by Anne Emery
“Right.”
“So, did you get anything useful out of him at all?”
“Just his declaration again that Ginny would do no wrong.”
Something occurred to me then. “Sounds as if he is very protective of her, still. He liked her.”
“Yes.”
“Is it possible that there was something going on between them?”
I expected the raised left eyebrow I usually got from Burke following a question like that. All he raised was his glass and said, “There wasn’t. And he wasn’t the father.”
“You asked him that?!”
“I did.”
“You never cease to surprise me, Father.”
He clinked his glass against mine. “May I never cease to surprise you, Monty.”
“Well!”
“Bertoni’s impression of the child’s father was that the man was a cad, a louser, a seducer of young and impressionable women who were new in town and dazzled by the big city. The fellow disappeared as soon as Ginny informed him that she was pregnant. Bertoni provided a sympathetic ear and offered her support through the pregnancy and birth. He baptized the baby.”
“So, she did her best to raise the boy on her own. But one of the many things that puzzles me is this: if the child was so sick, on the point of death, why didn’t she have him in the hospital?”
“I asked Bertoni that. He didn’t answer. Just looked out the window, down at the street in front of his outreach centre, and said, ‘Some people should never have been born into this world.’”
Pierre
Our questions about the death of Ginny Drummond MacDonald’s son Lyle in Toronto were of great interest to the police up there. We knew they had spoken to her priest, Father Bertoni, who said he had signed a death certificate for the boy. But there was nothing about his death in the official records of the Province of Ontario. The paper generated by the priest Bertoni gave the cause of death as pneumonia; it said Lyle James Drummond died on March 27, 1956, and was buried three days later. I talked to Sergeant Bob Wesley on the phone, and he was no more impressed than we were with the burial story. The property where Ginny had been living was long gone, bulldozed to make room for a mall. There was no reason for the excavators to be on guard looking for bodies but, even so, Wesley managed to find an old guy who had worked for the subcontractor clearing the land. He was in his late seventies, but there was nothing wrong with his memory. Yes, he had bulldozed a lot of different properties and it was hard to tell one from the other after all this time, but he would have remembered if he had dug up the body or the skeleton of a child. Never happened. And, really, the burial story smelled bad from the beginning. A young opera singer out there with a garden spade digging six feet down into the grass and rock to make a grave? Even if the priest was on hand to help, it didn’t make sense when there were plenty of cemeteries around.
So. The burial story was bullshit. Where was the body? Was it disposed of somehow? Was it at the bottom of Lake Ontario? Did she murder her own child? If he died at her hands, it was more likely an accident or a sudden lashing-out by an exhausted, overwhelmed single mother. Or was there a new boyfriend on the scene? Was he responsible for the death? But Father Bertoni and Sergeant Wesley both indicated that, to their knowledge, there was no other man around. So, back to Ginny. Nothing I had ever heard about her, and nothing Dougald MacDougald had ever heard, suggested a tendency to violence against anybody, let alone young children. Dougald said she didn’t even have an “artistic temperament.” No storming off the stage or confronting music teachers who didn’t give one of her kids the solo for “Minuit Chrétien” in the concert at Christmas time. Nothing.
But now her granddaughter was missing. Was she at the bottom of Lac Bras d’Or? The lake had been searched, at least the portion of the east bay near Kinlochiel. Sydney Harbour? The Atlantic Ocean off Glace Bay? Forensic evidence told us the girl had been in Ginny’s car at or around the time she disappeared. Irene Cook saw Ginny’s car in the area of the video shop where Bonnie’s image had been captured. Two children with one factor in common: Ginny Drummond MacDonald. She was the last person in the world I would want to think of as a killer. But if she had murdered two children, I’d gladly see her spend her final years on earth in a cell with an iron-hard bed and an overflowing shitter in the corner.
Right now I wanted to sit her down in a dark room with a bright light in her face and grill her till she broke down and gave up the whole sad tale, but I knew Collins wouldn’t let us near her again. The police in Ontario were on the case up there, though, so we would hold off a bit longer to see if they came up with something, a lever we could use to pry the truth out of her at last.
Monty
“How do genealogists do this? They have brackets and lines connecting husbands and wives and offspring going down through several generations. Their charts must fill entire rooms if rolled out and flattened.”
We had hit upon this exercise on Friday afternoon in a desperate attempt to get an overview of the family, who was related to whom, who had recently come into the picture, which members if any were in conflict. In other words, had we missed someone who was close enough to Bonnie to approach her without arousing her suspicion and spirit her away? And could we find someone who would be a much better fit for the culprit than the revered grandmother, Ginny MacDonald? I didn’t hold out much hope, but it was better than doing nothing. Better than sitting around stewing over recent setbacks.
Maura had done her best. She had several eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of white paper taped together, showing how all the MacDonalds were related to one another. She spread her work out over the table in Alec and Catherine’s dining room.
“What’s this, everybody right back to their days in Scotland?”
“Aye, right back to the day the MacDonalds fled Glencoe for the Isle of Skye in 1692.”
“Looks like it.”
