I drove south along the highway to Settlers Road, pulling into Ian J. Cameron’s driveway behind his Nissan Pathfinder, which was mounted on blocks. Ian stepped out of the house to greet me before I made it to the back door. His smile was warm, but behind the big wire-frame glasses cool curiosity showed in his pale blue eyes.
Ian was a well-built, good-looking man in his late thirties, with a high, speckled forehead under thinning sandy hair, a lantern jaw and a large mouth that was frequently set in a roguish grin. He had done some serious bodybuilding in his youth, and though he stood three or four inches under my six feet, he must have had at least forty pounds on my glutted hundred and sixty. As advertising manager at the Chronicle, Ian had been permanently disgruntled by the time I had gone to work there late last year, and had quit in the spring, about a month after me.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“You’re still here. I thought you were moving the family back to Ontario.”
“Before school starts. We’re still hoping to unload the house first. And I gotta get this pig”—he pointed to the Pathfinder—“roadworthy.”
He lowered his voice and moved closer. “Have to get the girls away from this freak show. You know Connie, our thirteen-year-old? She has a paper route. If she’d been up an hour earlier Saturday morning, that would’ve been her discovering that goof hanging from the old apple tree. I call that getting too close to home for comfort.”
“Can you show me where it was?”
He considered the question. “I’ll just let Tish know.”
He stepped back into the house and came out after a few minutes, banging the door. His delinquent look suggested he was acting against the better judgment of a higher authority. The kitchen curtain, I noticed, was being tweaked.
Ian brushed past me. “Let’s go,” he said.
We walked about a quarter mile down an easy grade toward the sea. He led me to the site. It was a deep lot, unfenced and overgrown, packed with mature apple trees, some nearing full production. He stood by an old giant that grew close to the road.
“Here.”
“Fine big tree,” I said, patting the trunk. It was one of those pulled-wishbone-shaped beauties, with Atlas arms supporting a dense crown of leaf and upper limbs.
“Natural born hanging tree,” Ian said, nodding up at one of the high sturdy boughs.
“I guess.” I got a chill looking at a pair of big moss-covered rocks on the ground that could have been jump-off points, I supposed. I was picturing the mechanics of the thing.
“Who owns the lot?”
“Some people in Port Moody. He’s an accountant, I think. They haven’t built on it yet, obviously, but they’ll be out soon to strip the trees and cut the grass. They stay in a camper when they’re here.”
“Beautiful lot.”
“Oh, it’s choice. Across the street—” Ian pointed to a big ranch-style bungalow set among towering cedars and hemlocks—“that’s where the municipal office was back in the Barlow’s Landing days.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“There’s plenty you don’t know, son. The settlers planted these old fruit trees all over the Coast, but this area is the epicentre. With the mostest and the oldest. This was all part of the original Barlow homestead, which covered about two-thirds of the peninsula. Then, during the war, the settlers’ heirs carved up this and the four other major holdings and turned the Coast into cottage country. More money in cottage lots than jam factories. And then those cottage folk have to buy their groceries and their gas and their egg foo yung. Then you need schools for the gas jockeys’ kids. Doctors for the teachers. Upscale car dealerships and teak furniture emporiums for the doctors. And behold: Witka is born.”
“Look at that,” I said. The right side of the trunk had a long gash in it, extending about six inches. Time and weight had almost flattened it, but a layer of dark moss grew out like fur from an old man’s ears.
Ian whistled. “Some long ago fool started chopping this mother down. Sanity prevailed, and the tree endured.”
We started back. A strong breeze was blowing off the sea, and laughing women were straining against it, pulled along by mammoth protein-rich dogs hungry for the beach. Cars shot by with their pre-school passengers, little faces flying past us with doubtful expressions.
“I saw the goof down here last month.”
“Albert?”
“That’s him, was him. Yeah, it was about the middle of the month. I was driving Tish to work, and he was standing right where we just stood, looking at self-same hanging tree.”
“Really? Did you tell the Mounties that?”
“Oh, they paid a visit. And I told them.”
“Did they say anything?”
“Mounties?”
“Right. How did Sloan look?”
“The usual dazed. Looking up—waaaaay up—as the Friendly Giant used to. And I wouldn’t swear to it, but I also got the impression that he was wearing that famous wolfish leer of his, but I wouldn’t swear.”
“Like hell you wouldn’t.”
“Okay, I did. I cursed him when we passed. I curse him in my sleep, too. You know, I sold his advertising for almost seven years. One day, I was standing in Safeway, closing a quarter-million-dollar account, and you know what? I looked down and I realized I had holes in the soles of my shoes. That ditzy wife of his drew the same salary I did—and what she sold during a week, I sold during a coffee break.”
“Remember what he used to say: ‘To keep everyone equal—’”
“‘Everyone must earn equal keep.’” Ian J. Cameron spat. “What a loser.”