“It’s not easy to distinguish right here on my front porch sometimes.”
“I don’t suppose you were sitting here late the other night, before Clement went missing? No.”
“How late?”
“Oh hell, maybe three in the morning, thereabouts.”
“Why, Lauch?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I went down to the road. I…I thought maybe someone else was up too. I had a feeling, I guess, I…”
“Not me, my son. Nobody stops that time of night. There’s no action in this house.”
“There was action somewhere. What’s with the bicycle, Malk?”
“You know as much as I do, Lauchlin.”
W
HEN
he turned in at Clement and Tena’s, an RCMP cruiser was parked high up the drive and Arsenault was ducking underneath the yellow tape stretched across the driveway. He met Lauchlin in the shade.
“How is Tena doing?” Lauchlin glanced up at her open bedroom window through which a curtain waved.
“Not here,” Arsenault said. “The Mathesons took her into The Mines. She’ll stay with friends there.”
“She could have stayed on with my mother and me, any length of time.”
“It’s what she wanted, to get out of St. Aubin for now.”
“Jesus, I wanted to see her.” He looked at the neglected field. The wild poplar saplings seemed higher, a throng of nervous leaves. “Talk to her.”
“I’m sure you’ll get your chance.”
“Nobody thought it would come to this, losing him.”
“She took the news calmly. She didn’t expect it to be good.”
“She knows that Clement was shot?”
“Who told you he was shot?”
“Tell me if I heard wrong. I hope I did.”
“Rumours fly like birds around here. We’re piecing things together bit by bit, that’s all I can tell you.” In the sky two crows were circling like hawks. “I see a lot of those crows. Smart. They know when something’s up.”
Beyond the yellow tape the yard Lauchlin knew so well looked deserted, abandoned. “That blood we found…he was killed here then, wasn’t he?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Jesus, the son of a bitch came back here for the body with Tena upstairs, didn’t he? He took Clement to Glen Tosh and dumped him there.”
“That’s your scenario.”
“It’s more than that. My God.” But how the hell had he
done
it? When? Before Lauchlin came by? Had to be
after,
he’d driven right to their driveway, he’d looked at that house, kitchen-lit and normal as rain, the van parked, the yard arranged as always, no sign of threat or danger anywhere. Who, with ordinary sight, would have seen it differently, who
could
have? Lauchlin had no cause to go further than he did, no reason. Did he? And Tena inside the house while the shooting took place, and upstairs when the killer returned, listening to him retrieve Clement from the bloody spot he must have lain in the whole damn day. “So who are you looking for?”
“We’re narrowing it down,” Arsenault said.
“Ged Cooper, isn’t it?”
“We don’t know yet how the killer got here. Nobody seems to have seen him on the road, and he left in the fish van, no other vehicle anywhere.”
“I heard you suspect a bicycle was used. I’ve never seen Cooper on a bicycle.”
“We’re checking that out, that a bike might have been involved.”
“Where’s Cooper then?”
“Can’t say. Some think he might’ve taken to the woods, and he’s got a good head start if he has. What woods or where we don’t know yet.”
“Those?” Lauchlin gestured vaguely toward the mountain across the strait. Through the high poplars overhead a west wind rushed and swept like a breaking sea, but nothing of the mountain forest seemed to stir.
“Unlikely he’s this near. No shortage of mountains if he wants to hide in them, north or west, and he thinks he’s a bit of a mountain man, from what I’ve heard. Is that true?”
“I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“There’s no way he can get off the Island, not in a vehicle. I suppose he could steal a boat.”
“He doesn’t know boats,” Lauchlin said quickly, not entirely sure that was true but it seemed that it ought to be. He was looking back at the house, the yard, trying to see it as he had that morning. What had he
missed?
“You used to box, right?” Arsenault said. “My uncle said he saw you fight in Saint John, way back.”
“Box? Cape Breton mostly. Saint John maybe twice.”
Arsenault smiled. “Lightning Lauchlin MacLean?”
“Yeah. I thought it was funny too.”
THE ROAD WAS A BLUR
. Cooper. On that bike. Where had he got to? But you could’ve stopped him, anyone could have, Tena said. Someone whacking grass along the ditch waved at him but he barely noticed who it was. It seemed so long since he’d talked with Tena. Why hadn’t she asked him to drive her into The Mines?
Marsail and Calum have an easy affection with each other, she’ll reach over and touch his hand as they joke or reminisce. It’s affecting in a way, them married so long. Funny, I married late but that’s what I wanted, I wanted her. We’re so unlike, Lauchlin. You’ll
never settle on a wife, blind or sighted, you’ll always be a little crazed about women.