“No, I’d have to take down a forest if I committed all that to paper. It just starts with Morag, who was a MacAskill from the Isle of Skye. Morag immigrated here as a child, then at the age of seventeen she married Lauchie Drummond. That’s in there just to give us a starting point. I list all their children and grandchildren, so we’ll know who’s who when we get to the times that concern us. Of course there were lots of jokes in the family because Ginny Drummond married a MacDonald, and her daughter Sharon married a MacDonald. But those brides and grooms were not related to each other, or were so distantly related that nobody knew about it.
“Anyway, moving on to recent times after the band was formed in 1985. I went through to see who came into the family around the time the tensions began. New husbands and wives who appeared in those years, boyfriends and girlfriends, new hangers-on around the band.”
“Does anything stand out?”
“After all that work, I’m tempted to start a rumour and say yes, here’s a real shit disturber who came into our lives the day before the first false word was uttered.”
“But the rumour would be false.”
“Pure invention. The unhappy events included the break-up of Collie and Sharon’s marriage. That happened nearly five years ago. The band kept touring, with Andy in the mix. I haven’t put the Campbell family tree in here, but Andy’s ex-wife, Marsha, whom we all know as Master, was and is quite bitter about the whole thing.” She paused and scowled at the papers. “Christ, I hate this kind of conversation! All this gossip. It makes me want to heave.”
“I know. And that’s why I haven’t heard any of this dirt from you before. And for that, I commend you. But if there is someone lurking in the shadows, spreading misery around the family, we’d better keep looking.”
“I know, I know. Where was I? New people. Someone who may have brought a poison pen to the family history books. Robbie met a woman from Margaree, not long after his first wife had died of kidney disease in 1988. As usual in these cases, some in the family felt it was
too soon for him to remarry, but I don’t remember anyone saying anything nasty about the new wife herself. She’s a sweetheart. Andy and Master Campbell’s daughter, Nancy, started going with Lee Kaulbeck, the paramedic. She was working in the hospital in Sydney, and he was at the college. I think he dropped out before getting his degree. He started working with the ambulance. But that was only a couple of years ago. The nastiness had started well before then. Collie MacDonald has been quite the lad since his divorce, and there have been a few broken hearts in his wake. One of his cast-offs, a woman by the name of Shirleen, who styles herself a country singer, has been a bit persistent and tends to invoke Collie’s name in her songwriting. But I never heard anything too extreme about her apart from her lyrics hinting at revenge. From what I hear, it’s more a case of Collie getting his just deserts on Judgment Day than at the hands of an earthly avenger. A couple of his brothers sit in on Shirleen’s performances, get all tanked up, and come back to Collie and rag him about it. Lots of laughs on those occasions, to hear the boys tell it.”
“We’ll keep her in mind.”
“Waste of time.”
“Speaking of the bitter fruits of love and marriage, Andy and Master?”
“Right. She is, understandably, resentful about the fact that he left her to live it up on the world stage with Sharon and her band. Even though . . .”
“Even though, from what I’ve always heard, Sharon wasn’t the cause of the breakup. Things had been on the slide for Andy and his wife for a long time before that.”
“For sure. He never wanted to be there in the first place. Shotgun wedding. Then the bank foreclosed on their house.”
“Even with all that, can you see Master having any involvement with the abduction of Bonnie?”
“No, I can’t. She’d take her revenge in some other way. Something to do with land or money, I don’t know. And even less can I see the hand of Andy Campbell himself in this, the awful note notwithstanding.”
Yes, the note. I didn’t know what to make of that, given that the handwriting was, apparently, Bonnie’s. Sharon unreservedly denied that Andy had ever behaved inappropriately around his stepdaughter. And so did everybody else.
I was saved from any more rumination on that subject by a knock on the door, and we looked up to see Brennan Burke coming in.
“What’s all that?” he asked, pointing to the chart.
“My family tree, Brennan. I can trace my lineage right back to King Macbeth.”
“Lady Macbeth, you mean? I’d have no trouble believing that.”
“How darest thou speak to me in such a manner, thou murdering minister! Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell!”
“Whoa! I’m not going to tangle with that,” he declared, leaning back and pointing a finger at my wife.
“Though I do think my grandmother Morag’s maiden name, MacAskill, has something to do with a cauldron!”
“Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Why is it I can so easily picture you and old Morag and one of the other wit—, em, enchantresses in your family hunched over a fiery pit, cackling and brewing up a pot of trouble?”
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you now, Father. Don’t be frightened. Settle yourself down and have a drink.” She got up and went into the kitchen, opened a bottle, and poured him a shot. She brought it in and held it out to him.
“You’ll not have me drinking gall, I hope, my dear.”
“No, it’s the same elixir you have going through your veins twenty-four hours a day, every day.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Will somebody please put manners on this woman.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my manners. Or my hospitality.” She made an expansive gesture towards his brimming glass.
“Ah.” He took a good manly portion of John Jameson’s whiskey and sighed with contentment.
“What we have here, Brennan,” I said, “is the family tree of the MacDonald family, though she didn’t take it as far back as the eleventh century.”
“And you’ve prepared this for what reason?”
