Flee, flee from those who speak in the name of God.
– Eduardo Corbizzi
IT STARTED ON A MONDAY MORNING in early summer. As usual, I pushed through the alley door into the cramped room at the back of Olde Gold Antiques and Collectibles-the Mississauga Street store owned by my parents-where I was the official restorer, refinisher, and repairer of furniture. The store was closed the first day of the week, so I could toil away without being distracted by the tinkle of the doorbell.
I slid an autorickshaw CD into the player and began to repair an antique bird’s-eye maple chest. Somehow the upper-right drawer had been smashed-it takes a mighty blow to break a dovetailed pine drawer-and Dad had asked me to make a new one. He had sold the chest and promised delivery in a couple of days.
Soon I was lost in the fragrance of pine shavings and sawdust, the rasp of steel teeth on wood, the familiar vibration in the saw’s handle as the blade cut kerfs along the lines I had scribed to mark the dovetails. An up-to-date cabinetmaker would have used an electric router to make the dovetails, but I preferred hand tools.
When the dovetails were done, I chiselled out the slots that the drawer bottom would rest in, cleaned up the edges with a bit of sandpaper, then painted the corner joints with glue and fitted the drawer sides to the front. After I slid the bottom into its grooves-without glue-I eased the back into place and clamped the completed drawer, setting it aside to let the adhesive dry. Good for another hundred years or so.
I hung my apron on a hook beside the curtain that separated the shop from the showroom, brushed sawdust off my sleeves, and left by the front door, crossing the street to the sunny side to get a good view of Olde Gold’s display window and the small walnut cabinet I had designed and made myself. On the store’s sign, OLDE GOLD ANTIQUES AND COLLECTIBLES, there was room for another line of print: Fine Custom Furniture.
With the ink on my high school diploma barely dry I had spent most of the past year as unofficial apprentice to Norbert Armstrong, a well-known local cabinetmaker. I wanted to design and make furniture, not spend my life working only for my parents, and although it had taken Mom a while to come around, they supported my ambition. When I “graduated”-the ceremony was a picnic of ham sandwiches, potato salad, and Norbert’s foul-tasting homemade beer on the patio behind his shop in Hillsdale-Norbert had grumbled good-naturedly that for the first time in many years he might have some competition. I took his remark as a compliment.
I headed down Mississauga Street, bought a copy of the local paper from a box outside the Shepherd’s Crook pub, and re-crossed the road where it began its descent to the park on the shore of Lake Couchiching. The Mariposa Princess, a double-decker sightseeing boat, was backing away from the pier to begin its morning tour of the lake.
I stepped into the Half Moon Cafe, with its fragrance of ground coffee and fresh baking. It was a popular place, with maybe a dozen wrought-iron tables, the original plank floor, and a stamped-tin ceiling painted light grey and crisscrossed with pipes and ducts.
I took a table near the coffee bar and opened the paper to the classified ads.
“Hey, Garnet,” I heard from behind the bar.
Marco Grenoble was not a good advertisement for the famous homemade pizzas he concocted in the little kitchen at the back of the restaurant or the tasty Italian pastries displayed in tiers along the bar. Tall, reed thin with a concave abdomen, he wore a T-shirt and an apron stained with pizza sauce.
“Hi, Marco.”
“The usual?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“I’ll bring it myself.”
I went back to the ads for property rentals. It didn’t take long to see there was nothing there for me. I’d try some online sources later.
“You lookin’ to move away from home?” Marco asked, placing a mug of latte on the table and then, beside it, a plate with three tiny lemon tarts in the middle.
“Thanks, Marco, but I only ordered the coffee.”
“You gotta eat somethin’. You’re too thin.”
I folded up the paper and put it aside. “Well, thanks.”
Marco nodded toward the paper. “So…”
“I’m trying to find space to rent,” I explained. “The shop at the back of our store isn’t big enough for the business I hope to start up.”
I went on to describe what I was after. I needed room for a few large work and layout tables, machines like saws and planers, a booth for spray staining, and an electricity supply that would take the strain of all that equipment. I didn’t have the machines lined up yet, or the money to buy or lease them, but I could at least search for a place.
“Latte okay?” Marco asked when I had finished talking.
“Perfect.”
“How big an area d’you need?”
I looked around the restaurant. “About what you have here, give or take.”
Marco turned his head from side to side, taking in the room as if seeing it for the first time. “I got this cousin,” he said, but didn’t finish the thought.
I nodded to encourage him, took a sip of my latte, said, “Uh-huh.”
“A distant cousin.” He smiled, making creases like parentheses on either side of his mouth, and ran his fingers through greying hair. “Real distant. From the brainy side of the clan-the Corbizzis. Heard of Professor Corbizzi? Never mind. Anyways, the old prof passed away some time ago. I heard that whoever takes care of the estate wants to rent out the coach house. You prob’ly know about the old mansion.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It’s up the lake a ways. North of town. Sits out there on its own little peninsula. Course you can’t see the house from the water. Too many trees. Anyways, if you’re interested I’ll try to get you the phone number.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“Might take me a day or so. It’s unlisted, and I don’t know who inherited the place.”
“No problem.”
“One thing, though,” Marco added, “there might be a string or two attached.” He smiled again. “With the Corbizzis, there always is.”
THE RAIN SHOWER that began as I left Orillia had faded to light drizzle by the time I delivered the chest with the repaired drawer to a house on Big Bay Point. When I pulled into a parking spot across the street from the bus station in Barrie, the afternoon sun was shouldering through the overcast, flooding the street and the whitecapped waves of Kempenfelt Bay with honey-coloured light.
After a while, the Toronto bus turned onto Maple Street, its engine roaring, its brakes hissing, and swung into the station. The doors flapped open and the driver hopped out and heaved up the cargo doors. He began to pass cases and bags to the knot of passengers who had quickly gathered behind him. Raphaella was the last to step off the bus, a tote bag slung over one shoulder.
I stayed in the van for a few minutes, watching her. She would be expecting to see our old white van and wouldn’t notice me right away. She looked around as commuters flowed past her, rushing to taxis, the parking lot, or the line of cars in the pickup lane by the curb. Although their bodies were here on Maple Street, their minds were already somewhere else-at home, most likely. Whoever said you couldn’t be two places at once was wrong.
Raphaella wasn’t like them. She stood under the eaves of the station, beautiful as always in a black leather coat with caramel trim at the collar and cuffs. Her coal black hair, gathered behind her neck, fell to the middle of her back. The afternoon light seemed to highlight the wine-coloured birthmark on her neck and right cheek.
Even from my vantage point across the road I could sense the stillness that she wore like a comfortable cloak, the calm that sheltered her without making her seem vulnerable. Raphaella was the only person I knew who seemed secure in who she was, rooted and at home in the present, totally unlike the frantic passengers schooling past her.
But I couldn’t sit and feast my eyes on her forever. I tapped the horn and got out of the van and threaded my way across the street, dodging cars as they scrambled away from the depot. Raphaella caught sight of me and her face lit up. We had been together for about a year, but whenever she smiled at me like that I felt a nerve at the back of my neck wake up and tingle.
She set down her bag, threw her arms around my neck, and kissed me like we’d been apart for a year rather than a couple of days.
“I missed you,” she said after breaking the kiss.
“Me, too. How did everything go?”
“Perfectly-almost. They had everything we’ll need and the price is right, but the man I had to deal with is a leerer. With an aggressive comb-over.”
“Well… theatre people,” I remarked, earning a punch on the shoulder.
The Orillia Theatre Group was putting on a musical, and Raphaella was stage manager. This time it was Merrie Olde Orillia, written by a local author. She had turned Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town into a musical comedy. Naturally, I referred to the show as MOO. I hated musicals, but Raphaella loved them-the only defect in her otherwise perfect personality. She had spent the day in Toronto at the costume rental company.
“Let’s boogie,” I said.
She laughed. “You sound like your dad.”
We made our way across the street and climbed into the van.
“So you finally gave in and got a new vehicle,” she commented as we headed north. “Or rather, new-ish.”
My father had been forced to give up our white rattletrap when it shuddered and died in the driveway like an overworked draught horse. The “new” vehicle, brown this time, was ten years old.
“Yeah. No choice. Um, changing the subject, I may have a line on some rental space for a workshop.”
I told Raphaella about Marco’s possible connection.
“It may not work out, but it’s possible,” I said. “Anyway, you’re invited for supper at our place tonight.”
“Who’s cooking?”
“Me. I’m doing cold pasta salad with chopped olives and tuna, barbecued chicken on the side. Nothing complicated.”
“Oh, I am glad to be home,” she said.
WICKLOW POINT, north of town, was a peninsula that hooked into the lake and pointed back toward Couchiching Park. At the end of Wicklow Road and occupying the entire peninsula was an estate enclosed by a high stone wall with a wrought-iron gate set into granite pillars. The dense stand of trees beyond the wall was flagged every fifty metres or so with NO TRESPASSING posters, whose message was emphasized by a PRIVATE: NO ENTRY sign on the gate.
I had never been out there before but found it easily enough with the GPS mounted on the handlebar of my motorcycle, a vintage 650 Hawk GT. My dad the traditionalist gave me lots of grief for using the electronic gizmo so much. “Pretty soon you’ll need that contraption to find your bedroom,” he joked.
I coasted slowly up to the gate and pushed a button below a brass grille. A hollow, tinny voice responded after a few seconds.
“You rang?”
“It’s Garnet Havelock. I have an appointment.”
“You may enter,” said the grille.
There was a click, followed by the hum of an electric motor and the rattle of chains as the gates rolled aside. I heard them closing behind me as I guided the bike slowly up the gravel drive that curved through a grove of maples, birch, and a few conifers, and into a clearing where a big two-storey stone house brooded in the shadows.
It looked like something out of a history book-slate roof with three broad chimneys, flagstone porch, oak double doors adorned with black lion’s-head knockers, mullioned windows along the first floor and dagger-shaped windows, their tips glazed with crimson stained glass, on the second. To the right of the mansion, also built of quarried granite, was a three-car garage in a stand of birch, with a concrete apron in front and along the side. This must be the “coach house” Marco had mentioned.
