Black Fly Season (7 page)

‘Keep track of anyone she visits. And especially keep an eye out for visitors. No one gets in to see her without talking to me or Delorme first. You make them wait right here. Anyone hanging around in a suspicious manner, you check ‘em out and let us know right away.’

‘Will do,’ Quigley said. ‘Seems like a nice kid.’

She looked small and frail lying back against the pillow. Her hair was a red blaze against the white of the bed, her skin, except for the freckles, almost a match with the sheets. The bandage on her temple was a miniature, pale flag. She stared at Cardinal with no sign of recognition, which was unnerving even though he was expecting it.

‘We met a few days ago,’ he said. ‘I’m Detective Cardinal. But here’s someone you haven’t met - my partner, Lise Delorme.’

The girl smiled shyly as Delorme shook her hand.

There was a pause, during which Cardinal became aware that he was in an awkward position. If he couldn’t ask her questions relating to her injury, he didn’t know what he was doing here.

‘How’s your head, after your operation?’ Delorme asked. ‘You must have one nasty headache.’

‘My head?’ The girl touched her hair absently,

fingers fluttering round the bandage. ‘It’s actually not too bad.’ She wrinkled her nose.

‘Maybe when you’re doing better, I can take you to a good stylist. See what she can do with that shaved patch.’

‘That would be nice. What’s your name again?’

‘Lise.’

‘Lise.’

The young woman looked out the window. Down the hill, a train loaded with oil tankers rolled lazily past the school.

‘You know what I can’t understand? I can’t understand why I remember some things and not others. Why do I know what a stylist does, when I can’t remember my own name? Why do I remember how to speak, how to tie my shoe, but not where I’m from? How come I can’t remember any of the people I meet?’

‘You’ll have to ask Dr Paley that one,’ Cardinal said. He noted the irritation in her voice. The rise in her emotional temperature, slight though it was, seemed a harbinger of recovery.

‘I’m afraid to ask anybody anything,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve already asked it nine times and people will hate me.’

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Delorme said. ‘Dr Paley only wants to help you. So do we.’

‘What I really want to do is get out of here. It’s boring lying in bed all day.’

‘It’s not safe for you to go out yet. You might be seen by the person who tried to kill you.’

‘Someone shot me. I keep forgetting.’

Cardinal and Delorme looked at one another.

‘I don’t feel like I’m the kind of person people would want to shoot. Isn’t it possible that it was just an accident?’

Cardinal shook his head. ‘You were shot from very close range. If it was an accident, why didn’t anyone go for help?’

The pale fingers fluttered over the bandage. ‘I just can’t …’ Her voice trailed off and the green eyes filled.

‘Look at it this way,’ Cardinal said. ‘You’re feeling bored, bewildered by your memory problems, and nervous about asking questions. A few days ago you weren’t feeling anything. I’d say things are looking up.’

‘You’re safe here,’ Delorme said. ‘There’s a huge cop guarding your door, and we’re going to do everything we can to catch the person that did this to you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘We’d better go,’ Cardinal said. ‘Dr Paley wanted to talk to us again.’

‘He seems very optimistic,’ Delorme said to the young woman, ‘so try not to worry too much.’

‘How can I?’ the girl said and smiled wanly. ‘I can’t remember what I’m supposed to worry about.’

Dr Paley was waiting for them in a staff lounge down the hall. There was a fridge, a microwave,

and a few plastic chairs around a table. The blue screen of a combination TV and VCR glowed high up on a shelf. Dr Paley slipped a videotape into it and sat down beside them with a remote in his hand. He pointed it at the screen and the VCR began to whirr.

‘I won’t play you the whole thing,’ he said. ‘The way I went about this, I told her I was an avid shutter bug - true, by the way - and I wanted to show her some of my favourite photographs. What they are is scenes from around Algonquin Bay - places any local person would recognize. I got my wife and kids to pose, so the pictures wouldn’t seem so obvious as memory cues.’

‘How will we know which one she’s looking at?’

Dr Paley clicked the remote and froze the image that appeared. They were looking at a wide-angle shot that included both him and Red, with the angle favouring the young woman. In the upper left-hand corner was a smaller image of the doctor’s daughter in a red snowsuit, standing in front of the Gateway to the North sign.

