The sky was a palette of frosted pastels; pinks and lilacs and blues. Beneath it, dark mounds of drumlins rolled away in the distance. On both sides, stands of birches flickered past, their white trunks like a giant picket fence. Beside him in the passenger seat, Traz’s silence reminded Jejeune of all his friend had done for him, all he was still doing for him. But he knew he had to see things through to the end, as bad as it was going to be.
Jejeune saw an abandoned building in a field, tethered to the highway by a narrow road that was slowly being reclaimed by the wilderness. He pulled off the highway and guided the Durango over the rutted surface, stopping beside the building. As the two men got out, Jejeune realized it had once been a chapel. The paint was peeling from the exterior in great scales, as if the building was sloughing off dead skin. Tattered shutters dangled from rusted hinges, flapping listlessly as the wind blew through the open windows. Through a hole in the roof, a shaft of light pierced the interior and flooded the space with a pale glow. Jejeune stared at the building now as he spoke.
“Annie Prior would have needed someone on the inside, Traz, to fit those cranes with the cameras. Aransas would have been the best place. It would have been easy enough to attract the birds to baited traps.”
“Come on, JJ, those devices could have been fitted anywhere along the birds’ migration route. Damian trapped cranes in Wood Buffalo without patterning them to bait. Is that all you’ve got?”
“The cranes at Wood Buffalo were fitted with VHF collars, which made it easy for Damian to locate them. He sent you coordinates for all the stopover points. You already know whether there was any possibility somebody could get close enough to transient birds elsewhere, at Cheyenne Bottoms or Salt Plains, for example, to fit those devices. And there wasn’t, was there?”
Traz was silent.
“Prior knew she would only have a short time after the cranes arrived to remove the collars and cameras before the park staff started their nesting survey. But to anticipate when those cranes would be arriving in the park, you’d need to know exactly when they had departed from Aransas.”
“Anyone at Wood Buffalo could have called in to request that information.”
“I don’t see anybody from the Canadian Wildlife Service asking on behalf of a cultural anthropologist, do you? Not without wanting to know what her interest was.”
Traz was shaking his head. “Verity would never be involved in anything like this. She loves those birds. The extra weight of all that monitoring equipment could have put their entire migration in jeopardy. She would never do that.”
The protest was almost frivolous, but Jejeune wouldn’t treat it that way. Traz saw it as his duty to protect Verity now, so Jejeune would field every question, answer every objection, until his friend was ready to accept the truth. “Ultra-lightweight housings, Traz,” he said reasonably. “They would have had negligible impact on large-bodied birds like the cranes. At worst, the extra drag might have forced the birds into an additional stopover or two, if the weather was particularly bad.”
Traz said nothing.
On the hillside behind the chapel, the tarmac road ran like a scar through the dense blanket of fir trees. It had been an incredible feat of engineering to drive an access road through this wilderness. But did humans really have any place here, wondered Jejeune, where surviving was the only rule, and things like friendship and loyalty and betrayal played no part?
“Verity was going through my things when I woke up.” Jejeune fished in his pocket and withdrew the blue photo chip. “She was looking for this.”
“No.” Traz was shaking his head now. “You must have this wrong. It was dark in that room. You were probably still a little messed up. Hallucinating, maybe.”
“She wanted these photographs, Traz. Perhaps she still intended to give them to Robideau, maybe she was just going to destroy them to cover her tracks.” Jejeune shrugged, “I don’t know. But she thought I had them, and she was going to take them.”
Traz had fallen silent again. Jejeune looked at the ruins of the chapel, this place where faith had been abandoned, and belief in something greater than yourself had been carried away by the harsh northern winds. Traz hadn’t asked him the question. He had once told Domenic not to check into somebody unless you were prepared to live with what you found. Traz had looked into Verity Brown, Jejeune knew now, and whatever he had found, he was prepared to live with it. He would make whatever compromises he needed to, sacrifice whatever he had to, in order to have his companion in this world. Traz hadn’t asked Domenic the question, and that meant he already knew the answer. For Domenic, that answer was the one piece of the puzzle left, the one unknown. He knew Verity was guilty. He knew what she had done, and how she had done it, and when, and where. In the end, what did it matter if you didn’t have the whole picture? So, he would let Traz keep it to himself — the answer Domenic didn’t have, the answer to the question Traz had failed to ask him: Why?
