If you drive west on the Trans-Canada Highway, through a million miles of Precambrian Shield, the great red rocks clawing straight through the earth to confront you with the fact you’ve already crossed beyond the beginnings of your kind and into the lush and smoky world before history; and yet you keep driving, winding your way west to where the land flattens and trees begin losing ground to clearings where farms and tractors hold what can only be temporary dominion over the great forest; and still you drive, until you find yourself passing through the most relentless landscape on the face of the planet, burnt grass and stubble and assorted shades of brown stretching away on either side of a highway that runs straight into the sky, the blinking yellow centre line threatening to murder you by hypnotizing you into a messy sleep; and yet you persist in your going, perhaps deluded into believing you have reached the unfinished edge of the world and are about to make a significant discovery by dropping into the abyss that Columbus’s crew so greatly feared–if you drive west on the Trans-Canada Highway, eventually you’ll come to a spot on the map called Broken Head, Saskatchewan, just another Prairie town dying from complete lack of culture and too much interbreeding, a place with absolutely no significance beyond the fact that Darwin Andrew Goodwin once picked up his mail at the post office on Main Street.

And if–perhaps after a lunch of deep-fried breaded meat and lumpy gravy and powdered mashed potatoes slopped onto a cold plate and shared with a waitress who insists on telling you all about her children’s latest diseases or the plot of her favourite soap opera–if you then head south on a secondary highway, away from the last vestiges of what some might laughably refer to as civilization, and you turn west again on the Hochfeld Grid, named for a disappeared community of Mennonite settlers who, a century ago, were conned by the Canadian government into coming to this godforsaken place, you will be following the same route that RCMP Detectives Brock and Frazier took on the morning of May 12th, 199—, when they arrived with a search warrant at the Goodwin farm to seek out documentary evidence that would prove Darwin Andrew Goodwin had murdered Stephanie Rush.

What they found was the Goodwin forest: acres and acres of Scotch pines planted in a grid of squares measuring exactly a hundred yards on each side. (Goodwin was never an advocate of the metric system.) A driveway bisecting the rigidly ordered woods led the two officers into a kind of courtyard in the centre, where a few corrugated steel sheds were surrounded by rows of antiquated machinery, the parts supply for the ancient combine harvester and swather and tractors that Goodwin still used to farm the land he hadn’t already turned over to the trees. When the detectives walked through one of these coniferous walls they found a hundred square yards of open clearing, overgrown with dead grass and weeds. They stood for a moment, looking around. The space the trees created gave them an eerie feeling of being audience to nothing in an empty and unused arena.

They did not realize they were witnessing evidence of Goodwin’s great love for Stephanie Rush–Hollywood sex symbol, tabloid icon of the seventies, the Province of Alberta’s most celebrated daughter–who had so recently and cruelly passed from this vale of tears. Goodwin planted the trees for her: as spokeswoman for the Sierra Club, Stephanie Rush had urged him, in countless thirty-second spots, to do his part to help save the rain forest.

Investigating further, they found another square of pines occupied by a decaying farmhouse. As they climbed the front steps Detective Brock’s foot broke through the top plate, and Detective Frazier remembers him limping slightly for the rest of the day. Their knock brought no response, but upon entering they were attacked by an elderly woman their report describes as “armed with a television antenna of the rabbit ears variety.” The woman, Goodwin’s mother, was raving about aliens from other planets preparing to take over the world.

Again the detectives missed the clue. Stephanie Rush was originally from Venus, a village in Alberta.

Having concluded that questioning Mrs. Goodwin would be fruitless, the detectives made a tactical retreat. They stood in the yard, surveyed the situation, and noticed a telephone line running from the southwesterly corner of the house off into the woods; not toward the road, as you would expect, but in the opposite direction. A single wire was strung on either side of each pole, the lines attached to each cross arm at a green glass insulator. These rows of crucifixes once filed in procession along seemingly every Prairie road, but they had completely disappeared when all the phone lines were buried by SaskTel over a decade before.

Following the line a quarter of a mile through four or five squares of pines–some of them completely empty, some storing scrap metal or more rusting machinery or piles of weathered lumber–the detectives discovered the end of the line at a prefab bungalow that would not have looked out of place in any suburb in Middle America. What made it look out of place in that particular clearing–what might have made it remind them of the cottage that Hansel and Gretel stumbled across, though it was not made of gingerbread–was that it was so well tended: recently painted, and the flowerbeds all weeded and groomed. A white picket fence marked the boundaries of a perfect green lawn.

On this occasion Detectives Brock and Frazier did not overlook the evidentiary significance of their find: they realized at once that this was the legendary house Goodwin had built for Stephanie Rush; as such, it could well prove important to their mission of gathering documentation, circumstantial or otherwise, that would link Mr. Goodwin to Ms. Rush’s untimely passing.