Dark August

by Katie Tallo

  Dedication

  For my sweet ba

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  August 2018

  Ten Weeks Earlier

  1. The Ballerina

  2. Lars

  3. Miss Santos

  4. The Puppy

  5. Honey and Virtue

  6. Mansfield

  7. Haley-Anne

  8. Rose

  9. Blue

  10. Henry

  11. Senator Halladay

  12. James

  13. Charlie

  14. Rory

  15. Lucky

  16. Bebe

  17. Dez

  18. Renata

  19. Kep

  20. June

  21. Alice

  22. Stanton

  23. Elgin

  24. Detective Monet

  25. Good Dog

  26. Constable Lashey

  27. Todd

  28. Manny

  29. Grease Monkey

  30. Annalee

  31. Pequeño Policial

  32. Ollie

  33. Stu

  34. Alison

  35. Halladay House

  36. Lois Greenaway’s Dance Academy

  37. Possum

  38. Lana

  39. Lois

  40. Edgar

  41. Levi

  42. Shannon

  43. Mama

  44. Tommy

  45. Marty

  46. Augusta

  47. Gracie

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  August 2018

  HER GAZE SLIPS OUT OF FOCUS, TURNING THE VALLEY OF purple loosestrife into a lavender sea that ebbs and flows in the hot breeze. Smells like cat piss. She continues to push through the scratchy weeds that made their way to North America in the hoof mud of nineteenth-century heifers. Stowaway seeds never meant to cross an ocean.

  Big-shouldered settlers took up arms against them. Hacking. Burning them alive. One season to the next. One generation to the next. Fathers and sons. Daughters too. Slashing and burning and cursing the flowery invaders. Held them off for decades until an underground river of toxins turned golden cornfields to black muck and sent a town up in a ball of fire.

  With no one left to fight off the loosestrife, it spread. Running rampant across acres of twitch grass and wild rye. Choking every living thing in its path out of existence. Oblivious to the toxic sludge drenching its roots.

  Maybe thriving because of it.

  Poison doesn’t kill everything.

  The young woman is overwhelmed standing in their midst.

  A speck. A bug. An orphan child. A lone seed.

  Twenty years old yet feeling eight.

  She shuts her eyes. Grabs hold of that eight-year-old’s hand. Holding tight to the past. Holding on for dear life. She picks up her pace. Knees high. Bare legs etched with tiny cuts from the razor-sharp stems. Should have changed into long pants and sneakers instead of jean shorts and flip-flops. But she didn’t think.

  She just bolted.

  Keys. Ball cap. Car. Gone.

  Pit stop at the Quickie to fuel up. Then autopilot kicked in. Like it does when she knows thinking is only going to get in the way. Took the 416 out of the city then Highway 5 along the Rideau River. Knows the highway well now. The fork in the road near the rust red barn. The lopsided flea market billboard that marks the halfway point. And the moss-eaten highway that leads straight into a town that once was but is no more.

  The town that went up in that fireball. Elgin, Ontario.

  A settlement carved from nothing in the 1830s by Mormon missionaries. Made nothing again by greed and spite and toxic wastewater.

  The late afternoon sun is baking her brain. She lifts her ball cap, pulls sweaty strands of auburn hair from her neck. Twists and tucks her ponytail under the cap. Her dad’s cap. The one from the ’87 Masters when a nobody named Larry Mize beat a couple greats of the game. Her dad loved the underdog. Loved the idea that anybody could do something great. Just once. And that would be enough. That would make his life matter forever. At least that’s how her mother told it.

  He wanted to name you after the home of the green jacket.

  The cap is frayed at the bill. Well worn because a twelve-year-old boy never took it off except when his mother insisted at the dinner table. Frayed because that kid wore it right through high school and beyond. It was part of his off-duty guise. Ball cap, T-shirt and jeans, jean jacket, cowboy boots. Same thing worn by every other country boy from small-town Ontario in the early eighties. Now she wears it. It smells like him. At least she imagines it does. Musty. Like grass from the course where he caddied before becoming a cop.

