Apparition Trail, The (14 page)

I picked up the music book and leafed through it, noting the strange squiggles that someone had penciled in under the words to several of the hymns. I couldn’t read the script myself, but knew it was an “alphabet” that served to render the Cree language into written form. Translating the hymns must have been a laborious task; I could see that the McDougalls had put a good deal of work into their efforts to convert the local Indians.

The McDougalls had come to this spot to minister to the Cree in the early 1860s, more than a decade before the riverboats began their service. Back then, they had been the only white people in the area, and the annual trip east to Fort Garry and back for supplies had taken four long months. John McDougall had been just 21 years old then — just a year younger than I had been when I joined the North-West Mounted Police. Like me, he had left Ontario to embark upon a new life in the Territories while still in his early twenties. Unlike me, he had done it in the company of his family, and under his own name.

Although McDougall was said to be popular among the Indians and had helped to convince them to sign Treaties Six and Seven, he had never returned their Manitou Stone. It had sat in the front yard of this church, a constant thorn in the side of the Cree who passed it on their way into the place of worship. Given the attacks on the melodeon and prayer books, I doubted whether the Indians’ embracing of Christianity had been more than superficial. The thought brought a wry smile to my lips; just as I had done as a boy, they had briefly donned religion like a cloak, then cast it off again.

I wondered whether Reverend McDougall was still alive, perhaps held captive in an Indian camp with his wife and six children, and whether he was preaching to the Indians this day, which was a Sunday, but it didn’t seem likely that the McDougalls still lived. Patrols had visited every reserve and Indian camp in the area, but reported no trace of the family.

The dark and silent church had yielded up few clues. I scooped up my haversack and walked back out into the heat and sunshine, and saw that the riverboat men had abandoned Four Finger Pete’s body in the tiny graveyard. I wiped perspiration from my brow; it was already a warm morning and the heat was just going to get worse. I wondered who would be coerced into burying the corpse in this weather. I hoped the chore wouldn’t fall to me; I didn’t relish the thought of being the one to lay to rest a man whose killer I had let go free. If, as Chambers said, our astral bodies really did continue to exist after death in an unseen world that was a shadow of our own, the ghost of Four Finger Pete might be watching me even now.

I heard movement among the trees that bordered the graveyard, and for a moment imagined a vengeful ghost lurking there. Instead, I saw Chambers picking his way carefully through the bushes and grimacing each time one of them brushed against his coat. He flicked away a twig that had caught on his jacket, then looked up and noticed me. Immediately he clasped his hands behind his back and began walking briskly back and forth through the graveyard, studying the markers there. As I approached, he bent down to take a closer look at one of the gravestones. As he stood again, I heard him muttering under his breath: “Just a sister,” and, “No, not close enough.”

“Chambers,” I said as I walked toward him, making a wide circle around Four Finger Pete’s canvas-wrapped corpse. “I have a question for you. Can a ghost have any effect on the physical world?”

Chambers squatted in front of another grave marker and shook his head, not bothering to look up from the white marble tombstone he was reading. “No,” he said. “Ghosts pass through solid objects — even people — as if they were not there.”

That offered me some relief, although I didn’t like the reference to ghosts passing through people. I noticed that Chambers had used the same word I had: ghost — and had not “corrected” it to astral body this time. Nor had he answered in his usual longwinded, lecturing manner. He was obviously very intent upon the grave marker — but not so intent that he knelt directly upon the ground. Instead of dirtying his trouser knees, he squatted in a precarious position, reading the words that had been engraved at the bottom of the slab of white stone.

I stepped around to the front of the tombstone, curious to see what had arrested his attention so. The grave was that of a woman: Abigail McDougall, who had died on April 11, 1871, at the age of 23. Below this information, in flowing script, were the words “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”

Chambers laid his hand on top of the stone and stared off into space at a point somewhere beyond me. I glanced nervously in that direction, wondering if he’d seen Four Finger Pete’s ghost, but saw only the church, sitting in its clearing among the trees. There weren’t any unusual cloud formations overhead; the sky was a clear, solid blue. When I looked back at Chambers, his eyes were closed.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Without realizing I was doing so, I had dropped my voice to a whisper.

