The Borrowman Cell

”It was like a movie. It didn’t seem real. We paddled around a bend and there was this heap of black fur all bloody lying on the rocks, and men were beating the bushes behind it with long sticks. They didn’t notice us at first.” She laced her fingers around her mug so tightly the knuckles stood out. “Then the cubs burst into the open and the men flung these black nets over them.” Like giant bats, the nets had swooped down through the air. Marigold swallowed. “I thought it was because they didn’t want to leave them to starve.”

Peter rolled his eyes.

“Well, that’s what I’d hoped anyway. Until one of the men picked up a rifle and started hitting a cub on the nose with the butt. To stun it.” She looked Peter in the eyes. “Have you ever heard bear cubs cry? They sound like babies. Human babies.”

His forehead crinkled. “Marigold…”

“It’s all right. I am not going to start weeping again. I’m just telling you so you’ll understand. Lynn shouted at him to stop and that’s when they looked around and saw us.”

Guffaws of laughter went up. The repair crew was joking with the woman who’d come out from behind the counter with the coffee carafe. Marigold frowned.

“The man yelled something in Chinese. He pointed the rifle at us and we started to raise our hands. But not quickly enough… ”

Her voice trailed away and she stared across the road, where a lone white birch stood candle-straight amid a stand of cedars.

“Eat your sandwich,” said Peter. Obediently, she lifted it from her plate, but now that she’d summoned them, the images wouldn’t stop coming. Lynn in the bow of the canoe, her body jerking forward, her paddle splashing into the water. Herself, instinctively ducking and being knocked sideways by what felt like a bee sting on the temple. Grabbing at the gunwhale just before darkness sucked her under.

“When I came to, I was lying half in the water and half on the rocks.”

“And the men?”

“Gone. Lynn and the canoe, too. And the bears.”

“God, Mar. You were lucky. They must’ve thought you were dead.”

At first she hadn’t known where she was or what had happened. The only sound she’d heard was the murmur of the river current. The side of her face felt sticky and when she touched it she saw blood on her hand. That was when it all started coming back to her.

The door of the diner opened and she held her breath. A sixtyish couple in matching Spandex bicycle outfits came in and her shoulders dropped. Peter was watching her.

“You’ve got them on the brain, haven’t you? The guys in the balaclavas.”

She gave him a helpless look.

“I kept thinking they were coming back to finish me off.” She had crawled out of the water and spent the first day and night under some bushes, hiding. She’d blacked out a lot, a blessing because it made the time pass.

The Hydro repair crew was leaving. One of them, a big man with a curly black beard, winked at Marigold as they tramped past in their steel-toed boots. “Talk is cheap, Red,” he said softly. “Get it in writing.”

The others chuckled and Marigold didn’t know where to look. Peter half rose in his chair but thought better of it. His furious glare followed the men out, daring them to lay a finger on the Corvette as they filed by, but they didn’t. He waited until they’d piled into the truck and rumbled off in an eddy of dust.

“Time we hit the road,” he muttered.

Marigold nodded and got to her feet. She’d only eaten half her sandwich, but she wasn’t hungry anymore. Back in the car she pulled her seat belt tight.

“Will Darlene worry if you’re late?”

“Will she heck! I’ll be lucky if she’s home.” Half the time Darlene was out when he got in. Working late or stopping for a drink with the girls from work. So she said. Peter sat with the key in his hand, frowning. “It never occurred to you to start walking back?”

“Through the bush?” She shook her head. “I was so dizzy I could hardly stand. Besides, I wasn’t sure anymore which direction we’d come from. I thought if I stuck where I was, sooner or later somebody else in a canoe would come along. I had water to drink and the blueberries were starting to ripen.” Apart from the bugs and the cold at night, the worst had been the dark—wondering what was creeping up on her. Or who. When some fishermen stopped to rescue her, she tried to fend them off with her Swiss Army knife. So she was told, by then she couldn’t remember.

“Can we leave now, please?” she said. Not that she had anybody waiting for her at home. Only Big Red, looking for his dish on the windowsill. Peter had called her landlady and let her know she’d be gone a few extra days. “Mrs. Patel didn’t say anything about a stray cat hanging around?”

“No.” He started the engine. “You asked me that already.”

“Sorry.”

The Corvette nosed out onto the road. After they’d left the town behind, Peter switched on the cd player. A band came on playing music with a Latin beat that made Marigold think of sunshine and warm sand. She leaned her head against the crook of her arm. The lakes were coming into view now across open fields, with their Ojibwe names and their bright blue glitter stretching to a tree-lined horizon. Lake Muskoka and Kahshe Lake, and in a while Lake Couchiching edged by a necklace of little summer places with names dreamed up by white men, like Buena Vista Park and Happyland. Marigold’s eyes drifted shut. Sleep was another thing she was starved for. In the bush she’d been too scared to do more than doze, and in the hospital it had mostly been too noisy.

At the first rest stop past Toronto, Peter pulled into the parking area and found a space off to the side where his fenders weren’t likely to get dinged. He needed the washroom and another coffee to clear his head. Driving the 401 was no picnic, even in the Corvette. In fact he had the impression it made him a target for bored drivers. The guys in Audis who wanted to race. The truckers with crossed Canadian and American flags on their oversized rigs who took up half his lane when they went barreling past; them he trusted least of all. His stomach was beginning to play up the way it did when it was empty and no wonder, the dashboard clock read after two. He looked at Marigold.

She had slept through the worst of the traffic as they skirted Toronto and its sprawling environs. Her face, soft and rounded as a child’s, lay half-hidden under that fantastic fiery waterfall of hair. Be a shame to wake her, he decided. He took care to close the car door without slamming it.

The sun had gone behind the clouds when he returned. A chill breeze plucked at his thinning fair hair as he crossed the lot. He carried an extra coffee and a carrot bran muffin he’d bought for when Marigold came awake. The Tim Horton’s counter had featured blueberry but he didn’t think that was a taste she’d want to experience again any time soon. She hadn’t moved. Her bronze eyelashes curled like feathers on her cheeks. He wrapped the muffin in a paper napkin and stowed the plastic cup in the holder between the seats. He didn’t mind the silence while he drove. He had plenty to think about.

Say, just for the sake of argument, the poachers really were Chinese, and his theory and everything he’d read and heard was right and they were indeed after bile; it stood to reason they’d need a way to process the stuff. Even if they set up their own lab, which was likely, they might welcome the cover of a licensed Ontario laboratory to lend their product legitimacy in the North American market. Peter expanded on this line of thinking. He would make the Chinese an offer they couldn’t refuse—his silence about what had occurred in Algonquin and a modest share of the profits—in return for their use of the Cormier name. Kim Wu’s uncle probably sold the stuff under the counter; he’d know how to get word to them.

Marigold would have to be talked around, but that was the least of his worries. It wasn’t only the bank loan falling due that was making him put aside his scruples. Last night when he’d reached for Darlene in bed, she’d told him if he couldn’t book her the cruise she had set her heart on for the fall, she knew a man who could. The guy had already offered, and all she had to do was say yes.