Beautiful Lie the Dead

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Beautiful Lie the Dead Page 22

by Barbara Fradkin


  What else was the bugger keeping from him? “On my way out of town,” he’d said. Where? East to St. Dominique to see if Lise’s family knew anything about the affair or the circumstances of her death? Or west to Ottawa to confront Elena Longstreet in the hope that a surprise attack would pry crucial secrets out of her.

  Fuck, Green thought with alarm. Cam mustn’t get to her first. Green had been saving that interview until he returned from Montreal with all the ammunition he could muster. If Cam Hatfield tipped her off, he might ruin it all.

  With Magloire still on the phone, apparently climbing the chain of command in the Sûreté du Québec, Green turned on his phone again to call the Major Crimes Unit in Ottawa. In the middle of Sunday afternoon, not surprisingly, voice mail picked up. The skeleton staff would be out in the field. Green hung up and dialled Marie Claire Levesque’s cell phone. He knew he shouldn’t bother her during her family time, but this could not wait until tomorrow. When her phone also went directly to voice mail, he suppressed the urge to hang up in frustration. Goddamn voice mail was a scourge! After suffering through her bilingual announcement, he left a terse message.

  “Marie Claire, an urgent situation has arisen regarding Elena Longstreet. Call me ASAP.”

  After hanging up, he dialled Bob Gibbs. Ever faithful, Gibbs answered right away. Green winced when he heard soft, romantic music in the background. “Sorry to disturb you, Bob.”

  A second’s hesitation. The music clicked off. “It- it’s all right, sir. We’re not busy.”

  “Hey!” Green heard Sue’s shout in the background.

  “I wouldn’t call if it weren’t important. I need two things done. First, I need an alert on the vehicle owned by Cameron Hatfield of Greene Avenue in Montreal. I don’t know the plate or make, but look it up. Don’t intercept, just record the whereabouts— unless he shows up at Elena Longstreet’s premises, in which case detain him and call me.”

  “Yes, sir? Do you think he... I mean, is he armed and dangerous?”

  Green chuckled at the picture of the grizzled old reporter wielding an assault rife. “Not unless you count loose cannons. He’s a freelance reporter horning in on the investigation.”

  “What should I do with him once I detain him?”

  “Call me. Secondly I want someone to keep a discreet watch on the Longstreet house.”

  “You-you want me to do this personally, sir?”

  Green could hear the dismay in Gibbs’s voice. “No, pass the word on to patrol. Frequent drive-bys will do, but nothing that would arouse her suspicions. Make sure I’m called the minute anyone spots Hatfield, especially if he goes near the Longstreet house.”

  “Are you still in Montreal?”

  “Yes, but not for long. I may be...” He glanced at Magloire questioningly. The big detective gave him the thumbs-up signal. “Making a quick trip to St. Dominique.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s in St. Dominique?” Sue burst in, presumably on the other line.

  “Lise Gravelle’s family, I hope. Whatever there is of it.”

  “We could only find a cousin,” Sue said. “And there’s no point going to St. Dominique. He’s on his way here to Ottawa to claim her body.”

  “Then I’m on my way too.” That solves my dilemma, Green thought after he hung up. Even if Cam Hatfield did go to St. Dominique, he was not likely to find anyone useful to interview. Back in Ottawa, the list of interview subjects was growing every minute.

  Magloire was digging into his smoked meat with alacrity. He looked up between mouthfuls and patted his stomach, which was as firm and flat as a pro athlete’s. “If you stay longer, I’ll be in trouble even before my wife’s Christmas baking.”

  Green grinned as he picked up his own sandwich. “You’re safe. I’m leaving as soon as I finish this. Lise Gravelle’s next of kin is on his way to Ottawa.”

  “The sister?”

  “We haven’t been able to track her down. This is a cousin. I didn’t get his name.”

  Magloire nodded. “Must be Denis. The SQ detachment that covers that area says the Gravelle farm is abandoned now, and Denis is the only family still in the vicinity. Sister left Quebec when she got married, and Lise hasn’t returned for years either.”

