A Door in the River Page 10

  Was the girl a dealer? Maybe she’d dismissed the weed in the medicine cabinet too quickly. Was it possible what she saw there was for personal use, but the rest of it was going out the door? And he’d hooked up with a charming urchin at the casino. God, that felt like a long shot. But you could always filter the proceeds of a minor operation like that through a small business.

  She still had Cathy’s keys and she let herself into the house, hoping that if she heard the bird, it wouldn’t terrify her this time, or vice versa. “Helll-ooo, birdie … it’s Hazel. Don’t be scared, birdie …”

  There were no sounds from the office, and she pushed the door open to find the birdcage was gone. For the second time in this house, she removed her sidearm. So someone had been here between the attack and now and taken the bird. Or it was on the lam.

  She was beginning to feel exhausted.

  She set aside the mystery of the cockatoo and stepped into the destroyed room. A ledger. That’s what she was looking for now, one of those big, hard-covered books with black tape down the spine. Something like that, or else one of those cerlox thingies. She found a yellow file folder that said Cafe on its label. She righted the desk chair and sat in it. These were bank statements from the café. Hazel settled in and began to read. She’d never had any idea how much it cost to run a restaurant, or if it was hard to make a living from one. Judging from the statements, it was possible to make money, but there was a lot of overhead, too. It looked like Cathy took in about six thousand dollars a month over her costs. Not a fortune but enough to live on. Some months, it appeared as if she was doing better, but the bottom line didn’t change much: on months where she made more money, she also had more expenses. This was to be expected: if you sold more coconut cream pie, you had to buy more coconuts.

  She stopped and listened for a moment. Every creak in this house was making her heart race. None of the other papers pertaining to the café seemed to point anywhere. She kept flipping through stapled, paper-clipped, perforated, and folded paper that had been strewn everywhere. A folder full of stale-dated income tax forms. These she flipped through as well, to get an idea of the household’s income. For the last five years, it seemed that Cathy was bringing down just about what Hazel thought she would be: ninety thousand, some years closer to a hundred. Running a restaurant was a tough business, but Cathy’s had been around for ten years now and she knew how to do it. Henry’s returns were here as well, and the store contributed the lion’s share of the household income and there was a lot of it. The Wiest name had been good for eighty years. Generations of families had shopped there. It looked like Henry was bringing in over a quarter of a million every year. That was his profit, after supplies, personnel, and other costs. He owned the building. That was an excellent living; it would have kept them both in style and she didn’t have to work. But she did, and they lived modestly, and as far as she could tell, they respected, but did not admire, money. Henry had already endowed a countywide hockey trophy. It was top prize in each division of girls’ hockey in the region. It was called The Wiest Westmuir Trophy.

  There was nothing in this room and there was no way of knowing if there had been anything of interest when the girl went through it.

  Hazel went down the hallway to the bedroom and flipped the lights. No other forms of life. The two open dresser drawers were the ones she’d spied last time, both pulled all the way out, the top one concealing the lower. A bloom of clothing burst from the top drawer. She went through the top two drawers, found nothing, and closed them. The bottom one was closed. Hazel opened it and lying almost centred on top of a folded Hudson’s Bay blanket was a ledger book. She grabbed it greedily.

  She opened the ledger. It was hard to make out what all the cheques might be for; there were so many company names that could have been his suppliers. She ran her finger up the columns, scanning the recent entries. She flipped pages back and forth, comparing dates, checking monthlies, looking for easy patterns. There were many. But just two weeks ago, there had been a cheque made out to cash for ten thousand dollars. July 31, five days before his body had shown up in the Eagle’s rear parking lot. Cashable by anyone, but it looked as if he’d cashed the cheque himself. He hadn’t wanted to categorize the expense; probably thought he would be able to cancel the debit out and explain it away if his accountant – or the government – ever asked. So what was the ten thousand for? He seemed to have spent forty-five hundred. And then the girl had helped herself to twenty-five hundred. Was this about money or not? What was this bloody girl looking for?

  Roland Forbes was starving. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. But he’d be home in time for supper: he’d seen something a few hours back, and then he’d seen it again. Now he was sure. He pushed himself up to his knees and stretched his stiffened back. Sometimes police work was almost comical: you committed to actions that made you look and feel ridiculous. But then, sometimes you got to have this feeling of a job well done. Milled out of the dailiness and normality of the world sometimes you could make out patterns and resonances. He sat behind the wheel moving his head around on his neck in little circles and looked at his tick marks again.

  The people who arrived at the Eagle alone, on foot, or in vehicles of their own, were both men and women.

  The people who arrived alone on foot or in vehicles of their own and who left with bags were both men and women. Of the men and women who had arrived on foot, and who clearly made purchases, some left in taxis. Some did not.

  The people who arrived alone on foot and who left without bags were men and women.

  Of these men and women, some took taxis. Some of those taxis turned left onto Queesik Bay Road and some turned right, in the direction of Dublin, the edge of the reserve’s territory, and Westmuir County as well.