  The cicadas buzz incessantly. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. She could die out here and never be found. Collapse in a heap of dehydrated bones and slowly get sucked underground by the loosestrife. Her body liquefied by the wastewater bubbling below. She could die of a thousand cuts. Die of thirst.

  But none of these things is going to happen.

  Not today.

  Not even the mighty loosestrife can mess with her mission. And even though all roads leading to Elgin are permanently barricaded with concrete blockades bearing warning signs that say ROAD CLOSED. DO NOT ENTER. HAZARDOUS TOXIC WASTE. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY BANNED. Even though the fields around the town look more like a demilitarized no-go zone than a once-thriving farming community. Nothing is going to stop her.

  She drops into the past. Sinking into the cave of her memories. A habit she mastered as a kid in boarding school. It comforts her. And if she tries hard enough, conjures the tiniest scrap of memory—a color, a smell, a sensation on her skin, a word spoken by someone she loved—she can see the past projected onto the walls of her imagination. Once there, she can alter those flickerings to her liking. Reshape the past. Bring people back. Undo the horrible things that happened.

  If only for a sweet second.

  It’s a hard habit to break.

  Twenty-five minutes. That’s far enough to get her head straight and her feet moving. Twenty-five minutes and a mile back she goes. When she parked in the dirt lane off Highway 15 just east of Upper Rideau Lake. Same shady spot under the weeping willow. Locked the Buick, pocketed the keys, headed out on foot.

  Destination: Halladay House.

  Two clicks inside the no-go zone, up the rolling hill, over the cedar rail fence. Then along the eastern boundary of the Halladay acreage. Steering clear of the chemical ponds that dot the west side of the property. She knows the lay of the land. Knows the stench of diesel and naphthalene that hangs in the air. Knows the slippery footing along the soggy banks of the creek of wastewater runoff.

  Just like the loosestrife, she’s a stranger. A trespasser who’s made herself at home. She’s scaled the barbed-wire fence around the defunct compressor station and yanked ivy from the headstones of graves. She’s pried plywood from windows. Walked down the main street, past a grocery store where people once stopped to gossip and buy their milk and eggs. She’s even sat on the wooden pews where they prayed every Sunday seeking salvation.

  Seems their God wasn’t listening.

  Now she’s back. A can of gasoline in tow. Hiking toward that big old house that sits outside town. A nineteenth-century Gothic farmhouse perched on the brow of a purple knoll. Majestic veranda limping sideways from rot. Moss dripping from its shingles. A widow’s walk clings to the rooftop like a spider hovering over its prey.

  She has only seen the house once before by moonlight. It’s the mansion where Kep Halladay lived. Where he lorded over the county. Stole from the work-worn pockets of his neighbors. Sucked the lifeblood from the very land su
rrounding his own home. Until he destroyed everything.

  She’s come to finish what her mother started.

  Come to set her eyes upon Halladay House in the light of day, one last time.

  Before she burns it to the ground.

  Ten Weeks Earlier

  AUGUSTA LIES AWAKE. IT’S EARLY MORNING. SLEEP ONLY comes in fits and starts these days. Her boyfriend, Lars, is snoring beside her. Her phone vibrates. She grabs it and stares at the name on the screen. Rose Ryan. Her great-grammie Rose. Gus slips out of bed and into the cramped motel bathroom, covering her mouth as she whispers hello.

  It’s not Rose. It’s Miss Santos, Rose’s nurse. Calling to tell Gus that she has to come home. The word home knocks the wind out of her.

  When Augusta was eight, her mother, Detective Shannon Monet, was killed in a car wreck. Gus was left with one relative, Great-Grammie Rose, who was about two hundred years old. Always struck with a migraine or a heavy heart or exhaustion of the bones. Rose lived her feeble elderly years propped in her bed with her Brazilian nurse, Yanna, tending to her every need.

  Miss Yanna Santos always reminded Gus of a crow. Thick coal-black hair dancing on her shoulders like a feather boa. Sour lips sewn shut in a thin cruel line. Basketball tall. But it was her high-pitched voice that was most crowlike. She cawed when she spoke in her sharp Portuguese-tinged English.

