Strange Things Done (26 page)

“Good book?” he asked.

“Haven’t read it yet,” she said, dropping it lightly onto a sideboard. “Was there something you wanted to see me about?”

Now Cariboo looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had company.”

“I wasn’t expecting him. Seat?” Jo motioned to a wingback, but he waved her away.

“No, this won’t take long,” he said. “I just wanted to say sorry, if I was hard on you today. I was just doing my job.”

Jo felt her shoulders relax a little. “That’s fine,” she said, but knew she didn’t sound convincing.

“Also, I wanted to bring you something,” he said, handing her the carrier bag.

“What’s this?” she said, surprised, but she was already
lifting the lid off the shoe box inside. She realized with a
thrill that they were a brand new pair of white, fur-lined North Face boots.

“I thought … you know. They might keep you warm,” he said. When Jo didn’t say anything, he added, “I noticed the boots you’ve been wearing aren’t all that …”

She thought about her cold rubber boots with the skull-and- crossbone pattern. “What, you’re not partial to pirates?”

He smirked a little. “Well, I might be.”

Jo realized with a shock that Johnny Cariboo was flirting with her. She wondered whether this was some kind of good-cop-bad-cop routine, all rolled into one person. Jo found herself looking down at her grey woollen socks, embarrassed.

“I can’t accept them. They must have cost you a fortune.” She put the boots back in the box and attempted to hand them back to Cariboo, but he resisted. He pushed them toward her.

“Go on. It was nothing. My buddy owns Wild & Woolly. I keep an eye on the shop for him during off-season, so I was able to barter with him.”

Jo’s fingers closed around the boots reluctantly. “You shouldn’t have. That’s very kind.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Cariboo looked relieved to have the conversation finished.

“Wait, how did you know my size?”

“Ah. My constable photographed and measured all of the footprints in the snow at May Wong’s after the break-in.
Yours too.”

“Oh, right.”

“If you need anything … if you have any problems. Well, here’s my card.” He handed it to her. “And I’m working late at the station if you need somewhere to stay warm this evening.” There was a long, meaningful pause. “Because of the power outage, I mean.”

Jo took the card. “Thanks.” He looked hopeful, until she added, “But I’m fine.” Jo hoped that Sally hadn’t overheard their conversation. She was sure that Sally wouldn’t let her live it down if she had.

26

Not long after the power blinked out in Dawson with a knowing wink and a nudge in the ribs, Jo laced up the new North Face boots Cariboo had given her and, with Sally, trudged directly to the nearest pub with a crackling good fireplace: Bombay Peggy’s.

Sally might not have been Jo’s first choice of drinking partner, given what she’d just overheard, but there was little choice now—unless Jo wanted to go back to the interview room. Both women needed to go somewhere to stay warm and survive, at least until Gertie’s opened, or until the power came back on.
Any port in a storm.
They were headed in the same direction, and Jo wanted to ask about the conversation she’d overheard between Sally and Byrne. It was a job best done over drinks.

They leaned into the wind as they approached the building: a white, Victorian queen among inns, aptly placed on the corner of Princess and Second. According to Sally, the former brothel and bootlegging headquarters was rescued from its swampy fate when the current owner, a woman named Terra, spotted it sinking into the marsh a few years back and recognized a diamond in the rough. Terra had the sagging house dragged from the bog at the north end of town, where it had been quietly decomposing for half a century, and relocated it to Princess, restoring the structure to its former glory, if not its original purpose. Much of the original décor was maintained, including the framed black-and-white photographs of the lovelies who worked at Peggy’s when it was a house of ill repute. Sally said Peg’s was to die for.

On this particular Thursday evening, the mood at Peggy’s was as dark as the town. Patrons were seated in small, uneasy clusters around the fireplaces, or huddled along the gleaming, walnut bar. The conversation died as Jo and Sally entered the room.

Sally held her chin high and thrust her shoulders back as she crossed to the bar and pulled out a stool for Jo. Sally dropped her white fur muff on the counter with an air of “ain’t it wonderful?” and called out, “Two gold diggers.” The way she said it made it sound like an introduction instead of a drink order. Jo’s shoulders slouched forward a little and her chin dropped down deeper into her parka. She avoided making eye contact with the others at the bar, who gradually resumed speaking, albeit in hushed tones.

