Stormy Cove (19 page)

CHAPTER 25

Beth Ontara, 45, archaeologist

You’re asking me questions you already know the answers to, aren’t you? I mean, you know damn well I first met Lori Finning at the Birch Tree Lodge. My impression of her? You know what first struck me? When Lloyd introduced her to our group, she remembered everybody’s name, that’s a dozen names—even though they were all talking. I didn’t even remember Lori’s name at the beginning. Is that what they call a photographic memory?

Naturally, we were curious to find out how Lloyd knew this pretty photographer from Vancouver. We wormed it out of him right away—he can’t keep anything to himself. But when we asked Lori why she was here, I thought she seemed a little . . . let’s say . . . uptight. My gut feeling was that she wasn’t telling us the whole story. Annie and me talked about it afterward before going to sleep. Annie thought it was funny that a photographer like Lori would be living in a desolate village, an outport—just to make a book of photographs. I mean, who’s going to buy a book like that? Maybe a few homesick Newfies living somewhere else in Canada. And why’s a woman like Lori interested, anyway? She didn’t look like a person who knows how to be away from a city like Vancouver for very long. Archaeologists like us are used to living in the field. We can eat cold beans out of a can if we have to and wear the same underwear for three days.

Not that she was all dolled up or anything—I don’t mean that. Her nails weren’t even polished. I look at my nails a lot, and they’re almost always dirty. Comes with the job.

Certainly doesn’t come with hers. Although . . . she liked bright colors, I remember that, but maybe that’s typical for Vancouver. They’re all semihippies in that city—either that or they imitate the movie stars who make films there. No, never been there. Not interested either. There are enough Newfies in Western Canada already who really don’t want to be there.

What did I want to say? Oh, right, she had something . . . sophisticated about her. You know, like somebody who can tell you right away who a quote came from and . . . or what material an expensive evening dress is made of. And she read the book reviews in the Saturday
Globe and Mail
. And somebody like her winds up in a godforsaken hick town on The Rock? You’ve got to wonder.

Yes, we went for a snowmobile ride, and she came with us. And she played poker afterward. With Annie, me, and Lloyd. No, we didn’t talk about Stormy Cove. Don’t recall it ever came up. We talked more about our crazy experiences on our digs. She was very interested, and it made her laugh.

Lori hardly ever said anything about herself. I got the impression—assuming you want to hear my impressions—I got the impression she’s a good listener, and that gets people to talk. And maybe we yakked so much because Lloyd sprung for a good red wine.

Jacinta Parsons? Name never came up, and Lori didn’t ask about her either.

But we weren’t surprised Lloyd wanted to hire her to take pictures. Lloyd’s ambitious. Don’t get me wrong—I’m OK with that. We archaeologists need more recognition. More recognition brings more money—I have a good head for business there. Lloyd convinced himself that her photographs would get him into the international media. That was a smart move. Of course, he couldn’t predict what would happen next. But it probably wouldn’t have stopped him.

The business with Jacinta Parsons didn’t stop him either. It was a terrible situation for all of us. Worst-case scenario. Sure, we look for bodies, but hey, they’re at least a thousand years old. You know what I can’t figure? Why the locals spread those rumors about Lloyd. A seven-thousand-year-old grave—I mean, what more do those folks want? It’s such a win for the area. It brings the tourists and . . . it rescued the place from being nothing. And how do they thank us? By making us look bad.

We’ve got nothing to do with the nut that killed Jacinta.

Did I know her? It’s on file. Did you read the files? I didn’t have anything to do directly with the village folks who worked for us. But when Annie got sick, I took over her job drawing up the work schedule. Jacinta came to see me because she only wanted to work on days when somebody could drive her home, either her older sister or her sister’s boyfriend, a fisherman from Stormy Cove. Jacinta said it’s what her mother wanted. Until then, she’d only come to work on days when her friend Una did.

The second time I talked to her was on Lloyd’s birthday. We celebrated in the Hardy Sailor. Yes, exactly, the night Gideon’s lodge burned down. She was standing around after work so I asked if she was being picked up. She said yes, and she had a birthday present for Lloyd. I told her he was already at the Hardy Sailor. She should get there fast to join us for supper. She wanted to know if our whole team was at the bar, and I said it was. I was in a hurry because I’d organized the meal and everybody was waiting for me. That’s the last time I saw Jacinta.

