Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  Sharon sat down beside Maura on the chesterfield, and we turned to the subject of Bonnie’s disappearance. Not surprisingly, we had already been through every bit of information Sharon possessed about the last movements of her daughter the night of July 15. Simply put, she knew nothing beyond the fact that she and Andy had left the party at Mary Reid’s house with the two younger children, Heather and Jockie, at around quarter to eleven. They had said goodnight to Bonnie, who was going to stay overnight at Red Archie Drummond’s with his daughter Louise. There was nothing the least bit out of the ordinary to that point on that Friday night. There had been nothing wrong, nothing unusual, in the days and weeks leading up to this event.

  “I haven’t been able to move. I haven’t been able to do anything,” Sharon said to us now. “Andy has been giving music lessons in the summers. He says he has a hidden agenda. He works the mathematical principles of music into the lessons in the hope that this will help when the students come into his math class at school in the fall! Anyway, I’ve encouraged him to keep on with the music lessons, and he’s agreed to do that. That’s where he is today. He is devastated, but his way of dealing with it is to work it off, keep himself occupied, surround himself with people. He’s a social animal, no question. So that works for him. I’d like to be the same way, but I . . . I just can’t. All I do is think about what might have happened to her, where she might be, what she might be going through. If it weren’t for Heather and Jockie, I wouldn’t be able to drag myself out of bed in the morning. And trying to put on a brave face for the two of them! ‘Mummy, where’s Bonnie? Did a bad man take her?’ Andy and I are just winging it as we go along: ‘Sometimes people go away, and then they come back and say where they went, and everything’s okay.’ How long will an eight- and a nine-year-old child be satisfied with that? There have been a lot of long nights sitting at their bedsides trying to reassure them, while I am living in terror every day and every night myself. And when I finally get to sleep, well, I wish I could sleep forever, because that instant when I wake up, when I return to consciousness and remember what has happened, I just want to howl in grief. So I wish I could just put myself out until . . . until she comes back unharmed. I have a fantasy of her bounding in the door. ‘Hey Mum, you wouldn’t believe what happened! Sorry, I can’t imagine how worried you’ve been, but I’m fine. And wait till you hear this!’ I live for that. Unless and until . . .”

  Every parent’s worst fear. Realized here on the shores of beautiful Lake Bras d’Or in Kinlochiel, Cape Breton.

  In contrast to the mood, the room was perversely cheerful with colourful mats on polished wood floors, high windows looking over the brilliant blue waters of the great inland sea. There was no television in the room. The only electronics on display were a compact disc player and two sets of shelves crammed with CDs. Shelves on the opposite wall were filled to overflowing with books. Discreetly displayed at the far end were several East Coast Music Awards, two Junos, and other honours Clan Donnie had earned as one of this country’s premier Celtic music bands.

  Sharon caught me looking at the awards and said, “It’s ironic. We had been planning to do a benefit concert. And it was going to be for children and young people in trouble, you know, kids whose parents had been thrown out of work with the closing of this or that mill or plant, kids with disabilities, kids who were suffering in the midst of family breakdown, children living in poverty, all of that. We were going to raise money for various children’s causes and invite the kids to come. Raise money and raise spirits. Bonnie was looking forward to it as much as any of us. She was going to play the whistle and step dance. Now it’s our family that’s in trouble. It’s Bonnie who is out there in desperate need of help. I remember her last year, when some of this family dirt was rising to the surface . . . well, it had been going on for a few years by then.”

  She stopped speaking, and nobody filled the silence until I decided to ask about the trouble we had heard about between members of the band. “What was going on there, Sharon?”

