Seven Days Dead by John Farrow Page B

silent, unnoticed. So the regulars look out for one another. Anyone becoming too tipsy is required to stand on the safe side of the barrier, while only the more sober among them may enjoy a front-row seat to observe the setting sun. The vantage is due west, and from this height the view is all that it’s cracked up to be in the tourist brochures. West lies the continent, and between that huge landmass and this mere dot of one, various species of whale—humpback and minke, finback and right whales, who breed here—break the Bay of Fundy’s glimmering surface. All come for the nutrients carried in on a tide so powerful that the volume of water every twelve and a half hours all but equals the daily flow of every river on the planet. No surprise, then, that even lost and wandering orcas from the Pacific have found their way to this feeding ground.
    “Do you?” the cop inquires of Roadcap. They haven’t shared a word for over a minute, both losing themselves in the vista, so he adds, “Come here often?”
    “I’m not a drinking man. Once in a while I drop by for the stories.”
    Louwagie makes a sound, as though wishing he could do the same. Cops aren’t welcome. “So which way?” the officer asks.
    They follow a trail along the ridge, not one that’s well known, as it’s hazardous to tourists with their kids in tow, but the most dedicated and athletic of hikers can follow it across the Bishop. The policeman can scarcely believe that this man passed through here at night, in a storm, with scant, if any, moonlight, although he learned that Roadcap did carry a flashlight.
    “Still,” the officer points out, “dangerous.”
    “Not if you’re used to it. Not if you know it well.”
    “No. Still dangerous.”
    On second thought, the man agrees. Yet he knows the trail intimately, and has the sense to be careful even in daylight. They tramp across the Bishop until he encounters what he believes to be the camping area for a group of men and women the night before.
    “How did you see them here if they were sleeping in the dark?”
    “I heard them. They didn’t come here to sleep.”
    “I see. How do you know what they came here for?”
    “I don’t. But in the dark, over the storm, they had to shout to communicate.”
    In departing, the unknown strangers left little trace of their trespass. Grass lies matted in patches where tents were pitched, and the remains of a small cooking fire demonstrates that it was never lit for long. A near-impossible task in the torrential rain. Neophyte campers. Today they are probably drying out somewhere. A broken tent peg was left behind, and Roadcap points out where another is stuck in rock, unwilling to be extracted.
    “And you have no idea who they were or why they were here?”
    “How should I know? They weren’t my people.”
    To the Mountie’s mind, that doesn’t sound like an honest answer, but for now he doesn’t push him. Instead, they amble on across the meadows and into the woods of Ashburton Head. Corporal Louwagie, in this pastoral, can forget from one moment to the next the purpose of this trek, and what awaits him. He is hardly paying attention when his guide pipes up, “There.” And the cop stops walking and cranes his neck up.
    There.
    He was supposed to prepare himself. But how does he prepare for this?
    A shock.
    Louwagie is overcome by a maze of reactions, both familiar and strange, immediate and distant. As if he himself has fallen away from here and into a dream. He feels both dizzy and ill, which he can handle, but he’s also suddenly disoriented, and Louwagie is not confident he can deal with that part. Or with any of this. As though a physical switch has been flicked in his brain, admitting the dreaded serum of depression and entanglement, confusion and remorse, that has nagged him for much of his career. His guide kindly waits and makes no comment while he vomits over a cairn of stones probably placed there decades ago by travelers who wanted to