Mistletoe Mysteries Read online

  His next story had concerned the pregnant Eskimo woman who had been left to die by her band, but who had appeared out of the blizzard two months later with a healthy baby dressed in the skins of animals she had trapped, and whose flesh she had survived on, as well as devising needles and thread from the bones and sinews to sew the skins for clothing. This one goes back to Samuel Hearne’s diaries, where Wordsworth probably heard of it to write his version. Bane claimed to have met the Mountie who took her in when she appeared at his post.

  I knew what was going on from the beginning. The table he sat at was clearly where he regularly held court. The few drinkers at other tables glanced our way occasionally, grinning—obviously at old Duncan conning the tourist. Nevertheless, he had been a trapper, and he had lived in the north for fifty years, and I figured that once Bane had run through his party pieces I might still get something. He seemed to be winding down now, and I signaled the waiter for more beer.

  “How did you find out what really happened between those two partners?” I asked, quasi-skeptically. It was an obvious question and if I didn’t challenge him a little bit he might get bored.

  “He told me,” Bane said. “On his death bed,” and looked expansively around the room.

  I decided that acting as if I believed him was wrong. There was something about the way he made his last ridiculous statement that implied the further comment, “And if you believe that you’ll believe anything.”

  “Now you’re bullshitting me,” I said, laughing, choosing a level of gullibility that could be a challenge to him.

  His mouth opened, his eyes widened, and he looked around the room again, in mock protest. Then he laughed. “You’re a smart one,” he said. “That’s a story that was told to me. I can’t testify to it.”

  “And the others?”

  “Oh, no,” he protested. “Them are true enough.”

  Now what? I needed something personal, something he might not have polished into a story. “What did you do for entertainment?” I asked. “Did you work alone?”

  “I did, yes. About once a month I’d find me way to the mission and have a drink or two with the priest, or up to the post and the same thing with the factor there. Once a year I went into town.”

  “Winnipeg?”

  “That’s right. I’d have a whoop and a holler and get me oil changed and a couple of teeth pulled. That was enough for me. People talk about being bushed if they stay up here too long at a time. I been bushed for fifty years. I’m bushed now, I suppose, but I couldn’t live in town now, not me.”

  The tape stopped and I changed it over. Now I was getting somewhere. “What about Christmas?” I prodded.

  “How d’ye mean?”

  “Didn’t you get lonely at Christmas even?”

  “Only once. In the city. I’d broke me hand setting one of me traps and I couldn’t get it straight, so I went into town to the hospital. They wrapped it in plaster, but so I could use it. One of the furriers I dealt with made me a good mitt which would go over it. I was all set to come back when I noticed it was the twenty-third, two days before Christmas, so I stayed where I was, to celebrate. Well, let me tell you, I’ve never been so down in me life. Christmas in the Winnipeg Hotel. The city was deserted—Winnipeg downtown always looks deserted these days, have ye noticed?—and an empty city is a lot lonelier than a cabin, where you can hear your dogs outside and the crack of the lights in the sky at night. I never did that again. If I didn’t go to the mission or the post I’d save meself a mickey of rye for the day. I wouldn’t do any work, just sit in me cabin until the whiskey was gone, then go to bed.”

  “Did you drink much, by yourself, at other times?”

  “Never.” Now he was serious. “Never. I’ve seen it kill a few, not the drink but what it can bring. Fella gets to drinking and falls asleep outside. He don’t last long. I’ve seen a few of them, whites and Indians. Matter of fact, there was one up at the fort here, one Christmas Eve. Call that waiter and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Not quite what I wanted, but it sounded better than his tales for tourists. He was more relaxed now—I calculated that he must be on his eighth beer—and he had stopped orating. The waiter loaded us up, and Bane started in.

