Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (19 page)

“So what do you suppose the cops nabbed that old guy for?”

Goldie shrugged. “I wish I knew more about it. He seemed like such a nice man. Harmless. Hard working. He certainly wasn’t looking for a free ride here. He was always asking Gran how he could make himself useful.”

“They say psychopaths are like that.” Mark took a pull on his beer. “They can be charming as hell, but they really don’t give a damn about anybody but themselves.”

“That doesn’t mean just because someone is nice, he’s a psychopath.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Like you, for example,” she interrupted him to add, with a smile.

“Haw haw.” He said, scowling, then immediately breaking into one of those cute grins.

It took her half an hour to drink half her beer. It wasn’t as tasty as pop. He offered to finish it for her, while she told him more about growing up in the bush and going to school in Eagle. She learned a lot about him, too. How he liked to spend his time, what is family was like, that he didn’t much care for school but managed to get reasonably good marks.

“I loved school,” she told him. “I wish I could go to college.”

“Why don’t you?”

“On what I make working part time at Sally’s during tourist season? Fat chance.”

“You could work your way through school. Lots of students do.”

“Yeah? Where? It’s not that easy to apply for a job thousands of miles away when you live in the bush without a phone.”

She was about to tell him about her search for her mother when Hootie’s ears perked up again, and seconds later, Goldie heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. Soon the nose of that reddish SUV emerged from the trees, and moments later, Hunter and her grandmother had joined them at the outdoor kitchen. Gran slid onto the bench, but Hunter remained standing.

“If you don’t need me for anything,” he said, “I’ll be on my way.”

Goldie began to thank him, in case Gran was her usual sour self, but her grandmother turned and smiled up at the man. “Thank you very much,” she said. Goldie was surprised to see her grandmother’s smile remain as the man put his hand briefly on her shoulder, and told her to take care.

Hunter pointed at Mark’s beer can and said, “I hope you left a couple of those at the lodge for me.” He smiled as he turned to walk back to the SUV. Mark picked up on some invisible cue – perhaps the awkward silence that followed Gran’s arrival – and excused himself, driving away from the cabin soon after Hunter.

“Are you okay, Gran? Can I make you some tea?” Gran hadn’t even blinked at Mark’s presence. She looked tired, but not unhappy, and Goldie was dying to hear all about her day.

“Yeah. Tea. And something to eat.”

While Goldie put together a quick supper for them both, she asked Gran to tell her what had happened. Gran sketched the events of her day, then said, “Nobody says Orville is guilty of anything. I really don’t understand why they would have to take him to Whitehorse, and even tow his truck back there. Hunter – the man who gave me a ride – he said not to touch Orville’s belongings, if he left anything here. He said they will probably be sending someone from the Mounties to take it to Whitehorse as well.” She shook her head. “I don’t like police coming here.”

“Why does it scare you so much, Gran?” She left the moose sausage sizzling on the stove to sit beside her grandmother. She winked at her and added, “You never killed anybody, did you?”

Her Gran’s face froze, and Goldie reached for the old woman’s hand. “Gran? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, child,” she said. “Don’t you worry about me, child. I’ll be fine.”

Elspeth Watson arrived at the office much earlier than her usual six thirty. Hunter had asked her for help – well, to be honest, she had asked him if she could do something to help get some information related to that cold case he was interested in – and she wanted to show him that he could count on her when he needed assistance with an investigation. Michigan was three hours ahead of the west coast, in case she had to make any calls.

Of course, Hunter didn’t want her calling the relatives of the missing woman. That was certainly understandable. What could she possibly say? ‘Hi, I’m a freight dispatcher in New Westminster, British Columbia. Can you tell me where your daughter is?’ What good excuse could she possibly give?

That got her thinking, as she scooped some dog kibble into Peterbilt’s food dish and put fresh water in his water bowl. He looked up at her expectantly. “Is that all?” he seemed to say. “No roast chicken? No filet mignon?”

“Eat,” she said.

Not that she planned to call anybody, but what
would
be a legitimate excuse to be looking for someone who might have been missing for – she tried to recall the notes she’d made, while she spooned ground coffee into a filter in the coffee machine – twenty-five years? An old school friend? No. She didn’t even know what school the woman had attended. Could she have found something belonging to the woman? Something at least twenty-five years old?
Oh, hell
, she thought,
screw that
. She was only looking for a phone number. Someone named Corbett, in or around Hastings, Michigan.

