“There’s no connection.” If he tries to work some angle that Nina might have been involved with Hess and I was jealous, they might as well arrest me because Rachet is going to eat the tape deck. “I came here to help with the evidence search,” I say carefully. “I was told that you were looking for help.”
There’s a pause. The magnifying glass is pulled back, put away. Rachet punches a button on the tape deck, extracts the tape. “Your assistance with the search is appreciated and I understand you want closure, but you have to understand that this is police business. You cannot involve yourself further.” He pauses, his brow furrowed, gives me time to appreciate his sincerity. “You’ll have to be patient.”
I nod — not in agreement but because I knew he would eventually tell me this.
“Good.” Both Mounties stand. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
I nod again to keep from saying anything more and we leave the tiny room. At the front counter, sheathed to the roof with bullet-proof glass, Rachet offers me a ride.
“No thanks,” I tell him through the glass. “I’ll be fine.”
All hospital emergency wards are pretty much the same. They all have curtained cubicles filled with moaning victims. It’s only a matter of scale. Some have huge waiting rooms where you could die before they get to you. Others have small waiting rooms where you could die before they get to you. The Curtain River Hospital has a row of six chairs just inside the doors. I’m fairly safe because I doubt anyone has died of a sprained ankle. The guy next to me is in a bit more danger though. He’s lost several fingers and his hand is wrapped in a bloody towel. He sees me staring.
“Planer mill,” he grunts through his pain. Wood shavings cling to his shirt. A name tag above his chest pocket says LEONARD. His hardhat, which he’s still wearing and seems not to have contributed to his safety, says Curtain River Forest Products. A nurse appears from the direction of the admitting desk, followed by another mill worker, also still wearing his hardhat.
“And this happened when?” asks the nurse.
“About 20 minutes ago,” says Leonard’s buddy.
The nurse leans over the injured man, carefully unwraps the bloody towel. He looks away, tries to smile without much success. His face is pale, the skin contrasting with his dark stubble. “Gonna lose our safety bonus this week,” he mumbles.
The nurse scowls. “What a terrible place. Third one this month.”
“I didn’t notice at first,” he says. “It didn’t hurt until I looked at it.”
“Did you save the fingers?”
“I was just going along,” Leonard says faintly. “Doing my thing. There was a loose board, come off the infeed. I must have reached too far. Next thing I know, someone is yelling, bringing me my fingers —”
“They’re in the truck,” says Leonard’s buddy. “In my lunch bucket. I’ll get them.”
“Nine thousand feet per minute,” says Leonard. “It makes you dizzy —”
The nurse leads Leonard into a room and the hallway is mine. There’s a small table piled with a scatter of magazines — Vanity Fair, Good Housekeeping — all obviously selected by the nurses. I’m too distracted to read though, thinking about the lone gunman. I try to remember his face, recall features seen beneath the splotches of black and green grease paint. He turned too fast, was too far away. There was a hat: a baseball cap, the visor crimped in the middle like the gable end of a roof. It could have been a hunter. It could have been anyone. I should have stopped him.
Another nurse, red-haired and younger than the nurse who attended the injured worker, helps me hobble into an examination room, has me take a seat on the bed. She peels off my sock and looks at my ankle, cradles it in her hand and bends it carefully from side to side, asking if it hurts. It does, but there’s something reassuring about having a woman tend to your wounds in a room filled with stainless steel. She takes my temperature and blood pressure — a bit elevated for some reason — asks a few generic questions and tells me the doctor will be by in a few minutes. But the medical profession has a different concept of time, because the few minutes stretch into two and a half-hours. By the time the doctor arrives, a pale man in his forties, I’m in danger of having healed. “Stay off it for a few days,” he says. “Elevate and ice for the first 72 hours. Take painkillers if necessary.”
He offers me crutches — the real reason I’m here — which I accept. I need mobility.
He doesn’t ask if I need a ride. If you can make it to Emergency, the assumption is you’ll have a ride home after. I do not. An adolescent stubbornness prevented me from accepting Rachet’s offer, but a lady in a minivan saw me hobbling along the road. Now I’m on foot, so to speak. Fortunately, nothing is very far apart in Curtain River.
It’s been a few years since I’ve operated a pair of crutches. It takes a block or two to get into the swing of it and when I do, a motorist pulls over and interrupts my cadence. It’s a Volkswagen Beetle, a real one, not the newer, yuppy version. The window squeaks down and a familiar face appears, causing me to stumble and nearly fall.
“Well, if it isn’t the twig pig,” she says. “On sticks.”
