“What about your wife?”
Ray stopped dead and our eyes locked in an ugly embrace.
In measured words he said, “What about my wife?”
“I just heard she and Diamond had a thing going. Must have been kind of hard on you.” God, that was hard to say. I had nothing against this guy and here I was bringing up what must be a painful memory, but I needed the information. I could brood about it later.
I watched as his face crumpled and his hands lost their grip on the maps as he struggled to control his emotions. “That was a long time ago.” He turned his back on me and I quietly let myself out, feeling like a pariah.
chapter twenty
It was a hot, humid day and the dust from the new road was clogging every one of my pores. I kicked the dust with my feet and headed off toward the cookhouse and the path to the lake. As I approached one of the mobile trailers I heard a noise and stopped.
“Psst.” It came again. “Psst.” I turned toward the sound and there, perched on an overturned bucket between an outhouse and what I took to be the cook-house, was Martha. Her back was to me, her head twisted around like an owl to keep me in view, and her thick, solid ankles were wobbling in time with the protesting wobbles of the aluminum bucket. I watched in fascination, wondering if the bucket would continue to hold her weight or would decide to crumple and, if so, what Martha would do.
“Good god, Martha, what the hell are you doing?”
“Shhhhh.” Martha’s low, insistent command slithered toward me and caught me just as I was about to laugh.
Martha motioned quickly with one hand for me to join her and judging by the protesting groans of the bucket would have lost her balance except for a rather remarkable balancing act.
I stepped into the alley between the two makeshift buildings and looked up at Martha as I struggled to adjust to the gloom. She was leaning against a fence that crossed the alley, her head just topping it so that she could see what was on the other side.
“There’s something fishy going on around here,” she said in her best Perry Mason voice. I rolled my eyes skyward.
“No really, Cordi. The cook told me all about it.”
“About what?”
“The fish,” said Martha in a dark, ominous voice as she strained to look over the fence.
“For heaven’s sake, Martha, get down before you kill yourself,” I said in a whisper.
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“I can’t get down. I’m caught on something.”
I moved around behind Martha and saw that her shift was caught on a wicked-looking spike. I squeezed my arm in between Martha and the fence and untangled her. She dropped to the ground with relief, took out a large pink handkerchief, wiped her forehead, and slapped a mosquito on her arm.
“Really, Cordi, I don’t know how you can stand to be out here with all these bugs.” She looked at me and sighed, as if all her lifeblood had just been sucked out by that one lone mosquito.
“Check out the freezer on the other side of that fence.”
I looked at her in puzzlement and hesitated, wondering what she was getting at. “Well, go on. I can’t do it. You’ll get your answer when you see what’s inside it, mark my words.” I could almost see each of her words being ticked off with a little checkmark in Martha’s head.
I repositioned the bucket and leapt up, gripping the top of the wooden fence and scrambling over to the other side. The freezer was snuggled up against the fence and another fence with a gate in it, well hidden or presumably well protected from any animals. I opened the lid and looked down thoughtfully at the contents, pushing aside the top layer and rummaging down in the lower levels to be sure I hadn’t missed what Martha was advertising with her wildly dancing eyes.
By the time I had climbed back over the fence, Martha had rearranged her shift and fixed up her appearance by applying some more lipstick and brushing her hair.
“Well?” she said triumphantly.
“Well what? Your lipstick’s on crooked,” I said.
Martha pinched her mouth with her thumb and forefinger to wipe away the lipstick. “Gone?”
“Still some in the lower right corner.” Martha scrubbed some more and raised her eyebrows at me. I nodded.
“The stuff in the freezer. Did you see it?”
“So the loggers like corn. What of it?”
“Corn?” Martha said her mouth opening in a grimace and her eyebrows struggling to meet her widow’s peak.
“Frozen corn,” I said, and Martha’s features crashed down in bewilderment as I took her by the arm and led her out of the alley.
“No fish?”
“No fish. Now why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on here. What’s all this about fish anyway?”
I made for the path Ray had pointed out to me, dragging her along with me.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to see the lake.”
Martha dawdled and picked her way around rocks and branches most people would have stepped over. She doggedly pursued her latest theory.
“The cook really liked my dress, so when I told her I’d made it she asked me to send her the pattern.” Martha looked sidelong at me. “She’s a little bigger than I am, and it’s not always easy to find things to fit. Anyway I agreed and she took me into the kitchen for a bite to eat. She was cooking up a mess of fresh fish for the men and it smelled so good I asked her where it came from.
“‘Just down at the lake here. They bring ’em in by the barrelful,’ she said to me, and I swear she winked, but I wasn’t sure. But that’s when I got suspicious. They were having trout, Cordi, and I’m pretty sure it’s out of season.”
I stopped in my tracks and looked open-mouthed at Martha.
“How would you know if it’s out of season, Martha? You hate the outdoors and anything to do with it.”
“Ah, but Cordi, I love fish, fresh fish gently sautéed with a bit of lemon and garlic.” She closed her eyes and licked her lips. “Anyway, even if it is in season I’m sure they must have been way over their limit. Besides, the cook said they had a whole freezer out back that they kept stocked full of the stuff. Then I swear she winked at me again.”
“Did she say anything about bears?”
“Yeah, that was really curious. She said Cameron came into camp a while back all clawed along his arms. He’d been across the lake and said a bear had mauled him after he’d spilled a can of tuna fish on himself. Then that zoologist turned up dead and Cameron and his buddies told the wildlife guys that they’d shot the beast. The cook didn’t think they had, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because they always give her the pelts or the fish to clean. She gets paid extra under the table. But there was no pelt, she said. I suppose if she knew they were poaching fish she’d just keep quiet so that the extra money would keep coming in. She stopped talking after that because I think she knew she’d told me too much.”
“Did anyone else know about this