The Night Bell Read online

  Since they had the murder weapon – it remained firmly lodged in Sandra Fremont’s skull – the report merely made official what they already knew: Oscar Fremont had suffered a fatal loss of blood as a result of being stabbed multiple times in the face and throat. Sandra Fremont died from a single knife wound to the head. She’d already been stabbed when she struck the desk, and the killer used extra force to drive the knife into the floor.

  Hazel and Ray were still looking over the report when Melanie Cartwright advised Hazel that DC Torrance had sent a copy of her report from the crime scene. Fraser had written a report of his own on the weekend and submitted it. Neither report made any mention of Wingate. “The forensics and the reports look fine, but there’s nothing to build a case out of,” Ray said.

  “I guess it’s their problem now,” Hazel said. “What about our further instructions? You know, on the case we’re permitted to work?”

  “There’s nothing,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “More cryptic gibberish. Pronounce his name. End his line. Came in an hour ago.”

  “Pronounce his name.”

  “End his line.”

  “Show me.”

  He spun his screen around toward her and she read the six words written in full caps. “What do you make of it?” Hazel asked.

  “Someone thinks we’re going to jump when they tell us to.”

  “We’re not? Oh, right. Depends what direction they want us to jump in.”

  He looked right at her, and his expression clouded. “I swear to god, as soon as Willan unties my hands –”

  She just laughed. “Good thing no one’s given you a real clue yet. Then what would you do?” She didn’t give him a chance to reply. The bad taste in her mouth was beginning to sour her stomach, too.

  She returned to her glass-windowed office and accidentally glowered at Cartwright, who held her palms up in questioning supplication. Hazel waved her off. Clearly, word of her trespass hadn’t arrived yet. None of the Queen’s representatives were in the lobby brandishing their gleaming crops. Let them come on their ceremonial black horses and try to cover up one of her investigations. She stabbed a key on her keyboard and her computer sputtered to life, issuing clicky creaks from deep within its plastic shell. She wasn’t going to break her word to Ray again unless she really, really had to. But he’d said nothing about continuing her research, so she logged on and went to the BMD archive at gov.on.ca and looked under DEATHS. You could search by year and sub-search by county. She typed in 1951 and Westmuir.

  There had been eighty-six deaths in Westmuir County in 1951. The website let you refine your search by date of birth, sex, marital status, or date of death. If you found something you liked, you could click through to the detailed listing. And then, for fifteen bucks, they’d send you an official copy of the certificate. Compared to the olden days, when information was stored in drawers and files and stacks, it was a snap. But it was insubstantial whereas index cards were real. You could trust an index card.

  She scanned the 1951 death records, looking for males with birthdates between 1942 and 1947. There were none. In 1952, there were one hundred and eight deaths, none of them in her subset. One boy, born 1944, died in 1953 by lightning strike. That would be easy enough to cross-reference with medical records or obits. She felt queasy as soon as she realized she was pleased she’d found at least one record of a dead child. Kids fell afoul of gravity or speed all the time, but even in the 1950s they’d mostly survived their brushes with mortality. It struck her how unusual it was that just the bones they had already found had increased the yearly total of that demographic by something like seven hundred per cent.

  Her math almost held. For the years 1951 to 1955 she found only two deaths in her category: the lightning strike and a drowning. There was one more in the other half of the decade: a boy had slipped off a stone roof near Mayfair and broken his neck. No doubt these tragic stories would be told in the newspaper archives. She could buy proof of their deaths for $15 apiece.

  Three lives cut short by sad, tragic accidents. Boys properly buried, remembered, and grieved. Many of the people who had wept were now dead, and many who witnessed their suffering were also dead. Their dates, all of them, entered dutifully into the public record.

  The bones from the fields belonged to boys whose deaths had not been officially recorded. The boys they were looking for had even lost their names. She clicked out of the database and leaned back in her chair. Melanie looked through the glass, as if willing Hazel to give her something to do, but Hazel shook her head and looked away. Then she looked back up. Melanie’s attention was elsewhere, so Hazel threw a tennis ball at the window. It went whonk.

  “Oh my god!” Cartwright shrieked. She jumped up and sped around to Hazel’s door. “Please don’t do that.”

  “How else am I going to get your attention? Did you bring something to take notes on?”

  “No.”

  “Go get your pen, Cartwright.”

  Melanie took a pen and some paper off Hazel’s desk. “In my heart, you’ll always be the skip, but Commander Greene is getting along with no one on his front desk – he’s taking his own calls – and half the time you’re not even h –”

  “Look up the number of the Westmuir County Archives. Tell them we would like to see the records of both the Dublin Home for –”

  “Slow down.”

  “Boys. I want the years 1951 to 1960.”

  “It’s almost five p.m.”

  “Call them first thing in the morning, tell them I’ll be there at nine a.m., and just give my name as Hazel. Don’t tell them why I’m interested.”

  “Keep it on the down low?”

  “If you must keep it anywhere. You can go. And thanks. Oh!” Cartwright stopped in the doorway. “Don’t tell Ray.”

  “Honestly, Skip?”

  “Technicalities.”

