Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  In the photo on the poster, Lucy is standing on her front porch. She is dressed up to go out somewhere, wearing a knee-length patterned dress and heels. She is smiling right beside the block-lettered words “MISSING PERSON” and her physical description.

  LUCY STOCKMAN

  46 YEARS OLD

  5'1" TALL

  100 POUNDS

  DARK BROWN SHOULDER LENGTH HAIR

  TANNED COMPLEXION, BROWN EYES

  LAST SEEN APRIL 22 (SAT) WEARING A DARK BLUE COAT WITH SMALL RED STRIPE, BLACK OR NAVY COLOURED TIGHT PANTS, NIKE RUNNERS.

  HER YELLOW AND WHITE SUZUKI SIDEKICK WAS FOUND PARKED ON RIVER ROAD JUST SOUTH OF THE LARGE ROCK QUARRY AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL WHERE THE ROAD CONSTRUCTION SITE IS.

  The police contact information was provided at the bottom.

  There was one message waiting on my machine when I got home. It was from Curtis. He spoke in a quiet voice that seemed to mask some great emotion. He had got my number from Tim. He hoped I would call him back.

  From Tim? Was he in league with Tim? That made no sense. He was, I assumed, the jilted lover. How would I feel if something happened to Marc? Devastated.

  I made myself eat dinner to work up my nerve to call him back. His exchange was in the Wakefield area.

  Our conversation was awkward. He wanted to hear the story of how I’d found the car. I gave him the same bare bones version I’d given the CBC. I remembered he’d gotten my phone number from Tim. “Did you call Tim?” I asked.

  “I called Lucy,” said Curtis. “On Sunday. Tim said she wasn’t home and I hung up, but he called me back. He must have star-sixty-nined me.” He was referring to the phone company last-number-called service. He didn’t sound pleased. “He gave me some song and dance about Lucy coming to stay with me on the weekend.”

  “Lucy told me she was going to be in the Gatineaus on the weekend,” I said.

  “We never made any definite plans.” He sounded adamant. And defensive, as if others had already brought this up. Then, in a disquieting tone, he added, “She wouldn’t listen to me.”

  No, I thought. There wouldn’t be many people Lucy would listen to. I thought about what she’d said about being abandoned by all her lovers. Until Tim. If she’d still been with Curtis when she started seeing Tim, he must have been absent in some way. I could well imagine the conflicts that would have created. Still, it must have been a slap in the face when she’d started corresponding with Tim. Had Curtis been jealous? But Anna had said it was Tim who’d been jealous.

  “Have you talked to the police?” I asked.

  “They’ve been here.”

  There was a silence. He obviously didn’t want to say more. As I didn’t. I tried to think of something neutral. “We’re trying to get a media campaign going. I got Tim to call the papers. I talked to CBC. Anna and Doug made some posters.”

  “I’m knocking on doors in the area,” said Curtis. Then there was a pause, and his voice became more conciliatory. “I don’t have any connections to Lucy’s friends anymore. If you hear anything, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know.”

  I reviewed our conversation in my mind after we hung up. He had sounded as wary as I had felt. We had danced around each other, neither giving the other too much information. His reactions were the same as mine. He must be innocent. I caught myself. What do you know? Trust no one.

  I had agreed to call him. But I didn’t intend to.

  I drifted in and out of sleep. Voices were filling my head with unintelligible words. There were no faces attached to the voices. They kept waking me up. And then the voices faded, and Lucy was again sitting on my bed.

  Her mouth begins moving. She speaks as if with great effort. But I hear every word. “He’s trying to frighten me. So I’ll stay.” An image comes, a silent-screen image. A small figure with long, dark hair lying on a couch, eyes closed, then opening, expression angry, her mouth moving as if yelling. Someone hovers over her. A faceless male figure. He forces something down her throat. Pills. A second, shorter figure watches. Again, no face. Then Lucy’s voice, in eerie voice-over: “You’ve looked in her eyes.”

  I am in a vehicle, moving to the end of a street with houses on either side. I see stores on a busy street. Then an odometer, larger than life. The numbers click over. Five, six, seven. The odometer fades and I’m back in the car, watching it stop beside a dark shadow of a building.

