The River Burns (33 page)

In two cars, the three of them drove down to inspect the area where the bridge once stood and stared out across that vacant gulf. Nothing pertinent remained to be examined, but the newcomers grasped the dimensions of the space. By looking over Mrs. McCracken's photographs, they appreciated the magnitude of the fire.

“Who was first on the scene?” Maltais inquired.

Although he expected the question, Ryan chose not to answer on the spot. Both SQ officers looked at him and he wanted that, their interest. He was courting their curiosity to help him guide their progress.

“You don't know?” Vega checked with him. Notwithstanding a kindliness to his voice, he expressed disappointment in Ryan's silence.

The three men moved away from Mrs. McCracken to converse in private. At their backs, by the train station, the steam locomotive puffed away, having arrived a while ago. Passengers were still organizing to take the shore path, then scale a short hill through the trees to the site. Ryan warned the officers to expect that parade—Maltais resented that a crime scene was now a tourist attraction.

“One of my officers got here early that night,” Ryan recalled. “Second on the scene maybe. One other man was here before him. Forgot his name. He's not somebody well known in this town. My officer will remember.”

“You didn't interview that one other man?”

“Me? My officer talked to him. At the time, things were chaotic.”

“I'm sure. Since then?” Vega inquired.

“Not my case,” Ryan reminded him. “If I interview people ahead of time, that might contaminate your investigation, no?”

The officers agreed with that but seemed disgruntled also.

“About that,” Vega said.

“We don't get this,” Maltais confirmed.

“What don't you get?” Ryan asked. But he knew.

“Why ask the SQ to take over the case? You can't get that many big-ticket crimes up here. I'd think you'd put up roadblocks to keep us out.”

Ryan prolonged his silence, which further secured their attention. Fish on a hook.

“What?” Maltais pressed impatiently.

“A rumour's flying around town,” Ryan told him. “You'll hear it. It's not based on anything. I'm not aware of any witnesses. It's only hearsay. A guy mentioned as a potential perpetrator—”

Ryan let his report hang in the air awhile.

“Yeah?” Vega prodded.

“—is my brother.” Ryan raised his hands. “Conflict of interest. If I don't get him convicted, people will think I let him get away with something. That he's innocent won't enter their heads. If I convict him . . . let's say that I agree with most folks. I'm not the person to do that.”

“So is he innocent?” Vega inquired.

Ryan deflected the question. “It's like I said, I'm not investigating the case. I didn't ask him.”

“Why do people think differently?” Maltais wanted to know.

“He's a logger. Probably one of their leaders. Loggers want a new bridge. They were frustrated it didn't get built. That's well known.”

“So they had a reason to burn the bridge,” Vega noted, and nodded. He seemed to have the background. “Your brother included.”

“My brother—his name is Denny—he fought for a new bridge through legal channels. Guys like him, in my estimation, aren't the hotheads who turn into arsonists. So I'm guessing it was someone else. Someone with his own reasons. Someone who's got a criminal streak in him. There's a lot of loggers in this town and some of those guys are hotheads. My brother? He's a worker, a family man, he's never committed a crime. I don't see why he would now.”

The cops nodded. They could see his predicament, caught between family and the local population.

“Makes sense,” Maltais mentioned. “I'm going to ask this little old lady over here, see if she has an opinion on the subject.”

“Fair warning. Don't call her that.”

“What?”

“Neither little nor old.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

The other two tagged along behind him.

Mrs. McCracken was pleased to show her photographs again, to give them a detailed visual account of the fire. When asked who she thought was involved, she declared that the only possibility was outsiders.

“Why's that?” Maltais asked her.

“It's simple. Even a logger who wanted a new fast bridge, even that man grew up here. Any man who grew up here adored the bridge. Ask him, the policeman, if he didn't love the old covered bridge.”

Nodding his chin, she virtually forced Maltais to do so.

“Officer O'Farrell,” he asked, speaking to him in English for the first time, “were you in love with the old covered bridge?”

Ryan admitted that that was probably true. “Kissed my first girl on it.” A reply that seemed to seal the deal.

“Do you think his brother loved the bridge?” Maltais asked.

