When the Flood Falls. J.E. Barnard

envision it all too clearly, but the water didn’t look that high from here, staying inside its banks as far as the eye could follow them. That would be reassuring if she hadn’t seen a lot more gravel and boulders and trees down those banks just a few days ago. All below the water now.

      “Oh, yeah, definitely bad. The Elbow River took out a swath of riverbank just upstream from here and detoured straight along Whyte Avenue into the business district. A once-in-five-hundred-years flood, except now they’re saying it’ll be more frequent than that. It made a major mess and everyone’s paranoid it’ll happen again despite the expensive flood mitigation the province is doing.”

      Lacey shared the villagers’ paranoia of flooding waters. She shivered.

      “Cold?” Dee glanced at the clock and gathered up her stuff. “Coffee’s ready, espresso machine’s there if you’d rather. You know where the tea stuff is. You have plenty of time before work. No commute.”

      “I think I’ll go for a run,” said Lacey. “Where’s good?”

      “My old route is out the back, on the trail behind the dog pen. Go uphill past the next houses and follow the wall around Jake Wyman’s place. Watch out for horse droppings up there. The trail eventually drops behind the hill and reaches a back road.” She took a deep breath. “You’ll recognize it. That’s where I … where Duke … the accident happened. Then the same way we came back the other day. About six kilometres total. Stay on the pavement, though, not on the river path. The riverbank could be undermined in places.”

      No fear of Lacey not staying as far from the water as possible! “Sounds great.”

      “Oh, and watch out for thundering herds of hockey players.”

      “Huh?”

      “Running, riding, biking, anything to keep in shape. There are half a dozen staying at Jake’s place for the Stanley Cup Finals, including whichever nitwit was driving yesterday. You’ll meet them at the gala. Hot today and gone tomorrow if you’re looking for some no-complications sex. Every girl’s answer for the post-divorce blues.”

      This morning’s Dee was so chipper it was surreal. “Including yours?”

      Dee smirked. “Maybe. But let us not be distracted from more important matters. I bet you don’t have an evening gown to wear on Friday night.”

      “I’m not going to the gala.”

      “Of course you are. We need a security presence in case something goes wrong with the door locks or whatever. Or if Eddie sneaks in with his protest signs. I already talked to Wayne. You’re his rep for the night, and my date. I’m not coming home alone at two o’clock in the morning when I could have my own personal bodyguard.”

      “I suppose you also fixed it so I’m getting paid to attend?”

      Dee grinned. “Natch. Don’t worry, I’ll find you something not disgraceful to wear. Go run. And watch out for deer.”

      “Hockey players and deer. Check. If I meet a deer on the trail, what do I do?”

      “Make some noise. They’ll get out of your way. Bears are unlikely this late in the spring, and you’re too big for a cougar’s lunch. I’d say you should take the dogs, but they know you don’t like them.”

      “It’s mutual. Between the bears and the dogs and who knows what else, I was safer on the mean streets of Surrey.”

      Five minutes later, Lacey stood on the red-gravelled path beyond the dog run, conscious of two sets of hostile canine eyes on her back. The trail ran downhill from here as well as up, its contours quickly lost amid the aspen and spruce. She would investigate that direction after work. Any prowler had to be leaving his vehicle within walking distance, in the yard of some empty house or on a road where the trail crossed it.

      For the moment she turned uphill, walking and then jogging, her legs and lungs settling into their familiar rhythms. Lush spring undergrowth sprawled onto the path, the low bushes bursting with small wild blossoms. Instead of the familiar Surrey fug of traffic fumes, car horns, and emergency sirens, all around her were pine-scented breezes and birdsong. It should have been soothing, but her brain could not let go of Dee’s problem. Was there danger? From where, or from whom? Could she stop it before Dee got hurt or went completely around the bend?

      Jake Wyman’s estate wall crept alongside, its brown bricks deliberately blotched with grey to play optical tricks with the surrounding woods, like those paintings of tree trunks that suddenly became spotted horses. An open stretch revealed the imposing reality: interlocked brick twice Lacey’s height, interrupted only by wrought-iron gates that were secured with motion-tracking cameras and a keypad lock. Nothing visible through the gates except more trees. Multi-millionaire privacy. Up here, there was not a single other access point from which Dee’s prowler might come. On one side, the wall, on the other a thickly treed slope with snarled, spiky underbrush as far down as the eye could penetrate.

      Soon the trail turned downward, and she left the civilizing presence of the wall behind. This side of the hill felt more isolated, even lonely. When had she been so alone before? Her previous wilderness experiences were hiking the Algonquin Trail, continually meeting other hikers, and skiing the busy trails at Whistler with other locals and tourists. For most of her adult life, the RCMP was at her back, in spirit if not in fact. There was a void behind her now, almost tangible in its emptiness. No spouse, no partner, no fellow officers to cover her moves at a moment’s notice. Just Dee. And when Dee no longer needed her? She shut her mind to the questions and simply ran, red gravel crunching beneath her feet, her eyes alert for branches, bears, deer, horse shit, or other hazards of life on the eastern fringe of the Rockies.

      The burn-off effect worked, as it always had. By the time she passed the spot where she’d picked up Dee and the setters, her head was clearer, her body calmer. The gravel road stretched peacefully ahead in the sunshine, devoid of vehicles and yet comforting in its tidy signage, trimmed-back shoulders, and other signs of human encroachment on the wilderness. She was alone, isolated for the moment by choice, but human habitations were close enough for comfort. Then she turned the corner, and there was the river.

      She found she was jogging on the spot, watching the distant line of brown through the intervening trees. This far up the long slope of the road, she could tell herself it was not rushing water she heard but the wind among the spruces, and yet her heart thudded as if she teetered on the edge of the torrent. She could not force her feet forward. Crouching on the gravel shoulder, resting her elbows on her knees, she struggled to get her breathing and heart rate down. The breeze rolled over her and birdsong filtered through the nearest trees, and her whole body shuddered with completely irrational panic.

      The sound of her own voice jolted her. “McCrae, you cannot be this much of a wimp.” It was the voice in her head that had gotten her through the gruelling training at Depot. The voice pushing her to run just one more circuit, swim one more lap, haul one more classmate up from the bottom in the dive-training course. This time she’d had to say it out loud, just to get her own attention.

      Her head came up. “Okay, McCrae. Enough with huddling on the dirt like a scared rabbit. You are genuinely afraid of ever being trapped in a sunken boat in murky water again. But this is not that situation. This is a peaceful morning run in beautiful country. Why are you terrified of that water way down there?”

      The answer rang through her head as loud as if she’d screamed it. Dan.

      And just like that, she remembered. They were walking through the river park on a grey spring day in the Lower Mainland. The drizzle had lifted while they were staring into their cups at Tim Hortons, not talking about the unthinkable, the literally unspeakable half hour two weeks earlier. The day she’d told him at knifepoint to leave the house before the neighbours called the cops on them and destroyed both their careers. He’d left, then, but she’d ended up handing in her resignation the next week, anyway, fed up to her scalp with the barely veiled hostility her male subordinates offered their first female shift boss and the lack of official or unofficial support against any of it. This was her first face-to-face meeting with Dan since, and