by Anne Emery
There it was. I started to careen into the long driveway leading up to her house, when Maura hissed at me. “Normie said sneak up, remember?!”
If you were in that house, way out here on the Skye Road, you could hear any car approaching long before it came into view. But I dimmed my lights and slowed down. Best I could do. I pulled over, and Maura and Brennan were out of the car before I got it stopped. Maura was at the back door, when Brennan put his hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her aside. He tried the door. It was unlocked, and he and I went inside. Maura was on our heels. We didn’t speak. There wasn’t a sound. I knew before we even entered the hallway that there was nobody home.
But we had to go through the motions, just in case. We didn’t know what we might find. We were practically falling over one another as we raced from kitchen to dining room to living room.
“Jesus!” Maura cried out. She was staring down at her feet. There was smashed crystal and a bunch of other things on the floor.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean . . .” But I didn’t continue. I couldn’t keep up the charade.
There was nobody in the room so we clambered up the stairs and into each bedroom and the bathroom. Nothing.
“Oh God, where is she?” Maura’s voice broke.
“We’ll find her,” Brennan vowed.
I said nothing, because I knew nothing.
Downstairs again, I turned on the basement light, and we headed down the stairs. It was as we all expected. The house was deserted.
Up in the living room, I asked Maura again about the phone call.
“She told us to come, to sneak up. We didn’t get here in time. We have fucking failed her! Our child needs us, and we are useless. We should have called the RCMP!”
“And tell them what? To come here? They’d be standing here as useless as we are.”
“She kept talking about Ginny,” Maura said then. “She was pretending to ask Ginny to come to Morag’s. But it was us she called. And now where in God’s name is she?”
“We don’t know what happened between the call and now.” Except that things had been thrown around and smashed in the living room.
“Oh, God almighty!”
“The only clue we have is Ginny. If Ginny’s not here, maybe Normie and Morag went to her. We’re going to Ginny’s.”
“I’m calling the police!”
“We can get to Ginny’s long before they can. If . . . if there’s a reason, we’ll call from there. Let’s move!”
“I’m calling them!” She ran to the phone and picked up the receiver. “Oh, for God’s sake! There’s no dial tone! What — oh, Christ, the line’s been cut! What in God’s name happened here?”
A spasm of fear went through me like an electrical charge. Brennan looked as if he’d had the same experience. Maura was in tears. We ran for the car without another word. I spun out of the driveway, and we sped off towards Ginny’s. Back into the village and through the dark and silent streets. Five minutes later, I was at Ginny MacDonald’s place and was about to pull into the driveway when I saw three cars already there. Ginny’s old LTD, a black BMW, and, behind that, an Audi that looked vaguely familiar. The back end of the Audi was almost on the street, so I brought my car to a screaming halt in the street outside. So much for sneaking up.
We scrambled out of the car and up to Ginny’s front door. I pushed it open, and we stormed in through the front porch and hall and into the living room. And came upon a most extraordinary scene. There on the couch were Morag and Normie, but Normie didn’t get up and run to us. She was fixated on the two figures standing and facing one another in the middle of the room. One man was big and heavy with buzzed salt-and-pepper hair. The other, I realized, was Lee Kaulbeck, the paramedic who was going with Nancy Campbell. Both men turned in our direction when we came in but showed no interest. Whatever was going on was between the two of them; we were but a momentary distraction.
First things first. “Normie! Are you all right?”
Maura reached her, lifted her from the couch, enveloped her in her arms. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she assured us, “honest. But Bonnie . . .”
“Bonnie?!”
Normie pointed to the far end of the room, which was wreathed in shadow. And there was Bonnie MacDonald, thin, pale, haunted. Seated next to Ginny, Bonnie was rigid in her place, fingers gripping her knees. Her eyes, and Ginny’s, were glued to the men in the centre of the room.
“Bonnie! What happened? Are you hurt? Where were you?” Maura and I were babbling in our haste to find out what had happened to the young girl.
