The Taken

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  She returned to the front door and tried it gently, somewhat relieved to find it locked. Then stepped back onto the path and took the whole house in again. There was no one at the windows, no sense of movement from within. In fact, the house seemed as still as a dead heart. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but as she crossed the street and began to walk in the opposite direction out toward Spadina Avenue, she felt disappointed.

  She wasn’t surprised to feel the radiophone in her pocket begin to vibrate. She took it out and put it to her ear without saying anything.

  “I didn’t think you gave up that easily.”

  “You want me to commit a B & E, Joanne?”

  “Ah,” she said. “It’s nice to hear you say that name.”

  She’d stopped before reaching the avenue. Red and black streetcars swam past on their rails. “You can see me,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Someone can see you,” she said. Hazel turned around and looked behind her, but the street was empty.

  “Have you rented a room in every house on Washington?”

  “If you didn’t want us to find each other, then why did you come back here?”

  “I came back because I have questions.” Cameron said nothing. “We found her,” Hazel said. “Your girl. She drowned in Lake Ontario on August 4, 2002. She was not, at the time, someone who should have been operating a boat.”

  “Tell me how long we’re going to stick to the official story.”

  “Marijuana, alcohol, and Ativan. That’s what she had in her. That’s what I know.” She’d decided to play her cards close to her chest for the time being. “There was water in her lungs, so she was alive when she went in. It’s going to be hard to convince any examiner that she did anything but end her own life.”

  “There’s a key between two empty flowerpots at the back of the house.”

  Cameron hung up. Hazel was facing the direction she’d come in. She took a deep breath and began walking back to the house. It seemed to her that all the windows in the houses on either side of the street had sprouted eyes and every move she made now was being marked. The skin over her spine was tingling. She slid her hand down to her belt and flicked the snap on her holster open.

  She walked up from the sidewalk at number thirty-two again and followed the path to the right gate, tripping the latch. Her heart was beating fast in her chest as she stepped into the garden, keeping to the wall as she moved slowly to the pots. There was a keychain lying in the second one down, as Joanne Cameron had told her, with two keys on it.

  The fact that she would need a key to get in meant she would be alone in the apartment. But how would she know what to look for? Cameron would tell her. She knew this now. Cameron was leading her, completely. She realized she had accepted this, no matter the danger it posed her, or the rules it broke. Her hunger to know the rest of the story was greater than her sense of self-preservation.

  She walked back down the pathway to the front of the house and went up the steps. With the key in the front door (she’d had to try both keys) she was joining herself to Cameron now, she was complicit.

  She held the phone, waiting for a sign that Cameron was with her. She gripped the silent device in her hand. It felt hot.

  The door opened silently on the dark hallway. The door to the main apartment was to her right. She stood in the hallway and listened to the house. Apart from the sound her entering had made and her weight on the floorboards, there was silence. The other key opened the apartment door.

  It was empty. From the window outside, she’d viewed a denuded space. Inside, it was a generous, open set of rooms with blond wood floors burnished to a warm glow. The apartment was an empty shrine. A fireplace was bricked up in the wall across from her. She crossed into the room carefully, her hand on her hip holster. She took small, shallow breaths. Behind this living room, through the opening she’d seen, was the dining room, perhaps the main dining room in the house of old, from the time when it contained a single family and servants as well. The most gracious room in the house. A window in the back wall looked out on the half of the garden she hadn’t walked through. She passed into the room, taking small steps. And then she was alone there as well. Her watchfulness intensified as the space she’d moved through diminished.

  To the side of the dining room was the kitchen, and behind the kitchen, a small hallway leading to a bathroom and a bedroom. Her footsteps followed her through the apartment. From a vantage in the doorway leading into the kitchen hallway, she could see all four rooms of the apartment. It seemed a good place to establish as her blind, and she stopped there and listened again.

  She thought she saw movement through the open bedroom door and pressed her back against the end of the hallway, beside the kitchen, and then smartly transferred herself to the other wall and slid down it, giving herself a vantage on the bedroom. It was empty. She felt comically grateful the closet had two doors on it, both of which swung open outwards. The closet was empty as well.

  A shock went through the palm of her hand and she dropped the phone. It buzzed against the floor like a mad insect. She snatched it up and marched back to her post with the handset against her ear.

  “Detective Inspector.”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  She stayed completely still to listen for the voice under the voice, but if Cameron was anywhere near her, she wasn’t within earshot. “There’s nothing in this place,” Hazel said. “Am I supposed to tear up the floorboards?”

  “You could, but I can do it for you. Look around at the space you’re standing in. I can fill it with tables and chairs and hang paintings on the walls. I can put my daughter here on the night of August 4, 2002, with Colin Eldwin.”

  “What’s putting me in an empty room going to show me, Ms. Cameron?”

  “It might look empty, but there’s a heart under these floors.”

