Roanoke Ridge Read online

  CREATURE X MYSTERIES

  Roanoke Ridge

  Copyright © J.J. Dupuis, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Scott Fraser | Editor: Allison Hirst

  Cover designer: Laura Boyle

  Cover image: istockphoto.com/valio84sl

  Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Roanoke Ridge / J.J. Dupuis.

  Names: Dupuis, J. J., 1983- author.

  Description: Series statement: A Creature X mystery

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2019023167X | Canadiana (ebook) 20190231688 | ISBN 9781459746459 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459746466 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459746473 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8607.U675 R63 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

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  I know I won’t be able to convince the world by argument, because it doesn’t want to be convinced. I just keep going — and I will do — until one of these creatures is collected dead or alive.

  — René Dahinden

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, I SEE A wounded Sasquatch running straight into a crowd of people holding cotton candy. It has a head start, but it’s hurt, cradling its left arm. My friend — well, best friend, I guess — Saad is behind me, trying to capture the whole thing on his cellphone camera. I know, I just know that the video will be one long blur and I may as well be chasing Santa Claus. It’ll never hold up, definitely not in a court of law. Saad breathes heavily, his feet slap on the concrete. I feel better knowing he’s there.

  The air is hot and thick with the smell of burgers and hot dogs cooking on a half-dozen barbecues. The Sasquatch turns a corner and almost knocks over a little boy with a snow cone. There’s a parade happening and the main street of the town is shut down. I keep pace and even gain on the furry ape-man as he runs right across the street, between floats and into a curious crowd. I run in front of an old black convertible with a trio of silver-haired women from the Ladies’ Auxiliary who are throwing packets of candy into the crowd. Behind the wheel is a fat old guy with dark Elvis-style sunglasses. He honks at me, but I keep running.

  There’s no question of primate locomotion here, bipedalism versus brachiation versus quadrapedalism. It’s just running, running for its life. Sasquatch runs behind the drugstore, down a side street that slopes down into a parking lot. It’s opened up its wound — I can see the blood.

  “Stop!” I yell.

  It’s a beautiful day. A wall of evergreen trees rises up behind the Sasquatch, just across the river. This whole town is like paradise, nestled among mountains and river valleys. But it’s not beautiful enough to erase death.

  ONE

  What did startle him, however, was that these footprints were of a naked foot of a distinctly human shape and proportion but, by actual measurement, a whopping 16 inches long!

  — Ivan T. Sanderson, “The Story of America’s Abominable Snowman,”

  True, 1969

  THERE IS NOTHING OUT HERE BUT TREES. No restaurants or gas stations. Just trees on either side of the highway, broken up by the odd rocky outcropping or pond filled with cattails and floating logs. In the distance, far from any roads or trails, I can see pristine old-growth patches of western hemlock and Douglas fir.

  The radio is on. Some kind of folk music plays between static crackles. Saad isn’t listening to it; neither am I. We’re not talking. Maybe we used up all the conversation on the flight from Cleveland. We flew into Sacramento this morning instead of Portland because it’s closer, and we wouldn’t have to wait another day until the next flight into Medford.

  Saad keeps his back perfectly straight and stares straight ahead. As each minute of silence passes, it feels more and more like I should have left him at home. This is not his problem. Sometimes it feels like Saad’s life is all mapped out for him and I just screw with that plan, because I’m selfish or stupid. It’s another detour for him, like the conferences or the speaking appearances, all the extras that come with running a popular website. And he’s been there, like a rock, from the very beginning.

  I distract myself by thinking of all the thousands of people who followed this same trail westward, looking to cash in on the bounty of natural resources cached away in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest — the loggers, the miners. Hordes of people, mainly men, trying their luck in a land with less order, less structure, and less scrutiny than the cities back east. The teeming wilderness conjures up both a sense of freedom and a desire to exploit, to take or name that which belongs to no one else.

  Turning off Interstate 5, we come to a detour. Two inches of rain fell last night, causing both a landslide and a sinkhole to open up in the middle of Old Highway 99. A highway patrolman redirects us down a quiet road. The patrolman’s uniform, its two shades of blue like the cop in Norman Rockwell’s The Runaway, tells me we’ve crossed the state line into Oregon, the khaki-coloured California cops I know from reruns of CHiPs now behind us. Birds of prey, perched on bare trees, watch us as we pass.

  “I can take over the driving, if you want,” I say.

  “I’m fine,” Saad says.

  “Twenty percent of this state is either Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management property, did you know that?”

  Saad shakes his head, keeping his eyes locked on the road ahead. The sun hangs low in the sky, ducking behind the pointed tops of pine trees. A minivan with two canoes on the roof rack drives toward us, passes with a whooshing sound. Saad looks like he desperately wants to talk about something, but won’t. He adjusts his grip on the steering wheel, tightening it and then relaxing it. He swallows and I watch his Adam’s apple move. He’s too logical, too analytical to get hung up like this. I’m trying not to watch, but I almost enjoy it.

