Hazard of the Hills, page 5
“My sister’s son said that his dad had ‘dangerous sharp things’ on his face,” Margie told Ada. “Does your daddy too?”
“Yes.” Ada gave a definite nod. “Yes, dang’rous sharp tings.”
There was a lump in Margie’s throat. She swallowed and tried to continue as if unaffected. They needed to be professional. Ferret out everything they could in case the significant other had any reason to want the victim dead. Do the official notification. Ask if he needed anyone to stay with him.
“Is there anything we can do for you, Mr. Vance? Is there anyone you would like us to call for you? Maybe someone who can come and sit with you and help with Ada?”
“No. I’m used to looking after my own daughter. Anyone else would just be in the way.”
“You will want your loved ones around you. Are your parents in town? Siblings? Friends?”
“No. Not yet. I don’t want to do this yet.”
By “this,” Margie assumed he meant that he couldn’t accept that Evie really was dead and wasn’t going to do anything that might concede that she was gone. By avoiding the truth, he could keep her with him just that little bit longer.
“I’ll give you my card,” Jones said. She reached into her pocket and thumbed one out. She looked at Margie, who handed her one of hers. Jones nodded and passed both of them to Vance. “There you go. That’s both of us. If you need to talk, please give us a call. And we can refer you to some community resources. Grief counseling. Other supports.”
“Not yet,” Vance murmured. “Not yet.”
At home in the evening Margie was still thinking of Evie and Ada. She played some upbeat music on her iPhone and danced around the kitchen while she searched the fridge for ingredients and prepared her meal, trying to lift her spirits. She talked and sang to Stella, who sat watching her with a doggie grin, happy to have the attention, whatever the reason.
It was important not to bring all those work worries home with her. She could not fix everyone’s lives or protect all the family members from feeling the effects of what had already happened. She could do her best to bring the families answers and closure, and that was all. Worrying about it at home wouldn’t improve her work. The best thing would be for her to go into work the next day rested, refreshed, and ready to tackle the case again, and that meant she needed to let it all go.
She felt very virtuous making herself a vegetable stir-fry. Since Christina wasn’t home, she threw the leftover chicken in as well. She considered leaving out the noodles and rice to keep her calorie intake down, but she really couldn’t have stir fry without rice or noodles, so she went ahead and warmed those up as well. A run in the morning would help combat the extra calories. No reason she couldn’t enjoy a little extra here and there if she were increasing her activity level.
“We’ll go for a walk after supper too,” she told Stella. “I can do a nice long walk today, as long as it isn’t too hot.”
The last couple of days, the weather had moderated a little due to the amount of smoke in the air from the BC forest fires. The temperatures had still been getting up to 29 or 30, but without the direct sun, it was much more tolerable, except for those first couple of minutes in a hot car. She had also figured out the best places to put fans in the house and it really hadn’t been too bad.
But if she took a long walk, her legs might not be ready for a run in the morning. So maybe just a medium walk.
Her music stalled, a call coming through on the phone. Margie clicked her earphones to answer it without checking the caller ID first.
“Detective Patenaude.”
“Your daughter,” Christina snapped back, and laughed.
“Oh, hi sweetie. Sorry, I’m working hands-free and didn’t know it was you. How are you doing?”
“Good. Lots of fun at the Stampede, but I’m exhausted. That’s a lot of walking around. And my feet!”
“I wondered whether sandals were a good idea for all that walking around. If they’re broken in, then they might be okay, but those ones were pretty new.”
“Well, I guess they’re broken in now. Or my feet are broken in. Ouch.”
“Did you get some band-aids on them?”
“Yeah, but the straps keep rubbing against them and pulling the band-aids off. I just went to the first aid place the first time, but now I’ve got a box of band-aids in my backpack and I’m replacing them like every hour.” Christina sighed. “The things we do to look good,” she said dramatically.
Margie laughed. “Glad you’re looking after them. So have you had something to eat yet? I mean other than deep-fried Twinkies and mini donuts.”
“None of us are very hungry right now. Just tired. So we’re going to take a break in the park, just stretch out in the shade. When we’ve finished digesting all of those Twinkies and donuts, we’ll go to Peters’.”
Margie could hardly even think of Peters’ after all the other Stampede junk food without feeling a little queasy. But the teenagers had iron stomachs.
“Then we’ll go find a place to watch the fireworks. I hope we can still see okay with all this smoke.”
“I saw some pictures on Facebook. I think you’ll be able to see just fine. It’s the ‘Fireworks Spectacular’ tonight. Should be the best night to watch them.”
“They’re at eleven.” Christina yawned. “Then I’ll be home after that.”
“Are you sure you don’t need to come home and go to bed right now?” Margie teased.
“Mom! I just need a little nap, then I’ll be just fine.”
“Okay. You guys be careful going to sleep. Make sure your electronics are safe and out of sight and have someone stay awake to keep watch. Don’t make yourselves a target.”
“I promise we’ll be fine,” Christina reassured her.
