Read Online Apparition Trail, The by Lisa Smedman - Free Book Online Page A

personage than Lord Dufferin, the Governor General of Canada, was a friend of the family — which was hardly surprising, given that the Inspector was the son of the famed novelist Charles Dickens.
    I lifted my haversack onto my knees. Dickens, taking a drink of his brandy, watched as I rummaged for the folder that Superintendent Steele had given me. I hoped he wouldn’t see the bottle of Pinkham’s at the bottom of the haversack and mistake it for spirits. I didn’t want him demanding a drink from it, then draining it dry.
    “You’re not going to ask me to sign one of my father’s novels, are you?” Dickens asked.
    I shook my head, and he emitted a brandy-sweet sigh of relief.
    “Everyone is always asking me to do that,” he added. “Do you know that Chief Sitting Bull himself once called me into his camp by dead of night to autograph a copy of Oliver Twist ? This was, of course, after he’d skipped across the ‘medicine line’ into Canada following the battle of Little Bighorn.”
    “Is that so?”
    My scepticism must have been reflected in my voice. Dickens frowned. “It wasn’t even a proper edition. Just a cheap American copy.”
    I nodded in what I hoped was a sympathetic manner, and pulled the photograph I’d been searching for out of the folder. The brownish-black photograph was mounted on card stock and embellished with the photographer’s name in gold script. It was part of a series of views of the North-West Territories, taken a few years ago, which included scenic images of the North Saskatchewan River and Victoria Mission. The small church had been founded in 1863 by John McDougall’s father, George, a Methodist missionary who came west with his family to minister to the Blackfoot Indians. After the elder McDougall froze to death in 1876 in a blizzard while hunting near Calgary, his son John had taken over the mission. Now Reverend John McDougall, his wife, and their six children had disappeared.
    The mission occupied the background of the photograph: a two-story whitewashed log building, set in a clearing on the riverbank. The photographer had focused on a large boulder with a distinctive rectangular shape that stood in the front yard of the mission. John McDougall was shown standing beside this waist-high stone, hands on his hips, his dark wavy hair combed back from his forehead. A full beard hid the set of his lips, but there was a defiant look in his eye. His expression matched what little of his writings I had read: McDougall had railed against the Indians’ “barbarism, shiftlessness, and demon-worship,” and had vowed to use the gospel to wash away “centuries of ignorance.”
    Above the mission, the clouds had conspired to mirror McDougall’s expression: dark patches within the white vapour looked like scowling eyes, and the bottom of the cloud was like a jutting chin. Other patches of shadow gave this “face” the distinctive high, wide cheekbones and long nose of an Indian.
    Before my summons to Regina two weeks ago, I would have regarded the cloud formation as an amusing coincidence. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder if the face in the clouds was as real as the thunderbird that had nearly put paid to the air bicycle.
    “The Manitou Stone,” I said, tapping my finger on the rectangular boulder in the photograph. “According to Corporal Cowan’s report, it disappeared from the mission yard around the same time that the McDougalls vanished. Can you tell me more about it?”
    Dickens drained his brandy and refilled his glass. “Only what’s commonly known,” he said. “It was a big, bluish-grey stone, sacred to the Indians, that used to be situated beside the Battle River. They would ride from all over on their ponies to the hill it rested upon, to leave offerings of pemmican and tobacco. Even mortal enemies — Blackfoot and Cree together — would venerate it side by side.”
    Dickens took another drink, then continued. “In 1868 George McDougall decided that he could