Giles Blunt - The Delicate Storm

‘There was no lock on it,’ Arsenault said from behind her. ‘The door was just hanging open.’

‘Hasn’t been used for a long time.’ Delorme pointed at the giant cobwebs around the doorway. ‘Is it a trapper’s shack?’

‘Totally illegal, of course,’ Cardinal said. ‘They build them wherever they damn well want. The question is, whose trapper’s shack? There must be at least a dozen guys make their living out here.’

Collingwood was young, jug-eared, thorough and silent. Cardinal could count on one hand the number of complete sentences he had uttered in his entire career, because he tended to speak, when he spoke at all, in single words. He was pointing silently to the sinks. They were the kind with a pump handle where the taps should be. Wearing a latex glove, Collingwood stuck his finger in the drain and brought it up again, stained.

‘Is that rust or blood?’ Cardinal asked.

‘Blood.’

‘So he could have been killed here. On the other hand, it may just be animal blood.’

Delorme was kneeling in front of the wood stove. ‘Looks like somebody tried to burn clothes in this thing. Collingwood, have you got a drop sheet?’

Collingwood opened a leather case that contained all the tools of his craft and together they spread a thin plastic drop cloth, white so that evidence would be visible against it. They used a pair of tongs to extract the blackened mass from inside the stove. There was a pair of denims, reduced to little more than the waistband, a shirt collar, several buttons, most of a pair of shoe soles and a mass of burned, unidentifiable material.

Collingwood took an instrument from his case and measured the shoe soles. ‘Elevens.’

‘All right,’ Cardinal said. ‘We’ll need sizes from the waistband and the shirt collar, too, if there’s enough left to measure.’

Delorme, ever so gently, was stirring the burned matter with the tongs. ‘What’s this?’ She said it more to herself than to the others.

She held a small lump of fused metal in the tongs. She turned it over on the drop sheet. The other side was shinier, and there was part of the incised outline of an animal.

‘Looks like a loon,’ she said. She looked at the two men.

Cardinal leaned over her shoulder to get a better view. ‘I think I know exactly what that is.’

The northern shore of Lake Nipissing is one of the prettiest places in Ontario, but Lakeshore Drive, which runs along the top of the inlet that gives Algonquin Bay its name, could have been designed for the sole purpose of keeping this fact from the public. It has been a magnet for eyesores for as long as anybody can remember. On the lake side there are fast-food joints, gas stations and quaintly named but charm-free motels; across from these, car dealerships and shopping malls.

Loon Lodge was at the western edge of this ugliness. It was not actually a lodge but a dozen miniature white cabins with green shutters and country-style curtains, having been built in the fifties before the log-cabin look became the fashion. Many people in Algonquin Bay imagine such businesses are closed in winter, but in fact they have two sources of winter income. One is from ice fishermen, the dentists and insurance salesmen who take a few days off to come up north with their buddies and drink themselves into oblivion. The other is from people who want a dirt-cheap place to live, and nothing is cheaper, off-season, than a cabin on Lakeshore Drive.

Cardinal had been to Loon Lodge a few times. Every so often one of the winter residents would knock his wife’s teeth out. Or the wife would tire of her husband’s drinking and insert a steak knife neatly into his ribs. Occasionally there were drug dealers. Then in summer it was all sunburnt Americans, families on a tight budget, taking advantage of the reliably frail Canadian dollar.

Cardinal and Delorme were in the first of Loon Lodge’s white clapboard cabins, the one marked Office. It was four times bigger than the rental units, and the proprietor lived in it with his wife and kids. He was an egg-shaped man named Wallace. His face was puffy, with a wounded expression, as if he suffered from toothache. An equally egg-shaped and disconsolate four-year-old boy was watching cartoons in the next room. Smells of supper hung in the air, and Cardinal suddenly realized he was hungry.

Wallace pulled out a guest register, found the name and turned the book around on the counter.

‘Howard Matlock,’ Delorme read aloud, ‘312 East Ninety-first Street, New York City.’

‘I wish I’d never set eyes on the guy, now,’ Wallace said. ‘Was a really slow week last week, so I was glad as hell to see him, even though he only wanted to stay a few days.’

‘Ford Escort,’ Delorme read, and copied down the licence number.

‘Yeah,’ Wallace said. ‘Bright red one. Not that I’ve seen it for a couple of days.’

‘What day did he arrive?’ Cardinal asked.

‘Thursday, I think. Yeah, Thursday. I’d just turned away a couple of Indians who wanted to rent a place. Sorry, but I don’t care how many vacancies I’ve got, I won’t rent to those people. I just got tired of cleaning up the blood and the puke. I have a reputation to maintain.’

‘You better hope none of them lays a discrimination complaint on you,’ Delorme said.

‘People don’t understand about Indians. Put two or three of them together with a bottle of Four Aces and you got a unit that’s unrentable.’

‘And what have you got now?’

‘You say you took this key ring off a dead body?’ He pointed to the melted mass in the Baggie that Cardinal had put on the counter.

‘More or less.’

‘Then I guess I got a bill that’s not paid and a tenant that’s not alive.’ Wallace shook his head and cursed under his breath. ‘Do you have any idea how long it takes to build a reputation like Loon Lodge? It doesn’t happen overnight.’

‘I’m sure it doesn’t,’ Cardinal said. ‘Did Mr Matlock say why he was in Algonquin Bay?’

‘I’m telling you, something like this comes along and all that effort – all those extra little touches that make a motel a special place, the kind of place people want to come back to – all of it comes to nothing. I might as well take down my shingle and declare bankruptcy.’

Cardinal wondered how anyone as gloomy as Mr Wallace would have had the optimism to open a motel in the first place, but he stuck to his original question. ‘Did Mr Matlock say why he was in Algonquin Bay?’

‘Ice fishing’s what he told me.’

‘Little early in the year for ice fishing. Even without the warm spell.’

‘That’s exactly what I said. I told him no one’s going out on that lake for at least another two weeks, even without the warm snap. He said he was well aware of that fact. Said he was only up here scoping the place out for a bunch of buddies who were planning to come up with him late February.’

‘From New York?’ Delorme said. ‘New York seems like a long way to come just to check out the ice fishing.’

Wallace shrugged. ‘Americans.’

He plucked a key from the rack behind the counter and they followed him outside past several cabins.

‘Never seemed like much of a sport to me,’ Cardinal said to Delorme. ‘The fish are stunned with cold. They’re starving. Where’s the skill? Sitting over a hole in a dingy little shack.’

‘You’re leaving out the beer.’

‘Oh, don’t leave out the beer,’ Wallace said. ‘You wouldn’t believe the cases these guys haul out there. I keep a toboggan in each unit, supposedly for the kiddies, but do you see any hills around here? They use ’em to haul their two-fours out on the lake.’

‘You say Mr Matlock arrived on Thursday. When did you notice the car wasn’t here?’