“What are you saying? You’re saying he’s violent toward you?”
“He can be … emotional. I just need you to be there, that’s all. Please?”
Emotional? He looked at the lit windows of her comfortable home flickering with silhouettes. “There’s a house full of people, most of them cops. Take your pick.”
“Cal —”
He had run out of patience and was no good at head games. He lifted his arm to break her grip, and before she could latch on again, started down the stairs. It was all so silly, and he expected her to laugh, but she didn’t. Instead, her words shot after him in a sudden, explosive rage: “You know what, Cal? You know what your problem is?”
He paused to look back at her.
“You’re a fucking ass-banging queer,” she called.
So gay guys weren’t the sweetest, after all. He kept walking, down the path and into the floodlight zone. The motion-sensor lamp came on again, showing the pavement leading two ways: straight ahead to the back lane, and off to the side, which he supposed would take him to the front of the house. Out to the street, to his car, to escape. He stood still as he heard a shriek and whistle — not the woman, but fireworks. Looking to the west, he saw a green-and-gold explosion of whirling sparks, then another, and another. Below the flickering sky, he saw the back alley, the roofs of houses, the gleam of a parked vehicle.
Montgomery’s fiancée was still shouting at him. “You don’t even know where you’re going.” Her voice cracked in anger, the snap of a whip. “It’s that way, you blind sonovabitch. That way.”
Her rage rattled him. He had committed no crime, and didn’t deserve this kind of abuse. It’s not me, it’s her, he told himself. She’d had a bad night, maybe. Was high, or low, or bitten by a mad dog. But for sure, whatever was interfering with her reason, she sure as hell shouldn’t have been driving.
He didn’t look at her again, but walked around the side of the house, through the carport, past Montgomery’s van, and out onto the street.
He was at his car, rummaging his pocket for keys. A few oversized late-night trick-or-treaters, drunk on sugar — or something stronger — torpedoed past in the rain, making their way to the Montgomery front door with its strobing lights and recorded spooky noises looped and broadcast, a soundtrack of witches cackling, ghosts wailing, demons laughing. There were synthetic cracks of thunder, too, a pale imitation of the real thing.
“Trick or treat, smell my feet,” one monster who could have been his own age bellowed after him.
“Fuck off,” he bellowed back.
He eased his Honda Civic from the curb, where it sat tightly packed amongst many, and drove back to his apartment. Soon he was in his neat bathroom, stripped down to his shorts and vigorously brushing his teeth in the dark. He crawled across his mattress to crash into the pillow, and reached out to press play on his stereo. Didn’t matter what was on — in this case it was an ambient track that sounded like an approaching train. Ever since the crash, noise had helped him sleep. Pan pipes or trash can lids or newscasts, it didn’t matter. Anything to break up disturbing thought patterns. Tonight he needed it more than ever. The woman with the dark wings had cranked his depression level back up to ten out of ten. Eleven.
By the third track, he was dozing. Not that it lasted. Moments later, it seemed, the jangle of his cellphone dragged him back to the surface. The clock’s red numerals read 1:02, and the caller was a dispatcher, trying to round up extra manpower. There were problems out there in the night, which was nothing new to the North Shore, but it was always worse on Halloween. And this involved a young teen, a trick-or-treater gone missing in the Edgemont Village neighbourhood. Could he pitch in?
“Yes, of course,” he rasped, and he was sitting up already, reaching for his clothes. “Right away.”
Twelve
CREEP
In the early-morning hours of Stefano’s second day off, he finished his thirty-third painting. His bare arms were smudged black and blue, and his hands were cold and cramped. He breathed hard, inhaling the pleasant stink of acrylic paint, sweating like a long-distance runner in front of his canvas propped on its makeshift easel, still wet. Forest at dusk, lines of dark through mottled light. His self-portrait had failed, and he had receded once more behind gobs of ochre and onyx.
But though he had painted trees over his ghastly form, with its lowering face and bloody ribs showing through torn fur, it didn’t matter, because it was there all the same, inside the canvas, staring out. Good, he thought. The best so far. But good enough? Never.
He went to wash the paint off himself, and when he returned, excited to see the masterpiece afresh, he saw instead a mess. It happened every time; the best became the worst upon the moment of completion, and no extra strokes would fix it.
He could not look at it now. He would let it dry, then place it with the other thirty-two, facing the wall, and try again only once he had built up new courage.
But for now, he was stuck. He had run out of both inspiration and stretchers. He needed to make more as soon as possible.
Paul had a woodwork shop in the basement, on the far side from Stefano’s suite. There were lathes and sanders and chisels, a mitre saw, everything Stefano needed to make his stretchers. The shop had been set up so Paul could make mouldings and spindles to finish the house nicely. He no longer used it much, but Stefano did, whenever Paul and Colette were out. He would listen for the front door upstairs to thump shut, then for the long process of getting the wheelchair strapped into the van. As soon as the vehicle purred out of the driveway and was gone, he would set up the equipment and bang together a frame or two. In his room he would stretch the cheapest canvas he could find, staple it into place, slather on the gesso.
