She Felt No Pain Read Online Free PDF Page A

dry stones. Everyone will have to move on.”
    “Problem solved, but I need to check it out. I’ll take the car,” Holly said. They were limited to an older Impala with a Sooke decal on top of the trunk for air identification, and an ancient Suburban for winter driving in the high hills where snow could lurk. Keeping it full of gas was like pouring water into a sand dune.
    * * *
    She drove east from the sheltered enclave of Fossil Bay. Still tenanted by many former loggers and fishermen, its grid of streets had attracted a new crowd. Spying lower prices west of Victoria, retired boomers from Ontario and points east bought its more modest houses and occasional doublewides. The old clapboard grade school from the turn of the century had been refurbished and took students from Otter Point. Shopping was marginal, only a gas station cum convenience store and Nan’s restaurant. Recently a few home businesses had opened, a hair salon, dog kennels, wood salvagers, or personal services like Marilyn’s.
    Holly rolled past the unmarked town limits and headed to Bailey Bridge, only too aware of the hazards of gaping at the world-class scenery as a gravel truck rolled around the blind curve, taking the centre line under the laws of physics. She eased off the gas and felt her heart skip several beats.
    At this time of year, Bailey Creek was one of the last still flowing in salmon country. It would be a different matter in spawning season. “The persistence of Nature,” said romantic philosophers, but nothing seemed more brutal than battered cohos pushing their way up their natal creeks, flopping shadows of their former iridescence. Short of an emperor penguin wintering five months without food on ice floes with a lone egg incubating between his feet, their ritual sacrifices were heroic.
    “Please protect our resource,” the signs at each spawning creek asked. On one side was an entrance to a public beach accessible only at low tide, and on the other, Bailey Creek followed circuitous paths up into the hills. She left the Impala in the sandy lot and headed under the bridge. A generous hollow of concrete held an assortment of shelters on the alluvial plain. The campsite was self-limiting, as Chipper had indicated. But though the rains had ceased, the fruit was oncoming. The salmonberries were emerging, which would draw hungry bears, tired of their spring-grass feed and down for the summer roaming the temperate rainforest. Later would come thimbleberries and finally the hardy Himalayan blackberry with thumb-thick thorny branches.
    A grizzled old man with a handsome carved walking stick bearing a fierce eagle on the handle levered his body from a tippy lawn chair and approached her. He wore cut-off jeans, a t-shirt and flip-flops. A healthy tan testified to days outdoors and a shiny metal peace sign hung around his neck, though his salt-and-pepper hair was cut military short. Aging draft dodger? His arms were lean and muscular, though he wore a knee brace. In one discordant note, his left eye, irritated and red, sported a purple bruise. “Morning, officer. Fine day, isn’t it?”
    She held out a hand and introduced herself, tucking her cap under her arm. “And you are, sir?”
    “Bill Gorse. Formerly of Gorse and Broome.”
    This made her arch an eyebrow at mention of two of the island’s most tenacious plants. “Sounds like an old family company.” She wondered if he were joking, like the Dewey, Cheatham and Howe firm in the Click and Clack Tappet Brothers radio show across the pond in Washington State.
    “Pshaw,” he added, emphasizing the “p” as her father had when he was in his Gay Nineties period. His sigh was palpable and self-effacing. “It’s a law firm. Still is, for those not partial to corporate ethics. My late father, the Major, and two brothers. I squandered my youth with the family compact, but my nose couldn’t take it. When they started chasing the dollar by representing goddamn mining polluters up north,