Inspector Green Mysteries 9-Book Bundle (298 page)

With this new goal in mind, he headed to City Hall. Contact information for Isabelle Lasalle was not hard to find, including her date of birth: June 19, 1944. The time frame was perfect.

He’d expected Victor to warn his mother that the cops might come snooping, but when the woman opened the front door to her small wood-frame house she was smiling cheerfully. Her smile crinkled her eyes and accentuated the deep laugh lines carved into her face. Chris could tell at a glance that she had some white blood. Her skin was honey-coloured, her eyes brown, and her thick salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a single braid. Her face, however, was narrow and angular, her nose aquiline, and her eyes too round to be pure Dene.

He introduced himself. He had dressed in uniform today for his confrontation with Victor, but the sight of the uniform did not seem to disturb her. Her smile faded and she looked concerned but not alarmed. She was probably used to police, but as a counsellor and community activist she was not afraid of them.

She drew her short, squat form to its full height and nodded for him to enter. Inside she settled him on a sofa that sagged in all the right places, and then offered him coffee. He accepted, welcoming the trappings of an informal chat. The yeasty sweetness of fresh bread filled the house, but he resisted the urge to follow her into the kitchen. Instead he looked around.

The house was quite old, possibly even from frontier days, and it still had its original plank floors, pitted and knotted but polished to a golden gleam. The living room was tiny but packed with mementoes, plaques, and odd bits of artwork that looked homemade; beadwork, wood carvings, woven mats, leather hangings. On the floor was a large braided rug in a Dene design. Above the fireplace hung a framed photograph of Virginia Falls shot through golden mist.

“One of the Creator’s great wonders,” she said, startling him as she came up behind him. She set down a tray with two cups of black coffee and a plate of buttered rolls. The butter had melted and oozed down the sides. He suddenly realized he was famished.

“How can I help you, Constable?” she asked once he had sipped his coffee. He suppressed a grimace, for it was strong enough to peel paint.

“I hope you can provide me with some background,” he began, picking his words with caution. “I’m investigating the disappearance of a party of young canoeists up in the Nahanni. One of them is Scott Lasalle.” He watched carefully. Surprise flickered across her face. “He may have been trying to find a ruby mine that his grandfather had staked out over sixty years ago, up in the Mackenzie Mountains.”

Now she leaned forward, listening intently.

“There were two brothers involved in the claim. Gaetan and Guy Lasalle. Guy was Scott’s grandfather. Does either name mean anything to you?”

She shook her head, but slowly as if wary. “But Lasalle is my last name, of course.”

He hesitated. His heart was racing and he set his cup down to hide his trembling. “They would have been friends with your mother, in Nahanni Butte back in the mid-1940s.”

Her face grew rigid. She didn’t speak but she left the hint dangling in the tense air.

“This is … awkward,” he said. “The fact is, Scott Lasalle met with your son Victor a few months ago about this mine. He called Victor his cousin.”

“Cousin.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about this Scott Lasalle.”

“He’s a young geology student. He grew up in Vancouver but his father was born in Whitehorse, the only child of Lydia and Guy Lasalle.”

“Are you implying Guy Lasalle is my father too?”

“No.” He coloured. “Not necessarily. I mean … well, I think one of the Lasalle brothers may have been your father.”

She sipped her coffee and took a careful bite of her roll. “I never knew my father, barely remember my mother. She died when I was six. I was … sent away.”

“And no one ever mentioned who your father was?”

“I didn’t stay in Nahanni Butte. After I got out of residential school, I mean. I lost touch with the place.”

“Did you ever try to track down your father?”

She shook her head. “Not seriously. I know he was white. My uncles told me he was a kind, gentle man who treated her well, not like a Native squaw. But he left her. Got her pregnant and disappeared, so I didn’t believe them.” She straightened her shoulders, as if she was trying to shrug off the resentment that was creeping in. “That must have been a surprise for Vic. Some white boy showing up claiming to be his cousin.”

“They were meeting about the mining claim. Victor flatly denies they’re cousins.”