Midnight struck. The music was off upstairs. Stefano looked at his skin folded up in the corner. There had been technical problems with fit and flexibility, so last week he had torn it apart and was now putting it back together. It was almost ready for another test run, but for now, he was only a man.
He picked up his running shoes and padded up in stockinged feet, avoiding the squeaky risers. At Anastasia’s door, he paused to listen, wondering if his father was in there with her. Paul spent a lot of time in there, too much time. He could do anything to her, and Anastasia couldn’t complain.
But no, he could hear Paul snoring from the master bedroom, and from Anastasia’s little cell, there was only the wheeze of her breathing machine.
On the back steps he sat and tied on his scruffy runners, then proceeded down through the woods, giving the neighbourhood a wide berth. He emerged close to Chef’s house and craned to look across a couple of lawns to see if her windows were lit. They should be. At this hour she would still be awake, maybe visible moving around inside. He would slide into her garden, creep around the foundations, urinate on the decorative shrubs. He would press against her back door in case it was open, as she had left it once, on that night he had broken in.
Tonight he would not only break in, but break through, confront her.
He dropped to a crouch, crawled across a dip in the dark lawn, avoiding the motion sensors. By the back hedge, he stood tall and stared.
Her windows were dark, the lights off. Her car wasn’t in the carport.
She was out. At 1:00 a.m. Doing what? With who?
He clambered up the back porch, heaving with rage, and rattled the doorknob. The handle turned without resistance. He paused, breathed on the glass for a moment, then pushed. The door swung inward.
Thirteen
THIRTEEN
At 1:30 in the morning on November 1 the rain had stopped, leaving only gusty winds to sweep the North Shore, and Dion was out looking for a missing trick-or-treater. Alone in his cruiser, he tracked over an unlikely stretch that had already been searched: the loop of Sunset Boulevard that would take him around Eldon Park.
His reason for checking out Eldon w
as a complaint from earlier on in the evening, teens getting rowdy behind the baseball field. The party had long since been disbanded, but the missing girl was also a young teen, and it might be worth it to take another run through the area.
He entered the MacKay Creek Greenbelt and was slowing for the curve when something caught his eye to his right, cropping up in his high beams and falling away again. A flutter that could be leaves or grasses flaring in the sweep of his headlights.
He pulled over and set the hazards flashing, and since he was parked in a place with poor visibility, he switched on the emergency lights to warn oncoming cars. He stared into the rear-view mirror, at the road and trees flickering red and blue. The road was a two-laner and poorly lit, but now he could see something glittering on the asphalt, maybe broken glass.
He called it in, putting the dispatcher on notice that he might have a situation and would check it out and confirm. Outside, the night was a medley of smells. Wet earth, mostly, car exhaust lying low in the cold, and maybe a whiff of gunpowder, as firecrackers were still sounding off from the direction of the ball field. Far away, a chorus of sirens raced to an alarm. The glittering objects picked out in his light beam, he discovered, were not glass shards, but wrapped candies, two on the road and three in the grass, a good forewarning of what his Maglite beam was going to find next.
She lay partly hidden behind the concrete barrier, downslope, sprawled in the weeds. If not for the flutter of fabric that lifted and fell from her clothing, he would have missed her altogether. He crossed the barrier and blasted his light square in her shockingly chalk-white face. Her lids were sooty black, crimson blood streamed from a gash in her cheek, and crude black stitches radiated from the corners of her mouth and across her forehead.
Halloween paint, all of it. The only real blood that Dion could see was a creek of darkness tracing a jagged line from her nostrils, down her cheek and into her hair. She was a zombie in grey rags, the theatrical effect spoiled by a dark-blue ski jacket with lime-green accents. He knew she was dead before he crouched at her side and felt for a pulse at her throat. No pulse, and her skin was cool to the touch — but not cold.
He jogged back to the car to give the dispatcher his location, asking for ambulance, traffic control, GIS.
After the call, he returned to the child, nothing to do but stand watch over her. She lay as thrown, he believed. Dead on impact or abandoned to die. There was no question who she was, as she fit the description of the missing teen, Breanna Ferris, to a T: small stature, pink hair, zombie duds.
The rags seemed to be made of bedsheets and cheap gauze cut ragged. It was a gauze strip unravelling from her hips that had flagged his attention. Black tights covered her slim calves, and on one foot was a clumpy high-heeled boot. She looked younger than thirteen to him. She looked too young to be out and about on this dark forested road all alone.
From one ski jacket pocket spilled more wrapped candies.
He walked up to the road. The spill of candy would mark the point of impact. His flashlight beam picked out skid marks, the burn of a hard braking. Whoever had hit her had seen her too late and tried to stop. A simple, violent story.
The other boot lay in the grass, on its side. To a passing driver it would look like just another rock. And now something else appeared on the asphalt some distance away — a tall pointy hat, tumbled there by the wind. Did zombies wear witch hats? Was there another victim hereabouts? As he watched, the tall hat tipped over in slow motion, scuttled farther down the road, and tried to take flight. Instead, it spun once and lay still.
He was searching for a second person, dead or alive, on the off chance, when the ambulance arrived. The paramedics confirmed what he already knew, that there was nothing they could do for the girl. He stood with them and waited for the ultimate confirmation of the coroner.
