Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  “You’re saying Jeff believes Collie MacDonald did something to his own daughter?” You could tell John Rory thought that was crazy.

  “Hey, happens every day. It’s a sick world out there, and a lot of the sickos look like ordinary dads. You just don’t know what’s going on behind the closed doors of the family home. Anyway, I gotta go to the ambulance. If a call comes in on the radio and I miss it, they’ll fire my ass out of there. And then I’ll be unemployed, and the only thing I’ll be able to drink is Brights 74, and they’ll come and repossess my car. Like I was some kind of a loser. And Lee Kaulbeck doesn’t play the loser for anybody.” Then he laughed and said, “So I sure as hell hope I don’t get fired over this!” He jerked his head towards the house where Jeff was, then he headed back to sit in the ambulance.

  John Rory didn’t say anything about Lee’s ideas, so I didn’t mention them either. The baseball game was starting up again, second inning. And I got to bat. I had two strikes and two balls, and then I hit the ball and started to run but my cousin Louise threw me out at first base. That was okay, though, because it was really fun. Andy Campbell came out of the house a few minutes later, and everybody asked him what went on with Jeff McCurdy but he just waved his hand as if to say, “Nothing happened” or maybe “Don’t ask.” Andy picked up his glove and went back to the outfield and called John Rory an “easy out,” and everybody made smart-arse remarks and we played the game.

  About half an hour later, we saw Nancy and Jeff come out of the house and get into the ambulance, and it drove away.

  Good thing, because a few minutes after that, Collie MacDonald arrived with Heather and Jockie. Imagine what Collie would have said if he’d found the guy who broke into his house sitting in Nancy’s house.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Collie said.

  “Aww! How much of the game is over?” That was his little boy.

  “Don’t worry, Jockie,” said John Rory. “We’ll add some extra innings just for you guys.”

  “Yay!”

  “See if there’s any marks on Collie!” one of my boy cousins said.

  But I couldn’t see any. If Collie had beat up Jeff to pay him back for the break-in, he must have been the winner of the fight because he didn’t have any cuts on him or black eyes. And besides, he had already called the cops on Jeff, which is the way you are supposed to handle things, not beat the guy up yourself.

  After the game, we were all standing around talking and having our lemonade. I didn’t have any runs, but I caught a pop fly and got Louise out. It was so much fun! Even Bonnie’s little brother and sister had a good time. Collie had stayed for a few minutes to watch them play. He and Andy stood on opposite ends of the field, but I talked to both of them. Mum would say their personal problems are nobody else’s business. When Collie was leaving, one of the kids said something about Jeff and wondered who beat him up, and Collie turned around and said, “Probably his old man. Wouldn’t be the first time.” His own father!

  I was standing beside John Rory, and I said to him, “Lee says he thinks Jeff is innocent. And now that we know Jeff’s father beats him up, that makes me really think he didn’t do it. He probably wouldn’t do anything bad to Bonnie. Because he would know what it was like to be hurt really badly, and he’d never want to do that to anybody else.”

  And John Rory told me one of the saddest things I have ever heard in my whole life. Eleven long years. He said, “It works the other way around sometimes, Normie. A lot of the time. People who are beaten and abused at home often go on to abuse other people. It’s all they know. And they are full of rage, and they take it out on their victims.”

  It doesn’t get much more horrible than that.

  That night it was weird. I was with Mum and Dad. They came to see me at Morag’s. Morag had gone to bed early, and it was just the three of us in the sitting room. All of a sudden I couldn’t hear them. I could see them but they looked far away. There was a big sound in my mind, something I could feel and hear at the same time, as if something went “hhhaaaaawwwww” on a really low note on the scale. It was as if all the low instruments in an orchestra played that loud, low sound all at once. But it was also as if someone — or something — was breathing that noise. It was the kind of sound or music you would hear if you saw a movie about the devil, and they had just opened the door to hell! Something really bad was happening or was in the air. The noise kept getting louder and louder; it was all I could hear. This went on for a long time, or it seemed long to me. Then I could see Mum close to me, looking into my eyes. I could read her lips calling my name. She looked worried. And then the big noise started to fade away, and I said something to Mum but she must not have heard me because she kept saying my name. I didn’t want to let on that something spooky happened, so I didn’t tell her. She and Dad came back into focus in a normal way, and I saw for sure that it was only them. No bad guys had sneaked in or devils! I felt foolish and tried to act as if nothing had happened.