  “Back in the early fifties, it was. There was a big military base there then, Army, Navy, Air Force, even a couple of sailors. There was Americans as well as Canadians. I think they were supposed to stop the Russians when they came over the top of the world. They was training in arctic warfare, learning how to survive and fight at forty below. I don’t think they ever got to the fighting bit; they was learning that it took them twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four just to take care of surviving which only left them one hour for fighting. Somebody asked them once if they would have to get an agreement with the Russians about which hour they would use for the fighting. Anyway, there were hundreds of them and I worked with them for a while. They hired me to show them the country and I used to go out with them in their Caterpillars when they were mapping the area. I got to know some of them pretty good, one especially, a big sergeant from somewhere down in the south. He wanted a polar bear skin real bad to take back and I got him one. You wasn’t supposed to shoot polar bears but one of them attacked me one day and I had to kill it in self-defense.” He stuck his tongue in his cheek and gave me a grotesque, owlish look to make sure I understood. “So Sergeant Vivaldi was very grateful and he insisted I come up to the sergeants’ mess on Christmas Eve, to the dance, and stay over a couple of days.” He shook some salt into his beer and took a swallow. “I didn’t want to go but he insisted and so did some of the others so I went and it was quite a night I can tell you. They made a bit of a pet of me, found me a coat and tie, you had to wear a coat and tie in the mess, and they give me a nice room. I used my team to come as far as the mission where I staked my dogs out, and they came in a Caterpillar and fetched me the rest of the way.

  “The American sergeants was the hosts for Christmas Eve. They used to compete in showing each other a good time on the holidays, which they celebrated all of, Canadian and American both. So the Canadians was the hosts on our Labor Day and the Americans on theirs and on Sadie Hawkins’ Day. They’d divided up Christmas so the Americans got Christmas Eve and the Canadians looked after New Year’s Eve.

  “As I say, it was quite a night. The mess was all decorated like a night club. ‘White Nights’ Lounge’ they called it, with fancy lights and balloons and such, and a bottle of champagne on every table, free. I don’t like the stuff meself, but there it was, one for every table. And they had a band. The Yanks had flown up a band from Washington just for the night and they were really letting her rip. I hadn’t danced, me, for twenty years and I wasn’t planning to try even if I could’ve done their dances, but Sergeant Vivaldi kept getting the girls to ask me—I could see what he was up to and I didn’t mind, but I couldn’t do those dances. The girls? There were some, a few wives and secretaries and such. There was enough if they shared themselves around. There was a Mrs. Caruso at out table, her husband was a sergeant away in Washington and she was sharing herself around a bit with an accountant for one of the construction companies, but I’ll come to that. So I told Vivaldi to stop it. I’d only ever danced the polka, none of this jitterbugging stuff, and I told him, but the next thing you know he’s over talking to the band and I’m up there dancing a polka with a girl named Lucy from St. Boniface. French girl. Round we went, all by ourselves with the crowd clapping and a big cheer at the end. I reckon it was the champagne. I don’t like it, but nothing else would have got me up. Afterward I recited a poem through the microphone which I’d made up when I was alone in me cabin, and that got a big hand.”

  This was what I wanted. “Can you remember it? Could you recite it now?”

  “Sure I can. I’ll do it for ye later. Let me get on with me story. The band got louder and louder and at one point the trombone player took off his shoes and played the instrument with his bare foot. That was the kind of evening it
was. Then, about midnight, they served lunch.”

  “Supper?”

