Until the Night

5

DELORME’S ALARM WOKE HER AT four a.m. She patted the bedside table to shut it off, cursed, and sat up on the edge of the bed. It was cold in the room and she was wearing nothing but the long T-shirt she slept in. The alarm was on the chair where she had put out her clothes the night before, placed there to ensure she got out of bed.

She hit the button to silence the alarm and closed the window and went still for a minute. Fragments of a dream. A highly graphic scene involving Leonard Priest. “Oh, please,” she said aloud. “Gah.”

Lifting her T-shirt over her head, she caught the fragrance of Ivory soap and resolved to switch brands. She put on the clothes she’d laid out and went to the kitchen, where her coffee was waiting. She poured it into her thermal cup and put the lid on. She ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts standing up and put the bowl in the sink.

She strapped on her Beretta and sat down to pull on her big boots. Then the blazer and finally the big parka. She closed the inner door of her vestibule—her airlock, she called it—and stepped outside into the dark. Black sky, crescent moon, and air so frigid her lungs refused the first breath entirely, making her cough. She locked the door and went down the steps, then went back up and opened the door. She picked up the tool kit she had put there the night before and shut the door again.

Her Volvo was facing the street, the trailer and snowmobile already attached.

Black streets. Empty. Soft roar of the Volvo’s heater.

Ten kilometres north of the city, almost as if she had crossed a border, the world turned white. Snowbanks, shoulder high, lined the highway, and boughs hung down under their burden of snow. Delorme made a left at a sign that announced a series of recreational trails. The parking area was empty. She got out and unloaded the snowmobile. When she climbed on and started it, the noise was shattering. Thirty-five years she’d managed to live in Algonquin Bay without owning a snowmobile, but the previous year she had caved in and bought one. The winters were long in this place, and if you let them imprison you, it could make you crazy. She had joined a club, paid a fee, and got a trail map and a schedule of events. She had attended exactly one. The racket was unbelievable and the entire membership appeared to be twelve-year-old boys.

The trail wound away from the road and past a tiny frozen lake. That was it for open country. Trees and brush whipping by. The ruby numerals of the speedometer showed forty, but being inches from the ground gave a tremendous sensation of speed. Snowmobiling at four-thirty in the morning—it’s crazy in fifty different ways, Delorme thought. Is this how you get a promotion? Or is this how you get a reputation for being a little “funny,” with colleagues rolling their eyes when your name is mentioned?

The Ski-Doo’s headlight threw long shadows shuddering into the woods. The engine’s roar ensured the absence of wildlife. She came to a fork in the trail and kept to the right. The map showed a dotted line, meaning an unofficial trail, coming up. Half a kilometre farther, a small gap opened in the trees. Unofficial indeed. But the snow was packed down and chomped by snowmobile tracks, so she steered up and over the verge and into the woods.

The engine blared louder. The front blades slammed over rougher terrain. Then a steep rise and she crested the old railbed. She had to do a two-pointer to orient the machine, and then followed the railway line. It wasn’t far now. Ancient utility poles tilted at angles’ others, felled by beavers, sagged almost parallel to the ground, supported by smaller fir trees.

The railbed ran for fifty or sixty kilometres, but Delorme kept an eye on the passing trees for another gap. When it came up on the right, she turned and the machine clattered onto even harsher ground. At one time this would have been a construction road, but that was short-lived and nobody had kept it up since.

A few more bone-rattling minutes and then there it was.

When the tracks were torn up, the developer’s plan had been to build first a road and then a “winter recreation lodge” right here in the middle of the woods. But he underestimated the kind of delays that can ensue when you’re dealing with three levels of government, two or three public utilities, at least one defunct corporation, and a population of aging boomers who just wanted the woods left alone—but with nice cleared paths for skiers and snowmobilers. In a fit of defiance, he had begun construction and worked at great speed, perhaps counting on a fait accompli to sway fortune in his favour.

Delorme was looking at the result now. Whatever rustic glory the developer may have had in mind, what he’d actually left was a concrete-block rectangle. Half of this was covered with split pine cladding and a sharply peaked roof. The rest was bare concrete.

He had intended to call it Deep Forest Lodge, but it was known to cross-country skiers as the Ice Hotel. It was set on the crest of a long slope that faced south, so it caught the sun all day, even in winter. Any snow that fell on it melted and dripped down the walls, where it froze into a sheath of translucent, impenetrable ice.

The place couldn’t be torn down until armies of lawyers had finished wrangling—much to the chagrin of the provincial police. Although they tried to secure it, it was impossible to keep teenagers away. The place was dark, unfinished and unsafe. Every year the OPP had to rescue some kid who had climbed inside, only to end up with a broken leg.

