Accessible from the Lower Mainland only by a forty-minute ferry ride across Howe Sound, the Witka Peninsula is a pocket of earthly paradise lying between Vancouver and the dismal clear-cut pulp and paper country to the north. Witka City, joined at the hip to its namesake native reserve, is the commercial hub, but most of the sixty thousand year-round residents live on rural lots, where lush rainforest gives way to sloping lawns, terraced gardens and orchard groves dating back more than a century. Glacier-fed creeks bless the inhabitants with superb drinking water and spellbinding vistas deep into the mountains.
Locals simply call it the Coast. The luckiest of the blessed live along the thirty-odd miles of shoreline in homes facing a postcard view of Valhalla: the Strait of Georgia backed by Vancouver Island, undulant in the mystical distance, with Gabriola, Valdez and Galliano islands curled at the base of the leviathan.
I was one of the lucky ones. My place was on the water, though many of my neighbours wished a good squall would knock it off the cliff and take it far out to sea. Big money had come to the Coast, and next to the tongue and groove tri-levels and solarplex A-frames, my little four-room fishing shack was clearly out of sync and out of line. To me it was vintage Coast—a remnant of the forties and fifties, when the peninsula was a summer playground for Vancouver’s comfortable working class. But to Anderson the surgeon, Chapman the British engineer, Popowich the retired canola farmer from Medicine Hat, even Price the old Vietnam War draft dodger—to them, my place was a drag on property values, and I was the wrecker of the showroom view.
There were some friendly exceptions, however, and George (Jake) Jacobson, twice elected Member of Parliament for the federal constituency of Witka, was one of them. Jake had grown up on the Coast and seemed to appreciate the derelict integrity of my old-fashioned digs. Once he had even remarked that my cabin was the correct character and scale for its lot, which he called the prettiest in the vicinity, owing to the abundance of fruit trees: pear, apple, cherry and plum. Jake also remembered me from my city columnist days at the Vancouver Star. As a politician with one foot in Witka and the other in Ottawa, Jake saw me as someone who could understand his often conflicted position on the thorny issues of the day. Someone he could talk to.
I was chopping wood out back when Jake came to visit that Saturday in early August. Though well up in his fifties, Jake had retained the pleasantly pugnacious look of a younger man who didn’t believe half of what he heard but found just about all of it funny. He claimed the extra weight he’d put on after entering public life had made him “glad-handier” and inhibited wrinkles.
The usual tucked-in grin was absent as he neared the woodpile. “Catch the radio, chum?” he said.
“Something bad happened?”
“Afraid so. Your old boss passed away.”
“Sloan?”
He nodded gloomily.
“How?”
“Radio just said his body was found this morning on Settlers Road. Foul play not suspected. They would’ve said if it was a car accident, wouldn’t they?”
“Must be medical. He was wiry but a worrier. Probably heart. I’ll make a call.”
In the kitchen, I dialed the home number of Rita Champion-Davis, editor of the Coast Chronicle.
“Rita there?”1 asked the mans voice.
“And youre?”
“Hi, Bob. It’s Pat Ross.”
Rita, an Aussie, came to the phone sniffling. “Hello, Pat. Guess you heard the news. Isn’t it awful?”
“What the hell happened?”
“Looks like suicide.”
“Suicide?”
Jake was standing beside me. When he heard the word, he closed his eyes and scowled.
Rita went on. “He was spotted just after sunrise by an old lady out walking her dog. Suspended from a tree limb.”
“No!”
“I know. None of us can believe it.”
“I heard it was on Settlers Road. How close to Ian’s place?”
“Same general area, further toward the water.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“Apparently he did. They gave it to Jan. She’s been with the RCMP and the coroner’s people all day, poor dear.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Just briefly. She wants us to put out a special tribute edition Tuesday. She got quite upset with me when I asked about Albert’s note. Doesn’t want to go near cause of death.” Rita sighed, and I could almost see her blowing the dyed blonde strands from her chunky face. “She’s the boss now.”
“Did you see it coming, Rita? Had Albert been acting strangely?”
“He didn’t seem particularly morose to me—maybe a little more into himself than usual. Who’s to say with these dreadful things?”