  “Did they say how long?”

  “Well, they finally connected me to an old SQ sergeant who used to run that detachment, and he said she’d been estranged from them for years. Didn’t want the farm life, wanted the big city and the fancy college degree—the family’s words, not the sergeant’s. The father used to complain to anyone who’d listen. The final straw was going to McGill instead of the Université de Montréal. A complete vendue. Sell-out. Later, the father seemed happy she fell on her face. what did she expect? The old man sounds like a piece of work. High walls, narrow mind.”

  No wonder the young woman left, Green thought with a twinge of sympathy. With any luck the cousin would be able to shed more light on what exactly had happened at McGill two years later.

  “Had anyone seen or heard from Lise recently? Anyone come looking for her or asking questions about her?”

  “I asked them to conduct some inquiries, talk to old school friends and neighbours. It’s a very small place, and now the news of her murder is spreading through the community. Everyone will talk about her, and if someone has a piece of gossip, they’ll share it. Or they’ll make it up.”

  Green nodded. In his experience, people in small communities lived in each other’s pockets. If there was anything to know about Lise Gravelle in the past half century, it should come out.

  * * *

  When Brandon walked in, the house echoed like an empty tomb. He shook his head to get rid of the spooky image. The air smelled stale and dusty as if nothing had stirred in days. He knew instinctively that his mother wasn’t home, especially since her BMW was missing from the garage, but nonetheless he went from room to room checking. Everything was neat and orderly.

  No sign of haste or panic, until he came to her home office on the second floor. Her filing cabinet was wide open and file folders were scattered on the floor as if someone had been searching in a desperate hurry.

  Had his mother discovered that her file on his father was missing? Had she realized that he’d taken it? Is that what had precipitated her departure?

  She could simply be out for Sunday lunch with friends or at her office downtown, or even out in the Gatineau for her first cross-country ski outing of the season. She loved the crisp exhilaration of the trails and looked forward to the first good snowfall of the winter. After the record storm of last week, the trails would be fabulous.

  But even as he considered the possibilities, he knew they were wrong. The house had been empty far longer than a few hours. Perhaps ever since Friday, when he himself had left.

  What the hell was she up to? He had a dozen questions to ask her, yet once again she had outmanoeuvred him. Frustrated, he splashed a little medicinal Scotch over ice and went to sit at his computer, hopeful against all odds that there would be a message from Meredith. Nothing. Not on Facebook nor on his private email account. A faint flicker of anger stirred. Behind the worry and the grief, outrage was gathering. She was alive; she’d been running around Montreal meeting strangers and tracking down some secret from the past, all without trusting him enough to confide. Then, without giving a damn about the anguish she was causing, she’d taken off.

  On her Facebook page, he stared at her last cheerful posting of a week ago. “Shots for Ethiopia all done. Ugh. What we do for love ever after!”

  His fingers shook over the keyboard. He wanted to type “Bitch! Whatever happened to love ever after?” He wanted to type “Where the fuck are you? Answer me!” He wanted to type “You can go to hell!” He sat back instead and took a slow sip of Scotch. Swirling the ice in the glass, he gazed down into the fractured amber light. After a few deep breaths, he wrote, “Meredith, I don’t care what’s happened or even what our future might be. I just want to know you’re okay.”
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br />   He exited Facebook and sent the identical message to her email account. He’d already sent dozens over the past week, as had her friends and family, and all had been met with silence.

  Why should this one be any different? What could he say that would change her mind? He took another sip of Scotch and typed a new message.

  “I know about Montreal. I know about the past. I’d understand if you can’t come home, but just tell me you’re safe. One little word. Safe.”

  After pressing send, he picked up his empty Scotch glass and headed downstairs to the kitchen. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew he had to eat if he wanted to preserve his strength. He’d had nothing since he’d forced down half a croissant and coffee with the reporter.