“Christina Telson,” I say, dredging her name out of a mosaic of jumbled images, hoping I have it right. “How are you?”
A wide, lovely smile.“Better than you. Did that guy finally catch up with you?”
“No, an unrelated incident. Do you know him?”
She looks amused. “Need a ride?”
I hesitate, remembering my guilt from this morning. Her hair is loose, falling over her shoulders, and she’s wearing a bulky canvas jacket, which makes her look smaller, waifish. I’ve always been a sucker for a woman in bush gear. “Okay,” I say. “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
It’s a bit complicated, fitting a pair of crutches into a tin can that size, but we manage to cram them between the seats. She has a dreamcatcher hanging from her rearview mirror. The seat backs are covered with bead mats, and strings of beads dangle from the top edge of the windshield. The dash is plastered with faded hippie slogans. Blackened bits of incense have collected in the ashtray.
“Where to?”
I think of Carl’s place and the long rest that awaits me, then remember my Land Rover. It gets lonely if neglected. With my bum ankle, it would be nice to have wheels handy. “The Corral, if you don’t mind.” Telson gives me strange look. “To get my truck,” I add quickly.
I notice for the first time that her nose is pierced; a tiny silver tear; funny I didn’t notice that before. It makes her seem forbidden somehow. Maybe I’m just not hip anymore. “What?” she says as we rattle over the bridge.
“Nothing.”
“You had this funny look on your face.”
There must be another admirer of vintage Land Rovers in Curtain River because when I turn the key, Old Faithful doesn’t stir. It takes a few minutes to track the problem to it’s source — the starter is gone; there’s a gaping hole in the bell housing through which I can see the ring gear. Overkill if someone doesn’t want me driving, or maybe they’re just collecting. I swear — it’s going to be a bitch trying to find a starter for an old British import out here in the Land of Chevy. Telson watches from her Bug, her expression polite as I fiddle under the hood, crawl beneath the chassis and cover myself with dust, catch crumbling bits of rust with my eyes.
“Sabotaged,” I tell her, blinking as I use a side mirror to clean my optics.
“Bummer.” She looks appropriately serious, rummages under her seat and offers me what looks like a fluorescent purple banana. “You want to use my cell phone, call the cops?”
“No thanks.” The thought of talking to Rachet again so soon doesn’t appeal to me.
“Can I give you a ride home?”
I start to nod but my stomach gives a turn, obviously a step ahead. I haven’t eaten today and the exhibits in Carl’s fridge are for display purposes only. “How about an exchange?”
She raises an eyebrow, looks intrigued.
“A ride for a bite to eat.”
She considers. “I can do that.”
I use Telson’s trendy purple banana to call a tow truck, ask the garage to pull the Land Rover to the Forestry compound. Then we look for a place to eat. There are a surprising number of restaurants in Curtain River, no doubt to service the tourists headed through to the mountains. We wait five minutes for our turn at the only four-way stop on mainstreet, trapped in a long line of motorhomes headed west. In the other lane is an equally long line of loaded log trucks, headed east. It seems a recipe for trouble. We choose the restaurant in the Curtain River Hotel, knowing the menu there will be predictable. We pause at the threshold, look for a seat among the tiny tables. Like a Western movie, the bearded patrons all stop eating, turn to watch us. Forks dangling bacon are suspended in hazy mid-air and there are ten seconds of silence. The only thing missing is the piano player, frozen in mid-tune. The clatter of dishes and hum of conversation resumes and the patrons ignore us. We take a seat by the window, where the smoke is slightly less dense and there’s a splendid view of the intersection.
“Did you catch that?” asks Telson.
“What? That doesn’t always happen to you?”
She gives me a sarcastic smile. “Maybe they were looking at you.”
A sobering thought. Telson hums a few bars from Deliverance. She dumps her big coat over the back of a chair. I move my crutches out of the aisle, lean them against the window. Settled in, Telson brushes back hair from her face, gives me a confident and relaxed look.
“So what happened to your leg?”
“Mountain bike accident. Nothing much. Just a flesh wound.”
“Where were you biking?”
“Out west.” I’m purposefully vague, too tired and hung over to have much to offer in the way of conversation. But I make an effort — it’s been a while since I’ve had this kind of company at dinner. “There’s a forestry lookout tower about 20 miles from town. I biked up to that.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Ooh, a machocist.”
“Only the day after. Had to purge the poisons.”
“Did you stay much longer — after I left?”
“A little, but my heart wasn’t in it.”