“The phone number I said I’d get for you,” he had announced a few days earlier at the Half Moon, slapping a scrap of paper on the table beside my coffee. “You’ll be talking to a Mrs. Stoppini about the coach house. Good luck.”
It was the same Mrs. Stoppini, I assumed, who was now standing in the doorway at the back of the house, squinting in my direction. I shut off the bike, pulled it up onto the centre stand, and hung my helmet on the handlebar. Already pessimistic that I could afford to rent space in a setup like that, I approached the house.
“Hi,” I said.
If the house seemed forbidding, Mrs. Stoppini was worse.
She was tall and skeletal, with a long face, pale skin stretched tight over flat cheekbones, intense, bulging eyes, and a wide mouth painted crimson. Her iron grey hair was cut short. Dressed entirely in black, her long-sleeved dress buttoned at the neck, she looked like something from a story told to scare children.
She scrutinized me as if she found my jeans and leather jacket below standard.
“How do you do?” she replied to my greeting. “You must be Mr. Havelock.”
“Call me Garnet,” I said.
“I am very pleased indeed to meet you, Mr. Havelock. I am Mrs. Stoppini. Do come in.”
I followed her into a spacious, well-lit kitchen with a view across the patio to the lake.
“You’ll take tea,” she informed me, turning to the countertop where a tray holding cups, a sugar bowl, and a jug had been prepared. “Any seat will do.”
Mrs. Stoppini’s enunciation was correct and formal, her English slightly accented, and she seemed to use her politeness as a shield. I did as I was told and sat at the table, trying to imagine the inside of the coach house. I could tell from the quick glance I got that it contained all the space I’d need. But why was she interested in renting it out in the first place? The stone wall, the gate, the sign-all demanded privacy. The house, the grounds, the silver tea service shouted money. Whatever the answer, the place wouldn’t come cheap. The rent would be a lot more than I could afford.
She placed the tea tray on the table, then added a plate of steaming biscuits and a bowl of pale yellow butter. She sat, her erect spine at least ten centimetres from the chair back.
“Are you enjoying this lovely weather?” she enquired woodenly.
I hated small talk. “Yes. Nice riding weather today. Motorcycle, that is-not horse.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I ride a motorcycle. A Honda Hawk 650.”
“Indeed.” Mrs. Stoppini poured the tea. “Milk? Sugar?”
I said no thanks to both and accepted the cup. Close up, her long face, with its wan complexion, was startling. She had unusually thin lips and had applied her lipstick beyond their borders to make her mouth appear fuller. The effect was both comical and eerie.
She seemed to sense that I wasn’t up for a lot of chit-chat and got right to the point. “Mr. Grenoble has informed me that you may wish to lease the coach house,” she began.
“I’m interested,” I said. “That’s the building to the right of the house as I came in?”
She nodded, took a sip of her tea, and whacked the cup back onto the saucer, rattling the spoon.
“But I’ll have to take a good look at it before I make up my mind,” I added.
“Let us assume for the moment that you find it suitable,” she countered.
“And you need to realize that a woodshop can be noisy now and again.”
“That will not be a problem.”
I didn’t have much experience at negotiations. My father was a championship haggler who enjoyed bargaining over antiques at the store. He handled all the sales. I stayed away from that part of the business as much as I could. But if I wanted my own shop, I’d have to learn how to be a businessman. Sooner or later we’d have to talk money. Should I bring it up now? I wondered. I took a sip of tea to stall a little.
“With your permission, Mr. Havelock,” she put in, beating me to the punch, “I wish to put to you a proposition.”
I nodded, relieved that she’d taken the initiative. “Okay.”
“You may find it a trifle unusual.”
If it’s half as unusual as the person making it, I thought, it’s bound to be strange.
“And,” she went on, “I am obliged to inform you that I have made certain discreet enquiries.”
“Er, I don’t follow.”
“Concerning your family-and, of course, you. Please don’t be offended. What I am about to propose-and I would not have agreed to this meeting had I not received a glowing report on the Havelocks-requires that I place in you a considerable degree of trust.”
“You had me and my family investigated?” I blurted. “Who do you think-?”
“Do calm yourself, Mr. Havelock, I beg you,” she exclaimed, eyes bulging. “I merely enquired of my lawyer, who is well acquainted with the town, whereas I am not. The late professor and I have led an extremely reclusive life here. All it took was a phone call. I say again: please do not take offence. My precaution-you will agree, I am sure, once you hear my ideas-was quite necessary.”
I struggled to hold down my anger. Well, you horse-faced, dried-up old stick, I can push too.
“I’ll have to look over the coach house before we go any further,” I said, setting my cup and saucer on the table and getting to my feet.
Mrs. Stoppini’s thick dark brows dived toward the bridge of her nose. She was about to object, but she checked herself. She seemed used to getting her own way. Not this time.
“If you insist,” she said.
I KEPT MY ENTHUSIASM reined in as I looked the coach house over from the inside. There were three overhead garage doors at the front, with a standard entrance on the side facing the main house. Big windows on three walls provided lots of natural light to supplement the overhead fixtures. The concrete floor looked recently painted and was as clean as a dinner plate. The building was fully insulated, and there were electrical outlets spaced every two metres or so along the walls. The power supply-unusual for a garage-looked adequate for my needs.
When I returned to the kitchen Mrs. Stoppini was at the sink rinsing the tea cups.
“Will it suit, do you think?” she asked, wiping her hands on a tea towel.
“It’s perfect,” I was tempted to say. But I settled for “I think it might.”
“Very well. Shall we sit down again and discuss the details?”
Like an awkward kid assembling a difficult Lego figure, Mrs. Stoppini made what she probably thought was a smile.
“Mr. Havelock, I very much hope that you will permit me to describe my proposal in full before you respond,” she began, with her precise enunciation.
“Okay.”
“Splendid. The enquiries I made of my lawyer yielded certain information which I found very much to my satisfaction, and which allowed me to hope you could be of considerable assistance to me and to the late Professor Corbizzi.” She cleared her throat. “I am prepared to lease the coach house to you, exclusively, for a period of three years, for the sum of one dollar.”
“One d-”
She held up a bony hand, palm toward me. “If you please, Mr. Havelock. There is more.”
I recalled Marco Grenoble’s warning: with the Corbizzis there are always strings attached.
Mrs. Stoppini rolled on. “I must share certain information that I will rely upon you to treat with the utmost confidence.”
Meaning, don’t tell anybody. I nodded.
“Indeed, as the late Professor Corbizzi was, and I remain, an extremely private person, everything I am about to tell you must remain confidential. I have been his housekeeper and companion for the past twenty years, first in Italy and then, for a decade or more, here. Professor Corbizzi was a Renaissance scholar, specializing in Tuscan history. He published several books and many articles. He was always devoted to his studies, but toward the end he became more reclusive, even secretive, spending most of his day behind the closed doors of his library. He passed away suddenly-this is, of course, common knowledge. What is not well known is that there was… an incident that immediately preceded his death. An accident. A small fire. These details are my affair, and mine alone.”
She paused and looked at her hands folded in her lap. It was the first time since I’d met her that she seemed to soften, even to search for words. But then she looked up, her composure restored.
“That is the first fact that is pertinent to your decision. The second is this: I am the executrix of the late Professor Corbizzi’s last will and testament. I now own this estate and most of its contents, but nevertheless I require an inventory of Professor Corbizzi’s effects, for legal reasons. A person in my position must conduct matters transparently, so as to satisfy relations who may or may not benefit from the late professor’s will. A certain university is also a beneficiary of a number of items. The objects in the rest of the house I can deal with myself, but to note all the contents of the library is too daunting a challenge even for me. Besides, I… do not wish to be in the library. At all. The late professor seldom permitted it, and in any case I am not… comfortable there.
“This brings me to the third and last item apposite to this discussion, and one that relates directly to your skills and experience. The fire-it was small and easily brought under control-occurred in the library. The authorities concluded that the fireplace was the source, and that the professor, felled by the seizure that ended his life, somehow dislodged a burning log, which then rolled onto the carpet, setting it alight. There is damage to the fireplace mantel, which is of wood, and perhaps the bookshelves on one side, as well as the floor. I trust I have been clear so far?”
“Yes,” I answered, my mind darting about, chasing dozens of questions flushed by her story. “Very clear.”
“I now come to my proposal. In exchange for the three-year lease on the coach house, I require you to complete two tasks. You will repair all damage done by the fire, and you will make the necessary inventory of the library’s contents. You may, within reason, take as long as you deem necessary. I shall provide you with an electronic key to the gate, and you may come and go as you wish. I am always here. I never leave the estate.”
The impulsive angel on my right shoulder whispered, “One dollar! Go for it! Now, before she changes her mind! This is a sweet deal!” The logical angel on my left shoulder cautioned, “Maybe this is too good to be true. Remember? The Corbizzis? Strings? Tell her you need a day or so to think about it. Don’t rush into something you might regret.”
Mrs. Stoppini saved me from being pummelled half to death by two imaginary and opinionated spirits. “I should think you’ll want a day or two to think it over,” she suggested.
“Yes, thanks.”
“Fine. Shall we say two days from today? You may telephone at any time. In the meantime, perhaps you’d care to examine the library?”
I followed the wiry black form of Mrs. Stoppini as she glided along panelled halls, this time to the east wing of the house. Our feet whispered on the oriental rug that covered the central part of the dark hardwood floor. She stopped before a beautifully carved double pocket door sporting a set of brass lion’s-head knobs-smaller versions of the ones on the front door. Mrs. Stoppini rolled the doors open.
Stepping back and to the side she said, “Please enter. I shall be in the kitchen.”
“But-”
“I don’t go in there,” she reminded me.
I heard the doors closing behind me.
THE LIBRARY WASN’T in the east wing of the house, it was the east wing-a spacious room full of light, with a view of the lake through wide corner windows, a stone fireplace, antique rugs arranged on the hardwood floor among trestle tables and leather club chairs, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on every wall. I could easily imagine that it had once been a comfortable, restful place where a scholar might spend the day reading for pleasure, doing research, or writing a thesis.
