“But it is so remote,” Joanne tried.
“Now, yes,” Nina argued her point. “But in this vastness of time where no records were, or could be, kept? Nobody can say for certain nothing ever happened there.”
Joanne set Nina's cup down and sat down, propping her face up on her hands. “It would be pretty cool though, hey? A place so barren of energy and so meaningless to happenstance that not a single incident wished to take place there.”
The morbid thought was strangely poetic. “Sounds like my mother's house,” Nina muttered in thought just before she took a sip of coffee, leaving Joanne in stitches. She was still laughing when she heard Nina catch her breath at something on the screen. Instantly Joanne stopped chuckling to inquire.
“What? What? What? Did you find something?”
Raising one eyebrow, Nina looked up from the luminescent screen, slightly adjusting her glasses on her nose. “Are you familiar with a missing persons case in Labrador from 1981?” she asked Joanne, who had been resident in Newfoundland long enough to not be considered a foreigner.
“1981?” she frowned. “Um, not that I know of. I only moved here after my second year after graduating from the Quebec Teacher's College, love.”
“I know, I know. But since you’re a history teacher I reckoned you might have heard of important and/ or infamous incidents in Newfoundland's history too, you know?” Nina shrugged.
“I suppose,” Joanne agreed. “Let me think. I would not have heard of it really, unless someone told me about it. After all, 1981 is too far back for our generation anyway.”
“True,” Nina concurred. “Anyway, I found an article in the Labrador Herald from 1981, imploring the public to keep an eye out for one Leslie Michaud, a young woman from Quebec who had been reported missing by her roommate.”
“Could it be the woman?” Joanne asked, suddenly wide awake and her zest rekindled.
“Could be. Listen,” Nina announced. “Miss Laura Hampshire from Thunder Bay, Ontario, had been Miss Michaud's roommate for over a year. When Miss Michaud did not return to the Montreal flat they shared from a long weekend with friends, Miss Hampshire reported her friend missing. After police questioned Miss Michaud's friends they determined that she left their company an hour after arriving back in Montreal, at 7:20 p.m. on the evening of October 3rd.”
“Whoa, a name, time, date, hometown… the works!” Joanne remarked. “But is it her?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Nina affirmed.
“How come?” her friend asked, drinking faster as the information was revealed.
“The friends they spoke to that she was out with? They described to the cops,” Nina read, scanning and skipping to the important parts, “that she wore a pink knitted top under a large brown parka and corduroy pants with Doc Martins.” Nina looked up at Joanne. “Did she wear any of that kit?”
“I can’t remember the pink top being knitted…” Joanne scowled in frustration at her holey memory. “Wait! Wait, let me get hold of Pam to get hold of Lisa so we can get those pictures before her parents make her delete them!”
“Aye! Good idea. Hurry up, this is getting interesting. Look at this one,” Nina chattered happily, finally getting a pay-off for all of her hours of aimless reading. “This is from the Montreal Post, dated October 12th, 1981, reporting that Michaud went missing in the vicinity of Quebec City, which is different from the other account.”
“Do they say why?” Joanne asked while furiously texting Pam for Lisa's number.
“Aye, this one says that she was last seen with a boyfriend at 9 p.m. in Quebec City at a restaurant. After that, nobody knows where they went. So I suspect her friends parted with her in Montreal and then bonny Leslie decided not to go home, because she had a booty call,” Nina winked. “I suppose she met the boyfriend there and went to dinner with him in Quebec City and then she disappeared.”
“Very plausible,” Joanne replied. “But how did her body end up here? Do you think she was killed somewhere else and just dumped here?”
“Hmm, maybe we should check what Goose Bay was in the Eighties. If it was a holiday resort, or if it had motels or accommodation, we could very well track down who checked in nearby around those dates,” Nina suggested. “It’s a very long shot, but with a bit of backdoor burglary one can uncover the most heinous secrets, and I speak from experience.”
“I'll ignore the double entendre I could milk in those words and share the good news,” Joanne scoffed with a giggle. “Lisa is going to send the pictures she took from her phone to mine. You can load them on your laptop to get better detail from the high resolution.”
“Excellent,” Nina smiled.
Looking a bit sheepish and uncomfortable, Joanne sank into her seat and stammered, “So, Nina? When are you going to call Sam Cleave to join us? I mean, if he can join us.”
Nina laughed. “You have such a thing for him, don't you?”
“I'm not blind,” Joanne grinned. “He is kinda gorgeous, even with those wild tresses.”
“I like those wild tresses. When I met him he looked like a rebellious schoolboy. Suave and groomed like a proper journalist. But along the way he became feral. As he found himself, I guess you could say, as he survived harsher and deeper waters, Sam came into his own,” Nina recounted dreamily. She could never tell Joanne, but as she spoke fondly of him she could smell his skin and feel his touch from her reminiscence. “So from what I can figure, when Sam Cleave finally grew up, he realized that he had grown up into the skin of the man he is now — the devil-may-care wild man who wields his temperament, judgment, and loyalty like fierce weapons. Through all the hell and tribulation, he’s morphed through a long and painful metamorphosis from a romantic and straight-edged Romeo to a hardened and strong Achilles.”
Suddenly she noticed that she was caressing her forearm lightly as she spoke of him. Opposite her Joanne was smiling, admiring Nina's admiration for the man she’d once called her lover before they’d drifted apart and inadvertently reverted to close friendship. “See? You know what I’m talking about,” Joanne giggled. “God, I sound like a school girl.”
Nina sighed and took to her cold coffee at the bottom of the cup to pry her thoughts away from Sam. “Anyway, speaking of schoolgirls, has that Lisa girl sent our images yet?”
“The first two are loading.”
“Okay,” Nina said satisfactorily. “Oh, and to answer your question… I first want to see if we can find a tangible trail to a physical location from where we can search for the rest of this hoard before I call Sam. I don't want to drag him out of his business there before I’m sure we have a solid lead here. And that solid lead we can only get from finding out where darling Leslie Michaud went astray in early October, 1981… literally.”
When the images were downloaded, Nina enhanced the best one and leaned closer to see better. It was close to 2:15 am already, but the women had their blood pumping in the excitement of drawing nearer and nearer to the young woman, Leslie Michaud. “She was shot in the head, Jo,” Nina announced. “Twice, by the looks of it. Fucking swine. I bet it was the boyfriend.”
“Of course it was,” Joanne concurred. “Wonder where he vanished to. If we could follow the trail… but where… ugh, God, all this for a treasure that probably got plundered long after Alexander the Great was dust.”
“Hey, stop that shit,” Nina frowned. “I did not come all the way here for this. Look!” She held up the coin. “Here it is, hard evidence that this treasure exists! This is not the typical coin with Alexander's face on, honey. This is from one of the empires he conquered during the height of his campaigns… and that is solid proof that it is from the hoard of Alexander of Macedon!”