  And two men and one woman had arrived in their own cars, gone into the smoke shop, left without bags, and then got into taxis, leaving their cars behind. And all of those taxis had turned right.

  2

  Saturday, August 13, and Sunday, August 14

  ] 15 [

  She rode the bike under the moon, north out of town, and kept to the smaller roads, just in case. She no longer had the electric gun on her. She’d used the last cartridge on the woman, and there was no hope of getting any more. They had been effective.

  It would be easier now with the cash. She’d grabbed some clothing out of the drawers in the bedroom – a blue hoodie, a couple of pairs of socks, and a pair of pants – and when she stopped at a gas station, past midnight, she imagined she looked like any other person out at night. Still, she kept her face hidden within the hoodie, as she bought another map, a bar of soap, and a chocolate bar. She ate the chocolate ravenously as she continued on the bike and felt the sugar swelling in her veins, driving her on. She hadn’t felt this alive in a long time.

  All along the roads here were quaint signs pointing down lanes to cottages. Little wooden fish or buoys with names painted on them. She went down one, the road turning to gravel, and rode the bicycle all the way to the bottom, where a line of cottages was spread out along the reedy shoreline of a lake. Some of the cottages were lit – these she avoided and carefully walked the bike between two that were quiet and dark. She leaned the bike against one of them and shucked her clothes in the dark before walking down to the water’s edge, naked, with the bar of soap in her hand.

  The water was cool but not cold; it was getting close to the middle of August now. She’d seen the date on a newspaper: yesterday had been Wednesday, August 10, 2005. Now the lakes would be keeping some of the daytime’s warmth in the nighttime. She gratefully slid in waist-deep and dunked herself. When had she last felt this kind of peace? She washed herself from head to toe and even used the soap to wash her hair. It wasn’t shampoo, but it would do.

  She swam out in the calm, past the ends of the few docks where watercraft were moored. There was plenty of evidence of children here in the form of bathing rings and blow-up toys. She had the feeling that she’d stumble
d on to a little community, the kind of place where you could leave your kids for a few minutes and you knew someone would be watching them. You wouldn’t even have to ask. When she’d been a child, her parents sometimes had rented a place like this, usually once a summer, where her father could get away from his desk job in the city. Sometimes they’d go with their neighbours – Anton and his wife, Theodora, and their son, Nicolas, whom she had liked. They’d splash around in the water and make elaborate meals at one or the other’s cabin, and then the adults would stay up clinking glasses and telling stories. Larysa thought back on those days, and remembered herself at ten, and twelve, and fourteen, thinking about a boy her age, just one wall away, one wall separating them. She’d been a romantic girl, imagining her wedding, the look on her father’s face. Of course she’d marry Nicolas. There was no question of that. She wondered where he was now. Last she’d heard, he’d moved away to school. She’d stayed at home while she studied for her masters in human physiology, and rarely thought of him anymore.

  She floated on her back beneath the clear, star-filled sky and the moonlight glinted off the parts of her that stayed above the water: her toes, the tops of her thighs, the little mound of belly, the tops of her breasts. A prickling of pubic hair floated on the surface of the water like tiny fronds. Her body had changed later than most. Her mother had reassured her that the same thing had happened to her when she was a girl, and it took sixteen years for Larysa’s body to wake up and change. Now she liked what she saw: she was slender, but not thin, with good legs and breasts, and even her face had changed in the last three years: all the teenaged roundness was now gone. There was an angularity to her face, something longer and more adult had settled into her features. She felt she had a face that had to be taken seriously, a face that would look all right if she smoked with it. But she was training to be a nurse, so smoking was out. At least smoking tobacco was. She was still a kid, after all. No more. She’d never be able to think of herself as young girl again.

  When she got out of the water, the air set her skin ablaze with cold and she felt every hair stand on end. She rushed back between the cottages where she’d left the bike and used the sweatshirt to towel off. When she was dry enough, she dressed and huddled, bent over for warmth, against the wall. It was too late now to get anywhere else, and she had to sleep. It would have been possible to use some of Henry’s money to get a motel room, but she was too tired to carry on for the night. Instead, she waited, bundled up in her clothing, until she was sure no one had seen her, and then she broke into one of the cottages she was certain was empty, quietly cutting the screen out of a back door with the knife Henry had given her. Then she used it to pry the plate off the base of the door handle and unscrew the mechanism. She was in luck: in a place like this, people didn’t worry too much about the security of their doors. She wheeled the bike into the cottage.

  Inside it was silent and the air was stale and cool. She was certain that no one was living here right now. She moved through the rooms in the dark and only switched on a light over the bathroom sink. It was enough to see by in the rest of the cottage. It was clear that no one had stayed here recently, and perhaps that meant she could spend a couple of days here, recovering. The fridge was empty, and the beds were unmade, but by the glow of diffused light, she was able to find some bedding, which she threw on the couch. She lay down and closed her eyes, but her mind was still revving from everything she’d done and been through in the last few days, and she could not sleep. By now, she realized, Henry’s wife would have gone to the police and her existence would be confirmed. She could have killed Henry’s wife. What would another have mattered? They’d be looking for her now. They knew what she looked like.