She nodded. “He would. I never told him anything about my mother except she came from Nahanni Butte. When he was young, I wanted him to look ahead, not back. Now I wish I’d given him more pride in the traditional ways.”

She stared out the window into the quiet street and a puzzled frown crept across her face. “Even if this was true, how would this man Scott have found out about us? Did his grandfather tell him?”

Chris shook his head. “Guy died — or at least disappeared — in the 1940s. The mining claim was abandoned.”

“And what about the other brother?”

“We don’t know what happened to him. He seems to have disappeared too. I can find no record of him.”

She sat back and looked at him. For the first time, she seemed excited. A young girl peeked through the wrinkles and pouches of middle age. “My father went away. I remember my uncles saying he promised to come back and marry her, and they’d be rich. She waited and waited while the village ridiculed her, until finally she believed them that she was nothing to him but an Indian squaw. But —”

Her eyes snapped wide. She set her cup down and hurried out of the room. He heard her thumping around overhead and a moment later she called for his help to drag a wooden crate down the rickety stairs from the attic. Both of them held their breath as she pried it open on the living-room floor.

Inside it was packed to the brim with a young woman’s memories. Beaded pouches, dried and curled with age, an old bearskin hat, caribou hide boots, skirts, jewellery, old books, baby clothes …

“When my mother got TB, her brothers packed up her things instead of burning them and sent them to the nuns who were taking care of me. I think my uncles wanted me to have some connection to her. But the nuns didn’t show them to me for years. They wanted me to forget, or maybe they were superstitious. Maybe I was too. I have hardly looked at this, but now I remember there was a book …”

She began to dig in the box, eventually pulling up a battered hand-stitched leather journal from the bottom. Inside, its yellowed pages were covered in large, awkward print. She ran her fingers over them. “My uncles said my mother was trying to educate herself, because she wanted to please him when he came back. She was afraid he’d be ashamed.”

She gave an odd little smile as she scanned the pages, peeling them back carefully. “She wrote about daily events, ordinary things. Her father shooting a bear, the ice breaking on the river, her dreams. She wrote about being pregnant and having to make new clothes, being sick, wishing my father was there. I didn’t read it all, but I seem to remember …” Her voice trailed off as she stopped to squint at some pages.

“Interesting. She’s keeping track of the CANOL pipeline project.” She frowned, focusing her thoughts inward. “That was a massive oil pipeline built during the Second World War from the Norman Wells oil fields to Alaska, to supply the American military with oil.”

Chris felt a surge of excitement. Was this a lead he could trace? “Right. It only lasted a couple of years, didn’t it?”

“The war ended. And it was an environmental and financial fiasco. Oils spills, forest fires, no permits or assessments. I wonder why she —?” She bent her head back to the book. “My mother even tracked the movement of the workers. She worried about the dangers to the crews from the cold or lack of food. Oh! Here she says, ‘Good news, the war is over. I can’t wait. How long?’ And here again ‘The pipeline is closed. How long now?’”

She raised her head, looking pale and moved. “By the end, she thought he had abandoned her. But what if something happened? What if everything she believed was wrong? What if my father died on the pipeline?”

“I can check. There should be records of that,” Chris said.

“Would you?” She smiled and took the leather book over to the sofa. Sitting back down, she laid it on the table beside her. “I will read this in more depth later. But I thank you for this. It’s an odd feeling to have one’s past defined.”

He nodded. His eyes strayed back to the box and to the little pouch of jewellery inside. He picked it up and fingered through the trinkets, stopping when he came to a stone roughly the size of a cherry pit. It was rough and oddly shaped, out of place among the cheap glass and painted baubles around it. But held up to the light, he could see, glinting through the dark exterior, a deep, rich red.

He looked up, his heart racing. “Do you think Victor could have looked in this crate?”

“I don’t see why.” She snatched the stone back with alarm. “I doubt he even knows it’s here. He has no interest in our past.”

Chris could barely hold back his excitement as he left Isabelle’s home. He’d been careful not to reveal his suspicion to her for fear she might tell Victor about his visit and their discovery of the journal. If he was to have any leverage against Victor, he needed the element of surprise.

