Ajidàmo’s brown eyes grew rounder when I asked about John-Joe’s book, but he remained silent. His grandmother, her cataract-clouded eyes cast in my direction, sat alert in her chair and equally silent. Although she would not understand my English question, she would feel the alarm it was causing in her grandson.
“At least I think it is a book,” I said. “He might’ve given you something else to hide. I don’t know. You see, when he told me about it, there was a policeman with us and I think your nìtàwis was afraid to say exactly what it was.”
Still no response from the young boy.
“John-Joe said his cousin really liked the book that I’d given him. I think he meant you, didn’t he?”
Ajidàmo nodded solemnly.
“And we both know that I didn’t give you a book, don’t we?”
He nodded again. “So I’m thinking maybe he was the one who gave you a book.”
He started to chew his bottom lip.
“Ajidàmo, please, you have to trust me. I’m not going to hurt your cousin. I want to help him. And I think your cousin wants me to have this book, because it might help him.”
His grandmother grunted and said, “Okay.” She must’ve understood the gist of my words.
Ajidàmo walked over to the other side of the front room, to a wooden box shoved under some shelves. He pulled out a box which I immediately recognized contained the Jenga game I’d given him. So John-Joe’s statement hadn’t been completely inaccurate.
Ajidàmo jiggled the narrow wooden blocks out of the box onto the floor. A small rose-coloured notebook spilled out on top. The boy picked it up and held it out to me.
“I promise I’ll take extra special care of this, okay?” I said.
The boy smiled. “It’s okay. I know you’re a good guy, ’cause you hid John-Joe. But don’t lose it, or I’ll get in trouble.”
I promised not to and flipped through the plastic-coated notebook quickly but could make little of the gibberish written on many of the pages. Columns of numbers and symbols with the odd letter. “Do you know where he got this?”
One page was filled with an indecipherable scrawl, which I realized, from the one or two words I could readily make out, was in French.
“Nìtàwis told me he found it.”
“Do you know where?”
He shook his head. “Maybe the nice lady gave it to him.”
“What nice lady?”
“The one with the long brown hair. She had a nice smile.”
“So you met her. Do you know her name?”
He shook his head.
I only knew of three women associated with John-Joe, and one was dead. Besides, Chantal’s hair had been blonde. “Could her name have been Yvette or Thérèse?”
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“When did you meet her?”
“She came here looking for Nìtàwis.”
That would rule Yvette out. She didn’t drive, and it was hardly likely her father would bring her to a house associated with the man he’d banned from her life. That left me with Thérèse, but “nice” would never be a word I would use to describe her.
“What colour car was she driving?”
“Dunno, mighta been black. No, maybe it was red.” Then he finally admitted he hadn’t seen any car.
“Can you remember when he gave you the book?”
He nodded solemnly.
“Yeah, it was when the police were >chasing him.”
“Do you mean earlier this week, when he was hiding out at your house?” I asked, surprised that John-Joe still had it after being incarcerated in the Somerset jail.
He shook his head vigorously. “Nope. It was before that. He was all covered in snow and bleeding. He just give me the book and told me to hide it.”
So that meant John-Joe had it with him when he was first arrested at his hunting camp. It was amazing that the police hadn’t found it when they’d frisked him. And the fact that young man had risked capture to come to his grandmother’s cabin before seeking my help only served to magnify the importance of this small notebook.
Anxious to examine it more closely, I was about to rush off when I noticed the hopeful look Ajidàmo was giving me. I glanced at the blocks on the floor. “So you like this crazy Jenga game, do you? Want to play?”
“You bet.” And he began to build the tower that started the challenging game of balance.
An hour later, after several precarious games in which Ajidàmo proved he was considerably more dexterous than I in maintaining the tower’s teetering balance, I made my way home with the pink notebook securely tucked into my pocket. When I turned my pickup into the Three Deer Point Road, I noticed a fresh set of tire tracks, in fact two sets of the same track, which meant someone had paid me a visit. It wasn’t Eric; his Jeep couldn’t have made such a narrow track. Most people I knew drove trucks or SUV s. Unless it had been Yves’s Mercedes.
Grey, leaden clouds scudded overhead, dashing any hope of a break in the weather. As I watched them race over the tops of the giant pines, I felt the icy prick of freezing rain. I fled up the verandah stairs to the dry warmth of my house.