Telson looks down, traces a pattern on the placemat. Bold green letters proclaim it’s Mental Health Awareness Week and there’s a list of the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia. Be on the lookout for social withdrawal, flat emotions, abandonment of personal hygiene. Sounds like a typical redneck. Or a forest ranger. I stop reading, worried I’ll recognize too many symptoms.
“So, Miss Telson, do you live around here?”
“Oh sure —”
A waitress comes, bringing with her the usual lull in conversation. By the way she waits by our table, pen and pad ready, I suspect there’s not a lot on the menu. She’s tall, thin, middle-aged, with the formaldehyde hair and skin of a well-preserved smoker; a workplace hazard — she’d be perfectly cured if she was a stick of salami. We read our menus — a single typed and photocopied page, cheaply laminated. The quality of the fingerprints would drive a crime scene cop wild with envy. My menu lists bacon and eggs, French fries, Monte Christo, buffalo burger and steak — a real cholesterol smorgasbord. But right now my stomach doesn’t care, and when the waitress impatiently clears her throat I have to restrain myself from ordering everything and getting so bloated I’d arrive back at Emergency. Telson orders French fries and coffee.
The waitress frowns. “You want somethin’ to go with them fries?”
“No thanks, I’m a vegetarian.”
“Not too loud, honey,” whispers the waitress. “You’re in ranching country.”
She continues on her rounds, armed with a pot of very black coffee. I look over at Telson, want to make a comment about her dietary restriction — about needing to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh — but control myself. Sometimes my sense of humour goes unappreciated.
“So, how long have you lived here?” I ask.
She tests her coffee, cringes. “Since Monday.”
“Really. What happened on Monday?”
“I needed gas. What about you?”
“Friday.”
She smiles condescendingly. “Ah, a newcomer.”
“So, other than gas, what brings you to this thriving metropolis?”
I’m suddenly worried she’s just passing through and I won’t get to see her again. Not that I need more to worry about. Telson sips her coffee, looks privately amused. Maybe she can read my mind. “Truth is,” she says, “I’m temporarily unemployed.”
“Maybe you can find work here. What do you do?”
“I’m not really in a rush to work again.”
“Must be nice. You win the lottery?”
“No,” she says. “I quit. I had this boring job and I was living with this guy who wouldn’t have noticed if I’d dropped dead. So I figured, screw this, you know. Why wait until the New Year to make a resolution? So I bought this used motorhome and got the hell out of there. Life is too short not to be doing what you want.”
An impressive personal philosophy. “So you’re just passing through?”
“I’m not sure.” She takes a long sip of coffee, looks at me over the rim. Maybe it’s just a burst of oxytocin but the look she gives me seems subtly loaded with promise. “It’s a nice area, so close to the mountains,” she says. “I might stay a while.”
“Good — I mean, it is a nice area.”
She smiles. I feel heat brush my cheeks.
“What about you, Mr. Forest Ranger? Here to count the trees?”
With a twinge of guilt, I remember telling her I’m still a ranger. Was it Mark Twain who said it was always best to tell the truth so you don’t have to keep track of your lies? Good advice but I don’t want to talk about why I’m really here; don’t want to get into the sordid details of the bombing — just doesn’t seem good mealtime conversation. “No tree counting, but I am sort of here on business. I’m visiting another ranger, helping out.”
“Your friend Carl?”
I nod, remembering she wasn’t the only one at the bar last night.
Outside, a white van pulls to the curb, the decal on the side advertising a television channel touting action news, always first on the scene. A guy with a ponytail and a woman with short hair get out of the van and when they step through the door, the Twilight Zone pause is even longer than when Telson and I came in. “The vultures have arrived,” I mumble once the din has resumed.
“Vultures?” Telson gives me a wry smile.
“I’ve had a few unpleasant experiences with representatives of the media.”
“Really?”
I nod, scare off a fly that’s inspecting a blob of something on the corner of my placemat and quell a sudden urge to blubber my life’s story to the first attractive woman I’ve shared a meal with since the bombing up north. “It was a long time ago.”
She looks politely concerned. “What happened?”
“I’d rather not spoil my appetite.”
The food arrives. Telson picks at her French fries, sucking ketchup off the end of a fry in a way I find very distracting. Not that I couldn’t use a bit of distraction right now, but I look away. “They must be here because of that bombing,” she says absently. “What a horrible thing.”
So much for distraction. I attempt to pilot the conversation to calmer waters.
“What made you want to become a vegetarian?”
“Oh, nothing special.” She waves off the omnivorous fly, which has become intensely attracted to her puddle of ketchup. “I just don’t care for the taste of meat.”