Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  “She’s the woman Tim called from my place the night I found the car. And then she was with him the next day at the site. He said she was a friend of theirs.”

  “And we’re supposed to follow her because—what? She’s checking on Lucy?”

  “That’s the sense I got.”

  It was bad enough telling my story, not knowing if I was implicating an innocent woman. It was worse hearing it come out of Sergeant Quinn’s mouth. I should never have come.

  Quinn looked at me for some time without saying anything. He leaned forward again. He had his elbow on the table and his hand over his mouth. He tapped his fingers against his mouth, and breathed audibly through his nose. He never took his eyes from mine. They were narrowed, as if trying to read my mind. I didn’t want him to read my mind. He’d hear the irrational voice that kept screaming: she might be alive.

  I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud until I saw the look Sergeant Quinn gave me. Then he released a breath. “I think we’d better go for a drive.”

  He smiled at the look on my face. “I told you I might surprise you.”

  The unmarked cruiser was big and blue and luxuriously comfortable. There was the faint smell of leather, coming from Sergeant Quinn’s jacket.

  “You say you’re not psychic. Your experiences sound psychic.” The voice came out of the soft darkness of the plush interior.

  “You mean ‘crazy.’”

  “You don’t have to be afraid to admit it. My grandmother was psychic. She called it having the ‘sight.’ She was Scottish. In your case, it sounds more like clairaudience. Hearing things—messages—”

  “Oh, I’m hearing things alright.” My attempt at humour came out in a shaky voice. Quinn made no response.

  Ottawa’s busiest street was empty. I kept my eyes on the side roads. There it was, Glen Avenue: Lucy’s street. I tried to read the odometer without leaning over in a noticeable way. It wasn’t easy to see it, but I wanted to make sure Hunt Club really was six or seven kilometres from Lucy’s street as I’d determined from the map.

  It was a silent drive. An unreal drive in a big smooth car down a deserted main artery. It was another dream. I was unsure what we were going to find. I didn’t think it would come to anything. I was terrified it would.

  We neared the Hunt Club area. I had been down here before. I saw that now. It was the shopping mall strip. The street names on the map had meant nothing to me. I didn’t come this way very often.

  I kept my eyes peeled for abandoned buildings on side streets. I saw how hopeless this was and understood the reasons for Sergeant Quinn’s heavy sighs.

  “I think it was just the general Bank and Hunt Club area.” I wanted him to slow the car.

  “I know that,” said Sergeant Quinn. He slowed down, and held the wheel loosely, at the top, with one hand. “I also know there are dozens of abandoned buildings down here. In these economic times, everyone’s abandoned something.”

  “I see that.”

  We were approaching another main artery. Hunt Club. Sergeant Quinn turned right.

  It felt right to turn right. It was bizarre, that feeling. But at least the number of kilometres we’d travelled from Lucy’s street to Hunt Club seemed to be correct.

  I glanced to my right. There was a building at the end of a short intersecting street—a building several storeys high, with boards over the windows.

  “Isn’t that an abandoned building?”

  Sergeant Quinn slowed the car right down and peered past me. “That’s an apartment building under construction.” He drove on.

  “Are you sure? Those looked like boarded-up windows.”

  Sergeant Quinn swung the wheel around with one hand and pulled a U-turn in the middle of Hunt Club. He turned up the street. It was a court, with the building on the west side.

  Quinn stopped the car so that it was facing the building. A window directly in front of us wasn’t boarded up. The glass was broken at one corner. Eerie lights shone out. It took me a heart-stopping minute to realize what they were: our headlights reflecting back at us.

  “There’s a grove of trees over there,” said Sergeant Quinn. His voice was odd.

  I looked beyond the building. There was, as he said, a dark wooded area. I couldn’t tell what the trees were. The skin on my arms began to feel prickly.

  “Have you ever seen this building before?” Quinn’s voice was cop-stern again. But pitched to a slightly higher key.

  “I have never seen this building before.” My voice was that monotone again. Also pitched slightly higher.

  I began to shiver.

  Sergeant Quinn got out of the car. I did the same. We approached the building.

  The corner of the window that had appeared to be broken was merely a corner of torn plastic over the still-glassed-in window.

  We cupped our hands on the plastic-covered glass and peered inside. In the dim light I made out bales of pink fibreglass strewn about the floor.

  “That’s a man-made material!”

  “I know that’s a man-made material,” said Sergeant Quinn. Then he added in a calmer voice, “I’m not laughing at you.”

  I knew he wasn’t. I knew he was as shaken as I was.

  We walked around the building. All the other windows were boarded up tight. The only door was a solid metal one at the back. It had a keyhole but no handle. It couldn’t be the right building if there was no way someone could get in.

  I followed Sergeant Quinn back to the car.

  Back in the driver’s seat, he radioed the dispatcher. “I have a strange request,” he said. “I’d like a police cruiser with two officers. And make sure they have flashlights.”

  “Can I go in with you?” My voice was peculiar. Flat.

  “Yes,” he said. “But do me a favour. Don’t tell these officers what brought us here.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  We waited in the darkness. In the silence. A few minutes later, a set of headlights arced onto the road and snapped off a short distance away.

