Strange Things Done (32 page)

A moment ago, Jo had felt the dizzying effect of too much cheap sparkling wine (and pickled toe), but now she felt disagreeably sober. Or at least, a little more sober. The room seemed to tilt a bit less as she fought to keep control of her faculties and the situation. Jo had gotten it wrong again. And she was very concerned that the RCMP had gotten it wrong too. She had to talk to someone.

The room swayed with the music. Jo made her way over to Sally and tried to attract her attention, but Sally was too busy dancing on a table to notice. Jo reached up and tugged on her skirt. “Sally! Sally!”

Others began to join the chant. “Sal-ly! Sal-ly!” Sally, who had just removed a pair of frilly bloomers and was waving them around her head, motioned for Jo to join her on the table. A throng of men cheered.

“Sal—I need to talk to you. It’s serious.” Someone in the room was responsible for the deaths of several people, and that person might not have finished their ghoulish work. The pink ruffled bloomers landed on Jo’s head. The crowd went wild.

34

Jo waded through the crowd and the opaque fog of cigarette smoke at the Sourtoe Saloon, headed for the door. She’d given up trying to talk to Sally, and left her dirty-dancing with a salmon. Jo was almost at the door when someone grabbed her arm.

He was a young man, probably midtwenties, with black hair and eyes almost as dark. Something about the mouth reminded her of Johnny Cariboo, and Jo guessed that he must be a relation. He also wore a trucker hat that read “Han Construction.” A dead giveaway.

“You’re not what I expected, eh?” His tone was cheerful.

“Pardon?”

“I’m Johnny’s cousin.” He grinned suddenly. “I thought you’d be bigger!”

“I work out,” she said, shoving her hands into the pockets of her parka with a flash of annoyance. Jo knew that she was scrawny. She tried to compensate for it by wearing heavy, solid boots and bulky black sweaters.

He let go of her, but made no move to leave. “The guy who’s too self-sufficient to live in Moosehide with the rest of us.”

Jo knew that Moosehide was the First Nations community upriver from Dawson. She’d heard of it, but to date it hovered around the outskirts of her imagination, like everything else off the map of Dawson City proper.

“The only cousin pushing thirty who isn’t hitched yet. Hunts his own food—won’t take even a rabbit from his aunties.”

“Okaaay …” She had no idea where he was going with this.

“Melted him like snow.” He was still smiling, a bemused expression on his face. He glanced at her boots and seemed to find something funny there as well. Jo wondered if he knew that they were a gift from his cousin. “Wait ’til I tell the others …”

“I didn’t melt anyone,” Jo said, “I hardly know him.”

“If you say so.” He coughed and gave her a knowing look, as though Jo should know what he was talking about.

“I didn’t catch your name,” she said.

“Mike.”

As soon as he said the name, it clicked. “Not Cousin Mike who worked at Claim 53,” she said, seizing a sleeve of his flannel shirt.

“Yeah! But that was ages ago.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you!”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Your friend, Christopher Byrne, said you thought guys at the mine were getting sick.”

Mike nodded slowly, giving himself time to remember. “Oh, yeah. There was this rumour going round. We always thought there was something wrong with the water near the mine.” He pushed his trucker hat back on his head a bit.

“Why was that?” She felt a little shiver of anticipation.

“Well, a lot of guys who worked there got headaches. Real bad ones, eh? And this one time, my friend Paul found this mutant fish in one of the streams.”

“In Sourdough Creek?”

“Yeah, like, a tributary stream, eh? The fish only had one eye.”

Jo felt as if she had been slapped. It had been right there, staring her in the face, the entire time. She knew that Jack Grikowsky was up to no good, but she’d assumed that it was
what
he was mining. It wasn’t. It was
how
. The inspection reports had asserted that Claim 53’s tributary streams didn’t support fish. The inspector must have known, so he had to be in on it. Marlo must have discovered the truth about the mine. That’s why they killed her. It
was
Grikowsky.

“I’m sorry, I have to go …” She began to back away, still watching Mike for a moment, then turned and hurried for the exit.