  Miss Santos was there that night when the female constable brought her to Rose’s big house on Island Park Drive. An eight-year-old wearing a pink nightie under a yellow polka-dot raincoat. It was four in the morning. Took three rounds of bell ringing before Miss Santos came to the door wearing a black raincoat she’d thrown over the shoulders of her long nightgown. The wind curled inside the house. The coat billowed like great black wings. Miss Santos stared at the small child on the stoop. Then at the policewoman. Not understanding at first. Then listening, narrowing her eyes, then stepping aside to let them in. She terrified Gus.

  From the get-go, Yanna insisted that her new charge call her Miss Santos. And she had other rules. Gus was not to bother her with runny noses or scraped knees or tears or appeals for rides to visit her best friend, Amy. She was to make new friends in her new neighborhood or she was to learn to keep herself company. Augusta was given the periwinkle guest room, all made up with matching bed skirt and wallpaper. But none of her own things. Not her feather pillow, not her doll, Sunny, not her blue toy trunk. Nothing from her old house except a few clothes and her toothbrush. And the puppy her mother had just brought home that summer.

  Gus started grade three at a new school and did her best to pretend everything was normal. Like she was happy. For a while, she thought she was. She even made a new friend named Shelly.

  But she shouldn’t have bothered pretending.

  The summer before grade five, voices were raised in Rose’s room. Yanna said she wasn’t hired to babysit. Threatened to quit. Rose said something about family obligations. Then Yanna said it.

  Her or me.

  A week later, Rose made her choice. Ten-year-old Gus was told she would be attending boarding school in St. Catharines for a “proper young lady’s education.” Rose’s words. Her feeble attempt to pretend this was for Augusta’s own good and not her own. Gus had never heard of St. Catharines. She didn’t want to be a proper young lady. She wanted her mother and pizza nights. She wanted to play I Spy in her room with her new best friend, Shelly. She wanted a home that felt like a home.

  But no one asked her what she wanted.

  Once Augusta left for boarding school, she thought she’d never see or hear from any of them again. Not Shelly. Not Rose. Especially not Miss Santos.

  And yet here is that familiar crow voice squawking from her phone.

  “Hello? Olá? You on phone? You there?”

  Gus can’t speak. She manages a croak.

  “Shannon, you her dodder, no?”

  Gus gently closes the bathroom door. She hasn’t heard her mother’s name said out loud in over a decade.

  “Yes, I’m Shannon’s,” she whispers. Hoping Lars doesn’t hear. He doesn’t like it when she’s on the phone without his say-so.

  “Dis Miss Santos. Yanna Santos. Rose, she gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “She pass.”

  “Oh.”

  Gus stares at the phone. She feels a deep pang of regret that the last tiny thread strung out into the world that connected her to her mother, however frayed, has now been severed.

  “How did you get my number?”

  “You leave on machine.”

  Gus vaguely remembers calling Rose a few months back in a red wine funk. She and Lars had been drinking cheap bordeaux in a box. Lars got particularly nasty when he drank wine. But he was also a lightweight so his tirades never lasted long. Usually he ended up puking or passing out. This time he was out cold, and Gus found herself curled in a ball in the corner of the motel room dialing Rose’s number. Perhaps hoping her only living relative might ignite in her some courage that would nudge her toward leaving Lars. But no one picked up so she left a rambling message and her phone number. No one called her back. Until now.

  “You come home, miss. You come now.” And with that Miss Santos hangs up, leaving echoes of the past reverberating in Augusta’s ear.

  1

  The Ballerina

  GUS REMEMBERS HOW THE LIE CAUGHT IN HER MOTHER’S throat.

  Back soon, Sugar Bunch. I promise.

  Shannon had those worry lines on her forehead. Gus wanted to smooth away those lines with her eight-year-old hands, but there were too many words in the way. Too many laters and back soons and promises. Too many when you get olders and neverminds for her to get close enough to her mother to rub them away. Gus wasn’t strong enough to make things better. Her mother was the strong one. The brave one.

  A police officer like her father. A widow. A single mother.

  Sometimes Gus spied on Shannon. Listened to her muttering as she scratched notes in her notebook or read newspaper clippings or tapped the keyboard of her laptop. Gus watched her mother’s eyes dart up to the photographs and articles pinned on the corkboard above her makeshift desk. Shannon created that desk from her dead husband’s tool bench in the garage. It was her sanctuary. Her office. Where she did her secret work. Not for children’s eyes. Out of bounds.