‘I use a video set-up with picture-in-picture capability. You see what she’s seeing in the little box. You’ll notice she has no particular reaction to the Gateway to the North arch.’

He clicked the remote again. On screen, the redhead made a polite comment, inquiring about the child’s age.

The Gateway morphed into an image of the cathedral.

‘Same again, you see?’ Dr Paley pointed to his patient. ‘She’s polite. Kind-hearted, too, asking about the kids and so on. But nothing in her reaction indicates that she recognizes the church.’

On screen, the girl smiled. The insert showed a triumphant six-year-old hoisting a fish he had just caught off the government dock, a local landmark. The white bulk of the Chippewa Princess, a cruise boat, loomed in the background.

‘No change, right?’

‘These are certainly the places you think of, when you think of Algonquin Bay,’ Cardinal said. ‘But her not recognizing them doesn’t mean she isn’t from here, right? It may just mean her memory isn’t budging for now.’

‘Correct,’ Dr Paley said. ‘But watch what happens coming up.’ He hit fast forward and the image smeared and leaned. They waited a couple of minutes while he kept his eye on the numbers that clicked round on the bottom of the screen. The tape halted with a clunk. ‘Here we are. I’m showing her my photographic vista of Beaufort Hill.’

‘Yes, there’s the old fire tower,’ Delorme said. A tiny dirt road that led up to it curved away from a line of hydro pylons below, forming an elongated Y.

‘She doesn’t say anything, you notice, but look at the crease between her brows. She lifts her hand and she starts to speak …’

The insert suddenly went snowy and there was

a loud hiss - almost a roar - of static. The girl’s eyes went round as two zeroes, and her hand flew to her mouth.

‘What is it?’ Dr Paley asked on screen. ‘What’s wrong?’

The girl’s face went blank, the horror gone.

Dr Paley asked her again what was wrong.

‘Nothing,’ the young woman said. ‘I mean, I don’t know. I felt scared all of a sudden.’

‘Note the return of affect,’ Dr Paley said to Cardinal and Delorme. ‘A good sign.’

‘What startled her?’ Delorme said.

‘There was a short in the jumper cable and it caused that awful spray of static and it made her jump out of her skin. But before that, I think she was about to recognize Beaufort Hill, or at least say something about it. So it’s not clear whether her fright reaction is to Beaufort Hill or just to the sudden noise. As you can see, I didn’t get anything else out of her.’

On screen, Dr Paley gently tried to get the girl to say what had scared her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, again. ‘I just felt this sudden … I don’t know.’

‘Was it the noise that frightened you?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Was there something about the picture? The picture of the hill? Could you look at it again?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘I promise it won’t make the noise this time. I’ll hold the cable.’

‘I guess …’

The insert of Beaufort Hill appeared again. The girl’s expression changed only slightly this time, to one of concentration. Then she shook her head. ‘It doesn’t mean anything to me. At least, I don’t think so. I don’t know what made me jump like that.’

Dr Paley hit the pause button. ‘I wrapped it up a few minutes after that. It’s probably not much use to you, but I wanted you to see it, if only to get an idea of how gently this sort of recovery has to proceed.’

‘Is it possible that hill is where she got shot?’ Delorme asked.

‘Very unlikely. As I said, she won’t remember anything about that - nothing that occurred within half an hour before or after. If she was held somewhere first, or if she was fleeing for a time, that may come back, but not the memory of the shooting itself.’

‘So it’s possible something happened there,’ Cardinal said.

‘Oh, yes. Possibly something leading up to the trauma. Possibly something when she regained consciousness. If so, we can expect it to come back to her at a later date. We just have to be patient.’

‘You feel like a little hike?’ Delorme said when

they were outside. She tucked a strand of

hair behind her ear; a damp breeze was

blowing across the parking lot. ‘We could take a

look at that hill close up. You recognized it, right?’

‘Yeah, the picture was taken from somewhere up behind the University,’ Cardinal said. ‘Why don’t we drive over that way before it starts to rain?’

‘You think she’s a student at Northern?’

‘We’d have heard from them by now, if she was.’

‘Well, if she was on Beaufort Hill, the most likely route for anyone not a student would be via the lookout off Highway 11. Why don’t I drive to the lookout and I’ll meet you in the middle?’