Chambers’s eyes opened. “Trying to contact John McDougall’s wife. Please — be silent.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

Chambers looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Of course she is,” he said. He patted the tombstone. “This is her grave.”

He must have noticed my confused look, for he elaborated: “Abigail was John McDougall’s first wife — an Indian woman. Her father was an Ojibway, but also a Methodist minister. Even though McDougall remarried a year after Abigail’s death, there’s a good chance she’s watching over her husband still. She may be able to tell me where he is.”

I was surprised and annoyed that Chambers’s briefing appeared to have been more thorough than my own. I hadn’t known that McDougall had married twice.

“The dead can see the living?” I asked. Again my thoughts were drawn to Four Finger Pete. I wondered, too, if my father were watching over me now, and what he would think of the strange direction my career with the North-West Mounted Police had taken. Here I was, standing with a psychic investigator in a graveyard, watching as he prepared to begin a conversation with a ghost.

“Please do be quiet,” Chambers said. “I need complete silence to concentrate.”

His eyes closed. I couldn’t resist one last remark, if only to take a verbal jab at him. “So you’re a medium, then? Have you spoken with the departed before?”

“I am a student of thought transference,” Chambers hissed back. “And I’m trying to put it to work now, to contact Abigail McDougall on the astral plane. I’d like to establish contact before anyone from the settlement comes to disturb us, so please do go on about your job and let me do mine.”

My eyes narrowed. I was a corporal, and he merely a special constable — a civilian, temporarily contracted by Q Division. I was half of a mind to tell Chambers to go to the devil, but he’d spoken earlier as if Superintendent Steele was a personal friend of his. I didn’t know whether that was true, and I liked to believe that the Superintendent was above taking sides with a man who was in genuine need of being taken down a peg or two, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

I left Chambers to his tombstone and walked down the forested trail that led to the McDougall residence. When I was about half way down the trail, I spotted Four Finger Pete’s wife, Emily, making her way through the woods with her daughter in her arms. She was walking slowly, looking around her as if lost.

In the light of day, I was struck by the colour of the child’s hair — which was almost white — and the pallor of her skin, which was lighter than my own. The blanket in which the girl was wrapped had slipped down, and I saw her face in daylight for the first time. She had Indian features and wore a buckskin dress and beaded moccasins like her mother, but her eyes were a pale pink. That was when I realized that the child was an albino.

I suddenly remembered the briefing Steele had given me, back in Regina. When listing the magical phenomena that had been reported in the North-West Territories, he’d mentioned an Indian woman who gave birth to a blonde-haired child: a stillborn infant who had been raised from the dead. Had that tearful mother been Emily, and was this the resurrected child in her arms? It seemed too much of a coincidence to be true.

I hurried toward the pair. As I approached, Emily wrapped the blanket around her daughter, but not before I had noted the child’s fever-flushed cheeks, sweat-damp hair, and utterly listless appearance. The infant lay limp in her mother’s arms, only occasionally stirring or whimpering in a soft voice. Emily rocked her and said something soothing in Peigan.

I paused, wondering how I could broach the indelicate subject of childbirth with a woman. “Your daughter looks like a fragile child. Has she always been that way — since the day she was born?”

Emily looked up at me with a strange expression on her face. I saw the same combination of fear and determination on her countenance that I had seen the previous evening, after she had shot her husband.

“I hope you were able to purchase some medicine from the traders,” I continued. “A good patent medicine should set your child on the road to recovery — although I expect you’ll also want to combine it with your own remedies. I understand that Indians have many powerful medicines. I’d like to learn more about them, some day.”

Emily’s response was noncommittal. “White man medicine good. Birth hard, but white man medicine save me.” She glanced around the woods with a distant look in her eye, tilting her head as if she was listening for something.