  “Oh, it was just the kind of pettiness that seems to crop up when people have something good going for them. Somebody has to create a disturbance. Ian’s wife thought Ian wasn’t being given enough prominence in our shows; someone apparently told her that Robbie was half in the bag one night and called Ian a second-rater. Robbie denies it. But Ian’s wife says, ‘How would he know? He was full of rum at the time.’ Robbie says he’s never thought that about Ian, so it wouldn’t have come out of him no matter how plastered he was. And I believe him. Ian knows it isn’t true, so that’s the important thing. Then there was talk — started by whom, I have no idea — that Kirsty’s husband and Robbie’s wife have been getting it on for years, and that’s why they seldom travel with the band. When they don’t come on tour with us, it’s because of work and childcare commitments, not because the two of them are in the crib together. It’s this kind of petty gossip that started making the rounds. Then there’s talk about money of course. Isn’t there always? Andy does a lot of the management and financial stuff for the band, and someone started the rumour that he was, excuse the pun, fiddling with the accounts. And all this shit was generated from outside the band; we’re not gossip mongers ourselves, and we’ve tried to ignore it. But it started taking a toll. At one point, Andy and I did a concert on our own, with Bonnie. And Kirsty and Ian went out as a duo a couple of times in Halifax.

  “And then there’s Collie. He was close friends with several of the miners who were killed in the explosion in ’79. We all knew them. It was terrible.” The explosion in the mine deep under the ocean off Glace Bay killed a dozen men and injured several others. Everyone we knew in Cape Breton knew someone who had died down there. “And a few years after that, Collie got laid off from Sysco.” The steel plant in Sydney. “He works for various contractors now, whenever there’s a job available. He always had a weakness for alcohol as you both know, but, after all this, the drinking got out of control. Collie saw me and the other family members in the band getting all the acclaim and making money from touring, and his attitude was that he was superfluous. The kids and I didn’t need him, he thought. Andy had joined the band, the only time we ever had anyone in the group who was not a relative. Robbie recruited Andy who strengthened our fiddling and keyboards, and he was a great addition. Full of personality. He added the element of storytelling to our shows. Well, you guys know all about it. So human nature being what it is, somebody started a rumour that Andy and I were getting it on. Andy had already separated from Master even before joining us on stage, so that helped fuel the rumours.”

  “Master?” I asked. “Am I missing a whole nother angle here?”

  “Master, his ex.”

  “His ex . . . what?”

  “Wife. Her real name is Marsha. The nickname comes from the jargon she uses. She always talked like a real estate agent, even before she became one. She’d show people around their house and say, ‘This is the master,’ about their bedroom. The master bedroom. You can imagine the jokes that inspired. And it had an ‘ensuite.’ And ‘did you see the way the home was nestled’ into the whatever. She eventually took the real estate course, and she has started billing herself as a ‘developer’ now.”

  “Doesn’t sound like Andy’s kind of gal.”

  “No, they weren’t well matched. Andy had a really sweet girlfriend before Master. I never understood why he didn’t stick with her, but if he had I guess he and I would never have linked up. So anyway, Collie was in a drunken funk much of the time, and here was handsome, talented, funny Andy Campbell on the scene. In fact, there was nothing going on between him and me until Collie stormed off one night and went on a week-long bender in Halifax. Our marriage had been going downhill, and at that point it crashed and burned. So I did start seeing Andy. Collie and I separated then, and we divorced, and I left Glace Bay and married Andy, and we moved back here to Kinlochiel. But that was old news. As for the later troubles we all, the memb
ers of the band, got together and talked it out, and decided we had no quarrel with each other, and we were going to carry on as always.

  “Through all this, at times when I felt like giving up, Bonnie stayed on my case and told me to rise above our troubles. Music could only make things better. At one of the low times, we were all having dinner, and Bonnie came into the room here and put on a video of us performing in Inverness. Inverness in Scotland, I mean. She cranked it up and stood there in the middle of the room, hands on hips, staring us down. Here she was, just a little girl. But she was wise beyond her years. Always has been, really. Comes from all that reading, I guess. She devours books of poetry and the kind of novels I should have read but never got around to. Anyway, she said, ‘You were born for this. This is what you are meant to do. Sitting around on your arses and letting people get you down, and not playing music, is a sin! I mean that. God gave you talent and you are wasting it. That’s a sin.’ A familiar reel came on and she said to her little brother and sister, ‘Step ’er down!’ and she held out her hands, and Heather and Jockie got up from the table, and big grins came over their faces, and the three of them danced as if there could be no greater joy in life.”

