Manitou Canyon (26 page)

C
HAPTE
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50

R
ose stood at the living room window of the house on Gooseberry Lane, staring west through the bare branches of the elm in the front yard, watching as ravenous black clouds gobbled up the afternoon sky. At her back, Waaboo played with his big Duplo blocks, building a garage for his toy trucks. His mother sat at the dining room table, at work on her laptop. Trixie lay under the table with her head on her paws, watching Waaboo and his trucks from a safe distance.

Although Rose had done her best to put the fate of those she loved into God's hands, that didn't mean she didn't worry terribly. When her sister had disappeared, how many times had she prayed for Jo's safety only to have Jo taken from her in the end, taken from all those who'd loved her and had prayed for her desperately. Faith was not an easy thing. Even as she told herself that God always had a plan, her heart was troubled and afraid, and she whispered, “Please, dear God, keep them all safe.”

A car pulled to the curb, and Leah Duling got out. She stood for a moment as Rose now stood, eyeing the storm clouds eating a good deal of the sky.

“Leah's here,” Rose announced.

Leah turned her back to the coming storm and walked to the house. “I couldn't wait alone in my hotel room,” she said when Rose opened the door to her. “Is it all right that I came?”

“Of course,” Rose replied.

The two women exchanged a hug, and Leah shed her coat, which Rose draped over the newel post of the stairs.

“Hello, little rabbit,” she said to Waaboo.

He looked up from his Duplos and his trucks.
“Boozhoo.”

Trixie found the woman's entrance interesting enough to trot from under the table and receive a vigorous patting from the visitor. Jenny said a simple “Hello, Leah,” and went back to her work.

“I was just going to make some coffee,” Rose said. “Will you have some?”

From a kitchen cupboard, she pulled down dark roast beans to grind.

“I've never had a kitchen of my own,” Leah said. “Not really. This is very nice.”

“And very old,” Rose said. “Cork's grandparents built the house. Cork grew up in it and his children, too. A lot of love and worry soaked into these walls.”

“This was your home for quite a while, as I understand it.”

“I helped raise the children. Some of the best years of my life were spent here.”

“No children of your own?”

“We haven't been blessed. I'm getting to the point where I'm believing we never will.”

“Don't forget Sarah and Abraham in the Bible.”

“What about you?” Rose asked.

“No children,” Leah replied. “Which, in a way, was good. We were always on the move, living under primitive conditions. And Lucius, while he was a good missionary, wouldn't have made a particularly good father. He could be awfully impatient, and sometimes thoughtlessly cruel.”

Just the opposite of Henry Meloux, Rose thought.

“I was married to him, but it was never a marriage of passion,” Leah went on. “Across all those decades, Henry was never out of my heart. I feel as if I've been preparing my whole life to return to him. Is that crazy?”

“When I first met my husband, Mal, I felt the same way, as if my whole life had been leading up to that moment.”

Their conversation was cut short when they both heard Jenny say from the dining room, “Huh?”

Rose poked her head out the kitchen door. “What is it?”

“Something's been troubling me all afternoon.” Jenny's eyes were intent on the laptop screen. “White Woman Lake. That name. I knew I'd heard it before. Come here, Aunt Rose, Leah. Take a look at this.”

The two women left the kitchen and went to the dining room table. They stood looking over Jenny's shoulder. Rose's niece had pulled up a page from the Internet with the heading
NOTES FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
.

Jenny said, “While I was researching Lindsay Harris, I came across this blog she'd been posting ever since she was a student at Northland College. She wrote about her life there, her thoughts on all kinds of subjects, and also about the protests over the proposed Penokee taconite mine that got her arrested. It's passionate and not badly written. But take a look at this later entry.”

Rose read silently from the blog post, which was dated more than a year earlier. It contained none of the diatribe Jenny had indicated, but was instead a lovely recounting of her meeting with a young man as a result of the protests and her arrest. His name was Isaac McQuabbie. He'd traveled from Canada to lend a hand in whatever way he could with the battle against the proposed Penokee Mine. He'd read about the protests and about her arrest, he'd told her, and had come because of her, because of her courage. She was taken with him. Lindsay had posted a photo of the two of them together.

