A Door in the River Read online

  The smoke shack was, so far, the only promising vector in the whole case. Hazel was sure hundreds of people – residents, tourists, workers, summertime renters – went in and out of it. But was it a connection to the girl?

  She’d gotten home after midnight the previous night, and she found Wingate sitting on the couch, leaning his head against the wall. The one lamp that was on illuminated his hands in his lap. He woke when the door closed and reached for his cap on the cushion beside him. “I got her here by about ten-thirty. She’s asleep now, I think.”

  “How often do I have to wake her up for the concussion checklist?”

  “Every couple of hours or so.”

  “Poor thing. She can’t even sleep. Anyway, thank you for keeping watch.” She took off her jacket and tossed it over the back of the couch. “Did my mother make any trouble?”

  “Didn’t see her at all.”

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Is she all right, Hazel?”

  “She’s eighty-seven. Eighty-eight this month.”

  She’d bade him goodnight and gone to make sure her mother was actually in the house. She was. There was a long, thin bump under her bedcovers.

  Hazel woke Cathy, as instructed, about every ninety minutes during the night, but as of five in the morning, she fell asleep herself and didn’t go into the woman’s bedroom until eight. She shook Cathy on the shoulder then and, after looking her over, decided the woman could safely be left alone. She left a note for her mother pinned to the back of her door, and another for Cathy on the kitchen table, telling her there was an officer outside the house and that when she woke, this officer, Eileen Bail, would bring her into the detachment. There were more questions, but she wanted Cathy as rested as possible. As soon as she left the house, she called down to Bail, who was finishing a twelve-to-eight, and asked her to do a couple hours of overtime in her car, outside the house in Pember Lake. She waited ten minutes for the cruiser to arrive and told Bail to bring Cathy in when she was ready.

  When she got to the station house, she brought Wingate and Constable Roland Forbes into her office. Forbes was about to take his detective’s exam. She thought it might be good for him to sit in. He dragged his own chair in and the two of them sat on the other side of Hazel’s desk. “This is what I’m thinking. Someone called Henry down there, to the smoke shop in Queesik Bay. And when he got there, he encountered this girl and there was an altercation and she discharged this weapon at him.”

  “What’s the chance it was a mugging or something like that?” asked Forbes.

  “Why would she go to the house and attack the widow then?”

  “I guess not. How did she know where he lived?”

  “Well, that goes to the question of their relationship,” Hazel said. “We don’t know enough about it yet.”

  “Should we be visiting that smoke shop?” said Wingate.

  “I think so. But I’m not sure I should be the one. I met with the police commander on the reserve yesterday and I don’t know if I want to show my face down there right now.”

  “Why?”

  “She seemed more like a kindergarten art teacher than a skip. And she’s got an angle, only I don’t know what it is. I’d like one of you to go down there and see what the place is like.

  “You’re out of here in three hours,” she said to Wingate.

  “You need me on this case,” said Wingate.

  “Forbes can do it. It’s reconnaissance, you know? Fact-gathering. Just go.”

  “I haven’t made detective yet,” Forbes protested. “I don’t know if the other officers –”

  “Just go down and buy a pack of cigarettes, would you?”

  “Okay,” he said. “I can make some notes. I can write it up if you want.”

  “Go forth, Gumshoe.”

  When he left, Wingate said, “What are you thinking?”

  “I just want him to buy a pack of cigarettes. Look around.”

  “No, Hazel. I mean with this case.”

  “We need to develop a blind spot to the murder and the murder weapon right now and focus on the reason Wiest was down there in the first place. I think it’s fair to assume that Wiest somehow knew this girl, and we need to find out how. That might tell us where this girl is heading and what or who she’s looking for. If she isn’t already done.”

  “I don’t want to make things any more complicated than they need to be, Hazel, but you should know Willan’s office called.”

  “Oh. Excellent.”

  “They said they expect to be notified in the future when cross-jurisdictional resources are being used, such as police cars in a countywide hunt.”

  “Well, are they for amalgamation or not? Jesus.”

