Stormy Cove (6 page)

She put her camera aside, wanting to help him load the sled, but he waved her off.

“Your clothes will get covered with resin, and your gloves.”

He gestured at the dark spots on his jacket.

“People used to seal up their cuts with resin.”

Lori looked down at herself. Her clothes were too impractical, too fashionable for Stormy Cove life.

“Is there a Salvation Army store somewhere? With used clothing?”

“Sally Ann?” Noah shook his head. “We never buy secondhand clothing.”

He threw a chunk of wood onto the sled.

“We’re not poor.”

She felt misunderstood.

“It’s no disgrace in Vancouver to buy used clothing. People are happy when they find a unique or particularly inexpensive piece of clothing.”

He gave her a look of disapproval. “You don’t look like you shop at the Sally Ann, my dear.”

“Then how
do
I look? High-end?”

At that moment, they heard the sound of a motor growing louder and louder. A snowmobile came roaring through the trees and stopped at their sled. The driver looked not yet forty and wore a blue-and-white tuque instead of a helmet. He leaned back on his vehicle with arms folded.

“So you’re goin’ to be famous after all, eh, Noah?” he shouted, eyeing Lori’s camera.

Noah’s brow clouded over. He turned his face away and bent down.

“You’ve come at the right time, Ches. This pile’s been waiting just for you. Like to tackle it?”

“You got some help already. Isn’t that enough?” Ches laughed and looked at Lori. There was something mischievous about him. “We haven’t met, but I’m your neighbor. Name’s Ches. I’m the house on the left.”

Lori pricked up her ears. “With three moose antlers in the gable?”

“Right. You’ll have to look in soon. Patience, my wife, would like to meet you. She’s a midwife.”

“There must be some misunderstanding,” Lori responded. “I’m not pregnant.”

Ches hesitated for a second, and Noah didn’t move.

Lori smirked. “Sorry, my sense of humor takes some getting used to.”

Ches laughed again. “Watch out! Newfies make jokes all the time. Mostly about ourselves. Didn’t Noah tell you? Or is he still a man of few words?”

Noah thumped a log onto the sled. “You do enough talking for two, Ches. You got your firewood in yet?”

“Lots of time still, my friend. I’m goin’ fishin’. Nothin’ better than a trout on a plate. Have you ever gone ice fishin’?” he asked Lori.

She shook her head.

“Drop by on your way back. We’re on the pond over there.” He pointed at the horizon. “Makes a good picture.”

He started his motor.

“Bring her over, buddy. She’s gotta learn how to fish.”

Noah raised his chain saw and pointed it at Ches.

“She’s already caught a fish, can’t you see?”

Ches laughed and got his snowmobile rolling.

Noah’s chain saw began screeching again.

Lori stomped through the snow to a tree stump, its roots reaching up to the sky like a sculpture. A clamorous blue jay flew over, and another. Lori took some pieces of an oatmeal bar out of her pocket and held them out in her hand. The birds landed on it and took off with their booty.

The chain saw fell silent. Noah rubbed his damp forehead.

“Those birds are lucky,” he said.

“You are too,” she said, holding out a sandwich she’d packed.

They leaned against the snowmobile and ate in silence.

“You don’t like Ches?” she inquired.

“Oh, I’ve got nothing against him,” Noah’s voice sounded too nonchalant.

“I sort of got the impression he bugs you.”

Noah cleared his throat.

“Problem with Ches is he’s got too much time on his hands. His wife has a job and he . . . like I said, he’s got lots of time. He noses around too much.”

“He noses around? What do you mean by that?”

Noah muttered something unintelligible. Lori waited. She was good at it. Photography was 80 percent waiting.

Noah lifted the snowmobile seat up, took out a can of soda, and offered it to Lori. She politely declined.

“Best if you don’t tell him much. He doesn’t have to know everything.”

Noah could have saved his breath. She’d never divulge much about herself to anybody in Stormy Cove, but she couldn’t tell him that.

“I’ll be friendly with everybody,” she said. “I’m a stranger here and want a beautiful book to come out of this.”

Noah emptied his can and wiped his mouth with his hand.

“Absolutely right. Can’t afford to have enemies in a small place. At some point, you’ll need help, and you can’t pick and choose your helpers. Everybody’s friendly with one another.”

But things fester below the surface,
she thought to herself.

It was clear that they wouldn’t be stopping on the pond to see Ches. She’d have to take pictures of ice fishing later. Lots of time for that.

She definitely didn’t want to spoil her rapport with Noah.

CHAPTER 8

She was shivering as she went into her house. She turned up the living room thermostat, just as Selina Gould had shown her. Cletus’s house must have been one of the few buildings in Stormy Cove without a traditional wood stove or fireplace. That was fine by Lori. She had ugly memories of a fireplace fire. She made coffee and carried it with her through the small rooms as if she had to announce her presence. She sat down on the bed in the front bedroom. A strange house, but at least she could do anything she wanted with the place. The inhabitants of Stormy Cove probably wondered how she managed to move in without any compunction. Even Aurelia, the nice librarian she called by her first name, had asked her about it yesterday. Lori merely shrugged. Ghosts didn’t scare her; it was people that made her fearful. People she couldn’t avoid.

