Excerpt: April Fool

It isn't easy to concentrate on tonight's job, Operation Breakers Inn, because he feels a little hypnotized by the soft grey eyes of Eve Winters, who doesn't take on sharp outline, she's like an Impressionist painting. The Owl, who is starting to wonder if he needs his eyes checked, senses her aura, a silver haze floating about her head. No makeup, but none needed, her face tanned gently by the wind and whatever sun you get this time of year on the West Coast. Dressed casually, jeans and light sweater.

Hardly anyone does the trail so early in spring, when it's still a swamp. This has meant a near-zero occupancy rate at the Nitinat since last fall, and by now, the final day of March, he is two months behind in his mortgage payments. His financial adviser, Freddy Jacoby, also his fence, warned him, you'll get three months' business max, maybe four if it don't piss in June. The Nitinat Lodge was his retirement program, cash in on the tourist trade, accommodate wayfarers in the middle of what turned out to be nowhere or, more accurately, the western shore of Vancouver Island -- you can only get here by logging roads or the local packet freighter, the Lady Rose.

Eve Winters says she supposes he's walked the West Coast Trail many times, and he replies no, not once, and it's one of his greatest sorrows. A skiing accident prevented him from pursuing his passion for the outdoors, he gets along with two pins in his right leg. That isn't the honest truth, which is that the Owl doesn't like walking more than he has to. Faloon is an easy person to talk to, he brings people out -- he's curious by nature, an information-gatherer. So he urges her on about how she found Bamfield "unspeakably funky" and stayed on for a week after her three girlfriends left on the Lady Rose.

What Faloon finds unspeakably funky about Bamfield, permanent population three hundred and something, is that it's almost useless to have a car -- you take a water taxi to go anywhere, an inlet splits the town in two, and the terrain on this side is sort of impenetrable. This is the pretty side, though, West Bamfield, with its boardwalks rimming the shore, resorts and craft stores, eye-popping beaches a stroll away, but East Bamfield has the only saloon. The most attractive thing about the town, though, is the RCMP detachment is a couple of hours away by boat or car, in Port Alberni.

The lady lets drop that her full title is Dr. Eve Winters, and according to the card she gives him she has a Ph.D., her angle being something complicated, a "relationship analyst." He gets the impression he's supposed to have heard of her. And maybe he has, he remembers something in one of the papers, a weekly column with her picture, like Ann Landers. She's not staying here at the Breakers, but renting a cottage down by Brady Beach. The Owl assumes, without asking, that Dr. Winters is alone there. The Cotters' Cottage, locals call it, is owned by an old couple in East Bam.

"So tell me -- is there any entertainment in town on a Friday night?"

Excerpted from April Fool by William Deverell. Copyright 2005 by William Deverell. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.