The Night Bell Read online

  Gloria shushed her father. “I’m cutting pictures out of Photoplay. Wanna see?”

  Hazel followed her friend up the stairs and they shut the door behind them. Gloria’s bedroom was a teenager’s paradise. She had a stereo LP player and a bed with a canopy. When they were younger, Hazel had sometimes slept in that bed, the two of them under the covers with one of her father’s penlights. When they were still little, they’d read comic books together, but by the time they were eleven Hazel had begun to tire of Gloria’s bragging. After a while, she stopped going over at all. There were other things of interest, like boys, by the time she turned fourteen.

  “Did you really meet a Chinese guy coming down the bluff?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  Gloria put on a record: Doris Day singing “You made me love you (I didn’t want to do it).” She mouthed the words, swaying her hips. “I saw a couple of people on the way back to my house, but you always see people. It wasn’t until Commander Drury asked me if I’d noticed anything unusual that I thought maybe it was unusual that this Chinese guy was coming onto the trail just a little while after we saw Carol, and then Carol disappears. It’s not like there are hundreds of Chinese people in this place.”

  “No, but I’m sure they still go for walks. Did you recognize this guy?”

  “No.”

  “So what did you tell Commander Drury about him?”

  Gloria shrugged. She stood beside the record player, watching the record turn. Then there was a knock at the door, and her father called from the other side. “Come in,” she shouted.

  He pushed the door open with his knee and came in holding a tray. There was a small pitcher of lemonade and some Hydrox cookies. “Don’t let me interrupt.” He put the tray down and left. Hazel’s mother bought Oreos. There was no reason Dr. Whitman couldn’t afford Oreos, but there had always been Hydroxes here, and Gloria claimed to prefer them.

  “What did you tell Commander Drury?”

  “That I’d run into this man just as I was coming off the path, and he was in a green jacket with a hat, and he nodded to me and I nodded to him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I looked back,” said Gloria, twisting a cookie open. “Just for a second. He looked back at the same time. He wasn’t much older than her, either – I guess you could say he was even sort of cute. I just didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

  “So you think he was a boyfriend? I thought you said she was going out with Tommy Landers.”

  “How do I know who she’s going out with?” Gloria snapped. “Why do you think I’m an expert on how many boys Carol Lim sleeps with? Do you want lemonade or not?”

  “Fine, yeah.” She accepted a glass of lemonade from her friend. “But you think this guy knew Carol.”

  “Why not? I didn’t know how unhappy things were for her though. My dad told me she’d threatened to run away before. She did it for real this time. Anyway, wouldn’t you get away from here if you could?”

  “I like it here,” said Hazel. “Don’t you like Port Dundas?”

  “Are you kidding? I want to be where the excitement is.” Gloria stretched luxuriously and her shirt rode up her belly, showing the soft undulations of muscle beneath her glowing skin. There were paper cut-outs behind her on the bed. She’d snipped the glamorous faces of film stars and entertainers out of her movie magazine. Their bodiless heads lay in rows, all smiling, some smoking cigarettes with panache. The display looked like a room full of people enjoying themselves, but you couldn’t hear what they were saying. Hazel imagined that she and Gloria were standing at a window, looking into a Hollywood ballroom.

  “Who cares where she went anyway?” Gloria said. “Carol Lim? She’s almost eighteen, she can do what she wants. It’s not our problem.”

  Hazel looked along a row of faces that included Eva Marie Saint, Martin Landau, and Connie Francis. “What is all this?”

  “Oh!” said Gloria, delighted to explain. “I put them in order.” She came over to the bed and shooed Hazel aside. “Who’s better looking? Eva Marie Saint or Angie Dickinson?”

  “Oh, Angie for sure.”

  “Angie or Elizabeth?”

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Which one is smarter?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hazel. “I think Angie Dickinson is smarter. She looks smart.”