What present? Jacinta’s birthday present for Lloyd? No idea what happened to it. Probably a quilt or something local like that. Lloyd would certainly have been delighted. Women work on one for three months and then sell it for fifty dollars because they don’t have a clue how much their work is worth.

We learned about the fire just after dessert. It was bad, awful. And we didn’t know at the time that it was only the beginning. It’s a miracle we managed to keep on working under those circumstances. And you know, the locals stayed on working for us on the dig. It wasn’t as if they boycotted us. Even the younger women showed up at work; their parents evidently had no objections. We paid well. I ask you: Would they have done that if they’d really believed we were connected with Jacinta’s disappearance?

Just Jacinta’s sister didn’t come anymore, and her friend the fisherman didn’t either. I heard later he was a suspect. Apparently nothing came of it. But the past always catches up with you.

It just occurred to me. Poker—I mentioned our game at the lodge. Well, Lori said she didn’t have the foggiest idea about poker. She made typical beginner’s mistakes at first. Joked about it. Later we played for money, not much, just twenty bucks a stake. She lost her money, of course. We raised it to fifty and then a hundred. But Lori won the last hand. Four hundred bucks. We were flabbergasted. Annie and me tried to analyze the game afterward. Lori must have been watching us like a hawk the whole time. She must have filed it all away in her brain. Like our names. But she still played the innocent. We completely underestimated her!

If you ask me, Lori’s a woman who keeps her cards close to her vest. Pun intended. Though I don’t really feel like joking around.

CHAPTER 26

The miserable husky belonged to a man called Tom Quinton, as Lori learned from Patience, and his house had the only double garage in Stormy Cove. Patience also said the Quintons were the only ones in town with a dishwasher. Tom drove the snowplow and the fire truck and sometimes the school bus when the regular driver couldn’t. Besides, he owned three pickups. Lori imagined a man with so many vehicles would have little empathy for members of the human species that sometimes chose to go on foot.

Fortunately, she got some help from Tom’s wife, Vera, who offered her a cup of tea in the kitchen. Lori spotted the fabled dishwasher.

“Folks in Vancouver walk a lot,” Vera Quinton said. “It was on TV. There are walking trails everywhere with a white line down the middle so cyclists don’t run into the walkers. Is that really true?”

Lori nodded. “I go jogging every day in Vancouver, but I prefer just to walk here, and . . .”

She wanted to say that she felt safer with a dog, but changed her mind.

“And it’s more fun with a dog.”

Tom Quinton wasn’t so easily persuaded.

“This dog will drive you nuts. It takes off and doesn’t listen when you call it.”

“I’ll just keep him on a leash,” Lori countered.

“A leash? We don’t have a leash.” Tom laughed at the absurd idea.

His wife butted in.

“Tom, you can tie a rope to his collar. That works too, y’know!”

Quinton growled a kind of acknowledgment and stood up. “This dog is—we took him in. He ran up to us because—”

“He belonged to Gideon Moore before,” Vera interrupted him again. “The dog always ran away from Gideon, though he denies it. We brought him back a few times, but then it got to be too much, so we just kept him.”

Vera tapped her fingers on the table.

“Gideon was unhappy with his wife, you see. He’s got a young one now, and he built a house for her. The dog probably wasn’t good enough for him either. Now they’ve got some kind of little lap dog. I heard they paid six thousand for it.”

“I could buy an outboard motor and a speedboat for that,” Tom grumbled.

“Or two weeks’ holiday in Hawaii,” Vera shot back.

Her husband snorted. “That would be throwing money away. I don’t need a sunburn.”

Vera’s mouth morphed into a thin line.

“It would be nice if you could introduce me to your dog,” Lori said, getting to her feet. “That way he could learn not to be afraid of me.”

“Rusty’s a good dog, doesn’t bite,” Tom assured her on their way outside.

As they approached the husky, he pulled at his chain furiously. But Lori quickly realized that this welcome break from his desolate life just excited him and that he wasn’t vicious. She waited until Tom had calmed Rusty down and then let him sniff her hands and clothing thoroughly while avoiding any eye contact.

“Does he obey commands?”

“Only sit and stop,” Tom replied as he tied a rope onto Rusty’s collar. “Go ahead and try.”

“Sit!” Lori shouted.

With his glacier-blue eyes, Rusty first looked at his owner and then at her. He seemed confused.