But it didn’t seem that way now. Dozens of books lay scattered on the floor at the end of the room, as if someone had frantically yanked them off the shelves and flung them to the ground. A dark oblong on the hardwood floor indicated that a rug had once lain in front of the hearth between two chairs. One of the chairs lay on its back. Charred wood and blistered varnish scarred the wooden mantel, and tongues of soot streaked the wall and ceiling above the fireplace.
Mrs. Stoppini had said that Professor Corbizzi had suffered some sort of deadly seizure, and the appearance of the room told me it must have been violent. He had probably knocked the heavy chair over when he fell, and when his body hit the rug, the tremor caused a log to roll off the hearth, starting the fire. I shuddered, picturing an old man lying amid smoke and flames, helpless, unable to save himself. I hoped he was dead before the fire got to him.
The professor must have hurled the books to the floor before he fell. Why? What had sparked the kind of rage that made a scholar throw his books around and wreck his own room? Had his anger brought on the fit that killed him? Or had it been panic rather than fury? Had he been searching desperately for something before the seizure came?
The atmosphere of the place was oppressive and vaguely threatening, despite the sunlight streaming through the windows. The heavy air stank from the damp ash and charred logs in the fireplace. The odour of smoke clung to the window curtains. Against my will, I imagined the professor sprawled before the hearth, dying as the rug smouldered around him. Were his sudden attack and the damage to the library the causes of the uneasiness that seeped into me like cold water? Why was I weighed down by the impression that the room didn’t want me there?
Unconsciously, I shrank back. Then I swallowed, took a deep breath, and reminded myself that I was there for a reason. I had work to do.
I took a slow tour of the room, moving instinctively away from the fireplace and toward the windows on the south side. To the right of the door was an escritoire with an ancient, clunky-looking black Underwood typewriter on top, along with a small brass lamp and an old-fashioned straight pen and inkwell. A chair was tucked under the desk, and a low filing cabinet stood to one side. There was no computer or printer, not even a telephone.
Trestle tables had been placed along the south and east walls, leaving room to walk between them and the bookshelves. Set into the northeast corner, where most of the displaced books lay scattered on the floor around a square oak table lying on its side, was an alcove with a small cupboard built into the shelves.
I was anxious to get out of there, but I forced myself to calm down and think. I returned to the fireplace and sat in the upright club chair. Mrs. Stoppini had described two jobs-inventory and repair-as part of the deal. The first would be mostly a catalogue of the books in the room-the contents of the escritoire and cupboard shouldn’t take more than a day. I counted the volumes on one shelf, then multiplied by the number of shelves, which, not including the alcove, were pretty much the same length throughout the room. Well over four thousand books-a huge, time-consuming, and phenomenally boring job. But possibly simple, depending on how much detail Mrs. Stoppini wanted catalogued. A list of titles, or titles with authors’ names, was easiest because these were printed on the books’ spines. I wouldn’t have to take the books down from the shelves.
But if Mrs. Stoppini required copyright date, publisher, and edition-the kind of information Dad noted carefully whenever he found an old volume that might be worth something-then every single book would have to be examined. A forever job. I’d be as old as Mrs. Stoppini, and probably just as eccentric, before I finished. I made a mental note to find out exactly what she needed before I committed myself. It seemed strange that an academic wouldn’t keep a catalogue of his own books, though. Maybe I’d find one somewhere and knock off one of Mrs. Stoppini’s tasks right away.
Feeling more optimistic, I got up and examined the shelves to the left and right of the mantel, looking for signs of heat damage. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was intruding into something that had nothing to do with me, and that I was being watched. I forced myself to concentrate.
The shelves seemed unharmed, but they’d need to be cleared to make sure. The mantel itself was a fussy, old-fashioned design in thickly varnished oak, finished in red mahogany. A little railing, about four centimetres high, with tiny urn-shaped balusters, skirted the outside edge of the shelf. The panels down each side of the fireplace opening had small decorative shelves also bordered by little dowel fences. The mantel was not only charred from the heat of the fire but also warped beyond hope. So, another question for Mrs. Stoppini: replicate the mantel or replace it with a simpler design?
Conscious of the resentment that seemed to seep from every corner of the silent library, I left the room without looking back.
UNLIKE RAPHAELLA, I had always been a two-brained personality. I had a sort of divided and contradictory way of looking at the world. One part of me was scientific and logical, with a love of gadgets and gizmos. The other I didn’t know how to describe-spiritual? intuitive? Raphaella called the first one “techno-mode,” and until getting to know her I saw things from that perspective most of the time. She brought out the other side of me, the part that realized some of the best things about my life, like love, exhilaration, friendship, couldn’t be measured or explained and weren’t always predictable. Both of us had learned from experience that spirits and what we called “presences”-the remains of minds or souls who came before us-existed all around us, and that Raphaella had been born with a gift that allowed her to sense them much more deeply than I could. I wasn’t New Age, or whatever it was called. I wasn’t about to change my name to Prairie Sunburst or something. But the threatening undercurrent in the dead professor’s library was as strong-and as real-as the chaos of scattered books and the stink of smoke, and I knew there was no way I could ignore it.
“HOUSEKEEPER AND COMPANION, she said?”
“Yup. Her very words.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm indeed, as Mrs. Stoppini would put it.”
“Of course, companion could mean a number of things,” Raphaella mused.
“My theory is that they lived common-law because one of them was legally tied to someone else.”
“But why describe yourself as a housekeeper if you’re partners?”
“Who knows?”
As I set up the rice steamer, chopped vegetables, and arranged spices at the counter in our kitchen, I filled Raphaella in on the offer Mrs. Stoppini had made me earlier that day. Raphaella was sitting at the table with a cup of green tea, watching me work.
I crushed a green and a red chili, a couple of cloves of garlic, some black peppercorns, and a bit of shredded ginger, and put them in a small bowl. In another dish I piled the vegetables-snow peas, whole baby corn, diced red bell pepper, and chopped spring onion. Rice noodles were soaking in a bath of warm water beside a platter of raw shrimp, shelled and de-veined. I hauled a big iron wok out of the cupboard beside the sink and set it on the stove.
“Are you going to accept?” Raphaella asked.
A polished copper ankh hung from her neck on a leather thong. As usual-and, I sometimes thought, only to tempt me-she wore her hair long, caught at the back of her neck with a sterling silver brooch. She was wearing black denims, leather sandals, and a canary yellow T-shirt depicting a street sign in crimson across the curvy front.
WITCHES’ PARKING ONLY ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOAD
The lame T-shirt joke reminded me of our high school days, when Raphaella’s transfer from Park Street Collegiate to my school came with a bundle of unflattering rumours-the tastiest one being that she was a witch. Little did the rumourmongers know, I thought.
“That’s what I need to discuss with you,” I replied, leaning against the counter. “I told her I wanted to think about it, even though I was tempted to snatch the opportunity on the spot.”
“Yeah, it’s a bit… surprising,” Raphaella commented. “Almost too good to be true. You wonder, What’s the catch?”
“Marco warned me there’d be one, but I’d like to accept anyway.”
“But?”
“Well, it all sounds straightforward enough.”
Mrs. Stoppini had replied to my two questions very clearly. Yes, the new mantel should be an exact copy of the old one, and yes, some of the books required full notification, but not the majority.
“The woodworking will take time,” I continued. “I can replicate the mantel and refinish the floor in front of the hearth. There may be damage to the bookcases that I didn’t notice. But cataloguing all those books… I’ll never get through it.”
“Ow!” Raphaella smirked, hands over her ears.
“What’s the matter?”
“The loud clang from the hint you just dropped.”
“It might be fun, you and I working together.”
“Hmm.”
“And we could take breaks, go for a swim, smooch.”
“Hmm.”
“But I guess, with MOO and all… And your mother will want you to work in the store as much as you can.”
Mrs. Skye owned and operated the Demeter Natural Food and Medicinal Herbs Shop on Peter Street. She didn’t like me.
“Don’t lay the guilt on too thick,” Raphaella said. “How many books did you say?”
“Four thousand, minimum. Maybe five.”
“And how many are to be fully catalogued?”
“Fewer than a quarter, I’d guess.”
“Hmm.”
“That’s your third ‘Hmm.’ ”
“It might be interesting.”
“That isn’t the first word that springs to mind,” I admitted.
“Working with you, I mean.”
“Oh. Well, definitely.”
I had been careful to describe the mansion, the eccentric Mrs. Stoppini, and what little I had learned about the tragically dead Professor Corbizzi in a way that I hoped would intrigue Raphaella. But I hadn’t mentioned the uncomfortable, oppressive atmosphere of the library or how the prof had died.
“I’ll talk it over with Mother,” Raphaella said. “Maybe I can work away at the books in my spare time.”
“As soon as she hears you’ll be with me she’ll object,” I said, turning on the gas under the wok.
Raphaella’s mother had never accepted me. She wanted Raphaella to lead a life without males in it. When Raphaella was a little girl her father had humiliated her mother by having affairs and eventually being charged with sexual exploitation of a woman in his firm. Mrs. Skye had learned to dislike and distrust men in general. But in my bumbling manner, without really knowing how I had done it, I had won Raphaella’s heart and ruined Mrs. Skye’s plans. She wasn’t grateful.
“Oh, I don’t know. I think she’s warming up to you. Give her a few years.”
“So you’ll help?”
“How could I turn you down?”
“You’re an angel,” I said with relief.
“But there’s one condition.”
“Which is?”
“You have to tell me what’s bothering you about the Corbizzi place.”
Raphaella’s ability to tune in to my feelings used to catch me by surprise, but not anymore. She had what her late grandmother had called “the gift,” although Raphaella sometimes complained it was more like a curse. She could sense things-emotions and even past happenings. I’d seen her walk into a building or a churchyard and know that something horrible had occurred there because she felt the presence of the people who had suffered. Raphaella once told me it was as if she was a string on a musical instrument and vibrated in sympathy with her surroundings. But her powers, her spiritualism, were a secret only she, her mother, and I knew.
“That library is creepy,” I replied. “I can’t put it into words. It’s more than the fact that the professor died there. It’s as if the room has… an attitude-a negative attitude. It doesn’t want strangers.”
Raphaella nodded as if everything I said made perfect sense to her. “I see. And that makes you uneasy-and a little scared.”
