Mutt looked at the list. “Likes turkey, chocolate milk, Cheetos?”
Belle waved a debit card receipt. “Pure gold. I’m going to call this in to CrimeStoppers. Maybe they can trace the number.”
As they headed for the van, she added, “This hasn’t given you a very good impression. When the heat starts up in late June, the bugs will level off. Then I’ll show both of you some great places.” Mutt laughed as she dug a blackfly out of her ear, wiping the red smear on one sleeve.
“Down south we take visitors to restaurants, art museums, plays. I suspect here it’s a favourite swamp.”
“You got it, city boy. I have one for every occasion.” She was beginning to like him. Her road needed its batteries recharged with new faces.
Near morning, Belle was dreaming of her last date with Gary. He had arrived in a white tux, wearing a carnation dyed to match her lace-and-satin Alice-blue dress with a strapless bodice and a hem just above the knees. An expert seamstress, her mother Terry had kept the extra cloth pressed in a drawer until the day she’d died. Gary presented the customary orchid corsage and pinned it to her with surprising dexterity, almost as if he had been practising. As he bent closer, she could smell the citrus of his 4711 aftershave. They walked down the stairs to his father’s black Reliant, where another couple waited, laughing in the back seat. Then a phone rang. And rang. Why didn’t someone answer their cell? She began to paw through the layers of sleep, remembering that even the car phone hadn’t been common then. Sitting up in a fog, Belle craned her neck to peer at the green digital display. 4:35. She growled an answer into the receiver. A wrong number, or a crisis with her father?
“It’s Mutt. I didn’t know . . . who else to call. Gary’s dead.”
FOUR
Belle brushed the corners of her eyes, still groggy and barely coherent, preferring childhood memories to an ugly reality. “What are you talking about? An auto accident?”
His voice fell to a whisper, and she turned up the volume on the handset. “No. The OPP called here.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t an accident.” The Ontario Provincial Police had jurisdiction over traffic outside of the Region of Greater Sudbury.
He cleared his throat, then resumed, strain apparent in the deliberate way he marshalled information. “It happened yesterday afternoon, probably about the same time we were talking. An air-ambulance helicopter was taking a kid to Toronto, flying over Bump Lake. Gary had an informal base camp there. A cooler. A little tent. Sleeping bag if he needed to stay over. They saw his canoe floating free and dropped for a closer look, then called it in. Thank God the boat was red, or it might have been hidden in the reeds. His . . . body wasn’t far away. The OPP found his wallet and university information. It took a while to track down his chairman. He gave them the new number, and they called to see if anyone else was at the address.”
These procedural details didn’t interest her. “I’m not clear on what happened. His canoe was adrift in a quiet lake? How did he drown?”
A bitter bark of a laugh surprised her. “It’s a cliché, isn’t it? Guy stands up in a boat to take a leak, overbalances, hits his head and farewell. Gary was a hell of a good swimmer, for all that mattered. We used to hit the pool at the gym every week. Olympic size. He could do laps until the place closed.”
“Was he wearing a life jacket?” she asked, knowing the answer. Few canoeists bothered with the bulky creatures unless they were travelling in white water or with children.
“Are you kidding? He told me that Bump Lake’s about as dangerous as a bathtub.”
So fast in and out of her life after so many years of absence. Was there a message here? “Is there anything I can do? What arrangements do you have to make? Where is he, uh, the—” Somehow she couldn’t imagine Gary as an it, a collection of periodic-table elements worth four dollars with inflation.
“I’m supposed to go in for the identification. The medical examiner, some doctor on rotation, will take a look at him. Then cremation, I guess. We never talked about our own plans, but for sure he hated funerals. Until the recent drug cocktails, nearly every month a friend of ours was dying of HIV/AIDS. I’ll take the ashes to one of our favourite spots on Lake Ontario, or maybe the Botanical Park in Hamilton. He loved that place.” At that, his voice broke, and she could hear quiet sobs.
“I’m so sorry about Gary. Keep me posted, Mutt.” Not long ago, she had placed her mother’s long-husbanded ashes around the rose bushes. It would be a banner year for blossoms.
Now wide awake, Belle left Freya sleeping on her sheepskin and went downstairs to boost the coffee maker, timed for 5:45. What was that old medieval verse from her lit survey? “Timor mortis conturbat me”? The fear of death confounds me. Gary’s last breath had stopped long before Miriam’s designated eighty years for a Canadian male. It was hardly fair, but she should be learning a lesson.
Taking her steaming mug to the living room, she sat in the blue velvet recliner and watched the apricot glimmers of dawn set fire to the leaden sky. A small compensation for rising early. To the northwest at the Wapiti Indian reserve, the same early flicker greeted her as it had done for years, neighbours yet strangers. Like Gary and her. Scarcely had their friendship ignited than it had guttered like a surfeited candle.
Dressing hastily in cream pants, loafers and a blue cotton sweater, she headed for the van. As she took off down the road, she saw a Prius in the Lavoie driveway. Mutt’s? She hoped he was getting some well-deserved sleep, perhaps only out of exhaustion. The first two months’ rent was paid. Would he be staying for the summer, or was that a grotesque idea?
At seven, she parked in the office lot and walked to the nearby Tim Hortons. She ordered a large coffee along with a ham-and-cheese scone, a filling bargain at less than two dollars. More customers swelled the lines, retirees prepared to nurse a cup for an hour, gossiping with chums, or working folk who blew by in minutes. “Help who’s next?” one of the counter staff asked, an efficient question which put polite Canadians on their honour not to jump the queue.
“You’re up early,” said a voice in a grey coat. Bearing his own cup plus a virtuous bran muffin without butter, Steve Davis parked his six-six frame in the opposite seat. They’d met when he’d been a young cop moonlighting on security work for Uncle Harold. Now he was a senior detective. The long-abandoned blue uniform had done more for his smooth bronze complexion and jet-black hair, courtesy of an Ojibwa background with a dram of Scot added a century ago.
“Someone died unexpectedly. Guess I wanted to get to work and stop thinking about it.” She explained the accident, wasting few words. Details were unknown at this point. She attempted a stoic shrug but felt her shoulders sag.
“Happens.” He leaned back in his seat and fixed his dark pupils on her as one expressive eyebrow rose in a question. At his temples, grey was making inroads as fast as it was leavening her red hair. “An old boyfriend of yours, you say? Never heard you mention him.”
Belle gave a wry laugh. As she shared the sorrow with her good friend, the irony of the little saga made grief secondary to reflection. “He wasn’t one of my success stories. Now I understand why. All that time out of my life and thoughts, and then he reappeared as a reinvented person. But one that I liked much better.” She explained her new perspective.
He spread his large hands, strong but gentle enough to cuddle his young daughter Heather, half-Italian and half-Cree, adopted a few years ago. “Hey, I’m with wise old Pierre. What any adult does with another in a bedroom isn’t the state’s concern. And as for the new marriage laws, who cares? Move on, world.”
Belle stirred her coffee and finished the scone, the buttered fragments dry in her mouth. She wasn’t solid enough this