The Night Bell Read online

  But the murdered boys, whoever they were, weren’t going to have closed files. There would be no final entries for them. Hazel wondered if their files had been destroyed. “We need to find an admissions ledger of some kind,” she said. “These personal files were kept individually, but there has to be something that was more basic. If our murderer was on the ball, he or she would probably have culled his victims’ files.”

  “So you’re thinking we need names that never made it through the records?”

  “Something that is evidence they were taken in, but perhaps nothing else. Hints and shadows.”

  “What about medical records? Pharmacy records?”

  “We have to find their names first, confirm they were actually at Dublin. Then maybe we can find them elsewhere while they’re still alive.”

  Wingate leaned forward and cleared some folders from in front of him, and looked out into the middle distance. “What about a false paper trail?”

  “It would have been hard to forge the right papers.”

  “Let’s look for your ledger.”

  They called Cutter back in. “What about each institution’s records, like admission books, ledgers, class lists? Is that stuff kept here?”

  “Can you tell me what, specifically, you’re trying to find?”

  “Anything someone intent on erasing a person’s records might have missed.”

  “Administrative records,” Cutter said. “Something like that?”

  “A loose end,” Hazel said. “When could you have something for us?”

  “Tomorrow,” Cutter said. “I can call the number you left?”

  “Don’t,” she replied. “One of us will come back in the morning.”

  That worked for him, and he led them back out to the foyer and exchanged handshakes. Hazel held the man’s hand a moment too long. “If we were police,” she asked him, “would you have shown us anything else?”

  “No,” Cutter said. “Down here, everything is a cold case. I figure who else would be interested?”

  She was getting a tingle. “Where are you from, Mr. Cutter?” she asked.

  “From? I’ve lived here my whole life.”

  “In the archives?” Wingate asked, and then laughed. Cutter laughed. Hazel didn’t.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  Cutter held the door to the stairs open for them and they went through. “Listen,” he called after them. “I sure didn’t mean to question your credentials or anything. Whatever you’re here for, you’re members of the public and I’m here to make sure you get what you need.”

  Hazel led the way up the stairs, and they left the building without another word.

  ] 12 [

  Wednesday, October 24, morning

  Brendan Givens had failed to find satisfaction in his life. A career that paid decently (he didn’t care to be rich, just comfortable) and allowed him to spend time with some nice people and also offered him the opportunity to get laid once in a while had been his sole ambition. But the modesty of his goals had not brought them within his reach. He hated the people he worked with, and not just the people who were on the corporate side at the Ascot Group, but also the upper management and employees of Tournament Acres itself, a wholly owned subsidiary. And also the residents of Tournament Acres, who were cheap, classless crybabies, with not a woman among them worth tapping. Except for Mrs. Freemey, but there was a police car in front of her house three times a week. So many single women – divorcees with settlements misled into buying “country homes” – but he’d not landed one of them. He’d not touched a woman in over fifteen years. It was over between him and women.

  He sipped his whole-fat, extra-foam mocha in the window of a downtown café. He’d been in Toronto for more than twenty-four hours now, and he still had no idea what to do with himself. The bars opened at eleven and he’d walked from his dive hotel to a dive bar and devoted what remained of the morning to drinking. Now he was in a place called He Brews (Where coffee and klezmer come together!) applying caffeine to the problem and trying to come up with a plan.

  Going back to Tournament Acres was out of the question. When fricasseed bodies start to turn up on a property you’re managing, that’s when your contract is over. No favours asked or owed.

  And there’d been that text.

  He shuddered and took his drink outside to the street. This was the rainbow part of town. Every city had one. All power to them, they never hurt anybody. He smiled at a couple of women coming toward him. When the sidewalk traffic thinned, he dosed his coffee from a flask. The cup, which had been about half-full for some time now, had changed from coffee with brandy to brandy with coffee.