“Yeah.”
I poured a dollop of peanut oil into the wok and flipped on the range hood fan. “Hold your breath,” I warned. “This may make you cough a little.”
Raphaella got up and opened the window that looked out on Mom’s flower beds between the house and garage. I dumped the spices into the hot oil. Instantly, the sharp savoury aroma of sizzling chili, garlic, and ginger filled the kitchen. Coughing, I added the shrimp and tossed them with a metal spatula. As soon as the shrimp had turned pink on both sides I scooped them onto a plate and set it aside. Next, in went the vegetables. I stir-fried them for a few minutes, then poured in some chicken broth, sending a cloud of steam into the air, and clapped the wooden lid on the wok.
While the veggies cooked, I drained the noodles. “Okay, here we go,” I announced. “The moment of truth.”
I removed the lid from the wok, dumped in the shrimp and then the noodles, blending the ingredients quickly, adding fish sauce at the last minute before turning off the stove. Raphaella scooped steamed rice into a bowl. While she set it on the table I poured the stir-fry onto a huge platter, then set it down next to the rice.
“Ready!” I yelled, pulling the strings of my apron.
Mom and Dad came into the kitchen, each with half a glass of red wine, Mom with the bottle. “Smells wonderful,” she commented.
Dad waved at the air, wrinkling his nose and pretending to be offended by the spicy aroma. “The fire extinguisher’s under the sink,” he remarked, grinning at Raphaella. Then he pulled out a chair. “Come on, Annie. No shilly-shallying. Let’s strap on the old feed bag.”
“Shilly-shallying?” Raphaella said.
As we ate, Raphaella told us about MOO. The cast had had its first run-though and the rehearsal schedule was set. Raphaella would be busy most nights. The dramatic and music directors were married-to each other.
“I hope the rehearsals won’t all be like our first meeting,” Raphaella said, popping a shrimp into her mouth. “The directors bickered over every point. And the guy playing Josh Smith thinks he knows more than both of them put together. If by some miracle we can pull the production together and do a good job, there’s a chance we’ll be invited to perform at a conference opening at Geneva Park on the same weekend. And,” she added, giving my father her most winning smile, “the musical ensemble is short one flute player.”
Dad shook his head. “Don’t even try,” he said. “I can’t perform in front of people. My mouth gets all dry and I can’t pucker.”
“But you teach flute,” Raphaella argued. “Garnet says you’re a great player.”
Dad looked at me. “You said that?”
“I may have been exaggerating.”
Mom got into the mix. “No, you weren’t, Garnet. Gareth is a fabulous flautist,” she said to Raphaella.
Dad beamed and blushed at the same time. “Well-”
“But he’s chicken,” Mom said.
NEXT MORNING, I paced back and forth in my room, mentally rehearsing what I wanted to say. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make the deal. A three-year lease at no cost! The biggest expenses in starting up a business, Dad had advised me more than once, were equipment and plant-the rental or ownership of the workplace. Mrs. Stoppini was offering the second for free, a huge boost to my plans.
But I didn’t want to sound too eager, because I had a condition of my own.
Okay, I told myself, it’s showtime. I keyed Mrs. Stoppini’s number into my cell, took a deep breath, and pushed the Talk button.
She answered with a coldly formal “Good morning. Corbizzi residence.”
“Hello, Mrs. Stoppini. It’s Garnet Havelock.”
Her voice warmed up a degree. “Good morning, Mr. Havelock. How nice to hear from you.”
“I said I’d phone and give you my decision about your offer.”
“Ah.”
“Er, I’m willing to meet your two conditions.”
A little more of the frost melted away. “Excellent.”
“But I have one of my own.”
A pause. “Indeed.”
I waited her out, chewing on my lip.
Her voice had iced over again, like a pond in winter. “May I know what you have in mind?”
“I have a friend. She’s very reliable. And honest. I want to bring her along from time to time to help with the books.”
“Mr. Havelock, I did stress that our business arrangements and all the attendant details, along with information personal to this household, must remain strictly confidential.”
“She’s very discreet. And I know from experience that she can keep a secret. Forever, if necessary.”
“But-”
“I need her help, Mrs. Stoppini.”
“Did you say she?”
“Raphaella is my girlfriend,” I said.
“Indeed,” Mrs. Stoppini said again, stuffing as much distaste as she could manage into the two syllables.
Girlfriend. I hated that word. It sounded trivial, as if Raphaella was a buddy I went to the movies with every Saturday afternoon. But how could I explain our relationship to a stranger? And why would I? Especially a cold fish like Mrs. Stoppini. Raphaella and I were soulmates.
“She’s my best friend,” I added.
Silence.
“My companion.”
More silence. Then, when Mrs. Stoppini spoke, her voice took on a neutral tone, as if she had made up her mind.
“Raphaella. An Italian name. It means ‘She who heals.’ I shall take that as a good omen. What is her surname?”
My turn to hesitate. “You’re going to investigate her.” It wasn’t a question.
“I must, Mr. Havelock. But I shall be just as circumspect as before.”
“Skye,” I said. “With an ‘e.’ ”
“Fine. Let us agree on the following: provided my lawyer has no objection, I shall consent to your condition and allow your… companion to assist you in your work and, to that end, come and go as she pleases.”
“Good. Thanks.”
“I shall have the contracts drawn up. And one more thing, Mr. Havelock.”
“Yes?”
“May I say how pleased I am that you have accepted.”
I almost shouted, “Me, too!”
WHEN I WAS IN GRADE NINE I went out with a girl named Sandy Mills until I found out I was her reserve boyfriend-the guy she dated as long as her real love interest hadn’t asked her out first. Sandy tore away the last shred of my already tattered self-confidence, and I wondered if any girl would ever give me the time of day. I was so desperate for ideas that one evening while my parents and I were washing the dinner dishes-we only used the dishwasher if we had company-I made the mistake of asking them how they met.
They agreed on the first part. Dad was an Orillia boy and Mom met him at the farmers’ market one summer Saturday while visiting friends who owned a cottage on Lake St. John and had brought her into town to shop. From that point on, my parents’ versions of their relationship story varied.
“She chased me all over town,” my father called out from the living room. He had finished washing and left Mom and me to sweep the floor and put the dishes away. “She wouldn’t let me alone. It was embarrassing. I’d turn a street corner and there she’d be. I married her just to put her out of her misery.”
“Not true!” Mom contradicted, directing her voice toward the living room as she swept. “You were so smitten you phoned me once a day and twice on Sunday. Your phone bill was bankrupting you. I only agreed to your proposal because I felt sorry for you.”
“Go on, admit it. I was irresistible. You were head over heels. Obsessed. Besotted.”
“You don’t even know what besotted means,” Mom scoffed, laughing, as Dad came back into the kitchen.
“Yes, I do,” he said, taking her in his arms, bending her backwards, and planting a noisy kiss on her mouth. “See?” he said to me over his shoulder. “She still can’t leave me alone.”
I threw down my dishtowel and left the kitchen. “No wonder I’m immature for my age,” I said.
Whatever my father claimed when he and Mom were horsing around, the grin on his beaming face in the wedding photo on the mantel told a different story. He couldn’t believe that the young woman holding his arm had agreed to have him.
They were different people-Mom was a journalist whose drive and ambition had made her well known, and had landed her in a few dangerous situations. She would go anywhere to chase down a story. Her favourite drink was adrenaline. Dad was a part-time music teacher-he played flute-and a store owner, and his calm familiar life in the town where he was born was adventurous enough for him. He was, in my mother’s words, an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud, which was why he operated an antique store, preferred the golden oldies station on the radio, and drove a 1966 Chevy pickup truck he had restored himself. Mom had once had dreams that I would go off to university and be a scholar and hold a pen rather than a chisel or screwdriver, but Dad had quietly backed my wish to finish high school and learn cabinetry and furniture design.
But they were as tightly meshed as the strands in a suspension bridge cable, and they made all their big decisions together. Which is why I sat down with them in the living room on the same day I talked to Mrs. Stoppini. I explained what I wanted to do and asked for their support.
“I suppose it wouldn’t be the worst investment in the world, eh, Annie?” Dad allowed, waggling his eyebrows.
Mom suggested that our family lawyer look over the contract before I signed it, and Dad offered an interest-free loan to get me up and running. We talked about my plans, and I noticed they kept exchanging smiles.
“What’s going on?” I demanded.
“Nothing,” my mother replied.
“We’re proud of you,” my father said. “She just won’t admit it.”
WITHIN A COUPLE OF WEEKS the workshop was operational. I had installed a layout table, a drafting board, racks for my tools, and, along the walls, benches equipped with vises. The table, band, and radial arm saws and a power planer were situated on the floor with lots of working room around them. There was also a lathe, only three years old, that I had bought from Norbert for a song. I ordered the wood for the mantel, along with a supply of lumber and specialty woods I’d need to have on hand for occasional work. The vacuum-and-exhaust system would be installed in a day or so.
Meanwhile, I hung sheets over the library shelves, rolled up the rugs, and threw dropcloths over the furniture. I took down the ruined mantel and gingerly carried the pieces out to the shop. Then I power-sanded the burned patches on the library floor. The damage hadn’t gone deep, so the sanding took only a couple of hours. It left slight indentations, but not enough to notice, especially if Mrs. Stoppini covered the area in front of the hearth with a new rug.
I spent some time in the paint-and-wallpaper store on Colborne Street discussing the available colours of wood stains with Rachel Pierce, an old high school friend, and comparing colour samples with the digital photo I had taken of the library floor. I left with paint for the wall above the fireplace, half a dozen small tins of stain, a can of urethane, and a few brushes. I figured I would mix the stain right in the library to get the colour match perfect.
When the floor and wall were done and dry, Mrs. Stoppini inspected the job from the hallway outside the library door and pronounced my work “most satisfactory.” I concluded that she was pleased, and that those two words were the highest praise I was going to get.
Because soft surfaces absorb smoke much more than wood or leather, the curtains and rugs stank of stale carbon and ash. No one else was permitted in the library except me and Raphaella, so with the work on the floor done, Mrs. Stoppini had me pull down the drapes, remove the rugs, and haul everything to the front door, where a company she had engaged would pick it all up and take it away to be cleaned. I then washed the windows and set about dusting the bookshelves.