Volker hadn’t breathed a word about people like them when she’d met him fifteen years ago. He’d come to Vancouver for three weeks to improve his English, but found it more exciting to wander around the city day after day. Lori nearly put an end to that plan when she almost ran him over with her bicycle in Stanley Park. Volker had the presence of mind to save himself by jumping onto the lawn next to the bicycle path. He later confessed that he’d fallen in love with her as she breathlessly explained the difference between bicycle and pedestrian paths.

Volker seldom played by the rules, as she learned on their trips together, which were almost always on assignment for a photo story, and frequently arduous. Nevertheless, they got along famously, and a notion grew in Lori’s mind:
if we can travel together so well, we must be meant for each another.
She paid him a visit in Germany, in his attic rooms in Heidelberg; then he went back to Vancouver, and they were secretly married two months later.

Lori’s mother felt deceived, particularly after she found out that Lori was supporting them both because Volker, a German physiotherapist, couldn’t find work in Canada. Volker grew more and more dissatisfied, and so they decided to move to Germany. Lori threw up on the plane: she was twenty-four years old and pregnant.

Never would she forget the day Volker’s best friend, Franz, invited them to the country estate that had been in Franz’s family for two hundred years. Franz had offered to let them live there until they found a place of their own. Lori had no inkling that Volker planned on staying put. And another thing she didn’t know: Franz, his wife Rosemarie, and their four children shared the huge farmhouse with six drug addicts that they, as practicing Christians and trained therapists, were attempting to bring back to the straight and narrow. Lori didn’t find out about any of it until she was sitting in the communal kitchen, a huge room with a long table, fourteen chairs, a grand piano, and a stone fireplace with a fire in it.

Stairs led from the kitchen to the bedrooms. Franz and Rosemarie had a large private room with a TV. Not Volker and Lori. Their bedroom was small and cramped. The people in therapy slept on mattresses in several rooms. They were between sixteen and thirty. Volker criticized Lori for always locking the door to their room. He said you have to trust the patients, that’s part of their therapy. From then on, she carried her passport and credit card in a slim tummy belt under her clothes, as if she were traveling in foreign lands.

Lori’s role was quickly spelled out. She was to cook every other day for the residential community. The refrigerator and gas stove were much too small by Canadian standards, not to mention for the number living in the house. Lori found it stifling to have so many people around her all the time. She could see an orchard and a chicken coop out her bedroom window—not really places to take refuge. Volker and Franz, on the other hand, would frequently withdraw to a hidden clubroom in the attached barn and smoke hash.

Lori spoke English, French, Spanish, but not a word of German. Plus, she didn’t have a work permit, so she occasionally assisted other photographers under the table. Otherwise, she was—and the German word is so felicitous—a hausfrau.

At first, she fought back. She demanded more privacy and space for their baby. Volker promised they’d build another addition on the barn and live there. But in exchange, she’d have to acquiesce to his wish to have their little family stay on the farm. She was in the late stages of pregnancy, exhausted, isolated, and without the strength to refuse. Andrew was born, and he brought some light into her life. But the barn expansion dragged on for months, and Lori’s hoped-for nursery was long in coming. Volker opened his own practice in a small town a half hour’s drive away. He left early in the morning and came home late at night.

Lori was lonely. She thought maybe if she assimilated more, everything would be easier. She took German lessons from an old teacher in the next village, traveling almost two miles on her bicycle. And she cooked not only for the people in the house, but for the construction workers as well. The constant construction racket really got on her nerves. She missed her mother and friends in Vancouver. And her work. It was difficult to communicate with the people she was living with. Lori felt cut off from community events, but she tried her best. And everybody adored little Andrew. She was relieved to see that her baby was comfortable. Things would turn out all right.

She sometimes looked after the neighbors’ children. Once, she staged a powwow for ten children; after all, she knew how much Germans admired Native Canadian and American cultures. Everybody stamped their feet on the floor while Lori played indigenous music she’d brought from Vancouver. The kids thought it was marvelous. Suddenly, shock-faced mothers appeared.

“They thought I had a screw loose,” she told Volker that night.

“You don’t have to exaggerate” was his reply.

The German mothers didn’t entrust their kids to Lori after that episode. To their mind, Lori was more dangerous than the junkies.

Then Lori began to dream in German, which frightened her. Who was she becoming?

One night when Volker was off at a conference, she was sitting in the newly finished recreation room in the barn, and looked up through the big new skylight at the full moon overhead. Andrew was asleep in his cradle. The door to the next room was filled with building materials and had been left open to let in cool air. Then there was a sudden flickering in her eyes. A white apparition in the dark of the next room. She clearly saw it move. And vanish.