A gust of bleak air surged through the room as the door opened, raising the flesh on Jo’s arms. Christopher Byrne entered the bar, wearing a fur-trimmed parka, and Jo almost collided with him.

“Easy, tiger,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Where’s the fire?”

Jo licked her dry lips. She had been going to find Cariboo, to tell him what she knew about the falsified inspection papers and the fish in the tributary streams at Sourdough Creek. But on second thought she realized that the RCMP offices would be closed, and anyway Grikowsky was already under lock and key. Perhaps it could wait until morning. Besides, five minutes ago she had been sure that they had the wrong man. Maybe she needed to sober up and then process things. “I was just going home,” she said.

“Well, I’m wrapped at Gertie’s for the season—not enough players for the Hold ’Em tables.” He placed one hand lightly on the small of her back, but the heat of it seemed to burn right through her wool sweater. “Snowing pretty hard. You need a lift?”

Jo looked away, at the dizzying red and gold damask wallpaper, trying not to smile as she thought of the statue Byrne had carved. “Yeesss …” she said, wondering how much she had just slurred.

The sound of tires crunching on snow had an air of finality as they pulled up in front of Sally’s house. Jo hesitated for a moment. She dreaded the bone-chilling sprint from Byrne’s cab to the front door; the wind outside sounded querulous. More than that, Jo was reluctant to raise the subject of what she’d overheard Byrne say to Sally.

Byrne nudged the truck gently into neutral. “Well …” he said. He looked at his lap and did something with his mouth, as though looking for the right words. “Good night, then.”

“Wait,” she said. He moved the gearshift to park. “We should talk.” Byrne turned to her and raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. In the light of the dashboard, his blue-green eyes were extra blue. “About last night … I overheard you and Sally talking …”

“I see,” he said, and his expression clouded.

“You were asking Sally whether I suspected.”

“Yes.” She had expected denial. She hadn’t expected his sense of quiet resolve, and it made her less certain. Jo reminded herself that Dawson police had enough evidence to incarcerate Grikowsky, not Byrne. But she needed to know for sure. “What did you think I might suspect?”

He looked away for a moment, watching angry torrents of snow hurtling toward the headlights. “Okay,” he said. Another pause. “Sally and I used to date.”

It was strange the way Jo’s body seemed to tighten and relax both at the same time. Jo laughed. “I thought … I don’t know what I thought.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “And if you want to know the truth …”

Jo held up her hand. “Stop! To quote a friend, there are some things I don’t need to know that badly.” Jo thought of the worn photograph tucked away in the corner of Sally’s mirror. The looks on their faces, frozen in time.

He smiled a little, the laugh lines fanning out around his eyes in that familiar way that made her melt every time. “No, you should probably know. That’s the reason that Marlo was following me. She couldn’t get past the Sally thing.”

“And what was it that Marlo saw when she followed you? The thing you fought about?”

“Marlo saw Sally kiss me.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not proud of it. But it didn’t mean anything to me—that was all over for me years ago. And I know it didn’t mean anything to Sally. You know what Sally’s like.”

“Yeah.” Jo thought about the look on Sally’s face when Jo had asked for directions to Byrne’s cabin.

“It was at Gertie’s one night, at the end of a shift. Sally’d had a little too much to drink and tried it on. I pushed her away, but a little too late. Marlo saw.”

“I see.”

“Jo, I’m not into Sally.”

“Okay,” Jo said. “It isn’t really any of my business.”

“That’s why I didn’t want Sally to tell you. But you wanted to know.”

“Yes. Well, I’m glad it’s all been cleared up now. Good night,” she said, clinging to her last thread of sobriety and willpower. She turned away to open the truck door. She’d been mistaken about the uranium. And she’d been mistaken about Christopher Byrne: he was guilty only of dating her housemate a long time ago.

“Hold up,” he said. “I have a question for you, too.”

“Yes?” Jo leaned back in the seat.

“Do you have a boyfriend back home?”