All this going to and fro, into and out of the library-careful to follow Mrs. Stoppini’s strict instructions and close the doors firmly each time I entered or left-didn’t alter my reaction to a room that should have felt homey and inviting. After all, there were the books, the worn, comfortable chairs, the warmth of natural wood and of wool rugs-all bathed by the light streaming in through the big windows. What more was needed to help me relax?
But each time I drew open the double doors and stepped into that silent room I felt something, like the change in air pressure that comes immediately before a storm. Or like a background hum, as if the room was faintly breathing.
I assured myself it was all in my head. But then I had told myself the very same thing in the past, when I had been stranded in a pioneer church during a blizzard and haunted by the frantic, ghostly voices of some men on their way to a murder.
I put much of my uneasiness down to the professor’s awful death. At the same time, I had a niggling feeling there was more to it than that. Did all this explain the eccentric behaviour of the crow-like Mrs. Stoppini? She felt the library’s strangeness, too. I was certain she did. That was why she refused to enter the room. It was more than grief that I saw in her eyes. It was fear.
I FOUND MOM at her desk in her study the next morning, her hair still wet from the shower. She took a run most mornings, summer or winter, before she began her day, and put in a couple of hours’ work before lunch. The sun was bright in the window behind her, highlighting the red and pink petunias in the window box.
Except for the tiny crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes, Mom looked young for her age. She was slender and small-boned, easily taken for a frail person-until the fierce energy in her eyes hinted at her iron will. Her determination was one of the ingredients that made her a national-class journalist-and sometimes got her into trouble. Her face glowed with the brightest intelligence of anyone I knew, except Raphaella. Her eyes sparkled with wit and creativeness, and if you paid attention they told you a lot about what she was thinking.
And once in a while, just for a second, they’d lose their focus. At those times I knew she was flashing back to the day about a year before when she had been on assignment in East Timor, reporting on the brutal events of a dirty war in which one side employed so-called militias-gangs of rapists and murderers who used religion as a battering ram. Mom was abducted by a gang of young Islamist men with guns and medieval ideas about women who didn’t “know their place.” Enraged by a female who had the nerve to be a reporter, they had thrown her into the back of a truck, beaten her, and threatened her with death for hours before dumping her in the dust by the side of a road. She had come home cut and bruised and in a kind of otherworldly shock that kept her numb for weeks.
This morning, she was clicking away on the computer keyboard. I didn’t ask what she was working on. She wouldn’t tell me until it was almost complete, but it would be either an article for a print or online magazine or an entry on her blog.
She looked up.
“Off to work?” she asked.
I nodded, then said, “Have you ever heard of a Professor Corbizzi? Lived near here?”
Mom was also a magician when it came to research. “Lived? Past tense? Doesn’t ring a bell. A professor, you say?”
I nodded again. Her fingers blurred over the keyboard.
“Eduardo Corbizzi?”
“I don’t know his first name.”
“There’s someone here. Wrote a few books. Died recently. It just says he lived somewhere near Orillia.”
“Must be him. There can’t be more than one professor in the area with an unusual name like that. What are the books about?”
“The Italian Renaissance, all out of print. Wait a minute. That’s where your new shop is-that estate up the lake.”
“Right.”
“It’s his library you’re working on. Might be interesting.”
“It already is,” I replied. “Anyway, see you later.”
“ ’Kay,” she replied, her hands already in motion, her eyes on the screen.
IT WAS A SULTRY MORNING, the heavy air already sweltering when I got to the Corbizzi gate and activated the remote I kept clipped to the inside of the fairing on my motorcycle. I drove up the lane, grateful for the cool shade of the woods, and parked under the birches by the workshop.
I saw Mrs. Stoppini’s mannequin-like shape in the kitchen window as she worked at the sink, probably washing her breakfast dishes. I waved, but she didn’t seem to notice. I let myself in the side door of the shop and hung my helmet and leather jacket on a hook by the door. Then I flipped on the overhead fans, wound the windows open, and put on my apron, mentally rehearsing my plans for the day.
I clamped one of the new mantel’s side panels into the bench vise and began to plane the edges. As usual, I got lost in the work, and when my cell rang I was surprised to hear Mrs. Stoppini announce, without so much as a hello, “I shall be serving a light lunch on the patio in thirty-five minutes.”
Even under the patio umbrella the air was sticky and oppressive. The lake gave off a brassy glare under the relentless sun, and the flowers in Mrs. Stoppini’s gardens drooped as if they had given up the fight hours ago. For the first time I noticed that there was no dock on the shore, which probably meant that the late professor was not a boater. It also meant that no one could conveniently visit the estate from the water.
Mrs. Stoppini had prepared panini-Italian sandwich rolls-of prosciutto, cheese, and lettuce and arranged them on a platter beside a bowl of olives. When we had made our deal and signed our contract, she hadn’t said anything about providing tea and coffee and lunch. But I wasn’t going to bring it up.
“I would customarily offer a good Chianti at lunch,” she said, looking cool despite her long-sleeved black housedress, “but as you are using machinery I thought mineral water might be best.”
“Good thinking,” I said, helping myself to a sandwich.
She sat down opposite me, straight-backed and rigid, and proceeded to demolish a panino. I popped an olive into my mouth, savouring the saltiness, and watched an Albacore far out on the water by Chiefs Island, desperately searching for a snatch of wind.
“If I may say, Mr. Havelock, you seem an admirably quiet and serious young man.”
I felt myself blush.
“Not like those uncivilized creatures whose animal noises and whoops one hears from the city park when the wind is in an unfavourable direction.”
“Raphaella says I’m steady. And reliable. I think she means dull.”
Something happened to Mrs. Stoppini’s face. I realized she was smiling. Sort of.
“I shall look forward to meeting this Miss Skye of yours.”
“I don’t think she’d like the ‘of yours’ part.”
“Indeed.”
“Do you mind if I ask something?” I said, changing the subject. “Professor Corbizzi-he was a university teacher?”
“He was an eminent historian and author of several books. He held a chair at Ponte Santa Trinita University in Renaissance studies in our native Florence, and his specialty was the San Marco church and monastery. I take it you have not had an opportunity to examine his library.”
“Too busy,” I said.
“Indeed. Well, he was, some years ago, offered a post at the University of Toronto, and after a few years he retired to this place. I fear he was not happy at Toronto. His work was… a trifle unorthodox.”
“Oh.”
There was something unusual in the way she talked about the man who had been her companion. Raphaella and I assumed that meant they were a couple and had been for years. Yet she seemed impersonal when she spoke of him. “He was not happy,” “he retired,” “his work was unorthodox.” Strange, I thought as I munched on the last olive in the bowl.
“He continued his work here, but I am not aware of its exact nature. He did not share it with me.”
I got the message. Don’t enquire any further. I drank down the remains of my water and stood.
“Well, thanks for the lunch,” I said. “Time to get back to work.”
DURING THE AFTERNOON, thunder grumbled on and off in the darkening northwest sky. I wondered if I should pack it in and head home before the rain came. Riding a motorcycle with a face full of windblown water was no fun. But I put it off, intent on what I was doing, and didn’t clue in to the weather again until I heard a handful of rain spatter against the window above the bench. I opened one of the garage doors, allowing a gust of cool air to swirl inside, carrying sticks and dust with it. I pushed the bike inside and ran the door back down, hoping that if there was a thunder-shower, it would be short.
I sat for a while, safe and dry behind the glass, and watched the drama in the sky above the lake, where thick purple clouds roiled over the whitecaps. Here and there bars of sunlight shot through like yellow spotlights, illuminating the emerald green water. But soon the lowering sky formed a dark ceiling. Lightning flashed and crackled. Thunder boomed like artillery. The wind came like a series of punches, bending the tall spruce between me and the water like blades of grass and lifting the skirts of the willows along the shore. Small branches spun past the window. The patio chairs tipped and rolled across the grass. The umbrella, folded and tied, rattled in its mooring, rocketed into the air, touched down briefly in a sea of irises, and somersaulted toward the lake and out of sight.
A roar like an approaching train announced the downpour, and huge raindrops slammed the concrete apron outside the shop like tiny bombs. Puddles appeared almost instantly. Distorted by the curtain of rain running down the kitchen window, Mrs. Stoppini’s tall form appeared. My cellphone rang.
“Are you quite all right?” she asked anxiously.
“Snug as a bug, Mrs. Stoppini.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’ll probably blow by in few minutes.”
“I hate storms,” she said, and hung up.
The uproar moved on after less than an hour of heavenly mayhem. The violent gusts of wind gave way to a steady breeze. The rain stopped and the sun came out, drawing steam from the apron and the patio, and setting alight the droplets that hung from every leaf. I went back to work, but by suppertime, when I had planned to quit, a sullen downpour had set in.
Mrs. Stoppini offered me supper and a guest room for the night, “in view of the weather,” and when I saw the doleful look on her face I remembered her saying earlier in the day that she hated storms-which meant they scared her. I called home and let my parents know. After supper-pasta with garlic, butter, fresh Parmesan cheese, and asparagus-I put in another hour’s work, then called it a day.
“Let me show you your room,” Mrs. Stoppini said when I came back into the house holding an umbrella against the rain. She went ahead of me up a wide staircase that gave onto a carpeted landing, turned left, and led me down a wainscotted corridor, past a few doors to the east wing, floating like a wraith ahead of me, her leather lace-ups tapping the floorboards. How does she do that? I wondered.
She pushed open a door and gestured toward a large tiled bathroom. Then she showed me into a spacious bedroom with its own fireplace and easy chairs, as well as a four-poster bed with what looked like antique end tables. A bulky dresser took up most of the wall opposite a huge bay window that looked out over the lake. There was no TV, no radio, no clock in the room.
“I trust you will be comfortable here,” she said, flipping the light switch beside the door. “There are candles and matches in one of the end tables. Electrical storms often cause power outages here. You will find towels and a bathrobe in the lavatory.”
With that, she turned on her heel and left the room, saying “Have a pleasant evening” over her shoulder.