  She couldn’t sleep. She got off the couch and looked at her drawn, thin face in the mirror. Too thin. Her hair was straggly. If the police had a likeness of her, this hair would give her away. She got her knife out and took a hank of hair in her fist. She leaned over the bathroom sink and hacked it off. Her hand came free again and again with sheaves of light brown hair. She stared at them in her palm and thought with wonder that the tips of the hairs in her hand had probably emerged from her scalp at a time in her life when there had been no trouble at all except getting her essays in on time. These dead cells had been alive briefly in their follicle and then, like a shadow expressing the passage of time, they had been pushed out. They’d had one of the old movie channels in the living room in Bochko’s house. In one of them, a woman said, “Here I was born, and here I died.” That was what the body did, measuring out its hours and days in hair and nails. Rings around your years.

  Larysa dropped the hair into the sink and took another handful of it up.

  When she was done, it looked pretty ragged, but it was different. She didn’t look at all as she had before, and that was what mattered.

  She woke to a smart rapping on the door. She’d fallen asleep. It was late morning now – perhaps even early afternoon – and someone knew she was in there. She called out, “Just a second!” and threw on her pants and pulled the hoodie down over herself. She put the knife into the pocket in her sweats.

  It was a woman standing at the door, a giant thing holding a zippered portfolio the size of a laptop against her chest. Larysa opened the door, hoping she could somehow skate through whatever this was going to be and then go on to plan the rest of her day.

  The woman offered a cheery “Hullo!” and stepped into the cottage, looking around. She saw the bedsheets on the couch and turned and frowned at Larysa. “Why didn’t you sleep in the bedroom?” She made an angry face. “Are the beds not made? I told the girl to make the beds.”

  “No, no,” said Larysa. “She made the bed. I thought bed was too soft.”

  “Nonsense,” said the woman. “They’re Posturepedics. They’re new, too.” She walked into the kitchen and pulled out a chair. “I’m just here to give you your receipt. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow morning – didn’t you have the place from tomorrow?”

  “Oh, well, I get off early and I thought I come up –”

  “How’d you get in?” said the lady now, her head just slightly tilted.

  “Back door.”

  She was still for a moment. “You French Canadian or something?”

  Larysa hesitated. “Yes. From Quebec.”

  “I can tell from your accent. Subtle, but I can pick up those kinds of things. Nothing gets past Rita. Nest pah?” Larysa laughed. It came out sounding a little strangled. “And you rode your bike in from the train in Port Dundas? Rather desperate to start your vacation!”

  They shared a laugh now, the landlady’s rough burble covering Larysa’s anxiousness. She’d become talented of late in the game of playing along, and luckily the landlady had never met the woman she thought Larysa was.

  “Hubby’s coming up with your daughter?”

  “Ah, she has school early tomorrow, and they come up after.”

  “Funny, you said in your email that she had already finished her summer school,” the woman said, looking up.

  “I mean, ballet school.”

  “Ah, of course. Who has school on a Saturday in the middle of summer, anyway?”

  The lady tore a thin white piece of paper out of a receipt book and handed it to Larysa. “Well, that makes it official. You’ll get the damage deposit back by mail once we’ve checked everything.” She stepped forward to give Larysa the paper slip and took the opportunity to look around. “Did you bring anything with you?”

  “My husband is bring everything we need.”

  “Milk? Butter?” Larysa shook her head. “Well, this is silly. Do you have money, at least?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, give me ten minutes and I’ll drive you into town. Ridiculous sitting in the dark without so much as a cup of tea and a piece of toast.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, waving the woman away in as friendly a fashion as she could muster. But she was going to have to get out of here right
now. No more resting, which was unfortunate, because her energy was still building. She needed more time to plan, but the landlady was insisting on being helpful.

  “Splash some water on your face and meet me outside in five minutes, young lady. What’s your name, again?”

  “Kitty,” she said, and she went to get ready to be seen in the world.

  The town was called Compton Mills. She remembered seeing the name on the map. Gilchrist wasn’t far away. When the landlady was deep in the frozen-foods aisle, Larysa told her she was going to use the washroom, and she walked back out to the parking lot. It was the kind of place where people just left their car keys in the ignition, or tucked up under the visor. It was a pity because back at the cottages the children from other cabins had already filed out, laughing and fighting, and the water would be full of them. Just an hour among children would have done wonders for her, and she could have had the cottage for the whole day. But she had to get going now. She had not been careful enough. There would be too many people looking for her now.

  ] 16 [

  Saturday, August 13, morning

  He called her at home at 5 a.m. He’d been awake since before dawn. “James?” she said when she heard his voice on the other end of the line. “Is everything okay?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. Thinking about the case.”

  “Nothing is happening, James. You’re on vacation, remember?”

  “I’m not so good at it. How’s your mother?”

  “Imperfect.”

  “What did Forbes discover?”

  She squeezed her eyes together; she wasn’t quite awake. Her body could manage to stay asleep until six most mornings; five was still too early. “Something about the taxicabs down there.”