  Gloria Whitman considered Angie Dickinson’s face, comparing it to Elizabeth Taylor’s. “The ones who are both very good-looking and also very smart go into a special row,” she said. “They’re the best of the best. Cary Grant is in that row.” She pointed to a section of her bed where Hazel also saw Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Ingrid Bergman.

  “Are you sending them prizes or something?”

  “They are the prizes. I like to look at their faces and try to think how the world appears to them.”

  “I don’t think you can know how a person feels just by looking at their face,” said Hazel. Gloria had strange enthusiasms. One time, during one of their final sleepovers, she’d forced Hazel to hold her cat Dennis while she covered his nose and mouth with her hand. She wanted Hazel to feel how fast the cat’s heart went when he was scared. Dennis had licked Gloria’s hand afterward, as if he understood that she didn’t mean, as she had explained, to do him any harm.

  ] 9 [

  Friday, midday

  Detective Sergeant James Wingate looked Oscar Fremont in the eye. He was standing on the stairs leading up to the second floor; Fremont lay on his belly, glued to the shag carpet. The lake of sticky blood beneath him had all but fastened him to the floor. A crime scene officer was cutting the carpet around him, and back in the bedroom, two attendants waited beside a gurney.

  He’d come in through the back. He didn’t recognize any of the SOCOs. Fraser was somewhere else at the scene, so Wingate was waiting where he wouldn’t get in the way. He hadn’t taken off his uniform, so it had been easy to get through the police tape, but he hadn’t counted on running into Oscar Fremont. The dead man’s carotid artery gaped pink on the side of his neck where it had been cut right through. There was a yawning wound at the top of his neck that extended to under his chin. It was clogged with pale, fleshy structures that were speckled with black clots. Wingate could see the underside of Fremont’s tongue through the gash. He felt his own throat tightening.

  Where was Melvin Renald in all of this? He had to hope Renald was still alive. He had the idea of trying to raise Sean Macdonald on his walkie-talkie, to see if he’d found anything, but he thought better of it. The fewer people who knew he was here, the better.

  Wingate hadn’t known at first whom Hazel had meant when she said Mel. No one, at least in his presence, had ever called Sergeant Renald “Mel.” Or Melvin, for that matter. The man was Renald, through and through. Wingate had been surprised to learn he wasn’t a lifer. He had the look of one: he could size you up in a tenth of a second, and get away with anything because he’d been there so long. But that wasn’t the case – he was a bouncing bear. He’d been in half a dozen detachments. You learned to give guys like that a wide berth: they’re just passing through. But Renald felt like a guy who’d come to settle. More than once, he’d given Wingate a careful look, and Wingate couldn’t tell what worth had been determined. Bringing his eye level with Fremont’s carotid again, Wingate wondered if Melvin Renald was even more tightly wound than he seemed. But who was he to the Fremonts? Or they to him?

  He took another two steps up toward the body to get out of its eyeline, and nodded at the red-haired officer who was almost done cutting Oscar Fremont out of the hall carpet. She wore a surgical mask over her mouth and was ripping the broadloom with a small, curved knife. The gurney-bearers were gazing at their phones. Wingate looked to the right and saw Sandra Fremont’s shoes, heels up, the toes splayed outward. The murder weapon wasn’t hard to spot. It was sticking out of the back of her head. She could have run down the stairs he was on now, but she’d run int
o her office instead, into a cul-de-sac where the murderer had had an easy time of it. What must it be like to have your death come so unexpectedly, in a place of apparent safety?

  The female officer and the attendants tore Oscar Fremont free of the wooden floor beneath him and loaded him onto the gurney. Wingate had to step up into the hall to let them past. On his stretcher of bloody carpet, Fremont looked like he’d died falling onto a fluffy cloud. Wingate watched them take him out the rear of the house. No way they could load him out the front, and he wouldn’t fit into a body bag like that. They’d have to figure it out in the backyard.

  The door closed below him. He jumped onto the exposed wood where Fremont’s dead eyes had stared at him from the edge of the top step. Wingate was alone now, without paper booties or gloves. He looked upon the crisply imprinted bloody boot treads leading to where Sandy Fremont lay on a small circular carpet in her office. There were no such prints leading out of the room. Whoever’s boots they were, they’d been taken off and removed from the scene.