“Sit!” Lori commanded again.

This time, the husky obeyed. She rewarded him with a dog biscuit she’d bought at the village store. Nothing beats the power of a treat.

She let the dog sniff her hands again then stroked his neck. The dog was docile. He’d evidently never been beaten, just neglected, left all by himself. A dog that needed to run but was never allowed to. What a sorry life.

Tom walked them out to the street, where she went off with the dog alone. Rusty trotted along in front of her, stopping frequently to investigate scents and peeing to leave his mark. She didn’t attempt to train him, just let him run around as free as possible.

A strong, offshore west wind was gusting over the cove, rather aggressively, angrily. She had to keep adjusting her hat and sticking strands of hair back under it.

That’s what you get when you grow a mane.

Whitecaps sparkled on the bay. Ribbed waves hurried toward the ocean, like a carpet made of the backs of shimmering insects. The snow on the hilltops had melted.

She made her way briskly past the last houses. Faces appeared and disappeared in the windows. She was creating a stir. Walking a dog in Stormy Cove just wasn’t done, as Vera had informed her. Life was hard for the villagers, so why not for their dogs as well? If you didn’t survive, it was your own fault. If there were any cats in the village, Lori hadn’t seen them, either outdoors or in a home. On the other hand, there
were
dogs—all of them tied up, some with doghouses, some without. Nobody seemed to give it a second thought. That’s the way their parents had done it, and it’s all the villagers knew.

Lori had photographed some boys and girls a few days before, shooting at wild ducks. The oldest girl was maybe ten. The next day, Lori went with an eleven-year-old schoolgirl to a hill behind the village, and her camera recorded the girl taking dead snowshoe hares out of traps where the animals had died in terrible pain. Lori’s brain told her that these kids were simply learning to survive in a brutal and threatening environment. But her mother had brought her up to protect weak and helpless beings, especially animals.

She hardly saw Noah over the next several days. He was out hauling his nets on the ocean every day, from five in the morning until dark. Catching fish sucked up all his energy. Nothing seemed to matter for him but life on his boat. She’d gone out twice with him and Nate, but the magic of the first trip wasn’t there, just the grinding slog and the cold, so that after a few hours, she was bored. Lumpfish just weren’t photogenic. She’d go back out once the authorities announced the opening of the cod season. She’d read that no fish better embodied the essence of Newfoundland life. When she listened to fishermen talking on the wharf, they would of course discuss shrimp and mackerel and lumpfish and herring; but at some point, they’d always come back to cod, and then in almost reverent tones, as if referring to a mystical being. They just called it “the fish,” as if it didn’t need any other appellation.

She’d read that cod was so abundant five centuries ago that it fed half of Europe and kept its economy running. But in the last fifty years, it had been overfished almost to the point of extinction. Draggers from Spain, Portugal, France, and Great Britain used to haul millions of tons from Newfoundland waters. As cod stocks kept shrinking, the Canadian government declared a two-hundred-mile protective zone around the Newfoundland coast; it had been off-limits to foreign fleets since 1977. But the zone had little effect because Canadian deep-sea trawlers—floating factories with gigantic fish capacity—continued doing the foreigners’ job. Not until cod had almost disappeared did the Canadian government, in 1992, ban cod fishing on the Grand Banks, in the greater part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and in the coastal waters off Newfoundland. The politicians in the capital, Ottawa, didn’t stop the overfishing until even the big trawlers with sonar couldn’t find enough cod in the Atlantic and moved to other fishing grounds. Noah told her that the small coastal fishermen had warned about overfishing for ages, but everyone turned a deaf ear.

“And yet we’re the ones who suffer the consequences,” he pointed out.

Today they had to keep strictly to very small catch quotas that were being lowered little by little every year.

It seemed to Lori that the cod’s near extinction was like a crime novel, and she could have listened to Noah talk about it for hours. But for a few days now she’d sensed that he might be evading her.

Rusty pulled her along a grassy edge, eager to run as much as he could on his longed-for excursion. She slipped twice, whereupon the dog would impatiently turn around and look at her. Up on the crest of the hill, she had to brace herself against some squalls with all her might. Lori pulled her hood over her beret, then tied the leash around her waist. She squinted over the entire horizon. The Isle of Demons looked like a bulwark amid the waves breaking on its cliffs. The abandoned Marguerite must have seen the mainland in the distance on some days, but it was too far away to reach, and nobody knew she was battling for survival out on the island. She would certainly have carried out a thorough and constant search for some sign of life in the surrounding waters. Like Lori was doing now.