  Lucy’s voice again. “Abandoned buildings—outbuildings. I’m wrapped in something—a man-made material. She’s afraid. Follow her.”

  Then Lucy reappears on my bed. Looking at me. Pointing at her watch. Frantically.

  I sat up in bed, and reached for the light. My heart was pounding, my T-shirt soaked. Oh God, it was happening again.

  I got up to get a drink of water. Lucy’s voice was still in my head. He’s trying to frighten me. So I’ll stay. “He” could only be Tim.

  The images returned, vivid in my memory. Pills being forced down Lucy’s throat, her anger. Tim had mentioned Lucy had a supply of Valium. My subconscious had clearly taken that idea and run with it. Because I didn’t want to entertain more violent thoughts. Because I didn’t want to think about why she might have needed Valium.

  But there were lots of things in the dream that couldn’t have come from my subconscious. The involvement of a second person. Someone whose eyes I had looked into. Who had I met that Lucy and Tim knew? Only Marnie. Was Marnie involved? She was the second person Tim had called from my house. She had been right there with him the next day. Follow her. Why? Was Marnie checking on her? Could Marnie lead the police right to her? I had been in a car, driving down a main street, stopping at a building. Abandoned outbuildings.

  He’s trying to frighten me. So I’ll stay. Of everything in the dream, those words made the most sense. She’d been trying to get away. Maybe she had got away. Maybe she’d abandoned her car to make it look like Tim had done something to her. The car had been found up somewhere near where Curtis lived. Maybe Curtis was in on this. Maybe he had helped her get away. Maybe he had called Lucy on Sunday to look innocent.

  Or maybe the figure in the dream was Curtis….

  I splashed water on my face. It was a dream. Nothing more. I would get a grip.

  But it was fear that had the grip. Had I locked the door? Could he get in?

  At the front door, Belle and Beau waited, mouths drawn back in expectant smiles, tails wagging.

  “We’re not going out.” I punctuated my words with a pull on the door knob to make sure it was locked. It was almost funny: their eagerness to go out, mine to stay in.

  I started at my reflection in each window. I had never seen the need for curtains. Before.

  “No one’s out there,” I said aloud. I looked at the dogs. “What reason would anyone have to be out there? What threat am I? No one knows I know anything. I don’t know anything.”

  But I did know some things. Things that weren’t the suspect messages from a bizarre dream. They were there, on the videotape of my memory, waiting to be replayed once again: the odd things from my encounter with Tim on Monday evening.

  I looked at the dogs again. I wanted them to tell me I was being irrational. Instead, I heard Lucy and her second message from the previous night: Write it in a book.

  Oh Lucy, what are you doing to me?

  But I couldn’t refuse her. Whether she was a figment of my imagination or not. I went in search of paper and pen.

  It took an hour. I finished the description of my dealings and conversations with Tim, all the odd things he had said. But I didn’t stop writing. The things Lucy had said in my dream, the scenes she’d shown me, were still vivid in my memory. The dream, hallucination, whatever it had been, it fit with all the odd things. I couldn’t dismiss it. There was no way around it. I was going to have to go to the police.

  I paced up and
down the living room, avoiding the windows. Belle and Beau paced with me and whimpered. Every few minutes I deviated from my path to check the clock on the stove.

  At two a.m. Lundy and Roach were not likely to be on duty. Was it worth getting them out of bed to hear my far-fetched tale? They would never believe me. I didn’t believe myself.

  But even if everything else was bunk, the odd things were probably worth something. The odd things might get their attention. And then what? Entertain them with visions visited on me by the victim? The dreams were so convoluted, so vague. The first seemed more believable, more straightforward in its messages. Maybe I should simplify the second. The kilometres must have been indicating how far from her house they had gone. I needed a map of Ottawa. Please let there be one in the house. I wasn’t ready to go outside.