“He's a hunk,” Leah said.

Then Rose found the part that had made Jenny take particular notice. McQuabbie was from a small First Nations settlement called Saint Gervais, which stood on the shore of White Woman Lake.

“White Woman Lake,” Rose said.

All three women stared at the screen in silence.

“An incredible coincidence?” Rose offered.

“Right,” Jenny said. “He's Native, eco-minded, he admires her courage. And she just happens to be the granddaughter of the man who designed the dam his people had worked so hard to keep from being built.”

Rose and Leah sat down, flanking Jenny, and they read almost a year's worth of blog posts, from Lindsay's first meeting with Isaac McQuabbie to her eventual decision to follow him back to McGill, where he was doing graduate work. The posts were a mix of diatribes concerning threats to the environment, meditations on the magnificence of nature, and reveries about her life with Isaac. Very soon after she arrived at McGill, however, the posts ended.

The three women sat back and looked at each other. In the living room, Waaboo made a roaring engine noise and ran his largest truck into the Duplo garage he'd built, exploding the block structure.

“He targeted her,” Jenny said.

“But look at how she writes about him,” Rose pointed out. “It sounds like genuine love to me.”

“On her part anyway.”

“You can't fool a woman forever,” Leah said. “He must have felt something.”

“So much the better for the people behind all this. More incentive for her to . . .” Jenny paused.

“To what?” Rose asked.

“I don't know. We've been blaming Trevor for everything. But maybe they planned it together.”

“He told us everything and never said a word about Lindsay being involved.”

“So either he's a good liar or a good actor. Or . . .” Jenny drummed her fingers on the tabletop as she thought. “Maybe he's her unwitting pawn.”

“I'm not sure I follow,” Leah said.

“I'm not sure I do either. I'd like to talk to Trevor.”

Jenny got up, went to the phone on the stand beside the staircase, and dialed.

“Hi, Kathy? It's Jenny O'Connor.” She closed her eyes and nodded. “I know. Listen, Kathy, is Marsha in? Could I talk to her? Thanks.” She looked up at the ceiling. Her foot tapped a mindless rhythm on the linoleum. “Marsha?” She listened. Quite a while. Then said, “Oh, my God.” She looked at Rose and shook her head. “Well, look, I might have another piece of the puzzle. But I need to talk to Trevor Harris. Can I do that?” She nodded. “Ten minutes, then.”

“What was that ‘Oh, my God,' about?” Rose asked when Jenny had hung up.

“Lanny Russo from Thunder Bay got back to her. He's been in touch with investigators from some national security organization in Canada. It sounds like this thing is big. Really big. I've got to go.”

“I'd like to be there, too,” Rose said.

“Go,” Leah told them. “I'll watch Waaboo, if you'll let me. Just keep me informed.”

* * *

Jenny and Rose waited with Marsha Dross while Deputy Pender fetched Trevor Harris. Jenny filled the sheriff in on what she'd learned from the Internet. Dross pulled up the site herself and scanned Lindsay's blog.

“She's too smart to be taken in easily,” Dross said. “If it's what you think, and I've got to tell you, I'm right there with you on this one, then at the very least, she's a coconspirator with her brother. But like I told you on the phone, this is looking like part of a much larger scenario.”

She explained what she'd learned from Russo. The NSCI—the RCMP's National Security Criminal Investigations—had been looking into a series of incidents that had occurred across Canada in the past two years. In the Cascade Mountains east of Vancouver, a high bridge on a rail line that serviced a controversial copper and molybdenum mining operation which abutted Native land had collapsed unexpectedly. The subsequent investigation revealed that the bridge support had been weakened by an explosive charge.
The cost of replacing the bridge was estimated to be too high to justify continuing the mine. No one had claimed responsibility, and the RCMP investigation was still open. In that same province, a pump house on a highly controversial oil pipeline that threatened the rare all-white “Spirit Bear” of the Great Bear Rainforest was demolished by an explosive device only weeks before oil was scheduled to begin flowing from Alberta's tar sands to a port facility on the coastline of the Inner Passage. In northern Quebec, a company granted a government permit to log on land within the Ottawa River watershed, over objections from the local Anishinaabeg, was beset by dozens of incidents of equipment sabotage, so much so that the operation had nearly ground to a halt and armed personnel were required for protection. A politician from the Maritimes, a staunch advocate of nonderogation legislation which would strip First Nations of many treaty rights, was killed when his Mercedes missed a turn on a winding seacoast highway and plunged two hundred feet into the surging Atlantic.