DANGER: KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

The usual signs were prominently posted, and just as prominently defaced. Delorme regarded the ruin with a shudder. Some women like to be scared. It wasn’t the place that frightened her so much as the idea that anyone would fantasize about bringing a woman out here and doing God knows what.

She left the snowmobile running to have the benefit of its headlight. She took up the tool kit and flashlight and walked toward the fence, her shadow totemic against ice and concrete. The gate was padlocked, but ten metres to the right someone had clipped the chain-link fence—none too recently by the look of it, and high enough that you could slip through without great difficulty.

She forced the fence back even more and managed not to rip her parka climbing through. She walked up to the wall and shone her flashlight upward to where the concrete wall became a glacier wall. Entrances had been bricked up, but there were gaps. She climbed through one, turning her ankle on the jagged detritus underneath the ice so hard that she gasped.

The snowmobile’s headlight was no help here. She looked up. A thin cirrus dimmed the stars, but the crescent moon hung low and bright just above one wall. No glimmer of daylight yet. She played the flashlight beam over what looked like a small prison yard. A perfect square of white ground, with a frozen white wave of snow about two feet high curling up against one wall, giving the whole a tilted effect. No tracks of any kind. Solid concrete block on three sides, then on Delorme’s right the partially collapsed building.

The cold was getting to her and she wanted to keep moving. She pushed on one boarded-up window, but there was no give in it. She tried the other window. Someone had put the original three-quarter ply back in place and wedged a two-by-four over it, but there was nothing securing it. Delorme pulled away the two-by-four and dislodged the plywood without even opening her tool kit.

Utter blackness inside. Shadows veered and lurched in the flashlight beam. Exposed struts and temporary plywood flooring, curled and separating at the edges. Delorme got up on the ledge and examined the flooring below. She turned around and lowered herself to test it with one foot. She lowered her other foot, holding on to the window ledge.

She wished Cardinal was with her. The cold seemed worse in this darkness. She moved slowly, sweeping the flashlight beam from side to side. Graffiti jeered from the walls. Old cigarette packs, beer bottles and candy wrappers littered the floor. Whoever liked this place, it wasn’t health food addicts.

A square of emptiness opened up in the floor ahead of her, a concrete stairwell that looked like an invitation to hell. She was tempted to call out, make her presence known, but the thought of how it would reverberate dissuaded her.

She went halfway down the steps and shone the flashlight around. Forest of I-beams. Could anyone—even Leonard Priest—conceivably come out here for sex?

Not far from the stairs, a sleeping bag, much stained and torn, lay in a twisted heap. Nearby, the charred remains of a small fire and a pile of feces, thankfully frozen. In a corner, a dead fox lay on its side, small white teeth exposed.

Graffiti everywhere. Many sexual invitations, many phone numbers. An individual of loftier ambition had written in letters three feet high, Become Your Dream. And Jenny P, whoever she might be, was apparently blessed with a “hot vag,” which to Delorme sounded like something you’d find in the produce section. Clearly, in the minds of many, sex and isolated ruins were a natural combination. A longing overcame her to be inside her car with the heater going full blast.

Ambition like a pheromone. Is it just ambition—or are envy and resentment making me stupid? She stood outside again and swept the flashlight beam over the walls, the snowdrift, the rest of the emptiness. She was glad she had not called Cardinal to come with her on this jaunt. He wouldn’t have anyway, she told herself, because he would have realized it was dumb.

At the break in the wall, she reached through and set her tool kit down on the far side. She turned and made one last sweep of the courtyard and the long curl of the snowdrift, which ran the length of the wall about knee high. Toward the far corner it rose higher, and now, as she held the beam steady, she saw that there was something in it. Some material partially exposed. Impossible to tell the colour.

She crossed the white square on a diagonal toward the corner. Probably another sleeping bag. She leaned closer, and now, in the more intense light, she could see that the fabric was blue, and more like a jacket than a sleeping bag. She reached with her big snowmobile mitten and brushed at the snow. It was crusty from melting and refreezing and she had to break a piece off.

A shoulder, a scarf, hair.

Delorme took off her mitten and worked her fingers under the crust of snow and broke more off. The powder underneath slid away. She went down on one knee to get a closer look.

A woman’s face, eyes closed, white crescents of snow clinging to the lashes.

Delorme reached into her parka and pulled out her cellphone. It took a while for Cardinal to answer.

“You’re not gonna believe this, John. I’m looking at a dead body. A woman … No. That’s the incredible thing. It’s not Laura Lacroix.”