bit thinner, hadn’t quite recovered from the atrophy. It’s my turn to get teary.
“What about Ronny? Did he have any reason to know her?”
“No. Why?” Linda’s expression is intent but confused, as if part of her mind were processing an unreasonably complex program. I slide the wallet home, tuck it into my shirt pocket where it hangs like an anchor. “It’s just that both Ronny and Nina were in Fort Termination and they’ve both —”
I hesitate, find myself using Rachet’s words. “I’m just trying to establish a connection.”
She’s frowning. “You think there’s a connection?”
I massage my forehead. “I don’t know —”
The back door creaks open and from the corner of my eye I catch a flash of someone coming in, carrying white plastic grocery bags. “I’m back Linda,” a woman’s voice calls out. “You okay, honey?”
Linda looks toward the backdoor, then over at me. The look of puzzlement returns and I get the impression I don’t have much time. “Did Ronny ever act strange when you were living in Fort Termination?”
“Strange?” she says distantly. “What do you mean?”
I’m not sure I should press harder, but I need to know. I don’t get the chance.
“Oh — you have company dear.”
Another version of Linda Hess stands at the entrance to the kitchen; 30 years older, more solid, with greying hair and a tired but determined expression. Four bags of groceries hang from each hand; her forearms are as big as my bicep; her calves the size of watermelons. “Hello,” she says. “I’m Linda’s mother. And you are?”
“Porter Cassel.” I stand, unsure of etiquette under the circumstances.
Older Linda looks at her daughter and frowns. “Honey, you really should take that off.”
It dawns on me that Linda isn’t going to work.
“Mother —”Linda speaks mechanically. “This is Porter Cassel.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard.”
“It was his girlfriend that was killed up north.”
For a moment, Mother looks uncertain. Then she sets down her grocery bags and comes across the kitchen, gives me a firm, unexpected hug. “I’m Gertrude,” she says. She’s nearly as tall as me and I get a whiff of shampoo, perfume and cigarettes. “Sad times, Mr. Cassel. Such sad times.” She releases me and steps back, a tear in her eye. “Will you stay for supper?”
“No, I really should be going.” The last thing I want to do is grill Linda Hess in front of her mother about the possibility that her dead husband was having an affair with my dead fiancée. Come to think of it, I can’t believe I’m here. I glance toward the window; it’s dark outside. I’ve been here longer than I realized. “I just stopped by for a minute.”
I retreat to the front door, slip on my boots, nearly have to be rude to get out of there. The screen door slaps shut and I hurry down the dim walkway to my truck, fire up Old Faithful and punch the gas, nearly stalling the old girl. When I turn the first corner, I realize my hands are shaking and pull over, force out a deep breath.
Behind me, a set of headlights swing around the corner. Brake lights flash as the vehicle hesitates, then accelerates furiously past me. I catch a glimpse in the beam of my headlights of a dirty, pale blue, old Plymouth with a mudded-over licence plate. The car rocks as it takes a corner and I see an old sideswipe dent on the driver’s door. Maybe it’s the hesitation when the driver saw I was pulled over, or the way the mud covers only the licence plate and not the bumper, but I get a feeling the car was waiting on the curb, the driver having watched me go into Hess’s house. My tail has turned tail and I punch the accelerator, give chase.
We cat-and-mouse for a few blocks, the old car always a corner ahead of me, until it turns onto the highway and I’m blocked by a big truck with an entourage of impatient cars. I nose in as quickly as I can, eliciting angry honks from the lineup, but by the time I have a clear lane on the highway, my one-time pursuer is gone.
11
THE NEXT DAY, I’m playing teacher. The Forest Service requires all firefighters to receive a basic level of training and Gary Hanlon, the chief ranger at Curtain River, took advantage of my temporarily being in his employ to have me give a little spiel on basic fire investigation. The course is being held at the Christmas Creek staging camp out in the bush and I’m standing in a plywood shack, in front of a group of natives, all wearing orange coveralls. They look a little like a chain gang on lunch break, seated at picnic tables in the cook shack, their demeanour subdued, their faces intent and worried. I try to break the ice with a few jokes but the faces looking at me are impassive. I tell them a story about a forest ranger who accidentally started a fire after a long and arduous tree planting project by ceremoniously burning his map. The map scorched his fingers and he dropped it — into the dry grass. Attempts to stomp out the fire failed — I demonstrate with energetic stomping — and the bombers had to be called. My audience likes the story and the room thunders with raucous laughter.