  Wingate crept toward the office on the tips of his shoes, taking care to avoid the bloody marks on the shag runner. Sandy Fremont bisected the colourful rag carpet she lay on. She’d struck her temple on the corner of the desk going down and left a smear of bright gore there with some hair in it. She was face down, her nose pointed to the floor. Wingate took his shoes off and kneeled beside her. There was very little blood.

  “That took some force,” Dietrich Fraser said from the doorway. “Getting a knife that far into someone’s head.” Wingate leaned over and looked straight down at the butt of the knife. A big, eight- to ten-inch chef’s knife. Only two of those inches were visible. The handle was made of a hard, dark-brown wood, held together with four rivets.

  “Don’t touch it,” Fraser said.

  “Why’d Greene send you?”

  “Why’d he send you?”

  Wingate stood up. “You know Hazel’s got her hands tied with her mother right now. I’m here in a more unofficial capacity. So there’s an investigating officer present.”

  “Present, but on admin duty. And in uniform.”

  “Skip says you’re taking the exam.” Fraser didn’t answer. “I’m sure you’ll make a good detective.”

  “Thanks, James. Listen, there’re enough people here. Three SOCOs and a photographer. You can –”

  “Look at this. C’mere,” Wingate said.

  Fraser stood silently in the doorway a moment longer to register his continuing objection to Wingate’s presence, but then he came over. “What am I looking at?” he asked.

  “The angle of the knife.”

  Fraser tilted his head this way and that. “Sort of straight in, isn’t it?”

  “Almost exactly straight. The spine of the blade is pointing right at the tip of her nose. If we knew her height and we could get the angle of the knife –”

  “Get out of the way,” someone said. It was the SOCO from the hall and the gurney-bearers. They had a fresh gurney. The SOCO positioned herself at Sandy’s feet. “You get her shoulders,” she said to the attendants. Wingate came over to stand with Fraser.

  The attendants leaned over to grip the dead woman’s shoulders. “Just don’t think about it,” one of them said to the other. “OK, go.”

  They began to lift Sandra Fremont. It looked like her upper body weighed five hundred pounds, the way they were tugging. They struggled a moment longer, then there was a loud creak under her face and they pulled her up. The knife was closer to fourteen inches in length, and the end of it stuck out of the middle of her face. Her nose was a steel fin.

  Wingate strode out of the room. Fraser began laughing. “James? What was that about the angle of the knife?”

  On the way back to his car, Wingate puked twice.

  Jack Deacon’s report on the rest of the bone fragments came through just after 4:00 p.m. After Greene was done with it, Wingate made a photocopy and took it out to Pember Lake.

  “You look awful, James,” Hazel said when she opened the door.

  “I had a bad egg,” he said. “The bones from the field are at least forty years old.” He gave her the report, which she started to read on her way back to the kitchen. He followed her. “How’s your mom?”

  “Asleep.” In the kitchen, he drank a glass of water and she read and reread the report, flipping back and forth to tests and photographs. “God,” she muttered. The Fremont bone was from the pelvis of a fifteen-year-old boy. The victim had died between 1950 and 1960, according to Deacon. Marks on – and indentations in – the bone were consistent with blows from an axe. He attributed the darkness in the grooves to scorching. The other bone, the frontal arch of a skull, had also been hacked and burned; Deacon put the age of the victim at twelve. He reckoned the vertebra didn’t belong to either victim. So there were three bodies at least.

  Hazel tossed the file onto the kitchen table. “Someone murdered these children more than forty years ago and got away with it.” They both found themselves staring at the folder, as if it were glowing, and they were each correct about what the other was thinking. “Those poor boys,” Hazel said.

  “Poor boys,” said Wingate.

  She poured some coffee out of a fresh pot into two cups, made Wingate’s the way he took it, and brought them back to the table. “You should go home after this.”