“It was him!” she said, her voice breaking. She pointed a trembling finger at the older man. “He said he was a concert promoter. He was taking me to Halifax because there was a big surprise party for Andy, and I was going to be part of it with some dancers from Scotland . . . But why weren’t the other members of the band with us? . . . I passed out in his car. I think he drugged me. And I didn’t remember anything else until there was a house surrounded by trees in the middle of nowhere. And then I couldn’t believe what was happening. He grabbed me and dragged me down to this stinky old basement apartment, and I couldn’t get out. The door and windows were barred and . . .” She convulsed in tears then, tears of pain and rage. Maura enfolded her in her arms and let her cry it out.
I looked at the stranger, and he was smirking and playing an imaginary violin. I wanted to kick his head in. But before I could make a move, he reached into his back right pocket and produced a knife. A sgian dubh. He passed a fingertip over the blade and drew blood. He didn’t flinch, only smiled. He stepped back against a wall, so he had nobody behind him. The telephone was on a table beside him, and he grabbed the phone and yanked it and its wire out of the wall and let it clatter to the floor. Then he cast his eyes around the room and let his gaze fall upon Bonnie. She was the person closest to him. Everybody got the message: he could get to her in an instant. I could not avoid the impression that he was enjoying the scene, the young girl describing her helplessness while she was his captive, everyone in the room now terrified. Who in the hell was this guy, and what was going on?
Bonnie took a ragged breath and began to speak again. “There was no phone, no radio, or TV. Nothing to do. Hour after hour in there, day after day. It was so awful . . . I thought I was going crazy. I slept as much as I could, and I prayed to God and cursed Him for letting this happen to me. One day —” she pointed an accusing finger at the man again “— he came in and made me write this really horrid note about Andy, and I said no, and he stood over me and threatened to knock all my teeth out or do something worse if I didn’t. So I had to write it, even though it was all lies about my stepdad. Andy never acted like that!”
Bonnie bent forward, weeping. I felt sick to my stomach, picturing the child writing out the distressing note, the note that was later planted in her friend’s knapsack.
“God forgive me, God forgive me!” That was Ginny. She had her arms held over her middle and was rocking back and forth. Why did she need forgiveness? What had she done? She looked as if she were staring into the maw of hell.
Brennan was standing at the edge of the room, never taking his eyes off the stranger. I thought that, with the three of us — Brennan, me, and Kaulbeck — we might be able to shut this down by two of us going at the man from one side and one from the other side. But that would depend on the three of us getting our signals straight.
Bonnie spoke up again, pointing to Kaulbeck. “Lee rescued me today and brought me here. He found out the truth about what happened. At first he believed there was really a surprise for Andy, and that’s why he went along with the idea and picked me up from the party. But then he did an investigation and found out the real story, and where I was hidden, and came for me. Please, I have to see Mum and tell her . . .”
“Lee didn’t rescue you, you stupid little bitch. Lee went and got you today just to
fuck me over.” To Kaulbeck, he hissed, “And don’t think I’m going to forget that!” His dark eyes bored in on the paramedic.
What? How did Kaulbeck find out where she was? While I was trying to make sense of that, Maura asked, in a voice more bewildered than frightened, “Who are you? I’ve been looking at you, and you seem . . . you can’t be . . .”
The man with the knife veered towards her, and Brennan and I stepped forward at the same time. But the man went no closer. “Yeah, I can be and I am. Your long lost cousin, back from the dead. He is risen! Happy to see me?”
“Lyle!”
Ginny’s son, Lyle! Where had he been all these years after Ginny returned to Cape Breton? Returned to Cape Breton telling everyone her son was dead.
“It’s been donkey’s years since anybody called me Lyle Drummond, cuz. I’ve been living under the name Kenton W. Loring. My first foster family was the Lorings. Poor old Mrs. Loring; she came to a bad end. Too bad, so sad, tilt, game over. But that’s getting off topic. Where were we? Oh, yeah, names. You guys can call me Lyle if it helps you get over the lonesomeness you must have been feeling for me all these years. Excuse me, the grief over my death.”