  But they knew something was wrong, and Mum asked, “Did something happen that got you upset, Normie?” She was trying to sound casual as if I just had a bit of a tummy ache, but I can tell when she’s worried about me and trying not to show it.

  “No,” I said.

  “You had fun playing ball today?”

  “Yeah, it was great!”

  “Did somebody say something that bothered you?”

  “Not really.”

  “What, then?”

  I just answered, “Nothing.” I knew they would hear about Jeff McCurdy and somebody beating him up, maybe his father, and that a lot of people think maybe Jeff had something to do with Bonnie being missing. But I wasn’t sure that was the reason I had the . . . episode. Maybe it was him, but maybe not. I knew one thing for sure: the things I’d been hearing lately about people’s families were going to stay in my mind for a long, long time.

  Mum changed the subject after that. She talked about this really good blues guy they had gone to see the other night at a place called the Strange Event. Or maybe it was the Main Event. Anyway, he lives in Cape Breton, and his name is Matt Minglewood, and he has really good songs. Daddy said he uses some of them with his own blues band, which has a funny name, Functus. He says it means something in the law, but I think he’s joking.

  We played two games of Scrabble after that, and I got enough letters to make the word “palomino.” So I had the best word in the whole two games. I felt better by the time they left and I went to bed. But I had nightmares.

  The next morning, I sat down with Morag. I wanted to tell her about the nightmares and the feeling I had before I went to bed. I didn’t want to be a crybaby in front of her, so I tried to keep my voice calm and steady. I looked off to the side when I told her what happened. “I was scared last night, Greatgran. When I was here with Mum and Dad, I heard a big, loud, low sound like music from hell! And then in bed the noise came back, and there were horrible things, but I can’t describe them. I’m not sure I even saw them when I was in the dream itself. I thought I was trapped in a place with high walls and no light. Something low and dark was slithering around on the floor and up the walls. I couldn’t see it, but I could sense that it was happening. And then the walls just evaporated and I was in a space as big as the whole world, and the scary, creeping thing was still there.”

  I turned my eyes back to Morag, and I was afraid she would think I was being silly. But no, she was looking at me as if what I was saying made sense. So I went on, “My heart was pounding. I felt it was going to fly out of my body. And I woke up screaming! Nobody screams in our house. That’s not something we do!”

  Morag said to me, “You screamed because you sensed something moving through the world, something low and lethal, moving just below everything we see and hear in our daily lives. It is present at all times, humming like the bass line under the melody, like the drone of the pipes under it all.”

  “It’s e
vil.”

  She just nodded her head.

  “Greatgran, did it take Bonnie?”

  She looked at me for a long time and then said, “I don’t know, m’eudail. But I know there is something here that should not be here. Should not be in the world.” She leaned closer to me. “And it is with us now.”

  Chapter VII

  Monty

  The coal miners organized by Maura’s father didn’t find anything suspicious underground. No other tea parties or traces of the missing girl. No crime scenes. The search party organized by Collie MacDonald, which covered everyone in the village and on the outskirts of Kinlochiel, didn’t fare much better. It produced no useful information with the possible exception of an observation somebody made of an expression on Bonnie’s face at the party at Mary Reid’s. It could be nothing, it could be something, or it could be something blown out of proportion by the desperation to fasten on anything that might be a clue. Mary Reid’s neighbour, Noella Sampson, told one of Collie’s volunteers that she saw Bonnie come into the upstairs hallway from one of the bedrooms. Noella had just come out of the upstairs bathroom when she saw Bonnie. Bonnie spoke a couple of words, apparently to someone in the bedroom behind her. She said “I will” or “For sure” or something of that nature. Noella didn’t remember the words; she just remembered that it was an expression of agreement. And when Bonnie saw Noella, Bonnie looked a little flustered at being overheard. No, the woman corrected herself, it was more of a mischievous look, as if Bonnie was up to something but not something bad. “I just don’t know,” Noella said. “I’m trying to remember my impression. But it was so minor — it didn’t cause me any concern at all — that I had probably forgotten it by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs.”

