“We were manning the barricade with about thirty other people. Didn’t you see it?”
I shook my head.
“It’s just up the road from the biology station. If you came by the portage, though, you’d bypass it, so I guess that’s why you never saw it. We’ve been using the biology station as a storage spot for food and other supplies.”
“Was anyone else with you who was out in the field who might have bumped into Diamond on his last day or seen something that could help me?”
“I don’t really know what you’re looking for so I can’t say. I didn’t see him. I generally prefer to do my fieldwork alone. You should check the bio station schedule, though. We have an in/out roster. Everyone signs out and signs in again when they return. We have to record where we’re going, who with, and for how long. It’s an honour system, but everybody observes it for their own safety. Besides, Davies doesn’t take kindly to wasting the budget on emergency rescue operations. They’re expensive and if they are unnecessary, well … you understand.”
“Where can I find this roster?”
“Dr. Davies keeps all the old ones in the registrar’s office. Roberta, my grad student, is helping out there this week. Someone’s sick, I think, and she needed the cash. It costs a lot to get a grad degree these days. Go ask her.”
“Who else should I talk to?”
“Diamond’s grad student, Patrick Whyte, might be able to tell you something. He sometimes went out in the field with Diamond, but I don’t think he went on this last trip. Anyway, Diamond and I weren’t that close, just work colleagues. I was far too conservative for his liking and not athletic enough. You should also speak to Leslie. They were friends once.”
His voice suddenly sounded hollow and empty.
“Look. I’m sorry. I have a load of work. Leslie’s new office is just down the hall. Diamond’s grad student is in the lab, room 205. But he won’t be there right now. He’s demonstrating a lab. But you’d better speak to Davies. He gets furious when things happen around here that he doesn’t know about.”
I stepped thankfully out of his office and went back up to see Roberta. Allenby had unnerved me and I wasn’t sure why. The tap tapping was still going on, and I popped my head around the barrier. She jumped.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, but Don said there was a roster for the biology station that I could take a look at.”
“Oh sure. You mean the ‘come look for me if I don’t show’ book? It’s over here.”
She led me across the cluttered space to a large desk heaped with magazines; above it was a huge topographical map with red pins scattered about. I waved my hand toward it while she got out the roster and put it on the table in front of me.
“Are these all the study sites for the faculty?”
“Yep. You got it. The little red pins mean people in the field right now. All those other little pins of various colours mean study sites.
There were strings linking together all the blue pins, all the yellow, and so forth, so at a glance you could see all the study sites.
“Who’s yellow?”
“That’s Don. He works in the area east and south of the bio station.”
“You’re Don’s student, right?”
“That’s right. Just finishing up my master’s. Roberta Smith. I’m doing a population study on hares, but most of my fieldwork is done. I’m glad of that. I don’t really like the bush. But he’s up there almost as much as Diamond.”
I remembered the picture of the woman and the little girl.
“What about his family? How does he juggle his time with them?”
She frowned.
“Oh no. Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“He doesn’t really have a family anymore.”
“But the picture in his office?”
“Yeah, his wife and kid. Really sad.”
I felt sick, anticipated what was coming. Waited.
“That picture was taken just before his wife died, five years ago now, I think. It was a godawful accident. They were driving home one night. Don fell asleep at the wheel, or so they say. They barrelled through a stop sign and were flattened by a truck. His wife died instantly, and the kid, who was only four years old at the time, is now a vegetable. But Don won’t give up hope that she’ll get well. The poor man was wracked with guilt and has spent every blessed penny and gone into debt giving her the best care in a private nursing home. He still talks about the day she’ll come home, but we all know she never will. He won’t face up to that, poor man. He’d do anything for the poor kid.”
I tried to say something, anything, but what do you say to a story like that?
“He changed after that. Never the same again, they say. Some men can get over their grief, but his daughter is always there to remind him, I guess. He moonlights at other jobs to help pay for the poor kid. Shows, too. His work here is suffering, and Davies is sitting on him pretty hard.”
Again, I had absolutely nothing to say. All I could think of was the pain the man had gone through.
“But it’s not all bad. He and Diamond have just done a paper together, but Diamond wanted to postpone publication for some reason, so it’s on hold. Don was really disappointed — so was I, because my name is going to be on it too. Diamond wouldn’t tell Don why, just asked him to be patient. When the paper gets published it will give Don a boost and hopefully help to get him some more funding. At first Diamond really was doing him a favour collaborating like that, but then Don’s data turned out to be good, so I guess Diamond was right to take him on. Surprised everyone, though, because Don’s work hadn’t been very good since the accident. Sloppy, you know.” She shrugged and said, “Diamond was a good man. He didn’t deserve such an awful death.” Roberta hastily wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and I wondered if the tears were for Diamond or Don.
I stood there like an idiot trying to think of something to say, but there really wasn’t anything that would make her feel better. I gave her some time to get herself back together again and then gently asked, “Does Don have a semi-permanent camp like Diamond’s?”
She shook her head. “Only Diamond did.” She said slowly, “You see, he loved the bush. Often went up just to write his reports and to get away from his students. Even if he had no fieldwork to do. Sometimes I think he started doing it to get away from his wife. Often he’d go up just for a night, mark some papers, and come back in time for afternoon lectures. I used to have a bird, ’cause I demonstrated his comparative anatomy class and I was always afraid he’d miss classes.”
“That’s a hell of a portage to get to his place for just an overnighter.”
I was remembering the rain-mucked steep cliff paths and treacherous footing Ryan and I had stumbled over in our haste to get help. Even in excellent shape it wasn’t your average sort of daily walk.
“Oh, that route. You been there? Canoeist, right?”
I nodded. “It was a bitch.”
She laughed. “Yeah, only the canoeists take that route. Diamond hardly ever used it, and no one at the station did. There’s another path, only a quarter-mile from the road through the forest. Easy footing. He’d drive up, park his car just out of sight in the bush, and walk in. Take him ten minutes at most. And he was real close to the barricade. He set it up just on the road between the biology station turn off and his portage. Very convenient for him. He sometimes slept at his camp when he was on the barricade.”
“You were part of that group,