“Honestly, must you call out so much attention to yourself?” Jo said to Sally, giving the white muff a look of ridicule. “What is that, some sort of self-esteem issue?”

“What, you have a problem with my muff? You liked it well enough last night.” Sally said it loudly, so that it could be overheard by the men in the general vicinity, and stroked the fur muff in a provocative way. Her smile lit her up like a fun fair. More wattage than was really necessary.

“I think you have me confused with someone else. Probably that stray husky you’ve been …”

“Him too,” said Sally, undaunted. The men at the bar wore a dazed expression, like fish in an aquarium, their mouths falling silently open.

A bartender in a shapeless black dress brought the drinks, landing them hard enough on the bar that the liquor sloshed over the edge. “Careful, Terra,” Sally said, making a little tsk-ing sound with her tongue, “don’t stain my bar.”

“
My
bar.” Terra said it firmly and crossed her arms. She was a petite woman in her thirties, wore her sandy hair in a closely cropped, spikey style, and sported glasses with dark frames.

“For now,” Sally said, lifting the martini glass for a demure sip, enjoying herself.

The woman looked crestfallen, and she left suddenly without making change for the large bill Sally had placed on the countertop.

“What was all that about?”

“Oh, nothing. Seems Terra is in a spot of trouble.”

“What, financial trouble?”

“Something like that.”

“But … you’re not thinking of buying her out, are you?”

“Me? You can’t even
begin
to imagine the things I think about.”

“You make that kind of coin at Gertie’s?” Jo straightened on the barstool. She already knew the answer, but hoped Sally would elaborate on how she planned to obtain the money, or perhaps had already come into it. Not a single family portrait graced the walls of their shared abode, so Jo thought it unlikely that Sally had inherited from a close relation. Jo felt she was on the verge of something, as though Dawson, the town, was finally sharing one of its little secrets.

“Of course not.” Sally frowned. She fumbled in her handbag for a lipstick, which was just a shade too dark for her. The colour made her mouth look severe. Or perhaps it was the way the low, flickering candles and scarlet walls cast a strange light on the townspeople, giving them an unnatural pallor.

At that moment, if someone had told Jo that she had just stumbled into a vampire coven, she might have believed it. Dawsonites stared wanly back at her, the smoky figures leaning in to one another, whispering. Jo hoped she was imagining the dark looks aimed in her direction.

“Looks like you’re not winning any popularity contests today,” Sally said, following Jo’s look. “That’s what happens in Dawson when you attack miners.”

“Do you think that’s what happened to Marlo? She was going after the mine.” Jo took a sip of her gold digger, which was laced with flakes of gold. Jo wondered if they were real.

“The problem is, everyone has family or friends connected with the mining industry. Peg’s isn’t even a mining crowd and look at it—you’ve stirred it up like a hornet’s nest.” Sally sipped her drink, a delighted expression on her face. Bits of gold sparkled in her lipstick as she lowered the glass.

Jo glanced at the townspeople around her, their fiery, inflamed expressions. Jo thought she could see something else flash in the eyes of the townspeople, too. “I think they’re afraid.”

“You’ve just suggested that someone among us, possibly right here, right now, is a monster, and has killed three people thus far. The roads out are closing. Of course they’re afraid. You expect them to thank you for it?” Sally tilted her martini glass back and forth, watching the gold sparkle in the half-light. “No one is going to rest easy tonight. Everyone is second-guessing their neighbours right now.”

Jo thought about that. If the town needed someone to blame for her revelation, she certainly made an easy target. “How long do you think it will take for the town genny to kick in?” Jo asked, her gaze dropping as faces turned in her direction.

“Well, I think we’d better prepare to hunker down at the bar for a good while. I remember one time it took the city forty-eight hours to get the heat back on. Temperature dropped to minus thirty-nine.” She shivered, her mouth a hard, dry line of lipstick.

“What!”

“Yes. They say the outage was responsible for quite a few fall babies.” Sally seemed to shudder at the thought. “Survival 101, isn’t it? Take your clothes off and crawl into a sleeping bag with a friend.” She raised her glass to the idea.