He was losing his sense of her. What blame or bitterness might she be harbouring? She did not know what he had seen, or not seen, no one did. But yet something had changed between them. Because he hadn’t been there at breakfast? She knew now what a close call she’d had that morning. And that night, the return of the van? Horrible. But Cooper didn’t
need
to kill her, she wasn’t a witness, he preferred to terrorize her, to mess with her mind. Or maybe he’d thought her irrelevant, she couldn’t see, she couldn’t act, she hadn’t wronged him. Jesus. And Clement, the poor man had walked through his house that morning like any morning. All the ordinary things he did, washing his face, dressing, eating a breakfast, and then out the door into the world as wide as ever, the way it can look here in the morning, the water beyond the trees, the sweep of the mountain. Did he give it a glance? But the fog had pulled in his vision, maybe he wasn’t looking forward anyway to starting a day in that van. Then the flat tire. He must have cursed when he noticed it. An old trick, but Clement didn’t catch it, eager to get underway without a hitch first thing in the morning. More likely to worry about a meteor flaming down than dying in his own yard. But he didn’t have a clue what hid there behind his house. In the barn, in the woods? To continue on with his life, all he needed to do was change a tire,
a tire,
and then his truck would go, again the wheels would turn, take him down the back roads, around the highways, back home, it was just a truck, the van he drove with fish, for his wages. The clap of the lug wrench, torquing the nuts. Or maybe he didn’t get that far. What he was not listening for, of course, he did not hear. And he’d never heard Lauchlin’s truck idling in the driveway at four a.m. or so. Cooper had. Could there be any doubt?
The commotion and expressions of shock in the store, the comings and goings, the parsing of news and information, the ringing phone exhausted Lauchlin even with Shane’s help. Ged Cooper was on everyone’s lips. Whether or not they’d had dealings with him, assessments
of him coursed freely through the room, old suspicions, signs of bad character noticed or missed. Lauchlin stayed on the fringes—the man in his mind looked different from the one in theirs.
After closing, he sat at the desk in the backroom, his head in his hands. Johanna had stayed up at the house all day. I don’t want to listen to the talk anymore, she told him when he brought her the bad news, I want to be alone. He fished out Frank’s letter, riffling through the thin, soiled pages.
Climbed the Chaipaval, the big hill on the Head. Keep to the sheep tracks, Calum said, they know where you won’t fall. But a squall caught me up there and I fell anyway, whacked my head on a stone. Not a bad cut but it’s swollen and bruised, pretty ugly. Worse than you looked on your worst night in the ring? Can’t say, didn’t see you, whatever night that was. Marsail wrapped me up in a big bandage, I look like the walking wounded, all I need is an old crutch. I sit by the fire, subdued by a good headache, ice in a towel clapped to my head. My hosts eye me like I’m a sad man who showed up at their door. I won’t go hiking drunk again. What’s the good of it, my mind clouded up? End up at the bottom of a gorge, splattered on the rocks. Be leaving soon. Oh Jesus, whisky and ale in the Rodel, how mellow the light was that afternoon!
Johanna was there, standing in the doorway, and Lauchlin pulled himself out of the letter. She was dressed as she might for church, in an elegant dark blue dress with a white-trimmed lapel. He hadn’t heard her come in.
“Don’t get up,” she said. “I know you’ve got your own thinking to do. But I’ll tell you about the call I got from Eddie MacCormack that runs the campground. Some people in a trailer there saw that Cooper fella, or someone awful like him, on a bicycle two nights ago. He was coming down the New Pabbay road from the
Slios.
Late, in the a.m. He went onto the highway from there and headed right toward the bridge. Now where was he coming to if not here?”
Lauchlin did not want to say yes or no. He fixed his eyes to the side of her, on a photo of Blair Richardson, poised and young, posing for a publicity shot in the Venetian Gardens gym before the
third Greaves fight, a black flashbulb shadow crouching behind him. Cooper must have pitched the bicycle in the ditch, flung it out the back of the bloodied van.
“Seems like every second person
thinks
they saw that guy, Ma. But that time of night, coming from the
Slios?
Foggy? Maybe they were smoking pot.”
“Tourists? Retired folks in trailers with little windmills on their lawns?”
“You’d have to put a gun to that man to get him on a bicycle. He’s too cranky, Ma, he’d fall over.”
“They saw him and the Mounties talked to them about it, that’s all I’m saying. I don’t know what to think anymore. It must be forty years at least since there was a murder along here. The MacColl fella up the road killed his wife.”
