Stony Point

On its way west, the Canadian Pacific Railroad train stopped in Frank. Lucille Reilly stepped down from the coach car onto the wooden platform of the tiny station. She looked around in the bright afternoon sunshine. Turtle Mountain loomed above with the broad scar running down the center of its face where the portion of its summit had slid down. A blanket of limestone rubble covered the valley. More mountains rose in the distance along the winding valley of the Crowsnest Pass. Lucille pressed her lips together. How am I going to find Stanley in all this wilderness, she asked herself.

She straightened her shoulders and lifted her head, refusing to be discouraged. A robust woman of medium height with a wide bosom and broad hips, she wore a straw skimmer hat with a white band and a bow on the side of the crown. Her skirt and bodice were in the style of a tennis costume; the cream-coloured bodice had buttons running up the left side and bishop’s sleeves that were baggy but not too large. The skirt had a black belt with a large silver buckle at the waist. Lucille carried a parasol in her right hand. It was too frilly for her outfit, but  her parasol was actually a concealed weapon and she never went anywhere without it. As she waited, she glanced at a little watch that hung from a silver chain around her neck. In less than thirty minutes she would arrive in Stony Point, another town in the Crowsnest Pass west of Frank. Her brother-in-law had disappeared from Stony Point almost two weeks ago. It was Lucille’s mission to find him.

With enough anguish in her own life, she didn’t need to gawk at someone else’s; for this reason she didn’t go look at the wreckage from the landslide. But even though a few weeks had passed, one could still marvel at the extent of the disaster. Eighty million tons of rock had crushed the eastern edge of Frank and spread out over the valley for over a square mile. Presently in the town workmen were pushing barrows or carrying shovels and picks up and down either side of Dominion Avenue. At the station returning evacuees stepped off the train with bundles in their arms, and to the left of Lucille a ragged boy was trying to sell a fist-sized rock to one of the train passengers.  “Some of the big rocks still got blood on them from rolling over folks,” the boy enthused. Lucille shifted restlessly from foot to foot.  Absolutely nothing was fascinating about the number of people the slide had killed or left destitute.”