His face took on a mock-mournful expression, and he shook his head as if at the tragedy of it all.
Then he whirled on Ginny, who jumped in her seat. “Bet you never thought I could pull off something like this, eh Mom? Bet you never thought that seven-year-old son you threw away like damaged merchandise could come back and turn your whole life upside down any time he felt like it. Anybody can learn how to drag a stick across a bunch of strings and stomp around on the stage. Can’t believe they give awards for that. What’s my award for pulling off this scheme after years of careful planning? Never mind. I don’t need a trophy. The look on your face is all the reward I’ll ever need!”
Only someone without a trace of human compassion could take pleasure in the look on Ginny’s face at that moment.
“But life has had other rewards for me. I got a good job when I relocated to Halifax to take on this task. Too bad I had to be seen for a while in a piece of shit car from the 1970s, instead of the little German rocket you see out there now. But, hey, I needed to find an old brown LTD as close to yours as I could. Couldn’t have anyone see my car snatching wee Bonnie from the street. But then, the night I got her, I had to take a big chance and go around the block a couple of times and blow the horn, to make sure somebody looked and saw the car, so you could get the credit, Mother. Otherwise, buying that old heap would have been nothing but a waste of my time and money!”
“You hate me so much you set me up for the crime of kidnapping my grandchild!”
“Give the lady a teddy bear! You’re not as dumb as you look. Well, yeah, I guess you are. I mean, were you so delusional that you thought I wasn’t good enough for the likes of you? You were nothing but a small town slag from the ass end of nowhere in Cape Breton who thought she could make it as an opera star in Toronto. A dumb little bitch who got knocked up by a man she thought was a record mogul. Right, Mom?”
“You will roast in the fires of hell!” Morag cursed him. Ginny sat staring at the man, horrified. She looked as if she had aged twenty years since I had seen her last.
He started in on her again. “I was hard to handle, was I? You weren’t up to the job? So instead of learning how to be a mother to an exceptional son like me, you dumped me into the Children’s Aid department and told them to find me a foster home. And made up a story for the folks at home that I had died of some disease. I’ve been monitoring your life since the day I got out of Kingston Pen after a long and ugly stay for a violent and ugly crime that wouldn’t have been committed if I had been raised in a loving home. If I had been, say, a member of a musical group that travelled all over the world, lapping up all the awards and the money. That’s where I would have been if you had been a mother instead of a selfish little scrag.”
Ginny found her voice again. “You were in a loving home for your first seven years.” Her voice was infinitely sad. “I tried, Lyle. I did my best for seven years. Nothing worked. It broke my heart to give you up, but you needed to be with people who knew how to — how to handle children like you.”
“Children like me?” It came out as a roar. Everyone in the room drew a collective breath and tried to back away even farther from him. “Children like me are supposed to be in schools for the gifted, not a bunch of second-rate schools that happened to be in the downmarket neighbourhoods where I was passed from one foster home to another, all because of you! And believe me, Mother, when I say none of those placements were loving homes!”
“Love had no effect on you, Lyle; it never did and it never will. You are incapable of loving or being loved. All you ever cared about, from childhood till this moment, is yourself. A loving home would have made no difference whatsoever to your life; you would have destroyed a loving home — you destroyed everything you ever touched.”
“Right you are, Mother. Make no mistake about it.” His voice was low, but nobody missed a word. “I can destroy anything I touch. Your other children, for instance, the ones you’re so proud of. Pity about all that conflict in the band, those nasty rumours that set them against one another. Seems to me things started to go downhill for them right around the time I was released from the pen.
“But enough about your children. I have children of my own. You are a grandmother many times over, Gin. Most of them I don’t bother with, any more than I bother with the horde of little sluts that I fathered them on. Except for this one.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of . . . Lee Kaulbeck!
