by Ann Lambert
“I told her about how I just walked into this girl’s room at the place I was staying, and the girl freaked out on me. Like, freaked out. Up north, that’s what we do—no one ever knocks or nothing. You just go right on in to someone’s place. It was a small thing, but I felt really stupid about it.”
Charlotte looked down at her sweater and picked a stray piece of fluff from it. She had very small, capable hands that looked like they’d seen some hard work.
“We used to make each other feel less homesick, you know, by telling stories.” She hesitated. “Like, in Nunavik, most everyone loves to golf—well, the men do—but they also stick their hunting rifles along in their golf bags in case a caribou or a bear or a seal came along. We laughed about that.” Charlotte looked at the two policemen and felt the need to explain.
“Because now, some of the animals are a lot harder to find. My grandfather said it’s changed so much.”
Roméo had read everything he could on Nunavik. And the Arctic North. Besides the social problems, climate change was accelerating at a pace scientists had not even predicted. The Arctic was warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and Nunavik was experiencing the effects earlier than anywhere. Caribou herds were dying off. Winter fishing was harder, too, since the water didn’t reliably freeze over the way it used to just a generation ago. Maybe the most terrifying was that the permafrost was melting for the first time in thousands of years, which then released more methane, a greenhouse gas, than they could even measure. It’s like the Inuit were the most extreme victims of colonization. Again. Roméo suddenly felt dizzy with the immensity of it all.
Annie Qinnuayuak decided to interject. “Charlotte, can you tell us a bit more about what Rosie was like?”
“She really loved her sister, Maggie. They were real close. Maggie was her big sister, and looked out for Rosie. She told me that once that her uncle tried to…mess with her, and Maggie came home and just about killed him. So when Maggie got sick, Rosie came down here to be with her—for her treatment.”
Roméo continued. “And she was staying at this Aboriginal Women’s Residence?”
“Yes. She liked it there okay.”
“Did Rosie have other friends that you knew?”
“Not so many, I don’t think. I warned her about hanging out in the square, because that’s where a lot of Inuit go anyway. But there’s guys there—who…target girls like us. They’re like, waiting for us. So, she stayed away. But then, her sister died. And for Rosie, it was like her world ended. I told her to get back up to Salluit, you know? I told her to get out of the city because it wasn’t good for her. For us. I was staying because I wanted to try another program at the college, but for Rosie? I saw her a few weeks after her sister passed. She didn’t look good. She lost a lot of weight, and her eyes weren’t clear. She was still pretty drunk from the night before.”
Charlotte got quiet for a few moments. Annie Qinnuayuak took her hand this time and asked, “Would you like to take a little break?”
Charlotte shook her head and looked directly at Roméo, and finally at Steve Pouliot, too. “I wanted to tell you before that she was a real good piano player.”
Annie nodded in agreement.
“Like, sort of amazing. We went over to the waitress’s apartment one night, and Rosie sees that she has this old piano—I mean it was pretty crappy—it had broken keys and everything, but Rosie just went and sat down at it and just knew how to play. You know when someone suddenly does something unusual, or has this like…talent you’re not expecting? She just played these really great songs. Like, straight out of her head.”
Roméo smiled at Charlotte. “She sounds like a really wonderful person, Charlotte.”
“She is. She was.”
Roméo looked briefly through his notes. “What was the waitress’s name?”
“Helen. Or…Hélène? Like the French way to say it. You don’t pronounce the ‘H.’”
“What?” Roméo realized he’d almost shouted. “Do you know her last name?”
“Um. No. I just knew her as Hélène.”
“Do you know where we can find her to talk to her?”
“No. I haven’t seen her in a while—maybe five or six months?”
To Annie Qinnuayuak’s and Steve Pouliot’s surprise, Roméo reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He scrolled through it, then held it up to Charlotte.
“Is this the waitress Hélène?”
The girl took the phone from Roméo’s hand and peered at the photo. “Yeah. That’s her. Maybe when she was a bit younger?”
“Sorry—where was her apartment?”
“Someplace on Lambert-Closse—I can find the address, I think. It was just a little place, pretty basic but okay, you know. Clean. We went over maybe a couple of times to watch Netflix, or just hang out—”
Roméo would go to Roasters and check employee records. He would find Hélène.
“Did you meet other people there?”
“No. It was just us.” Charlotte thought for a moment. “Wait, there was this guy once.”
Roméo felt a frisson of anticipation. “Who was this guy?”
“He dropped by one night to visit Hélène. We weren’t sure if he was her boyfriend or something. Like, I think he sure wanted to be. He was pretty nice—like, pretty friendly and curious about me and Rosie. Maybe more to impress Hélène? He was really complimentary about Rosie’s piano playing. He said she was gifted. Anyway, they seemed to hit it off.”
“What did he look like?”
“Um. He was very tall. Like, huge. And white, an Anglo-Canadian type of guy. He seemed like a military guy. He had very good—what’s the word? Posture. Like he had a stick up his ass.” She giggled again. “Sorry.”
Roméo’s frisson had become a chill. “What was his name?”
Charlotte frowned. A few moments later she said, “I can’t remember. I’m sorry. I only met him the one time—”
“How old was he?”
