Author: Steve

WHEELER/SVN

SILICON VALLEY NORTH

by
STEVE WHEELER

CHAPTER ONE

When Phil Reilly felt the thump through the hull of the aluminum boat, he thought it was a floating log. The river was full of them. He fastened down his rod, moved to investigate.
The shiny black hair of a man’s head, the red puncture wounds at the back of his neck, reached out. The body floated silently against the hull, no blood, no reason for the sudden revulsion he felt. No need to panic, he told himself, an inanimate object, a piece of meat.
Shade enveloped Phil’s boat and a small swatch of fluffy cumulus crossed the sun. The first cloud he’d seen that morning accompanied by the first ripples on the river and the first small breeze.
The rod rattled and buzzed. Something had hit the lure. Phil grabbed the rod, released some pressure. He heard the deep purr of an outboard behind him. He sat down hard as his boat began to pull at her anchor. A speedboat approached, slowing as it reached him.
They were strangers. Big men, young, short hair, jeans, t shirts, shades. One held up official looking ID which Phil couldn’t see clearly. He spoke into a cell phone while the other shifted the outboard into neutral and reverse. They pulled alongside.
The blond man with the ID reached across their gunwale to hold onto Phil’s boat. Both men’s attention was fixed on the corpse bobbing in the water. The blond man reached down to seize the dead man’s hair. He pulled the head back. The three stared at the face.
The dead man was oriental. His sightless eyes were open, staring.
The rod jerked again in Phil’s hands. The blond man talked to him in a friendly, confiding tone while the other guy hauled the corpse into their boat. He said that the OPP had been seaching for the body for a few hours. He said that they were lucky to have extended their search this far downriver.
A pike jumped twenty yards from the boat. Phil reeled slack but the weight had changed, the fish was gone when he reeled in the line. The Merc on the speedboat launched it upriver. Phil turned to watch.
It wasn’t a marked police boat and the men didn’t seem like cops. There was something in the way that they handled the body which didn’t seem right. They were already small, unidentifiable figures.
He pulled up the anchor, turned slowly towards home.
It was the middle of August. The hills of Quebec across the river lay green and solid. He would have stayed out longer, but there was work to be done at home and it was Sunday. There would soon be hordes of water skiers and seadoos on the river. There was no pleasure in trying to fish with the noise all around and the boat bobbing up and down on the waves coming from all directions.
Phil let off his ten Johnson as he rounded the corner into the bay. At the point, jutting out into the Ottawa, a castle stood high and wide. It was made of stone and glass, a billionaire’s home. The billionaire was Edward Stevens, Phil’s unimaginably rich, high tech neighbour.
Phil and Nora lived on two acres beside the grounds of Teddy Stevens’ estate. They were neighbours by coincidence. Phil sometimes worked for Teddy.
The Reilly’s little bungalow sat on a cliff looking out over the bay in the Ottawa River. Wooden steps descended from the house to a small, sandy beach and boat dock.
Phil could see Gary, their mutt, staring at the boat accusingly from the end of the dock. His tail wagged in short, quick jerks. He turned toward the house to bark twice.
On the deck at the top of the stairs Nora sat in the sun with the newspaper. She lowered the sunglasses from the top of her head onto her eyes, lowered the paper to her lap, sipped from her coffee mug. She watched Gary perform a bellyflop and splash his earnest dogpaddle toward the boat.
Phil slipped the Johnson into neutral and hauled Gary in by the pits. The dog shook himself and soaked Phil.
Gary was doing what came naturally. Phil suspected that he was demonstrating his displeasure at being left behind. Gary made too much noise in the aluminum boat to take him fishing.
Phil didn’t really care about getting wet. He had too many things to do: the firewood, the potato bugs in the garden, the court case, the Teddy Stevens’ job.
Phil was a landscaper by trade. It was by the process of elimination that he had come upon the work. It seemed to be the only thing available when he started and grew to be an enjoyable occupation.
Nora was trying to quit smoking so that her doctor would give her hormone treatments to alleviate menopause symptoms. She was getting ready to retire from a longtime government job,  obsessed by bingo.
Phil leaned over to give her a quick kiss before settling into the chaise lounge beside her.
“Catch any?” Nora asked, watching him.
“Almost. They found a body right where I was fishin”.
Phil recounted his strange adventure. Nora scoffed at his paranoia when he voiced his reservations about the cops. She picked up her gardening magazine, took a sip of coffee and lifted her sunglasses back to the top of her head.
Phil contemplated the bay with Gary. The heat was rising. He ascended more stairs, grateful that Nora wasn’t having hot flashes which led to irrational grumpiness. Phil was glad, secretly, that Nora wasn’t his boss in some office job in the city. It was time for a shower.
