The Taken Read online

  The girl was a student at St. Pius X in Rowanville. They brought two of the most popular girls down to the hospital and they sat by the victim’s bed weeping and holding her hand. At the end of the visit, the girls left and one of them leaned over to PC Peter MacTier, who was waiting for them in the hallway, and gave him a name. They made the arrest that same afternoon.

  Wingate, sitting in a chair in the Chamber Street basement, passed Hazel the file. “They want to go to trial,” he said.

  Hazel sat opposite him, the small coffee table between them doing double duty as a desk. She was listing to one side, but he ignored it. He’d told her a number of times that she should stay in bed when he visited, but she wouldn’t have it. It was bad enough she had to greet him in a housecoat; she would not play invalid to the hilt. But he could see how difficult it was for her to sit in a chair.

  “Idiots,” she said. “They want the whole thing on record?”

  “It’s her story too. This one” – he reached across and pointed to a name in the file – “he’s got no way out and he knows it. He just wants to shame her. And his lawyer is telling him the girl’s amnesia is going to make her unreliable on the stand.”

  “She gave a name.”

  “They’re going to argue her friends suggested it to her. Although when we ran the kid through CPIC, he had two priors, one violent.”

  Hazel sighed.

  “You know she’s changed schools,” Wingate said. “She wouldn’t go back to St. Pius.”

  “Is she getting the help she needs?”

  “Our job ends with the collar, Skip. You know that. We gave her mother all the phone numbers.”

  She closed the file. “Justice ‘done’ and another life ruined,” she said. “We give the mother a list of phone numbers and hope for the best, right?” He shrugged sadly. “It’s a wonder we don’t have more heartbroken mothers on the trigger end of revenge killings, James. Honestly. If someone had done this to one of my daughters and then basically walked, I don’t know what I’d do. But you’d have to take away my sidearm for a year, I can tell you.” There was no role for the law in prevention, she thought, no role in giving solace. They said the law was an ass, but those who enforced it knew it was blind, deaf, and mute as well.

  She tossed the file onto the table. “Anything else?”

  “Well, there’s one thing,” he said, and he fished in an inside pocket, removing an envelope that had been folded in half. “This came addressed to the station house, no stamp, just a drop-off. No one has any idea what it is.” He handed it to her, and she unfolded it, noting that the address had been typed out on a label and glued to the envelope. It read “Hazel Micallef, Port Dundas OPS/Port Dundas, ON – PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL” and there was no postal code. She tipped the contents of the envelope out into her hand: a small pile of dark photographs.

  She spread the pictures out on the table in front of them. There were twelve of them. To call them photographs was generous, they were nearly black images on glossy photographic paper, but there was nothing identifiable in them. In some of them, differentiation between shades of black suggested shapes, but in none of them could a concrete image be made out.

  “What do you think?”

  “Maybe someone wants to file a complaint against a local photo lab?” she said.

  “Forbes said he thought they were pretty menacing. Like someone had sent us pictures of people with their faces X’ed out.”

  “Well, if he can find any faces in these pictures, then we’ll talk. But otherwise, I’ve got no idea what it is.”

  “Okay.” Wingate swept the photos off the table and put them back into the envelope.

  “There was no note or anything?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She shrugged. There were crackpots everywhere, even in Westmuir County. “How are things with you? People treating you right?”

  “You know. They resent me with a smile.” He cast a look around the dim room. The bed was made, the pillows squared. “And you?”

  “I’m in hell. I keep hoping you’ll show up with a saw and a change of clothes.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know. I saw Gary – Dr. Pass – yesterday. He seems to think I’m coming along.”

  He shook his head. “We all hate knowing you’re trapped down here. I wish we could make up one of the cells for you and keep you safe from all this.”

  “Anything that would get me back into work would be fine with me. I’m going crazy down here.” She saw him mask the look of pity that crossed his face. There was no way to reassure her that the situation didn’t look as strange as it did.