  He still bristled when he thought how little information he’d managed to pry out of the cunning old bastard. He’d told Hatfield everything—about Lise Gravelle being run over by a snowplow near his house, about the flowers on his father’s grave, even about the fairytale his mother had invented about his father all these years. Hatfield had listened without taking a note and pretended to confide important details that were in fact just a rehash of old newspaper reports. He’d pretended to be as baffled as Brandon about the mysterious graveside visitor and agreed that it could well have been Meredith, but Brandon had seen the crafty gleam in his eyes. What did he know, and what was he planning next?

  He had the guy’s card with his cell phone number, which he’d given to encourage Brandon to keep him informed, but that cut both ways. Brandon intended to keep close tabs on what the man was up to, and what he found out. Everyone was keeping secrets from him—Cam Hatfield, his Aunt Bea, Uncle Cyril, and most of all his mother. How did all the secrets connect to Lise Gravelle, who had ended up dead just blocks from their home? And to Meredith, who had disappeared on the very same night. His breath quickened with fear.

  He poured a second Scotch. As he stood at the kitchen counter with his runaway thoughts, he heard a rumbling sound. He glanced out the window just as his mother’s BMW slipped past him into the garage behind the house. He watched as she climbed out and stood studying his car. She walked around the front of it, wiped some salt stains off the front bumper, then strode purposefully towards the house. He steeled himself. That second Scotch had been a mistake.

  He stayed where he was and listened as she opened the door, unzipped her boots and hung her coat on the hall rack. He heard a faint gasp and a whispered “Damn!” He wondered what had rattled her, but when she appeared in the kitchen archway, she had a smile pasted on her face.

  “Darling! I’m so glad you’re home.”

  He remained rigid in her embrace. She drew back, her eyes searching his, and for the first time he saw her as a stranger, tired, bruised and middle-aged. Her eyes, already haggard, darkened further at the accusation she must have seen in his. She pulled away and turned to the Scotch bottle still open on the counter.

  “Right. I’ll have some of that.”

  Once she’d poured herself a shot far healthier than his, she waved the glass towards the living room. As always it was a command, not a request, but nonetheless he followed. No point in escalating the battle before it had even begun. She sat down in the wing chair by the window that had always been hers, but now had the added benefit of casting her in shadow while his every expression would be bathed in light. He dragged the second wing chair over to the window opposite hers. A minor victory, but he needed all the advantage he could muster.

  She crossed her legs and gripped her glass in her lap. “I did it for you, darling. And for your father’s memory.”

  “Sure.”

  She paused. “All right, yes, I did it for me too. Because it was humiliating enough that the whole of Montreal knew how your father died. At first it seemed like the best foot to put forward, and then the story—”

  “The lie.”

  “It wasn’t strictly speaking a lie.”

  “Spare me the legal hair-splitting, Mom. People were paid off, who knows, maybe even threatened, to kill the story and promote this fiction. That this wonderful man, this brilliant, dedicated, overwhelmed professor had succumbed to the pressures of life.”

  “He was all those things. His...his weakness didn’t negate all that. But in the public’s eye, in the police eye, it would have. Great men can have—”

  He held up a sharp hand. He was surprised by the energy he felt. “Don’t! I’m a man. That ‘great men’s weakness’ is bullshit. I don’t care what the public thinks or remembers him for, I care that the father I treasured and admired for three decades was a lie. I care that for reasons I haven’t fully uncovered, it may have cost me the woman that I love!”

  She took a deep breath and sipped her Scotch with a rock-steady hand. Before she could regroup, he leaned forward.

  “Mom, what the hell is going on! Did Meredith learn something, see something that caused her to disappear?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Brandon. Everything I know is thirty years old. I can’t imagine why it would matter to her.”

  “I went to Montreal—”

  “I know you did. Cyril told me.”

  A chill ran through him. “You were in Montreal too?” She nodded. “Your Aunt Bea called me to tell me you’d arrived and she was going to tell you the truth about your father.”