Which didn’t reassure Margie.
She sighed after the call was disconnected, then grabbed her dinner and sat down at the table to eat alone. But with the TV on and Stella at her side, she didn’t feel quite as lonely.
After dinner, Margie clipped the leash onto Stella’s collar. “How about that walk now? We’ll get some fresh air and exercise, see if there are any squirrels or gophers, and check out all your scent posts. How does that sound?”
Stella’s mouth was wide open as she panted her approval and her tail wagged back and forth so fast they didn’t need a fan.
“Yes? Yes, you’re ready for walkies?”
Stella gave one excited yip, then pointed her nose at the door, waiting for Margie to follow.
“All right. Let’s go.” Margie opened the door for both of them to step out, then locked it behind her. She let Stella pull her to the city sidewalk and start walking toward the multi-use trail along Twenty-Sixth Street.
When they reached Twenty-Sixth Street, Margie’s eyes widened in wonder. She wasn’t sure what to say or think. There was a teddy bear or other stuffed animal fastened to each fence post between the pathway and the road. She knew instantly what it was for. People had been setting out their own memorials of children’s shoes and stuffed toys on their porches to memorialize the children who had died at the residential schools. The toys on the fence posts were clearly a continuation of this idea. They extended down the road as far as Margie could see. There were, she suspected, 215 bears, each symbolizing a grave discovered with ground-penetrating radar at the old residential school site in Kamloops.
Margie pressed her finger to the bottom of her nose for a moment, trying to quell the emotions rising up within her. It had already been an emotional day, discovering that their victim was the mother of a little girl. A sweet little angel who would grow up without her mother, and probably remember nothing about her as an adult.
“Okay. It’s okay,” she prompted herself. Though the raw wound she had felt each time new gravesites were acknowledged had been starting to heal, it was good to stop and acknowledge those children once more. Someone in the neighborhood—more than one someone, considering the number of toys that had been collected for the project—was mourning with Margie. She was not alone.
Despite the deniers and the people who thought that Margie should “be over it already,” since she hadn’t gone to a residential school herself, there were still others out there who were looking for ways to express their grief and to memorialize the deaths of the children far away from their families.
Margie tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She looked down at Stella, who was sitting beside her patiently, staring up at her and wondering what was holding her up.
“Let’s walk,” Margie told her lightly. They crossed the street at the crosswalk, and Margie looked for a sign explaining the memorial and who had placed it there. There was a yellow sign to the right where the line of animals started, so Margie turned right so that she could go read it.
There was no signature. No name of a school or other organization that had arranged the collection and installation of the animals. Just the words
In memory for the children found
CHAPTER EIGHT
Margie stayed up reading until Christina was dropped off by her friends. She entered the house quietly, then raised her brows at her mother sitting up on the couch.
“You didn’t have to stay up for me, Mom,” Christina whispered, as if she might wake someone else in the house up.
“I wanted to make sure that you got home safe. I know you think that I worry too much. But you don’t know how much I’ve really dialed back. If you knew the level of worry that I started at, you would be really impressed.”
Christina laughed. “Well, I’ve seen you worry, so I think I know. But I’m home safe. Nothing happened to any of us. It was a good day.” She yawned widely, not bothering to cover it until she had closed her mouth again, politely patting her lips. “We had a really good time. Just—a long time.”
“You’ll have to tell me everything that happened.”
“I will. Tomorrow. Did you know Marianas Trench was there? They were so good. And…” Christina yawned again. “And there was a bannock booth at the Elbow Park Camp. Mmm.” She patted her stomach. “So good.”
“Did you bring me some?”
“Nope.” Christina’s look was mischievous. “We’ll have to make some.”
“Oh, I see. Well, we will soon. Brush your teeth before bed.”
“Yes, Mom.”
Margie closed her eyes as Christina headed to the bathroom. It felt good to have everybody home.
“We have a surprise,” Jones announced when Margie answered her phone, not even bothering to say hello and exchange social niceties. “So you should come out to Edworthy again today. Is that okay? Are you already on your way in?”
“I was just heading out the door. And I still have it in the GPS from yesterday, so that isn’t a problem. What’s up? I thought we finished with the scene yesterday.”
“Didn’t I just tell you it was a surprise? See you when you get here.” Without waiting for an answer, Jones hung up.
Margie looked at her phone for a moment, then put it down on the counter and poured her coffee into a travel mug. So much for having a leisurely coffee before work. She would drink it on the way instead. At least she had driven the route once before, so she wouldn’t be as worried about not being able to find it.
Half an hour later she was blasting the wrong way down Bow Trail and looking for a way to get turned around. After forty-five minutes, she was finally pulling into the park, sweat dripping down her forehead and back, not from the heat but from the stress and embarrassment of getting lost despite the GPS and the flak she anticipated she would get from the other law enforcement officers for being so late.
There were no barricades this time. Margie got as close as she could to the staging area from the day before, and saw several vehicles pulled up on the grass. She followed their lead and drove her car out of the gravel of the parking lot. She drained the last of her coffee, very cold and bitter, and climbed out of the car.