Hastings was a familiar name to anyone who’d spent much time in Vancouver. El thought of Hastings Street, which ran from Coal Harbor on the west side of Vancouver – close to the entrance to Stanley Park – through downtown Vancouver, across East Vancouver, all the way to the northeast corner of Burnaby. The intersection of Hastings and Main had at one time been the downtown hub of Vancouver, the site of the Carnegie Library and the once elegant Balmoral Hotel. Now the neighborhood was referred to as the Downtown East Side, and that mile of Hastings Street was a skid road populated by the homeless, addicted and destitute. But Hastings, to El, still had an aristocratic ring to it, and made her think of the thoroughbred races at Hastings Park – the sport of kings – and the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

El looked up the coordinates for Hastings, Michigan in the back of the road atlas, then turned to the page with the map of Michigan. There it was, a relatively small dot almost in the center of a skewed rectangle with Grand Rapids, Lansing, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo at the corners, each anywhere from twenty to thirty miles away. What did people do in Hastings, she wondered. What’s the weather like in June? What kind of talk would she hear if she sat down at the corner table in a coffee shop? That was one of the things that she loved about her job, and also hated about her job. She got to travel to towns all over North America in her imagination, but never for real. She sent her drivers out on the road, and sometimes they came back with stories, but mostly they came back with a shrug and a blank look. “What was Hastings like?” she might ask. “Any other town in the Midwest,” might be the reply.

Sometimes El wished she were still a driver, just so she could see all of these places with her own eyes, but life was much more comfortable with a phone and a desk in front of her, a lunch room and washroom just a few steps away. She’d paid her dues on the road, sitting behind a steering wheel, watching for a place to buy a decent meal, and trying to time her need to pee with her arrival at a parking lot that could accommodate an eighteen wheeler.

The gurgling of the coffee machine told her coffee was ready, and she was soon back at her desk with a big mug full of it – two spoons of sugar and a hefty splash of real cream – ready to make her calls. She got hold of directory assistance and soon had a list of Corbetts in the 616 area code. There were twenty-six of them, none of them April. Now what?

She couldn’t very well give Hunter twenty-six telephone numbers that
might
belong to a relative of April Corbett. She wondered if perhaps she could call a few, just to see if she could weed out the ones that had never heard of an April. If they said yes, they knew April, she could always hang up. The first two numbers she called just rang and rang, the third one went to an answering machine, but she didn’t leave a message. She was about to try the fourth number when the front door opened and her friend, Marilyn Jenkins, dropped a pile of paperwork on the front counter with a big sigh.

“You’re early,” they said to each other at the same time.

“Whatcha doin’?” said MJ. “Want to go to Edna’s for breakfast?”

El dropped the receiver back in its place and decided the remaining phone calls could wait.

Edna’s Kitchen was a small, bare restaurant that catered to workers in the industrial complex where Watson Transportation’s warehouse was situated. The tables were cheap and plain, the chairs small and uncomfortable, especially for big women like El and MJ, but the service was fast and the food edible.

“That’s new,” said MJ, pointing at a framed print on the wall.

El looked around and saw a total of six prints, three on each of the side walls. They were all scenes of dogs playing poker.

Susan, the proprietor of Edna’s, appeared at the table, arriving swiftly and not quite silently in her white Reeboks. She and her husband, Walter, were Chinese-Canadians. They owned and worked at Edna’s, she waiting tables and manning the cash register, he doing double duty as short order cook and dishwasher. Walter was seldom seen outside the kitchen, and only communicated to the clientele with smiles and nods from behind the kitchen’s pass-through. El suspected he didn’t speak English, because Susan always shouted her orders in Chinese, or what sounded like Chinese.

“Coffee?” Susan, always in a hurry, filled both cups at the speed of light. “What you want to eat?”

“Nice addition to the décor,” said El, nodding at the print.

“Junk shop. Five dollar. Nice, eh?”

MJ congratulated Susan on the find. El ordered a fried egg sandwich and MJ ordered scrambled eggs and sausages with toast.

“That all you’re having?” she asked El.

“I stopped at MacDonald’s on my way in.”

“So what are you doing in so early?”

“Trying to find a woman named April Corbett.”

“You got a shipment with no address and phone number?”

“I’m helping Hunter…”

“Not again.” MJ rolled her eyes. “You planning to open the Watson Detective Agency?”

El didn’t know why she bothered talking to MJ about this kind of thing. She could count on MJ for some smart remark, making fun of her attempts at helping Hunter with an investigation.