There was ocean as far as the eye could see. But no boats. Impossible for Noah to have gone out in a wind like this. Was he at home, recovering from all the exhausting work?

Maybe she should have him over for dinner, as she’d long promised. Until now, it was only the subtle fear of too much closeness that had been holding her back. And Noah surely had more important things to think about right then, she told herself.

Rusty tugged on the leash.

“I’m sure you think there are more important things in life,” she yelled at him as they moved on. Finally, there was no more snow and no more ice underfoot, just grass and low bushes and stones and soil. The dog’s energy was transferred to Lori, and she walked much farther than she’d planned to. The final stage saw her staggering down the street, and it wasn’t long before a pickup pulled up.

“Want a ride?” Nate shouted.

She shook her head. “It’s OK. The dog needs some exercise.”

“Well, you’d better get to the beach. Capelin’s in. You’ve got to take pictures!”

“Which beach?”

“Right around the corner from the wharf. You can’t miss this!”

Capelin! Now Lori wanted to climb onto the back of the truck, but Nate had already driven off.

She’d heard about those little fish: cod food in large schools that are a sure sign of the cod’s arrival. She upped her pace, and Rusty was thrilled. She got to the Quintons’ place a half hour later, a white bungalow with a gable still bedecked with Christmas tree lights.

She tied up the husky and took off his makeshift leash. She tried to avoid his sad eyes while slipping him a dog biscuit.

Vera Quinton stuck her head out the door.

“Weren’t you gone a long time! Like a cup of tea?”

“No, I’ve got to get to the beach. Capelin’s in. But I think Rusty’s thirsty. Would you give him some water?”

Vera nodded, and Lori could only hope she’d do it.

She sped to her car and down to the bay. From some distance away, she spotted the beach. People with buckets and nets on wooden poles were running around excitedly in the water. It looked like half the population of Stormy Cove was there. Lori jumped out of the car, grabbed her bag from the truck, and mingled with the crowd. Nothing was more important than the pictures she was about to shoot. The waves bringing in the capelin sparkled like chains of jewels when the sunlight hit the fishes’ white underbellies. Schools of them rolled up onto the beach like dancing lights, covering the sand with their small, flipping bodies, where rubber boots tromped them into the sand if they weren’t dead already. Lori trained her lens on a young man stomping around in the water and scooping fish out of the waves with a net. He’d already filled two plastic buckets and had three more at the ready. Little kids gleefully ran up and down the beach with different colored sieves. Their cries mingled with the calls of the gulls circling overhead. Lori got swept up in the people’s exuberance and delight at the ocean harvest. She recognized Molly, proudly holding up a capelin, but didn’t see Patience anywhere. Molly was wading out into the waves in her boots until they came over her knees.

Lori looked around for Patience or Ches to see if they were keeping an eye on their daughter. Then she saw Noah leaning on his truck; his head was pointed in her direction.

“Can you watch Molly and make sure she doesn’t go out too far?” she asked a woman in rubber boots who was watching the goings-on with folded arms.

The woman gave a friendly laugh. “Not to worry! We won’t let anybody sink! Too many people here for that to happen!”

Lori took her point. In the village, it wasn’t just parents who felt responsible for the children—every last relative and neighbor did too.

She looked back at Noah, who hadn’t moved. He had his hands in his vest pockets and his baseball cap pulled down partly over his face. He knew exactly what would happen, she thought: it wouldn’t be long before somebody would come by and strike up a conversation. But she couldn’t resist going over to him.

He spoke first, without moving a muscle.

“You should catch a few capelin, for lunch. Taste good.”

“Why don’t you show me how—you’re not even lifting your little finger.” She leaned against the truck beside him, mimicking his posture.

“Naw, I do enough fishing. Today’s for relaxing.”

She looked at him from the side.

“I haven’t seen your boat for a long while.”

“Went to Saleau Cove for five days, going for halibut. And turbot.”

“Oh, so that was it.”

He’d gone off without saying a thing. Didn’t he think she’d be interested? Would want to record it with her camera?

Disappointment rose up inside her like bitter stomach acid. She saw some men with full buckets shaking the contents into larger containers that were then loaded onto trucks.