“Ryan?” Mrs. McCracken queried.

“I'm Ryan,” Ryan said. “He means Denny.”

“Of course! If anyone loved that bridge it was Denny!”

“How do you know that, ma'am?”

“He was a student of mine. I know him! Once a year I conducted a class right on the bridge, a field trip for my grade twos. Everybody loved that bridge. Everybody! Except,” she reconsidered, “obviously, an outsider. A malcontent. A n'er do well.”

They thanked her for her contribution.

Ryan was about to lead them away when he noticed Detective Vega separate off to stand on the ridge above the water. He seemed transfixed, staring upriver, in a distant daydream. He craned his neck in an expression of curiosity and befuddlement.

Ryan called to him. “Quique?”

“What the hell is that?” Detective Vega shouted back.

Ryan returned up the hill a short distance to gain the same perspective, while the other cop, Maltais, chugged along as well, willing to move when he felt an urgency to do so. The two stood beside Vega, each man trying to make sense of a perplexing sight. Ryan O'Farrell broke their silence by swearing, but he could no more explain what he saw than could the visiting cops.

A weird floating contraption, its base burying itself in the rise and fall of the river so that it resembled the rear of a dilapidated city tenement more than any houseboat, a squat tower churning in the waves, tore away from rocks lining the opposite bank into which it collided and, spinning in a prodigious circular motion, plunged down the slope of the rapids.

Across the deck skidded items only loosely lashed down while belts and ropes bound a jostling array of percussive pots, pans, and thudding
things—
clothes and suitcases and battered furniture, toys and sports equipment, tools and half-executed carvings and sculptures—as fruits bashed about in slings and tormented chains thrashed sundry bicycle parts and internal combustion engines in whole or in ruptured chunks, while other debris, wrested free from their pins, plopped into the water to either disappear or to accompany the tower, swaying, heeling, careening down the rapacious current.

Initially, the fellow on deck appeared to be in charge, a captain of this tenuous ship, hustling to get a single long oar to break the water's surface and effect some modicum of steerage, but that proved a short-lived assessment. The man was thrown about himself, once right off the edge into the drink and only a quick grab of a fortuitous rail—an upright crankshaft embedded in the deck—kept him attached, and he pulled himself back up only to be slammed into the side wall of the vessel's three-storey cabin by a sudden, violent lurch. He reached for a line that inadvertently caused a tangle of rope to land on his noggin. By this point the barge entered the full chaos of the churning rapids, its viability and balance in doubt, and while trying to extricate himself the man veered on his bottom and crashed headfirst into the remnant of a six-cylinder motor that was sliding along more slowly. He was sufficiently stunned to spend the next several seconds attending to his wound before he was catapulted forward as the raft slammed into the quiet water at the base of the drop and its pell-mell thrust was suddenly aborted. A big wave rose up around the raft, and the floating barge settled while the intrepid captain hung on. Down on his knees, he clutched a cast-iron house radiator, and as it became apparent that he'd conquered the wildest section of the river, he drifted down to a prone position on deck, let his arms fall freely, and just lay there, bleeding.

Both SQ officers looked to Ryan O'Farrell to check his reactions.

“That guy,” he said. “On the deck.”

“Yeah?” Maltais asked.

“That's him, I think. Pretty sure. First guy to the fire. Same guy.”

The current held the raft—and they saw now that it was intended to serve as a raft—in its influence. Attracting a crowd along the riverbank, including many disembarking from the steam train, the vessel ambled downriver conning the shoreline. An elderly person in a walker could move equally as fast. Mrs. McCracken, up for a better view having missed the action, travelled more quickly than the boat.

The SQ officers exchanged a nod, which Ryan encouraged. “I never saw that he had motive before,” he said. “Now I do.”

“What these eyes have plainly seen,” Mrs. McCracken stated, and the men concurred with the sentiment. “What I've observed go down this river in recent days,” she added, and they agreed with that unfinished remark as well.

“Gentlemen,” the local officer announced, “you can come along or excuse me, but I'm off to see what's up with that houseboat.”

The men chose to tag along.

“You call that a house?” Mrs. McCracken scoffed as they readied to depart. “Not I. Do you call it a boat? I cannot. If it's not a boat and it's not a house, how can you call it a houseboat?”

