In a workshop dusty with crushed ore and tools, Belle lifted another quartzite sample and traced the thick vein with her fingertips. A propane torch lay on a wooden workbench beside picks and chippers. Following a gleam on the floor, Belle knelt to gather a bit of molten metal that had worked into a knothole, small sister to Jim’s drop. A birchbark basket on a high shelf contained a chamois bag of the fabled buttons. Even at two or three ounces each, a slim reward for such painstaking work. Franz had been a busy and patient man to finance his sister’s hospital stay with this laborious process. How far was Bonanza from the cabin? The topo read two to three miles, yet where else would this heavy ore have come from in a place where snowmobiles or small quads were the only transportation? And how many well-timed and cautious trips had been made to run his cottage industry? She filled her hands with the buttons, warm, sensual, atavistic delights. Gadz, she was turning into Zasu Pitts, she laughed nervously. Soon she would be rolling in them on the bed. In her absorption, she didn’t hear the door open, or the footsteps enter.
TWENTY
In the frosty silence of the room, a gravelled throat cleared. “Belle. I didn’t want it to be you.” She wheeled and stumbled, letting the buttons roll on the wooden floor, the elation from her discovery giving way to a palpable fear. “No classes today, a bad cold and laryngitis. Mother had gone to town, and I couldn’t focus on my research, just sat looking out the window. You drove by my island so fast, so unlike you, this haste. A clear purpose in mind. Perhaps that drop told you its golden story. I trailed you, hoping that you might be heading to the Burians’ lodge or to Jim’s camp. I walked the last hundred yards. The cedars hold secrets well.” His red and rheumy eyes fell softly on the buttons. “Lovely, aren’t they?”
Belle would have felt more confident if she hadn’t seen the large pistol in his right hand. “Luger,” he said, a catch to his voice. “My father’s. Canada is not a land of handguns. A classic example of German design, form and function. And it never failed him in the war. I have always kept it oiled and clean out of the same reverence for workmanship.” He brushed its muzzle with his lips, then motioned her to a wicker chair in the main room.
“Why did you kill Jim?” Belle asked, dropping onto the hard cushion.
“Not even a guess? You have enough of the pieces concerning my sister. That receipt which disappeared from my office.”
“That was an accident. I picked it up with my books.”
He coughed as he waved off her confession. “Of no concern now. You traced the hospital, of course.”
“What happened to Eva?”
“Why do I have a feeling that you already know? Still, if you insist on playing the innocent. It’s an old story. She became pregnant and in the fourth month had a miscarriage. There is some question in my mind that it was not an accident, that she used my mother’s herbs. Tansy, for example, is a historical abortifacient. Even the common yew. Whatever the cause, it was traumatic. Eva is a gentle spirit, wished from childhood so much to please, but guilt overcame her small soul. After the pain was over . . .” He sat down heavily in the other chair. “It flows through in my nightmares in a red tide, all her precious blood. She became catatonic, you see. That beautiful, intelligent girl couldn’t even communicate her basic needs. All she did was sing one of Mother’s old lullabies and rock herself. When she wasn’t sleeping for most of the day.” His voice broke.
“Why didn’t you get her treated here? Or in Toronto? Why all the trouble and expense of going to the States?”
“Do you know the number of psychiatrists in the North? When she fell ill, Sudbury was down to three practices. She would have been lucky to be a faceless number in a weekly group therapy session with a dozen other needy souls. Do not be naïve about a two-tier medical system. It’s here already for those who can afford it. And I can. I bought the best doctors and the latest techniques. With our prayers she’ll be home soon.”
“Home to what, Franz? To find her brother a murderer? And are you implying that Jim was the father? That’s absurd!”
He forced an ironic laugh. “Perhaps an improvement on his more bitter fate. Let me explain. Eva was a delicate child, asthmatic, sheltered. She attended a convent school in Ville Marie for most of her education. Even when she came home for the summer, isolated as we are on the island, social activities were few, not that she cared to make friends. Mother became concerned and sought to break into that solitude by enrolling her at Shield.”
“And Jim?” It occurred to her that Franz was moving all too circuitously, using his consummate logic to avoid the truth. Belle was piecing the story together herself, much too fast and much too late.
“Jim was the first friend she found, and she became instantly infatuated. He was scarcely her equal, for all his country knowledge. And that scarred face.” Belle narrowed her eyes and felt a dull rage rise in her heart as he continued without apparently noticing. “From spending most of her life immersed in novels, knowing nothing of the realities of life, Eva took matters of the heart seriously. She was an inveterate romantic like our sensitive young Werther. A first terrible love, an equally terrible rejection. Yes, she tried every sad ploy her old-fashioned books advised, poetry, flowers, invitations. I saw them and wept inside, tried to tell her the lessons we all learn, that there will always be another love. When he didn’t respond, even avoided her, she went into a serious depression. Why didn’t he see how fragile she was?”
“I’m not following you, Franz.”
He was shaking, crying without tears. “She was a sister, a child, all things to me. I tried to comfort her, one night when Mother was away . . .”
“And then?” Belle saw the danger of pressing him too far.
He shuddered, his face pale and clammy, drained by pain. “A scandal would have killed my mother. Eva was her little saint. You saw that shrine. My mother believes the father was Jim, and I have left it that way for all our sakes. It is a shame which will not happen again.”
“And the gold?”
He nodded and slumped his shoulders, letting the gun fall into his lap. “For twenty years, my father had been searching the Bonanza third shaft, hidden in the woods, protected so handily by poison ivy. After he retired, he became obsessed with locating the vein. He told me where he thought the gold might be, but before he found it, he died of a stroke. I continued his work in a desultory fashion, more as a pastime, always careful to brace the timbers and wear a mask in case of fumes from the rotting wood. And about three years ago, after that small earthquake in Quebec, a rock shift here revealed the vein like a timely miracle. I spend the winter refining what I have found in summer. No tracks that way. The vein is almost mined out, but the gold has saved my sister.”
Belle remembered the earthquake. Centred near Chicoutimi, it had struck with evil happenstance the day after her foundation had been laid. “Now I see why you fought the park. Less chance of being observed.”
He bristled as if insulted. “Not at all! Why would I have wanted this land despoiled by such a commercial operation? All of my efforts have been based on a sincere and rational opposition. When Eva comes home soon, I will leave the rest of the metal to heaven where it belongs.”
“Perhaps you should have left the whole situation to heaven. You’ve told me your twisted reasons for killing Jim. But why wait so long? Eva’s been away for over a year.”
“Quite so. After his insensitivity had plunged her into a depression, I let him pursue