He thought about the jobs while he showered. There was no way to control the potato bugs without pesticide. Nora and he would have to travel to their garden, two miles up the road, to pick them off by hand. She would collect jars full and burn them ritually. The other jobs would have to wait.
Their two acres up the road held a building which contained Phil’s landscaping and snowblowing equipment. When they moved to the country from the city, Nora commuted, Phil started mowing lawns with the lawnmower carried in the trunk of his old Celebrity. The business had grown over the years until they bought the highway acres, built the shack and filled it with the accumulated equipment.
Old Jim Steadman had told them the potato bug story of his childhood. At times he and the other kids in the family were assigned to the hated bug picking on their primitive farm somewhere near Wolf Lake in Quebec. To hurry, to get it over with, they filled their jars in no time and buried the contents in shallow holes between the potato rows. By the time they had filled their jars a few times each, they had succeeded in infesting the soil beyond saving. The family gave up growing potatoes after that.
Old Jim’s mother maintained until her death that his father’s first heart attack was traceable to the potato bugs.
It was described as a drowning in the paper. Phil stared at the account looking for the word ‘murder’ or a mention of the ragged puncture wounds at the back of the man’s neck. There was nothing.
Phil was aware that there was something about being near a powerful body of water. Maybe any body of water for that matter. It made death by drowning more understandable if not acceptable. In Niagara Falls, on both sides of the border, everyone knows of a suicide or accident or murder story which ends with the victim dying in the falls.
Around Ottawa, people in boats or skidoos, swimming, wading, even walking nearby, managed to drown in the river. People lived their whole lives beside the river but had never learned how to swim.
It wasn’t treated by the paper or the police as a murder. It was called a drowning. At the back of the classified section, just before the obituaries, was a picture of the dead man Phil had seen in the river. He was alive and smiling in this picture. Next to it was his name, Sammy Ho, next to it, a picture of a tearful oriental girl, his widow, Kim, holding an infant. He was an employee of Ozone Technologies.
Phil felt sure that something was wrong. Something was being covered up. He knew Sammy Ho hadn’t drowned, he was murdered.
Phil thought about it, chewed on it, for the next few days. It bothered him, but life went on. Nora went to work, he finally called up Old Jim Steadman. They met at Teddy Steven’s front gate.
There were trees on Teddy’s grounds which were too close to the power lines for Teddy’s liking. The hydro and municipal workers did a pretty good job but not as perfect as Teddy would  like. He saw it, in passing, from the back seat of his limousine. The problem was relayed to Lou, Teddy’s security chief. He called Phil. 
Phil couldn’t see a big risk but in these days of ice storms and weather explosions you couldn’t be too careful. Especially if you were rich and had a serious dependency on electricity, like Teddy Stevens.
Lou had called Phil a few years before to ask him if he’d be interested in some work. Phil didn’t think Lou liked him, but Phil liked the jobs on Teddy’s estate. He made good money doing them and they were close to home. He made sure all of his jobs were done extra well.
There was always the possibility of witnessing the rumoured debauchery which took place at Teddy’s. It was probably just a press piece to sell papers, but the hint of scandal and titillation was always there. Phil had seen nothing out of the ordinary in the past but it was an added attraction.
The tree which caused the main problem was an oak of about sixty feet which stood beside the big front gate, towered above the guard house. It wasn’t as hard as knocking down a tree near someone’s garage or close to a house in a small backyard but it was tricky. There was a large hydro wire leading from the road to the guard shack on into the estate. Phil didn’t want to make a mess of it, some expensive damage could be done and his reputation was on the line.
Edward Stevens was known as “Teddy Boy” on Bay Street among the people there who made fortunes on his companies. His eccentric image portrayed him as a much younger man than he was. This was all the more fun for brokers who hooked onto his coat tails as the hi tech boom erupted in Ottawa. It was over in a brief, brilliant flash of growth.
Teddy’s small company grew into a monster. Teddy got rich when he sold off his first company to the big boys south of the border. He had created a chip which contained enormous amounts of information used in digital communications, everyone made a lot of money.
Within a few years, Teddy Stevens became a billionaire. He bought a farm west of Ottawa on the river and built a modern castle next to the Reillys’.
Old Jim and Phil took down the oak in one day and hauled away the wood. Part of the deal was that they could keep the firewood in the tree and clean up the rest. There were some other trees which needed to be cut back but they could wait till spring. The winter was approaching, days were getting shorter.