  “Bonnie’s right,” Maura declared. “Fuck the begrudgers. You are meant to be enjoying your music and giving it to the world.”

  “I know, I know. But I’m not sure that I can. Not now. You’ve heard about the concert we had planned for the middle of this month, us and some of the other bands and performers from around here . . .”

  “Right,” Maura said, a note of caution in her voice.

  “Nobody knows what to do about it. The others are on standby; they are being wonderful about it, but how can we —”

  Maura rose and drew Sharon up from her seat and wrapped her arms around her. The cousins stood like that for a long moment, then let go and sat side by side on the chesterfield.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” Sharon asked Maura.

  “July. I was on stage with her at the Maritime Gaelic Cultural Association Festival. God love her, she invited me to sing!”

  “I certainly hope you didn’t let her down!”

  “I assure you, Sharon my dear, I did not let Bonnie down. I left the stage without croaking out a single note. Hearing me sing would have been a definite let-down. I was up there handing over the cheque for the donation Monty’s firm gave to the association. He got stuck in court in Halifax, so I did the honours. Well, you remember that. Great festival. Hotter than Scotch love that day.”

  “We were lucky. Barely a cloud in the sky. I’m trying to think why I missed seeing you on stage. I think that’s when I was doing an interview with the Cape Breton Post. But,” she said, looking at me, “we are not the only band in the family. I’ve been going on and on about Clan Donnie’s concerts, but I hear there’s a blues night or three planned here on the island.”

  “Well . . .” I didn’t know what to say. My band, Functus, which was formed in my law school days, had been offered a series of gigs at Iggie’s Tavern in Glace Bay. This had been arranged way back when the Cape Breton holiday was in the planning stages, before Bonnie was reported missing. Now, the idea of a night of blues and booze and public partying by a member of Bonnie’s family . . .

  “Monty,” Sharon said, “please don’t change your plans. Don’t let this guy, whoever he is, take us all down. We can’t let him control our lives, can’t let him silence us. That would give him an even greater victory over us than he has already achieved. Temporarily achieved. Just because I can’t get up there myself with all this happening doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”

  I nodded my head and turned my mind to the songs my band would play for Bonnie when we got up to sing the blues in the tavern. I started to say something to Sharon when I was interrupted by the ringing of the phone. Sharon leapt up and ran for it.

  “Hello! Yes? Yes, Dougald? Oh God! No, I know what you mean. It probably isn’t. I understand. Should we . . . No, you’re right. Okay, thanks, Dougald. Thanks to you and Pierre for all you’ve done. You’ve been working way beyond the call of duty! Okay, bye.”

  She returned to us and took a deep breath before speaking. “That was the Mounties. They received some kind of tip.” Maura and I waited, immobile. “Dougald sounded kind of sheepish about it, as if he doesn’t think it’s reliable, but he has to go through the motions anyway. It was more than just trying to keep my hopes down; he thinks it’s a wild goose chase. But the tip is about Andy and Master’s old house. The bank foreclosed on it before they split up; they couldn’t afford to do it up the way they wanted. Or the way she wanted. And nobody else has been interested in it either. It was a black hole when it came to expenses. Andy never liked the place, and he’s had nothing to do with it for years. So whatever Dougald is talking about, it can’t be about Andy.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. An abandoned house that Andy could no doubt still get into? Whatever the case, I didn’t say a word, and neither did Maura.

