Dark Water Under the Bridge

by P. D. Workman

  “She knew you cared,” Mr. Roscoe told her, putting his hand over hers. “She knew that the reason you didn’t want her with Scott was that you did love her and wanted her to be happy.”

  But it had probably not made her happy to have to choose between the two of them. Or not to have her mother in her life.

  “So if you haven’t seen them lately, and didn’t have anything to do with them regularly, then I don’t suppose there is anything you can tell me about their relationship. Or whether she was under any new stresses the last little while.”

  “No… we just weren’t a part of her life anymore,” Mrs. Roscoe said. “I was… waiting for her to see the light and to leave him.”

  Margie sincerely hoped that wasn’t what had resulted in Patty’s death.

  “How long had she worked at the park?” she tried. “Do you know anything about how she enjoyed that? Whether she got along with everybody she worked with?”

  “She’s been working there since she got out of school. She liked it. At least, she did back then. I don’t know if she’s had any problems since then. I guess if she’s still there, she must like it. Otherwise, she would have left by now.”

  “Do you remember anything about her coworkers? I know it has been a few years since you would have heard anything about them, but is there anything you remember?”

  “No… not really. There were always other students or recent graduates working there. Lots of young people her age. So it was comfortable for her, lots of people she could relate to.”

  “And her bosses or supervisors? They must have been older than her.”

  “She talked about them sometimes… everybody has frustrations with supervisors at work. Policies and procedures. Getting to work late. Trying to get a raise after a positive performance review. You know how it is.”

  “Of course,” Margie agreed. “Was she not advancing as fast as she had hoped?”

  “I think all kids think they’re going to change the world. She thought she could walk in there and make a difference. Teach them all of the things she had learned in school. But you can’t just walk into a place as the newest employee and update all of their procedures, implement all of the latest science. It takes time and experience.”

  Margie nodded. “After five years, or however long she has worked there, hopefully she was able to put some of her ideas into action. I guess you wouldn’t know…”

  The two of them shook their heads. There was a lot of sadness in Mrs. Roscoe’s face. Not just grief over whatever had happened to her daughter, but the realization that she had missed out on her daughter’s life the last few years when she didn’t have to. If it had been Margie, she would also be wondering what would happen to the children and whether she would ever see them again. If something had happened to Patty—as they had to guess it had—then what were the chances that Warner would allow them to be a part of the grandchildren’s lives?

  Mrs. Roscoe had been able to provide some of the names of Patty’s friends, at least the ones she had spent time with before getting married. And she had Patty’s email address, even though they didn’t still correspond with each other. Assuming Patty was still using the same email address, it gave them not only a chance to get into her email, but also her cloud storage and syncing. If they couldn’t guess her password on the first few tries, they could get a subpoena for the service provider once the identification was verified.

  “Do we have confirmation on the dental records yet?” she asked the team in general as she returned to the duty room after finishing with the Roscoes.

  “Dr. Galt says it is a match,” Siever confirmed. “He’ll get us his official report later today.”

  “Yes!” Margie had harbored the secret worry that they were going in completely the wrong direction and they would find, on comparing the dental records, that it wasn’t Patty Roscoe at all. “I mean, that’s terrible, but at least we have a name now. Did we get the devices?” She looked over at Jones.

  “We did.” Jones pulled down her face mask for a moment and grimaced. “Hubby claimed not to know the unlock password on the tablet, but it looks to me like it’s been sanitized. I’ll send it over to the lab to have them see if they can recover anything. It’s possible that she was just using it as an e-reader, but most people will at least put their email on the thing.”

  “She might have just used it as an entertainment device for the kids too,” Cruz offered. “That’s mostly what my wife’s gets used for. Electronic babysitter when she has to stand in line for something. If the kids are going to be playing on it, you don’t want them to have access to your email or schedule or anything else that they could end up messing around with.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Jones admitted. “It does have Netflix Kids and Disney+ on it.”

  Cruz nodded. Jones swore under her breath, not happy about this. “I’ve got her laptop as well. Hopefully, it has better security and he didn’t guess her password before I got it from him. I don’t trust the guy.”

  “I have a few friends to run down,” Margie said, looking down at her notepad. “I’m hoping some of them were still in close touch with Patty. And then I might have another talk with Finkle. I have a feeling he wasn’t totally honest with us.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The calls with Patty’s friends did not go as well as she had hoped. They were old friends, but had not had a lot to do with Patty during the last few years. They had gone different directions, had different friends, and most were still single or childless. One woman who did have a child only had a baby, none close to Patty’s children’s ages. So they hadn’t spent much time together recently.

  They expressed the appropriate shock that Patty was missing and something might have happened to her. Margie tried to gently broach the possibility that her husband might have had something to do with it with each of them, but didn’t have much success.

  “Do you know her husband, Scott Warner?” she asked Mindy, the one with a baby.

  “Oh, we’ve met. I don’t know him well, but he seems like a nice guy.”