  He’d calmed down since booting it south on the 400 yesterday morning – in the Fremonts’ car. It had been nothing to go into the house and find the keys to their Infiniti. If the person who had sent him the text was already on top of him, maybe he’d be watching for the wrong car. That’s good thinking, B. He’d arrived in the city close to eight. He’d taken nothing with him but the cash in the safe, which amounted to eighty-five hundred or so. Beside one of the water traps, he’d burned all his IDs except his passport and driver’s licence and then kicked the ashes in.

  It was ten months since he’d last been in Toronto, but it felt like a safe haven now, a place to blend in. He’d left the Fremonts’ car deep in the long-term parking at Pearson Airport and he was getting around in taxis. He’d get the car in a few days maybe, then go over the border in Quebec. He’d tell the customs guy he was going down to play poker in Connecticut. He’d leave the Infiniti on a side street in Chateaugay or Rouses Point. Then it occurred to him that there could be a problem if he went over the border in the Fremonts’ car. Maybe it would be best to park it on the Canadian side and go over on foot.

  He went back into the coffee house. It was starting to get busy. He didn’t want to be around people now.

  In his forty-nine years, he’d caught two people surreptitiously drawing him in one of those little pocket notebooks. In both sketches, his bulbous nose had looked even larger than it did in the mirror. God had given him this nose, and when he was younger his mother enthused to him that a big nose was character, a big nose attracted smart women. But a big nose had just made him look like a shorebird with good hair. Many times he’d considered a nose job, but he couldn’t have done it while his mother was still alive, and now that she was dead, he still heard her saying, “God gave you that nose!” And there was also the problem with the surgery: the thought of being cut up terrified him. They would have to cut his face.

  No one inside He Brews was drawing him, but the place was lousy with people typing on laptops. What if any of the people in this place were working for Ascot? Half of them had to be failed novelists, but who were the other half?

  He looked over the shoulder of one of the typers as he drank some water. Gotta keep hydrated. She was an older woman wearing a couple of gaudy rings, her hands passing back and forth over the keys. She typed with only her two middle fingers and used her right index finger for the space bar.

  Maybe everybody watches everybody else. I watch people, he thought. I watch everything. That’s how I knew when to blow town. I have a sense about things.

  Not all things. He was drunk and he could be honest with himself. After a certain amount of brandy, he knew the truth, but later he could never remember it.

  The lady with the rings was typing line after line as if someone were dictating to her. He looked over her shoulder and read the line The dead wear expressions of drunken stupor. He shuddered again. She sensed him and turned around.

  She had short hair with one thick streak of grey in it. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “How can you write something like that? Is that a diary?”

  “Mister, do I know you?”

  “I hope not,” he said.

  First thing Wednesday morning, James Wingate was back at the front door of the Westmuir County Archives and Licensing Centre. Cutter gave him a fun
ny look as he unlocked the office. Then he took Wingate down and showed him the inventory of admin material from Dublin Home, some of it in steel boxes and dating back to the turn of the last century. Wingate dug through for the relevant years and pulled the logbooks from the home’s registrar, as well as vaccination records. The vax records themselves were snapshots of boys passing through. They’d taken no chances: new boys got all new shots.

  He kept notes on his laptop, although he would have preferred to put everything in pen in his notebook. He took down the names that they hadn’t encountered in the personal files they’d pored through the day before. He used the summary cards from the wooden boxes in the cabinet drawers to look up names. If a name in the home’s own vax records didn’t appear among the individual records, then he looked for it in the name changes database. If it wasn’t there, he checked the BDM. A kid who’d been vaccinated in 1955 – the form telling him so was signed in ink and stamped with a red sigil – who thereafter never once appeared in the public record, was an excellent candidate for murder, he thought.

  Across platforms, the recordkeeping in various provincial offices and institutions was spotty, but it was possible to fill in the blanks. The spectres of dead boys began to fill the negative space between records, their names leaping out, singular in the welter of repetitions. He found a dozen names in the span of four years that fit his criteria. The period covered late 1955 to 1959. A big enough sample. It was a strange exercise to look for victims when he was usually tasked with finding perpetrators. From the dozen, he selected the six he liked most for further investigation.

