The long trek to our stranded vehicles ended up being the slippery challenge the temperature drop had augured. To avoid crashing through the snow’s icy crust, Eric and I kept to our track of the previous night, but it made for a precarious balancing act, especially where the pooled rain had turned to ice. The added veneer of freshly fallen snow raised the level of difficulty several notches. Without Eric’s supporting grip, I would’ve spent more time sliding on my behind than walking upright.
Silently suffering trees lined our way. Some took the heavy snow and ice load in stride, like the spruce, which remained standing tall with its boughs collapsed inward. The white pine, however, were not so well designed. Although still upright, their skyward-reaching branches bent downwards at awkward, painful-looking angles. And the less fortunate, like the birch, succumbed completely to the clinging weight and bent their ice-laden crowns to the ground.
We passed under several of these overarching birches on our way to the road. Halfway there, a snowmobile suddenly burst from under one and stopped a few metres in front of us. The driver sat for a moment looking at us, then pushed the visor of his helmet away from his face. Yves’s expressionless eyes stared back at us.
“Bonjour, Marguerite. I have come to make sure you are okay.”
A huge, pregnant pause followed. Each man eyed the other suspiciously. Both mumbled some sort of hello, then looked back at me as if to say the ball was back in my court.
“Well, as you can see, Yves, I’m okay. Thanks for checking, though.” I hoped he would take it as a dismissal.
He didn’t. Instead he offered me a ride to my truck. With Eric in full agreement, I couldn’t decline. So I hopped onto the back of the long narrow skidoo seat and clung to his slim waist as loosely as I could for fear of giving him the wrong message.
“I am sorry for yesterday,” he said, when we reached the tree blocking my truck. “In such weather, it is necessary that I bring you home. I did not.” Yves’s English had taken on the thick accent of his sisters. Perhaps it reflected his nervousness.
“No need to apologize. Eric looked after me.” Another pregnant pause. I tried to shake off the frozen snow from some of the boughs of the downed tree. With the main trunk buried under a good ten centimetres, its removal was going to take time. Behind me, I heard Eric’s crunching approach.
“This man, this Indian, he is a good friend, non? Perhaps a boyfriend?”
I turned to watch Eric’s burly figure come towards us. “You could say that.”
“I must warn you about him. He is not a good man.”
“I thought you didn’t know him?”
“Non, but he treated my father badly. He wants to take away some of my father’s land.”
“But I thought that was sorted out. Besides, I believe it was a former chief who instigated it, not Eric.”
“No matter. You should watch out too. These Indians are only interested in taking our land away from us.”
This narrow-mindedness wasn’t worthy of a reply. Instead, I grasped Eric’s outstretched hand and squeezed it tightly. “Thanks for coming by, Yves. I think we can take it from here.”
The veil over his eyes flicked to anger. For a second I thought he was going to say something, but he snapped his visor back down, roared his skidoo into life and with little regard for the fallen tree or my truck on the other side, whizzed past them.
“Is he really a friend of yours?” Eric said, with a quizzical arch to his brow as he came up beside me.
“He sure isn’t one of yours,” I replied. “I’d stay away from dark alleys, if I were you.”
“Ah, he’s just jealous because I stole his woman from him.” Eric clasped me in his arms.
“I was never his woman.” I broke from his grasp. “In fact I ain’t nobody’s woman but my own.” I picked up a piece of the paper-thin ice covering the snow and shattered it over his head.
He responded in kind, and we found ourselves embroiled in an ice and snowball fight, laughing and splattering each other with ammunition that sent shivers of icy crystals down our necks. The loud honk of a horn from behind the fallen tree brought us back to our age.
“Meg, you there?” shouted an old man’s gravelly voice.
I scrambled around the tree to discover my truck had vanished, and George Braun ready to tackle my road with his snowplow. In his hand he held a chainsaw.
“Left your keys in, so I moved your truck,” he said. “Won’t take me a minute to get rid of this here tree for ya.”
While he cut away branches, Eric and I threw them into the woods. Soon we had the severed sections of the main trunk pushed out of the way, and George’s plow was heading up my road, leaving a smooth, drivable swathe behind him.