Kaulbeck was his son? What in the hell was going on here? I looked around the room. Everyone appeared to be as stunned as I was, including Bonnie herself. Everyone but Morag, who was beaming her damning black eyes at Kaulbeck.
“I had hopes for young Lee,” Lyle continued. “You should have seen me in court in Toronto, fighting his mother for custody. I was dressed like a banker and I talked myself up like a good suburban dad and I had the best lawyer money could buy. By the time we finished slandering poor little Betty Kaulbeck before the judge, it was a wonder she got out of there with custody of her pet poodle.
“Little old Betty had called him Jeremy. I didn’t lose any time getting rid of that. I changed his name to Lee. Anyway, I recognized in my kid a chip off the old block. He wasn’t a wuss. He wasn’t going to go all sentimental on me if we had plans to make a big score and we had to get our hands dirty in the process. He wasn’t going to faint at the sight of blood. Lee loves working the ambulance. Don’t you, Lee? You love it when people are busted up and bleeding and they look up to you as a hero. Hope you haven’t forgotten the laughs we had about the things people say when they think they’re dying. Calling for Mommy. Grown men! Telling God they’re sorry. Hey, you with the blood pouring out of your mouth and the shit in your pants, there is no God. So there’s no need to be sorry. For anything you ever did. Remember those good times we had, Lee?”
Lee’s eyes slid toward us. “He’s lying! That never happened!”
“No, that’s probably the only time he ever told the truth in his life.” It was Morag speaking. “There is no true or untrue, no right or wrong for either of you. All that matters to Lyle is what Lyle wants. And all that matters to Lee is what Lee wants. And what they want can change in the blink of an eye.” To Lyle, she said, “My daughter knows what you are. She always did.”
Ginny spoke then, in a voice barely audible. “I knew when he was three years old. I didn’t have a name for it back then, but I knew.”
Morag addressed Lyle Drummond again. “And your spawn here, Kaulbeck, is the same kind of abnormal, unnatural, soulless being that you are.”
Lee Kaulbeck looked at Morag as if she were several evolutionary stages behind him. “You haven’t got a clue, you crazy old hag.”
Lyle said, “You haven’t got a clue either, my son. All these y
ears I’ve been trying to smarten you up, but you’ve never been anything but a fuckup.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Kaulbeck shouted, his face suffused with anger. “I did everything right! Every single thing!”
“I’m talking about you dragging this whole thing out for weeks on end! The plan was simple: snatch the kid, do as much collateral damage to dear old Ginny and her precious family as possible, direct the suspicion at one of them and then another, and then cut the crap, get a hefty ransom, and blow town. Right? And we knew Ginny would pay up and keep her mouth shut because otherwise she’d have to tell the whole world that she lied about the death and burial of her first-born child. No way was she going to rat me out to the cops. But you never got the ransom note to her, did you, son?”
I sat in Ginny’s living room, hardly able to believe my ears. Lee Kaulbeck had been working hand in hand with this psycho throughout the whole ordeal of Bonnie’s disappearance.
“I fixed your bone-headed plan!” Kaulbeck shot back at his father. “Without my input, none of your plans would have got off the ground! Who figured out how to make the snatch? Me, not you! And it required split-second timing. I gave Bonnie the ‘surprise Andy’ story, then got the idea of pouring booze into that hillbilly at the party so I could take him home to his old man, circle around, and grab Bonnie on the way back. That’s how I got away with it and was able to hand her over to you in the big old shitty car. Nobody thought I had time to do it. Worked like a charm. Then I planted all the evidence, bought those new clothes for the kid so we could get her scent on them, placed fibres and rope and a drop of the kid’s blood in the old bag’s car. And set up that scene in the bootlegger’s cellar to get the suspicion away from that loser, McCurdy, and back on the family where it belonged. I was the one who masterminded all that! Right? Remember?” His voice had gone up several decibels. “Where was the payment I was supposed to get for all that, Pa?”