  “There was considerable overtime in Fort Leonard.”

  “So what. Isn’t he impressed with there being a killer on the loose?”

  “I think he wanted to be notified.”

  “What’s the point of having moles if they don’t report back to you?”

  “I think it’s about getting the right clearances for extra –”

  “Oh, fuck the clearances!” she shouted, standing suddenly. “I mean, just, we almost had two bodies on our hands just now …”

  “I know.”

  Her chair had shot out when she stood, and she reached behind herself to pull it back into place. She sat. There was a long silence in which her outburst seemed to bounce off the walls. “So, when are you heading out?” she asked him finally.

  “Sorry?”

  “Your vacation, James?”

  “Oh.” Silence. “After my shift.”

  “Okay. I’ll keep in touch with you.”

  “Are you mad at me now?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Willan’s turning into everyone’s problem, Hazel.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  There was more paperwork to catch up on, another whole pile of it, and Hazel started drawing the file folders down in front of herself and flipping them open. One report spoke of three kids stoned out of their gourds and jumping into the Kilmartin River from the bridge at the end of Main Street. Their names were noted here, names she recognized as the offspring of multi-generation Port Dundas families. Had her cohort been as problematic when she was a teenager? There’d been fast cars and drinking, to be sure, but she didn’t recall them taking their very lives into their hands. In the 1950s there’d been no such things as drugs, not even soft drugs, but now there was something out there that could make kids so numb to risk that they’d jump into a fast-moving river at night. But all this was going to have to be back-burnered for now.

  She called Dr. Pass when she was done with the surprising amount of petty crime that had unfolded in twenty-four hours in the locality. Hearing of Emily’s lethargy, he’d told Hazel to bring her in. He’d get a rush on the tests he’d take and have an answer for them quickly. She felt relieved after speaking to him, but she knew whatever he found, it wasn’t going to be as simple as a case of the flu. She could feel it.

  Cartwright knocked on her door at eleven. “Cathy Wiest is here.”

  “Send her in, please.”

  Cathy entered, and her colour wasn’t much better than it had been the night before, but her eyes showed she was capable of thinking straight, and that was all Hazel needed. “Sit down, Cathy.” She waited a moment, then asked Cartwright, who was standing in the doorway to see if she’d be needed, to get them both coffees. “Did you sleep?”

  “On and off. I kept … waking up.”

  “Yes … sorry about that. And I’m sorry you’ve had such a terribly rough ride, Cathy. I’d do anything not to have you sitting in a police station so soon after your husband’s death.”

  “Who was she?”

  “We don’t know yet. But it would seem from the state of your house that she was looking for something. Can you imagine what it might have been?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The coffees arrived, with a plate of digestive c
ookies, and Cartwright left them on the desk and hurried out. Hazel pushed Cathy’s coffee toward her. “I have some difficult questions to ask you, Cathy. I’m sorry.”

  “I understand.”

  “Let’s just get the worst of it out of the way. Is it possible, do you think, that Henry was having an affair?”

  “It would never have entered my mind before. Henry was …”

  “I know.”

  “I’m supposed to say it’s possible, right? If that girl killed him with that thing, how could anything not be possible. But not the Henry I knew. We’ve – we’d been together for twenty years.” She was studying Hazel’s reaction. “You’re divorced, aren’t you?”

  This took her aback a little. “Yes.”

  “Would you have known if your husband was, if he’d been … I’m sorry. Maybe he was.”

  “It’s all right, Cathy. He was. But I didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Would you have known if you had been?”

  She thought about it. It was pertinent. “I don’t know. I think I would have noticed if he was out a lot and I didn’t know where he was. Or if something about him had changed. Did Henry seem different to you at all lately?”

  “My husband was the most even-tempered person I’ve ever known.”

  “Well, was he often out of the store? During the day? Did he have appointments at night?”

  “Sometimes. He was called on a lot, like you know. But there was nothing ever the least bit suspicious about any of it, and half the time, I’d run into the person he’d helped in town, or they’d come into the café and sing his praises. He was always where he said he’d been.”