“Yes, but what about Indian medicine? I hear there are Indian women who can effect miraculous cures.”

I watched her keenly for a reaction, but didn’t see one. Either Emily hadn’t understood what I had said or she really wasn’t the woman whose child had been raised from the dead. My hopes of being introduced to an Indian medicine woman faded.

“I couldn’t help but notice the colour of your daughter’s hair and skin,” I added. “Albino children must be quite unusual among your race.”

Emily tucked the blanket more tightly around her child and her face grew guarded. I realized then that she might think that I found her child freakish. Indeed, that was not the case. The girl might be pale as straw, but her features had the same delicate beauty as her mother’s did. I cast about for something else to say.

“Is she feeling any better?”

Emily nodded. “She be well soon. Medicine come soon.”

I assumed that meant she would be purchasing medicine from the traders, after all.

Emily’s daughter whimpered and reached a soft pink hand out of the blanket. Instinctively, I stuck out a forefinger and let her grip it. The child’s palm was hot and moist with sweat.

Emily stared at me, her brown eyes pleading for me to let her be on her way. Her face still bore the marks of the beating Four Finger Pete had inflicted upon her. If she’d been my wife, I’d have given her anything she wanted — not used rude fists to bruise such a lovely face. I suddenly noticed how close Emily was to me, and how warm the day had become.

“Your girl is a dear little child,” I said, withdrawing my finger. “What’s her name?”

“Iniskim.”

It must have been a Peigan word; Emily, it seemed, had given her daughter an Indian name. I noticed that she was trying to keep her daughter’s face covered by the blanket, and that my proximity was disturbing her. I decided to give this beautiful, tragic woman no further discomfort by dwelling on the subject of her daughter. I instead decided to be helpful.

“Are you looking for the graveyard?” I asked. I pointed down the trail. “Your husband’s body is just over there. They should be laying him to rest presently.”

Emily nodded and murmured something in Peigan that might have been a thank you. I watched as she hurried away down the trail toward the graveyard with graceful steps. As she did, she began singing to her child. The song was a simple chant of the kind the Indians favour, and was presumably a comforting lullaby, yet hearing it sent a cold shiver down my spine.

I wondered what would become of the woman and her child. I supposed she would return to her tribe, now that her white husband was dead. I watched her a moment longer, and toyed with the idea of going after her — although to what end I could not say. Reluctantly, I turned away.

I continued along the trail to the McDougall house, which proved to be a simple two-story structure, built of the same squared-off logs as the church, with a stovepipe emerging through the roof. Like the church, it was deserted. As I stepped up onto the porch I heard an unusual chirping sound, and paused to listen to it. The morning was too far advanced for birds to be singing, and evening was too far off for the chirping of crickets. The noise was muffled, as if the creature making it was inside a hollow tree trunk. I listened for a moment, but before I could identify it as belonging to either bird or cricket, the sound stopped.

I pulled my report book and a pencil out of my haversack in order to make notes. Then I pushed open the front door of the house.

I could see immediately why Corporal Cowan had reported signs of a struggle. The kitchen in which I stood looked as if a whirlwind had struck it: tables and chairs were smashed to splinters, broken crockery was strewn across the floor, and one window was broken with its curtains torn. Flies buzzed around mouldy lumps on the stove and floor, and the smell of spoiled food filled the air. Unlike the church, the McDougalls’ home hadn’t been cleaned up.

I took a good look around the kitchen, the back room, and the two upstairs bedrooms. The destruction was concentrated on the main floor; upstairs, everything looked peaceful, as though the family had just gotten out of bed. On one side of a curtain that divided the upper floor into two bedrooms was a double bed with nightclothes neatly folded upon it; on the other were two rumpled double beds that had been pushed together. A child’s rag doll lay on one of the pillows, and a washbasin still held soap and a whitish crust from the evaporated water. A wardrobe on the parents’ side was filled with neatly folded clothes, and none of the children’s possessions had been disturbed.