Ryan indulged her. He spoke over his shoulder. “What do you want to call it then?” Stopped at his car, he awaited her reply.

She thought the question through. “To call it an eyesore is to pay that contraption an unnecessary compliment, one it clearly does not deserve,” she declared. “Plain and simple, it's an aberration. If anything should be burned on the river . . . If you have half the brain I think you do, Officer O'Farrell”—she turned away to gaze out over her beloved ravine, perhaps affected still by the missing bridge and seeking, on some level, revenge for that—“sink it.”

■   ■   ■

Her freshly baked pies were
cooling nicely upon her return to the quiet of her home. Mrs. McCracken decided against taking a lemon meringue into the late-afternoon sun—it might go squishy, soaking the bottom crust. Her apple crumbles would be fine, packaged in boxes for transport on the slow train.

Things were not going as splendidly as hoped. Not a single passenger made it up to the old entrance to the vanished bridge today, compelled instead to watch a ridiculous floating contrivance get lassoed off the town's riverbank and pulled ashore. So her petition did not fare well. Still, later on, the attraction of pies and lemonade ought to draw people to her stand. “The day,” she whispered to Buckminster, “remains to be salvaged.”

She was feeling, after giving her cat a brushing and a treat, then settling back into her chair, in need of salvage herself. After taking an uncomfortable turn, she elected to struggle up from her spot and over to the sofa, where, should the need arise, she could spread out. Catnap. She set the alarm clock kept handy for such occasions so as not to oversleep, and when her queer intestinal queasiness developed into dizziness and an odd attitude down her limbs, she concluded that she was in for a wee spell. She extended her limbs. She would give herself a good lie-down.

“I've earned it,” she declared.

Soon she felt better. Anxiety dissipated.

“Inner ear, my Buck,” she informed the cat, her diagnosis for the day. She did not suspect that he shared her worry, but he came over to ensconce himself alongside her forearm, an intimacy she welcomed. “That one came on quickly, dear,” she informed him. “A wee nap, as we know, is the best remedy for whatever ails these old bones.”

She did nap, and fell asleep both quickly and deeply. When her alarm sounded in an hour it seemed too soon, and a long way off, and she took a while to respond to her cue. Mrs. McCracken opened her eyes and surveyed the space. She noticed Buck across the room, that rather than nap himself he was keeping a watchful eye on her from his favoured chair. She tried, but failed, to get up. She fully intended to be cross with herself and with her predicament, but discovered that she was unable to speak. The incessant alarm annoyed her no end. She shut her eyes, thinking that a further moment of quiet might help. She again felt somewhat queer, and again failed to speak when she tried. She knew what this might mean. That conclusion instigated an intense moment of panic, of terror, which she brushed aside as quickly as it advanced. She reminded herself that she was a strong person who held herself to a high standard in the face of calamity. She told herself that if this was that dreaded thing, then this was it, and she might as well face whatever came next. A stroke might kill her, but it might not, and she must ready herself for either alternative. She wondered who might be by to see to her. Might she be missed? And then, finally, and it seemed that she was never able to fully achieve this moment before, or not for some time, she relaxed. She let that endless fretting dissipate, just go.

She might have been pleased to know that, since she didn't supply Potpourri
with pie that morning, Tara Cogshill ventured out to visit her stand by the train platform. When Mrs. McCracken still did not arrive, Tara suffered an inkling, and the walk was a short one over to her home. She knocked on the outside screen. The cat meowed. Tara went in. She saw the elderly woman on the sofa and heard no sound. She wanted to call Ryan, to have him check on her. It's not as though she ever . . . but she pushed the thought away. She called out to her, softly at first, then more firmly. Mrs. McCracken appeared to be sleeping, eyes closed, one hand up under her jaw for support. Tara went over and touched the woman's cheek. Instantly, her hand jerked away. Then she let it rest on the old woman's temple. Her friend had not been gone so long. Her skin felt warmish cool. Tara would say to Ryan, after she called him to come over and wrapped Buckminster's blanket and toys and his litter tray to take him away with her, that the death must have been peaceful.