  Hazel couldn’t help looking down at her shoes and, as she thought of the box buried in Nick Wise’s garden, the back of her neck went cold. “I’m listening,” she said quietly. She slid down the doorframe until she was sitting half in the hallway, half in the dining room. The action had pulled at her lower back, but the pain was bearable. From this vantage, she’d be able to see anyone coming from any direction.

  “He’d placed an ad in one of the university papers,” Cameron began. “That was where he threw his nets. ‘Creative writing tutor,’ it said. He auditioned them in a student pub up on Bloor Street, looked them up and down to see if they had any talent, and if he liked them, he told them he could help them improve. Get them published. Brenda was in a good place then – she’d signed up as a ‘mature’ student in the night-class programs at U of T. She wrote poetry. Did you know she wrote poetry?”

  “They tend not to include that kind of detail in a police report.”

  “Just the bodies, not who lived in them. She wasn’t a good writer, yet, but she was trying to grow. That was my daughter, always looking around for another chance at life. She’d had a lot of them. Almost as many lives as a cat, I always told her. She’d been messed up with drugs, in trouble with the police; she hooked up with the wrong men, took stupid jobs in rotten parts of town, but she always got up and dusted herself off. She made me proud of her.”

  Hazel shivered, thinking of Martha, and felt herself shift a spiritual inch closer to Cameron, a fellow watcher in a world where people like them suffered for others. “Anyway,” she continued, “she answered his ad and went and had a beer with him. Brenda was a beautiful girl. And for all her familiarity with the street, she was unworldly. That kind of thing can help you in life if it keeps you open to the right kinds of things. They had a couple of meetings and he went over some of her poems. Then he suggested they meet here. In this apartment.” Cameron lowered her voice and continued. “Maybe the first time, he served her coffee, there in the front room. Then he suggested she come for dinner. What do you call that, Detective Inspector? The modus operandus? Tha
t’s how it worked. Like there was a conveyor belt from the front door to the bedroom and it took a few weeks to get there. Where are you right now?”

  It took Hazel a moment to realize Cameron was talking to her. “I’m in the hallway beside the kitchen.”

  “Go into the living room.”

  Her heart jolted and she pushed herself up the doorframe. “Why?”

  “I want you to see it as it was. I want you to be there with her.”

  She walked cautiously into the living room, but it was still empty. She strode to the apartment door and locked it, then stood with her forehead against it.

  “There was a couch with its back to the window,” Cameron said, “and a round, low coffee table in front of it. In the corner, beside the opening to the dining room, a comfortable chair with a lamp beside it.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “She described it to me.”

  She turned around to look at the room. “There’s nothing here, Joanne.”

  “All of this happened here, in this place. You don’t see it yet, but you will if you let yourself.” Hazel wondered if Cameron was repeating lines Dana Goodman had once said to her, when he’d turned her grief to his own purposes. “Put me on speaker-phone.” There was a button on the side of the device and Hazel pushed it, then leaned down and stood the phone upright in the middle of the floor. Joanne Cameron’s voice radiated out of it. “All Brenda wanted was someone to show her some kindness. I knew what Colin Eldwin was the moment she told me about him. A carnivore. I warned her. But the heart is a puzzle, isn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t mean he killed her, Joanne.”

  “No, of course it doesn’t.” Hazel heard a car drive past outside the house and for a moment her attention wandered, but she brought it back. “Brenda fell in love,” the voice from the floor said. “And that was an inconvenience to him, you know, but he dealt with it. He used it, when he wanted her; he shot Cupid’s arrows at her, full of promises. But he tired of her. He was too busy to see her this time or that time, but he still told her he loved her. She couldn’t read between the lines.”

  “She told you all this?” she asked.

  “She never hid anything from me,” said Joanne Cameron. “Whether she was in love or despair, troubled or happy. I was always there for her.”

  “It must be hard feeling it wasn’t enough,” said Hazel.

  “People like Brenda… they’re beautiful in so many ways. They believe in others, but they can be taken in. Their love goes out into the world and finds its kind, even if it’s really only a shadow or a show. They’re blind to things like that. I told her all the stuff you tell someone when they’re on a bad drug. That it’s going to let you down. That the world doesn’t look that way when you get the juice out of your system. But she was an addictive personality. She started turning up at his place, unannounced. And she saw how many students he had. She found out he had a lot of Brendas. She wasn’t special.”

  “She must have been crushed.”

  Cameron ignored her. “It got bad enough that he broke up with her, finally. I guess even Colin Eldwin had his standards.”

  Hazel had picked up the radiophone and moved into the dining room. She imagined candles on a table set for two. “Get to the night in question,” she said. “How do you know she was here?”

  “He broke up with her in July, but she wouldn’t stay away. She had other troubles and they were clouding her judgment.”

  “Drugs?”

  “She’d been clean since the previous fall, but she started back on crack and she was unravelling. She showed up at my place a few times talking about how they were going to get back together, how she had a plan. He just needed her to show him the way back, she said. The night of August second, she was with me before she went to him.”

