“Eh bien, another murder and we meet again, madame.” Sergeant LaFramboise’s needle eyes stared down at me from the height of his pointed nose.
Without waiting for my response, he turned to Chief Decontie. “We take the suspect.” He grabbed John-Joe’s arm and propelled him down the stairs. John-Joe landed face first in a snowdrift, where he lay with his hands clamped behind his back.
“Relève-toi,” LaFramboise yelled at John-Joe.
John-Joe struggled to get up, but without the use of his hands, he only managed to dig his head deeper into the snow.
Eric reached down to help him. LaFramboise thrust Eric aside, who started to lash back at him, but abruptly stopped. A charge of assaulting a police officer would only exacerbate the situation.
But Decontie, a fellow police officer, had freer rein. Saying “The boy needs air,” he brushed past his counterpart and pulled John-Joe up onto his feet. Coughing and sputtering, John-Joe shook his head to remove the snow from his face.
“I’m only handing the suspect over to you because I have to,” Decontie said. “But, if he is in any way injured or treated unfairly, I will make damn sure you lose your badge.”
LaFramboise shrugged his shoulders as if to say “so what.” Motioning one of his men to guard the prisoner, he headed back up the stairs to the hut. Chief Decontie told his patrolman to stick with John-Joe then followed on the heels of his adversary.
I started to follow, but Eric held me back. “Not much more we can do here,” he said. The telltale scar beneath his eye glowed white with suppressed anger. Turning to John-Joe, he continued, “We can do more good by finding you a lawyer. Don’t say anything until we get you one, okay? And don’t do anything stupid.”
John-Joe started to say something, but the SQ cop quickly shut him up.
I followed Eric to his skidoo. The snow had pretty much stopped. In fact, the sun was attempting to brighten the last of this abysmal day.
“That was a brave thing you did back there,” Eric said as he straddled his machine. “It probably saved John-Joe’s life.”
“You should be thanking your grandfather’s healing stone.” I held out the greenish stone, which still seemed to project a life of its own.
“No, that was you,” he replied, putting the stone back in his pouch. “The stone only helps us to express what is inside.”
Because Eric’s snowmobile was parked at the front of the line of eight machines, he had to go forward past John-Joe’s shack to the bordering beaver swamp in order to loop back around them. As we drove past a lone pine standing at the edge of the swamp, I suddenly remembered.
“Stop,” I shouted to Eric.
I jumped off and ran over to the tree where I’d seen the snowshoes. There was no sign of them now.
“What happened to your snowshoes?” I called out to John Joe, where he stood secured to a tree, under the eyes of the two cops, one set watchful, the other scornful. I had assumed the snowshoes belonged to him, but his answering confusion told me otherwise, which could mean only one thing.
“Someone else was here,” I said to Eric. And while I searched the surrounding snowy area, I told him about the snowshoes with the red strap.
“You sure you saw them?” he said.
“Yes, look at the track.” I pointed out a line of indentations, more recent than the barely discernable snowshoe tracks Eric and I had followed into John-Joe’s shack. These partially filled tracks skirted along the frozen edge of the swamp to the dam itself, where they disappeared up and over the top.
I scanned the narrow expanse of the valley to see if I could catch sight of a vanishing figure. The wind whipped the new snow into eddies that slammed against the opposite cliff wall. Short of scaling the steep incline, there seemed to be no easy exit other than the way we’d come.
“Did you see anyone on your way in?” I asked Eric.
He shook his head. “They’ve got to belong to John-Joe.”
I called out to the young man to ask again if he’d worn snowshoes. He shouted back, “No.”
“Which direction did you come from?”
John-Joe started to answer, but was stopped by the SQ guard. John-Joe, however, managed to tell us by nodding his head towards a line of deeper indentations, more boot-like, that emerged from a cleft in the valley wall behind the hunting camp. They abutted the flatter and broader snowshoe track at a right angle.
“Okay, so someone else was here. Would explain the tracks we saw earlier.” Eric said.
“So he must’ve been here when we arrived. Yikes, he was here while I was alone.” I gasped as the enormity hit me. “But I don’t remember seeing any snowshoes. Do you?”
“No, but this tree is a little off to one side. We probably just didn’t notice.” Eric paused. “And there has to be a damn good reason why he never made his presence known. He’s got to be involved.”
“Maybe, despite John-Joe having a knife, this guy’s the one who actually murdered Chantal?” An icy shiver ran down my spine. “If that’s the case, then he could’ve killed me too, while I was alone.”
Eric ran his fingers through his thick mane. “I never should’ve left you.”
“But it was my choice.” I searched his eyes, looking for any hint of loving concern, but he’d shut that part away from me. I glanced away. “I wonder where the guy hid out.”
Then I noticed another set of depressions leading to an outhouse at the edge of a birch grove. “I think I’ve found his hiding place.”
As Eric called out for one of the SQ policemen to check it out, I started walking towards the weathered wooden structure. Its door was firmly closed. I reached it at the same time as the cop. He shoved me aside, pulled out his gun and shouted in French for the guy to come out.
Eric grabbed my arm and jerked me backwards, almost making me fall into a snow drift. “Christ, what are you doing, Meg? You could get killed.”
I rubbed my wrenched shoulder. “If you don’t mind, I can look after myself. I don’t need you to push me around. Besides, there’s no way the guy is still hanging around here.” I turned my back to him but stayed where he’d pushed me, a safe distance from the outhouse.
We waited in icy silence. By the time the cop decided to open the door, my anger had dissipated, and I was chastising myself for rushing in without thinking. I snuck a quick glance at Eric, intending to offer an apology, but the set line of his lips dissuaded me. I turned back to the scene at the outhouse.
As expected, the open door revealed an empty privy. After a cursory once-over, the cop gave us the classic “crazy in the head” motion with his hand and returned to the hut.
Eric walked back to the snowshoe tracks. “You stay here. I’m going to see where these go.”
He retrieved the high-tech aluminum snowshoes strapped onto the back of his skidoo, headed up to the beaver dam and started walking across the solid, metre-wide structure made from the most stable materials the beavers can find, branches and mud.
“Sacrebleu!” Sergeant LaFramboise shouted in my ear. He pointed to Eric. “Qu’est-ce qu’il fait?”
I told him of our suspicions.
“Stop, monsieur,” he yelled at Eric. “This is a matter for the police.”
But Eric ignored him and continued walking along the top of the dam. When he reached the other side, he headed towards the cliff wall.
“Probably a better tracker than any of your men,” the Migiskan