  I found an old torn city map buried under the shoes in the coat closet. I pieced it back together on the kitchen counter and pulled up a bar stool. I found Lucy’s street on the map. The nearest street with stores on it would be Bank. North would take them downtown. That made no sense. South headed out of town. I checked the map scale and measured, with my fingers, the equivalent of seven kilometres south on Bank from the intersection with Lucy’s street. I noted the name of the closest main artery: Hunt Club Road.

  Then I reached for a pen and paraphrased additional one-line instructions from Lucy.

  I wouldn’t bring her into it at all. I would just say I had heard a voice in my head. Oh God, they were going to think I was certifiable, no matter what I said.

  I sat at the kitchen counter with my head in one hand and the other on the phone receiver. In my mind, I could see Lucy, pointing frantically at her watch.

  Ellen. It was a voice in my head. Not an imaginary voice. My own. And it was loud and clear: You might find her. She might still be alive.

  The words shot through my brain like a bolt of lightning. They snapped me to attention. They triggered an adrenalin rush that didn’t let up for ten weeks.

  *

  THE PHONE CALLS HAD TO come collect from Tim. “The operator comes on right away,” he explained. “I hate to make you pay. I got no choice. I got no choice about time either. We only have six phones in our cell block, and there’s a few dozen of us who gotta share it. We have a system worked out, a schedule of who gets to talk when. I’m working during the day—doing maintenance, taking mechanics and carpentry courses. I put myself down for six-thirty p.m. on Tuesdays. We got twenty minutes. Is that okay? I don’t mean to be presumptive about us talking every week—it’s just easier to book it ahead. It’s totally up to you.”

  She assured him once a week was fine. And she didn’t mind paying. She didn’t mind the time of day either. She found it interesting that he couldn’t call during the day when Curtis was at work. It was going to have to be out in the open, this time, whether she liked it or not. She liked it. A pattern was being broken. The days of covertly running from one man to another were over. Maybe by breaking that pattern, she’d break another. Maybe this was about not expecting everything from one man. Maybe in getting the intimacy of sharing with Tim she would stop expecting it from Curtis. Maybe she could let him be. And then maybe he’d stay.

  When the second phone call came, Curtis announced that he was leaving.

  “I am not,” he said, “accepting calls in my house from a murderer.”

  “It is not your house! And he’s not a murderer! If you call him a murderer one more time, I’ll—”

  “Great.” Curtis gave a grim smile. “He’s teaching you well. No, you already knew the fine art of threatening. You two are obviously made for each other.”

  “Yes,” she threw back. “We are. Which is a lot more than I can say for you and me.”

  There was a deep, unexpected, sigh from Curtis. And a long look. Then that quiet voice: “You’re wrong, you know. And if you weren’t so pigheaded, you’d see it.”

  He suddenly smiled—a teasing, affectionate smile she hadn’t seen in awhile.

  She steeled herself against that smile. She would not let it suck her in, not anymore. She crossed her arms. “If you weren’t so pigheaded, you’d show it.”

  Curtis shrugged. “You mean I’d show it in the way you want me to show it. You may as well be having this relationship with yourself.”

  “I am,” she snapped.

  5.

  THE DETECTIVE ON THE OTHER end of the phone invited me to come down to the station to tell him my story. He even offered to send a car.

  I told him I had a car. I didn’t tell him it was going to take all my nerve to run to it from the front door. I didn’t tell him Tim Brennan was outside my door, lurking behind every bush.

  My rational mind, usually in control, could only stand by and watch. It watched me scramble behind the wheel and lean over to lock all the doors. It watched me accelerate down the dirt road, make the sharp uphill turn onto Cameron without stopping, and then speed down the highway towards Ottawa. It heard me muttering under my breath, over and over, “Hang on, Lucy. Just hang on. I’m coming.”

  Reason just barely stopped me from thanking God for all the green lights on the city streets and for the absence of cops stopping me for speeding. Reason watched me walk into the cavernous police station on Elgin Street with the certainty that I was going to be thrown in jail for my tall tales.

  By the time Detective Sergeant Stephen Quinn of the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police shook my hand, reason was back in control. His grip was firm and warm and attached to a man with his feet on the ground.