I drew back the window curtains to reveal a view of the side yard and the lake spreading beyond a row of willows, then sat down on the cushioned seat. Darkness flowed across the grounds and rose up the trunks of the trees. The rain hissed in the big blue spruce to the left of the window and gurgled in the gutter over my head. Thunder boomed out over the lake, and lightning flickered. Another cell was moving in. I switched on the crystal lamp that stood on the night table nearest the window and pulled open the drawer to find a half-dozen candles, a box of wooden matches, and a saucer-shaped brass candle holder.
I looked around the room for something to read but had no luck. Then I remembered I was directly above a huge library. I made my way along the dim corridor and down the stairs. At the bottom I noticed the faint smell of smoke. Old, stale smoke. Strange, I thought. The library had been completely cleaned.
The ground floor was sunk in shadow. I considered returning to my room for a candle rather than blundering around looking for light switches, then changed my mind. The notion of visiting that gloomy library with a storm brewing overhead to make a creepy place that much creepier didn’t sit well with me.
I climbed back up the stairs The faint sound of weeping floated from the west wing, where Mrs. Stoppini’s room was. I crept down the corridor toward her door, cringing at every creak underfoot.
“How could you leave me? How could you?” I heard, followed by pitiful sobs muffled by the door.
I had been so involved in my own projects-setting up the shop, solving the various problems that came with making a replica of the mantel-I had forgotten that Mrs. Stoppini’s life companion had suddenly been snatched away from her. I told myself as I turned toward my room that I would try to be more sensitive in my dealings with her.
I took a long shower, towelled off, and pulled on the blue hooded bathrobe I found neatly folded with the towels Mrs. Stoppini had left for me. By the time I closed the bedroom door behind me the sky was black. A brilliant blue-white flash momentarily lit up the spruce branches outside the window, then the thunderclap whacked the house, shaking the glass.
The lights went out.
With thunder banging and crashing on the roof, I felt my way to the bedside table, lit one of the candles, and carried it to the dresser top, the highest flat surface in the room. I crawled under the duvet and settled into a soft mattress. The candle flame reflected by the dresser mirror gave off a comforting yellow glow. I thought about calling Raphaella, then remembered that the power outage would have killed the cell network. She was probably in her room, looking out into the dark. I imagined her profile in her window, sporadically lit by the lightning. I wondered if she was thinking about me.
The commotion in the skies slowly moved east, and the sound and light show faded, leaving the soft thrumming of rain. Out on the water, I thought I heard an outboard motor running roughly and muffled shouts as the sound faded. Wondering what kind of fool would be boating at night in a storm, I drifted off to sleep.
Soon I was in the grip of one of those anxiety dreams. I was alone, cowering in a dark corner of a small cabin. It was stiflingly hot, but I was wearing a heavy overcoat. Someone was trying to break in, howling with malice as he hammered on the door. Someone who I knew was dead. I dashed back and forth, frantically checking the door lock, which never seemed to close properly, and broken window latches that spun uselessly on the sash. The heat was unbearable. I tore open the coat and tried to take it off, but my arms tangled in the sleeves. There was a deafening boom and the cabin door flew off its hinges, and I stood helpless, my arms snared by the coat.
I awoke struggling and thrashing in the bed, one arm snarled in the sleeve of the bathrobe. The bed was hot, the room airless. I sat up, throwing back the duvet. The candle still burned. I got out of bed and opened the window, admitting a draft of fresh, cool air. I returned to the bed and pulled the sheet over me.
Every house has its own night noises, and the older the building the more it seems to creak and groan, like an old dog getting comfortable in his basket. The Corbizzi mansion was no different. And if you had a big enough imagination, every squeak and crack had a sinister cause-a malevolent intruder creeping slowly up the stairs, an evil spirit bent on revenge pushing open a door. What is there about the dark that awakens primitive images and drags them to the surface of your mind? And why will a rational human being-like me-lie awake, telling himself, “That’s just branches scraping against the roof slates,” or “It’s only the floorboards shrinking as the building cools”? And why don’t these explanations bring any comfort?
After a while my body sank deeper into the mattress and my eyelids grew heavier. I became aware of a sound emerging from the air around me, muted and faint. It reminded me of two pieces of cloth rubbing together, or a fingertip brushing repeatedly across an open notebook. Soft as a whisper, the sound was rhythmic. Like breathing.
There was someone in the room.
I jerked to a sitting position. Frantically scanned the shadows in the corners of the candle-lit bedroom. The breathing grew louder and rougher. I jumped from the bed and threw open the door. Nothing. The hallway was a silent black cave. The breathing was coming from behind me. The respiration became laboured and coarse-someone struggling to draw air into constricted lungs, fighting for every breath, saliva rattling in his throat as he began to choke.
It stopped.
The room was silent except for the window curtains brushing the sill with the breeze.
I closed the door, crawled into bed, curled up, and dreamed.
A BLACK RAT SCUTTLED across the floor of a dripping jail cell, the yellow light of a single candle reflected in each glassy eye. It passed unnoticed beneath a rough-plank trestle table where three men in hooded robes sat deep in shadow, their hands folded on sheaves of documents.
An iron key struck a lock. A heavy oaken door squealed open on rusty hinges. A man clad in only a filthy shift, his face veiled in shadow, was dragged into the room by two burly jailers and dropped on the floor. He moaned, rising to his knees, clasping his hands to his chest as if in prayer. The jailers yanked his arms behind his back and bound his wrists with leather thongs.
One of the three men at the table nodded almost casually. A jailer reached overhead for the rope that hung from a pulley bolted to the ceiling and passed the end between the arms of the groaning victim, tying a stout knot. Both jailers moved away into the murk at the opposite end of the room.
The rope tightened and quivered, the pulley squeaked as it took the strain. The kneeling man’s arms were pulled up and behind his body, squeezing an animal-like noise from his collapsing chest. He was hauled up until his feet barely touched the stone and his contorted shoulders took the full weight of his body. Then, in sporadic jerks, he was winched higher and higher until he hung close to the ceiling, like a grotesquely misshapen angel.
He cried out, then his voice fell to a chant. “Credo in unum deum patrem omnipotentum factorem caeili et terrae. Credo in unum deum…” He paused, choking. “De profundis clamavi ad te domine, domine esuadi vocem meam.”
For the second time, one of the men at the table nodded.
The bound man plummeted toward the floor. The rope unspooled, then thrummed viciously when his body jerked to a stop, inches above the ground, the momentum of his fall dislocating his shoulders with a sickening crack. His scream exploded against the stone walls.
The pulley began to creak again.
I WOKE UP PANTING, breathing raggedly, my heart knocking at my ribs, my eyes frantically probing the gloom for faceless men in hooded robes. There was barely enough pre-dawn light in the bedroom to show the outline of the bedposts and the dresser. It was a dream, I told myself, lying back to stare at the ceiling. Just a nightmare. I forced myself to breathe evenly, repeating my words until my heart rate slowed almost to normal. I threw back the sheet and stood by the bedside, closing the bathrobe and tying the belt tightly. I looked around the room. The window curtains lifted and fell in a cool breeze. The house was silent.
I made my way on unsteady legs to the bathroom and gulped down two glasses of water, then splashed more on my face. I held my hand out. It was shaking. Tension knotted my stomach. I hadn’t had a nightmare that bad in a long time. I returned to the bedroom and looked out the window. A gold-red line, with a pastel blue band above it, marked the horizon.
“A normal day,” I said out loud. “I hope.”
On the dresser top a spent wick lay in a pool of wax on the candle holder.
I climbed back into bed. Raphaella had once advised me that you should always confront a nightmare right away. Lie back, tell the dream to yourself, analyze it, ask yourself what the dream is trying to tell you. That way you can put it in perspective. A fear faced is a fear defeated. Show your terror who’s boss, she told me. But I wasn’t ready to face the horrors I had witnessed. I had seen five men calmly torture a sixth, indifferent to his suffering.
I pushed the images away, reminding myself they were only that-images-and forced myself to concentrate on my plans for the day. I would return home for a change of clothes, call Raphaella, and see if she could come and begin to catalogue the books. I would work on the mantel while she got started in the library.
Fixing on normal, everyday things brought me back to reality. I rolled over, hoping to catch an hour or so of sleep. I dozed. A black rat scuttled into my mind. A candle flame flickered. Suddenly, the room was flooded with light. I jumped up, jolted with adrenaline, looked frantically around the bedroom.
“What the-?” I yelped.
The overhead light had come on, as had the lamp by the bed. The electricity was back. I hadn’t switched the lights off when the power failed in the storm.
“Stupid fool,” I said into the empty room.
MRS. STOPPINI HAD BREAKFAST READY when I came downstairs. She had dark circles under her eyes. For my part, I had managed an hour of fitful half-sleep that hadn’t relieved my fatigue one bit. And my head ached.
“Good morning, Mr. Havelock.”
“Morning, Mrs. Stoppini.”
“I would customarily enquire as to how you slept, but I expect no one for miles around managed a restful sleep last night.”
“You can say that again.”
The music of robins and starlings trickled in from the yard, and outside the patio door a hummingbird darted and hovered over flowers sagging from the night’s onslaught of wind and rain. Mrs. Stoppini rose from her chair and stepped over to the espresso machine on the counter. She wore the same type of long-sleeved black dress that fell past her knees-only this one had a velvet collar-and woollen stockings with black lace-up leather shoes.
“Cappuccino or straight espresso?” she asked. “Or perhaps you’d prefer a caffè macchiato.”
“Er… a-”
“Espresso marked with a little milk foam,” she explained. “It was the late professor’s preferred morning drink.”
“Sounds good.”
There was a plate of small pastries in the centre of the table alongside a bowl of warm rolls. Mrs. Stoppini placed a small cup of deliciously aromatic coffee in front of me and indicated the food with a turn of her hand. “Please,” she invited.
As I layered butter on a roll she sat down. “The patio chairs and umbrella seem to have disappeared during the storm. The gardener doesn’t come until Wednesday. I wonder if you’d be so kind…”
I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted as good as it smelled-hot and strong.
“Sure,” I replied. “Be glad to.”
Mrs. Stoppini nodded.
“If you’ll make me another macchiato,” I said.