  “Anyway, the Mounties are going to have a look around the place. Dougald made it clear that I shouldn’t come to the house. Just wait and hear what they find. Which will be nothing. Dougald didn’t want me hearing about it second hand.” She broke down then. “And of course my hopes would not be up, for them to find anything. I don’t want them to find something. I just want Bonnie to waltz in that door and give me a damn good explanation of where she has been! The last thing I want is something turning up at that old Campbell house.”

  Normie

  “Mean Normie.” That’s what they’re going to call me, because I was mean. After I went to the spooky old house and didn’t see anything weird and didn’t feel anything wrong, after all that, the Mounties came to Morag’s house. People were playing music in the kitchen. It wasn’t a rip-roaring party or anything like that, not with the sad event that had happened. Some of my little cousins were there, and they were drooping against their mums’ and dads’ shoulders, or curled up by the stove, they were so tired. So grownups weren’t talking about Bonnie, because of the little kids being in the room. But some people were playing quiet and sad pieces on the fiddles and whistles and guitars and singing quiet little songs. I knew some of the music, like “Catherine’s Lament” and “Lament for the Children.”

  And, no question about it, there was lots of booze being drunk. (That’s what you say, booze being drunk, even if it sounds funny. Even if it sounds as if the booze itself is drunk and acting foolish. Booze being drank is bad English.) Anyway, everybody there was drinking beer or rum or Scotch. Scotch is booze; the people are Scots. I have been known to drink half a glass of wine with my supper at home with my parents, so the grownups at Morag’s let me have that much on this night. Everybody laughed because, as I said, the Mounties arrived. Two of them came in. One was tall and had dark red hair and dark eyes; the other was shorter with light brown hair and really light blue eyes, and he had a French accent. He talked with everybody for a couple of minutes, then went back out to the police car. The other guy stayed in the house. And it’s a good thing somebody said who they were, because they were in disguise! They didn’t have their uniforms on, just ordinary clothes. How are you supposed to know? Anyway, I shoved my glass away and I must have made a quare face because somebody said I looked like a deer caught in the headlights. The reason I looked stunned and guilty is that it’s against the law for me to drink. I’m not nineteen. Eight years to go. So I was scared. Especially when Robbie pointed at me and said to the cop, “You’d better take her in, Dougald. Should she pack a toothbrush?” And everybody cracked up, except me. How did they even know? The Mounties, I mean. How did they know a crime was being committed in that house? Did somebody call and tell on me?

  But Dougald the Mountie said, “We’re going to let her off with a warning. This time.” Phew! That was close, but then he said to Robbie, “But you, sir, are in contravention of Section 99Z of the Act. So you’re coming with m
e.”

  “Oh, your arse. Have a little dileag with us, Dougald.” The “d” in dileag sounds like a “j” and when you’re getting a little dileag you’re getting a little drink of booze.

  “Better not. Pierre is waiting in the car.”

  “You’ll have a shot of rum.”

  “No, not right now. Came here to talk to Morag.”

  “She’s gone off to bed. What is it, Dougald? We’ll fill her in tomorrow.”

  The Mountie’s face was serious then, and everybody got quiet.

  “We went to the house.”

  Nobody asked him, “What house?” They’d probably all heard about Morag’s bad feeling about that old house. Everybody in the kitchen stopped whatever they were doing. They were as still and quiet as people in a painting.

  “We set the dog up at the beginning of all this with a piece of clothing of Bonnie’s. We bring that out whenever we go on a search. Anyway, we did that and we brought Fritz with us, the dog, and he responded to something and we did some digging.”

  “Oh God!” someone cried out. I didn’t see who it was because I had my eyes on the Mountie.

  “Turns out all it was was a cat.”

  “What do you mean?” Robbie asked.

  “Somebody buried a cat there. Used to be a well, way back, so I guess it was easier digging there than in the woods around it. When they cleared the land to build the Campbell place, the well got cemented over along with the other ground for the foundation. This was just at the edge of the foundation in the back, just under soil and grass, so our dog sniffed it out. Anyway, that’s what was found at the top of the pile of junk under there: a cat.”