Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  Normie

  It was teatime at Great-grandma Morag’s, and I helped her make the tea and pour it into old-fashioned cups with pink roses on them. She had the kind of sandwiches old ladies make with no crust, and she had delicious oatcakes and cookies that she made herself. I saw a sporran on the little end table she had by the chesterfield in the living room. A sporran is the little pouch I talked about before. It hangs down in front of your kilt. This one was brown leather with tassels on it. I wished I could have it to use as a purse, but I wouldn’t dream of asking Morag for it. I decided to buy one just like it. There was a sgian dubh with it, the knife you stick in the top of your sock when you’re in your kilt.

  “How come you have those things, Greatgran? Do you wear a kilt sometimes?”

  “No, that’s for Robbie’s young fellow. I’m making him a kilt, and Robbie dropped those off for him. I haven’t got it finished yet.”

  “You can make a kilt all by yourself?”

  “Ach, why not? Everything used to be made at home, you know.”

  “Oh, that’s right.”

  “Your mother’s not one for sewing, I don’t think.”

  “She doesn’t know how to.”

  “Well, there’s no reason you couldn’t learn.”

  “I suppose I could, but we don’t have any of the stuff you need. A sewing machine and needles and all that.”

  “That’s the way of the world now.”

  “I can’t do that, but I’m doing better on the fiddle these days.”

  “Let’s hear you.”

  I had gone for my lesson at Mrs. Beaton’s that morning, so I picked up my fiddle and played a tune for Morag. She said I sounded good, and I told her that Maggie had let me play for her two little grandchildren who were visiting. They thought they were in trouble because they snuck into a jar of strawberry jam Maggie had made and got it all over their faces and clothes. But she told them it was okay, and I would play a tune called “Sticky Faces” for them. She just made up the name, and I played one of the easy tunes I knew, and the kids were happy and clapped their hands.

  Then Morag told me about being a little girl all dressed up for her first communion in a beautiful white dress and how she snuck into some cookies that her mum made, filled with jam, and got the jam all over her dress. And it wouldn’t come off, and there was no other fancy dress like that because it had been made specially for communion day, and so she had to go to the church with red stains all down the dress. And her mother said this wouldn’t make a very good impression on the people of Cape Breton. Morag’s family had just moved here from the Isle of Skye in Scotland. And here she was in the church in Kinlochiel and everybody was looking at her. And the priest leaned down to her and said something in English and she didn’t understand him. So he switched to the Gaelic and said, “I hope you were keeping the fast before your communion, little girl.” And she had to decide right then and there whether to lie to the priest with communion in his hands or get up and walk back to her seat in the church in front of everybody and fail at making her first communion. And then the priest let her off the hook. He smiled at her and said, “I imagine you were helping your mother do some baking for the big day.” And then he switched from the Gaelic to the Latin and said, “Corpus Christi,” and all that, and gave her communion.

  “Oh, that was a lovely dress. I never had anything like it again. Even my wedding dress wasn’t a patch on that one.”

  “I wish I could have seen it.”

  “Well, you can. I have pictures of myself that day.”

  I must have had a shocked look on my face, because I didn’t think people would have had cameras that long ago, but she just laughed and said, “Ach, it was long ago, but you can see for yourself. Go on up the stairs to the front room, and you’ll find the old albums.”

  So I ran up the stairs and pulled out a bunch of photo albums from a bookshelf and opened them up. Carefully, because the pictures were on thick black paper that crumbled when I grabbed it too hard. The pictures were all black and white, some yellow and brownish. They were kept in place by little holders at the corners. The old people looked really crabby the way they stared into the camera. But you should have seen the beautiful dresses on the ladies and little girls. They were all long, right down to their shoes, and some had kind of puffed-out blouses on top, and others had jackets that fitted into their waists with big wide belts.

  I was just trying to find the picture of Morag in her first communion dress when I heard the door open downstairs and somebody come in. I heard a lady crying and saying, “What am I going to do?”

  “What’s happened, Ginny?”

  “The Mounties! They think I had something to do with taking Bonnie!”

  “Ach a Dhia, ciamar a bhiodh a’sin?” I think she was asking God how such a thing could be.

  “But they do,” Ginny said. “They think I did it!”

  Oh my God in Heaven! The Mounties were loony if they really arrested Bonnie’s grandmother! They would know she wouldn’t hurt anyone in the world. Maybe she was so upset about Bonnie that the Mounties came and asked her questions, and she thought that meant they suspected her. I tiptoed to the top of the stairs, but I made sure they couldn’t see me.

  “They had me at the RCMP detachment. They grilled me. I’ve been putting off telling you, Mum. I don’t want to upset you, and I’ve just been sitting in the house, catatonic. But I had to get out. I had to talk to you! Maybe someone has told you . . .”

  “Nobody has said a word to me. They are probably afraid I’ll cast a spell on those polis! But of course I want you to tell me, m’eudail.”

  “They had me in a room and asked me all these awful questions.”

  “Surely you didn’t say anything to them, Ginny.”

  “I just told them I didn’t do it, and that they could ask me anything they liked.”

