Read Online Aloha, Candy Hearts by Anthony Bidulka - Free Book Online Page B

golden urn? Where the heck could that be? I had no idea. This treasure map wasn’t about to let me cheat my way to the prize without doing the work to get there. All I could do was start at the beginning and see what I came up with.

    Begin where it ended,
    For the first of Saskatoon,

    Aww, jeez, I was stumped already. Great detective I was. But I gave myself a break. It was Sunday morning, after all, and I was suffering from jet lag and a lousy night’s sleep.
    “What’s this?” Mary asked as she set both herself and my breakfast down. “Have you taken to writing love sonnets for Alex?”
    I smiled at Mary, as always taken in by her glowing, dark eyes.
    “Nah. It’s supposed to be a map to find…something…I’m not sure what.”
    “So why are you looking for it if you don’t know what it is?”
    Good question. “Curiosity, I guess. But if my first try is any indication, I’m never going to find it anyway. Listen to this.” I read her the first four lines. “What does that mean to you?”
    Mary turned the page so she could see it straight on. “I love stuff like this,” she enthused, taking a sip from my coffee cup.
    “These are like clues, right? You have to figure them out to know where to go next. Like a scavenger hunt.”
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    Anthony Bidulka

    I stared at Mary, surprised by her zest for the project. The things you don’t know about your friends. “Yeah.” I pulled my coffee closer to me.
    “So they’re obviously telling you where to start,” she said as she mulled over the words and chewed on a piece of my curious-ly sweet-and-sour muffin.
    “Doesn’t seem so obvious to me.”
    “Begin where it ended, for the first of Saskatoon,” she repeated. “Hmmm, the first of Saskatoon.”
    “They’re clearly talking about the first settlers,” I said, “the pioneers.”
    Mary gave me a kind but indulgent smile. “That depends on who you think our pioneers were. My people, the Cree, the Northern Plains people, were the first to settle here. They’ve gathered here for six thousand years, to hunt bison, gather food, find shelter from winter winds, open a restaurant/bookstore.”
    I smiled at her gentle way of giving me a much-needed history butt-kicking without making it seem like a lecture. I tried for some brownie points: “I’ve heard that some of the sites discovered at Wanuskewin are older than the pyramids.” Wanuskewin is a heritage park just five kilometres outside of Saskatoon.
    She nodded. “Uh-huh, that’s right. But by the look of this map and the clues, something tells me they’re talking about something a little more recent, and a little more white.”
    “So that would be the Temperance colonists?” I said, scouring my mind for whatever I remembered of city history. “Early nineteen hundreds.”
    “The first immigrants to Saskatoon arrived in more like the late eighteen hundreds,” Mary noted.
    “Brought here by John Lake, right?” I said, impressed that my memory banks were beginning to open up. High school social studies class hadn’t been such a waste after all.
    “On the advice, once again, of one of my people,” Mary proudly announced, “Chief Whitecap of the Dakota Sioux. Check out the statue by the river.”
    Mary was right. A twice life-sized bronze statue of Lake and Whitecap had recently been erected at the base of the Traffic Bridge DD6AA2AB8
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    Aloha, Candy Hearts

    to commemorate their meeting. Conceived as an agricultural utopia on the unspoiled prairies, far from the wickedness of Toronto and Montreal, Saskatoon was founded in 1883 by the Temperance Colonization Society. It was an organization dedicated to the ideals of capitalism and prohibition. Strange combina-tion, I always thought. John Lake was their representative, come to check things out. Things have changed a bit since he was last here.
    Especially the no drinking part.
    Mary mumbled under her breath as