Kathy-Diane Leveille’s Weblog

“It’s often said, but usually not with such eloquence, that the only one you can’t outrun is you. Kathy-Diane Leveille writes with passion and assurance of a woman who risks sacrificing far too much to try to erase the things she knows are true.”

-Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

LET THE SHADOWS FALL BEHIND YOU

 By

 Kathy-Diane Leveille

Chapter One

 

No … don’t leave me!

Brannagh Maloney awoke in darkness. “Nikki?” she mumbled. Something pinched her eyelids shut. Brannagh popped two fingers into her mouth before laying them across each eye. She could feel the ice crystals sealing her upper and lower lashes dissolving.

Brannagh opened her eyes. The down sleeping bag had slid off the mattress and onto the floor.

Don’t go.

She rarely remembered dreams. If a rare echo carried over to waking day, she ignored it.

Brannagh glanced at Nikki’s dark, curly head on the pillow next to hers. He looked deceptively vulnerable with his six-foot-frame curled inward. His right arm, browned by the hot summer sun, was flung across his forehead.

Brannagh yanked the cover upwards. She tucked one corner around his shoulder, and then sat up, pulling her knees into her chest.

In the muddy half-light seeping beneath the window curtain, Brannagh detected whiskers of hoarfrost on the timbered walls where the joints met below the red-shingled roof. Autumn was a mere blip in the changing of the seasons in northern Ontario.

Nikki was leaving today. Brannagh looked forward to a week of solitude and time to regain her perspective. She would sketch the surrounding hills now that the waves of scarlet and plum had disappeared, leaving behind skeletal branches; a bleak blend of brown and grey.

Alex Turner, Nikolai Mirsky’s assistant, had found the cabin after they had returned from their first expedition into Lake of the Woods to survey birds in the boreal forest. Their offices, housed in a pair of abandoned MNR trailers ten kilometres west of Ignace, didn’t offer living quarters. Most of the staff stayed at Bob’s Motel. Nikki had insisted he needed a retreat from the rest of the crew. What he hadn’t revealed initially, even to Brannagh, was that he wanted her to share the retreat with him.

The cabin was at the end of a rumpled dirt road, perched on a cliff overlooking Davey Lake. It was rodent-infested and every spare inch that wasn’t already littered with rusting coffee cans or tobacco tins had been filled with animal droppings.

“It’s haunted,” Alex had claimed one night, as they sat around a fire on a curve of shale that overlooked the water.

“What is?” Brannagh had been lying on her back trying to locate Ursa Major.

“This place.”

According to Alex, who had grown up in Lake of the Woods, the cabin had been built at the turn of the century by a prospector for his mail-order bride. Child bride, the town folk called her. Thirteen years old. Ten months after she arrived from a small town in Minnesota, the prospector disappeared. She claimed he’d rowed out to the island to fish, that she’d found the lunch she’d prepared for him, yellow-jackets crawling over the jam cake, still wrapped in a handkerchief.

“Let’s row out there.” Nikki had jumped to his feet. “Fry a catch of northern pike.”

Brannagh had peered intently into the fire, a shiver snaking her spine.

“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts?” Nikki paused at the edge of the cliff.

“People who disappear aren’t ghosts,” Brannagh answered softly.

“What are they then?”

But she had already turned away.

There was only one piece of furniture in the room where Brannagh and Nikki slept; an old-fashioned bureau with a glass bowl and water jug. The floor was covered with stacks of paper, file folders and texts; all the research that they, and the team of university students, had carried out over the past year. Nikki was a wilderness preservationist. He organized the first count of birds in the boreal forest, which would set a baseline for the ecosystem before the building of dams and hydro plants (which big business and government insisted would not change the environment). The ten-year-study would help measure the effect of sulphur dioxide on two million acres of lakes and rivers.

Nikki had fought long and hard to bring it together. Brannagh, by a pure stroke of luck (and white lies), had been hired as cataloguer. When she had left Toronto and headed north last spring she had anticipated starting a whole new career, one that would change her life. Her life had changed, all right.

Brannagh leaned toward Nikki on one elbow until her face was inches from his. The mask worn by the man who fought battles all day was gone. There was something that rose to the surface in sleep that she only caught fleeting glimpses of when he was awake. When Nikki pondered an ornithological puzzle, his dark eyes would flash. It was this sense of child-like wonder experienced on the brink of the spectacular that left Brannagh weak. It was the enticement that beckoned and would not let her go. Still, she didn’t know what possessed her to let down her guard and move into the cabin with him. The exhaustion at the expedition’s close had skewed her better judgement. Luckily, their work would wrap soon, and they would go their separate ways.

Brannagh fell back onto her pillow. On mornings like this, when she was unable to drift back to sleep, Brannagh sensed the presence of the child bride. After she and Nikki had moved in and scrubbed the cabin from top to bottom, she would awaken in the half-light of dawn to a vague distant swishing crackle. She would find clumps of faded newsprint on the floor. Old-fashioned insulation, Nikki had explained, tumbling out from between timbers. Ghosts, Alex had insisted with a wicked grin. Brannagh saved every one.

Advertisements: Dan Schinsky’s Hair Dye.

Random pages from a pulp novel: The Five Cent Wide Awake Library.

The Bible: Joseph’s brothers saw him coming from far away. Let’s kill him and throw his body into one of the wells and tell our father that a wild animal killed him. Then we shall see what becomes of his dreams.

On days like today Brannagh sensed the child bride pacing the floor when the wind rose, or sighing when a log tumbled into the fire.

Brannagh added messages of her own to the cracks between the timbers. She pulled articles from Nikki’s files: Canada Accepts Nuclear Warheads. Man Walks on The Moon. “I Have a Dream” says Martin Luther King.