  Charles Shearing. Born June 9, 1945. Bounced around, ended up at Dublin Home in 1955, according to both the registrar log and vax records. Wingate logged into the archives’ Wi-Fi and checked the federal databases: no passport, no SIN, never named in a criminal or civil suit. April 14, 1955, he arrived at Dublin Home and then vanished off the public record.

  Valentijn Deasún. DOB November 30, 1944. Mother died at birth, no father. St. Patrick Home, 1944 to 1947. Transferred July 18, 1947, at the age of two-and-a-half to the Dublin Home for Boys. Fostered out to a family in Brigham; back in the system at Charterhouse in Renfrew County on January 15, 1958; transferred to Dublin Home for a second time later that same month. Record ends. No such name in the passport records, no social insurance number, no marriage certificate, no death certificate, no burial place on either Interment.net or the online Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid.

  “The next two were at the Charterhouse orphanage in Renfrew County, though,” said Wingate. “Both Charterhouse and Dublin Home were in the same catchment and there’s a lot of back and forth between the homes.” He turned two sheets of paper to face Hazel. She was sitting across from him in Uncle Pepper’s, the burger joint on the highway between Mayfair and Port Dundas. The owners had converted a bunch of old train cars into dining rooms. “Brothers,” said Wingate. “Claude and Eloy Miracle.”

  “Miracle?”

  “That’s what it says. Kahnawake Mohawks. DOBs unknown, but they had Indian Status cards when they arrived at Charterhouse in 1956. They put Claude as twelve and Eloy as nine. Then they were both transferred to Dublin Home. Claude was fostered out in 1960, but there’s not another mention of Eloy in the provincial or federal records.”

  The fifth and six boys had come to Charterhouse without last names. In such cases, these children of nobody were given a local name or even took the name of the home. There had been quite a few St. Pierres in the records, after the name of a home in the town of Renfrew.

  They asked for the check and split it. “We only need a single drop of blood to link one of these names to one of those bones,” Hazel said.

  “It’s going to be hard to find the blood relations of dead orphans.”

  “That’s why we should start with the brothers. The Miracles.”

  They arrived at the station house right at shift change. Wingate went quietly to his desk. By the time the afternoon staff came in, Hazel had found the couple that had adopted Claude Miracle in the records of the town of Gannon Lake: Thom and Georgia Wetherling. But she could find no record of Claude Wetherling himself. Nor of Claude Miracle. A name like Miracle would be hard to hide. Maybe he changed it, became someone new? There should have been a record of that.

  There were plenty of Wetherlings. More than fifty, as it turned out, and by lunchtime, she’d spoken with fifteen of them – some kin and some not – trying to stay on an east–west tack from Renfrew County all the way to the Manitoba border. There had been a concentration of them around Dundas, Ontario. Cattlemen and sheepherders and corn farmers up behind the town and on both sides. There, the name went back to the early 1900s. She found a Wetherling outside of Dundas, in a gesture of a place called Copetown. This Wetherling was named Hadley – she was her daughter Martha’s age. She told Hazel that from the 1930s until the mid-1960s, orphan kids who’d come of age sometimes ended up working the fields near there and around Hamilton. Sometimes they’d ended up joining a family. Hadley Wetherling was the local family historian and she’d kept everything she’d found in relation to the family name, at least in Southwestern Ontario. Hazel highlighted the lady’s number in her notebook and next to it wrote: Has papers.

  She chased Wetherlings all the way to Fort Leonard, looking for relatives of the adoptive parents. Many of these Wetherlings thought they’d heard one thing or another about Claude Miracle/Wetherling, but none of the information she got connected together. Supposedly he had moved to Quebec, back to his band (the Mrs. Wetherling with this information did not know what the band name was); he may have, alternatively, died piloting a Cessna or a Twin Otter, although the date given for this Miracle’s death was in the 1930s.