“Man, that must’ve been embarrassing,” says a stocky fellow in the front row.
“I can’t believe they didn’t fire you after that,” says another.
“Me?” I say. “That wasn’t me.”
More laughter. In truth, it was Carl, sitting at the back of the class. He’d been smiling before, watching me play professor. Now his smile is a bit forced. The fire he’d accidentally started wiped out the cutblock he’d just planted.
I move on to the subject at hand, give the class a Reader’s Digest version of fire investigation. Their role is limited but critical, and I tell them about using burn and scorch patterns to identify the area of origin — stress the importance of marking the origin, cordoning it off with flagging and protecting it. Post a guard if necessary and don’t drag hose through this area or spray it down. If it’s still smouldering, resist the temptation to put it out and instead extinguish the surrounding area. I don’t have a blackboard at my disposal and so scribble diagrams on sheets of paper taped to the plywood walls. As is typical, there aren’t many questions about the lecture.
Most of the questions are about the recent arsons.
“You guys figure out who’s startin’ all them fires?”
“I hear they’re using some sort of bomb —”
Like everyone else, they read the papers and they’re curious, want the inside track. Even a firefighter isn’t impervious to gossip. I decline all questions, except to say the case is ongoing. I’m starting to sound more and more like Rachet.
A question from the back row. “What if we’re on a fire and we see the guy?”
Twenty-five brown faces look at me expectantly. Native firefighters are a tough, capable group and if I was the culprit, I wouldn’t want to face this crew. Not that our Red Flag suspect would be hanging around anywhere near enough for that to happen. “Just give him a little squirt with the hose,” I say. “That’ll knock him over.”
There’s a pause, then more laughter.
Carl’s voice cuts through the tail end of the laughter; he’s annoyed at my light-hearted suggestion. “You think you’ve found the guy, you just leave him alone. First of all, how are you going to know it’s the right guy? And if it is, he could be armed. You just report it to your crew boss. We’ll leave the rest to the cops.”
“Right,” I say. I should have sidestepped the humour.
My lecture is over and Carl takes his turn, then we troop outside and stand on the bank of Christmas Creek while Carl gives a demonstration on setting up and using a fire pump. He expounds on the virtues of fire foam — water efficiency and the smothering effect — and coats a spruce tree so it looks like the middle of winter. Then it’s time for lunch. Carl and I sit on the back steps of the cook shack, in the shade, sandwiches in hand.
“You had to mention the map,” he says, shaking his head.
“Too good a story to resist. Besides, they don’t know it was you.”
“You shouldn’t do that Porter.”
“Do what?”
“Tell them how their supervisors can screw-up.”
Carl sounds unusually serious. I eat my sandwich, don’t say anything.
“You know just as well as anyone,” he says a moment later, “that a fire is like a military campaign. Safety is achieved through organization and obedience. We can’t suggest in any way that the people giving orders don’t know what they’re doing. Lives are at stake.”
I’ve never heard Carl talk like this, so stern. He’s getting a case of green underwear — a sort of overzealousness at being a forest ranger. Or maybe he’s right and I was being too flip.
For a few awkward minutes we eat our sandwiches, pretend nothing was said. Carl eats twice as many as me, then lights a cigarette, speaks out of the corner of his mouth. “Sorry for coming across like such a prick. I guess I’m just a little sensitive about that fire. It’s still sort of embarrassing. Not that I caused irreversible damage or anything. I mean, fire is a natural process. If we didn’t put the fires out, everything would burn eventually anyway. So it wasn’t really a big deal. Except for the trees we just planted, I guess.”
“Sorry for bringing it up.”
“Forget about it,” he says, waving his cigarette.
I watch him smoke. He looks older today, skin beginning to wrinkle around his eyes, long hair becoming coarse, streaked with the odd grey hair and receding slightly at the temples.
“So how’s your investigation going?” he asks.
I assume he means the Lorax investigation. “When the cops questioned me, they asked about a possible connection between Hess and Nina. That got me wondering, so I went to the mill and got a copy of Hess’s resumé. Turns out, he worked for kcl Logging out of Fort Termination, in the south part of the district.”
“So you know who he worked for. So what?”
“I’m not sure. I went to see Hess’s widow yesterday.”
“Really?” He looks surprised. “Why?”
“To see if there was something she could tell me.”
“What could she possibly tell you?”
“I don’t know. Something that might link Hess with Nina.”