  “We always call it lunch in this part of the world. Where are you from? Anyway, they served the food. Now here is where it started. Some of the civilians had asked the Americans if they could lend a hand. There was about twenty civilians who was part of the mess, honorary sergeants sort of, construction foremen, the accountant, people like that, and they wanted a chance to show their gratitude, as I was told, but there wasn’t enough of them to put on their own evening so they asked to join in with the Americans. They was responsible for the lunch. So now, about midnight the lights dimmed and there was a roll of drums and then a strange thing happened. The door to the kitchen opened and out came the camp barber, running, pushing one of them steel trolleys they use in hotel kitchens, loaded with plates of spaghetti. After him came another fella with a trolley, and after him came a fella called Figge, all of them running. Figge crashed into the other two, upsetting them, fighting the barber, rolling over and over in the spaghetti which was all over the floor. Well, the band was pretty tanked up by now and they started to play galloping music and we got up on the tables to watch and cheer. Of course, Sergeant Vivaldi wasn’t about to let his evening be spoilt—it wasn’t being spoilt, we was having a fine time—but him and three or four others separated Figge and the barber, and some others cleaned up the floor, and then we lined up in the kitchen for our spaghetti just as they always did on Saturday night. We heard afterward that the fight had started in the kitchen. That fella Figge was a nasty piece of work, he’d been by the table earlier during the dancing and he’d had a few. He asked our girls but they wouldn’t dance with him and the last time he came by he shouted to Vivaldi that he couldn’t keep it all to himself.”

  “All what?”

  “He used a word suggesting the female gender as only a fella like Figge would use in mixed company. Even I knew that. Anyway, it had been Figge’s idea that the civilians should dress up as waiters and they was supposed to all enter together and form a ring on the floor, in the dark, and when the lights went up there they would be, with their trollies of spaghetti. Sean the barber thought it was a bad idea. He thought they would all bump into each other and they was still arguing when they heard the roll of drums, and Sean the barber took off before the lights was dimmed or any of the others was ready. We saw what happened next. Figge smashed into the barber on purpose. That wasn’t the end of it, either. A little while later they had to separate Johnson—the plumbing foreman—and the barber, and then Figge and Johnson were at each other. It was like a brushfire. But that’s what it can get like up here. These fellas weren’t used to the life and they took it out in drinking and fighting more than you’d see in town. Fact is, a lot of them were up north because they’d run out of places to go. A lot of alcoholics came up here when the work started on the Distant Early Warning line; alcoholics, fellas skipping out on their wives, running away from debts. For some of them, the north was the last place they could get a job. And like I told you, they got into feuds with each other. There’s lots of time during the winter for that kind of thing to fester, because they couldn’t get away from each other. Figge and Johnson, for example. There was bad blood there because Figge had won Johnson’s parka in a poker game one night. That was a beautiful coat that Johnson had brought with him from his last job on the Gaspé peninsula. Made of summer caribou hide—the winter hides are no good for clothings—and it was Johnson’s pride, but he was losing heavy and finally he bet his coat against the pot and lost. Figge should have took that coat and put it away, but he liked to dress up in it sometimes just to make Johnson feel bad. Fact is, just about all of the civilians had had a falling out with each other at one time or another over the winter, but I mention the coat because it was the cause of what happened later. Let’s have another beer.”

  When the waiter came, he took two glasses and swallowed one in a gulp. He continued. “The dance went on until one o’clock or thereabouts and then it happened. Everyone went to bed; I had a room in the mess, but most of the construction fellas was staying in their own camp, a couple of hundred yards away, far enough on a night like that. Did I tell you? Outside it was like walking around the inside of a milk bottle. They went off home in twos and threes and when I went to bed there were only two parkas and a pair of mukluks left in the cloakroom. Mukluks. Boots. Take note of that. It’s a clue.”

  “A what?”

  “A clue. I won’t say any more. The next morning was Christmas and I wasn’t feeling up to much, nobody was, I reckon, but I went down to the mess for a cup of coffee and when I walked in I thought the war had started. The place was full of people all talking at once. Eventually somebody broke off to tell me what had happened. Johnson, the construction foreman, had been found in the snow the night before, beaten up, unconscious, and now he was in the camp hospital. The word was he wasn’t expected to live. His sub-foreman—his close pal, Claud Dupuis—had gone looking for him because he’d said goodnight to Johnson and had a last drink himself but when he got home Johnson wasn’t there. They shared a room, you see. Dupuis went back to the mess to look for him but it was all quiet by now so he raised the alarm and they—the construction fellas—went to look for him in case he’d fallen asleep in the snow. They found him soon enough, he hadn’t gone far, but he was a bit of a mess. As I say, unconscious, nearly frozen, and lots of blood about.