Between idle conversation with the EHS crew, he thought about the dead girl’s pink hair. Colourful hair was all the rage these days — purple, pink, green, or rainbow. But it hadn’t been, as far as he could recall, back when he’d spun his Charger out of the gravel pit last year, pedal to the metal, trying to catch her, and instead gotten T-boned by the red sports car at the intersection. Pow, his best pal dead, his world torn to smithereens, and the mystery girl with the pink hair, the witness who had seen god knows what, had escaped into the night.
“Rough, eh,” the paramedic was saying. “Just glad it’s not me breaking the news.”
Dion nodded at him. “Just hoping it’s not going to be me.”
Next out, a big gun arrived, putting in a rare appearance in the field. Inspector Hope was a heavy bull who had been with the North Shore for years. He came tonight wrapped in a dark coat over a dark suit. He wanted the details in broad strokes, and Dion described how he had come to be checking the area, taking a final sweep of some known teen hangouts that had caused a bit of trouble earlier in the evening.
More members arrived. David Leith piled out of one of the unmarked cars. He was lead on the search, and Hope began to harangue him for a job not well done. “Constable Dion here came out on his own initiative, and he found her. This area’s been gone over, Leith. Don’t your people have eyes?”
“She was hard to spot,” Dion offered. “She’s lying out of sight down there. In fact —”
“There’s candy all over the fucking road,” Hope said, not to Dion, but to Leith.
“Yessir,” Leith said. “I don’t think —”
“Which I spotted a mile away myself, without my glasses. Candy. And what’s that?”
Leith, along with everyone else in the vicinity, looked in the direction of the man’s pointing thumb at the witch’s hat seated at the road’s shoulder like a soggy black pylon. Hope wasn’t looking at the witch’s hat, because he was looking at Leith.
“That actually blew onto the road just now.” Dion said it more forcefully, not to be talked over again. “And I came out on his instructions,” he added, indicating Leith with a glance. “There was a party at Eldon that got dispersed earlier. David said to follow up.”
He had Hope’s attention now — and Leith’s — and went on. “I almost missed her. Driving past in the dark, I didn’t see the candy on the road. The hat wasn’t there when I arrived, and she lay out of sight completely. If that fabric she’s wrapped in hadn’t fluttered, I would have driven right by.”
“If it fluttered for you, it fluttered for everyone else,” Hope said, and went back to snarling at Leith. “What it is, is we’ve got a bunch of guys out here moping over last night’s hockey scores instead of keeping a lookout. How much time have we wasted? At whose expense? I’m not impressed.”
Leith said, “Yessir. We were focusing on Edgemont and the Highlands, because —”
“Struck by a car,” Inspector Hope interrupted, but more pleasantly, to Dion. “Hit and run.”
Dion had to agree. He guessed the driver hadn’t stopped for longer than a heartbeat before running. When Hope went to speak to the coroner, Dion asked Leith about the mystery of the witch’s hat. “Was she supposed to be wearing one? There was no hat in the description I got.”
Leith was looking pale, tired, and disgusted. Probably smarting from Hope’s bellowing, which still left angry ripples in the air. “I don’t know,” he said. “Good point.” And went to make arrangements to have the entire park searched for a possible second victim.
* * *
In the refuge of his car, Leith sat looking at his map of the North Shore. He felt shredded. He was disgusted with anyone who would mow down a child and flee. Also with his inobservant crew, whom he personally had assigned to run all roads in the area, even on the periphery, like this one. He hadn’t told them to keep a sharp eye out, because that went without saying, didn’t it?
The disgust he felt for the parents who had let their daughter out at night, dressed all in darks — no reflective clothing that he could see — was complicated b
y a searing pity.
The map was a blur, even with the overhead light on, and he couldn’t find his reading glasses. He could see Dion outside, talking to one of the Ident techs, a guy from traffic. They were looking at the road surface. Leith rolled down his driver’s window, letting in the cold, and gave a sharp whistle.
Dion got in on the passenger side, and they looked at each other. The lateness of the hour, the horror of the girl’s death, and their mutual weariness seemed to have sapped the antagonism out of both of them. “Thanks for the lie,” Leith said. “Didn’t put a plug in his fat mouth, but you tried, and I appreciate it.”
“It wasn’t a lie,” Dion said. “You mentioned Eldon in the briefing.”
“Did I?”
“The bush-party angle. You said check it out.”
Leith decided not to pursue this gross rubberizing of the truth, and Dion seemed happy to do the same. “I can’t read this fucking map. Can you show me where we are?”
Dion found their location and marked it with a pen. He then checked his notes and was able to place an X where Breanna Ferris lived, too. Or had lived. “Highland Boulevard, just down from Tudor,” he said.
“But she was trick-or-treating down here, in Edgemont Village, with a friend,” Leith said. “Grace something or other.”
“What did Grace say?”
“Nothing much. Says she and Breanna split up about eight thirty, still in the village.” He squinted at the map. “Down here. Grace went home, which is here, not far from where they split up, and she says she thought Breanna was going to do the same.”
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