“Life is full of maybes,” she said sharply. “Sometimes it’s all we’ve got.”
He couldn’t deny that one. He looked at the Google Earth view again. He looked at Bosko, checked for skepticism, and saw none. He said, “Sending planes up for more aerials isn’t going to help any, with this dense tree cover. We’ll have to check it out on foot. But first firm up the theory before we go any further. I’ll make some inquiries.” To Giroux he said, “Can you organize a couple pairs of legs to walk the woods?”
“I’ll put out a bid for volunteers,” she said, and added with smug confidence, “My boys will be fighting over the chance to get outside and play in the snow. Just watch.”
* * *
Sergeant Giroux stood at the threshold, asking who wanted to go for a nice hike in the woods on this beautiful winter day. She already had one volunteer, Jayne Spacey, but she needed one more. Everyone looked to the window, including Dion. The morning sun had been blown away by fast-moving rain clouds, and shrubs and treetops were thrashing about as if frightened by what was moving in. Giroux ignored the silence and went on outlining the assignment for them to find a route between the RL Logging site and the Matax trailhead — much like the intrepid Sir John Franklin, except without the ships, she said. Dion didn’t know much about history, but he knew the Franklin expedition had not ended well.
Maybe everyone else was thinking of Franklin too. Giroux lost patience and snapped, “If nobody puts your hand up in two seconds, I’ll have to raise it for you. I need somebody big and healthy and just bursting with vim.” Still, nobody’s hand went up, and just as Dion feared, she was looking at him. “Big and healthy, anyway. You’ve just volunteered. Thank you very much.”
* * *
They gathered their gear and drove together up the mountain in the SUV, Spacey behind the wheel. She seemed to have gotten over her hatred enough to make small talk, but it was just speckles of cool commentary, and he didn’t bother responding much. Up at the cut block, the rain had stopped but the temperature had plummeted. Rob Law was away, but his crew was at work. Spacey advised the foreman that she and Dion would be looking around the site for a bit, if that was okay. She didn’t pose it as a question so much as a fact, and the foreman only rubbed his muddy nose and nodded.
The two constables walked up to the ridge behind the office trailer and explored its perimeter for twenty minutes before Spacey gave a victory shout. Dion worked his way through the brush toward her and they stood looking downslope together, facing southwest. There were mature conifers above and beyond as far as the eyes could see, giving the place a cathedral feel, and uninvitingly thick undergrowth, mostly bare-branched shrubs. Spacey had found what might be called a track leading through the undergrowth, just wide enough to allow a man through.
She said, “Deer trail. This is as good as it gets, and it’s headed in the right direction. Stick close, and if you see anything at all of interest, notify me right away and I’ll flag it. Got that?”
Dion zipped up his jacket and followed on her heels.
The jobsite fell behind, and with it the noise, and they soon were walking in wild isolation, through evergreen woods that rushed and creaked at the upper reaches, leaving a darkened dead zone below. They didn’t talk, the only noise of their passage the soldierly thud of boots on soggy earth and the occasional muttered curse as they untangled themselves from low-hanging branches.
The trail lost definition and blurred into many small clearings. Sometimes it petered out and they had to wade through bushes until it picked up again. Sometimes it meandered in circles. Spacey marked their progress, tagging each fork with a strip of fluorescent ribbon, sometimes green, sometimes pink, occasionally blue. Sometimes she replaced the ribbons, one colour for another. She checked her compass and made notations in her log, and when Dion lagged for a third time, she told him if he wanted to go back, it was fine with her, she’d carry on alone.
Downhill rose to uphill, and the trees thinned and the path branched again, radiating every which way. Spacey stopped to catch a breath, damp and irritated. “It’s a frickin’ maze,” she said. “Up or down?” It was herself she was asking, and herself who answered. “Up, I guess. Follow the compass needle, right?”
She started to climb, as if she’d never stop. Dion stopped to take off his jacket, tying it around his waist and elbowing sweat off his brow. He called out that she could take the upper trail and he’d take the lower, maybe they’d narrow it down faster.
“Oh, that makes a helluva lot of sense,” she called back. “Let’s get separated and when you get lost we’ll just call in another search party. Giroux will be madly impressed.”
“I wouldn’t get lost,” he shot back angrily. But he followed after her. A few minutes later, the trail became difficult, then impassable, and they had to double back, and to allow her to take the lead he needed to back himself into the bushes, scratching his face and hands as she edged by. He stood wiping blood off his cheek and swearing, and Spacey looked back at him with disgust. She said, “Tell you what. Go back to the truck and put a Band-Aid on that, then have a doughnut or two. I’ll radio if I need you.”
The doughnuts she spoke of were the half-dozen assorted that Giroux had given them to take along for the ride, what she must have thought of as a reward. He didn’t need a Band-Aid and didn’t want doughnuts, but he did want to stop trailing after a woman who treated him like pocket lint. He said, “We’re supposed to stay together.”
“It’s a formality. Go on. I’ll get in worse trouble if those cuts get infected and you die. Anyway, I’ll get this done a lot faster on my own. Go.”
He returned alone to the logging site and walked down to Spacey’s SUV parked in the mud with several other vehicles. He stood looking for his keys. They weren’t in his trousers, but they were in his jacket when he untied it from his waist and went through it. He also found something missing: his personal notebook.
“God,” he said, standing in the parking lot, being stared at by passing workers. He tried beeping open the SUV to check if the book had fallen in there, but the doors remained locked. He looked at the keys in his hand and realized they were the wrong ones. These keys were to his cruiser. Spacey had the keys to the SUV.
He radioed Spacey and asked if she’d found a notebook on the trail. She said she hadn’t. He told her about the keys, and she said he’d just have to come back and get them. He returned to the narrow little deer trail and headed down it, following the fluorescent ribbons and keeping an eye out for the little notebook in its black leather cover. Most likely, though, it had fallen when he’d taken off his jacket to tie around his waist. So why hadn’t he seen it when he doubled back?
Because Spacey had seen it first.
The ribbons began to confuse him. He didn’t understand Spacey’s complicated system of colour-coding, and they soon led him into the middle of an unfamiliar glen, surrounded by trees, all identical and dizzying. He backtracked, looking for the flutter of neon plastic that had misled him, but now even that had disappeared in the maze.
Something seized in his chest, and the pain in his stomach began to cinch and twist. He radioed to Spacey again, and her voice, breaking up over the air, asked him where the hell he was. He said he didn’t know. She called him a jerk-off. She asked if he had his whistle on him. He did. She said to blow it, hard, and to blow it every minute or so until she located him. He did as she said, and eventually heard her voice calling through the trees. He called back, and minutes later she stood before him, puffing out jets of vapour.
“Sorry,” he said.
Spacey was sweaty and rosy-cheeked, stripped down to her shirtsleeves, jacket slung crookedly around her waist, but she looked pleased. “It’s okay. I got through to the Matax. It’s all ribboned out. We can head back.”
“You didn’t find my notebook?”
She walked backward to look at him. “How could you lose your notebook? My goodness, you’re a dumb fuck,