“There are other incidents as well, enough to alarm the NSCI.”

“What are they thinking?”

“They believe it's all part of some coordinated First Nations quasi-military initiative. An indigenous vigilante group. The NSCI has been trying to pin something or someone down, but so far the group has successfully eluded them. Apparently they communicate through throwaway cell phones and hide their Internet activity with sophisticated technology. Encryption, that kind of thing.”

“Given what they're fighting against, I could almost applaud them,” Jenny said. “If it weren't for Dad.”

Pender stepped in with Lindsay's brother in tow.

“Sit down,” the sheriff said.

Harris took a seat.

Dross said, “We need a few more answers, Trevor.”

He tried to look confident, but it was clear to Rose that he was worried. Not just for himself, she hoped.

“Whatever you need,” he promised.

“Did Lindsay have any part in planning your grandfather's abduction?”

“I already told you how it happened. She had nothing to do with it.”

“Who exactly approached you?”

“Like I said, an Indian. In Las Vegas.”

“How did he know your situation?”

Harris shrugged. “I assumed, you know, that it's a gambling community. The Indians have casinos, too. They probably all talk.”

“Was Lindsay aware of your situation?”

“When I got way behind and my markers were called in, I told her.”

“Hoping for some help?”

“I knew she didn't have money. Grandpa John paid for college, but when she headed up to school in Canada, she was on her own. School loans and such. Mostly I was just keeping her in my life.”

“That was it? Just maintaining lines of communication?”

“Okay, well, I guess I hoped she might put in a good word for me with Grandpa John.”

“She had a better relationship with him?”

“She was more like him. Outdoorsy and all. And, you know, motivated. They didn't have heart-to-heart talks or anything like that, but I knew she had a better shot at getting something out of Grandpa John than I ever would.”

“So, she was well aware of your situation, of its desperate nature.”

Harris frowned as the light dawned. “You're not suggesting she's somehow involved in this?”

“Who proposed the plan to you?”

“I told you. The Indian in Las Vegas.”

“Did he have a name?”

“Black.”

“That's all?”

“Mr. Black. That was it.”

“And he laid out the whole thing for you? Going into the Boundary Waters, the kidnapping, the whole ball of wax?”

“Uh-huh. All I had to do was get Grandpa John to agree.”

“But you and your grandfather were never on the best of terms?”

“You got that right.”

“So it was clear that you'd need your sister's help to convince him. Is that something Lindsay would have known?”

“Sure. We've talked about Grandpa John. Like I said, neither of us relate to him particularly well, but he's always seemed fonder of her. She's, you know, a fighter. I just disappoint him.”

“Did she ever mention a man named Isaac McQuabbie?”

“Yeah. Big part of the reason she went to school in Canada.”

“Did she ever mention where he was from?”

“Canada,” he said, as if it were a stupid question.

“Where in Canada?”

“Got me.”

“An Odawa settlement called Saint Gervais on White Woman Lake. It's the home of Chief Aaron Commanda.”

“So?”

“He led the fight against the dam your grandfather built.”

The change came to his face slowly. Rose watched as his head cocked at an angle, and his mind went over things, and pieces fell into place.

“The Boundary Waters. She knows the Boundary Waters well,” he said. “I figured it was just, you know, a coincidence. But when I think about it, she was on board with the whole thing really quick. She didn't even question that I wanted to get closer to Grandpa John. And when he had to cancel the first date, she seemed really upset. More than me, and I was the one with everything to lose.” He shook his head. “Or so I thought.”