LITMIR.BIZ

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       FIVE

      It’s all still a nightmare, but I can’t wake up,” Mutt said, sipping coffee on her deck. A slight breeze ruffled the needles on the huge fir that loomed twenty feet above the railings. The poplars and birch in the greenbelt to their right wore a bright cloak of new leaves, but he didn’t seem to notice. His handsome face was battling the signs of stress. Circles had appeared under his dulled eyes, and his hand shook. “When I saw him on that table . . .”

      She leaned forward. “I’ve never had to do that. Must be painful.”

      He shook his head, his dark curly hair close around his neck. “I write about this stuff. I tried to be objective, but it’s different in real life. His face was untouched. Almost serene, pink from the sun. The illusion of warmth. I wanted to touch . . .” His voice broke off.

      A minute passed. “What about his family?”

      “I had to call his mother. She’s in a retirement community near Hamburg. Even three Valium didn’t do the job for me. Maybe I should have driven down, but I didn’t trust myself on the highway.”

      Like her, Gary had been an only child. Belle tried to recall his parents, seen at a distance at concerts and plays. He’d never introduced her, a bad omen. His father had been a lithographer, his mother a housewife like most women in Scarborough of that era. Gary had inherited his father’s blond hair and his mother’s chubbiness. “And his father?”

      Mutt drained his cup. “Liver cancer. Didn’t make it past fifty. Gary connected the condition with his work, all those toxic chemicals. Of course, they didn’t know in those days.”

      “Did you get any more information from the OPP?”

      “I took a taxi and picked up the truck at the impoundment lot.” He gave a bitter laugh and drummed his fingers on the table. “An empty bottle of scotch on the seat.”

      “I don’t believe it.” This was turning into a B-movie.

      “Cheap stuff, too. MacKay and Whyte. Gary wouldn’t drink that on a bet. It was his only splurge. Glenlivet or nothing.”

      Belle winced at the trashing of her bargain brand. “Did he usually carry alcohol along when he was working?”

      Mutt shrugged. “I wouldn’t deny that if he stayed over in the tent, he might enjoy a few toddies around the campfire, but leaving an open bottle on the truck seat? No way.”

      “Reminds me of Tom Thomson.” A friend of the Group of Seven, Canada’s foremost pantheon of painters, he had drowned in Algonquin Park.

      “A famous mystery,” Mutt said. “There was a theory that he had been murdered by a local and that someone else lay in his grave. When a skull was unearthed, it showed signs of a bullet. Then the skull was identified as an aboriginal’s. Some said the family had relocated Tom. No one knew where, or they weren’t telling. I wrote a short story about it.”

      “I know it’s tempting, but let’s not get carried away.” She imagined that with his crime writing, he juggled forensic possibilities on a regular basis.

      Mutt stuck out his jaw, a faint stubble giving him the appearance of a high-priced model, probably through neglect, not affect. Belle preferred men clean-shaven. “The booze doesn’t make sense.”

      She shifted to another subject. When her mother had died in Florida, Belle was fast on the scene with twenty garbage bags for her closets, burying her grief, as women often did, by turning to chores. By the following week, someone who needed them was wearing her mother’s stylish clothes. Mutt would have his own sad duties arranging the evidence of a soul. “Are you going over to the Ministry to clean out his office?”

      “This afternoon. He was only there a few months, but someone at Brock might be able to make sense of his elk research, if I can put it in order. Shame to throw it away . . . along with his life . . .”

      He turned aside, and a hand brushed his eye. Then his broad shoulders straightened.

      “Do you know much about zoology? And what about your own book? Don’t you need the time for that?” Did it make sense for Mutt to get involved in the research? Maybe a mission would ease his pain.

      “Minored in it. An odd combination, but it gave us a connection. And as for my book, let it go for the moment. Nothing’s worse for an author than forcing a story.” He paused and frowned at a fresh thought. “Gary was especially excited about something lately, something that bothered him. We talked on the phone nearly every night.”

      Belle shook her head, trying to remember what Gary had told her about his studies. Survival rates, was it? “A new disease? Or maybe someone poaching the herd?” Despite the ruinous penalties, which included heavy fines and confiscation of vehicles, the North was full of people who regarded the bush as a free supermarket.

      Mutt walked to the edge of the deck, his velvety black hair stark against the pillowing cotton clouds in the distance. A raven warbled and swooped past. A marauding group of crows, smaller but dangerous, cawed shrilly from the tops of a high cedar, likely protecting their nests from the larger bird. “It was a white elk. A calf he found.”

      She blew out a breath. “Sounds rare. I wonder if it was an actual albino or just a hybrid. I’ve read about moose with pale fur. Did he tag it? Take pictures? He must have carried a camera.”

      “It was dead, that’s all I know. He said he had to make a few calls. Get someone to look at it.”

      “So he was carrying the body around? My God.” The idea made her shudder, which explained why she was no scientist.

      “Not carrying it áround.” He looked at her with an amused turn to his lips, as if she lived on another planet. “He brought home specimens whenever possible. It wasn’t gruesome to him.”

      “I guess not, and there’s an ancient deer head in the woods that I am fond of. But surely no one would shoot a baby elk. There’s no meat to speak of, and it makes a poor trophy.” Then again, dogs and cattle and even people were shot every year by overeager hunters. Maybe it looked like a wolf to them.

      “He didn’t mention any wounds. Died from natural causes, I suppose. But he wanted it documented.” He sat back down in the chair and crossed his legs, Noel Coward-style. North of Sudbury, it might have earned glances. But he was an author, and a theatrical side helped the mystique. More than that, he was adjusting to a savage loss, and he had trusted her with his heartache.

      “How, uh, long were you and Gary together?” she asked. Perhaps she shouldn’t have intruded, but once Mutt had left, how could she fill in the gaps?

      “Seven years. Wasn’t there an old film about that? Marilyn Monroe? Gary said you liked the classics.”

      “The Seven Year Itch.” What else about her had been dinner-table conversation?

      He stretched out his left hand, where a simple gold band gleamed. “Gary was the sentimental one. He insisted on a ceremony. Gladioli in every colour of the rainbow, even cinnamon. Four of our friends in tuxes, including two women. A string quartet. Catering by Mildred Pierce. And down the aisle to Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. Kind of an inside joke. But it was quite the occasion. Even if my family didn’t come. All of them were conveniently in Europe.”

      “It’s a lovely song. Gary had a beautiful tenor voice, too.” They were mourning two different people, a boy and a man. “How did you two meet?” she added, her prying on a forward roll. It seemed that he wanted to talk about their life.

      “Over a bag of garbage, oddly enough. The annual initiative to clean up the hiking trails around the Niagara escarpment.”

      “Sometimes I think half the world’s out to trash the planet, and the other half’s cleaning up. It’s a stasis.”

      Mutt cleared his throat and looked at his watch. Men’s styles were getting larger every year, a metallic

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