  Quinn went to speak to the officers. A moment later he was back with a flashlight.

  I got out of the car. The officers made no move to get out of theirs.

  I stumbled and tripped behind Quinn and his flashlight beam.

  “Careful,” he admonished.

  We circled the entire building. There were no breaks in the windows. There were no other doors. My disappointment was acute.

  We arrived back at the front of the building

  “Stay here,” said Sergeant Quinn. His tone softened the order into a suggestion. There was no question I would stay. He disappeared into the wooded grove behind the building.

  One of the officers spoke from a rolled-down window. “What are we doing here, anyway?”

  I approached the cruiser. “A friend of mine is missing and I thought she might be in this building.” That didn’t sound too crazy.

  The two officers got out to stretch their legs.

  I hung back, waiting for Sergeant Quinn to reappear from the woods. That’s when Tim and Marnie strolled up the street. I could see Marnie’s face under the street light from thirty metres away. Her face was clear—so clear I called out her name.

  I expected them to run. But they didn’t seem to hear me. I expected them to run for sure when they saw the police officers. But they had obviously thought fast. They went right up to the officers, and Tim spoke. “Officer, my girlfriend is missing.”

  I ran over to the police officers. I grabbed the nearest one by the arm. “Arrest these two.”

  The officer sent a lazy look down at me from a great height. “And why would I do that?”

  I opened my mouth to explain. At the same time, I turned my head in slow motion to look at Tim and Marnie. And saw two stra
ngers. Two completely different faces. Younger faces. Smirking faces.

  I was stunned. Disoriented.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Hey, no problem,” said the male. He was grinning, as if it were all a joke. It was a joke: a cosmic joke, on me.

  I walked away. Spooked. Confused. The face had been clear. Not a hazy image that might have been Marnie’s. It had been her face. And then it hadn’t. I was going crazy. Truly crazy.

  As if it were a film soundtrack running without the visuals, I could hear the young man telling their story to the officer. He lived just down the street. His girlfriend and this woman were best friends. They had come over for the evening. His girlfriend, a black girl, had just walked out of the house a few minutes ago. They didn’t know why. They couldn’t find her.

  I didn’t hear the police officer’s response. It was an odd story. It wasn’t the whole story. Why had she left? Had they had a fight? Maybe she had wanted to leave. Maybe she didn’t want to be found.

  Maybe the police officer thought so too. A minute later the two young people were walking back the way they had come.

  I called out before I could stop myself: “Sorry!”

  A cheerful “No problem!” wafted back to me from under the street light. The two disappeared in one direction, and a beam of light appeared from another. The beam of light became Sergeant Quinn and his flashlight.

  There was no conversation between us. I knew he had found nothing. Maybe some poplars. Maybe not. I was afraid to ask.

  We peered one more time into the windows of the building. Our beam shone back at us.

  “Someone’s got in there,” said Sergeant Quinn suddenly.

  “They have?” I jerked around so fast, I tripped. He reached out to steady me.

  “Careful!” he admonished again.

  The beam was not ours reflected in the window. The light emanated, hazily, from within, through the layer of plastic and glass.

  I followed Sergeant Quinn at a run. He shone the flashlight behind for me. I sensed his hands ready to pick me up. My clumsiness embarrassed me.

  The steel door at the back was now ajar. We stepped inside.

  “We’re Vanier,” said one of the cops, naming a rough Ottawa suburb. “We have a key.”

  Quinn’s laugh filled the vast black space. He shone his flashlight around.

  The interior was a skeleton of wooden beams and joists and temporary walkways separating the “floors” over our heads. Everywhere were bales of fibreglass and garbage bags filled with debris. Or maybe, one of them, something else.

  “Stay right behind me,” ordered Quinn. It was another order I was happy to obey.

  We walked all around the ground floor. We were thorough. Quinn’s flashlight exposed every corner. I kicked and prodded every bale and bag. I called out Lucy’s name. Self-conscious but not caring if I was embarrassing myself. I was in a state of tension I had never experienced before.

  Sergeant Quinn shone his flashlight above us. A wooden ladder was nailed to a beam. I was going up into that flimsy skeletal framework. What if I fell? But I didn’t hesitate. Sergeant Quinn was already halfway up the ladder. I wasn’t going to be left behind. I climbed without allowing myself to think. The dark somehow made it easier.

  The Vanier officers stayed below. Then Quinn and I were alone in the building. Quinn didn’t reach down from the top of the ladder to give me a hand up. Professional protocol would not allow that. But I was aware that he was aware of my every move. He would have grabbed me if I’d fallen. It helped to know that.

  The second “floor” was a narrow walkway with great gaps and open places where a woman, clumsy in her terror, could fall through. There were fewer bags and bales to prod. We searched for the ladder to the next floor.

  I kept my eyes fixed on Quinn’s leather-jacketed back, not on the gaping blackness beneath us. I walked close enough to grab hold if I needed to. Close enough to step on his heels.

  “At least I know you’re there,” he joked in a grim voice after my third apology.