  “What about money, Cathy. How was he with money? Was there any trouble? I mean, in general?”

  “I don’t think so. We were fine. I had my own business to keep track of, and he dealt with his own, so I don’t know the details, but the store was doing very well. I know that he did his own books. They’re at the store if you want to look at them. There was no debt, we paid for almost everything with cash, although I know he claimed every last cent that came through the store. I have to admit, I had a creative accountant for the café, but nothing serious, and Henry always said your taxes were an investment. It wasn’t worth the couple thousand a year it would cost him to have a bookkeeper. Henry was on the up-and-up. Unless he was the best liar on the planet and he was having everybody on …”

  Hazel made a mental note to have someone go down to the hardware store and liberate the books. Was he buying something from this girl? For her? Would his accounts show anything untoward? There was that cash in the envelope, but fifty-five hundred dollars in cash wasn’t an alarming amount of money. She wasn’t going to comment on Cathy’s last statement because anything was painful conjecture at this point, and she didn’t need to go upsetting her unnecessarily. But of course it was possible Henry Wiest was not at all what he’d seemed. There were people like that and you never knew, or you found out in a shocking concentration of events that exposed a secret. After everything his widow had gone through, Hazel was praying fervently there wouldn’t be any more surprises.

  Cathy was waiting for something, and the silence was agitating her. “What are you thinking now?” she asked.

  “Nothing concrete. It’s just, we have to find out what brought him down to Queesik Bay.”

  For some reason, it was this statement that caused Cathy to drop her head into her hands and begin to weep. “Oh god!” she cried into her hands. “What did he do?” She looked up at Hazel and her brown hair flew back, revealing eyes silver with tears and shimmering like the sky before a lightning strike. “What on earth did he do? What kind of person was he, that he would have been mixed up with a girl, that he would have had something of hers! And she … she kills him in a parking lot?”

  “Please, Cathy, please try to calm down. None of this has to mean that Henry did anything. This girl could have been crazy. It could have been a random encounter and she got your address off his driver’s license.”

  Cathy stared at her.

  “I’m just hoping there’s something, some loose thread at the edge of your mind that might point somewhere.”

  “I told you,” she said. “He had to pick up some filters. He left the house at ten at night. It was a little strange, but you knew Henry. If he had to go do something, he went and did it.”

  “Do you know who his friends are, Cathy?”

  “Sure, some of them. Half of them were in the Business Improvement Association. They’re normal guys.”

  “Okay,” said Hazel, and she sighed. “Where do you want to be right now, Cathy? Is there someone you’d like to go to? You’re welcome to stay on with me, as long as you wish, I’m not kicking you out.”

  “I can’t be around people right now.”

  “Well, my mother will leave you alone, so do stay on if you want, okay?”

  She nodded quickly, hiding her eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Constable Bail is your personal driver. If anything comes to mind …”

  Emily was asleep on the couch when Hazel returned to Pember Lake for lunch. Cathy was in the guestroom on the second floor, resting, Hazel hoped. There were faces on the television nattering mutely. Her mother had lately taken to turning the sound off, but she seemed to like the presence of movement somewhere in the house, even when she was asleep, as if her mind lacked the energy to make its own dreams. Hazel switched the TV off and sat in a chair across from Emily. In sleep, her cheeks were sunken and her mouth gaped. There was no detectable personality to an unconscious person: her mother was a mere creature, not a woman with a history and a character, and Hazel was saddened by the sight of this insensate figure on her couch. This animal that was her mother was coming to the end of her time on earth. Hazel moved from the chair to sit beside her, and she took one of her mother’s hands in her own and just held it. It was cool and light and made her think of the frightened bird in the Wiest house.

  Police work had trained her to live in the present, but it wasn’t good discipline for being with others, where you had to be more alert to the future and the time you had left with them. She knew it was natural to ignore how time was stealing the present from you, how it lent itself to the illusion that you’d be able to get to all those important conversations you were meant to have with children and parents and friends.