With my truck problems so easily solved, Eric and I headed to his SUV , hoping that the promised tow truck had already extricated his stuck vehicle from the snow bank. Although the tow truck was nowhere in sight, his Grand Cherokee stood firmly level, snow-free on the plowed road. Two men were checking it over. A tractor, its engine running, was parked a chain length away from the Jeep.
“Thanks, guys,” Eric said. “Everything okay?” I recognized Pete, whose son had been one of the drugged kids found in my shack.
Pete wiped his nose with his snow-encrusted mitt. “Yup. Sent that rig you called in packing. Stupid idiot left your Jeep in gear. Woulda wrecked the transmission, that’s for sure.”
“Should’ve called you guys, eh?” Eric said. “Yup.” Pete secured the chain to the back of his tractor. He scowled. “Damn kids were at it again last night.”
For a second Eric looked puzzled, then swore, “Christ, I thought we’d plugged the hole.”
“New hole. One of the kids finally owned up. Said a new dealer’s taken over. A girl.”
“Did he give a name?” I asked with one in mind.
“I dunno, don’t think so.”
“Any kind of description, even colour of car?” I asked. Pete shook his head. “Kid said the girl came on snowshoe.”
“Old or new?” I shot back.
“Huh?”
“Sorry, I mean did he happen to mention if they were the old-fashioned kind of snowshoe, or the new modern ones?”
“How should I know? Snowshoes is snowshoes.”
After Pete and his friend left in the tractor, I said to Eric, “Remember the snowshoes at John-Joe’s shack? Maybe we can link them to this new pusher. And if so, we would be able to link this woman to Chantal’s murder. In fact, she could be Chantal’s killer.”
“Let’s go ask Decontie,” Eric said, climbing into his car. “But Meg, I wish you wouldn’t get your hopes up. You know the case is pretty solid against John-Joe.”
“You still aren’t convinced of John-Joe’s innocence, are you?” I said, sliding into the Jeep’s passenger seat.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Eric said. “I’d like as much as you for him to be innocent. His late father was one of my supporters in the last chief elections. And John-Joe himself has worked for me these past three years. But right now there is just too much evidence pointing in his direction. It can’t all be coincidence.”
I held my tongue, knowing I had nothing other than conjecture to counter Eric’s apparent proof. With my feeling of euphoria gone, I watched the snow banks slide past as we drove in silence to the Migiskan Police Station.
“Why are you asking?” Chief Decontie said from his seated position behind the cluttered metal desk that took up most of his office. Mounted on the wall behind him were the insignia of a variety of different First Nations Police forces. Although out of uniform, he still bore himself with the official demeanor of a cop. The overhead light outlined every wrinkle and acne scar on his earnest but skeptical face. And it also attested, thank God, to the return of the electricity.
I reminded him about the snowshoe tracks he’d followed from John-Joe’s shack the day we found Chantal’s body.
He picked up the notebook on his desk and leafed through it until he stopped at a page. “Interesting. One of the kids in last night’s bust described the dealer’s snowshoes. Said they were like the bear paws his grandfather used trapping. One had a red strap. Sound familiar?”
“That’s them.” I paused. “Anyone report sighting a bright yellow car last night?”
“Why you asking?” Deciding now was as good a time as any, I revealed my suspicions about Thérèse, that she had a better motive for killing Chantal and Pierre than John-Joe. That she had the opportunity; her yellow Volkswagen had been seen in this area around the time Chantal was killed. And since she probably knew about Pierre’s drug dealings, she could easily have taken over. When Decontie’s eyebrows arched at the mention of Pierre and drugs, I told him about the exchange Yvette had witnessed.
“In fact, you might want to talk to Yvette further on this and other things related to the case.”
Before I could provide him with the details on how to reach her, Chief Decontie was on the phone to Sergeant LaFramboise telling them to pickup one Thérèse Trottier.
When he hung up, he said, “Yeah, that yellow VW was reported last night. Seems it got stuck in a snow bank and had to be pulled out.”