This is who I am, she silently informed the chinks between the timbers. It’s 1970. This is my world. Women don’t need men to survive. I love being on my own. And then, just in case she was giving the impression that she was too serious, Brannagh scribbled: Bob Dylan writes Blowing in the Wind.

Brannagh pictured the child bride reading to the hermit every night from pulp novels, the bible. Did the grizzled old man grow dreamy-eyed and wrap his arm around her, or did he grumble over time better spent carving up a moose carcass?

Brannagh rose to her knees and parted the curtain on the window. Her warm breath fogged the pane, but she could see bits of feathery white drifting downward; the first snowflakes of the season. The rugged earth, pungent with the decay of rotting leaves, solid under her feet just yesterday, had disappeared.

Brannagh rolled off the mattress and fished around for the bush socks she had abandoned during the night. By 8:30 she was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor waiting for water to boil on the camp stove. When it did she tossed in a scoop of aromatic coffee grounds, followed by a handful of crushed eggshells.

Nikki was not a morning person, and lately it had been harder and harder to get him out of bed. Something seemed off, but then, how well did Brannagh know him? By the time Nikki emptied a dresser drawer into a rucksack and pulled a wool sweater over his head, it was 9:30.

“I’m late.” He lumbered into the kitchen and pulled Brannagh close to him. He smelt of wood smoke and the flowery motel soaps they pilfered whenever they went into town for a night of beer and burgers at the Evergreen Motel.

“How late?” Brannagh opened her bathrobe and pressed against him. His breath was warm on her forehead.

“The vamp in the woollen underwear.” He smiled.

She picked up the suitcase by the door and followed him outside, jolted awake by the morning air. The lake lay still and sullen beneath the falling snow.

Nikki tossed the rucksack into the front of the truck and leaned on the door. (Later Brannagh would recall a distant, haunted look in his dark eyes, the purple shadows beneath them.)

Brannagh wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering, and hopped from one foot to the other. “I’m sure it will be fascinating, your conference on … whatever.”

“Trends towards shorter turnover cycles in forestry, and their effect on boreal birds’ seasonal movements between biomes in the course of annual migration.”

“How terribly exciting. Whenever I tell people I’m a Natural Science Illustrator, they think I survey hydro lines in Labrador.”

Nikki reached out and grabbed her hand. He kissed it, and then slid it beneath the neck of his sweater. “Brannagh …”

“Yes?”

“I …”

“What is it?”

And then he shrugged. “Don’t forget to check the mail.”

Brannagh gazed into his dark eyes. She saw crag and burbling streams and tamarack. They had spent so much time in the bush that she was unable to define him, he could not come into focus, without it. Suddenly, inexplicably she did not want him to leave her. The snow made a faint shush, shush sound as it fell to the ground. Brannagh tilted back her head. The flakes were icy on her cheeks.

“Coffee for the road?”

He shook his head. “I put new batteries in the torch.”

Brannagh experienced a pang. Just when she least expected it, the big oaf did something sweet.

“Take it to bed with you if …” He squeezed her arm gently before turning away.

Brannagh had an illogical fear of the dark and could not sleep without a light, or Nikki’s foot hooked around her shin, and his masculine sea-scent interlacing her dreams.

“Nikki.”

“What?” Nikki kept walking.

She swallowed. “Don’t forget to eat.”

Brannagh stood on the porch and watched the truck tires slide along the rutted road leading to the Trans-Canada highway.

Three days later, when Brannagh called the hotel in Winnipeg where the conference was being held, the desk clerk told her that Nikolai Mirsky was not listed on the hotel registration.

The tips of her fingers, clutching the phone, tingled.

Perhaps, the desk clerk’s voice droned on, she would like to inquire elsewhere?

Brannagh hung up the phone and went outside to stand on the road. She stared down at the end, willing a dark figure to appear; first as a movement within the tall evergreens, then taking shape on its own. She told herself that the wetness on her cheeks was snowflakes. By the time darkness fell, Brannagh had abandoned the lookout. She already understood that, like the earth covered by the first snow of the season, Nikki had vanished from her life.

 

 

*

 

Brannagh Maloney had lived with disappearances all her life. They were as familiar to her as the changing of the Fundy tides.

People who disappeared left cast-off shadows of themselves, murky tremblings that slunk out of corners on drizzly autumn afternoons. They lurked offstage, silent or sighing or reaching out to run a finger across her arm. They were the curtains fluttering in the window on a breezeless morning, the musty scent that arose when opening an abandoned cellar door.

When Brannagh was three years old, her father, Ben, a shy man, not given to volunteering his thoughts, hopped a Russian freighter.

“When will you return to the mainland?” Pamela, Brannagh’s mother, had asked as she squinted into a hand-held compact.

He had shrugged his broad shoulders and laid one hand on Brannagh’s head. “Depends.”

Brannagh remembered the stillness that surrounded her mother when he did not return, the way that sunlight springing from behind a parted curtain made her flinch. Eighteen months later, at eight-thirty on a Wednesday morning, Brannagh’s mother packed a weather-beaten portmanteau and slipped out the door without a glimpse back. When Brannagh began to have nightmares, Aunt Thelma bundled her up in a quilt and recited an invented fairytale. After her mother’s tragic death, Brannagh became determined to leave and find her own happy ending.

Her childhood home had been a four-story dwelling on Argyle, on the west side of Saint John, New Brunswick, two blocks south of the Provincial Asylum where her grandfather saw patients two days a week. Long before halfway houses and support systems became part of the neighbourhood, her grandfather had run what was known as “The Nervous Clinic” in their home. Selected patients, too healthy for the asylum but too sick for families to cope with, were released into his custody for respite care. They settled on the third floor, where he kept an office, studied and slept. He made fleeting appearances downstairs, ensuring Gran’s comfort while treating Aunt Thelma more like hired help than family.