  There. I was right. If she had done something bad, she wouldn’t have answered their questions. She would have done what they do in the movies; they say, “I’m taking the fifth,” or they hold up their hand and wiggle their five fingers. The fifth, or the number five, means they are not going to talk; I don’t know why. So the fact that she answered their questions would tell them she was not guilty. I always hear my dad growling about his clients who talked to the police when they should have kept their mouths shut and called him. But they were bad guys. This was Ginny. This was different.

  But then I got a shock. Ginny said, “I phoned young Collins to come and get me.”

  Did that mean Daddy was her lawyer and she was one of his clients?

  “This is an outrage!” That was Morag. The police would be sorry if they got Morag outraged at them. She really might cast a spell on them, and something bad would happen.

  “They say there was evidence in my car.”

  “Well, there couldn’t have been, right? Unless somebody else took your car. Now, get in here and we’ll have a little dileag and figure out how to straighten this out and get the Mounted Police off your back!”

  I heard the clink of a bottle and glasses. Morag was pouring them a little dileag. Sometimes a little drink calms people down.

  Then Ginny spoke up again. “A’mhathair, they asked me about Toronto!”

  When Morag answered, it was in Gaelic and then “Normie Ruadh” and what sounded like “Maura’s little one.” That’s me, so she must have pointed upstairs and said I was in the house. So the conversation from then on was in the Gaelic, and it showed me how slack and lazy I had been with my language learning because I could only pick out a few words and parts of lines. I made up my mind to spend all next summer at the Gaelic College on the other side of the lake. I’d have the Gaelic forever after that. I sneaked closer to the railings at the top of the staircase. I heard balach, so they were talking about a boy. Then something about an creutair sin! That creature! I made a big effort to tune in and list
en with all my might. “He was cold,” Ginny said. Then something like “I tried for years” and then she went back to English. She didn’t have as much of the old language as Morag did. So she started talking in English but made her voice really soft. But I could hear. “He left me chilled. Me, his own mother! His eyes — there was no warmth to be seen there. He had no thought for anyone but himself. I know it’s normal for very young children to be self-centred, but this was far beyond that. When he was five, I had him in a nursery school. I would go in to pick him up, and the teachers would look at me as if I was a monster. He was a braggart, he took everything he wanted for himself, he stole things, he hurt a couple of the other children. And everything he ever did, he either boasted or lied about it. Lied to my face all the time with not a shadow of guilt. When something sad happened or someone was hurt, his only reaction was a cold, almost amused, curiosity. He just left me chilled!”

  “You don’t have to tell me, my love. I know what he was. How could I forget those heartbreaking letters you sent home to me? The little girl you told me about in the park that day with her brand new kitten, and him grabbing the kitten’s paws and making the kitten scratch the wee girl’s face, then him breaking the poor little cat’s legs. That image has never left me.” Morag’s voice got even softer, but I could make it out. She said again, “I know what he was.”

  Then Ginny broke down and cried her heart out. Her voice was shuddery when she said, “I was petrified, Mum, for years after, that whatever it was . . . was in me, and I would give birth to something like that again.”

  “No, no, child, you needn’t have worried about that,” her mother said to her. Then she asked, “So, what did you say to the police? Where did you tell them you buried it?”

  Something like that? It? Was I missing something up there on the stairs listening in?

  Ginny answered, in a tiny, shaky voice, “I told them it was near my house.”

  Chapter XI

  Monty

  The investigation into Bonnie’s disappearance, which had produced nothing useful in over a month, had culminated in suspicions that every person on the island of Cape Breton would have dismissed out of hand. Nobody would consider it even remotely credible that Ginny MacDonald was involved in her granddaughter’s disappearance. Sharon was absolutely poleaxed by the fact that her mother had been questioned about Bonnie, and she was just as floored by the innuendoes being made about the death of Ginny’s firstborn child. Sharon had been born three years after Lyle’s death — she had recently turned thirty-five — and three more siblings came along after Sharon. There was not a scintilla of doubt about Ginny’s fitness as a parent. She was the most wonderful mother in the world. In Sharon’s view, not surprisingly, the investigators had honed in on something that wasn’t really there and had missed something that really was there. Something or someone that people had seen but not recognized as being out of place. With this in mind, Sharon came up with an idea, and the Mounties thought it was worth looking into. She asked everyone in the family to gather photos and videos of events attended by Bonnie in the period immediately preceding her disappearance. The family would pore over all the images in the hope of finding something that stuck out as suspicious or someone who was out of place in the setting.

  We made it a potluck event at Sharon and Andy’s house on Friday night. Normie was at Morag’s, so we decided she should stay there rather than be exposed to more anguish about Bonnie. Maura and I bundled little Dominic into his car seat and picked up Brennan Burke for the drive to Kinlochiel. There we were joined by the band members, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and RCMP Constable Dougald MacDougald. Dougald knew everybody in this part of Cape Breton, so his insight as a local would be just as valuable as his skills as an investigator. We started with newspaper photos that people had clipped as souvenirs back before the disappearance, souvenirs of ceilidhs and concerts and community events. Andy had collected them all, and he and Sharon passed them around the kitchen table, after which they made their way along the assembly line out to the living room and back. It quickly became apparent that this might be a pointless exercise. The presence of strangers in most cases merely meant that the events had attracted interest, as they were meant to do. People came from other communities in the province, tourists were on hand because it was summer, and the fact that faces were not recognized had no obvious significance. Photos snapped by participants and family members in attendance were not helpful either; they were mostly of people everyone knew, with, inevitably, some shots of faces that nobody recognized. But there was nothing more that could be said.

