LITMIR.BIZ

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Shannon struggled to hold back the tears and gulped the water I brought to her.

      “Sorry, I can’t help it. I still can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t believe it happened. Jake was the best woodsman I ever knew. He kept a flare gun by his head every night before turning in just in case he needed it for bears or other wild animals. The cops didn’t mention that he’d fired the flare. It just doesn’t fit. He’d have had time to fire the flare. No one could surprise Jake. He had eyes in the back of his head. He would have fired the flare.”

      “But it was a rogue bear, a crazy bear, Shannon,” I said with a conviction I wasn’t sure was justified. “A rogue bear is unpredictable. It could have been stalking him. Perhaps he just didn’t wake up in time,” I said, trying to remember if there had been a flare gun listed in the police report.

      “Jake would wake up if a grasshopper tried to sneak by him; he was that light a sleeper. Honest to God. An owl couldn’t sneak by that man. There’s no way he could have been surprised by a stupid bear. Even a rogue bear or whatever it is you call it. He would have had some warning, some feeling that there was something bloody wrong. I’ve seen him wake in the tent and listen for fifteen minutes until a bear, silent and stealthy, walked into our camp one night. He knew. Don’t ask me how the hell he did, but he knew and he was ready for it with the flare gun. He didn’t have to hear it first. He could sense it with some sort of sixth sense. He would have put up a fight.”

      “But suppose he’d taken a sleeping pill or something like that? Maybe a shot of scotch even. It could make him groggy. It would be harder to wake up, make him sleepier.” I was remembering the coroner’s report. The guy was certainly under enough stress with the logging to have resorted to something that would let him sleep.

      “A sleeping pill? Jake? A sleeping pill? Christ, you obviously don’t” — she suppressed a sob, swallowing it — “didn’t know Jake. He never took any pills at all, no medication, not even vitamins. He was not just a planet environmentalist, he was a body environmentalist too. And who would ever take a sleeping pill in the bush anyway? No. He’d have woken in time to do something, even if he’d had a drink or two. I’m sure of it. Besides, he had Paulie.”

      “Polly?”

      “His cat. Never went anywhere without little Paulie. Beautiful black velvet cat with liquid gold eyes. Loyal little devil. It belonged to Jake’s nephew but got run over by a car. The parents wanted to put it down but the nephew appealed to his Uncle Jake. The vet had to amputate one leg but the cat adapted remarkably well and Jake began to admire it for its tenacity. In the end he kept it. She stuck to Jake like a burr. She went with him every time they went into the bush. Nothing got by Paulie. Nothing. She’d have wakened him even if he were in a coma.” She looked up and saw the expression on my face.

      “You know something,” she said eagerly. “What?”

      “There was a black three-legged cat around the day we found Diamond.”

      “That was Paulie!” she said excitedly. “Where is she? Have you got her? Is she okay?”

      I shook my head. “It disappeared and we never saw it again.”

      The eagerness in her face faded and she murmured something about posting a reward.

      “Look,” I said, trying to bring the subject back to Diamond, “even a seasoned woodsman can get careless sometimes, and that’s all it would take if a rogue bear was around. He was careless enough to leave a chocolate bar in the tent. He could have misplaced his flare gun too, or lost it along the portage.”

      Shannon’s head jerked up and she stared at me, open-mouthed. “Are you crazy? No way. He found out he was allergic to chocolate, months ago. Migraine headaches. But he didn’t like to tell anybody. He thought he had to be macho and all that. He hated to think he had any weaknesses. But even if he was sneaking it on the sly, he’d never leave food in the tent. He made me empty my pockets of candy wrappers and burn them before we got into the tent, he was that meticulous. Drove me crazy. He knew what bears could do and he never did anything to entice them. He never kept food in the tent, even toothpaste, and he always strung up the food pack well out of reach of animals. And I can’t imagine him ever losing that flare gun. He’s had it more than twenty years and it’s saved his neck a dozen times or more.”

      “Suppose he did lose the flare gun? Would he have resorted to using his tranquilizer gun in an emergency?”

      She nodded. “Yeah, sure, if he had time to load it and all, but it’s not something you can do quickly, and besides, he didn’t have his trank gun with him this last trip.”

      I looked at her in surprise.

      “How do you know?”

      “Because it’s in my car. He forgot it there when I drove him to work the day he went into the bush. I didn’t notice it until last week.”

      I tried to swallow the implications of this new revelation. If Jake hadn’t taken out the tranquilizer gun, then whose dart had hit him?

      “Could he have picked up another one at his office?”

      “It wouldn’t have occurred to him. He’d already packed it, you see, but he needed something from the pack and we were in such a hurry and he asked me if I could find it, and, well, I guess in my haste the tranquilizer gun case got left behind.”

      So where did the dart come from that was found in Jake’s body, I wondered. Someone must have been with him when he died, but who? Shannon got up and dumped a green garbage bag full of stuff by the sofa and then handed me another bag.

      “I know it’s crazy,” she said. “He was killed by a bear, but somehow I still can’t believe that.” She was looking like she was going to crumple again, so I quickly changed the subject.

      “Were there any disks stolen?”

      “You mean like yours? I don’t know. As I said he didn’t keep any disks here except … Yeah, hang on a moment. This might help you.” She got up, picked up her purse, and rummaged in it until she finally surfaced with a disk.

      “He gave me this just before he went into the bush. Asked me to take it to a printer and print out the injunction stuff on it for him and keep it in my purse until he got back. He was afraid the loggers might get hold of it and learn his game plans, I guess. He’d have done anything to stop the logging up there. He loved that place. And how he envied those guys on the west coast — you know, the ones who saved the forest because of a rare owl that lived there? He and his family used to camp up in Dumoine when he was a kid. Anyway, I printed out the injunction stuff for him — it’s still at work. You’re welcome to the disk, though. It’s no good to me anymore.”

      She handed me the disk. I placed it in my inside jacket pocket and then stood up to go. Shannon accompanied me to the door, grabbing onto the doorknob once again.

      I turned on the threshold and said, “Jake Diamond’s wife came to see me last week.”

      Shannon tensed every muscle and clenched her fists around the knob, but she said nothing.

      “She wanted to know about a black diary of hers that she says Diamond mistakenly took. She thought maybe I’d seen it when I first found Diamond as it hadn’t shown up in the police report and wasn’t among his effects. Do you know anything about it and why she’d think he had it?”

      Shannon ground her teeth and went pale and trembly. The doorknob rattled in her hand.

      “You’d think she’d be happy with the insurance policy she had on his life. A million bucks is nothing to sneer at. I know it made Diamond horribly nervous. People kill for less than that. She wants everything of Diamond’s right down to his camera and all the beautiful pictures he took of his lynx and bobcats. His stuff’s not worth much, God knows, but it means a lot to me to have those things, and I know she just wants them to shut me out. Diamond said he would leave all his things to me. He wrote another will in his black diary, and we got two acquaintances to witness it. He wanted me to have those pictures, to have all his things,

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