Brannagh had finally escaped to university ten years ago. With each mile on the train drawing her further and further away, personal scenarios had shifted, and edges had blurred, sending secrets scuttling into corners. By the time classes started at the University of Toronto, she had taken to wearing black, and when she was asked about her roots, gave no telling revelations. After Nikki’s disappearance, Brannagh experienced a queer sense of knowing. It was as if, after wandering aimlessly for years, trying to feel her way in a dark room, she had ended up in the very spot where she’d begun.

Sergeant Orser, the rakish ponytailed OPP detective who had arrived at the office after she filed the Missing Person’s Report, asked her point blank, “Where do you think he is? Gut reaction?”

“Injured?”

Orser’s dark eyes, behind the Lennon-style granny glasses, remained inscrutable. One bony finger tapped on the desktop. Finally he spoke. “You mean a robbery gone wrong?”

She nodded. Did he think she was wasting his time? Overreacting? That this was a co-workers’ spat? The detective looked like he had dressed inside a paper bag and spent his paycheque on roach clips and floor-to-ceiling black lights.

“What else?” His finger tapping did not miss a beat.

“Maybe he was working on a top-secret project, and dropped out, like he has before, to throw big industry off his trail. Maybe someone wanted to get rid of him. Or he could turn up on a logging road, chained to a tree.”

“Orchestrate a media event?”

He patted his pockets, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, glanced inside it then tossed it into the garbage. “Only nobody’s tipped off any reporters.”

“Not yet.”

“Let’s stick to the facts.” His eyes narrowed as they scanned Brannagh.

“I have no idea where he is, that’s why I called you.”

“What’s your relationship with him?”

Brannagh opened her purse, scrounged for a piece of gum. “He’s my boss.”

Sergeant Orser placed his palms flat on the desk and leaned forward until his face was inches from hers. She could smell sugar-laced caffeine and nicotine. “Are there any other relatives, besides his Uncle Zhuk, that you are aware of?”

She shook her head.

“He hasn’t heard from Nikki, doesn’t seem concerned.”

She waited.

“Sometimes spending so much time in the bush, people get a little stir crazy.”

“Your point?” Brannagh rose from her chair.

The detective held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture. The corners of his mouth shifted upward. “I’m just saying, they lose their perspective and get involved in things they later regret. Don’t see any way of backing out but to—”

“Disappear?”

He fished a business card out of his vintage suit-jacket pocket and handed it to her. “If you remember any facts you think could be relevant, call me.”

Brannagh nodded and felt her last remnants of hope exit with the detective. The aging hippy had probably been shuttled north for a reason; but even if screw-up was his middle name, he was right on one point. She had worked with Nikki long enough to understand the “facts,” the implications of a solid scientific hypothesis. The cold hard truth was that, like everyone else in her life that she loved, Nikki had disappeared.

*

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Brannagh felt as if the winter would never end. A hot nugget of fury lodged in the centre of her chest and refused to budge.

At first, Alex had been concerned about Nikki’s disappearance, but as time went on, and there were no reports of foul play from the police, Alex and the rest of the staff began to shrug it off as just one more of Nikolai Mirsky’s eccentricities. They became annoyed when Brannagh started sitting in Nikki’s office for days with the door locked. The office received complaints that inquiries from journalists and scientific bodies regarding the progress of the study were going unanswered. (Brannagh couldn’t stand the sight of the bundle of mail stuffed into her box each day, knowing perfectly well each held a request for an update on the marvellous career of the infamous Nikolai Mirsky. When no one was looking, she opened the lid on the abandoned Port-a-Potty stored at the end of the hall and dropped each bundle in.)

In March, Brannagh stopped calling Sergeant Orser once a week. He never had any news, and the tenderness that had crept into his voice was irritating. She forced herself to summon up the energy to collate the data they had compiled up north: juggling percentages of tree heights, canopy and ground cover.

In April, Brannagh made a unilateral decision to clear out Nikki’s desk. She and the detective had gone through it months ago, looking for any clues that might provide answers, but had come up empty. She was tossing things into the garbage without a second glance when the telephone rang.

“Any news?” Annie demanded, as if she needed no introduction. She didn’t.

“I told you not to call any more.”

“So, no news?”

“No.” Brannagh glared at the receiver.

“Sorry.”

Why did Brannagh think Annie’s response always carried a swell of relief?

“Anyway. This is the last time I’m going to invite you.”

“Jesus, Annie. Give it up already.” Brannagh leaned back in the chair, phone tucked under her chin. Annie, Brannagh’s childhood friend from Saint John, had begun telephoning her once a week to hound her about the reunion of the Tuatha-de-Dananns (the “girls only” club they had formed in grade eight).

“I need a smoke.”

Brannagh heard Annie’s sharp inhalation. She pictured Annie in the attic of the house on Argyle in Saint John; Annie as she had been, her long lean form sprawled across the dusty wooden floor, with a cigarette in one hand while the other impatiently gathered her long auburn hair into a pony tail and tucked it into the neck of her T-shirt. She would assess each of the four members of Tuatha-de-Dananns with her impenetrable brown eyes, and would proceed to methodically list what they each needed to do to save themselves.

“You swore you’d never set foot back here again,” Annie grumbled.

“Exactly.”

“Shit. Someone’s at the door.”

“People make different choices. You stayed. I left.”

“Hey, I’m a doctor, I’m not supposed to smoke. Battleaxe McGillvery will—oh shit!”

“Goodbye.”

“No! Don’t hang up.”

There was a clunk as Annie dropped the phone. Brannagh heard muffled voices in the background. Mrs. McGillvery was a nurse who had worked for Brannagh’s grandfather until he retired, and then moved on to work for Annie’s father, Dr. Baird. Brannagh almost smiled, relishing the idea of the Scottish spinster thwarting Annie. No one else could.

