The Cardinal Divide (48 page)

“Who knows? But when was the last time Dale did anything because he thought he could win?”

Cole nodded.

“So they found the murder weapon in the back of Smith's truck,” Gilbert said flatly.

Cole raised an eyebrow. His face still had a number of small bandages on it, and it was pocked with tiny cuts from the shattered glass. One longer cut dissected his left eyebrow. He had been lucky not to lose that eye, the doctor told him. He raised it now.

“Pipe wrench. Orange. About two feet long. He had washed it, but the forensics people can pick up even the faintest traces of blood. It was a match with Mike Barnes.”

Cole exhaled slowly. “What about the story that Dale's truck was seen at the mine?” he asked.

Perry shrugged. “Now that Dale's been cleared, we'll never know. There are three or four similar vehicles registered to men
who work at the mine.” The two men watched a woodpecker at work on a tree at the edge of the farm. Then Perry said, “I looked into Hank Henderson's whereabouts on the night of the murder like you asked. Boy, he was pretty sour about you messing around at his place. He nearly turfed me on my butt when I went there to talk with him. But I told him it was official business and he told me where he had been at. Made a trip to Red Deer that night to meet with a dude named Jeremy Moon. You know him?”

Cole nodded.

“So he and Moon finished up the final version of the Environmental Assessment that night. Henderson didn't get back 'til after midnight.”

“I wonder why Emma Henderson lied to me?”

“I think you must have spooked her. She panicked. It happens. We're under pressure, someone we love is being threatened. We do stupid things. We lie.”

Cole took a deep breath and let it out. He understood.

“And one last thing,” Perry Gilbert said. “I ran into your friend Nancy this morning. She had just checked out of the Rim Rock and was on her way back to Edmonton. She said that she asked Deborah Cody about her hand. I guess she hit that gorilla George and busted a couple of bones. Nancy said that they were ‘making up' after their big fight and that's why George wasn't at the bar that night.”

“All neat and tidy.”

“Seems like.”

Cole stayed with the McSorlies for another week after that. He tried to write a strategy for saving the Cardinal Divide, but in the end it seemed futile. Finally, one night, he, Gord and Peggy McSorlie, and a couple of others from the East Slopes Conservation Group were having dinner at the McSorlie place when Peggy said, “I think we've got to change course entirely. We've got to win over this community. They don't trust us. We don't trust them. We're at each other's throats. We say we're doing this to save this town, and to save Cardinal Divide, but we're hardly even a part of this community.”

“What do you propose, darling?” asked Gord.

“Go underground for a few months. Maybe a year. Build some bridges. Turn down the heat a little. Win some friends. Work on some things that the local community people want to see done,
not just our own priorities, but the priorities of our neighbours. Show them that we're real people, not zealots.”

“How's that going to stop the McLeod River project?” asked Cole.

“Maybe it won't. But what we're doing now isn't stopping it either. We need to get organized in this town so that it's not just twenty of us opposing the mine because it's bad for bears. It needs to be two hundred, or two thousand of us opposing it because it's just plain bad, period. Bad for our future, bad for business, bad for our kids.”

Cole sat up all night that night, writing. In the morning he handed Peggy a fifteen-page strategy paper, and by the end of the next day they'd polished it.

“We might not win in the short-term with this strategy,” said Cole, “but we just might pull this off over the long-term.”

Peggy flipped through the pages and smiled. She looked up at him. “I like the fact that you said we.”

He saw Nancy again before he left. “Did you ever figure out who put the goons on you in the bar?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Likely never will, but my money is on Henderson.”

“Sounds like a good guess. You going to ask him?”

Cole just grinned.

“Where are you headed?” she asked.

“Home,” he said, leaning against the bumper of a rental car he had been issued by his insurance company.

“Vancouver?” she asked.

He smiled. Where was home? “I'm going to Calgary first to pick up Sarah at the airport, and then I'm going to see my mom and my brother. What about you?”

