Chapter 9 #2
What she did know, had been told, was that he was a lost young man who’d found himself, found a passion, found a direction and purpose. And was killed when he’d found something else. And now they were trying to retrace his steps.
They were, it seemed, camping on the same site he’d chosen. Sitting around the very same campfire, on stones he’d rolled into place. Were looking out at the same view. At the same ancient light in the sky. So what had he seen that they could not?
Vivienne looked at the map again, then out across the lake. The moon had risen, its silver light reflected in the dark water. “It’s beautiful. But really? It’s like every other remote lake I’ve visited. There’s nothing unusual about this place. Not that I can see.”
Silence again enveloped them. Except for the far-off bark of a coyote, and the howl, even farther away, of a wolf.
“I wonder if it’s what we can’t see,” Vivienne said at last.
“I can understand why you and the Chief are friends,” said Isabelle, with a laugh. “He can also say some pretty vague things. Turns out they’re just train of thought, but they can sure sound odd.”
“Did I sound odd? I didn’t mean to, and I wasn’t being vague.” She’d turned to look at Isabelle. “I’m serious. Maybe that’s what’s different about this lake, and why we haven’t found it yet. Because what Charles found isn’t on the shores of the lake, it’s in it.”
Isabelle had a sudden vision of a submarine.
Surely not. Then her thoughts, lubricated by wine, slid over to the Chief Inspector telling her that as a unilingual Francophone about to go to university in England, he’d watched reruns of the old TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, to learn some English.
“You’d be surprised,” he’d said in all earnestness, “how little use ‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ ‘There’s a monster from outer space, Admiral,’ and ‘Fire all missiles’ are at Cambridge.”
“Or anywhere, I hope.”
“Il y a un monstre,” she now muttered and got such a strange look from Vivienne that she put down her tumbler, suspecting the wine was doing her no favors.
In vino babbling …
“What do you mean by in the water?” Isabelle asked, drawing herself up and trying to look completely sober.
“The elevated pH.”
“Could that be what he wrote? A chemical sequence?”
Vivienne returned to the photo of Charles’s map on the laptop while Isabelle held her breath. This could be the breakthrough they were looking for.
But Vivienne was shaking her head. “Désolée. It’s not that. I’d have recognized that. Still, he must’ve thought we’d understand.”
“Or at least another biologist would.” Isabelle hated to say it, but it was the truth, and honestly the main reason, the only reason, Gamache had asked Dr. LaPierre to come along.
Vivienne knew it too. And knew she was failing in her assignment.
Come on, come on, Charles. What’re you saying?
The unidentified sequence of numbers and symbols was on the map for a reason. The map was hidden for a reason. In case …
Vivienne looked behind her. The light from their fire did not extend into the forest, so she could not actually see the base of the tree where Isabelle had found the rock.
The young man had probably sat exactly where she was.
Had he reached out and picked up the flat stone, maybe intending to skip it over the water?
She imagined him sitting there, looking down at the river rock. And then something had changed his mind. Instead of tossing it into the lake, he’d placed it at the base of the tree. Carefully. Deliberately.
Vivienne had been to the Arctic many times.
Had seen the stone cairns erected over the graves of explorers who’d ignored the advice of the Inuit.
And died. With the last of their strength, the dying men had scratched names on the stones.
Dates. To let people know they’d been there.
Had once lived. And perhaps as a warning to those who followed.
“Can I see the stone again?”
Isabelle dug it out of her knapsack.
Vivienne rubbed the hard dirty surface through the protective plastic baggie.
“Careful,” said Isabelle, reaching out to take it back. But the deed was done.
Vivienne shook her head. Nothing.
Still, the rock itself was odd. It should not have been that far from the shore. She looked up at Isabelle.
“What?” asked Isabelle. “What’re you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” said Vivienne, getting up with a groan and walking away from the lake, away from the warmth and light of the fire.
Into the darkness. “Of the cairns in the Arctic. What doomed explorers left behind. I’m thinking what Charles wanted us to find wasn’t the rock but—” Now she had her flashlight app on and was kneeling by the base of the tree. “This.”
She leaned away and pointed.
There, cut into the bark at the base of the tree, hidden under some rotting leaves was etched a very small arrow and beside it an even smaller cl.
“Oh, my God,” whispered Isabelle. She raised her stare from the tree into Vivienne’s eyes. Her own wide with wonder. “You found it.”
Vivienne reached out. Some mothering instinct wanted to caress the letters, as though to comfort. But Isabelle stopped her.