Like all mothers, Isabelle wanted to believe the best of her son, but all Chris’s instincts were screaming that Victor had not only snooped in his mother’s attic but he’d figured out the significance of the journal and the rough red stone. Had he connected them to the Lasalle brothers and the old mining claim? Had he figured out that his own grandfather might well be one of the Lasalles? If so, then he knew Scott was a cousin, perhaps even before he’d met the young man in the bar.

By then it was noon and the streets of Whitehorse were awash in tourists. Every kind of language and accent chattered around him. Japanese, Germans, British, and Scandinavians were everywhere, all soaking up the last of the world’s great wilderness. He barely noticed them as he worked away at the puzzle. There were way too many ifs in his theory, way too many gaps that needed to be filled in before he could present it to Nihls or the Ottawa detectives with any confidence.

This theory of Victor and the crate, for example. It provided some clue as to how Victor knew Scott’s identity, but it hinged on Victor knowing something of his grandmother’s life in Nahanni Butte and of the legend of the Lasalle brothers there.

There was one more lead he should follow before facing down the slippery weasel. He put in a phone call to Fort Simpson and got hold of the number for the band office in Nahanni Butte. It was a bustling, enterprising little village with close ties to Fort Simpson. Its business people were co-operative and always alert.

Chris had met the chief himself on several visits to the local school. The man had been part of the local council for over a quarter century and he knew everything. What he didn’t know, he could find out.

Chris had one simple question for him, but with Jim Matou nothing was ever simple. After an exchange of greetings, news, and good wishes Chris eased into it sideways. “How’s the busy metropolis, Jim?”

“It’s July. Hopping.”

“Have you had a visit recently from someone asking about the old days?”

“Lots of interest in the old days recently.”

“I mean about mining and prospecting.”

“People from all over come to our village in the summer. We teach them about the traditional ways.”

“But anyone in the winter? From Whitehorse, say.”

“Maybe.” Chris could almost see Matou leaning back in his chair, enjoying the game. “There were questions about my family, the Konisentes, the other first families here — how did we get along with the white trappers and big game hunters. Especially the prospectors.”

“Who was asking these questions?”

“A party came in March, not the usual time for visitors, wanted to talk to the elders about their treatment by the whites. Not the residential school stuff, they weren’t interested in that, but the village. How much the whites mixed with us, and with our women. One of them was a student from the university, doing research. The elders said they got pretty personal, wanted to see documents like birth and marriage certificates.”

Chris’s excitement stirred. “Whose documents?”

Matou paused, then dropped the playful tone. “Is this about that Lasalle kid who disappeared?”

“Could be. What happened?”

“Yeah, these guys were asking about the Lasalle brothers. One of the great legends of the river, they said, trying to act all casual. Did anyone in Nahanni Butte ever meet them? Know anything about what happened to them? Of course we did. The Lasalle brothers spent lots of time in the community every spring and fall. Traded furs, picked up supplies. This was before the park and all the tourists. It wasn’t really a town like today, more like a trading post and a few tents.”

“Jim, whose documents did they look at?”

“They talked to my mother, who was a young woman at the time. She told me they were very curious if any of her girlfriends got cozy with the Lasalles.”

“And?” Chris pressed. He sensed the minutes slipping away from him.

“She told me the same she told them. Her friend Nicolette got pregnant by one of the brothers and he promised to come back for her. Nicolette always believed he would, but she died waiting. Took the fight right out of her, waiting for that bastard to come back for her.”

“Which brother?”

“Not the one disappeared in the bush. He was the shy one, my mother said. Always lonely for his wife, never mixed with the village girls. No, this was the one went to work on the CANOL pipeline. Guess the big money and all those city girls took his mind off her.”

Chris thought fast. It was a small piece of the puzzle; someone was trying to confirm the existence of Gaetan’s child. But the inquiry had occurred in March, after Scott’s confrontation with Victor, not before.

Jim’s voice broke into his thoughts. “I think they were interested in the mine. The research was just an excuse to talk to the elders, to find someone who was close to the Lasalles. They didn’t know where the mine was, you see. I bet they were hoping we knew. They sure asked my mother enough questions about it.”