  “You didn’t ever think that he and Patty might be having problems?”

  “We didn’t see much of each other,” Mindy reminded her. “I didn’t see them together a lot. But she didn’t complain about him that I heard. And when they were together, or I could hear him in the background, I never thought he was being an—well, I thought he seemed like a nice enough guy. They didn’t fight or snipe at each other in front of me. He didn’t tell her she was stupid or push her around.”

  “You didn’t find him critical or argumentative?” Margie asked, thinking of what Mrs. Roscoe had said.

  “Well, he was a man. Of course he was argumentative. Wanted to make sure you heard his side of the story and knew that he was the expert on everything. But that’s kind of par for the course with guys like him.”

  “Like him?”

  “Well…” Mindy looked for a word. “Kind of… guys who think they’re smart? Have all of the answers, even if they change from one day to the next.”

  “A know-it-all?”

  “Yeah. Like that. But not… I wasn’t scared of him. He wasn’t threatening or the kind that would get all hot and bang the table if you disagreed with him. Just… he wanted you to know how smart he was.”

  Margie thought about Oscar. He had wanted her to know how smart he was, too. Couldn’t stand the thought that a woman might be more intelligent than he was.

  Margie looked down at her phone. She wanted to get some more work done, but she’d been on the phone for hours. Her ear was hot and sore. Christina would soon be arriving home from school, and Margie didn’t want her to be on her own for too long. She could continue her investigation from home. There were other people she could call or email, some research and background she needed to do. She still hadn’t talked to Finkle again, but she suspected that he would be leaving the park soon if he hadn’t gone home already, and she hadn’t asked him for his personal number. With a sigh,
she started to put her things away.

  “Heading out?” MacDonald asked, startling Margie as he came up from behind her somewhere.

  Margie caught her breath and pressed her hand over her racing heart. “Yes. I’ll do some more from home, but I want to see my daughter—”

  “Don’t take your work home with you. Go home and relax and spend time with your family. Come fresh in the morning. You’ll be more productive if you balance it out and take breaks than if you try to push through. You can’t keep up that pace every day. We’ll run this guy down, but it’s going to be slow and steady, not a race. We’ll eliminate suspects, process evidence, dig into the history. It’s not all going to happen in a day.”

  Margie paused and considered his words. “I have been putting in a lot of hours on this.”

  “And you need to take care of yourself. You’ve had three back-to-back leads since you arrived here. You’re going to burn out if you don’t give yourself recovery time.”

  “Okay.” Margie nodded. “All right. I’ll take tonight off. I won’t do anything. Just take some time with my family.”

  Mac nodded. “Good. We’ll see you tomorrow morning, bright-eyed and ready to get back to it.”

  It was like physically training for a race or building muscle. Margie needed the rest days and breaks in between to be alert enough to see what was in front of her.

  Christina was lying on her bed, chatting on her phone when Margie got home. She rolled over and looked at her mother, eyebrows raised.

  “Just a minute,” she said to her friend, and covered the phone. “What are you doing home?”

  “I wanted to spend some time with you. I know I’ve been working too late the last couple of nights.”

  “Nice.”

  “I didn’t even bring anything home with me. I have a free night. I can cook while you’re doing your homework, and then we can do what we want. Take Stella out for a long walk. Run some errands—”

  “Go visit Moushoom?”

  “Sure, of course. I’m sure he’d be happy to see us again.”

  Christina nodded. She returned to her phone call. “My mom is home,” she said in an exasperated voice. “I have to do homework.”

  Margie was taken aback for a moment at this change in attitude. Then she laughed to herself. Christina just didn’t want whoever she was talking with to think that she was uncool, wanting to spend time with her mother and Moushoom. Teenagers weren’t supposed to care about that. They were supposed to be all about gaming and streaming video and social media. Margie went into the kitchen and looked through the fridge, this time with an eye to actually cooking something rather than just feeding a craving for sugar at the end of a stressful day. Salad, maybe a stir fry and rice. Maybe Christina would want some tofu or one of the various vegetarian meats they had purchased to try out.

  If she had enough vegetables for dinner, maybe she wouldn’t feel like dessert afterward. Her belt was starting to feel just a touch tight, and she didn’t want to let her weight get away from her. She might not be a beat cop anymore, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have to keep up her fitness level. She never knew when she might have to run or get a combative suspect under control.

  Christina came into the kitchen. She gave Margie a sideways hug, also gazing into the fridge. “Some noodles too?” she suggested. “We can make lo mein?”

  “Okay, sure.”

  They busied themselves getting the ingredients out and fell into a rhythm chopping vegetables.

  “How was school?”

  “Oh, you know. It sucked. And then it was over.”

  Margie chuckled. “Who was on the phone? I don’t know about any of your new friends.”

  “Tracy.”

  “Tracy. Is she the one who was telling you about MacKay’s?”

  “No, that was Stacey.”