  Hazel packed up for the night and saw that Wingate was still at his desk. He was in civvies. “What are you still doing here?”

  “Cleaning up my desk. You going home?”

  She looked around to check if they were alone and then pulled up a chair. “I was just looking through official records to get an idea of how common the deaths of adolescents were in the fifties. Not very. And nothing connects to Dublin Home. We need to find out where the boys went when they left there. Check them all off. When families took them. When they were transferred to another institution. When they reached majority and entered the workforce. There should be further documentation on every boy who left Dublin Home. If there isn’t, maybe we have a missing boy. That would be huge.”

  “How’re you going to do that?”

  “County archives in Mayfair.”

  “Wish I was on.”

  “I’ll pick you up at eight. Dress in your own clothes for god’s sake. We’re going in as regular citizens.”

  Hazel drove an ever more battered, sagging Victoria – the same cruiser she’d driven since she was named interim CO back in 1995. James Wingate sat in the passenger seat, where the upholstery was much less worn, and dozed. She was driving this shitbox American boat, but Ray Greene was driving a 2007 Toyota. It was part of the deal when Willan hired him as skip. Was that his way of ensuring Ray’s support? Port Dundas needed a local cheerleader for amalgamation, and who better to lead than the chief of police? Ray couldn’t be bought, she knew that. But he was a lot more co-operative with Willan than she had been, and she couldn’t help but wonder if Ray had been offered incentives.

  Or maybe Willan hired Ray to push me over the edge, give me a reason to really overstep. Then – bam! – I’m fired.

  Wingate wasn’t much for conversation at half past eight, and she was dwelling on past ills. After Ray quit under her, it took her a long time to forgive him because they had been friends. It was strained even after they patched things up, and sometimes it was still strained. She had a habit of letting people break her trust only once.

  Just the same, Ray’s
return to the fold was clearly going as smoothly as everyone had hoped. She was already over the feelings of worry and then jealousy that had accompanied his reappearance at the station house. She wasn’t made for being in charge anyway, and Ray was. Ray commanded respect without asking for it, because he was Ray Greene. But respect was overrated. The main task was to bring people over to your side. Or not. Defining positions. It did you well in your work to have a suspicious mind, and Hazel needed to know where people stood. It didn’t matter if they respected her or not.

  A sign went by that said Mayfair 33 km.

  Of course, you had to be right in the end, but that’s supposed to be the talent: reading people. The habits of mind that you harnessed to detective work also led to seeing connections everywhere, including where there might be none at all. But why wasn’t Ray angry? The case was being taken away from him too.

  “You know, I can’t stop seeing them,” Wingate said. His voice jarred her back to herself.

  “I’m sorry, James. Who?”

  “The Fremonts. I see her … feet, and the handle of the knife –”

  “You shouldn’t have gone down there. Really. Look at you. Do you look like this every morning?”

  “Michael gives me something to sleep.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something that keeps me from thinking about girls buried alive or the blood all over the Fremonts’ hall rug.”

  She shook her head as if to shake the images out. “I have to wonder, James …”

  “What.”

  “If you’re taking care of yourself.”

  “Michael thinks I’m ready to come back. He says I’ve made a lot of progress and I have to get all this energy varnished. Harnessed.”

  “Energy? You never used to talk like this.”

  “I know all about energy now, Skip. It’s real.”

  “I know it’s real,” she said, beginning to feel irritated with him. “But vague words like energy make me worry you’re unravelling. What detective even has the word energy in his vocabulary?” He shifted in his seat and she looked over at him. “I need to trust you, James. I’m vouching for you. Tell me the truth: do you think you’re ready to come back?”

  For a moment, his posture reminded her of a scolded boy. He pressed his lips together hard as if he were trying to keep from blurting the truth. Finally, he said, “No.”

  The Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services had only been established in 2003, and the scattered local and regional records pertaining to orphanages and children’s aid societies in the province were still being collected from all over so they could be centralized at the ministry’s head office in Toronto. Some offices and organizations had already digitized their own records; others had sent originals or copies to Toronto. Earlier, microfilmed records had all but disintegrated, and Hazel worried that the years they were looking for might no longer exist. The age of the victims tied them to the home, as no boys over the age of majority would have lived there.

  “I might have been just a little girl when these boys died. Who could have imagined that such a thing could be going on in the countryside in the fifties?”

  They walked down Grand Street in Mayfair. Wingate was still logy from the earliness of the hour. “Why would anything surprise you anymore?”

  “Keep up,” she said.

  Grand had been Mayfair’s main thoroughfare for almost two hundred years. Buildings of yellow brick fired in local kilns gave a wealthy look to the street, the two sides of which faced off in sometimes identical facades. The Westmuir County Archives and Licensing Centre occupied one half of an old brick warehouse back from the main road. The other half of the building was the Legion.

  They were not in their uniforms, so they were asked to wait in the completely empty foyer of the records office. The features of the foyer were a row of chairs, a door, and a window with a woman behind it, tightly wound in a wool shawl, who with an air of anxiety had told them it might be some time before anyone could help them. Just as they settled in for the wait, a man came out of the door and offered his hand. “How can I help you?” he asked.