She hesitated for a moment, thinking about how to classify her relationship with Kessler, then said, honestly, “No. Not really.”

“Good.” Byrne leaned forward a little. “Why not?”

“I don’t know.” But she did know. Jo knew exactly what her problem was, but it was too late to do much about it. “Trust issues, maybe.”
Not maybe. Also taste issues. A series of self-absorbed and ill-chosen musicians … And then Kessler.
“My father was a cop in Vancouver. He was strict. He saw a lot of things, I guess, so he … worried about me.”

“All fathers worry.” Byrne’s brow was furrowed, but he was smiling sympathetically.

“True, but Frank—that’s my father—was a little extreme about it. Once, when I was a teenager and broke curfew, he took me to the morgue. There was a girl there. Well. The remains of a girl.” Jo opened the door, allowing a tide of cold air to wash over her skin. She felt she needed the slap of cold to knock some sense into her. Before she did something crazy, like kiss Byrne. Again. “I’ve just never been good at relationships.”

“At some point, you might need to get over that.”

“At some point, maybe I will.” She smiled at him and hopped down from the cab.

“Good night, Josephine Silver.” His voice was husky.

“Good night.”

She could feel him watching her as she moved purposefully toward the front door. The porch light was off and she had to feel around numbly for the keyhole, the antique key grating loudly in the icy lock. Success. She turned and waved to signal Byrne that she was all right. He gave a little salute and threw the truck into gear. She heard his truck pulling away as she hit the light at the kitchen entry. Nothing happened. The kitchen remained in darkness.

Jo felt a queasy tide of panic slam into her. She began feeling her way through the blackness toward the living room, where she remembered leaving the candle in the Mason jar, and hoped she might also find some matches. Partway there she began to wonder if it was a new power outage, or whether someone had cut the power to the house. Jo tripped over something on the floor, put out a hand to steady herself, and grabbed onto someone’s arm. She screamed.

Jo stumbled backward, turned, and fled, smacking directly into a dark figure blocking the door. She hit him. Hard. In the stomach.

“Uh!” The man said. He doubled over, coughing. “Jo, it’s me! Chris!” Byrne’s voice.

“I heard you leave!”

“I didn’t see any lights come on, so I thought I’d better check … Then I heard you scream.”

“Body at the kitchen table!”

“Alive? Or dead?”

“Not staying to find out!” She grabbed him by the parka and pulled him back out through the door.

They left the truck running and the headlights on after they’d found Byrne’s emergency kit, just in case. Together, they went back in with a flashlight to reveal the hideous thing seated at Sally and Jo’s kitchen table: a heavy parka draped over the back of a chair, a scarf stuffed up one sleeve. Byrne had the good sense not to laugh, and after they’d checked the rest of the house and determined that the power was out on the entire street, Jo agreed to go home with him.

35

A fire crackled behind a glass door in the woodstove. Veils of smoke waved sinuously, while the bright flame hissed and popped.

Jo returned her attention to a Scrabble board on the floor, where Byrne had just formed the word “myopic.” “Curse you and your triple word scores,” she said. “Maybe it’s time for me to get going while I still have my pride … and the roads are still open.”

They’d pushed the table to one side and were stretched out on the floor in front of the stove. Byrne was lying on his side, propped up on one elbow on a well-worn fur. This fact alone made Jo feel uneasy. She was not the kind of person who lounged about on animal skins. Byrne looked relaxed. “Oh, I think you’re already trapped here for the night,” he said.

“What?”

Byrne laughed, watching her face. “Seriously though, the roads have probably snowed in by now. And in a storm like this, your power will still be out.” As if on cue, the wind howled through the beams of Byrne’s cabin. Nugget raised his head from his paws and sniffed at something unseen. “You’re much safer here, don’t you agree?”

“What, in the middle of nowhere with no phone or power? Sure, sure.” There was little doubt about what Byrne was suggesting in terms of sleeping arrangements if she chose to stay the night, and Jo wasn’t sure how she felt about that. “Besides, the whole town will be talking if I roll in tomorrow morning in your truck.”