  He got up and put his cap back on. “Is there anything you need? I don’t mind being in charge of contraband if it would help any.”

  She fished her pills out of the terrycloth robe’s pocket and held them up to him. “I’m covered,” she said. “You want to go back to the bed?”

  She shook her head. “Glynnis is coming home for lunch in an hour. She’ll get me.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He returned the few files he had with him to his bag. “I’ll see you again on Monday,” he said.

  “I’ll be counting the hours. Literally.”

  “How is she?”

  Wingate took the day’s mail out of Melanie Cartwright’s hand and shuffled through it slowly. There was nothing else like the envelope he had in his pocket. “She’s like a tiger in a cage. It’s awful.”

  “You could always put her up in your apartment.”

  “I’m three floors up,” he said. “And anyway, no thanks. This is strange enough as it is. Anything happen while I was gone?”

  “You mean like a palace coup?”

  “Sure, anything like that?”

  “Not so far.” He handed her back the entire pile of mail. She was the one who had to deal with it anyway. “They are stockpiling arms in the cells, though. I’d watch my back if I were you.” He could only manage a half-smile.

  “Is that everything?”

  “That’s everything,” she said.

  He went into the squad room, what they all called “the pen” here, a charming touch, he thought. For a small-town shop, the Port Dundas detachment always seemed busy to him. At Twenty-one Division in Toronto, on an afternoon like this, his old squad room would be buzzing with activity of a similar-seeming sort. Desk-phones ringing; cellphones playing snatches of music; people shouting over their desks for one thing or another. And the doors to the interview rooms busy, officers marching men and women (about equally at Twenty-one) in and out of these rooms to take statements, ask questions, cops plying their peculiar forms of conversation. It was hard, after spending a day in and out of those rooms, to engage in normal conversation with normal people – the leading question was an occupational hazard. James frequently had to remind himself to ask David if anything “interesting” had happened at work rather than something “unusual.” His colleagues with families found it even harder: children and criminals often hid the truth, but for different reasons. At home, you wanted to make it safe for your kids to tell you everything; at work, you knew you had to catch a mutt in a lie. There were ways to make it safe to tell the truth, and ways to make it hard to hide it, and the tactics were different. He knew a lot of detective-mums and detective-dads who didn’t leave enough of the investigative mind at work. There was no room for love in an interview, but you had to find it in yourself again when you went home.

  He wondered how well that skillset was developed here. With these people, who rarely brought in a person they didn’t know, it had to be hard to create and maintain the atmosphere you needed to fish out something hidden. The interview room was a place where the law traded safety for the truth. But there was no motivation to trade the truth if you didn’t feel you could be endangered, and Wingate had to admit, this place felt like everything was between friends.

  Still, he marvelled at the amount of activity here. The jail cells seemed permanently empty, and yet the
phones rang off the hook. The waiting area in front of Staff Sergeant Wilton’s desk was always busy. There were desks in the pen, rather than cubicles, and it created the aura of a squad room chock-a-block with humanity. Even the unoccupied desks, piled with papers, coffee cups, family photos, desk calendars, Rolodexes, and pens, seemed poised to burst into action. All this with a staff of sixteen, only eight or nine of whom were in during daytime hours. The station house was a tenth the size of Twenty-one, but it was its own thing, in its own scale, and it was alive.

  He’d been through difficult adjustments before. His life had felt like a chain of difficult adjustments – this one didn’t really rate – but he was hoping the day would come when he wouldn’t have to question anymore where he fit in. He’d just be. Back at Twenty-one, he’d been respected, but he wasn’t sure he’d actually been liked. Naturally, a gay cop wasn’t going to end up being “one of the guys,” but he wondered if his sexual orientation actually had anything to do with it. He suspected they’d looked on him as the one who’d report an internal irregularity, the narc in their midst. They’d never had a reason to suspect him on this level, and in fact he’d turned a blind eye as often as the next guy. But there was a wall between him and his fellows and he would never know now what it had been made of. Or how to avoid the same thing here. Certainly being who he was in a small town wasn’t going to be any easier than it had been in Toronto. He’d already decided no one would know that side of him here. There was no reason to think he’d have cause to advertise it; he wasn’t interested in meeting anyone and even if he were, he doubted there’d be an opportunity. After David’s death, that part of him had gone to sleep, and he didn’t care if it ever came back.