I FETCHED MY PUSH BROOM from the workshop and swept the leaves, sticks, and dirt from the patio before tracking down the four chairs the storm had tossed across the lawn. I found the umbrella knee-deep in the lake, up the shore a bit, where the sandy beach gives way to gravel and shale. I waded in and hauled it onto the bank and allowed the water to run out of the canopy, still furled around the pole, secured by a bungee cord.
Something glinted at the waterline. Glass. I bent to pick it up, thinking glass on a beach is a danger to bare feet. It was a hand-held GPS with a camo finish, a waterproof variety, the same brand as the GPS on my motorcycle. The display screen was cracked, allowing water and sand in. I pushed the Power button, but the screen didn’t light up. Ruined, but too valuable to throw away, I thought, jamming it into my pocket. I’d check it out later. Maybe the batteries were dead.
Back at the house I erected the sodden umbrella and opened it to dry in the sun.
AFTER SAYING A TEMPORARY goodbye to Mrs. Stoppini and thanking her for putting me up for the night, I mounted my motorcycle and headed back into town. It was cool in the shaded roads along the lakefront, and the air, washed by the storm, was fresh and fragrant, coaxing the aftermath of my nightmare from my mind. I rode slowly, 650 cc’s of power rumbling serenely between my knees, along Bay Street, around the park, and up the hill on Brant to our house. I parked in back by the garage.
Mom was at the kitchen table reading a manuscript, a pencil in her hand, her favourite dictionary close by. She liked to edit her work on hard copy rather than the computer.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “Dad at the store?”
She looked up and smiled. “He has a line on a nineteenth-century pine table. He’s trying to persuade Summerhill to sell it now rather than put it up for auction, but so far it’s no go. He’s as happy as a clam.”
“I’m going to change,” I said, heading for the stairs.
My room was on what Dad referred to as the third level and I called the attic. Accessed by a steep flight of narrow stairs, it was a good-sized, wainscotted room tucked up under the mansard roof, with two dormers looking out onto Brant Street-one a window and the other a glassed door to a small balcony. Another window overlooked Matchedash Street. It was the kind of place where, in a gothic novel, the family would lock up their mad auntie when company came over. In real life, a century or so ago, in the days when rich people owned the house, my room was where the servants had lived. I liked it. I had the balcony, lots of light, and if I craned my neck a little, a view of the lake.
I showered and changed into fresh jeans and shirt. I pulled a duffle bag out of my closet and tossed in a set of clothes, a flashlight, a novel, and the charger for my cell. I planned to leave the clothes at the shop in case I was ever soaked or stranded again.
In the kitchen I made some sandwiches and raided the fridge for a few cans of juice, making a mental note to find a small used fridge for my workshop, and put the food into my pack. Dropping into a chair, I sat back and keyed Raphaella’s number into my cell.
“Hello?” she answered.
“It’s your boyfriend.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The good-looking one.”
“That narrows the field to seven.”
“The one you love the best.”
“Oh. Hi, Steve.”
“Very funny,” I said. “Listen, can you make it out to the Corbizzi place today?”
I heard the muffled sound of Raphaella holding the phone against her body and telling her mother she’d be there in a minute. “I’m at the store,” she said to me. “I have to unpack and shelve a big shipment of Chinese herbs that came in this morning.”
Raphaella’s mother made up natural medicine prescriptions. Lately she’d been teaching Raphaella to prepare some of the simpler ones.
“Can you mix me up a batch of frogs’ teeth and spiders’ tails?”
“Not today. I’ve got to get going.”
“How long will you be?”
“Probably all day. Maybe I could come by your place for dinner.”
I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “Okay. Give me a call if you get the chance.”
“I promise. Gotta go.”
“Okay, bye.”
“Bye, Steve,” she said brightly.
BACK AT THE SHOP I cut pieces of dowel to make spindles for the decorative “fence” around the edge of the new mantel top. I fixed the first one between the spurs of the wood lathe, clamped the tool rest into position, and turned on the motor. Using one of the old urn-shaped spindles as a model, I meticulously shaped the wood until I had an accurate replica, finishing it with sandpaper. Then I turned off the motor.
The lathe had a feature that made the rest of the process easier, an electronic gizmo with a stainless-steel tip much like a ballpoint pen. I manoeuvred the tip to rest against the new spindle, turned on the device, and stood back as it silently travelled the length of the spindle, “reading” and memorizing its shape. I had only to remove the spindle, put a blank in its place, fix a cutting tool into the attachment, push a button, and watch as the lathe automatically shaped a new spindle exactly like the first.
It was slow tedious work as the lathe did all the thinking and cutting while I fed it blanks when the time came, but in less than an hour and a half the job was done. At the workbench I laid out the mantel top, the fence rail, and the spindles, then glued and clamped them, careful to keep the fence spindles perpendicular to the top. Then I made the decorative fences for the side panels. I was hanging up my apron when my cell rang. As usual, Mrs. Stoppini got right to the point.
“I shall be serving lunch on the patio in twelve minutes, if you’d care to join me.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Stoppini. Perfect timing, as always.”
“Indeed.”
After eating a plate of cold pasta salad with sparkling mineral water-a few notches up from the peanut butter sandwiches I had brought with me-I told Mrs. Stoppini I’d be working in the library for the afternoon.
“Splendid,” she commented, and began to clear the dishes.
I looked up into a perfect summer sky whose blue deepened as my eyes moved up from the horizon. There was a cool breeze off the lake, just enough to turn the leaves on the maples in the yard to show their pale undersides. I would have preferred to go swimming with Raphaella at Moose Park or lie on a blanket on the grassy shore and read-or doze off to the sound of kids playing in the sand at the edge of the water. I was beginning to feel the loss of sleep the night before, and the prospect of spending time in that unwelcoming room full of old books wasn’t exactly inspiring.
But about an hour later I banged the top back onto a paint can and surveyed the newly painted wall above the fireplace. Satisfied, I gathered the roller and brushes, folded the dropcloths, and took the stuff to the workshop. I decided to take a break and go for a ride on the Hawk while the paint in the library dried and the fumes cleared away. It was a soft summer day, and a motorcycle ride along quiet roads outside of town sounded like a good way to relax.
Then I noticed the broken GPS I had found on the shore lying on the workbench, pushed to the side. I had planned to try new batteries in the hope the unit hadn’t been destroyed in the lake. I might be able to find the owner’s house and return the device-giving me a destination for my ride.
I inserted the fresh batteries and pressed the Power button. Nothing.
“Oh, well,” I muttered.
Then a thought sparked. I powered up my laptop, connected the GPS to it, and launched the GPS software.
“Searching for devices” appeared on the laptop screen. “Device found” was my reward.
Because my own GPS was the same brand, my software could talk to the camo GPS and read its files. I searched around for information on the owner but came up empty. Not to worry. I might find his home by deduction.
A GPS like the camo one was pretty basic but powerful. It could memorize positions-longitude and latitude references-called waypoints, create a route linking selected waypoints, lead you to a specific waypoint using a compass rose, and record tracks. A track was a trip memorized and stored by the GPS. The tracks were usually filed in the unit’s memory by date, unless the user had given them titles. This unit was useless because the screen was broken, but I could read its files. And copy them.
The software displayed all the waypoints on a map. After a quick search, I found that almost all the activity was in an area northwest of town, and one spot in particular had a lot of tracks leading to and from it. I deduced that this place was the owner’s residence.
On my laptop I created a folder, naming it “Found Unit,” then uploaded the contents of the camo GPS into the folder. I slipped outside and removed my GPS from the motorcycle’s handlebars. I downloaded “Found Unit” into my GPS. I had now duplicated the contents of the camo GPS on my own.
I threw on my leather jacket and pocketed the camo GPS and my cell. I clipped my GPS back onto the Hawk’s handlebars and turned it on. Before long I was on Burnside Line at the edge of town. The houses lining the road fell away behind me as I rode away from town and into flat green farmland dotted with cattle and a few small stands of trees.
Motoring along under the speed limit-which was rare for me-I glided past an abandoned limestone quarry, a small herd of horses standing drowsily in the shade of an elm, a field striped with huge rolls of hay lined up under white plastic tarps. The new-mowed hay filled the air with a clean summery scent. The North River meandered lazily across the landscape, making its way to nowhere in particular. The tension from the last couple of days dissolved in the brilliant air.
Beyond the Maple Valley Crossroad the blacktop narrowed, the farmhouses took on a tired defeated look, the fields were blistered by protruding rocks. The road grew even more restricted, then played out completely. I turned onto a gravel side road, following the compass rose on the GPS with growing doubt that I was being taken to the owner’s residence. The gravel soon disappeared and I found myself bumping along a dirt track twisting its way over stony, rolling ground toward a forest in the northwest. A couple of pickup trucks hitched to flatbed trailers were parked along the verge. ATVers, I figured.
I stopped. I thought I knew where the track led, but I wanted to be sure. I pressed the zoom-out button on the GPS until the map showed a much wider area. The almost-road twisted and looped for miles and ended at Swift Rapids, a lock on the four-hundred-kilometre Trent canal system linking Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay by connecting dozens of rivers and lakes using humanmade canals and locks.
Did the owner of the camo GPS live around here? It seemed unlikely. And how far did my obligation to return the GPS to him go? I decided to poke along the rocky trail until the Hawk objected-it wasn’t a trail bike, and although the clearance was pretty good for a touring motorcycle, it was too unwieldy to handle rough travel.
Within fifteen minutes I had reached the forest, and soon after that the pointer on the compass rose indicated I should leave the track and take one that branched to the right. This one was narrower-but still wide enough for me to ride-fairly flat and covered with leaves that showed few signs of disturbance. I tooled along for a couple of klicks. The trees on either side of the path gradually squeezed in until the track ended.
Now what? I had not reached the destination I had been making for. I looked at my watch, deciding to walk for another few minutes, then give up on what was looking more and more like a wild goose chase. As a precaution, I entered a waypoint into the GPS and labelled it “mc.” If I got lost, I’d be able to find the Hawk.
I gulped down half a bottle of juice, then followed the footpath into a thickening forest of second-growth hardwoods. A couple of hundred metres farther, where it seemed that the trail was about to peter out, I found myself at the edge of a clearing.
