The Cardinal Divide
Prologue
He craned his neck and looked south into the darkness, beyond the existing mine, toward the Cardinal Divide’s jagged back. In his mind’s eye he saw the reef of stone rising abruptly from the rolling foothills that broke against the implacable wall of the Rocky Mountains. Though the Divide was beyond his line of sight, Mike Barnes knew it was there. Could not forget it was there. So much angst over a hill.
He stretched and turned from the window, the woods now completely dark, the mountains beyond pale shapes in the darkening sky. Barnes sat down at his desk and tidied up a few papers he had shown to his last guest. He filed them neatly in the hanging files in his desk drawer and cleared away his pens. Except for a portrait of his family, and his Day-Timer, the surface was pleasingly empty. His secretary, Tracey, urged him to track his appointments in Outlook, so she could have easy access to them from her own computer. But while Barnes was not opposed to technology, in fact embraced it, he preferred the old-fashioned full-sized calendar book that could be spread open each morning for a panoramic view of the day. It appealed to his sense of aesthetics and to his nostalgia. Barnes recalled his father’s Day-Timer, how each January he had given Mike the previous year’s to play with. Barnes had spent hours with those Day-Timers, colouring in his father’s doodling that adorned the margins of the book and carrying it around in a worn satchel that he pretended was a briefcase.
And now, with his computer sitting at Oracle’s only PC repairshop, Mike Barnes was glad for this outdated method.
Barnes took a deep breath, closed the calendar, and stood to clear away the glasses and water pitcher that sat on the low, round table at the centre of his spacious office. He collected two of the dirty glasses along with the pitcher and placed them on Tracey’s desk. She’d take care of them in the morning.
Mike Barnes’ final appointment of that long day hadn’t been interested in the glass of water he’d put out for him, though it might have cooled the flames of their heated discussion. Barnes had managed to keep his composure. His final guest had descended into red-faced shouting and livid finger pointing by the end of their two-hour meeting.
All this over a mine. All this over a chunk of stone called the Cardinal Divide. Barnes shook his head.
As he passed her desk again, Barnes thought about Tracey. She had taken it hard when he’d called it off between them, but that was necessary. In a week his wife and two children would arrive in Oracle to live with him for the summer. If he wasn’t done this job by the fall they would head back to Toronto on their own. If he finished, the family could head back together.
It was fun while it lasted with Tracey, and he didn’t relish sleeping alone, but all good things must come to an end.
He felt the water he’d consumed over the course of the last two-hour marathon meeting sluice in his gut. Time to tap a kidney, then retrieve his things and head for home.
He made his way down the corridor to the washroom at the far end of the hall, passing now empty offices as he went. When he had arrived six months before, most of these offices had been occupied, but slowly he was seeing to that. The operation was top heavy and he had a job to do. And while it wasn’t unusual for mining operations to lay off administrative staff, after a steady six months of cutbacks, some people inside and outside the operation were obviously getting wise to what Mike Barnes’ true purpose was in Oracle.
He opened the door to the bathroom and stepped in, flipping on the light as he did. He glanced at himself in the mirror, pushed a hand through his wavy blonde hair, pinched his nose where his wire-rimmed glasses rested, and then stood at a urinal to relieve himself.
His last two meetings of the night played out in his mind. He was surprised to find that he had actually enjoyed the meeting with Cole Blackwater. It was entertaining to see through Blackwater’s sketchy attempt at covering his environmentalist tracks by pretending to be a reporter. Wonders never cease, he thought. But his last meeting? That left a bad taste in his mouth.
But what did he expect? The cat was out of the bag.
He finished and stepped to the sink to wash his hands. Then he turned the water off and pulled a few paper towels from the dispenser to dry his hands. Mike Barnes heard footsteps in the hall. JP, the night watchman, had just made his rounds. Did he forget something? The footsteps stopped outside the door. Mike suddenly felt a chill rush through his body. He stood still, watching the door, and without knowing why, held his breath. When the door to the washroom opened, Barnes let his breath out through his teeth with a hissing sound. He turned back to the mirror and regarded himself as he spoke. “I told you there is nothing more to say on the subject,” he said as he removed a piece of dry skin from the bridge of his nose, stepping back from the mirror. Alberta is dryer than the desert, he thought.
The blow caught him entirely by surprise. The back of his head exploded with bone-crushing force, sending a thick rope of blood splashing against the bathroom’s tiled walls. Barnes pitched forward, his forehead connecting with the edge of the wash basin, blood spraying in a fine mist beneath the counter and across the walls. He collapsed in a heap on the floor, his eyes blank and staring into nothing, into a darkness as black as the hole in the earth called the Buffalo Anthracite Mine.
To find out who killed Mike Barnes, be on the lookout for The Cardinal Divide, making its much-anticipated debut in October 2008.