‘Top of Nishinabe Creek?’

‘Yeah. Where it splits round that little island. Figure forty-five minutes to an hour.’

Algonquin Bay does not have any serious mountains, but the high-backed hills of the Precambrian shield lumber around it like a herd of gargantuan buffalo. The terrain is unforgiving granite, luckily covered with a layer of loamy soil that supports

thousands of square miles of forest. The Northern University campus is flung across the top of one of these hills, affording the students a spectacular view of the city and the blue expanse of Lake Nipissing. Not that it was blue today. A light drizzle had set in, and the sky was a depressing shade of grey from one horizon to the other.

Delorme dropped Cardinal at headquarters before they took their separate routes. On the way up to the campus, Cardinal stopped at a curve on Sackville Road, where there was a small, comma-shaped lay-by. Back when Cardinal was in high school, he used to come up here with Brenda Stewart, his sweetheart of the time, but Brenda Stewart had staunchly refused to go all the way in his parents’ Impala. Now, he looked out across the rooftops of the city toward the Manitou islands some seven miles south. Beaufort Hill lay behind the forest to the west; you couldn’t quite see from here.

Cardinal drove the rest of the way up to the university and parked in the visitor’s lot. He walked across campus toward the network of trails that fanned out behind the college. A group of students spilled giggling from the main entrance and travelled in a boisterous, shifting knot toward the residence. How young they seemed - younger even than Cardinal’s daughter, Kelly - and how innocent. Cardinal envied their easy camaraderie. When he had been a student in Toronto he had tried to save money by living off-campus in a

smelly little room near Kensington Market. Thus he had missed the experience of living in a building full of fellow students, and it probably ended up costing more anyway.

There was a large gazebo among the pines, and then the trails. Cardinal took the one that led toward the top of the nearest hill, waving black flies from his face and hair, moving fast to keep ahead of them. About three hundred yards into the woods, the trail looped back toward a tiny man-made lake. Cardinal stepped off the trail and kept heading up the hill. The air was thick with smells of pine and loam and wet leaves. The drizzle didn’t reach the forest floor; it hovered in a fine mist that clung to the skin.

The worst thing about black flies, Cardinal thought - the truly diabolical thing - is that they are absolutely silent. They do not buzz like bees, or drone like horseflies, or even emit the highpitched whine of mosquitoes; there’s no warning, no chance of a pre-emptive smack. Cardinal felt a nip on his ankle as if someone had stuck him with a hot pin. He bent down to tuck his pants into his socks. The only good thing you could say about black flies: unlike mosquitoes, they did not bite through clothing. While he was bent over, another fly excised a piece of his neck. He slapped, and his hand came away bloody. He turned his collar up and continued toward the crest of the hill.

Ten minutes later - sweating, puffing, and

swearing yet again to put in more hours wrestling many-armed Mr Nautilus in the police gym Cardinal climbed atop an outcropping of granite. Lake Nipissing, roughly palette-shaped, glimmered dully to the south, but off to the west he could now see Beaufort Hill. The old fire tower was just beneath the summit; the narrow dirt road that led up to it curved away from the line of hydro towers below. This was where Dr Paley had taken his picture.

Maybe Red had stood here, too. Cardinal looked around at the clearing, swatting flies away as if he were conducting an orchestra. Signs of human activity lay everywhere - a rusted Sprite can, a wrapper from an Aero bar, the remains of a campfire. Obviously a popular spot for students, but surely not in black fly season. Cardinal swatted at his temple.

He jumped down off the rock and, moving as fast as he could through the trees, headed further west. There was no trail here, but the rocks made it the easiest route from the clearing, which was otherwise surrounded by thick brush. He kept moving, not sure what he was looking for. Bites were itching on his neck and ankles.

No one in their right mind would come wandering around up here. What might have drawn a young woman like Red? Of course, if she wasn’t from the north, she wouldn’t have known about the flies.

Cardinal pushed his way through the trees,

dogged now by a squadron of flies targeting his ears. Finally he found the trail that ran beside Nishinabe Creek. Winter had been particularly snowy this year, with blizzards into March, and snowfalls to the end of April. In a normal summer, you could almost jump across the creek, but now it was bursting its banks with runoff.