  “Laura,” he says, turning his face a little toward me but keeping his eyes on the road. “You didn’t …”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Y
ou and the professor … did you …?”

  “Sleep with Professor Sorel? No!” I say, relieved that he finally spoke.

  “It’s just — we’re travelling halfway across the country for a man who taught you for only two semesters, six years ago.”

  “I know. Weird, right? But there are those professors, those mentors, who you meet at just the right time, just when you need them, and they profoundly change you. They change your life. I wouldn’t be doing what I do now, there wouldn’t be a website, if it weren’t for Professor Sorel.”

  There’s a lie in there, if lies by omission are really a thing. But not the one Saad was suspecting. I don’t feel as if Saad would judge me, or my family; he’s not that type of guy. There are just certain things that I decided years ago, before I even met him, that I would not talk about. I can’t change the past, but I can control the narrative. If I don’t breathe the words into existence they are less real.

  This part of Oregon is littered with rivers and ghost towns, volcanic lakes and mountain ranges. I can see myself retiring out here in forty years, maybe buying a cabin much sooner than that. Saad breathes in the mountain air that pours through his window and I find there’s a part of me that is really, really hoping he enjoys it.

  The little satellite dish icon in the top corner of my phone screen stands by itself, abandoned by reception bars. I feel liberated, free of cell service, free of Wi-Fi, even the car’s radio fades out into nothing but crackles.

  The highway stretches before us and winds through tree-covered mountains. Beyond them are miles of rugged country, backstopped by the Pacific Ocean. This whole area is dotted with logging camps — Oregon has been called “The Timber Queen of the United States” — and every few miles, we come to turnoffs that lead into the trees, logging roads that cut through the forest. Trucks carrying timber roar past us.

  My clever little shortcut was for naught. The detour forces us to move like a boomerang, adds another forty-five minutes to our journey. We drive north, then curve back down toward Roanoke Valley, as though we came in from Portland. We don’t see anybody else on the road until we get close to town.

  “I forgot how much I missed this. Greenery as far as the eye can see,” I say. “I miss it so much, I find myself spending hours staring out my bedroom window toward the tiny patch of wetland on the other side of the train tracks, watching for any bird larger than a gull to fly by.”

  “Not likely.”

  We pull off the highway into a gravel parking lot nestled among the evergreen trees. A man-sized bear carved out of wood stands guard over the Tall Pines Motel, a long, single-storey building that mixes Tudor-style design with Pacific Northwest kitsch. A rack of moose antlers is bolted over the door to the office. There’s a sign in the window that reads NO VACANCY in neon green lights, the NO unlit and barely visible from the mouth of the driveway.

  Attached to the back of the office is a bungalow where I assume the proprietor lives. It has an extra half storey on top with a satellite dish growing out the side of it like fungus. What a quaint way to live. If not for my feeling that car culture is going extinct, I can almost see myself running a little motel like this by a highway somewhere. I’m just happy that the management here doesn’t live in a big, creepy old Victorian house on a hill behind the place. I wonder if there’ve been any studies on the amount of business that Alfred Hitchcock cost the motel industry in the U.S. after the release of Psycho.

  The busy tourist season is still about a month away, but the annual Roanoke Valley Bigfoot Festival is kicking off now, and there are only three spots left at the far end of the parking lot, in the shade of the tall pines that must have given the motel its name. The rest of the lot is filled with pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs. Our rental is the only compact car. It’s also the only foreign car, except for a silver Subaru Outback that shines in the sun.

  Saad moves toward the office with a hurried determination, as though someone may pop out of one of these parked cars and beat him to the last available suites. I text Barbara, Professor Sorel’s wife, to tell her we’ve arrived. Aunt Barb is staying at the Golden Eagle Motel, which the NatureWorld network has rented for the cast and crew of The Million Dollar Bigfoot Hunt, the show Professor Sorel was involved with when he disappeared.

  There’s a freshness in the air that I wish I could bottle up and take with me everywhere. Maybe it’s psychological, the effect of seeing the tall pines and the mountains behind the motel, tree-crested ridges in every direction. Maybe it’s the lack of visible industry — no smoke stacks, no factories, no smog. It could be nostalgia, the sweet memories of my childhood spent in these mountains.

  I hurry across the parking lot, feeling the gravel and stones through the thin soles of my sneakers. Saad is at the office door, pulling it wide and waiting for me to enter. In the bottom corner of the door I see two words that bring both joy and anxiety: Free Wi-Fi. No escape from work after all.