  And that was it. Noella, a woman in her mid-fifties, was beside herself with guilt that she had not mentioned this to anyone before, but she thought it was such an unimportant thing, a matter of so little significance, that she had not reported it to the Mounties. And she was probably right. Who could say that a young girl with a flustered or mischievous look on her face at a party was a phenomenon worthy of note? If Bonnie was up to something, it was not something that made her look fearful or guilty or resentful at being overheard. The person in the bedroom may have made a joke, and Bonnie had lightly agreed to go along with it. Who knew? What time had this happened? Maybe nine thirty or so, but she could not be sure. Noella was adamant that she had no idea who Bonnie had been talking to in the bedroom.

  There was no word on a second excursion, with volunteers combing the terrain for signs of Bonnie or of a crime scene. Collie may have realized that plan was even less promising than the door-to-door canvass of Kinlochiel.

  Brennan Burke had quite a time of it in the company of Sabrina Fay-Waddams.

  “I don’t know what role she sees for herself in this, but she virtually pleaded with every interview subject to ‘give me something I can use.’”

  I couldn’t come up with a response to that.

  “And if it was someone she knew, she went off on a tangent about that book she claims to be writing.”

  “What do you mean, someone she knew? How would she know anyone in Kinlochiel?”

  “No idea. I tuned her out. It was only a couple of people.”

  “But she just arrived in Glace Bay. She’s staying out at the beach in Dominion. How would she —”

  “Collins. Don’t exercise yourself over this. Just be thankful you didn’t spend the day listening to her prattle. Your name came up the odd time of course, in the same way it did the other night. ‘Don’t tell Monty I said this, because I can’t stand boastful people and I don’t want to sound like one, but . . .’ And then I was treated to one of her barmy insights or dubious achievements. Be it not for me to draw inferences from someone so subtle, but I’d say this versatile young person is out to impress you.”

  “Very insightful of you, Father. Must be all those years in the confession box, listening to the dark secrets of the human heart.”

  “Either that or yer one, Sabrina, never stopped blathering about you the entire day.”

  Normie

  I went sailing on the “great inland sea.” That’s what they call Lake Bras d’Or. It’s part salt water and part fresh water, but I don’t know how it’s mixed or where. But I do know that Bras d’Or is French for arms of gold. If you look at it on a map, it looks like great big arms reaching out. And when the sun is setting, they do look like gold. We were in a boat named the Toronto Farewell. It was big and black and had three masts. The guy who owns it is a lawyer named Phillip Thomson, whose kids go to Bonnie’s school, and he invited all the kids who were in grades six to nine last year. The younger kids already had their turn. I got invited because my cousins go to the school, and I’m their guest. People say it’s “good to get away from it all,” and it is, especially if there is something horrible going on in your life. This boat trip was like a holiday within a holiday. It was sunny, and the water was a beautiful blue, but it was windy, which made it even more fun because we skipped across the water really fast.

  There was a crew of sailors who steered the boat and put the sails up and down, depending on the wind and all that. And the owner of the boat, Mr. Thomson, had a cook on board, a real chef, and he made a humongous pot of fish chowder with stuff that had come out of the very sea that was underneath us. We ate out of bowls shaped like scallop shells, and sometimes the chowder sloshed out and onto our clothes and life jackets, but nobody cared because it was such a great time. They gave us pop made by Seaman’s Beverages, because of the name and because it’s so good. I had orange, and then later I had lime rickey. Best ever! John Rory started everyone singing songs about the ocean and sailing, like “Barrett’s Privateers,” and I knew most of the words. Some of the kids were too shy to sing at first, but then most of them did. We sang “Tiny Fish for Japan” and “Let Me Fish Off Cape Saint Mary’s.”