THE OPEN SPACE was half the size of a football field, sunlit and quiet. A small clapboard cabin sat off to one side, a stovepipe poking at an angle through the tarpapered roof. No doors or windows-I was looking at the back of the place. I watched for a while, standing motionless inside the treeline, but saw no activity beyond a pair of blue jays darting around and a black squirrel that seemed unable to make up its mind where it wanted to go.
I crossed the clearing. Shallow trenches and tent-peg holes made a pattern indicating that a few tents had been pitched opposite the cabin not so long ago. The building itself was a simple structure with one cracked window, a padlocked door, and a roofless verandah across the front. The shiny padlock looked new.
All around the window and door, yellow, red, and blue splotches streaked by rain marbled the bare wood, as if a half-dozen demented kindergarten children had been let loose with brushes and cans of paint. They were paintball hits. I stepped onto the creaking porch and peered through the window, letting my eyes adjust to the dark interior. I saw two bare bunks against the far wall, a wooden table, a few broken rail-back chairs, a small wood stove. Nothing else. No sign-a hat on a peg, a few dishes-that anyone used the place.
But outside, along the east wall, was a metre-high stack of firewood. The ground around the cabin was a mess of boot prints and ATV tracks leading to a trail heading northeast through the dense bush. If the direction held, the track would meet the Trent canal system near Morrison Landing.
I sat on the porch. Whoever used the place had left nothing behind that would identify them. It seemed clear that I had stumbled onto a paintball camp. I knew people in town who enjoyed an afternoon out in the woods, fighting a mock battle using paintball guns rather than the real thing. War games-and not for kids, either. The broken GPS in my pocket probably belonged to someone who had been out here, likely with a bunch of guys, probably more than once. He had lost the unit on Lake Couchiching-maybe last night, when I had heard a boat-and it had floated to the shore of the Corbizzi estate.
I searched the waypoint file again and displayed them on the map. Sure enough, there were points marked along the Trent waterway toward Lake Couchiching, proving that the owner accessed the camp by water. That explained both the ATV tracks and the fact that the way I had come in had shown no sign of human traffic.
I brought up the waypoint I had been seeking. A lot of tracks led to that spot from different directions. It was off to my right.
I got to my feet, hit the Go button, and followed the compass into the bush, away from the cabin and the ATV trail. The forest was thick, and pushing through it was hard work. After ten minutes of slogging I came upon a huge granite outcropping, like a stone kneecap protruding half a metre above the leaf-mantled ground. A fissure cut across the rock at a jagged angle.
I looked around and saw only the rock surrounded by a wall of trees. Why would the guy come here so often? I wondered. To be alone? Was this a hiding spot during the war games? A place to ambush “enemies” and shoot them with a ball of paint that would explode on impact and mark them as dead?
I circled the granite kneecap, thinking. This was no hiding place. Here, you’d be out in the open, an easy target. My eyes were drawn to the fissure snaking through the rock. Near the crest, juniper branches poked out. I carefully pushed the prickly boughs aside. Something down in the hole reflected the light. I reached deep under the shrub. My hand closed on a plastic bag.
Sealed inside it was a cellphone.
BEFORE I COULD OPEN the bag I heard the wavering rumble of small engines in the distance. The noise swelled gradually until I could distinguish four or five motors, their individual rackets rising and falling as the drivers worked the throttles. The clamour seemed to converge on the cabin.
I scrambled off the rock, skinning my palms, and darted into the trees, my heart leaping around behind my ribs. Instinctively I crept deeper into the forest. I called up “mc” on my GPS, punched Go, and began to walk as quietly as I could-the GPS only worked when it was moving. The compass rose appeared on the screen, rotated casually, and pointed toward the Hawk.
As I walked, placing every step cautiously, pushing branches carefully aside and releasing them slowly as I passed, I heard voices in the distance, laughter, and the commotion of a group of men out for sport. Then the motors fell silent. Someone barked an order and the horseplay ceased.
I made my way through the trees as quickly as I could without snapping twigs underfoot or breaking off branches. After what seemed like an hour of fighting the urge to run, I spotted the glint of sunlight on the polished aluminum frame of my motorcycle through the branches. My knees wobbled with relief.
Then I realized I still held the bagged cellphone in my hand.
I unlocked the saddlebag and tossed the cell inside and swung my leg over the bike, snapping the GPS into its cradle and pulling on my helmet. A few centimetres from the ignition, my hand, holding the key, stopped. Now that I felt safe, my curiosity began to get the better of me. I could sneak back and take a quick peek, I told myself.
“Don’t be an idiot,” cautioned my logical angel. “A gang of strangers finds you spying on them? Is this a pretty picture?” But I got off the bike, pocketed the key, perched my helmet on the saddle, took the GPS out of its holder, and headed toward the clearing, following the line I’d travelled earlier.
Once I’d made about half the distance I slowed and sneaked, eyes peeled for movement, ears alert for the slightest noise. I stopped when I spied shapes through the screen of leaves, gliding back and forth. Voices in a strange language floated in the warm air. No laughter now. The talk seemed serious and purpose-driven. I peered through the thick foliage. A droplet of sweat trickled down my rib cage.
I bent into a half crouch and crept forward until I reached a spruce tree a couple of metres from the edge of the clearing. Through the fragrant boughs I could make out the cabin and, nearer to me, nine men dressed in camo, right down to the caps and boots. They were erecting tents, also with a camo design, in the same place I had seen the trenches and peg holes. They spoke occasionally but didn’t waste words. I couldn’t place the language.
A tall man came around the corner of the cabin, a gun slung diagonally across his chest. He snapped off a couple of commands. The men speeded up their movements. Sunlight detailed the tall man’s gun, the canteen on his belt, the long knife in a calf-scabbard, his thick moustache. Like all the others he had brown skin, and the black hair under his cap was cut short.
I slipped my cell from my pocket, turned it on, and immediately disabled the ringer. I activated the camera, turning off the flash, then took the commander’s picture before I captured a few more snaps at random. Stowing the cell, I turned and, careful to keep the spruce between me and the men, began to creep back to my motorcycle.
When I had made about twenty metres I stood, looked back, saw nothing threatening, and began to walk.
And tripped.
I crashed to the ground, making a racket like a thrashing elephant, and dropped the GPS into the leaves. I scrambled to my knees as a shout rang out behind me. Another shout followed. Boots pounded as bodies crashed through trees. I felt around in the leaves for the GPS. Someone hollered, closer this time. My fingers hit plastic, and I snatched up the unit and got to my feet and began to run.
If “run” is the right word for zigzagging though dense forest, eyes on the GPS, eyes ahead, then back to the little glass screen showing me the right way, heartbeats thudding in my ears.
Shouts, snapping branches, and the thump of boots on the forest floor told me the men in camo were closing in. I burst out of the trees, jammed the GPS into my pocket, pulled on my helmet, fumbled out my key, swung my leg over the saddle. “Don’t drop it, don’t drop it,” I chanted, my hand shaking as I jammed the key into the ignition and turned it. Shapes approached through the trees. I pushed the bike off the stand, made a painfully slow three-point turn-why hadn’t I parked the Hawk facing away from the forest?-hit the Start button, kicked the gear shift into first, and roared away, eyes on the rear-view mirror, just as three or four men in military gear broke out of the bush and skidded to a halt in the cloud of dust I had left behind me.
ALONG BURNSIDE DRIVE I looked down at the speedometer to find I was fifty over the limit. I cut back on the throttle and tried to do the same to the flow of adrenaline racing through my veins.
I rode into Couchiching Park, where I bought an ice cream at French’s and took it to a bench by the boardwalk. I watched powerboats come and go from the marina under a blue sky where seagulls scribed lazy circles. People strolled by, kids shrieked and complained on the playground equipment. All was normal.
Sugar wasn’t supposed to calm people down, but licking chocolate ice cream helped me coax my heart rate back to normal. I had a bad feeling about those guys in the bush. Their appearance and their air of purpose didn’t suggest sport, even though they seemed to enjoy chasing me. They hadn’t seemed like a bunch of good old boys out for a bit of fun shooting paintballs at one another and pouring down cold beer between pretend battles. They were organized and disciplined. And that leader was anything but one of the boys.
I remembered that during the thunderstorm at the Corbizzi mansion last night, I thought I heard a motorboat out on the water-a strange place to be when the lake was crazy with wind and wave, when lightning flashed every couple of seconds. This morning I had found the GPS. Which had led me to the cabin. A coincidence? I doubted it. The GPS held waypoints stretching from Morrison Landing to Lake Couchiching. I got to my feet, wiped the sticky remnants of ice cream from my fingers with a tissue, tossed the paper into a bin, and walked back to the parking lot where I’d left the Hawk.
The GPS had probably been lost by one of the camo-boys. Simple.
Just as simple was the fact that I felt no obligation now to return it. The last thing I wanted was to have to explain to any of those guys, let alone the leader, how I came to possess it. On my way back to the Hawk, I removed the two good batteries and tossed the GPS into a garbage bin. Then I mounted up and rode home.
The cellphone in my saddlebag had completely slipped my mind.
RAPHAELLA LAUGHED.
I called her that night and related my unintentional visit to paintball heaven.
“I guess it does have its funny side,” I said, aware that my voice was a little chilly. She wasn’t taking the paintballers as seriously as I was. Maybe she was right.
“Sorry,” she apologized. Then she giggled. “I can just picture you charging through the trees, chased by the Testosterone Kids with their blotchy green-and-brown clothes.”
“Hardly kids.”
“All this because you were too conscientious about trying to return someone’s lost property.”
“Yeah, well, I misplaced that sense of duty in the bush somewhere,” I replied. “The GPS is in the trash down at the park, and the cell is still in the Hawk’s saddlebag.”
“You’re not going to try and return it, I hope.”
“No. It can stay where it is for the time being. I’ll probably end up tossing it, too.”
“Good idea,” she said, suddenly serious. “They sound like people worth staying away from.”
We talked a bit more and then signed off for the night. I watched a bit of TV and went to bed. Before I fell asleep, my imagination replayed images of the camo-boys flitting through the trees, converging on me.