  But when Shannon was asleep, Augusta would tiptoe into her mother’s sanctuary. Gus had one rule. Once she entered that place of secrets, she never stayed longer than it took to count to twenty. She’d stare up at that corkboard and try to see what her mother saw there.

  1–2–3

  None of it looked like it belonged together. Bits and odd scraps.

  4–5–6

  A photograph of a boy with his parents.

  7–8–9

  A page torn from a newspaper.

  10–11–12

  A Polaroid of a little girl in a tutu and leotard wearing glasses.

  13–14–15

  A web of red lines drawn across the board from one scrap to another.

  16–17–18

  A spidery collage that didn’t make sense to an eight-year-old.

  19–20

  One time her mother was working in the garage with the door closed. Gus slowly opened the door and poked her head inside. Her mother was bent over her laptop, bathed in orange light from a lamp clipped to the workbench. Without letting her toes cross the threshold, Gus leaned in to ask her mother a question she’d been pondering for weeks. Using as small a voice as she could muster, Augusta asked who the girl with the glasses was. The ballerina in the photo. She pointed. Shannon slowly looked over at her daughter, eyes sad. Then she rose from her stool, walked toward her, and quietly closed the door. The sharp click of the knob as it settled into place pricked Augusta’s eardrums. The orange glow extinguished, she was left on the other side of the door, standing barefoot in a cold blue pool of light from the kitchen stove. A terrible loneliness washed through her chest.

  She didn’t k
now who that ballerina was or where she lived or what her name was, but she did know one thing. The girl in the picture was more important to her mother than she was. Gus hated that ballerina and, in that moment, Gus hated her mother even more for shutting that door.

  But she’s not that little girl anymore.

  Augusta pulls her hands away from her face and pushes the past into the farthest recesses of her mind. She’s all grown-up and she’s sitting on the edge of a bathtub staring at a brown stain ringing the toilet bowl in front of her. She rises and looks at her reflection in the mirror. Her face is partly hidden by her long auburn hair, frizzy from tossing and turning all night. Her freckled cheeks are flushed and hollow. She looks older than her twenty years. Doesn’t recognize the weary face looking back at her. But she does glimpse the smallest of flickerings dancing deep in those green eyes and she knows what she must do.

  Gus slips out of the bathroom. Pulls on her jeans, T-shirt, jacket, and ball cap. Lars is still snoring. She quietly packs her duffel bag, grabs her purse, and heads for the door. On her way out, she glances at Lars, his mouth hanging slack. She takes four hundred bucks from his wallet and eases out of the door of their motel room.

  Hilda, the night clerk, stands in the small portico near the front office. Smoking a menthol.

  “Where you off to, middle of the good God night, missy?”

  Gus smiles.

  “Can’t sleep. Thought I’d hit the all-night gym down the road.”

  She lifts her duffel bag to back up her lie. Before Hilda can blink, Gus turns and strides down the street.

  Two blocks over she hops in a cab at the taxi stand.

  Twenty minutes later, she’s inside the bus terminal buying a ticket to Montreal.

  Three hours later, she’s on a Greyhound due west.

  And two hours after that, she’s standing in front of Central Station as the sun rises over downtown Ottawa.

  * * *

  The last time Augusta was headed to her hometown was when she was seventeen. She stood in the school office as papers were signed. Her bags next to her. She’d graduated. Miss Quinte, the assistant to the headmistress, drove her across town and dropped her at the St. Catharines train station. Gus felt like an inmate being released from prison. She’d served her sentence and now she was being shipped back to Ottawa. Back home. To Rose and Miss Santos. Gus was pretty sure the school had neglected to warn either of them of her imminent arrival, so after an hour and thirty-three minutes on the train, Gus stepped onto the busy platform. She was supposed to transfer to an eastbound train to Ottawa. But instead, Gus chucked her ticket in the nearest garbage bin and walked through the station’s great hall, out the front doors, and into the glaring glass towers of Toronto. Anywhere seemed better than going backward.