“Doesn’t look like there’ll be much of that tonight.” Jo took another sip of the cool, oily tincture. It had a metallic aftertaste.

“Oh, don’t sell Dawson short. The night is still young.” A smile tugged at Sally’s lips, revealing needle-like eye teeth. “Wait until the liquor kicks in. Anyway, some of us may not be able to go home tonight. And that’s a fact. But since you’ve got everyone in town looking at one another like we’ve all got two heads, the question is: who to bunk with? Or, more to the point, who not to?”

“Yes,” said Jo, thinking of the conversation she’d overheard between Sally and Byrne.
She’s completely clueless about most of the stuff that goes on in this town
, Sally had said. “Speaking of which,” Jo began, planning to ask Sally about what she’d overheard. A sudden sharp stab of pain in her back stopped her. She saw a flash of someone’s elbow as they stumbled away, toward the bathrooms. “Hey!” Jo called out, rubbing her back as the dark parka in question reeled through a door marked “Prospectors,” already gone. She turned to Sally. “Do you get the feeling that wasn’t an accident?” Jo felt a rush of adrenaline. She considered going into the men’s room after the guy. She wanted to. Jo slid off the barstool and stood, hands clutching the bar as a swell of ugly emotion rose in her.

Sally didn’t reply. She was looking at something that had been dropped on the well-polished wooden countertop. An ordinary white envelope with Jo’s name on the front. In type. Sally raised an eyebrow and put a hand on Jo’s arm.

Jo picked the envelope up, considering. “It doesn’t appear to be ticking.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Sally said.

Jo hesitated for a moment, then ran her finger under the seal. Inside, there was a one-way ticket from Dawson City to Vancouver via Whitehorse, on Air North. The passenger name was listed as Josephine Silver. “Ah, fan mail,” Jo said, secretly wondering if the airport had closed yet, already fantasizing about using the ticket.

Sally leaned over her shoulder, close enough that Jo could feel her breath, warm, on the back of her neck. She wasn’t sure whether Sally’s breach of personal space was the innocent result of curiosity, or whether the move had some kind of subtext, or what that subtext might be.

Jo had the sense that attempting to attribute meaning to anything in Dawson was like trying to look at something underwater, where the shape and size of a thing changed when you reached toward it. Jo covered what she knew was the strong profile line of her jaw, suddenly self-conscious. “Somebody sure wants to see the backside of me,” she said, rushing to fill the silence.

“Yeah.” said Sally. “Looks like you’ve got a blue ticket.”

“A what?”

“Dawson has a long history of giving its undesirables free one-way passage on the next steamboat out of town. You’ve just been blue-ticketed.”

“You’re kidding me.” Jo looked around her and caught the hard stares of several patrons.

“Well, you know what they say. ‘The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’ Something I personally couldn’t stand.” Sally straightened up on her barstool and smoothed out the lines in her dress.

“But … this is so unfair. I went out on a limb to protect these people by telling them the truth …” She hated the self-righteous tone of her voice, but it was true.
Wasn’t it?

“You think they feel protected?”

“They’ll be safer knowing they need to watch their backs.”

“People are happier being oblivious to the truth until there’s something they can do about it. Now they just feel helpless. They’re angry, and they want a target for their emotion.”

“Now you sound like Sergeant Cariboo,” Jo said. “He didn’t want me to go public with the possibility that Marlo had been murdered until there was more proof. He thought that people might panic when the roads snowed in and the airport closed. Maybe he was worried they’d take the law into their own hands.”

“Maybe he was right, my dear. Dawsonites do have a way of taking care of things themselves, you know. And I’m not just talking about chopping their own firewood.” Sally drained the last of her gold digger.

That gave Jo an idea. A terrible idea, she knew, but she could feel it lodged somewhere inside of her, pressing her with the urgency of a small, gold key in her back pocket. She hesitated for a moment, wondering whether she could trust Sally with her secret. She had the sense that what she had heard earlier had been taken out of context, and yet … Still, she had to choose someone to trust. Jo took a quick swill of her drink, watching the flecks of gold swirling around in the funnel of glass like atoms, a little microcosm of chaos theory. She knew she was about to set something in motion, an irrevocable chain of events. But she had to know …