  “Our master gave me leave to stay on unofficial duty.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Did he give you leave to keep wearing your stripes?”

  “You’ve got a lot on your plate, Hazel. I’m just trying to keep an eye out. You’ve done it many times for me.”

  “This isn’t the time to pay me back. If Ray or Willan sees you dressed for duty, they’ll –”

  “Skip saw me.”

  “Oh, right. You went straight back to the station house. And?” She looked at him funny.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re being evasive. Why?”

  “Who’s invasive?” came a voice from behind them, and they both swivelled in their chairs. It was Emily, in a housecoat, her hair aswirl.

  “What are you doing out of bed?”

  “What time is it?” She looked at the clock before Hazel could, then looked out the window at the long shadows on the lawn. “Is it six o’clock at night?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Yes. You weren’t feeling well.”

  “Hello James.”

  They both eyed her warily. “Hello Mrs. Mayor.”

  She was looking at their coffees with a confused expression. Her energy was subdued, not at all as it had been that morning after her attack.

  “How are you feeling?” Hazel asked.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Emily replied. “A little hungry. Groggy.” She was looking around the kitchen now. Hazel had thrown out the cigarettes. “I think I want a sandwich,” she said. Hazel rose immediately to make it.

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “And what’s happening tonight?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “We’re discussing a case,” said Wingate. “I wonder if the criminals in your day were anything like the people we deal with now.”

  “Criminals are always angry,” said Emily. “Whenever Evan noticed something missing in the store, he’d say, ‘Better he took a shirt than punched someone in the mouth.’ ” She settled in one of the two free chairs, not noticing how Hazel was watching her. “That man knew the price of salt, but he’d let a person walk all over him if he thought it would make a better world. Is there more of that?” she asked, nodding at the coffee. “It feels like six a.m., but it’s not, is it?”

  Hazel poured her a cup and made her a sandwich out of a Kraft Single on whole-grain bread with mayonnaise and a crispy rib of romaine lettuce. This had been her own favourite lunch when she was a kid. Every family had its standby. She’d learned early on that a certain look in Andrew’s eye could be wiped away with careful application of homemade meatloaf. She’d learned the rec
ipe – beef, pork, veal, prunes, and bacon – from Andrew’s mother.

  “You two chat,” Emily said, accepting the sandwich. Hazel had cut it in two diagonally.

  “Time to get some rest, James,” Hazel said.

  Wingate got up and tipped his cap. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Mrs. Micallef.”

  “I am not feeling better, James. I am sucking wind and that is about it.”

  When he’d gone, Hazel asked, “Do you even remember this morning, Mom?”

  “Yes,” said Emily, taking a chunk out of her sandwich. “I was going on like a fool.”

  “You thought it was 1957.”

  “I smoked a cigarette. I can still taste it.”

  Hazel shook her head in wonder. “Did you at least enjoy it?”

  “Not at all.” She looked up at her daughter and smiled wanly, although there was a wisp of wickedness in it. “I don’t much think about that time anymore, but there was a lot going on in our lives. Before everything happened.” She picked up the other half of the sandwich. “Here we go,” she said. “Down the long slide to happiness, endlessly.”

  She ate with gusto.

  ] 10 [

  Friday evening

  Instead of going home, Detective Sergeant James Wingate drove back to Tournament Acres. He had not slept in thirty-six hours.

  There was still a team at the Fremonts’, and many of the homes on the western side of the development were fully lit. When Wingate found him, Givens was watching the SOCOs go in and out of the Fremont house on his close-circuit feed from Fuzzy Zoeller. Cameras ringed the development at intervals of five hundred metres. The various feeds displayed across the fifty-inch flat screen in his office. A couple of the feeds were busy with people flowing back and forth under lights.

  He sat in a huge, padded chair, his injured leg up on a rolling drinks cart. A half-empty glass decanter was at his elbow. “This is bad,” he said. Wingate thought he meant his knee, but the man shook his remote at the screen. “Look at all that.”