“The arrow’s pointing into the woods.” Isabelle’s own phone was out, flashlight on. She was snapping photos as she spoke. “He wants us to go into the woods. That’s where he hid it.”
At last. At last.
“We’ll have to look tomorrow, right? Too dark tonight.” Vivienne was clearly hoping Isabelle would disagree and they could wander, drunk and lost, in the cold, dark forest.
“Yes,” said Isabelle, not without regret. “Tomorrow.”
Both women remained kneeling and staring into the woods. Then they walked slowly back to the campfire.
As they sat down on the warm rocks, Vivienne returned her gaze to the lake. A bat flapped overhead and disappeared into the darkness, and a loon called. It was hard to believe that not much farther north the disaster had occurred.
Wildfires had burned through millions of hectares of forest, sending plumes of ash into the atmosphere before falling to earth, coating American cities, large and small. Smothering them. The images had been apocalyptic. The events unimaginable. The fires unstoppable.
They’d broken out across Canada, all at once. As though nature had pulled a trigger.
And now there were fears the fires had heralded a new age. An annual calamity that would continue, in biblical fashion, until there was nothing left. No trees, no forest. No habitable cities. Just ash. A sort of nuclear bomb made of wood. And stupidity.
Vivienne stopped herself. The wine was making her maudlin. Surely she was overstating it. Besides, in a twist of fate, the worst of the ash had not actually landed on Canada. Such were the atmospheric conditions at the time.
A very bad thing for the United States but, it must be quietly admitted, a good thing for Canada. If you looked beyond the millions of acres of destroyed forest.
Vivienne turned around. If there was another disastrous season, this forest would be the next to go. These magnificent trees, which had been saplings when the Magna Carta was written, would go up in smoke to once again bury American cities.
How many times could that happen before too much damage was done? And what would be the American reaction if this became an annual catastrophe? How long before they tired of it and decided to do something about it? To defend themselves.
It was an unsettling thought. Not just the horrific destruction of millions of acres of vital forest, not just the environmental disaster, but how Americans might react to another onslaught. At least they’d know it was not done on purpose.
But was it? They’d been warned about climate change for decades. It was clear to any rational person that human activity was to blame. The fixes had been obvious and achievable. And yet governments and industry had—
“Huh. I’m an idiot.”
“What?” asked Isabelle.
“I know why the lake has elevated pH.”
“Why?”
“Potassium. I bet when I get the samples back from the lab they’ll show there’s potassium in the water. That will raise the pH, make it more alkaline.”
“I’m assuming you don’t mean that someone dumped a load of bananas into the lake.”
It took Vivienne a moment to figure out why Isabelle would have said something that ludicrous, then she smiled. “Non. Follow me. Potassium is potash, and potash is—”
Isabelle realized she might be more than a little tipsy, which explained the banana comment, but now she was suddenly stone-cold sober. “Ash.”
“And ash comes from—”
“Forest fires.”
Vivienne shrugged off her sleeping bag, picked up the pot that had been used to boil the potatoes, and went to the lake while Isabelle, guessing what she was doing, broke up the smoldering logs with the tip of her boot.
Vivienne splashed water onto the embers, and there was a great hissing. The dying embers enraged.
A few more trips and the fire was out, though a plume of smoke drifted across the lake, then finally settled.
“Damn,” said Vivienne. “I forgot. I have s’mores in my knapsack.”
“Well, the golden retriever probably ate them.”
“Hope not, there’s chocolate.”
This absurd conversation functioned to lighten the mood, to stop the shrieking in their heads. Telling them they had to hurry. Had to follow Charles’s arrow. Had to find whatever he’d hidden. And they had to get the results of the water tests.
Had to, had to, had to. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.
Vivienne reached for the dirty dishes, but Isabelle stopped her.
“You cooked. I’ll clean up.”
She took the dishes and pans to the lake.
The last thing Isabelle did, though she was bone weary, was carry their food and garbage, now in a sturdy bag, into the woods, away from their campsite.
And hoist it into a tree. If bears or wolves were attracted by the scent, they would not come knocking on their tent.
As she returned to the clearing, Isabelle could feel a slight breeze. There was a definite bite to it, and something else. Something she recognized.
She tried to dismiss it. After all, hadn’t the sky been red? And didn’t that mean it would be clear the next day? Not the rain or sleet or snow she could sense approaching.
But nature was changing, she thought as she crawled into her sleeping bag next to Vivienne, who was already asleep.
The world was becoming less predictable, the signs less readable. And why wouldn’t nature, at this point, lie to them? Turn on them?