I told her to take care.
“Strung himself up,” I said to Jake. I poured coffee, and we sat at the table.
He was shaking his head. “That was the editor you were talking to, Ms Champion-Davis?”
“Titular,” I said. “Albert was always calling the shots. After he got into municipal politics, he removed editor from his title, but it was for appearance’s sake. Rita was his whipping dog, actually, but she sounds worried about Jan taking over.”
“Mrs. Sloan? But she’s been working at the paper for years.”
“Ad seller, ostensibly. She only worked when the spirit moved her, which wasn’t that often. I always liked Jan—she’s a beautiful woman, vibrant—but she wasn’t a favourite with the staff.”
We were quiet for a while.
“Tough on the family,” Jake said.
“You bet. Damn cruel.”
“I know he was one ornery socialist, but he beat the booze, everyone knows that. Must have suffered from depression. Maybe money troubles too.”
“Both, probably. The business never paid enough, at least from what I saw, and his mood was lousy after he lost his bid for mayor. I hadn’t talked to him, though, in the last four months. Should’ve been content with his seat on council, not reached for the brass ring.”
“Still, he didn’t strike me as the type.”
“No. He was a scrapper.”
After a long, melancholy pause, Jake tittered. “He raked me pretty good a couple times on his op-ed page. I remember one time—oh, he gave it to me good. I wasn’t taking a tough enough stand against them damn Yanks over softwood.”
“Oh, yeah. I remember reading that.”
“So the day after the paper came out, we ran into each other in the bank. I was flying down to New York that night for that UN plenary session on security I told you about. This was last fall, I believe—right, November. Anyway, I’d just converted must have been five hundred bucks into U.S. currency for my stay in New York. Albert’s waiting in line, and he sees me, and I guess he figures I must have been pretty teed off about the editorial. I glared at him a couple times, to make sure he knew I was. Then, when I was done with the teller, I made a beeline straight for him, got right up in his face.” He laughed. “You should’ve seen him, he didn’t know what was coming. But instead of blasting him, I fanned the greenbacks under his nose, and I whispered, ‘Just here to collect the weekly payoff.’ Then I showed him some teeth. His face went through quite a sea change—from fright to delight. Never saw the man laugh so hard.”
Jake smiled widely and shook his head at the memory. “No, all in all, he was pretty easy on me in print. Considering my stripes.”
“You were too far away. Ottawa wasn’t really on his map. He liked killing his meat in his own backyard.”
“True enough. Tell you one thing, pardner. He sure enjoyed what you did for him, the short time you did it. I sat with him at a chamber breakfast back in February, and when he found out you and I were neighbours, he couldn’t stop saying nice things about your work. Told everyone at the table that he wanted you to be his next editor. Said the two of you would straighten a few things out around here.”
“Yeah, unfortunately, he broadcast that wish at every other weekly staff meeting, usually after taking a strip off Rita for bungling an easy job. He’d read bits of my stories out loud and tell her to listen and learn. Created some really ugly feelings in the newsroom.”
“I can imagine it would.”
“One of the reasons I left—I never told you this—was because when Albert and Jan went away for a couple weeks in April, Rita tried to use some muscle on me. Send me out to Boy Scout jamborees with a camera. I didn’t bargain for that, and I didn’t stick around to take it. But I also had some problems with Albert’s fast and loose approach to laying low the enemy. When he smelled blood, man was he vicious.”
“Look at Jerome Charlie,” said Jake.
“He assassinated the guy. But Albert treated me well, I’ll give him that. We used to do breakfast and had some good talks, good laughs. Yeah.” I sat there brooding for a while. “Maybe I shouldn’t have quit on him.”
“Don’t do that.” Jake got up and stretched. Then in a familiar gesture, usually reserved for the capital antics of corrupt Liberals or Quebec separatists, (Jake was a Conservative), he stomped a foot and shot a grimace at the ceiling. “Damn!” he said. He placed a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Listen, pardner. Come over later, and we’ll split that beer again.”
“I’ll pop by.”
He sauntered back to his house, crossing the surgeon’s manicured lawn, giving his head a shake a few times in mute bewilderment at the facts as we knew them.
That was Saturday.