The oncoming car rocked the Durango with its slipstream as it hurtled past. So many of the vehicles heading north had single travellers, as if the drivers were not so much on a trip, thought Traz, but a quest, to test themselves against the north, to find their own limits, their own tolerances. Perhaps he and Domenic had done that, too. The silence in the car had existed between the men long before Jejeune had drifted off into a deep sleep. Traz looked across at his friend now, his disquiet masked by slumber. Traz’s own feelings had spun through a spectrum of emotions since the two men had got back in the car. Resentment had been there. Anger, too. But now, there was mostly just sadness — for a friendship that caused Domenic to care so much that he had to tell him.
Them, too. Till they got rare. Gatean Robideau’s words still rang in Traz’s ears. Whooping Cranes. Part of the feast at these Dene gatherings, their bones part of the detritus buried at these sites. Bones that would have been recovered by Annie Prior during her excavations. Bones holding the DNA of long-dead birds whose migratory instincts were intact, uncompromised, pure. Bones that would have given Verity Brown the back markers for her genetic modelling.
It would have been a vital source of new data, one that would have garnered any researcher the respect of her peers. Data drawn from sources no one else had, or could ever have. Data that would earn you the right to be considered worthy to hold an opinion — more, to voice it without facing ridicule or contempt. And who wouldn’t want that? Who didn’t deserve it? And how far would we go, any of us, for a chance to secure it?
Domenic stirred and blinked himself awake. Traz looked across at his friend again. Through the window beyond him he could see farmland. The human landscape was gradually replacing the wild one they had left behind, encroaching ever nearer as they hurtled south on this highway. Soon there would be a town, then another, and another. And then, finally, the airport. And choices.
“Welcome back,” said Traz. “We made good time on that last stretch. We’re only a couple of hours out, at most.”
Jejeune realized Traz wasn’t just giving him their ETA. He was telling him how long he had to inform his friend of his decision.
“A crime was committed, Traz, and a woman died because of it. That’s not something any police officer can ignore.”
“Sometimes people die because of their own choices. There doesn’t always have to be a reckoning, JJ. She saved your life.”
It was the statement of a man bargaining for the freedom of somebody he loved. It was an unspoken appeal, too, to a friendship and all that meant, all that lay beneath it. But Verity Brown had broken the law. She’d played a part in an illegal scheme that had cost a woman her life. Domenic had a duty to make sure Annie Prior’s death wasn’t just chalked up as one more reckless, irresponsible soul lost to the wilderness. What else that duty demanded, though, he didn’t know.
They talked about other matters, anything and nothing, until Traz swept the Durango around to the departure terminal at Edmonton Airport and pulled up to the curb. Jejeune made no move to get out. He stared out through the windscreen. Traz did the same.
Like someone stirring from sleep, Jejeune slowly reached into his pocket and withdrew the small plastic bag with the blue disc inside. “It seems as if people have been reminding me, since the day I landed, that I have no jurisdiction in this part of the world,” he said. “This is evidence in Annie Prior’s death, and as such, I have no right to take it out of the country with me.” He pressed the bag into Traz’s palm. “I’m grateful to Verry, Traz. Truly, I am. But Annie Prior is owed something here, too. Somebody needs to do the right thing for her.” Did his loyalty lie with the the living or the dead? Traz was looking at him now, and Jejeune knew his friend could tell the question remained unanswered. He opened the door and reached over to offer a hand. “Thanks for the ride, Traz. It’s been …”
Traz nodded sadly. “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”