“I’m not so great with figuring out people’s age. Maybe forty? Or maybe fifty? Sixty?”
Roméo took a silent deep breath. “Please try to think of his name.”
“I can’t remember. I’m sorry!” Charlotte tugged nervously on strands of her thick, black hair.
Roméo turned off his recorder and reached across the table to shake Charlotte’s hand. He thanked her for being so brave in coming forward and told her how helpful she had been. He also reminded her that she might be asked to look at a few photos. He was hoping this mystery man might somehow be tracked down. Roméo and Steve Pouliot stood up and started to gather the many layers of clothes to prepare for the storm outside. Annie and Charlotte were talking with each other quietly—Annie probably just checking in on her, Roméo suspected. He touched Charlotte very gently on the shoulder and said, “I’m very, very sorry for what happened to your friend.” Then he beckoned to Steve Pouliot and they headed towards the door.
“Do you know what happened to Rosie’s dog?”
Roméo stopped in his tracks. “Rosie had a dog?”
“Yes. After Maggie died, like I said, Rosie really fell apart for a while. I don’t really know half of what she got up to.” She took a breath. “But then, a while later, she found this little lost dog—this ugly little thing. It looked like a little white weasel—or rat—I mean, we’d talked about the dogs up in our communities—how sometimes we were really scared of them, but Rosie, she just fell in love with it. I guess she kind of gave it the love she missed for her sister. She had to hide it because she wasn’t allowed a dog at the place she was staying. I don’t know what happened with that. The next I heard was—” Charlotte’s voice faltered. “That she’d been hit by a car. And died.”
Roméo recalled what Ti-Coune said about Nia Fellows and her boyfriend—something about a dog missing. And Steve Pouliot had told him th
at in the most recent attack the survivor was desperate to find his dog. What was going on here? Was Marie right? Was the killer after the dogs? Stealing dogs? For what possible reason? For medical experiments? For fighting? For some other awful way to use them? It was certainly not unheard of. But why would he have to kill their owners first?
Forty-Five
DESPITE BEING ADVISED TO GIVE UP the search for Hamlet, Nia had spent the entire afternoon at The Bunker scrolling through rescue shelter websites. Everyone kept saying he should have been spotted by now, but Nia knew they really meant that Hamlet was probably dead. What if someone had found him after he’d been wandering for a few days and then brought him to a shelter? What if someone had kept him for a few days, and then decided he was too much trouble and dumped him? She checked the SPCA website daily and had again called every single shelter within a radius of 100 miles. Nothing. Because some of the local media had publicized Nia’s situation, The Bunker was fielding dozens of calls a day from concerned dog lovers and the workers were now starting to get quite annoyed by the whole thing. There were actual human beings at this shelter who were struggling through every day, but a missing dog got the passionate attention of the city. Many of The Bunker’s intake workers knew that for the most part, these concerned citizens meant well, but they also felt that their priorities were pretty screwed up. Therese, one of the older counsellors, was keeping a close eye on Nia. She had brought up her case with the rest of the team, and they all agreed that now that she was not tied to Christian anymore, she might start to turn her life around. Therese had checked Nia’s school records in the Eastern Townships; her IQ test score was exceptionally high. She had been a gifted student as a child and then went off the rails in high school, after her parents were arrested. Diagnosed with OD—oppositional disorder—and possible borderline personality, Nia had resisted all forms of authority. Whenever The Bunker counsellors gently raised the possibility of going back to school, Nia just laughed and responded with some variation of, “Most of the really smart people I know—I mean the really smart ones? Don’t do so well in that so-called ‘real’ world. As in school. Christian was brilliant. Off the charts. It didn’t do him much good, did it?”
No, Nia had to focus all her energy on finding Hamlet. Because if she didn’t, she would have to think of other things, like Christian’s parents, who had come to get their son’s body and return him to South Porcupine. A meeting had been arranged with them, which Nia had agreed to in spite of her gut screaming at her not to. The mother was alarmingly normal. She looked like any middle-aged lady in any little town anywhere—including Rockville where Nia had grown up. She looked nothing like the monster Christian had described. The three of them sat uncomfortably on the edge of the plastic chairs in the Private Room and spoke very little. The mother didn’t hug Nia or try to comfort her in any way. The father actually shook Nia’s hand, like they had just agreed to some kind of deal. Nia examined their faces to see how terribly they were grieving. Maybe Christian’s death was a relief to them. She wanted to be kind. She wanted to forgive them for their sins against him, but she couldn’t. She knew too much. She told them that Christian was a lovely, generous, and thoughtful man who had been trying very hard to navigate his life. She told them she loved him very much. What else could she say, really? Certainly not the truth about how he felt about his entire life with them. The mother had opened a little plastic baggie of Christian’s—what was the word?—effects. Nia asked if she could keep Christian’s ring—it was a silver signet ring he would twist on his beautiful ring finger when he got agitated. His mother smiled very briefly at Nia, and said no. That ring had been his grandfather’s and it would go back to the family. Nia wanted nothing else.
She thought about her own family. Her mother had somehow tracked her down, called for her at The Bunker and left a message. I am so sorry for what happened to your friend. Please call me.
