Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Dec 12/01) - The Cinderella mystery is solved: a shoe found near the Legislative Assembly belongs to an Ottawa architect.

Denise Bicknell and the black pump she recovered from the icy reaches of Frame Lake. - Dawn Ostrem/NNSL photo

After a Dec. 7 article was published, Yellowknifer received several phone calls naming its owner as Sylviane Duval. She was here in late November for a meeting of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the signing of the Architect's Act.

She lost the shoe while she and her boss walked back to their hotel from a banquet held at the legislature.

"Suddenly, I heard a cry behind me. (Her boss) had fallen through the ice. I heard another cry. It was mine. I had fallen through the ice," said Duval in an e-mail to Yellowknifer.

When she reached dry land, Duval discovered that she had lost the left shoe.

"However, I had 20 pounds of water in each boot and my pants were freezing to my legs so I wasn't about to stick around and look."

"I was crushed at the loss of one shoe. It's like losing one sock - a real annoyance! Plus, these were soft Italian leather pumps that fit like a glove and dead comfy. I came across them at the Salvation Army depot in Montreal and paid a whole $3 for them, the kind of bargain which tripled their sentimental value and I had only just had them resoled at a fair expense. I was just devastated."

Duval searched for the shoe the next day.

"In retrospect and broad daylight, I would never have taken that trail. The ice was quite obviously thinner than elsewhere."

She asked a woman walking a dog if they could help, and the dog went right to the spot. The woman fell through, too, telling Duval: "I've just pushed your shoe in."

Resigned to never seeing the shoe again, she threw the other one in the trash.

"Now that the left one has been found, and my grateful thanks to Denise Bicknell for her tenacity, a few questions remain. Is it wearable? (if so, I shall just have to weep; and, are there any volunteers to go to the Yellowknife dump to retrieve the other one?"