Mesmerized, she sat on the edge of the sofa, looked out the window, and meditated. A flash of inspiration made her ask the apparition a question: What purpose does my life in Germany have?

That’s when the skylight exploded.

It was expensive, brand-new, recently installed.

It was two in the morning, and Lori, hysterical, ran to the main house with Andrew in her arms. Rosemarie was still awake in the kitchen, doing the accounts. She tried to calm Lori down, rocked her like a child. But for Lori, the message was clear:
I’ve got to get out of here!

Nobody could explain the explosion. Lori paid for a new skylight out of her savings.

Then the Katja tragedy.

That was the beginning of the end. Her mother arrived in Germany three weeks later.

A noise. A click at the door. Soft footsteps in the kitchen. Chair legs scraping on linoleum. She could even hear breathing.

She cracked open the door of the little room where she’d chosen to sleep. She’d felt uncomfortable in the larger room, where Cletus had died.

She instinctively reached for her cell phone—you never know—but then realized there was no reception in the house.

She picked up her tripod. She’d used it in Vancouver to ward off a petty thief trying to snatch a camera from her bag.

“Hello?” a high voice called.

A child.

Dropping the tripod onto the bed, Lori opened the door. A little girl was staring at her, bug-eyed, more curious than timid. A pink hairband with purple plastic flowers on it held back her frizzy hair. Pink, too, were the socks she was wearing, her ski jacket, and the stripes on her gray sweatpants. She was perhaps six. Even her cheeks had a pink glow.

Lori put on her cheerful voice. “Hello! And who have we here?”

“I’m Molly.” The girl looked past her into the room. “What are you doing in there?”

“That’s where I sleep.” She shut the door behind her and walked into the kitchen. “My name’s Lori. Where do you live?”

The girl pointed to the floor. “Are you living here now?” she asked.

“Yes, for a while. So you’re my neighbor, Molly?”

The front door opened again and a noise came from the stairwell. A woman with Molly’s round face appeared. She’d removed her shoes, apparently the custom in Stormy Cove.

“Hello, I’m Patience.” Ches’s wife. The midwife.

“Her name’s Lori, Mommy,” Molly shouted. “I’m her neighbor.”

Lori smiled. “The little tyke’s pretty smart.”

“I hope she won’t keep coming over. You’re probably not used to having people bursting in on you.”

Patience was plump but well proportioned. Lori estimated her age in the midthirties. She’d colored her hair with green, pink, and blue stripes in strong contrast to her otherwise homely appearance.

Patience led Lori and Molly into the living room as if she were right at home.

“I haven’t been in here for a long while. Not much has changed . . . I mean, in the room.” She looked around. “The photos are gone, of course. Selina probably took them down.”

“Were you and Cletus’s wife good friends?” Lori inquired.

Molly had climbed up on a stuffed armchair. Her mother stroked her daughter’s hair.

“Sweetie, why don’t you run and get your new doll so you can show it to Lori?”

Molly didn’t have to be told twice. The door slammed, and Patience took a deep breath.

“Una sometimes took care of Molly when I was called out for a birth. I’m a midwife, you know.”

“Right. Your husband told me,” Lori said.

Patience seemed puzzled.

“Ches? Where did you meet Ches?”

“I was in the woods with Noah, cutting down trees. He took me on his snowmobile.”

“Oh, with Noah . . . you must really have charmed him. He doesn’t normally thaw out so fast.” A smile flickered over her chubby face.

Lori changed the subject rapidly. She didn’t want people to get the wrong impression.

“You must miss having a nice neighbor like Una.”

“Oh sure. We often had a cigarette and a rum together when the men couldn’t see us.” She studied Lori’s face for a reaction. “When I was pregnant I stopped smoking, of course. Una worked in the fish plant before they shut it down. After that, she was bored a lot. Poor thing had too much time on her hands.”

Lori remembered that Noah had said the same thing about Ches. How ironic that most people in Vancouver complained they had too
little
time.

“So she vanished into thin air, and nobody’s heard a thing since?”

Patience looked around the room some more, as if retrieving memories.

“Nobody. They said on TV that this happens more frequently than people think. That people who disappear want to start a new life.”

“Did Una tell you about her plans?”

Patience pursed her lips.

“She didn’t tell me much of anything. I didn’t even know at first that she’d left.”

She gestured at the camera on the table.

“So you’re here to photograph us? Do you ever do family sessions?”

Family photo shoots? Why not? She could win over the people in Stormy Cove that way.

“Yes, of course, that’s all part of it. I . . .”

The front door banged.

“
Mommy
, Granny came over and Uncle Archie!”

Patience straightened her sleeves.

“You’ll have to meet Archie soon. He’s Noah’s uncle, and I’m Noah’s second cousin. Archie’s like a father to us all. Noah’s dad and my dad were killed fishing.”

She turned around to look at Lori again before going downstairs.

“It’s good if you meet Archie. But not today, he’s not in the mood to talk. A polar bear broke into his coop and ate all the chickens.”