  One of the guys who wouldn’t sing was . . . Jeff McCurdy! You’d think maybe a guy who was bad, and who could even be dangerous, wouldn’t have been invited. But that’s not the way it works. All the kids who had been in grades six to nine were allowed to come, and he had just finished grade nine, and you couldn’t leave anyone out. Which is nice in a way, but then you end up with a tough guy in the crowd who sits back and gives dirty looks to all the normal people, and you don’t know what he might do. He still had cuts and bruises from the last time I saw him, but they had faded a bit.

  At first he wouldn’t even eat the chowder. And he made a face when one of the girls offered him a bottle of cream soda. One of the big boys, Murdoch, dug into the cooler and brought out a bottle of pop that was brown. Root beer, maybe, and shoved it at Jeff and said, “Phil Thomson is not licensed to serve beer to minors, McCurdy, so this will have to do till you’re back on land and can break in and raid somebody’s liquor cabinet.”

  Jeff said a bad word back to him. He told him to eff off, but he grabbed the bottle anyway.

  Then Murdoch said, “You really should eat the chowder, man. Fish is brain food. Didn’t you know that?”

  “How could he know?” another guy said. “If he hasn’t eaten the brain food, he doesn’t have the brains to know fish is brain food.”

  “Eat this,” Jeff replied to him in a mean voice, and I won’t tell you what he pointed to when he said it. Unbelievable!

  Everybody ignored him then, but I sneaked looks at him once in a while to see what he might get up to. And I saw him eat three bowls full of the chowder. It was as if he had never had anything to eat in his whole life till now.

  Mr. Thomson took us in small groups after that and gave us a tour of the boat and explained how some of the rigging and things worked. It was good, except John Rory and I and a couple of grade eight girls got stuck in the same group as Jeff. After Mr. Thomson and one of his sailors finished telling us about the boat, we were left there with Jeff and the others. The g
irls made up an excuse to get away, so it was just me, Jeff, and John Rory.

  “Pretty cool, eh?” John Rory said, probably just for something to say.

  “Yeah,” said Jeff.

  “Wouldn’t mind having something like this when I get out working. Need to earn the big bucks to have a boat like the Toronto Farewell.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ll have to go to Toronto to get the big bucks to come back here and sail it. Thomson went up there and worked for years before coming back here.”

  “I know. He worked for some big law firm up there. Corporate-type clients in suits. He was one of their top earners, the way I heard it. Then he came back to Cape Breton and got a bunch of business clients here. And doctor clients, too.”

  “My doctor knows him.”

  “You ended up going to the doctor? You got pretty banged up. Did you get stitches?”

  “Some, yeah.”

  “What happened? How’d you end up in a fight?”

  “Shit happens.”

  I thought maybe it does. But it doesn’t just happen. Something, or someone, makes it happen. But I didn’t say that. I tuned back into the conversation, and Jeff was saying there was a lot of blood coming out of his head.

  “Good thing the ambulance arrived when it did!” said John Rory. “Lee was on that day, right?”

  “That prick.”

  Just when I thought maybe Jeff wasn’t going to be rude anymore, he said that. John Rory didn’t like it either because he asked, “Why do you say that? Lee’s all right. Nothing prickish about him.”

  “Guess you never got picked up by him after you’ve been injured.”

  “What do you mean? Is he rough?”

  “I was in fucking agony, and he was there with a great big Jesus smile on his face looking down at me.”

  “I imagine that’s exactly what he’s trained to do when somebody’s in pain, smile at them. Not give them a gloomy look as if to say, ‘You’re gonna die!’”