  She let her mother sleep another ten minutes and even drifted off for a moment herself before snapping awake. She shook Emily gently and her mother opened her eyes and stared out into the room. “How are you feeling?” Hazel asked her.

  “Tired,” her mother said.

  “You got my note?”

  “What note?”

  “The one I pinned to the back of your door.”

  “The one that said we have a guest who may or may not be at high risk of being murdered in my house? I got that one.”

  “She’s in no danger. And neither are you. Consider it a good deed.”

  “I’m not going to be unkind or anything, Hazel. But if she’s visited by a maniac, I’m running out the door.”

  Hazel understood the source of that sentiment and let it go. “We have an appointment with Gary Pass tomorrow morning,” she said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Let him decide that. It’s been a while since you had a checkup anyway.”

  Emily stifled a yawn. “This house is too hot.”

  “It’s not hot at all, Mum. It’s very comfortable. Feel your own hand: it’s cool.”

  She touched her hand absently. “My circulation was never very good. But this room is warm.”

  Hazel got off the couch and held her hand out to her mother, who took it and levered herself up. “Go for a walk, okay? Or go work in the garden a little. Get your heart pumping. You’re not active enough these days and it’s making you sluggish.”

  “You want me to get a job?”

  “Just do something with your time.”

  ] 11 [
/>
  Afternoon

  Constable Roland Forbes, dressed in a pair of slacks, a windbreaker, and a homburg, drove in a leisurely fashion down RR26 – Queesik Bay Road – in the detachment’s only unmarked police car, looking for Eagle Smoke and Souvenir. There were smoke shacks littering the side of the road the moment he turned off the 41a and onto the 26, but the one he was looking for was the largest and brightest of the lot. A neon sign announced its location two hundred metres before he saw it, and the building itself was like a western storefront, with a wooden porch and a wide, triangular gable above it. A wooden eagle with little white bulbs for eyes stuck out of the gable with the legend THE EAGLE above it in bright red neon. There was parking in front, as well as on the north side of the building, and there was a taxi stand with a single cab waiting in front of the store, under a lamppost. A small trailer by the roadway served as a drive-through for cigarettes. The store itself looked more like a saloon than a smoke shop, and although he was in civilian clothes, he entered with caution. His wife, Janice, had often told him that even in the nude, he looked like a cop.

  Inside, the store was fairly busy. Directly in front of him was a section of clothing, mostly sweatshirts and T-shirts adorned with the crest of the Five Nations, and a couple of browsers (tourists? On a Thursday? Perhaps in the middle of August) being helped by an Eagle staff member. Deeper in the store was a rack of books on native life and local history, a candy counter, some magazines, and a series of shelves stacked with knick-knacks like you’d find in any Canadian airport: maple candy, little stuffed animals with Canadian flags, Mountie banks, and so on. Behind it were assorted leather goods and a glass case full of fine art made from bone and antler and local stone.

  The cigarette part of the business occupied the entire south wall. Forbes had once smoked a pack a day, but he’d been quit of the habit for more than three years. Looking at cigarettes didn’t bother him anymore, although corner stores had once given him a frisson. The brands were stacked in cartons, ends out, in little cubbyholes along the wall. The boxes mimicked the look of national brands. The red carton, which looked like it contained his brand, DuMaurier, was called DKs. He remembered coming down here in the 1990s to get the cheap ones when he was short of cash. There was a row of glass counters in front of the cubbyholes, showcases of cigars, bongs, rolling papers, and pipes. Good to show the product, not so good if it walks out. A man was coming down along the counter, in front of the cubbyholes, letting the ring on his middle finger clack on the metal division between the glass counters. He was tall and moved with jerky movements, as if he suffered from the beginnings of some motor illness, or he was drunk. His skull was shiny and bald. A sew-on badge on his shirt read Tate, but Forbes wasn’t sure if it was a vintage bowling shirt or a uniform. He wondered if he should have taken some notes already. “Can I help you?” the man asked.