Brannagh contemplated hanging up the phone, but something held her back. Annie meant well, she always meant well. She sat in the wobbly chair behind Nikki’s desk and glanced down at the trash can.

Minutes before Annie’s telephone call, Brannagh’s hand had wriggled out a stained recipe card from the back of the drawer. On one side, in Nikki’s scrawl, was written: -soak beans overnight -add molasses, brown sugar, mustard, lard. She remembered how, on their first night out, he had been sitting on a log by the fire, hunched in concentration, puffing on a pipe while writing furiously into a leather-bound notebook that never left his side. She had been nervous and intimidated, worried that her lack of experience would trip her up. Brannagh was convinced he was cataloguing some earth-shattering observation he had noted on the journey upriver, one that she should studiously be making preliminary sketches of. Miserable, she shoved her pencil-less hands deep into the pockets of her down vest. Then he sprang off the log, dropped the recipe card into her lap, and after a brief smile, disappeared into one of the tents.

Alex, Nikki’s assistant, rose to his feet. “Tomorrow’s supper,” he said, by way of explanation. “That’s one of the cataloguer’s duties, cooking supper. You gotta soak the beans.”

Brannagh gaped. Now she understood why the six of them had sat around the fire for such a long time after setting up camp, eventually passing around a loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter. She choked on the stench of the cooling fire, fighting an urge to dive through the door of Nikki’s tent and throttle him. Coward, she thought. Why didn’t he say something?

The next night, Brannagh waited until they’d all been fortified with a shot of rum and Nikki was showing off a “proper demonstration” of the J-stroke to Cindy, one of the googly-eyed undergrads. Brannagh yelled, “Supper!” When she had Nikki’s full attention, she whipped the jar of peanut butter at him football-style. It landed in the dirt. His dark eyes fixed her with a puzzled look as he bent down. He rubbed it clean with one blue flannel shirttail. Brannagh walked over, unscrewed the lid, and pulled out the gooey recipe card. “Yeah, it’s done,” she announced, slapping him on the back. The recipe card stuck to his shoulder before dropping to land on his foot.

“You still there?” Annie asked impatiently.

Brannagh shoved the card deep into the garbage can. “So, tell me, what’s it like?” she challenged. “The Dr. Annie business?’

There was a long pause. When Dr. Baird had passed away, Annie had been forced to turn down a position at a hospital in Calgary until she could find someone else to take over the family practice. “The first time I sat behind Dad’s desk it just felt … bizarre. But my biggest headache? Battleaxe McGillvery.”

Brannagh closed her eyes and could see it all. Stout Mrs. McGillvery in her hound’s-tooth suit, the office, Annie’s childhood Victorian home with the white gingerbread trim.

“As if I don’t have enough to worry about, I’ve got this kid, Wilfred Adamson, a med student my dad promised an internship, in the office, and McGillvery is ordering him about like the paper boy.”

Brannagh pictured Annie sitting behind the desk that Dr. Baird had sat behind for so many years. He was a plump, rosy-cheeked man who, before the death of his son, had a contagious laugh that came from deep within his chest, and gentle dark eyes. Annie would coax him into letting them listen to the dull ka-thunk, ka-thunk of their hearts through his stethoscope. Brannagh’s heart would begin to pound, just because he was a man, up close and foreign. When he asked her questions about herself, she felt as if her feet had been nailed to the floor and that the blush rising in her cheeks was going to lift her scalp clean off. Dr. Baird would hug Annie and call her “my amazing child.” Brannagh would stare out the window at the leaves on the maple that flipped in the wind like beggars’ hands, and experience an inexplicable urge to bolt.

“I’ve got it all figured out.” Annie was clearly losing patience. “You don’t have to set foot in Saint John if you don’t want to. Who would blame you if you didn’t? After your mom, the murder, all that dumb gossip—”

“You haven’t listened to a single word I’ve said.”

“Here’s what we do. We hold the reunion in your cottage. What is it? Ten, twenty miles up river from Saint John? No busybodies nosing around. All we need is a key.”

Annie knew perfectly well Brannagh had keys. They had been sent to her years ago, along with a copy of Gran’s will.

“Maybe it’s time to forget about him.”

“Are you finished?”

“Did it ever occur to you that you might be better off without him? Forget about bringing him back.”

“I don’t have a clue where he is. How could I bring him back?” Last November she had rented a car and driven to Winnipeg, stopping at every gas station along the route. Not one person had recognized Nikki or his truck from the picture she had shown them. Brannagh rose from the chair and started pacing.

“That’s good,” Annie insisted.

“Eh?”

“That you don’t know where he is.”

There was something in Annie’s tone that made Brannagh’s stomach clench. They had been best friends for years, but she had never forgotten how dangerous spending time with Annie could be. When Annie began sending letters this winter, Brannagh had mailed them all back with a bold “no such address” scrawled across the front. But as the weeks dragged on and her loneliness grew, she had relented and started accepting the phone calls.

“I mean, if you don’t know,” Annie back-pedalled, “you might as well stop thinking about him. Start thinking about yourself for a change.”

“I’m not obsessing over him. I have work to do. The truth is, we barely knew each other.”

“Good! Then you’ll come home.”

“They need me here. No one gives a rat’s ass about sulfur dioxide contaminating canoe country. Bird counts aren’t sexy. They’re trying to cut our funding, and I can’t let that happen.” She still said our and us, even though winter had passed without one word from Nikki. Drama in the Canadian North was nothing like Dragnet.

“Dianne said you wouldn’t come,” Annie muttered.

Brannagh felt a stab of regret, imagining Dianne’s big blue eyes, framed by platinum bangs, her slow, shy smile.

“Say Hi to her and Tish for me?” “Tish” was short for Patricia, but Brannagh couldn’t remember anyone ever actually using her full name. “How’s the new baby?”