“To see if we can point to any person coming into the mix just around the time things started to go wonky for the members of the band. Trying to see if there is any one person who can account for the corrosion that has been eating away at the clan for the last several years.”
“How could one person account for all that? What have you found?”
“Nothing.”
I went out to the fridge and got a beer for myself and Maura and rejoined her and Brennan in the dining room.
“All right, so you didn’t get anywhere with that. How about the death of Ginny’s child back in the fifties? Have you learned anything new about that? I wasn’t able to get much out of Father Bertoni in Toronto. He’s not a man to be cutting the back off one of his parishioners or one of his friends.”
“He isn’t a gossip, you’re telling us,” said Maura.
“Right.”
“But you got to see the Argos play the Eskimos, so the trip wasn’t a total waste of time. I imagine you had a drink or two?”
“Had I a throat on me?”
“I put it to the court that the witness has admitted to imbibing intoxicating liquor, your honour.”
“Sure it was some session of beer!”
“No more questions, your honour.”
“But seriously now,” Brennan said, “is there new information about the child Ginny had in Ontario?”
“No, she is sticking to her story that she and the priest buried the child on the grounds of the house where she was staying outside Toronto.”
“That’s the line he was peddling, too, but it was obvious that he was just trying to shore up whatever she was saying about it. So, MacNeil,” he said to Maura, “do you recall anything about a cousin in Toronto?”
“I remember the one visit I had with Lyle Drummond, though it’s the kind of early childhood memory that has large gaps in it. Whose house were we at? How many days did we all spend together? Don’t know anymore. But it was Christmas, because somebody had a God-awful looking tree. Lopsided, with a couple of great long branches on one side and short bushy branches on the other. You’d think in a country with over a million square miles of forest you could get a nicer looking tree than that. But everybody had those ugly trees. Anyway, there is a picture of me and other little kids playing with Lyle in front of this sad-looking bit of vegetation. We’ve got ourselves all tangled up in Christmas ribbon and bits of torn wrap. Typical family photo.”
“What year was that?”
“I think it was 1955, because he died shortly afterwards.”
“Yes. He died at the end of March, 1956. Ground would have been pretty hard in the winter in Ontario,” I remarked.
“In the winter, yes, but March? You never know about March.”
“Must have been rough hearing that as a child, that one of your cousins had died. You were only what? Well, seven, obviously. You and he were the same age.”
“I was a few months younger. But still, he was the closest to me in age even though I barely knew him. It was awful when I heard he had died. I’d had all these plans for us, given that we were almost twins, being born the same year. We would go to the same school. I don’t know how, with him in Toronto, but logic never gets in the way of a child’s imagination. I pictured us dressed alike. That didn’t make any sense either. When I went to school, girls wore dresses. But nothing got in the way of my vision of the future with Lyle. Once school was behind us, with all the accolades we would receive there, we went on to military glory.”
Brennan said, “I never pictured you as a ‘yes, sir, no, sir’ type of person, let alone a member of a military regiment.”
“You don’t see me as a tool of the military industrial complex? What you need is the kind of imagination I had, Brennan. Th
en you’d have no trouble seeing Lyle and me as . . . fighter pilots. Remember this was the era of the war movie. But that future vanished in the blink of an eye. A child doesn’t understand death, so I’m not sure how much I really took in. Just as well. You wouldn’t want a six-and-a-half-year-old brooding too much or having nightmares about dying or being killed. Actually, the nightmares I had, or maybe daytime fears — not sure now — were a result of my concern that I would be found out!”
“Found out?”
“My parents and Auntie Ginny would find out that I’d had nasty thoughts about Lyle before he died.”
“Nasty thoughts. You were just telling us Lyle was your future companion in the skies over wartorn . . . well, wherever the Air Force was deployed next.”
“Those images battled with the reality that, by the end of that Christmas visit, I’d been wishing Ginny and Lyle would hurry up and get their arses on the train back to Toronto.”
“How come?”
“Lyle hit me over the head with Ginny’s new toaster, and it hurt like hell, and then he shoved me in a corner and took my new Brownie camera. I was bawling my eyes out, and he just stood there looking at me. Then this big smile came over his face, and he stepped over me and walked away. I ran howling to Mum and said he was mean. Then all I remember is that they were gone. And then we got the news — well, I didn’t get the news — Mum and Dad got the news and tried to keep it from us, but we found out eventually that Lyle had ‘gone to heaven.’ How this happened, what he died of, we were never clear on. He was in heaven, and I was going to hell because of calling him mean — a little seven-year-old boy — and wishing him gone. That was the first sin I confessed when I made my first confession as a child.”
“I’m sure you were absolved.”
“Thank you, Father. You’d know.”
“It’s a blessing that Ginny was able to come back home to Cape Breton and find someone she loved and start a new family.”
“Yes, she went on to have a very happy life. Till now.”
This story about Lyle certainly fit with what Alec and Catherine had told me about the kid. And it sounded as if he was cut from the same cloth as his father, who had abandoned Ginny after a relationship filled with controlling and abusive behaviour. I wondered what ever became of that father.