  It was a slow, methodical, eerie search. I kept calling Lucy’s name. My voice echoed around the black hollow shell. Every moment I expected the flashlight to expose her crumpled body in a corner, to hear a moan, or to feel the thunk of my foot on soft flesh inside a bag or bale.

  And all the time I couldn’t stop the irrational thought that this wasn’t the right building. There was no right building.

  In all, we climbed four ladders. We made our way around four narrow walkways.

  We came, finally, to a metal door exiting to the flat roof.

  Quinn walked to the edge and looked over the side. I stayed rooted in the centre, absorbing the solid ground into the soles of my feet. I took in long breaths of cool night air. I made them slow. Deep. It wasn’t over yet. I had to go back in. Back down.

  There was no way anyone else had got in here to hide a body. No one said it. No one had to. Quinn held the door open for me, and I braced myself to go back into the black cavern.

  At each floor, we had to creep along the narrow walkways in search of the next ladder. Again I walked barely two steps behind Quinn. And kept my hand outstretched, ready to grab him if I tripped.

  At each ladder Quinn turned to me. “Come down right after me.” It was a needless request. My feet landed where his hands had just been—and sometimes on them.

  At the bottom of each ladder, Quinn shone the light on the steps for the rest of my descent. His arms were outstretched. His hands all but touched me. He didn’t drop them until he made sure I had safely reached the bottom.

  There was no way to shut the steel door; there was no handle. There was only a keyhole, and Vanier had the “key.” And Vanier was gone. We left the door slightly open.

  We got in the car. We didn’t speak. We drove back down to the main street. We turned right, and drove under the Airport Parkway overpass. And past another set of uninhabitable buildings.

  “Aren’t those abandoned buildings?” I was sounding like a broken record.

  Again Sergeant Quinn pulled a U-turn in the middle of the road. A patient pulling of the steering wheel into the short incline of a driveway: to stare at the ruined barns in front of us.

  They were charred black from a fire. The roofs were caved in. It didn’t look recent.

  “Those are burnt-out buildings,” said Quinn. “And we’re not going in there at night.” His voice was firm, his decision final.

  He backed the car out of the driveway. We headed east and turned onto the on-ramp for the Airport Parkway, back downtown.

  “In these economic times,” said Sergeant Quinn, for what seemed like the dozenth time.

  “I know. There are a lot of abandoned buildings. I know it’s a long shot. But I had to—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  We stopped talking. The Parkway merged with Bronson Avenue and we continued north. Then we were turning onto Colonel By Drive. Beside us, the Rideau Canal was a long, dark presence. A long exposed tunnel, with a foot of water in the bottom. The water level was always lowered before winter, to transform the canal into the world’s longest skating rink. The real sign of spring in Ottawa was the sky-reflecting water lapping at the top of the canal walls and rowing shells gliding effortlessly up and down its length.

  I finally worked up the nerve to ask. “Could you at least follow Marnie?”

  “Tomorrow morning you call Sergeant Roach and tell him what we did tonight and let him decide.”

  “Will you still be on duty when he comes in?”

  “I hope to be home in bed. I’ve been on shift since one. I’m supposed to be on half time. I was supposed to leave at seven o’clock tonight. I’m still here.” His voice was sharp in its weariness.

  I sat in a terrible silence. It lasted the length of the long f
ast ride beside the canal. Through the red lights we ran at the deserted intersections. Down the ramp into the underground parking off a side street from Elgin. Into the empty parking space we’d backed out of almost two hours before.

  Sergeant Quinn killed the engine. He didn’t move.

  “I didn’t mean that to sound as harsh as it did,” he said, as if the five- or six-kilometre silence since his last words had been seconds.

  He turned to look at me. Thoughtful. Appraising. There were dark shadows under his eyes I hadn’t noticed before. Fatigue emanated from him. I had the sudden feeling it wasn’t just from the long day, but from whatever had put him onto half time. Something I hadn’t noticed on first meeting him. Cop burn-out? I dismissed the thought. I had just dragged him out in the middle of the night on a wild goose chase after his shift was supposed to be over. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” he said, “when women go missing.” There was anger in his voice.

  He paused. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “sometimes they want to go missing. Sometimes they don’t want to be found.”

  I nodded. “That occurred to me. I know. Like the girl in the parking lot.”

  He stared at me. “What girl in what parking lot?”

  “I don’t mean parking lot. I mean that first street we were on, outside that apartment building. And she wasn’t there.”

  “Ellen. You need to go home and get some sleep. You’re not making any sense.”

  “Sorry.” I leaned my head back on the headrest. I was suddenly overwhelmingly weary. I turned my head without raising it from the headrest. “I forgot to tell you. It was when you were in the grove. This guy came up the street with a woman, and I—oh, it’s stupid, but I could have sworn the woman was Marnie. Her face was so clear.” I sat up straight. “I know it’s nuts, but I saw it—her face. Clearly. The street light was shining on it. And then—to freak me out even more—the guy told the cop his girlfriend was missing. So I was sure it was them. I ran over to the cop and told him to arrest them.” I let out a shaky laugh. “And then I looked at them again, and it wasn’t them. They were completely different people.” My voice was breaking.