“Walks. Talks.” It was a blatant reprimand. “Gotta go. Think about it. That’s all I ask.”

“Sure.” But they both knew perfectly well that going home was the last thing Brannagh would ever do.

 *

 

 

 

When Brannagh was a child, she suffered from nightmares and terrible growing pains. Her Aunt Thelma tried everything she could think of to make her feel better. Hot water bottles wrapped in flannel, Watson’s liniment, a cherry sucker with a cup of warm milk before bed. But nothing alleviated the ache that started behind Brannagh’s knees and radiated to her toes and hips. Brannagh would wake in the night, and stuff the corner of the quilt into her mouth.

Finally, at her wit’s end, Aunt Thelma turned to her mother. Brannagh’s Gran, Rye, was a wild-eyed, crinkly-haired woman, who religiously traced a path, back and forth, from Simm’s Corner to Reversing Falls every Sunday afternoon after church without fail, an action that got every tongue in the neighbourhood wagging. Usually Grandfather was able to persuade his wife to keep her eccentricities under wrap, but after the tragic murder of a local boy had shocked the quiet neighbourhood and left them reeling, even Grandfather was powerless to calm Gran down.

“Brannagh’s still having pains,” Aunt Thelma had informed Gran, when they were alone in the kitchen shelling peas.

Brannagh’s Gran, like the eldest child in every generation in her family clear back to the Druids (according to those who relished the telling of a good tale on the steps of Sanderson’s Store) had been born with a tried and true knowledge of healing power. Only Mrs. Cunningham, the fastest back stabber on the block, had the guts to quibble.

“Pagan superstitious nonsense,” she would say, with an air of crisp authority that left everyone feeling uneasy. “She’s crazy and that’s all there is to it.” Though most didn’t have a clue what the word pagan meant, there was no mistaking Mrs. Cunningham’s implications. They were, in their open-faced gullibility, committing a sin.

The following day, after Grandfather left the house, Gran came to Brannagh’s bedroom. Her silvery-blue eyes burned intensely as she asked a litany of questions.

“Where exactly is the pain? When did it start?”

Rye ordered Aunt Thelma to drive them to the family cottage up the Kennebecasis River.

“We can’t.” Aunt Thelma’s jaw tightened.

“And why not?”

“I’m not supposed to leave the house. Grandfather’s orders.”

“But why?”

Aunt Thelma chewed her bottom lip. “It’s been locked up ever since that boy … I really don’t want to go there.”

“You asked me what to do and I’m telling you,” Rye said.
Brannagh rode in the back seat, trying to ignore the rising tension by counting the slanting farmers’ fences that slipped past between luminous stretches of the river. Years ago, it had carried the steamships which the shipbuilders in Saint John had travelled upon to their summer homes. The old estates remained with tall Palladian windows and exquisite hand-carved woodwork. They had become permanent year-round residences for those who could afford the upkeep. The Maloney cottage was no bigger than one of the outbuildings on their grounds. Situated further upstream, close to the ferry, it was built of weather-blackened granite. The rooms were small and cramped, crowded with reminders of the old country, Ireland. The roof had a tendency to leak, and the cellar flooded every spring, but the northern windows offered a shadowy view of the Kingston Peninsula, a finger of land twenty miles wide and five miles long on the opposite shore. 

When they arrived at the cottage, Rye wasted no time. She took a quart basket off one of the nails on the wall outside. “Brannagh, darlin’, skim the leaves and bugs off the top of the rain barrel,” she ordered. Then she marched into the woods that separated their property from the neighbouring abandoned cottage with the red roof, loudly singing, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small …”

“Ordering me not to leave the house. What gives him the right?” Aunt Thelma muttered chewing one of the pills she kept squirreled in her pockets. She hurried indoors, and returned with a couple of wool blankets, and a bottle of Moosehead. She sat on a wooden chair, wrapping a blanket tightly around her shoulders, and squinted through the cigarette smoke towards the woods.

Brannagh peered nervously towards the bush. Aunt Thelma had been at the cottage the morning the berry picker spotted the boy’s body a year ago. Upon hearing a scream, Aunt Thelma had run into the woods. For days afterward, she walked around whispering under her breath. A crazed lunatic had stabbed the boy in the chest and left him spread-eagled on the peak of the red-roofed cottage to bleed to death. Patricia, a girl at school whose father was the Chief of Police, whispered updates in gym class. She insisted that the police were hot on the killer’s trail. They’d probably already caught him, Brannagh decided now, maybe just this morning or an hour ago or the very minute they had piled into the car. 

Brannagh shivered as she stood on an overturned bucket and cleaned the rain barrel. The water was cold. The tips of her fingers ached. The water gave off the smell of moss in a blueberry patch after it’s been peed on. When she was done, she picked the twiggy flower stems that remained in the garden and sat on a blanket, weaving them into a lump, pausing every once in a while to stare at the river.

The tide was high. Brannagh watched as the waves gradually gave up their restlessness. Dusk approached, blurring the edges of the clouds. Aunt Thelma’s eyes grew heavy. Her grip on the arms of the chair loosened. Brannagh lay on her back with her hands under her head. The sky seemed bigger up river, away from the paper mill stacks, and the Provincial Asylum’s hulk. She watched a group of clouds trailing one another like ghosts on a slow eastward journey. They seemed to take the holy thoughts she held to protect her grandmother, and tug them away, one by one.

In the distance, a shout arose, followed by the high-pitched barking of a dog. Aunt Thelma stirred in her chair on the dock. “What time is it?”

“Dunno.” Brannagh followed Aunt Thelma indoors. When Brannagh’s grandfather and Rye had first married, they had decided to transform Rye’s childhood home into a summer cottage. But Grandfather had always been too busy to spend time there. The cottage, in Brannagh’s mind, defined the separation between Grandfather and them. Here, the women answered to no one but themselves and underwent a transformation of sorts. Brannagh’s grandmother became almost beautiful in a wild, startling way that seemed to flash beneath the surface of her skin in the cold Fundy breeze.