  “What the hell were you doing? Sneaking around trying to shut everybody up?”

  “No, Brandon.” She sounded calm. Patient, reassuring Mother talking to him as if he were five years old again. He felt his gut clench. “I only wanted to know what you’d been told, and to talk to Cyril before you did. But you beat me to it.”

  “Why did you want to talk to Cyril?”

  “Because...” She paused, studying him. He had the strangest feeling that she was re-evaluating what he knew and what lie she could safely tell him next. “Cyril was my rock when your father died. I was devastated. I know that’s hard for you to believe, but I was fresh out of law school, barely twenty-five years old, a bewildered, hurt young mother with a two-month old baby.”

  Brandon remembered both Cyril’s and Cam Hatfield’s opinion that his mother had come off far better with his father dead than alive. He hardened himself against his mother’s poignant portrait. “Come off it, Mother. Cyril hasn’t a tender bone in his body.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That’s not true. Your father’s death—and the manner of it—affected him very profoundly. He’s a deeply wounded man, Brandon. He’s always kept those wounds private, but in the aftermath of your father’s death, he was the one family member I could count on.”

  “To pay people off, to threaten the newspapers...”

  “To shield me. To shield you, and yes, to shield your father’s memory. I know Cyril comes across as austere and calculating, but he’s an old man who’s lived alone too long—”

  “Jesus. Please give me some credit. He’s a vindictive, controlling old bastard, and if he was nice to you when my father died, it was for his own reasons. Maybe just keeping the Longstreet name out of the shit, maybe something else.”

  She drew in a quick breath. “Like what?” He reined in his anger. Once again he sensed she was holding out and wondering what he knew. He tried a bluff. “You know perfectly well. It’s what you’ve been trying to keep from me all along.”

  “I haven’t been keeping anything from you!”

  “Okay, let me ask you this. Did you go to Dad’s grave when you were in Montreal?”

  She looked blindsided. “Of course not. Why?”

  “Did you know Lise Gravelle, the woman who was killed—”

  “I know who you mean. I didn’t know her.”

  “Was she coming to see you?”

  Her brow furrowed. “I have no idea, Brandon. I’d never met her, never heard of her.”

  His mother was the consummate actor, used to playing with truth and obfuscation on the courtroom stage. She had mastered every emotion—disbelief, outrage, bewilderment and hurt. Her denial rang with such authenticity
that he had to remind himself not to believe a word.

  “Why would she come to see you?”

  “I don’t know that she was! I don’t know the woman from Eve.”

  “Who else did you see in Montreal besides Cyril?”

  “A couple of old friends and cousins.” She supplied names, all relations who had had no useful information to offer Brandon during his trip.

  “Did you warn them not to talk to me?”

  Her lips twitched. “You missed your calling going into medicine.

  You should become a lawyer.”

  “Did you warn them?”

  “Darling, I’m not the enemy! I knew the cat was out of the bag. I told them you were all grown up now and could handle whatever they wanted to tell you.”

  He didn’t believe her for a minute. “And did you say the same thing to Cameron Hatfield?”

  “Who?”

  “The newspaper reporter who covered Dad’s story.”

  She blinked, and her playful smile grew rigid. The spasm lasted only a second, but it told him all he needed to know. She hadn’t spoken to Hatfield, but there was indeed more to the story that she didn’t want him to know.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was five thirty in the evening. Green had spent the first hour of his westward drive squinting into the setting sun. In the cloudless winter sky, its white rays had shattered prism-like over the horizon before mercifully slipping out of sight. By the time Green finally neared Ottawa, the evening sky had deepened to velvet blue over the countryside, but his eyes ached.

  He’d phoned ahead when he was about an hour out to ask Gibbs to pick up Lise Gravelle’s cousin and bring him to the station. It wasn’t the most compassionate way to handle a next-of-kin interview, but he doubted this cousin, after thirty years of estrangement, would be too grief-stricken.

 

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