  “Sir,” she asked an elderly Wetherling, “have you personally ever adopted a boy?”

  “No, sir, I don’t believe as I have, though I don’t have all my docaments nearby.”

  “My name is Hazel Micallef, Mr. Wetherling. I’m a woman.”

  “All right then.”

  “Can I ask you your date of birth?”

  “You can. We were born Jan’ry ninth, ought nine.”

  “We?”

  “Myself and Ewan. He’s been dead these fifty-one years now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. May I ask you: have you ever heard of a person called Claude Wetherling, or Claude Miracle? Mohawk Indian; he was adopted.”

  “Claude. Black boy, right?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Could he have been Indian?”

  “Maybe. I’m not so good with names anymore. Cousin Angie on my mother’s side I’ll say, could be wrong. Her parents had a boy when she went off to college. Got lonesome and adopted a boy.”

  “Up in the town of Lake Gannon?”

  “Sir, it might have been, but I’m ninety-seven years old and on these blood-thinner pills and r’membrin’ medicine, so I can’t tell you about that.”

  “Is Cousin Angie still alive?”

  “Oh gosh,” he said.

  “Could you give me her number if you have it?”

  “Oh, she’s moved a dozen times or more. Last I knew she was in the city.”

  “All right, thank you Mr. Wetherling.”

  “You’re welcome, young man,” he replied.

  She replaced the phone gently. “Jesus,” she muttered. She picked it up again and dialled Wingate. “Do I sound like a young man?”

  “What?”

  “Please tell me you are making the tiniest amount of progress.”

  “I have staff directories for some of the years at both places. It’s pointless, though. People moved around. Half the staff of Dublin Home started there but did a stint at Charterhouse and versa vice. Both places had some lifers, like superintendents. Maybe one of them is alive.”

  “Don’t bother with brass,” she said. “See if you can find an administrator, maybe a nurse. Someone who served a while in both homes. I’d like to talk to one of those people.” She hung up and looked at the clock: 1:30. Sh
e was going to have to eat lunch at her desk.

  Brendan Givens left He Brews at 1:30 and started walking up to his hotel at the top of Church Street. Once he was out of Boystown, the neighbourhood turned drab. Construction hoardings advertised the condos that were going to appear in the hole behind them. Life is easier – and cheaper – in Tournament Acres! That had been the radio spot. It had sold a lot of bungalows. Here they built cubbyholes high in the air. When this all cleared up, he’d land on his feet with a more reputable company. He’d start again. He’d started again many times.

  He strode past the billboard pitching High-Class Living in the Heart of Downtown, and he thought of the bottle he’d left behind in the suite. He still had the flask, though, and the flask wasn’t empty. He was reaching for it in his hip pocket when he felt the ground jar beneath his feet. Then he was suddenly alert – a car mounted the sidewalk and blew past him a foot away from his body. He pressed himself against the hoardings, trying to catch his breath. “Why don’t you learn how to drive?!” he shouted, but the car was long gone.

  The hotel was an old apartment building converted to cheap suites, but they’d given it a highfalutin name: Bristol Manor. Givens said hello to the man behind the desk, a nice ruddy-faced man with a nametag that identified him as Tic.

  He took the elevator to the third floor. In the room, he couldn’t get a signal on his shitty Nokia. He went out onto the balcony and held the phone up. No texts. Just the one he’d gotten at 4:00 a.m. the day before. It had been pretty clear:

  I know you have the files, Brendan. Why don’t you bring them back? No questions asked.

  As soon as he stepped back into the room, the phone in the suite rang. His heart was in his mouth, hammering. He felt his rib cage throb like a subwoofer. The phone rang and he stood paralyzed in the doorway. Then it stopped and a light on the handset flickered weakly, yellow and red, and in the sudden silence it felt like something had found him.