  “They was all talking and jumping to conclusions in the mess but there wasn’t anyone could say he knew anything. Dupuis had seen him set off, at least. Johnson had told Dupuis he was going home and Dupuis had one last drink and followed him.

  “Now there was a captain in the Canadian army in charge of security and he took over. It was a military camp but they had never sorted out whether a civilian crime should be investigated by the military or the Mounties, but since no one could get to town in the storm, Captain Blood—I forget his real name—he took charge. And take charge he did. When he interviewed me late in the day he’d set up what he called an investigations room in the office behind the bar, and he had drawn a map of the area where it had happened with a cross where they found Johnson. All this in colored crayon on a big sheet of paper pinned to the wall. On another sheet he had a sort of time chart of the before and after, all broken up into quarter hours, and on another sheet he had the names of all the people in the mess that night, mostly in black with the fellas who had to walk to the construction camp in red. They was the chief suspects. It looked like a hell of an operation and that was when I realized that poor old Johnson was going to die. Captain Blood was having a fine time himself, you could see that. It was like the war room of the Pentagon.

  “Lots of the names was already crossed off, and after he’d done me, he crossed me off, too. Most of the people he had questioned could account for each other so he’d crossed them off. They’d gone home in twos and threes, and they could testify for each other. I couldn’t, of course, I’d just gone to bed, so he asked me for me keys and give them to a sergeant to search my room while he kept me there. Looking for clothes with blood on them he was, though he didn’t say. When the sergeant came back, the captain crossed my name off his list as if he’d accomplished something and I left. There was a few names not crossed off yet. Sean Brady, the barber, was one, so was Figge, and two or three others.

  “Christmas dinner that day wasn’t very jolly, I can tell you. Everyone had an idea who had pounded Johnson, most of them different, and we got a lot of talk about what would happen to him when they caught him, if ever. Claud Dupuis didn’t say much, but you could see he’d want a hand in anything that was done to the man who had assaulted his friend.

  “Johnson died the next day. The sergeant hospital orderly was telling us at supper that he croaked a couple of words, then gave up. As the orderly heard it, all he said was ‘Kaput,’ and we all knew what that meant. I did, anyway, and I saw Claud Dupuis look up sharp.”

  “It means ‘finished,’” I said.

  Bane looked at
me in triumph and took a long swallow. “Ah. That’s what they all thought. Let’s just say it’s another clue. I’ll explain in a minute.

  “The storm was letting up a bit and the next morning I got permission from Captain Blood to go to town to see after my dogs. One of the Americans took me in on a Caterpillar, and while I was there I had a chat with the French priest at the mission to confirm an idea I’d had, and when I came back I told the captain what I’d found out. He got very excited about it and organized search parties to go over every inch of the area. They found what he was looking for under a building pushed out of sight, and the captain took Figge in and he and the Mountie corporal questioned him for the rest of the day.”

  “Why Figge?” I asked, as I was supposed to. “What did they find?”

  “What did they find?” he asked with an air that made me want to pour my beer over him. “What d’ye think they found?”

  “I don’t know. What?”

  “Figge’s parka. Or rather, Johnson’s parka. The caribou one that Figge had won off Johnson. Covered in blood.”

  “So Figge did it?”

  “Looks like it, don’t it?”

  “How did you know? What did you hear from the priest?”

  “I’ll tell you that at the end if you haven’t figured it out. Now the next surprise everyone got, after they got over their relief that it was Figge, was that the accountant at our table, Spenser, was involved somehow. He spent three hours with the captain and the Mountie, and after he came out he started to pack his clothes, ready to leave, and Figge was released. They didn’t let him loose, of course. Claud Dupuis would have killed him, just on the chance that they were right in the first place, so they took him into town and locked him up in a little Mountie jail for his own protection. Did you figure out why yet?”

  “No.”