“Back to Edmonton I guess.”

“You don't sound too thrilled by the prospect.”

“It's
OK
. The
Journal
isn't really my cup of tea.”

“The
Vancouver Sun
is a much better paper.” Cole smirked through his bandages.

Cole and Sarah Blackwater reached the ranch just as Cole's stomach began to rumble. He smiled. “You hungry?”

“Sure am!”

“Why don't you go and wash up and help Grandma set the table while I brush Mac and Sally here?”

“That sounds good,” she said, pulling gently on the reins as they came to the barn.

He stepped from Mac and helped her down off Sally. “Off you go,” he said, patting her arm. She ran to the house. When the screen door had slammed shut behind her he turned to face the barn.

“
OK
, you two, time for a handful of oats and then some dinner.”

He led the two horses around the back of the barn and gave them each its oats and a pail of water. He unsaddled them and felt the hot, wet flesh under each saddle with his hands. Then he patted their withers and their muscles twitched. He brushed them down and scratched their ears and rubbed their forelocks and led them into the darkness under the barn. “Thanks for taking good care of Sarah,” he said to Sally as he stowed her in her stall. “And thanks for taking it easy on me, Mac,” he said when the other horse was stowed inside.

He put the saddles and tack away, washed his hands in a bucket of water, and stepped into the yard, breathing in the rich scent of the horses and of spring.

He didn't plan to, but as he walked around the barn, he was drawn to its double front doors. Without thinking he walked up the grade toward them. When he stood before their weathered boards he reached up and flipped the latch and swung them both wide open. They creaked. The smell of hay flavoured the air. The barn was dark except for the sunlight that seeped through the big doors and found its way through the chinks in the walls. But there was enough illumination to see the boxing ring at the barn's centre. The four lights still swayed overhead, moving slightly in the breeze that swept through the open doors. It looked so much smaller than when he was a child. So much smaller than just three years ago.

He could see in the middle of the ring the dark stain that reached back angrily toward the sagging hemp ropes. He could see the fingers of that stain reach out, red and unforgiving.

“Thinking about making a comeback?” The voice behind
made him start. He turned slowly on his sore ankle and saw his brother walk up the grade to the barn.

He grinned tightly. “I don't think so,” he said and turned back to the ring.

Walter stood beside him. He was an inch shorter than Cole, his shoulders wide and body still muscular and compact. He was wearing his sweat-stained Stetson; the hat was an old Park Service issue, the badge removed from the leather strap that circled it. Cole looked at his brother. He wore a canvas coat and blue Wranglers and a pair of brown boots. He looked every bit the cowboy.

“When are you going to stop dressing like a cowpoke?” Cole asked.

“When I stop being one, I guess,” said Walter, and winked. Then, “This is where it happened, ain't it?”

Cole caught his breath. He was silent for a full minute. “You know it is. We talked about it after the funeral.”

“I know,” said Walter, peering into the darkness of the barn. “Just never really had time to talk with you about it after that. You headed off to
BC
so quick afterwards. Like you were running from something or somebody. Thing is, Cole, nobody would blame you for it, if they knew what really went down here. As they say, the old man had it coming.”

Cole shrugged and was silent. Finally he said, “Yeah, they would. It's not about blame. It's not even about right or wrong. It's about responsibility. He never took responsibility for what he did to me. To us. To mom.”

“So you're going to fix that somehow? By taking responsibility yourself? How's that going to help?”

Cole stood still for a long time, thinking of Sarah. Then he shook his head.

The two brothers stared at the ring.

“Maybe we should go a few rounds before we take this thing apart tomorrow. What do you say?” said Walter. He turned to Cole, put his hands in front of his face, and danced side to side in the dust.

“I don't think so, Walt,” Cole said quietly.

“Body not up to it yet?”

“Body is fine, Walt. It's my heart that isn't up to it.”

Walter put his hand on his brother's shoulder. “Let's go and get some dinner, Cole. Mom's been in the kitchen all day. And Sarah's got the table set. Don't want to keep them waiting.”