  He’d kept busy for part of the afternoon, and then gone home for a two-hour nap. Three days a week now, with Hazel gone, he was working doubles. In at six, break from three to five, and then back in until eleven. When he returned to the station house, the evening shift change was starting. Half the cars were out on the roads already, dealing with the developing mess that was long-weekend traffic. He went to his desk to check his messages and get ready to go through the day’s reports. That was part of his job now, too. Cartwright appeared behind him. “There you are,” she said.

  “Where am I supposed to be?”

  “You missed all the excitement. We got a call from a hysterical lady up in Caplin. We sent three cars up there.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Says she found a body.”

  He immediately stood and put on his cap. “A body? Where?”

  “She said she found it in Gannon Lake. The body of a woman.”

  3

  She was still sitting on the couch, lost in thought, when Glynnis unlocked the basement door and came in. She hated it when Glynnis used her key; she felt she deserved at the very least a courteous knock. Glynnis looked to the bed and then her eyes tacked across the room and found Hazel. “There you are,” she said.

  “World explorer.”

  “You want to eat lunch there or will you be more comfortable at home base?”

  “I’ll lie down.”

  Glynnis put a paper bag on the bedspread and came over to offer an arm. Glynnis was the one who lifted her, who carried her. Twice a week, she bathed her and that was the sine qua non of Hazel’s humiliation, an unthinkable abasement, to be bathed by the woman for whom her husband had left her. But she had come to accept that there was no other way. She wrapped an arm around Glynnis’s shoulders and the two of them hobbled to the bed. “You need a pill?” Glynnis asked.

  “I’m fine for now.”

  “I brought us tuna today. Okay if I eat with you?” She asked this even as she dragged one of the chairs to the side of the bed. “I know I’m not your preferred company, but it’s silly for me to eat alone upstairs and you alone down here.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should be careful,” said Hazel. “People might start to think you really care.”

  “Well, if they do, I can just smack you around a little and clear up any confusion.”

  Hazel took a long slug of her coffee. “Do you want to smack me around, Glynnis?”

  “I can wait until you’re done your lunch.”

  “See, I knew you cared.”

  Glynnis smiled. “Keep up that positive thinking, Hazel.”

  After lunch, Hazel reset the bed into afternoon sleep-mode, but when she lay down, she wasn’t as tired as she thought she’d be. Visits from Glynnis always rattled her. The woman’s kindness was the hardest thing: it would have been for anyone. Surely Glynnis deserved to be punished for her kindness? Everything else, Hazel had earned: Andrew’s cheating on her, the divorce, her life alone with her smart-mouthed mother. But did she merit this? This awful tenderness?

  She reached across to the bedside table to choose something to read. The gardening magazines were too much for a shut-in, and she chose instead Monday’s Westmuir Record. Her mother had mentioned it was publishing the summer story. She silently prayed it wouldn’t be a romance this year. She opened to the story. It was a little mystery called “The Secret of Bass Lake.” A man and his son fishing. A cooler full of beer. The sun peeking up over the horizon. Christ, she thought, it is a romance. The writer’s photograph was printed beside his name, a cheesy image of the man standing with his legs set widely apart and his hands in his pockets in a parking lot somewhere. She closed the paper and tossed it onto the floor.

  An hour passed. Slowly. She sat up and put her legs over the side of the bed. Dr. Pass hadn’t actually told her she was “coming along.” He’d gone down her left leg with a pin he’d taken out of his bulletin board – a nod to country doctoring – pricking her leg with it every few inches. She knew about these nerve paths because they’d gone dead on her so many times. He wasn’t dissatisfied with the neurological signs, but he told her off for the atrophy he found in the muscle. “You know what this tells me?” he said. She waited him out and he lowered her legs. “This is the sign of a woman feeling sorry for herself.”