  “Oh. Who is Tracy? What is she like?”

  “He.”

  “What?” Margie looked up at her. “He? Tracy?”

  “Yes.”

  “The poor guy. Who names their son Tracy in this day and age?”

  “I guess there used to be a lot of guys named Tracy. Before it became a girl name. Seems like people are always giving their girls boy names, but then all of the guys with that name end up being judged as being feminine.”

  “Yes, it was used more a couple of generations ago. But now… I didn’t think anyone would pick it for a boy name.”

  “Well…” Christina popped the end of a carrot in her mouth. “He’s Chinese, actually, and his family adopted English names to make them fit in better. So they let the kids pick their own names. And he didn’t know then that it was kind of a girly name now. He just picked it out of a book or off of a website of boy names.”

  “Well… it’s nice he was allowed to pick his own name, but maybe they could let him pick a new one now. He doesn’t have to make it his legal name if he doesn’t want to, just something else for people to call him.”

  “I think he’ll probably just go back to his Chinese name. Plenty of the Chinese kids around here go by their Chinese names and never adopted an English name.”

  Margie held her cutting board over the wok and slid the chopped vegetables into it. They immediately started to sizzle. “That’s good. I don’t think people should have to pick another name because they’re from another culture. Canada isn’t supposed to be a melting pot like the States. It’s supposed to be a cultural mosaic. So why not keep your cultural name?”

  Christina nodded her agreement. “Is that why you never changed Marguerite to Margaret?”

  “It’s a very common Métis name. It’s not hard to remember or pronounce, so I don’t see any reason to change it.”

  “Do people give you a lot of hassle about Patenaude?”

  “I get a lot of ‘Detective Pat.’ It’s easier for people, and I don’t mind. They don’t make fun of it.” Margie stopped to read the instructions on the faux meat package that Christina had taken out of the fridge. “Do you get hassled for it at school?”

  “No. People ask how to pronounce it or spell it, but a lot of the names are weirder than Patenaude. The Asian ones with too many consonants that we would put vowels between. It isn’t like I have a full Indian name that’s ten syllables long.”

  Margie was relieved that Christina wasn’t being bullied over her name. She had been worried, going from Winnipeg to Calgary, with such different demographics, that their Métis culture would cause friction. And there would still be a few people who were jerks about it. That went without saying. But it wasn’t like Christina was the only dark-skinned girl in a sea of white. The school was full of kids with all different shades of skin, from redheads with starkly white skin or freckles to ebony black with a blue sheen that she had rarely ever seen in Manitoba. Margie had been pleased with the diversity.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was still light enough when they got to Moushoom’s apartment to ask him if he wanted to go out for a walk with them. He loved to get out into the fresh air and nature whenever they could take him. The old Métis man always looked like a painting to Margie. He dressed in a mix of traditional clothes, including buckskins and a sash, and store-bought clothing like the long-sleeved boldly-colored dress shirts and dark sunglasses that he loved. Despite a long life full of tragedies and sorrow, his deep wrinkles seemed to always point up in a smile. She could have stared at him for hours and wished she had the skill to draw or paint him how he appeared to her.

  “I want kisses from my two favorite girls,” Moushoom declared, making them lean down to embrace him and kissing them on both cheeks, despite the pandemic. “I’m so glad that you came to live in Calgary.”

  “Me too,” Margie told him. “It’s wonderful to be so close to you.”

  “Do you want to go out?” Christina asked, looking through the clothes in Moushoom’s closet. “You will need a jacket.”

  “Yes, let’s go out,” he agreed. He patted Margie’s arm. “She is getting so big.”

 
“Isn’t she? I can’t believe it sometimes. It seems like she was a little baby just yesterday.”

  “She is a woman now.”

  Christina found a jacket that she deemed suitable for their outing. It was blue with contrasting white stitching and beadwork. “This is beautiful.” She helped Moushoom to get it on, then took charge of the wheelchair, releasing his brakes and pointing the chair toward the door. Moushoom folded his hands in his lap and smiled.

  A few years ago, he would have insisted on getting around under his own power. He would have walked, no matter how much it cost him later. It gave Margie a little pang of pain to realize how he’d had to accept his physical limitations. He had been such a strong and active person for so many years. Now he was shrinking and becoming more dependent. That was the way of life, but she didn’t like seeing him getting weaker.

  She pasted a smile on her face and didn’t show what she was thinking. There was nothing to be done about advancing age. All they could do was enjoy the time that they had together the best they could.

  Moushoom took a deep breath when they got outside. “It was warm today,” he observed. “You never know at this time of year whether it will be warm or cold.”

  “We had frost last week,” Margie said. “And it was rainy and smoky the beginning of the week, but today was warm.”

  “And sometimes we have a foot of snow mid-September.” Moushoom shrugged. “It has been nice so far this year.”

  “It has,” Margie agreed.

  “Where did you go this week?” Moushoom asked.