“As usual it’s left to me to pull the meal together. Would you all starve if I just up and left?” Aunt Thelma found a jar of jam and some soggy crackers. They sat at the kitchen table and washed the makeshift meal down with metallic-tasting water from the pump.

“Can she really do magic?” Brannagh asked, licking raspberry seeds off her thumb. “I mean, can she cure me?”

Aunt Thelma fished a cigarette out of her jacket pocket. “Don’t depend on anything but this.” She tapped her forehead.

“My brain?”

“Never mind, don’t waste your time.  Lot of good it’s done me.”

“But … ” Brannagh faltered under the scrutiny of her gaze.

“We should go after her.” Aunt Thelma pushed her chair back, but instead of heading out the door and into the woods, she filled the kettle with water, then took the old-fashioned letter box that had belonged to Gran’s mother, Brigid, off the shelf. She leaned down and opened it with a key from her pocket.

“What happened to your necklace?” Brannagh asked. Aunt Thelma always wore a gold medallion with an engraving of a starfish around her neck. Brannagh’s fascination with it grew in direct proportion to the degree of Aunt Thelma’s refusal to let her play with it. She never took it off. Ever.

“It musta broke! You lost it. We gotta find it.”  Brannagh started scrabbling across the floor on all fours.

Aunt Thelma sat down in the rocker, setting the stack of recipes she kept in the letter box onto her lap. Sometimes Aunt Thelma looked right through Brannagh, as if she wasn’t even there.

“Gran said it was a gift from a boy.”

Aunt Thelma’s head rose. She glanced toward the window. “We should go after her.”

“I’m … I’m scared.”

Aunt Thelma stared at her blankly. “Then we’ll wait.”

Brannagh tracked down a dog-eared copy of Wuthering Heights. She had already read it twice, but she curled into a corner of the couch, convinced that a third read would illuminate the true mystery behind Heathcliff.

She awoke, hours later, to a “shushing” in her ear.

“It’s only me,” Gran whispered.

Brannagh sat up, relief washing over her as she rubbed her eyes. Aunt Thelma, who never seemed to need to sleep, was snoring in the rocker, head thrust back. A line of spit ran from the corner of her mouth, forming a dark oval on the collar of her blouse. A wind had arisen. The dark branches of the oak churned outside the window.

“Look at these.” Rye sat beside Brannagh and pressed something cool into her palm. One, two, three stones: rough-edged lumps that, on closer inspection, she could see were flecked, here and there, with spots of green, some as warm as the sun shining through leaves at the end of the day, and some as dark as the bottom of a well.

“Lie down now,” Rye ordered. She rolled the legs of Brannagh’s shorts up. In the dampness, her frizzy hair had risen round her head, creating a silver aureole. “We need to stop the struggle,” she explained gruffly, “for the spell to take hold, I mean to really set.” Her face radiated an invisible light, some shining, humble knowledge that Brannagh could only wonder, and scoff at, and envy. “If you don’t surrender to the pain, it won’t matter what I do, or how long I do it …” Her voice drifted off as her gaze fell on the stones in Brannagh’s palm. Sometimes Brannagh imagined that God looked like Sister Mary Margaret at Saint Patrick’s School, sitting behind a huge desk in the clouds. She knew God had his pets. She wasn’t one of them.

Rye picked up the stones, and rolled them in her fingers. “No, it must be three green stones, gathered from a running brook, between midnight and morning, while not one word is said.”

Brannagh watched silently while her grandmother rubbed the stones up and down her legs. Her large-knuckled fingers traced a path. First thigh, then dip and rise over the bump of the knee, then smooth slide down the shins. A light rain began to patter on the roof overhead. The air in the room grew damp, stuffy, and the smell of the ashes overpowering.

“Wear away, wear away … there you shall not stay … Cruel pain, away, away.”

Brannagh closed her eyes, hiding her misery. Her Gran rubbed her skin raw with a bunch of rocks. What if someone found out? Mrs. Cunningham already called Rye a crackpot the minute she turned her back. Didn’t everyone, sooner or later, depending on which direction the wind was blowing?

“There you shall not stay.”

Brannagh opened her eyes. What if, when she wasn’t feeling well, Rye brought her an aspirin, carbonated soda, and the funny papers? She would have a heart attack, from the shock of it, that’s what.

Rye laid shaky fingers on Brannagh’s brow. “You look different,” she concluded with a self-satisfied nod.

“I feel different,” Brannagh lied. “I really, really do.”

Gran asked Brannagh to roll over onto her stomach. “Cruel pain, away, away.”

How long her Grandmother kept it up, Brannagh had no idea. She fell asleep. Later, she was thankful, and even gloated over the fact that God had finally answered one of her prayers. Rye never offered to perform the ritual again.

The odd thing was that the growing pains seemed to drift away after that. Not all at once. Just a gradual lessening, until Thanksgiving in the house on Argyle came and went, and Brannagh realized that they had disappeared altogether.

“Of course,” Rye said, as if there was never any doubt, while she poured cream into her morning tea.

“You outgrew them,” Aunt Thelma interjected, flipping pancakes onto a plate.

“But look! Your necklace.  You found it. The magic helped you too.” Brannagh pointed to the familiar star medallion dangling from Aunt Thelma’s neck.

“It fell in the flour bin, and you outgrew the pains.” She klunked the frying pan sharply for emphasis.

“Rats,” grumbled Annie. She yanked the corn syrup bottle out of Brannagh’s hand. “I was hoping you had Polio. Then I could have your pink and blue hopscotch chalk.”