  “Don’t you have to feel my head for that?”

  “These are legs shrivelling from bedrest, Hazel. You can’t heal in bed. You have to move.”

  “It hurts to move, Gary.”

  “It should. Your back is a mess. But movement and pain are the only way through to as full a healing as you’re going to get.”

  Now, after Wingate’s visit and lunch with Glynnis, she was so bored even exercise seemed an escape. She decided to try the stairs. She crossed the basement to the door that led to upstairs and opened it. The stairs looked like a job for a professional climber. She grabbed the banister and started up. She felt like she was emerging from a cave.

  The upper part of the house was full of light. The upstairs clocks her mother had told her about she now saw for the first time; their incessant ticking gave the house a fugitive presence, like there were people whispering in its rooms. What kind of person needed to know the time wherever they stood? Perhaps a woman who was counting her luck, and had to mark every blessed second of it.

  She strolled slowly through the living room, with its leather couch and chairs, the widescreen television sentinel in a corner, the fireplace with its pristine unburnt logs waiting for another winter to lend their hearthy romantic glow to the house. She saw Glynnis and Andrew cuddling on the couch, murmuring things to each other, indulging whatever conversational shorthand they’d developed with each other, only a word of which would be enough to make her crazy. She touched nothing, but looked closely. A line of old, heavy books lined the mantelpiece on either side of a rococo silver clock. Decorator books, never read. Probably cost them a pretty penny, too. There was another set of stairs off the living room that led to the bedrooms, although she knew her mother slept on the main floor, in what was Andrew’s office. She went there next, passing the dining room. She glanced in and saw the exact centrepiece she imagined would be there: a tangle of twigs with dried berries and little silver objec
ts in it, stars and planets, and a big, thick red candle sticking up out of the middle of it. The wick was white; Glynnis had never lit it. Perhaps they argued about it. Why did I buy you this nice thing if you never use it? But then Glynnis’s answer presented itself right away: Because if I use it, it won’t be the lovely, thoughtful thing you bought me one day for no reason but that you loved me. Goddamnit.

  Emily’s bed was tightly made and covered with a thick hand-sewn quilt. She didn’t recognize it. Did Glynnis quilt, too? There was a pile of books by the bed. A couple of puzzle books with a pen clipped into one of them, and a novel or two. But the book on top was one of Glynnis’s for sure: Talking to Yourself: A Dreamer’s Guide. Hazel hoped it was evidence of her mother ingratiating herself; it frightened her to think of Glynnis trying to inculcate her mother. But she couldn’t imagine it; Emily was the original skeptic. She opened the book at random:

  SHRUBS, SMALL FLOWERING PLANTS: Red or yellow flowers signify financial windfall; white flowers are unexpected visitors. Flowerless shrubs can mean respiratory problems or digestive issues. A dream of potted flowers is a warning of a suffocating relationship, especially if the petals have begun to fall.

  She closed the book and put it back exactly where she found it. The phone began to ring in the kitchen and she hobbled down the hall to it. When she picked it up, she was out of breath.

  “You okay?” came Wingate’s voice.

  “Fine, I’m fine.”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “No, James. What’s wrong?”

  “I think you better come in. Can I send a car around?”

  “What’s going on? What happened?”

  “I’m sending a car.”

  Hazel knew the name Barlow. A George Barlow had once owned one of the largest apple orchards in Westmuir County. He’d sold it fifteen years ago and now it was a pick-your-own operation that was gradually transforming into a county fair/family amusement park that did most of its business during pumpkin season. Hazel remembered going there with her father in the fifties and coming home with bushels of tart, mottled apples. Not supermarket fruits designed for long journeys, but misshapen, delicious real apples.