Diamond’s last evening melted into a clear and warm night with the stars crowding the sky in a pointillistic masterpiece. He lay sprawled on his sleeping bag, belly full of beans, outstretched in front of the dying embers of the fire with Paulie nestled in the crook of his arm. His head was propped up on an old canvas pack, and he breathed in the smell of ten days of grime and soot, sweat, bug dope, cedar, woodsmoke, triumph, and the river’s sweat on his clothes and in his mind.
A rustle in the woods made him roll his head lazily to one side and glance into the darkness beyond the golden circle of his campfire. Something was moving quietly through the underbrush. Paulie stirred beside him in her sleep.
“Just a coon, Paulie. You afraid of coons, girl?” The cat stretched out and burrowed up into his armpit, but didn’t wake up. Diamond laughed uneasily and scanned the woods again.
“All right, girl, maybe it’s something bigger than a coon.” He scratched the cat behind her ears and gently extricated himself, watching her as she whimpered in her dreams. He’d never known her to be so tired that his touch failed to wake her up. He reached over for his backpack and brought it back into the warm circle of firelight, aware that he was strangely groggy and that sleep was stalking him in the way it does after a hard day of physical labour. He unbuckled an outer pocket and withdrew the flare gun he used to fend off the occasional curious bear.
“This ought to make you feel better.” He caressed the fine black fur, but still the little cat didn’t stir. It made Diamond unsettled to see her so far away, and he suddenly felt very alone. He hefted the metal gun in his hand before cocking it and propping it inside his running shoe. He placed it ready, near his right hand. Its presence stilled a growing uneasiness that puzzled him more for its persistence than for anything else.
It was the distant thunder that woke Diamond, or perhaps it was the wind, now wailing through the trees overhead. Perhaps it was neither. The fire was dead, the bleak, black embers as cold as they had been warm. The wind had whipped the ashes around the clearing and there was a fine dusting on his clothes. His head was heavy and his limbs felt like lead pipes. He must have slept deeply to feel so groggy, like the heavy-headed feeling after an unearned afternoon nap, he thought. Diamond lay listening to the thunder, collecting his thoughts, sticky as molasses. The quiet between the distant thunderclaps and gusts of wind felt strangely ominous, as if the quiet was trying to tell him something. How long had he been asleep?
He saw that the crescent moon had moved through the sky and there were thunderclouds scudding past it, chasing themselves across its blinkered eye. As they darted across the moon, snuffing it out, it became eerily dark in the woods. He sat up slowly. He could hear the rapids in the distance, and he could smell the dampness of the water mixing with the pungent odour of the cedars and the cloying smell of fish, and something else. What? He shivered, held his breath, and listened to that endless, wild silence. The feeling of unease grew in him like a dull, gnawing pain, slowly coalescing into the first stirrings of fear.
“Goddammit, Diamond,” he said. “Pull yourself together. You’re acting like Paulie. Afraid of your own shadow.”
He reached out his hand for the comfort of the little cat and stiffened. There was no warm, friendly little body curled up next to him.
“Paulie?”
His voice hit the quiet of the woods like a hammer on granite, hardly denting or scratching the silence all around him. It sounded dead, flat, alone.
“Paulie?” he called again.
There was no familiar scrambling of little feet, no warm, wet snout nuzzling his hand, no purring, nothing. Diamond felt around with his hands, sure Paulie must have rolled away from him in her sleep. No Paulie.
Slowly, carefully, he reached for his flare gun, silently groping in the darkness for his running shoe. His hand gripped the familiar outline and followed the sole along to the tongue. The shoe was empty. He groped all around, like a blind man, tapping his fingers amongst the carpet of cedar twigs, but there was nothing.
“What the hell?” he whispered, jerking his head up to scan the woods around him.
A twig snapped nearby, then there was a slight rustling in the trees. Diamond turned to face the sound.
“Paulie?”
For an instant the moon came out from behind a cloud, and in the woods beyond him it reflected off something shiny before skidding back behind another cloud. He stared after it, willing his eyes to see, and slowly he picked out something on the very edge of his vision, a darker smudge staining the blackness of the night, standing in the shadows of the trees, barely perceptible, upright. Too small for a bear. Human? He felt the goose-bumps rise all over his body, a cold prickle of fear rapidly building into a crescendo, overwhelming in the suddenness of its vicious grasp, rearing out of his grogginess like some nightmare. He struggled to his feet, his heart racing like the rapids, and cried out in frustration as his sleeping bag entangled his legs. When he looked again there was nothing. He waited, head cocked, listening.
“Who’s there?” His voice was caught by a gust of wind and flung into the silence, as if to the wolves. He could taste the fear now, like some unwanted sickness, clammy, unhealthy, rising like bile. He stood there scanning the trees and called out again and again, in an odd, strangled mixture of fear and anger. Nothing. Only the shadows playing tricks on him.
Too late, he sensed movement behind him and whirled. In the split second it took for the horror of what he saw to surface, he raised his hands to shield his head. The impact of the blow across his chest knocked the wind out of him and sent him sprawling onto a rock outcrop, his head glancing against the rock and stunning him as he lashed out with his arms. He felt his mind spinning out of control, weaving in and out of consciousness.
A grisly, high-pitched scream careened through the forest. He felt a sudden overwhelming weight on his chest, pushing out the air he tried to breathe in, and he knew, in a spiralling crescendo of fear and terrifying clarity, that the scream had been his.
The dull roar of the rapids merged into a roaring in his head. His mind fell into slow motion, tumbling over memories and daydreams, and the pain, the violent jabbing pain, was followed miraculously by a delicious feeling of overwhelming calm that enveloped him. Its fingers gently probed the recesses of his mind, easing the pain until, quietly, gently, like wind whispering through trees, Jake Diamond was gone.
chapter one
“I wanted to kill him,” I said, as I scrambled out onto the rocky shore and steadied the canoe. I waited for my brother to respond, but he just grimaced at me as he slowly unwound his six-foot frame and stepped out of the canoe. The water lapped gently against the gleaming silver hull, safe now in the eddy, as it nudged the rocks where I squatted impatiently. Out beyond the eddy I could see the smooth, luminous sheen of the water, stretched like cellophane almost at the ripping point, as it gathered speed and funnelled between the two tree-lined rocky shores. Somewhere around the corner and out of sight it would rip apart and splinter into thousands of ragged shards of white boiling water — just as my life sometimes threatened to do, I thought.
The canoe suddenly jerked toward me as Ryan hauled out the first of our packs and, grunting, dumped it unceremoniously on the rocks beside me.
“Leave it alone can’t you, Cordi?” he groaned. “You’re like a dog with an old bone, slobbering and chewing on it even though there’s nothing left.” When I didn’t answer he sighed and said, “We’ve gone over it a thousand times. So he’s a jerk. It’s past. Over. Done with. Finito. For God’s sake, let it die.”
As if to underline his words he stooped and flicked the bow painter at me, then went to secure the canoe with the stern line. He was right, of course, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind because I knew I should have said something to the suave bastard. I’d been checking the glass tanks that housed my frogs in the zoology building where I worked as an assistant professor when Jim Hilson quietly materialized behind me and