And then Grandfather had come into the dining room, and they all quieted and concentrated on cutting their pancakes into tidy, fork-manageable squares.

After Nikki disappeared Brannagh would awaken in the two-room cabin and hear a faint echo of familiar words drifting through the night: COMING NEXT WEEK:  Stay tuned for Scene Six, the end of Chapter One.

 

 

Wear away, wear away … There you shall not stay … Cruel pain, away, away.

Brannagh would wrap the sleeping bag tightly around her and wonder where Gran was now. She would fall into a restless sleep and dream she was standing in the Kennebecasis during spring thaw, its swollen waters tumbling over gravel and scrub. Brannagh felt the gritty riverbed beneath the soles of her feet and the icy waters tugging at her shins. She watched, with growing trepidation, the path of the rising river as it spilled over the banks, wild and unfettered, sweeping toward the closed black woods.

 

*

Brannagh gazed at the empty drawers in Nikki’s desk. Everything was bundled into trash bags, except for a few file folders and a Rolodex. The telephone rang. She scowled, realizing too late that she had neglected to take it off the hook.

“What now?”

Tish’s husky voice held a hint of uncharacteristic hardness. “Don’t come home.”

“What?”

“I don’t think you should come home. You’ll regret it if you do.”

“Uh, okay.” Brannagh paused to digest this bit of news. “May I ask why?”

“Annie … it’s just not a good time.”

“It isn’t.”

“No.”

“Finally, someone’s on my side.” Brannagh waited for more. “So.”

“So.”

“How’s the baby?”
“Belinda’s teething. Everything goes in her mouth. Socks, leftovers, dust balls.”

Brannagh pictured Patricia, with her curly red hair and wide-spaced emerald eyes.

“You feel like they’re going to pin a medal on your chest the day they’re born, but they don’t tell you that you’re never going to sleep again.”

“You love it.”

Tish laughed. “Guilty as charged.”

Brannagh nodded. It was all Tish had ever wanted in life: to meet the man of her dreams. Of course, that drove liberated Annie crazy. She had argued for kidnapping Tish when she decided to drop out of high school and tie the knot. “It’s such a waste!” Annie had railed. “Let’s show her some mercy, perform a lobotomy. If she insists on going through with this barbaric charade, at least it will be painless.” Annie took the work of the Tuatha-de-Dananns seriously. Ironically, Tish’s father, the mayor of Saint John, had agreed with Annie, and wished he was still the chief of police with the power to threaten to put his teenage daughter under lock and key.

Brannagh heard Belinda gurgling in the background. “Hey, remember how we used to link pinkies and chant?” Tish asked.

“I try not to.” They had named themselves Tuatha-de-Dananns after an ancient Irish race. They snitched some pamphlets they found hidden under Aunt Thelma’s bed, and snuck up to the attic one night to perform a secret ritual. They swore by candlelight to “honour, uphold, and protect my sisters’ self-a-steam in the club, at any cost to life and limb, until death do us part. Amen.”

Dianne added the “Amen” just in case God misconstrued what they were doing with the burning of the candles and the kissing of the Gaelic cross.

Not to be outdone, Brannagh, who was always filling their ears with ancient legends that she said were passed on by Rye (but in truth she had simply made up) ordered them to repeat Rye’s charms for protection with their eyes closed.

“But,” Tish protested, “we aren’t all women of Erin.”

“My Gran’s magic,” Brannagh whispered, gazing at the cross through slitted eyes, “is strong enough for us all.”

And because Brannagh had always been the resident expert on witches and magic, no one argued the point.

Even when Dianne found a library book that said that the Tuatha were great necromancers, which meant they were yuck able to puke raise the dead, Brannagh didn’t waver. She cautioned them not to miss the point altogether. What about Jesus? What about Easter?

“I couldn’t possibly get away,” Brannagh lied when Dianne called, sheepish and strained-sounding, an hour later, confirming Annie’s hands pulling invisible strings behind the scenes.

“I miss you, Brannagh.”

“Sorry about your Mom’s funeral.” Brannagh had been saddened to hear that Dianne’s mom had passed away.

“She loved geraniums.”

“I couldn’t get time off.”

“Thanks for sending them.”

“And you’re okay?”

“I’m—”

“Great, so, anyway, listen, as far as this reunion thing goes, you’re a sweety for thinking of me, but please, convince Annie to drop it. I promise I’ll think about it. Just get her to back off, please?’

And, surprisingly, thankfully, Annie did.

Brannagh forgot about the reunion. When one of the ornithology students, Glen, started flirting with her (it was silly, really, he had to be ten years younger than she was) and she felt a slow tingling rush down her spine when he placed his hand on her back, she told herself that maybe everything was going to be okay after all.

One night, after Glen convinced everyone in the office to go for a beer at the Legion, Puffin, Brannagh’s cat disappeared. Someone had let the resident skunk out of its cage, which sent the poor feline scaling the curtains. Brannagh hunted everywhere to no avail. Glen gallantly put off quenching his thirst for five minutes, but then he, like everyone else, headed off. Brannagh was just zipping up her coat when she heard a faint mewing coming from under the window in Nikki’s office. She coaxed Puffin out from underneath the sagging couch, where she was tangled inside a ratty woollen scarf. Brannagh sat, clutching the mass of fur, wool and dust in her lap. Wrapped within the scarf she found Nikki’s beaded tobacco pouch. She opened it and inhaled the familiar sensuous biting tang. She remembered how, those first few nights in the woods, she would sniff this scent, then catch Nikki’s warm dark eyes watching her intently from across the fire.    

Every night during the trip upriver, Nikki and his assistant, Alex, pitched their tents next to Brannagh’s. Brannagh would never admit it, but she was grateful for their presence. She had discovered that there was no darkness as bottomless and chilling as the night that fell in the deep woods of the Canadian North. 