“Forget it. What about you?”

“Rush shipment for some outfit in Boston Bar. River rafters near Hell’s Gate rapids. I guess they’ve got a big group booked for tomorrow and one of their rafts got trashed.”

“You ever done that?” asked El. “River rafting?”

“Are you kidding?” MJ made a face as if El had suggested she body surf through Hell’s Gate. “I’d probably sink the raft. Besides, I’m not crazy about the idea of white water. I’m even scared to get close enough to the edge of the Fraser Canyon to throw rocks in the river.”

Susan arrived with their orders, deposited them on the table and was gone again in less than three seconds.

“Why would you even
want
to throw rocks in the river?” El asked, shaking ketchup into her fried egg sandwich.

“I wouldn’t. But it might be cool to throw a bottle in the river, you know, with a message inside. Your name and the date and something like, call me if you get this note. Who knows, it could end up in San Francisco.” She waved a sausage in the air. “Or even Japan.”

A message in a bottle? El’s chewing slowed as an idea began to take shape. That was possible, wasn’t it? A bottle found floating where? Why not the mighty Fraser? Anyone heading for the Yukon would have driven through B.C. and was sure to have reached the Fraser River at some point in their journey, anywhere along its eight hundred and fifty mile length, from a spring high in the northern Rockies to its ultimate destination near Vancouver. Entirely possible…

Not only that, but Watson Transportation’s warehouse was on an island – Annacis Island – in between the two main arms of the Fraser as it widened at its delta, so it made perfect sense that a bottle could wash ashore near here, maybe be buried for years in the silt of the delta. What a creative excuse to be looking for a girl from Hastings, Michigan, thought El. Not that she would use the excuse, of course. She was only looking for a phone number after all.

“Thanks, MJ,” she said, but refrained from mentioning why.

“No way,” said MJ. “You’re paying for your own damn sandwich.”

– – – – – ELEVEN

Hunter was back at Betty Salmon’s cabin again, early on the morning after he’d picked her up in Chicken. He found Betty Salmon working in her kitchen garden, and Goldie chopping kindling over at the woodpile. Betty got to her feet when she saw him, holding a stick she’d been using to poke holes in the dirt. The dog met him at the Blazer, sniffed his pant legs, then trotted behind him.

“Why are you here?” Betty asked, demanded almost. “Is it about Orville?”

“Good morning to you, too, Betty,” he said cheerfully. He’d seen a softer side of her yesterday, and was determined not to let her put that wall back up. “I come bearing gifts.” He held up a thermos of coffee he’d brought from the lodge. “Can I tempt you with hot coffee? I’ve even brought cream.” He dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of little creamers.

She maintained a stern face, but dropped the stick and walked toward him, wiping one hand against the other, then both against the denim on her thighs. “Real cream?”

By the time he’d poured the coffee, Goldie had joined them. “Any news?” she asked.

He passed each of them a mug of coffee across the plank table before pouring what was left into the thermos lid for himself. “Sort of,” he said, sitting down opposite them.

“I haven’t been totally honest with you,” he said. “I told you I knew April on a personal level when she worked in Whitehorse.” He didn’t want them to think the relationship had been more than it was, so he added, “She was waiting tables in a bar my friend and I used to go to and we used to talk. What I didn’t tell you was that at the time, I was a member of the Whitehorse RCMP, and was the first officer on the scene at the cabin near Johnson’s Crossing where she was living with a man named Martin Blake. At least, that was what he called himself.”

“On the scene? Like, the scene of a crime?” Goldie asked.

He nodded. “There was no one in the cabin, but there was a lot of blood, and evidence that a grizzly had been there. The man, and your mother, of course, were missing.”

The girl shuddered visibly. Betty Salmon just stared at him, her face like stone.

“The grizzly killed him?” Goldie asked.

“Nobody knows. No body was ever found. The man’s dog team was still there, five dogs, chained to their houses.”

“Do you think my mother killed him?” Her voice was almost a whisper.

“I was afraid the man – or someone, or something – had killed your mother, until I saw you.”

“What happened to the dogs?” There was a note of accusation in Betty Salmon’s voice, and Hunter wasn’t surprised that she was more concerned about the dogs than the man.

“One of our dog men took charge of them.” He didn’t know the details, and didn’t want to speculate.

“Are you still with the police, then?” asked Goldie.

