LITMIR.BIZ

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exaggerated force, and floored it, sending gravel spraying out at us as he roared away.

      “What the hell was that all about?” I asked, hoping that words might make my knees behave. I looked at the man, whose face had gone several shades paler.

      He pinned me with his eyes, wild and sweaty, stumbled around his words, got his tongue in the right spot, and whispered, “What body?”

      Ryan, who hadn’t heard the question, turned to me and said, “I only just bumped into these two down by the biology station when I heard you yelp. Leslie Mitchell and Don Allenby, Cordi O’Callaghan.”

      The woman inclined her head, but the man didn’t seem to notice the introductions at all.

      “Who was that guy?” asked Ryan, jerking his head in the direction of the departing truck.

      Don’s voice came again, louder, verging on hysteria.

      “What body?” He was nervously wringing his hands and the sweat glistened on his forehead.

      “His name is Cameron,” said Leslie, who glanced worriedly at Don before repeating his question. “What body?”

      “A couple of hours ago we found a body up river at the beginning of the portage around the falls. I was about to tell you when we heard my sister yelp. We need to contact the police,” said Ryan.

      “Oh, Jesus.” Don shook his head from side to side with a half moan.

      “For god’s sake, Don, get a hold of yourself,” snapped Leslie. She turned and looked at me. “Where?”

      “We found it near the water about a hundred yards from a campsite of some sort.”

      Don groaned and whimpered. “Oh, God. It’s Jake.

      It’s gotta be Diamond. Oh, Jesus.”

      “For Pete’s sake, pull yourself together,” said Leslie, looking curiously at Don.

      “That’s his campsite up there. He’s the only one who stays up there,” moaned Don. “He was due back tomorrow. It’s not my fault. If he hadn’t returned I was to give out the call. We all do that for each other. We go into the bush so often to do our fieldwork. It’s mostly crown land. All our study sites are up this way, we’re all biologists of some description or other. I work with small mammals: rabbits and things like that. Jake works with large mammals: Canada lynx, sometimes bobcat. Leslie here’s a moose woman. And we do a lot of fieldwork. Our base station is the building around the corner, down the road. We use it as a jumping off spot for say a week, a month in the field at a time. Leslie and I …”

      After this long speech he wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. “But Jake knew the bush, unbelievable he was. Not a better man than Jake in the bush. How could this happen to him? How could it be Jake? What the hell happened?”

      Leslie stopped the flow of words with a chop of her hand.

      “For Christ’s sake, Don, pipe down. It may not be Jake. It’s probably some poor sucker who got lost and panicked. Jake’s too much of a bushman to get into trouble, and he’s as healthy as an ox. He’ll be along to tell us all about it. Besides, whoever it is, there’s nothing we can do right now but get through to the police and report it.”

      She looked at me and Ryan. “There’s a CB radio in my car down the road. We can use that. Cell phones don’t work up here — too remote.”

      We walked in silence. Jake Diamond. The name rang some distant bell in my mind. I did of course know of him as a mammalogist, but it was for something else that this little bell tolled.

      “It’s Jake. I know it is. It’s Jake,” wailed Don with such sudden conviction it made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t help but think that this trembling basket case knew something the rest of us didn’t.

       chapter five

      “What’s this I hear about you finding a dead body? In pieces, no less. I’m gone three short weeks and you get yourself into trouble.”

      I was standing at my office window looking down at the pavement five flights below, feeling like a washed-out watercolour, bits of me fading into the early morning air, thoughts running into each other, creating mud. The early morning sun glinted off the sidewalk below, and the students rushed to make their 9:00 a.m. classes. At the sound of Martha’s deep guttural purr I turned in relief. Martha Bathgate literally filled the doorway of my puny office.

      “Really, Martha. Who told you he was in pieces?” Martha had a habit of being able to take my mind off myself and aim it at something productive. She was sometimes even able to dispel my sad moods before they spiralled down into darkness. If only I could figure out how she did it, I might be able to prevent depression from ever getting hold of me again. Unlikely, though; I’d fought it all my life.

      Martha winked knowingly at me. “I never reveal my sources, you know that. It simply wouldn’t do.”

      I shared Martha with two other assistant profs who didn’t rate their own lab techs, let alone decent office space. But I felt lucky: no one could replace Martha, even working for me full-time. She was my technician, secretary, bodyguard against students, friend, and jack-of-all-trades, who happened to remind me of a tennis ball, round and bouncy. Her black curly shoulder-length hair sprang like a wire mop from her head — cut page-boy fashion it made her face even rounder. Her features were tiny and, although almost eclipsed by the excess weight, they were beautiful, as though designed for fat and not for lean, and her age seemed to have hovered around forty-five for years. In fact, no one even knew her real age. Everything else about her was round as well: round pudgy hands, round belly and legs, short and squat, and now her mouth pursed into a round O. She made me think of the snowmen Ryan and I used to make: three round balls for the body, round raisins for the mouth, and small bright black eyes set against a white face.

      “I’m right though? About the pieces? But where in the name of God is Dumoine? That’s where you found him, isn’t it? I’ve missed all the news reports, except yesterday’s. Fill me in. There was no Canadian news in Bermuda.” It was a demand. Martha was the only person I had ever met who knew everything about everyone before they did, without being resented for it. I didn’t even try to keep the smile out of my voice. Gossip was Martha’s lifeblood, but at least she went to great pains to get it right.

      “Dumoine. It’s up the Ottawa River about two and a half hours from here on the Quebec side. It’s a medium-sized town, and the local police were supremely suspicious of the whole mess. Apparently dead bodies just don’t pop up routinely there, the implication being that they pop up routinely everywhere else. They asked me if I was sure it was a human body, if ‘perchance’ it might not be a dead moose or deer.”

      “As if you couldn’t tell the difference!” huffed Martha indignantly. She was nothing if not loyal.

      “To be fair, they’ve had some woman calling in all kinds of false alarms over the years, dead gophers that look like dead babies, the ribs of a cat mistaken for human remains. How can you mistake a dead gopher for a baby? Anyway, they had no end of stories from her. They thought I was her. It seems our voices sound alike.” I spread out my hands in mock self-defence. “When I finally chiselled a word into the conversation and told them that this body was wearing a man’s size-ten boots, they advised me that they’d be along. We waited hours it seems — since the body was dead and in a remote area there was no huge hurry. Someone else had said the same thing earlier. Rather crass, I thought. In the end, they didn’t need us, to our great relief. The two biologists waiting with us knew by our description exactly where the body was and they made an ID of sorts.”

      “Two biologists? Anyone we know?”

      “I’d heard of them, because some profs from here have collaborated with some of the profs at their university, Pontiac it’s called, but I hadn’t met them before. A lot of their study sites are up near Dumoine. They have a biology station up there.”

      I should have known a short answer

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