Page 25 of Smoky Lake

“What do you mean it wouldn’t be them?”

Her face flamed. “That’s a story for another day. Shall I open up this pouch?”

Wrestling with his overactive protective urges, he gave her a go-ahead nod, and watched her slim fingers slide open the zipper.

The pouch was stuffed with pieces of notepaper filled with Victor’s writing, along with a few sealed plastic bags that appeared to be plant samples. She turned over one sample, front and back, and showed it to Gil. It was labeled, but the notations made no sense to him. Maybe it was some kind of code.

Ani spilled all the notes onto the table and they poked through them.

“It looks like more of the same kind of thing he put in my pocket,” Ani murmured. “Maybe he was writing an epic dream poem.”

“In the deep of night, they whisper to me. Who’s there? Leave me, spirits. Let me be. Let me root in the ground and wave in the sun. I’ll drown myself in their blood,” he read aloud. “This doesn’t sound like the Victor I know.”

“When was the last time you saw him? Did he sound like that then?” Ani asked.

“I saw him a few weeks before he left, and no, he seemed normal then.” He thought about it some more. “Preoccupied, maybe. Tired. As if he wasn’t getting enough sleep. One other strange thing. Kathy at the general store told me he bought her entire stock of lemons.”

“Lemons? Why lemons?”

“Apparently, Kathy asked if he was doing a cleanse, and he kind of nodded, but didn’t answer.”

“Maybe the mystery drug gave him a craving for citrus.”

He looked down at the scraps of paper again. They didn’t all match. Some were blue-lined notepaper, some had no lines, some were from a yellow pad. The handwriting was all the same, but color of the ink varied. Some of them were written in ballpoint pen, some in fine-tip marker.

“These weren’t all written at the same time or in the same place,” he said slowly. “So maybe they weren’t all his words.”

“How do you mean?”

“Victor’s an ethnobotanist. He studies indigenous knowledge about local plants and their medicinal and spiritual uses, right?”

“I didn’t know that, but go on.” Her dark eyes on him nearly made him lose his train of thought.

“So maybe he was documenting the effects of these plants--” he waved at the samples—“on people’s cognition. These could be the notes from that research.”

Her eyes lit up. “So it wasn’t a drug, it was these plants. Maybe he tried it himself to see what it did to him.”

He was nodding along. “Except he couldn’t tolerate it the way the locals could, and it made him sick.”

“Which was why he was such a mess when I ran into him at the airport.” Ani raised her hand for a high-five. He slapped his palm against hers and they grinned at each other. A chime seemed to sound deep in his being, as a perfect connection clicked into place.

If Victor hadn’t disappeared and someone hadn’t blown up the Smoky Lake Institute, this whole crazy episode would have been worth seeing that light in Ani’s eyes. Had he ever thought she looked sad? Not anymore.

Then her smiled disappeared as a frown pulled together her dark eyebrows. “That doesn’t explain why people are after him, does it? What could be so important about a plant?”

“Tell that to hemp,” he said dryly. “Or the coca plant.”

“Okay, good point. Maybe we don’t have to abandon our hallucinogenic drug theory after all.” She yawned, then looked around the tiny cabin. “All this brainstorming is making me hungry. Any chance Bob’s canned goods are still…good?”

That damn Igloo…he’d been so close. But the flow of water from a creek feeding into the lake had washed it out of reach. He’d used the creek as an exit point, and mentally wished whatever bear found that cooler good luck with opening it.

“Dinner’s on me,” he said as he climbed to his feet, feeling comforting waves of warmth radiating from the stove. “It’s the least I could do after losing that damn cooler. Get ready for MacGyver in action.”

12

Ani snuggled by the cast iron heater as Gil poked around in the trapper’s shelves. Maybe she should have packed more snacks before she impulsively decided to fly to Smoky Lake. She eyed her bag, which she’d dropped by the door. She probably had some chocolate in there, and maybe a pack of gum, but that was it.

“Dinty Moore beef stew.” Gil triumphantly raised a tin can in the air. “So old the label’s peeling off, but the tin is intact and not bulging. We also have canned corn and bamboo shoots. Old Bob had eclectic taste, I guess.”

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