However, when I opened the front door, my breath sent jets of steam down the frigid hall. Even the dog seemed loathe to greet me from wherever he’d managed to find warmth. While the flick of a light switch confirmed the power had indeed returned, the furnace hadn’t been on long enough to remove the chill from the air. It would take at least another couple of hours. I kept my fleece jacket on and added another pair of wool socks. I soon had the living room fireplace built up to a chimney-licking inferno. Then wrapping myself in several blankets, I set about to decipher the notebook.
Despite its seeming importance, it looked innocent enough. A thin, palm-sized notebook with lined paper and a flexible cover, made of cheap plastic. The kind of notebook that could be found in any dollar store, including the Migiskan General Store. Not exactly a clue to its owner, unless frequenting cheap stores was the clue.
No name, no initials, nothing to indicate ownership. I was positive it belonged to a French Canadian, not only because of the French text but also because of the manner in which the numbers were written. Commas were used for decimal points, and spaces separated the thousands, a technique a native English-speaker wouldn’t use.
Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to shorten the list of possible owners, just eliminated Migiskan band members, including John-Joe, since English was their first language, or in the case of the older people, Algonquin.
But one person it didn’t eliminate was Thérèse. Even though she spoke English like an Ottawa Valley native, her first language was French. And the notebook’s pink colour also pointed to her as the possible owner. The rosy hue went right along with her collection of pigs.
I started with the French text I’d noticed earlier on the last page, figuring it would be the easiest to decipher. The writing was a coarse scrawl, barely discernable, but with the help of my French-English dictionary, I was able to come up with a rough translation that told me someone’s husband had been delivered. At least, that was my immediate translation for the word “mari”. But it did seem an odd thing to say about one’s husband.
I then tackled the bigger challenge, deciphering the numbers and symbols that filled the ruled columns of the remaining pages. I realized with a start that a different person had written this. The characters, although small, were neat and precise and perfectly legible.
The three right-hand columns looked to be the debit, credit and balance columns of a ledger like the one I tried to use to better manage my own abysmal financial affairs. The numbers at the top left of each page suggested that the financial activity was broken down by month, starting with October and running through consecutive months for a year until last month, November.
It would be a challenge to discover the nature of this activity. Certainly it wasn’t for running a household, not with the size of those dollar amounts. Which in turn prompted me to consider a different interpretation for “mari”. My suspicions were further reinforced when I realized the “k” in several of the entries probably stood for kilograms. And if I my math was correct, each entry worked out to a costly $1500 a kilogram. I saw this as further support for my suspicions, which were finally confirmed when I looked up the entry for marijuana in the dictionary. THC was its active ingredient. I then assumed it was likely the “.10 CHNO” represented the ten per cent heroin mix that was being passed out on the reserve
So there it was. I held in my hands the accounting book of an illegal drug operation. And with this conclusion, the initials attached to a set of regular monthly entries began to make sense, particularly since I knew Pierre Fournier had been a drug dealer. But it also told me that Pierre was not the head of this operation, for on the last day of every month he collected a regular sum of money, along with three others, one of whom called themselves “moi” as in “me”. Thankfully, I didn’t see John-Joe’s initials against any of the entries.
I did, however, find a couple of the deals rather curious, the ones with the initials “PF(RM)”. They had no associated dollar amount. And the last of these entries was dated the 22nd of November, which also happened to be the very last entry in the ledger. Four days after Chantal was killed and the day before Eric and I had found her body.
Then I realized with a certain degree of smugness that this drug deal confirmed another suspicion. “RM” could easily stand for the reserve’s name in French, Réserve Migiskan. Therefore it confirmed that Pierre was indeed the man I had seen leaving my shack wearing John-Joe’s orange cap. And if that wasn’t enough to identify this drug operation as the reserve’s source, the fact there was no dollar amount was consistent with Chief Decontie’s information that the marijuana was being given out free.
This entry also provided a better fix on the time of Pierre’s death. Unfortunately, it didn’t rule out John-Joe as his murderer. He wasn’t arrested until a day later.
This last entry had one additional curiosity. It had been written in a different hand from the other entries in the notebook.
But as valuable as the notebook was, the only purpose it served for John-Joe was to prove his innocence in the drug operation. It did not help clear him of the murder charges.
With nothing identifying the people behind this drug operation, the ledger was of little value. I didn’t recall seeing Thérèse Trottier’s initials anywhere in the book. Either she had nothing to do with the operation, or she played another role, one that didn’t involve the direct selling of drugs. After all, there was that mysterious “moi” entry for someone who got paid considerably less than the others.