“Here’s Patenaude,” someone called out.
Margie looked around and saw Cruz, a Filipino native, motioning to her, the others standing around in a loose grouping. She walked toward them.
“Sorry to be so long,” she apologized. “Traffic. So what’s going on? What are we doing back here today?”
“I was talking to Siever last night about the case,” Cruz said, nodding in Detective Siever’s direction. “We were bouncing ideas around. Got to talking about the fact that the victim didn’t have a phone or wallet on her. Or keys. Jones said that you guys talked to the husband yesterday, and same thing, where is her phone? It’s not at home, so where did it go?”
Margie turned and looked at the hill. It was a long way to the top. And she wasn’t climbing it for another search. Not after seeing the vertical rescue team navigate it with safety harnesses the day before. She didn’t need that kind of excitement.
She looked back at Cruz, who was nodding. “None of us are going back up there for a grid search,” he confirmed. “Besides, what if it is somewhere you can’t see or reach from the ground?” He motioned to the trees. “A purse strap could easily get caught in the branches of a tree. She’s not going to hold on to it all the way down. It’s going to get airborne at some point, and then… where? We don’t know.”
“Right. So are you hiring a pack of squirrels to search the trees, or what?”
Cruz raised one eyebrow. “That would be pretty nutty,” he deadpanned.
Margie smiled, glad that she and the others on the team could talk to each other and keep things light without worrying about offending each other. Some teams were so serious that just surviving through the day was like going to battle. At least with her homicide team, she knew she could count on them to try to keep each other from getting dragged down by the gloom that came with working in dark places.
Jones walked up and handed Margie a device with a joystick.
“Are we playing video games today?” Margie asked. “That’s a nice break from the job.”
“This one is yours,” Jones said, pointing to a drone on the ground nearby. “Flip the switch to activate it.”
Margie flipped the on/off switch. The drone buzzed to life, the rotors starting to spin immediately. A screen on the controller lit up so Margie could see that it had a camera installed and ready to go. “Okay. How do I do this?”
“You’ll get the hang of it really quickly. These are the sticks,” Jones pointed to the two joysticks, “and those control your direction and height. You can see your progress on the screen, and an aerial of the ground below.” She pointed to each control and explained what she needed to know. It was all a little overwhelming, but Margie had seen a four-year-old flying his father’s drone at a family picnic back before COVID, and she figured if a four-year-old could figure it out, she could eventually be taught how to operate one too.
In a couple of minutes, Margie had the drone in the air, and Jones ran her through a few exercises to make sure she got the hang out of how to move it around. She pointed to the hill.
“This area is yours. Everything left of that tree. You see the tall one there, with the weird branch to the right?”
“Yeah.”
“So just fly this baby around, over the trees, down close to the ground, behind bushes, everywhere you can think of that the firefighters might not have been able to see when they helped out with the search yesterday. Siever, he’s got one with a grabber, so that we can retrieve whatever evidence we might find, but it needs to be documented first, just like normal. All the footage is being recorded, so just fly around, get as many angles as you can if you find something interesting.”
“And call Siever to pick it up.”
Jones nodded. “Exactly.”
CHAPTER NINE
Margie found that she could only operate the little craft for a certain amount of time before things started to blur and she was no longer seeing what was on the screen clearly, but just going through the motions and not absorbing what she saw.
Everyone had the same problem to one degree or another, so Margie wasn’t the only one taking breaks to put down the controller and walk around looking at the ground and trees from their usual perspective for a while. Other than Siever, who seemed to have become one with his drone controller and was able not only to fly the drone much more skillfully than Margie, but to carry on conversations, walk around, and do other things while he was flying.
Margie called Christina when she was taking a break from flying.
“Hi, Mom.” Christina yawned into the phone. “How’s it going?”
“I hope you’re not still in bed.”
“No. I’ve been up for a long time. I was actually thinking of having a nap soon.”
“I figured with how tired you were yesterday you would be asleep until noon today.”
“No. I was up at eight-thirty. Something like that. I already took Stella out for a walk,” she informed Margie, anticipating what she would say. “Hey, did you see the memorial over on Twenty-Sixth Street?”
“Yes, I just saw it yesterday. I was going to tell you about it, but you were so tired last night.”
“Yeah, I was dead to the world in about thirty seconds. I don’t think I would have remembered anything you said between the door and my bed.”
“Good thing I made you brush your teeth.”
“Did you? See, I don’t even remember that.”
Margie laughed. Christina had had that zombie look when she had walked from the bathroom to her bedroom. Already asleep on her feet. “Guess what I’m doing today?”
“Well, you don’t usually sound that perky, so I’m going to say… running away from home?”
“No. I’m flying a drone.”
“Really? Like Uncle Dave had at that last reunion?”
“Yep. I am now as cool as Uncle Dave.”
“I wouldn’t push it. You don’t actually own a drone. I hope they didn’t give you the kind that drops bombs.”