  “My assistant called about county death records. Between 1951 and 1960.”

  “Oh, that was you.”

  “Were you expecting someone different?”

  “No, I just didn’t realize you were two people.”

  “Do you get many people here, Mr. –?”

  “Putchkey.”

  “Putchkey. Do you get many members of the public coming around to look at these records?”

  “No,” Putchkey said in a tight voice. He was a thin, nervous man of about sixty, with a flipper for a left arm. It had the words Seize The Day tattooed on it. “This is the first time in seven years anyone’s asked to see children’s records from Dublin Home. We were just talking about it, me and Cutter and Mrs. Hanteleh.”

  Wingate, seeing Hazel’s lips flatten, took over. “I’m James Wingate. This is my colleague, Hazel Micallef.”

  “Gale Putchkey.”

  Hazel saw the top of the receptionist’s head behind the window, bobbing in and out of the frame as if she were pecking at something. “Is everything OK here today? What’s she doing?”

  “The records have been set aside,” Putchkey said, letting them pass through the door.

  When they went behind, Hazel saw the shawled receptionist was hunched over her desk, her eye practically against a crossword book, a pen glued to her cheek. “Mrs. Hanteleh?” Putchkey said to her, and her head thrust up.

  “Ha?”

  “These people are here to see some records.”

  “Are they going in?”

  “Please.”

  Hanteleh reached under her desk and pressed a buzzer. Putchkey opened another door onto stairs leading down. “A Hebrew pigeon,” Hanteleh said. “Seven letters.”

  Downstairs they came to a wooden desk by another door. The person behind it, an older man in overalls, rose and offered his hand to Hazel. “Nice to meet you,” he said. His grip was stronger than he looked. “Leon Cutter.”

  The Putchkey fellow was hovering behind them. This was a government office, but people were acting loopy. Either they were all on drugs or they were gripped by fascination. “When was the last time anyone came to this office?” Hazel asked.

  Putchkey tented his fingers against his sternum. “My office? Mrs. Hanteleh brought me a Danish just three hours –”

  “I mean to see some records.”

  “Last month,” said Cutter. “Gale, I’ve got this.”

  Putchkey deflated. “I wanted to see this stuff.”

  “You can see it any time. These two, they came looking for it.”

  He let them into the archives.

  A room was ready for them. Metal cabinets lined one wall. The contents of the drawers, to judge by the tags affixed to them, held the records of humans and services in a variety of provincial institutions, including the mental asylums, the nursing homes, the children’s homes, and the TB hospitals. She opened one of the drawers. A small wooden box at the front contained index cards meticulously summarizing the files in the drawer. Perhaps it was not so different from the online records database after all. Each card had been typed, its embossed letters mainly in black but sometimes in red. The various methods of erasure practised through the decades were present, including single strips of paper glued over errors.

  The hand truck used to haul these cabinets out of their dark storage was still inside the room, and the person who had done the lugging now showed them to a wooden table with a solid pine top and three chairs. The table was bowed from years of being burdened with paper.

  Cutter had a strongman’s body, although he wasn’t thick in the limbs or the chest. He’d evidently been a wiry mongoose-type once, but the cables of muscle in his neck and arms had gone slack. “If I can be of any use,” he said, “you know where to find me. The Wi-Fi code is Beethoven. Does everybody know how to spell –”

  “How well do you know your way arou
nd these records?” Hazel asked.

  “I more or less know them inside out.”

  “And how good a job did they do with the filing back in the fifties?”

  “Painstaking. I’m sure there was some sloppiness, but the people who organized this information cared about it. You can tell. The Internet is a dumping site. You can’t really find anything. Only what wants to be found.”

  “Stirring words,” Hazel said. “We’re looking for dead ends. Individuals whose births are on record, and who are documented somewhere in these boxes as wards of the province. When they were no longer wards, they should have entered other records. Tax rolls, marriage licences, death certificates. But we want to find boys between the ages of ten and seventeen who disappeared from these institutional records and whose names never appeared again.”

  “May I ask why you are interested?”

  She looked over at Wingate, whose face was a blank. “We’re working on a book.”

  “About?”

  “The history of children’s homes in Canada.”

  Cutter blinked at her a couple of times. “I was hoping you were police.”

  “We’re writing a book,” Wingate said.

  “My mistake.”

  He left them to it, and Hazel and Wingate began to cull. She went on to the Ontario archives website again, and he began calling out names and birthdates. Dublin Home had been a train station for boys coming and going. For 1952, Wingate read out the names and birthdates of all the boys who left there and whose files contained a final entry. These final entries directed the reader to another branch of government if he or she wanted to read on, and they would be stamped FILE CLOSED on that last page. Adopted: see records at the Government of Ontario site. FILE CLOSED. Turned eighteen and left Charterhouse: check marriage and death certificates. FILE CLOSED. Died of scarlet fever at Charterhouse: see death records. FILE CLOSED. One after another, she could follow them. They bobbed up out of the chaos here and there, but they checked out. Boy leaves Dublin Home, boy eventually registers for Ontario Medical Services Insurance Plan, boy marries girl, boy’s name appears on registration of live birth, and so on till death, should death already have come for him.