  “And?”

  “She said she was pregnant.”

  Unbidden, the dead girl with the knifed fetus swam into Hazel’s mind. But she knew Brenda Cameron had not been pregnant.

  “Said it was the sign she was waiting for. She was going over to tell him the good news.”

  “She wasn’t pregnant, Joanne. I saw the report this morning, remember?”

  “I know she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “The members of your family stop at nothing to get what they want, do they?”

  “She’s at the door,” she said quietly. “It’s about ten o’clock at night on August second. She knocks, calls his name.”

  Hazel’s heart was thrashing now. She heard nothing, but when she turned to look back into the living room, she saw them in her mind’s eye, Brenda Cameron walking into the apartment, Eldwin standing there, his arms crossed. She asks him if he’s alone. He tells her she has to stop this, it’s over, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. She puts a hand on his arm, slides it down to his wrist, and puts his palm against her belly.

  “We can’t know any of this,” Hazel said. “There were no witnesses to what they said to each other. To what happened here, if anything happened here. Just because you saw her and she told you she was coming to this house, it doesn’t mean she did. She might have gone straight to the ferry docks.”

  “But she didn’t. She came here.”

  “Fine. And then she killed herself. Whatever happened here that night drove her to it.”

  “He drugged her. He knocked her out and dragged her across the floor. He took her out to his car -”

  “No, Joanne,” Hazel said. “I know you want that to be true, but all of this is a figment of your grief. You and Dean Bellocque have abducted and wronged a man you want to be guilty of murdering your daughter. Have you thought about what it means if you’re wrong? Have you thought about what you’ve done?”

  “I know what I’ve done.”

  “I want to know where Colin Eld -” She stopped mid-sentence. She realized the last thing she’d heard had not come from the device she held in her hand. She looked down at it and saw the call had been disconnected.

  From behind her, Cameron said, “There was a witness.”

  26

  Hazel dropped the phone and, in one motion, freed her gun from its holster and spun, weapon extended. Joanne Cameron was standing in the living room, the light from the closed venetians spreading in a bright fan around her body. She hadn’t flinched. Standing before her now, Cameron only faintly resembled that confident woman who’d shown up at her office one week ago. She looked smaller, her clothes hung off her, and her smart bead necklace looked cheap. She was holding a large white plastic bag with something inside weighing it down. Hazel’s eyes flicked between Cameron’s face and the bag. “Step back, Joanne,” she said. “Back away.”

  Cameron ignored her and reached into the bag. Hazel decided if she brought out Eldwin’s head she was going to shoot her on the spot. But she removed an official evidence bag and Hazel knew right away what was in it and who had given it to her.

  “She was wearing this the night she was killed,” Cameron said, holding out the bag with the black sweater in it. “There are bits of wood in it, and varnish. It was all in the lab report, but they ignored it.”

  “I told you to back away.”

  “Why would they ignore evidence?”

  “There was no lab report on the sweater, Joanne. No report and no mention of it in the inventory of documents. I saw it all just an hour ago. It showed, definitively, that your daughter drowned herself. There was no struggle, no witnesses on the island who heard any cries for help, nothing that points to anything apart from a girl who wanted to end it all. You said it yourself: she went up and down, she hoped and she despaired. It doesn’t always end well for people like Brenda, Joanne. You have to accept that.”

  Cameron was smiling sadly. “There’s a lab report. It was done afterwards. But they wouldn’t reopen the case.”

  Hazel hesitated a moment and then lowered the gun and put it back in the holster. She took a step toward Cameron and gently slipped out a necklace tucked into her shirt. It was a lamb dangl
ing from a leather cord. “He couldn’t save Brenda with this,” Hazel said, looking at the talisman with a heavy heart. “What makes you think it can save you?”

  “Do you have children, Detective Inspector?”

  “Joanne, that has nothing -”

  “He dragged my child across the floor. This floor. The varnish, the wood fragments are embedded in the sweater, not just on the surface. What really happened to Brenda is written on what she wore. I still believe you want to see it for yourself.”

  Hazel took the evidence bag from Cameron, who stood in front of her with her hands at her sides, empty. Her eyes had gone flat, like someone had turned the lights off in a room, and Hazel realized that this was it, this was as far as Cameron could come on her own and it had cost her everything.

  “I’m going to call my partner now, Joanne, and he’s going to come and get us.” She held the evidence bag up between them. “And I’ll take care of this. I’ll bring it to the police lab, I’m willing to do that for you. But it’s all over now, you understand that, right?”

  “Yes,” said Cameron quietly. “I do.”

  “You’re going to come in and help us put an end to all of this, Joanne.”

  She held her radiophone up. “I’m supposed to call at one.”

  Hazel looked at her watch: it was five past. “Well, let’s not keep him waiting then. Dial his number. But I’ll do the talking.”