“Malkie said the men he worked with on the highway made up stories about his wife, that she was cheating on him.”
“He was a bit simple. He buried her in a barrel of potatoes, right there in the cellar. He smothered her, he didn’t shoot her.”
“You look nice in that dress, Ma. It suits you.” At least he was not the only one who’d seen Cooper riding, and made nothing of it.
She touched a lapel. “I’ll go back up now. I wanted the air.”
Lauchlin listened to her close the front door behind her. His mind was roiling, but he sat there trying to lay it all out, the sequence that brought Cooper and himself to the same point on the same night. Not a train of thought even, just shunts and sidings. If Cooper had started on the other side of the mountain where he lived, he’d have to have followed the Trans-Canada for a few miles before he could turn off toward Little Harbour, where he’d pick up the western end of the
Slios
road. On the Trans-Canada even at that hour of a summer night there’d have been a car here and there and a big rig or two, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have looked like a bicycle tourist, no gear or packs or anything like that, just that silly helmet. But they gave him probably
no more than a cursory look, far less even than Lauchlin’s. And why would they care anyway who he was or where he was headed? A country eccentric, a character. Once off the Trans-Can, there’d be hardly a soul on Little Harbour Road, dead-ending at the old ferry wharf. Then up the mountain road east, toward the
Slios.
Not bad going for the first couple miles, decent road, a house here and there, but when, higher, he hit the dirt and gravel it would all be his, unseen, and one hell of a way beyond. By bicycle. Lord. Easy to take a tumble on one of those high stretches, a bike light too feeble anyway to show what kind of road was jarring him, and he’d have been damned tired by then, pedalling up that grade from the west. He had to be tight as a cat, if you thought about what he was planning to do, his heart had to be going like blazes, gritting his teeth over a stony road, even when it levelled out and took him to the highway and he turned toward the bridge to St. Aubin. He might’ve come off the bike once or twice, skinned himself, cursing in the dark, he had no bike light when he passed Lauchlin a long while later. His raked skin would have burned, but if he’d been flagging a little with doubt, if fatigue had been wearing on him, it would’ve flashed away in pain, pain could do that, keep you going, goad you, in the ring or in that dark, that fog, until the awful pedalling was over. And when he pumped past Lauchlin later that night, his mission was still driving him, his breathing was ragged but still he had a rhythm to him, him and the bike, and it had lulled Lauchlin somehow so that he failed to notice the long, narrow object tied along the handlebars, which could have been anything, least of all a rifle.
A slow, grey dusk had entered the room. He stood at the back window. Light dimmed out along the mountain ridge. Down its stolid, anonymous slopes subtle greens darkened to black, took into themselves all features, textures, turned blank and depthless. Yes, you could hide in a mountain like that, for a while, and there were other mountains beyond that one. Could he find him? God, if he had any
chance, he’d be heading there right now. If Granny’s house were still standing, he could shut himself away over there, no phone, no radio, just the light of an old kerosene lamp, he’d tune himself to those woods again and set out to hunt for him. He saw her house so clearly in his mind, he could get down on the floor and tell you what the nailheads looked like, the texture of the dark varnish on the front door, the smell of a cupboard, the clatter of a doorknob, the tiny pane of amaranthine glass in the border of a front window.
Faint lightning far off, then soft rumbles of thunder. He could not think of one thing
about
that queer duck on the bicycle that said he was Cooper, the last man you’d put on a bike. However murder might come to St. Aubin, who would guess by bicycle anyway, who? You wouldn’t guess by anything really, a terrible deed like that, back here in a corner of Cape Breton, Clement known and liked, killed the way he was. But yet, Lauchlin had seen the man that night on the Ferry Road. Why would he have made any more of him than the trailer park folks? It’s no crime to look foolish on a bicycle in the middle of the night. And Lauchlin did not see
him,
not Cooper, but just a figure, a stranger, you could say that, could you not? No one could blame him for that. He wasn’t clairvoyant. He didn’t possess the
taiseacht
like his grandfather had, the second sight that might have forewarned him. And how could he have known anyway that Cooper held such hatred for Clement, lit a flame and cupped it inside himself like a candle in the wind and carried it for days while it burned, bore it fifteen hard miles, on a bicycle, for Christ’s sake, over an old road so beat-up nobody would believe it or suspect. That flame never went out, it didn’t even flicker, not even when he came out of his hiding place behind the house while Clement was changing the tire that early morning, Tena innocent in bed, content, there was not a wind big enough to extinguish that cold bit of fire, blue and steady.