“No.” He took a deep breath. “And yes. I still have friends at the Whitehorse detachment.” He addressed Betty. “You remember I told you yesterday that the RCMP will probably want to see any personal belongings that Orville may have left here? Well, given I’m heading back to Whitehorse today, Staff Sergeant Bart Sam of the RCMP has asked me to collect those belongings and deliver them to the detachment.” He and Bart had discussed the pros and cons of this, knowing that anything a civilian brought might not have any value in court if it came to a prosecution for murder. However, at present there wasn’t enough evidence against Orville to justify sending an officer of the law to Eagle for them, but having access to his personal effects might make the difference.

He noticed both women turn to look at a makeshift tent near the edge of the clearing. “Is everything of his over there?” he asked.

The two women accompanied him to Orville’s campsite. Like many travelers prepared for the unpredictable on northern highways, Orville had evidently packed up much of his gear and taken it in the truck. Consequently, there was no bedroll or sleeping bag, nor any cooking supplies, but it was clear he had intended to return, for the overhead tarp was still in place, secured to trees, and there was some miscellaneous gear stacked underneath it, including a rusty gold pan, a tangle of steel chain, an old chainsaw, a small gas can, an axe and a shovel, plus two coils of dirty rope. A tarp covered another pile of goods. Hunter lifted up the edge of it.

“Is any of this yours?”

The women peered at what was there, but didn’t touch anything until Betty nudged a grime-stained canvas bag with her foot. “Winter clothes, maybe,” she said. “It’s all Orville’s. That old snow machine, too.” Her face still stone, she turned and walked away.

Hunter felt uncomfortable. Loading the man’s possessions – worth nothing to most people, but treasured implements of survival for their owner – in the back of the Blazer, it was almost like going through the belongings of the dead, and a better picture of Orville – a man he had still not met – took shape in his mind. A resourceful outdoorsman, a dreamer with low income and high hopes, used to surviving in the bush. A man who had been kind to Betty Salmon and given her hope. Hunter looked forward to meeting him, if circumstances permitted it, and also found himself hoping that Orville wasn’t guilty of the murder Bart was investigating.

When he walked into the summer kitchen to say goodbye, Goldie was finishing her coffee, a paperback book open on the table in front of her.

“Where’s your grandmother?”

“In the cabin. She’s upset you didn’t tell her yesterday you were with the police.”

“I’m not.” Why did it feel like a lie? He might not be on their payroll, but he had to acknowledge to himself that sometimes he still felt like a member of the force. He’d told Betty yesterday that she could trust him. Irrational as it was, he felt like he’d let her down.

“This was my mother’s.” Goldie held up the book, interrupting his train of thought. “Walt Whitman. Do you like poetry?”

“Not something I read, as a rule.”

“Me neither.” She pulled out what looked like a Polaroid picture. “This was in it, a note that she left for Gran.”

He took it from her. It was a typical tourist photo of that decade from the north. Bears seen from the highway. He turned it over and read the note.

“Can I take this?” he asked. “It could be important in helping find your mom.”

She reached for it. “These things are all I have of my mother’s,” she said. “There’s no way I can let you take it. Besides, I don’t see how it could help.”

He let her take it from him. “Is there a photocopier anywhere in town?” He’d rather have the original, but a copy would be better than nothing. “The RCMP will want to compare the handwriting to a note they received around the same time.”

“Do you think the other note was from my mother?”

“It’s possible. The timing was right.”

“Does this mean the Mounties are actively looking for my mother?”

Hunter didn’t want to give her false hope, but at the same time, it didn’t seem fair to keep her in the dark. “Last I heard, they were considering reopening the unsolved disappearance I just told you about. Now that I know she survived, I expect they’ll try to locate her.”

She reached out as if to touch his arm. “Please, please, help me find my mother.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“Will you call me after you talk to the Mounties in Whitehorse? Call me at Yukon Sally’s. You’ll be in Whitehorse tomorrow?”

“I can’t promise you we’ll find her.”

“But you can promise to call me, can’t you? I won’t rest until I know what’s happening.”

He gave her a gentle smile. “It may take them a while, Goldie.”

“But I don’t want to believe they’re working on it if they’re not. Will you let me know?”

“Yes. I will. I’ll let you know.”

As usual, when El got back to the office her phone had already started ringing. Drivers, shippers, receivers.

Can you get me a trip back home? I’ve been on the road four weeks already.

Where’s my freight? It was supposed to be here yesterday.

How much will it cost to get a load shipped to San Jose? Can you pick it before four thirty?