  The office is dark inside. A lingering smell of oak makes the place feel like home, like the cottages and cabins of my childhood. The pelt of a black bear stretches across the wall behind the front desk, its sheen lost under a faint layer of grey dust. The entire room is wood panelled; if you squint hard enough you can see sheets of plastic in the gaps between the boards. In front of the desk is a rack of pamphlets featuring various local attractions from all the way up and down the Pacific coast. On the wall, next to an alcove filled with various knick-knacks, sits a signboard with a marmot wearing a forest ranger hat. A word bubble leading out of the rodent’s mouth says Check out our gift shop! There are piles of T-shirts, a few books, photographs, and postcards, as well as various mason jars filled with preserves.

  “GPS not working?” the bald, plaid-shirt-wearing manager says as Saad approaches him.

  “We’re exactly where we’re supposed to be,” I say.

  “We’d like two suites, please,” Saad says.

  A smile appears on the manager’s face. His shoulders relax. He now has a stake in the game.

  “Alls we got is a double suite, and that’s only because we just got a cancellation. That’s one room, two double beds.”

  Saad turns to me, his mouth hanging open a bit. I nod at him. At this point, we’ll take what we can get. He hesitates, still quiet, then moves closer to the counter.

  The manager slides the register over toward him, across the glass counter that has a map underneath.

  “I thought you folks were lost,” he says. “We get a lot of young people passing through here, driving between San Francisco and Seattle or Vancouver.”

  “An honest mistake,” I say.

  “You don’t look like squatchers,” he says.

  “We’re not.”

  “Name’s Clive,” he says. “Anything you need, you just let me know.”

  We take some time to fill out the paper register, then Clive takes our credit card information. He unhooks the last, lonely keychain from the wall. The key is attached to a slat of wood with the room number burned into it, like something a freshman makes in shop class.

  Saad leads me back out, pushing the door open and letting the sunlight in. On the way out, I notice the bulletin board to the left of the door, plastered with flyers and business cards. The top sheet, prominent in the centre of the board and printed on bright green paper, is a notice for a lecture on the distribution of Sasquatch in the northwest. It’s tonight, eight thirty, at the Roanoke Valley Rotary Club. The speaker is a grad student from Washington State University. Her name seems strangely familiar.

  Saad takes all the bags out of the trunk: his suitcase and laptop bag, my duffel bag with my laptop inside. I unlock the motel room door and push it wide open, ushering Saad in. He walks inside and pauses midway, his arm going slack on the handle of his suitcase as he looks around the room, breathes in the smell left behind by the ozone generator used to cleanse the air combined with the pine scent used to mask it. His eyes linger over the TV with the bulging, cathode tube–filled rear.

  I r
ewind through memories of a hundred highway-side motels just like this one, family road trips with the windows down and oldies playing. How many rainy afternoons did I spend on the edge of beds like these ones, watching movies starring animals, like Beethoven or Free Willy, Mom crocheting, glancing out the window, waiting for the rain to stop?

  The ringing of my cellphone, deep in my purse, brings me back to the present. Barbara Sorel is already here, in the parking lot. I’m surprised and thankful that I get reception out here.

  I peel the door back and Aunt Barb seems frozen on the sill. Saad nods and waves from across the room, and I make a quick introduction. Her plump, lined face is haggard. She breathes heavily and tugs at the bottom of her yellow raincoat. We hug, then I offer her a seat and a glass of water. She holds the plastic cup like a praying Buddhist holds incense, her pale skin drawn tight over her long, bony fingers.

  “I’m so happy you came, dear,” she says.

  “How could I not?” I say. “I want to help in any way I can.”

  She rocks back and forth in her chair, looking into her cup like there’s a cue card floating inside with her next line. “I told Berton he was too old to go off in the woods by himself, and know what he told me? He said, ‘Barb, you’re rushing me into an early grave.’ Now look where we are.”

  Her voice is a little stronger than when she called last night, sobbing. There are still cracks in it, signs of exhaustion, but she is focused now. The worry is gone for the moment. It will come back, though, when everything is quiet and she stops moving.

  “Professor Sorel is tough. He’s a skilled outdoorsman. Most importantly, he’s a survivor.”

  Professor Sorel is not the feeble bookworm you might expect from an academic. Sure, he’s old, but he’s wiry and tough. I took a summer class with him once. He’d show up in a T-shirt, swollen veins rappelling down his defined biceps, and I could see the amazement on the faces of the boys in the class, boys who spent time in the weight room on campus trying to pump up, boys who didn’t know the difference between size and strength. He grew up out here among the mountains, where hunting, fishing, and trapping used to be a way of life, not a weekend activity, and he and Aunt Barb still live in a cabin an hour north of here, a straight shot up the highway. He’s the kind of man who chops wood to heat his home in the winter.