One day she had felt so low and so entirely alone that she almost did call her mother. Then, for some reason, she remembered one summer night when she was about eight years old, when she was supposed to be asleep. She heard cars slowly approaching along their long gravel driveway, and when the passengers in the back seats got out, Nia could see they had blindfolds on. She thought it was some kind of game her parents were playing with their friends. Blind Man’s Bluff? A surprise birthday party? She only learned years later that that’s how their customers arrived at her house—they were never allowed to see where their suppliers lived or how they got there. When they tried to convince Nia that they just had drugs for their own infrequent use—they were not dealers—Nia knew the truth. And so did everyone else. She lost everything. Her parents. Her home. Her dog, Heathcliff, and her two cats, Franny and Zooey. She had lost her school and pretty much all her friends. And what did she get instead? A foster home where the woman’s fat husband pinned her against the washer in the laundry room and shoved his hands up her skirt while his wife was making supper ten feet away. And that was just the introduction to foster care. So, no. Nia would not be calling her mother.
Nia went to warm up a cup of tepid tea in the microwave. Her eyes were going all squiggy from staring at the screen too long and too intensely. Just as she was returning to the computer, a hand restrained her.
“I think I found your dog.”
It was Claude. He actually lived in a little town called St. Calixte, northeast of Montreal. He stayed at The Bunker when he came into the city to beg, often bringing his two dogs with him. The guy was down on his luck—his truck was seized for unpaid parking tickets, and without it, he lost his moving business. But he had a home. And he’d had a truck. Nia didn’t like him much and so mostly avoided him, as she suspected the dogs were just props for his begging business. He knew it, and consequently was always trying to ingratiate himself with her.
“What do you mean?”
He pulled her over to another screen and scrolled down to a wall of dog photos. It was a no-kill rescue shelter Nia had not seen before. In some place called l’Épiphanie.
“Look. Isn’t that Hamlet?”
On the screen appeared a photo of a dog, looking quite disconsolately and timidly up at the camera. His name was “Buddy,” and the site claimed he was a rescue from a Korean dog farm. Nia peered at the screen. Enlarged it. Looked at all the angles. Her heart started to pound. It really looked like Hamlet. His collar was different, and he seemed thinner. But this dog had the same bizarre big torso and stubby legs as Hamlet. What were the odds that he had such a doppelganger?
“Where is l’Épiphanie? Do you know where that is?”
Claude nodded. “It’s about forty-five minutes northeast of here. Maybe an hour.” He moved a little closer to Nia. “Shit. If I had my truck back, I’d take you there.”
Nia quickly jotted down all the information and printed out the picture of Hamlet. She had to get there as soon as possible, but she knew the bus service in those little towns was sketchy, and according to the Google map, it looked like this place was outside of town in the middle of exactly nowhere.
“Can I use your phone?”
“I don’t have a phone. Can’t afford it.”
Nia smirked at him and gestured for him to hand it over. Claude reluctantly pulled it from under his shirt where he’d hidden it inside his belt. “Don’t tell anyone. They’ll all want to be using it.”
Nia found the crumpled piece of paper that she’d stashed away in her backpack and tapped in the number.
“Hi. It’s me. Nia. I think I’ve found my dog. Can you take me to him?”
Forty-Six
Tuesday evening
February 12, 2019
“IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND about pressing charges, it’s not too late. Please call me.” Michaela lay on her side in the same fetal position she’d been in for several hours, replaying Marie Russell’s messages over and over. She had left several since yesterday, imploring Michaela to call her back, bu
t they now seemed to have stopped. She rolled onto her back and looked around her little room, washed golden yellow with the setting winter sun. Nothing in it felt like her. Nothing in it mattered. Her stupid photos of her friends from elementary school tucked into her vanity mirror, mementoes from her high school—her dried wrist corsage from prom and the numerous awards and trophies she’d won for academic excellence. The stuffed animals she just couldn’t part with lined up in her window. She felt like burning all of it. She replayed the assault over and over in her head, wondering what she could have said or done to stop him, and why she was the one he raped. Was it so obvious to him that she was a perfect target? What did that say about her—feminist that she was. Stupid enough to go to a man’s fucking office alone.
Michaela had tried to get back to her normal routine. She got up and showered every morning. She dressed herself, and got some food down her throat, but she tasted nothing. She felt nothing. She went back to her classes at school—because if she blew this semester then he would win totally and completely. And Mika could not let that happen. Would not let that happen. She would not be a victim. Except nothing made sense. Why was she going to school when a rapist was free to live his life? Why was she talking to these people in class who knew nothing about what had happened to her? Why was she even studying or writing endless idiotic essays? What was the point? She tried to stay calm and in control, but whenever she saw Brittany she felt like throwing up. Nothing made any sense at all. There was no point to doing anything. Despite Marie Russell assuring her that she would be there for her, and that her partner was a policeman who very much wanted her to come forward and break her silence, Michaela was far from convinced. Still, Michaela gathered every ounce of the little energy she had, slowly roused herself to a sitting position, and pulled her laptop closer. She decided to do something—something very Michaela. More research.