Things quieted down around five o’clock. El ordered a delivery from the local pizza joint, put on a fresh pot of coffee, and pulled out the list of numbers she’d got from the Michigan operator. Peterbilt growled – a sound much like marbles rolling over hardwood – and punctuated his growl with a couple of sharp barks. El scowled at the little black dog; his glittery little eyes were fixed on her face and his curled up tail jerked back and forth. She sighed and hoisted herself out of her big captain’s chair.

“Okay, Pete. We’ll walk around the yard until the pizza guy gets here.”

Pete got to the door before she did and put his little paws on it, as if his twenty pounds were enough to push it open. They strolled the yard between a couple of parked eighteen wheelers and a few empty trailers. Pete lifted his leg on a broken wood pallet, and sniffed at an old Subway wrapper that lay flattened on the asphalt. El followed him around until the pizza guy pulled up in a VW Rabbit that had seen better days.

Ten minutes later, two slices of pizza under her belt and a fresh coffee beside the phone, El began dialing, trying to find a woman named April Corbett for Hunter. No luck the first few calls. When anyone answered, she simply asked, “Is April Corbett there?” If they said ‘no’, she would ask, “Do you know April? Is this the right number?” If they said, something like ‘there’s no April at this number’, she would ask, “Are you related to April? Do you know how I could reach her?” After half a dozen calls, she took a break for another slice of pizza. Peterbilt’s pitiful but hopeful expression moved her to share a couple slices of salami with him.

Three calls later, she got a response that she wasn’t totally prepared for.

“Who wants to know?” It was a man’s voice, confident but not belligerent.

El cleared her throat. “Uh. I – I guess that means you know April?”

“Who are you, and why are you looking for April?” Well, maybe a little belligerent.

“I live in British Columbia,” she began, knowing that anyone with caller ID would have her number anyway. She couldn’t very well just hang up at this point. “I – uh – found a note in a bottle.”

“Huh? What kind of idiotic story is that?”

“There’s nothing idiotic about it!”

She heard a woman’s voice in the background. “Who is it, Cal?”

His voice, muted, “Some broad in South America looking for an April Corbett. Ever heard of her?” A pause. “Me neither.”

“So just hang up.”

El beat him to it.

She slid her fingers under a fourth slice of pizza and lifted it out of the box, absently pulling off a small piece of salami for Pete before taking a big bite out of the droopy end. She was offended that So-and-so Dickhead Corbett had called her story idiotic. There must be a way to make the bottle story sound more legitimate. Or could she call herself a private investigator? Publisher’s Clearing House? Some kind of market researcher? How about a lawyer? A lawyer, say, looking for a distant relative of someone who died without a will? She moved the pizza to her left hand and began scribbling in her note book. If she added enough details, people would think it had to be true.

Seven calls later, a man answered. El put a smile on her face before saying, “I’m with Watson Investigations and at the request of a client, we’re looking for an April Corbett who might have been in British Columbia in the early seventies. Any chance she’s a relative of yours?” After seven calls, she had started sounding pretty professional, if she did say so herself.

“You mean my sister?”

“That could very well be. The April Corbett I’m looking for stopped to help a woman search for her lost dog at a rest stop in the Fraser Canyon.” She looked at Pete with a smug smile. “It was a little black dog, sort of like a Pomeranian. It had run off after a chipmunk and ended up falling off a ledge down a steep hill. The woman in question – her name was Edna, Edna Jenkins – was rather, uh, corpulent –,“ El glanced down at her own rather large thighs, “– and unable to get down the hill to retrieve the wayward dog. So April, perhaps the same April Corbett who is your sister, at no small personal risk to herself, slid down that hill to rescue little Blackie.” Here she paused long enough for feedback.

“That sounds like something April would do.”

Eureka! “So apparently Ms. Jenkins is ailing and wanting to include a little something for April in her will, but needs to find out where she is and how she can be contacted. First of all, was your sister in British Columbia – perhaps just passing through – in or around 1972?”

“Could be. She was somewhere in the west. I know she spent some time in the Canadian north. She was planning to go to Alaska but never made it there.”

El could barely contain her excitement, but kept her voice as professional as she was able. “And where is April now?”

There was an uncomfortable pause, then, “I really don’t like to give out that kind of information Ms…?”

El glanced at the cover of the Road King magazine under her left elbow. “Mack,” she blurted out, but it didn’t sound like a real name, so she quickly corrected herself, “Marilyn MacKenzie.” She’d used MJ’s last name for the dog lady, so why not use her first?