Brannagh sneezed and Puffin leapt off her lap. She wrapped Nikki’s scarf around her neck, tucked the tobacco pouch into her back pocket and headed toward the door. When the telephone rang, she decided to cut the line and drop it down the Port-a-Potty.

“What now?”

“Miss Maloney?”

“Uh, Sergeant Orser?”

“OPP found a body.”

Brannagh felt an icy needle prick her sternum, and numbness spread across her chest. How desperately she had prayed for his phone call with news of Nikki, but she had never paused to contemplate the grisly reality the call might bring.  Until now.

“On a deserted back road, ten miles west of Upsula,” he continued.

“Is it … ?”

“There’s a hunter who went missing not far from the location last spring. My hunch is it’s him.”

“Can you tell from the picture I gave you? Does it look like—?”

“Impossible. The body’s been ravaged.”

“Meaning?” An image flashed in her mind’s eye.  A body under a sheet. Cloud-shaped blood stains.  She winced.

“Some animal ripped open the abdominal cavity. Entrails dragged off. The face is—”

“That’s enough.” She couldn’t do this. She thought she could, but she couldn’t.

“You asked. Look, I’ll call you as soon as the autopsy results are in.”

He paused. Brannagh swallowed.  Is this how the summer would pass?  Waiting with trepidation for the phone to ring to confirm the worst? And all the moments in-between spent in desperation, flinching at every loathsome image her imagination conjured?
“Miss Maloney?”

“I’m listening.”

“The OPP in Kenora brought me up to speed.”

She waited.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the murder last summer on your expedition?”

Brannagh felt all the muscles in her body loosen suddenly as if an invisible string running the length of her spine had snapped. She sank into the chair behind the desk.  Bloody hell.  But there was no escape hatch, was there? “No, there wasn’t a murder. That’s not true.”

“There’s an ongoing investigation into the death.”

“The insurance company, one of the students, he overreacted.”

A measured tapping came from the other end of the line.

“Remember when I said if you recalled any facts to contact me?”

Brannagh closed her eyes. “I didn’t think—”

“The stench? It’s fierce.”

“I just … didn’t think …”

“There’s a reason why I’ve outlasted the techno-whiz cadets from suburbia. Constables who think it’ll be a cake walk coming up north and pulling rank on the red-neck dick.”

“I wasn’t, I wouldn’t …” 

“Solitude is good. The senses sharpen up north, every one of them. Cut through crap like a butter knife.”

Brannagh shook her head.

“You do not want to jerk me around.”

After he hung up, Brannagh buried her head in her hands. She pictured Nikki that last morning as he lay sleeping on the mattress, frowning. Her hands felt bloodless, wooden as she dialled the numbers on the phone.  This was the lesser of the two evils? Wasn’t it?

“I’ve changed my mind,” Brannagh told Dianne.  “I’m coming to the reunion.”

“But…but…I thought you said…”

“I need a change of scene. I can’t sit here worrying day after day about Nikki, about what the police might turn up.”

“I can’t believe it.” Even beneath her excitement, Dianne still managed to sound a bit worried. Brannagh figured the earth would stop spinning on its axis if she didn’t. “It’s never felt right, without you here. Without you walking down Main Street, without you bent over a table in the library.”

Brannagh’s eyes smarted. She had always been Dianne’s protector. Leaving her had been the hardest of all.

“Life just hasn’t been right since you left.”

No, Brannagh wanted to object. There never was a time when my life was right. But she didn’t. Instead, she hung up the phone and set about trying to track down Max, her new supervisor, at the local Legion Hall, to see what two weeks in the summer she’d be able to take off, praying silently that she would remain clear-headed enough to argue against any protestations he raised to talk her out of it.

*

Annie opened the door slowly. The room was dark. She could hear his breathing. She could smell him. He had a scent, a distinct aroma that she was growing accustomed to, coming to like, to look forward to, that she thought about in the middle of the day when she was busy doing other things. It was, she liked to think, the smell of the forest, a deep, dark, unexplored forest and he was at the heart of its centre.

From the moment she left her office she had known that she would come to him tonight. Because for one startling moment, while eating supper, when she had imagined him lying in this room, she had thought, “It can’t be. It isn’t true.” She had given her head a shake. It was someone else’s life, not hers.

It seemed for a moment as if it had all been a daydream, slow, hazy, lazy, like the kind you experience on a summer day in the middle of the afternoon, after a swim and a meal and a nap in the shade of a weeping willow.

She stood beside the bed, watching his chest rise and fall, and re-experienced a familiar frisson of wonder. The thrill of fear that ran beneath it. It was true. She had done it. It was startling, really. She had never been an impulsive person. Not like some. And yet look what had happened when she followed a crazy dare that rose within.

He slept like a baby, curled on one side, knees drawn in towards his chest.

She was surprised about this; about men, that they too could appear so vulnerable at times. She hadn’t known that. Hadn’t imagined that to be true. Because she had known so few men. Really known them. Beneath the layers of bravado and bluffing and hard sheen of masculinity. She had always been too busy trying to prove she didn’t need a man; always trying to prove to her best friends that they didn’t need one either. She had viewed men as crutches only weak women required.

Annie pulled back the covers and slid into bed behind him, pressing her knees behind his, sliding her arm around his waist.

He stirred in his sleep, mumbling. She pressed a finger against his lips. They were soft and full. A girl’s mouth. The kind of mouth that could tremble and cry when a heart was breaking. Who could have known that was possible?

“Shhhhh,” she whispered in his ear, pushing dark curls off his forehead. She circled both arms around him, and pressed her cheek against his shoulder blade. He smelt of sweat and the forest and a baby’s skin after a bath.

She was struck by the thought that this was all she wanted, all she had ever wanted. “Shhh,” she whispered. “It’s just me.”