  Sergeant Quinn was not bursting out of his suit like Lundy. He did not drink too much Scotch like Roach. He was not haggard from too many eighteen-hour shifts, or hardened from making the acquaintance of too many nasty criminal minds. He did not have an unhappy wife at home who nagged him for neglecting her and the kids.

  Sergeant Quinn had a solid build and a smooth roundish face with a five o’clock shadow I suspected even a fresh shave would not completely remove. His hair was shaved close to his head. Thick chest hair showed above the neckline of the T-shirt he wore under his dress shirt. He had steel blue eyes. He looked to be barely forty.

  He also looked like he had nothing better to do than to sit in an airless interrogation room with a tensed-up woman in the middle of the night. He gestured to a chair at the table in the tiny room and pulled up another for himself. “You tell me your story, and then I’ll decide if we should wake up Sergeants Lundy and Roach. They were here ’til midnight and I’m kind of reluctant to disturb their slumbers.” Then he smiled. The smile put me at ease, a little.

  I started with the facts. My acquaintance with Lucy. Finding her car. Dealing with Tim. I outlined all his odd comments and actions. I spoke in a monotone that kept me calm.

  Sergeant Quinn didn’t take his eyes from me.

  I finished reciting the facts and looked at him hard. “Now we get to the part where my tale becomes what you might call fairly unbelievable, and you get to send me home.”

  My ability to joke startled me. Sergeant Quinn’s laugh startled me even more. “Try me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll surprise you.” He folded his hands behind his head and leaned back.

  I looked at him for a moment. “Okay, but here’s the deal. I want to state for the record that I don’t normally pay attention to my dreams. I don’t believe in dreams. Or psychics. Or telepathy. Or any of that stuff. I don’t think of myself as psychic. I’m not psychic. But, unfortunately, I recently had a couple of dreams that I haven’t been able to ignore.”

  I took my notes out from my pocket, unfolded the paper, and placed it in front of me on the table. I let in and out a deep breath. “I was hearing a voice. It dictated lines to me. It happened twice. Both times I got up and wrote down the messages. They were about Lucy.” My voice had returned to that monotone that kept it from shaking. I looked at Sergeant Quinn to see how
he was taking this.

  Quinn’s expression stayed neutral. He nodded at my notes. “Tell me what you heard.”

  I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. I read off the first two phrases from my first dream and then stumbled over the third. “Tell Anna I’m.… Tell Anna she’s safe.” There was no way I was going to tell him it was Lucy who had given me these messages; he would send me home for sure.

  I told Sergeant Quinn what I thought they meant.

  “So,” he summed up, “you think this woman is in a poplar grove somewhere. And you’re supposed to tell her sister she’s safe.” He couldn’t keep the amusement out of his voice.

  I gave him a wry look. “I told you….”

  “Go on,” Quinn prompted. His voice was very gentle.

  I fought a sudden tightness in my throat. I couldn’t look at him. “I got another set of messages tonight.” I read the phrases I had partially made up: “Abandoned buildings. Bank and Hunt Club. Wrapped in a man-made material. Follow Marnie.”

  Quinn sat up straight and leaned forward. “Say all that again.”

  I repeated the three phrases from the first dream and the four phrases I’d made up from the second dream.

  “Okay,” he said. “She’s wrapped in some kind of synthetic material and being held in some abandoned buildings near Bank and Hunt Club, and possibly the building is surrounded by or near a poplar grove.” He kept his voice neutral. It impressed me, and disconcerted me. I couldn’t read him. It didn’t matter. He was listening.

  “Are there poplar groves near Bank and Hunt Club? Are there abandoned buildings down there?”

  Quinn looked stern. Cop stern. “Have you ever been down in that area?”

  I shook my head. “No, not that I can think of.”

  “Never?” He had shifted to interrogation mode.

  I shook my head again. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. This whole night was beginning to seem absurd.

  Quinn leaned back again and sighed. “That entire area is woods, beyond the main road and the shopping malls. And in these economic times, it’s full of abandoned buildings. These women’s names,” he went on. “Anna, you say, is her sister. Who’s Marnie?”