  We then crowded into the living room to watch a couple of amateur videos, one of a ceilidh at the Glace Bay Legion hall two weeks before the disappearance, and another of the Maritime Gaelic Cultural Association’s annual festival in Kinlochiel three days before the fateful night. I remembered the festival because my law firm had made a generous donation to the association, and I was supposed to present the cheque during the festivities. I was stuck in court, so Maura did the honours. Now we were watching a performance by Clan Donnie at the outdoor ceilidh. There were some poignant moments as people exclaimed over how sweet and happy Bonnie looked as she took centre stage in Highland dress and spoke to the audience.

  “Hi. I’m Bonnie, and I’m going to play the fiddle and provide the percussion. All at once.” She put bow to fiddle and played a lively reel. And she did a step dance and thereby, yes, provided the percussion. Her black curls gleamed and her eyes danced with joy as she did what she loved most in the world, losing herself in the traditional music of her Gaelic forebears and current relations in Cape Breton. Then Robbie MacDonald began a haunting tune on the pipes, and Bonnie sang “Cape Breton Lullaby” in her lovely, clear soprano voice. When her last note floated above the crowd, there was a hush before a heartfelt and prolonged ovation.

  There were unknowns in the audience, obvious “come-from-aways,” including tourists in gaudy shorts, knee socks, and goofy hats, with expensive cameras hanging around the necks of their Hawaiian shirts. But nobody approached Bonnie in the scenes we saw.

  We were all startled by Dougald MacDougald’s sudden command. “Stop it there and rewind a bit.” Andy did so and pressed play again. “There,” Dougald said. “Stop.”

  What we saw was Andy in conversation with a young woman with severely bobbed dark chestnut-coloured hair. I caught my breath when I recognized the face.

  “That one you’re talking to, Andy,” said Dougald.

  Andy peered at the screen. “Don’t know her.”

  “You’re having quite a gab with her.”

  “Yeah, but I never knew who she was. Just someone asking questions about the music. I don’t even remember what was said, at this point.”

  Sharon looked from her husband to the Mountie and back again. “What’s this all about, Dougald? Andy? Who is she?”

  It was only a matter of time before the constable would turn to me. Brennan Burke was still and silent by my side. Until this moment, word had not filtered down to my wife and her family about my connection with the groupie who had torpedoed the Mounties’ one and only chance to hear from an eyewitness to the abduction, an eyewitness who was murdered the night after his foray into the investigation.

  Revelation was at hand for the family, damnation for me. “That’s the one who had the information for you, Monty. The one who gave Pierre Maguire the statement about Bonnie in a car.”

  “What?!” The what came from all over the room. All over my known universe.

  Dougald obliged everyone with an answer. “That guy who was stabbed to death Monday night. Randy Gouthro. He had information about someone in a car with a girl who looked like Bonnie, the night she went missing. Gouthro has had some trouble with the law in the past, and he was on parole. May have been in breach of his conditions wherever he was when he saw the car. So he didn’t come to us. He decided he’d use Monty here as a go-between. Felt safer wit
h a lawyer. Okay, no problem so far. He went to the Bayview Hotel bar the night you had the party there after the concert. Monty was somewhere in the crowded bar. But Gouthro never got to you, did he, Monty?”

  Every eye in the room was on old Monty. “No, he didn’t,” I managed to croak.

  Dougald resumed the tale. “This girl told the guy she was working with Monty on the investigation and that anything he wanted to say to Monty he could say to her.”

  I met nobody’s eye. I was as furtive as a lowlife caught in the act of stealing his grandmother’s pension cheque. I didn’t even want to think about the flaying I would get from my wife.

  “But because this girl didn’t know anything about cars, the witness decided to wait until he could speak to Monty to describe the car that Bonnie was very possibly a passenger in on the night of July fifteenth. The witness, Gouthro, was murdered the very next night. And so,” said Dougald, stabbing Sabrina’s image with his finger, “this individual lost us the most valuable piece of information we might ever have received about Bonnie’s disappearance.”

  There were gasps around the room, and a couple of people started sobbing.

  It was a painful and pitiful retreat I made from Sharon’s house that night. I know I convinced everyone that the woman was a deranged fan whom I hardly knew. But that didn’t make me feel any better as I was leaving. And I had yet to face the wrath of the MacNeil.

  It wasn’t long in coming. She started to rip me a new one as soon as we got in the car, with Brennan a reluctant witness in the back seat.

  “So. Collins. Blues and booze and floozies. Will it ever change? The latest in a line of serial groupies followed you to Cape Breton, and —”