They turned and closed the barn doors and walked back across the yard side by side.

The beginning

The Cardinal Divide
was born of too much beer and not enough sun during a two-week vacation in Costa Rica in 2003. It was November and it rained nearly every day I was there. The lawn surrounding my tiny
cabina
became a shin-deep lake and red ants by the thousands invaded the airy hut, giving me something to do with my vacation time. Between bouts of fruitless struggle to prevent the
formicidae
invasion and mopping up after storm surges, I sat on the deck, drank
cervaza
Imperial, and read half a dozen damp and worn paperback mystery novels bought or traded from local vendors.

It wasn't my first foray into the mystery genre. Tony Hillerman's
Skinwalkers
was a gift from my colleagues at Grand Canyon National Park in 1994, and I read it on the inhumanly long journey home from the southwest that spring. For years I associated long cross-continental plane trips with Tony Hillerman books: stories just long enough to get me from Calgary to Toronto or back. My friend Paul Novitski gave me a Nevada Barr mystery in 2001, and I read a bunch of her excellent Anna Pigeon mysteries that year as well. I love James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series. But on the Costa Rica trip, I read
The First Deadly Sin
by Lawrence Saunders and became hooked on the genre.

I started to think about what I might have to contribute to the mass of murder mysteries crowding the shelves of used bookstores. I've been writing since 1988, seriously trying to get published since 1993 or so. I always imagined myself as a composer of literary essays on the relationship between people and nature, or the writer of a desperately sad, tragic work of fiction in which the protagonist reveals something core to the nature of the human condition before succumbing to a broken heart.

While I didn't see myself penning a mystery about a mine, I have been trying to
stop
mines from being dug in beautiful wilderness areas for the last twenty years. In 2003 the effort to stop the Cheviot Coal Mine from being dug on the northern side of the Cardinal Divide, just east of Jasper National Park, was one of the
most important environmental challenges in Alberta. I had first become involved in this fight in 1995 when, as a freshman member of the Board of Directors of the Alberta Wilderness Association, I heard Ben Gadd and Dianne Pachal talk about the new plans for the mine. The Cardinal Divide had been much on my mind since I had first walked along its gently sloping, sinuous summit some years back.

Sitting on the porch of my
cabina
in Costa Rica in 2003, knocking back Imperials, I started to piece some thoughts together: Could I find a way to tell a story about a cherished, beautiful place in a way that might appeal to someone other than an armchair activist or closet environmentalist? Could I do it so that the novel didn't simply rant against coal mining, but actually told a good story?

I remember something my friend and fellow writer Greer Chesher once told me when I worked for her at Grand Canyon National Park: “You have to have a plot.” Fiction can't simply be a new, shiny vessel in which to carry around my polemic. As an activist, I'm always searching for new ways to interest the public in an important issue. As a writer, I'm always looking for a new story to tell while delivering a poignant message.

As I sat there, watching the Caribbean Sea, I let the issue, the landscape, and the story slowly congeal in my head.

The flight back was long and, late at night on the silent plane, I sat with a tiny notebook and jotted down the names of the characters: Cole Blackwater, Nancy Webber, Dale van Stempvort, Mike Barnes.... I wrote down the events of the fictional opening crime, and then I crafted the story around the truth that would make the book a mystery. By the time I had defrosted my aging Toyota pickup at the Calgary airport at 2
AM
,
The Cardinal Divide
filled two dozen pages in my little notebook. It would occupy my mind, and keep my fingers moving, for the next five years.

Substantive form

While
The Cardinal Divide
had taken shape in a few days late in 2003, it was several years before it found any substantive form. During the winter of 2004 I managed to pen the first six chapters of the book, but I lost my momentum and the book languished for
a while. I didn't stop writing, I just stopped typing. I do a lot of “writing” in my head, playing with the characters and mapping out story ideas while I'm running or walking in the mountains.