The Canary List: A Novel

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Except tonight, burrowed beneath the covers, trying to feel warm and secure, she was trying to squash Inside Jaimie because Outside Jaimie had to deal with going to Rome and making sure she helped Dr. Mackenzie. And Outside Jaimie had to make sure to help Mr. G, but Inside Jaimie was worried about what might happen in Rome and thinking about how it had felt in Nanna’s kitchen, talking to Nanna like she was a real grandmother, and all Inside Jaimie wanted was to be in the kitchen again, where time didn’t seem to exist and she had a sense of belonging and completeness around the old woman who was so nice. Feeling all of this, the lonesome sound of the owl had formed into a little rock, rolling down a hill and kicking loose bigger rocks that kicked loose bigger rocks until suddenly everything felt out of control.

  And she found herself crying.

  Worse, she was feeling sorry for herself. That had not happened in forever.

  Was it too much just to hope for a family to belong to? Just about every other kid in the world had that.

  And why, of all the kids in the world, was she the one who could feel the Evil?

  She knew for sure she’d never have her own family, and that was bad enough, but she was also getting the feeling that she’d never grow into a calm, peaceful old woman, content in her little house.

  Really, she thought, as she buried her face in her pillow to let it soak up the tears, what kind of future did a kid like her have?

  For all she knew, the owl hooted at the Evil waiting for her right outside the chain-link fence, ready to pounce at the first opportunity.

  Nathan Wilby sat in his Ford Taurus, deep in the shadows of trees, overlooking the gate to the Bright Lights Center.

  Wondering if it would be worthwhile to make a move tonight.

  The girl was behind the fence.

  He felt a vibration in his front pocket. Only one person he expected to call at this time, well past the witching hour.

  He dug it out and snapped it open, aware that Abez was in the backseat, hunched forward in his miserable way. Abez had not talked much tonight. Abez was sulking because Nathan would not get rid of Nanna.

  “I’m here,” Nathan said to The Prince. “Watching the place where they are keeping the girl.”

  “Don’t worry about the girl. You need to take care of the old woman. You have your instructions. What’s the delay?”

  “There’s nothing she can do to hurt us.”

  “You have your instructions. Do I need to say more?”

  “No,” Nathan said. “You are The Prince.”

  The phone went dead.

  Nathan sat in the darkness for a long time, staring ahead, not thinking about the girl anymore.

  Thirty-Nine

  ine o’clock the next morning and halfway across the valley after an hour of fighting traffic, Crockett faced an RN wearing an ID tag that read Richard Jerome.

  “If you’re not interesting in talking to me,” Crockett told Jerome, “I’ll find other ways. Human Resources next. It didn’t take much background work to link you to this. I’m guessing HR would hate any kind of media exposure on this.”

  In his fifties, Jerome was not a typical candy-striping nurse. He looked more like a Harley-Davidson guy. A real Harley-Davidson guy, not a wannabe weekend rider. Shaved skull, surprisingly elegant facial structures for someone so big. He was easily four inches taller than Crockett’s six feet, and just as easily forty pounds heavier. His short-sleeved green uniform strained against the man’s bulk. Not what Crockett had expected after his arrival at the neonatal intensive care unit at the Methodist Medical Center, nor what you’d expect for a man in his fifties.

  “That’s a threat, isn’t it,” Jerome said. “Not hard to guess why your face looks so bad, you operate like that.”

  He pushed Crockett up against the wall, placing his hands on Crockett’s shoulders. Hands capable of holding preemies in one palm. The guy could probably crack walnuts between his knuckles.

  “Archimedes,” Crockett said.

  “The fulcrum guy.” Proving Jerome was well read.

  “Yeah, leverage,” Crockett said. Weird, looking upward at a man. Weird seeing the gap in the guy’s teeth and thinking about Shrek in this situation. “Look, there’s not much you can do to scare me, so don’t make this worse on yourself.”

  Jerome backed away, panting slightly. Probably not from exertion, but from restrained anger.

  “I’ve got nothing to say about this,” Jerome told Crockett.

  “That tells me a lot,” Crockett said. “I ask you about your name on a birth record twelve years ago, and you decide you have nothing to say. Must have been memorable, if you can remember it that far back and not even ask me for more details. Or maybe you’ve been wondering all this time when it would catch up to you.”

  “Who are you? And why you asking?”

  “How about,” Crockett said, “you find time for a ten-minute break, and I buy you a coffee.”

  Crockett waited in the hospital cafeteria. The ebb and flow of doctors and nurses and visitors was no different than it was during the hours and hours of hell he’d spent in a similar setting during the final months of Ashley’s life.

  It had taken willpower just to park at the Methodist Medical Center, let alone step through the doors to the corridor smells and sounds that had stained him permanently during his vigils. He’d only been in a hospital once again since. Mickey had tripped and fallen into the corner of the coffee table, needed ten stitches below his chin. By then Crockett had known that the marriage was gone; sitting in the emergency room, immersed in the smells and the memories of the vigils had been a particular hell he would have wished upon no one.

  Crockett thought about death a lot. Sometimes he envied those who believed there was life after death.

  Ashley’s words. “Daddy, don’t cry. It’s okay. I get to go to heaven. I’ll see you there. Right? Daddy?”

  No such belief for Crockett.

  Ashley was gone. No longer in existence. He knew that questioning why was a cliché, but he couldn’t help it. Why had she been taken?

  Jerome had glared at him and asked who he was and why he was asking.

  Crockett, at least, knew the answers to those questions.

  He was a father. He was asking because Brad Romans had given him Jaimie Piper’s birth records, and Crockett was still grasping at any straw to fight for the right to be a father to his other child. With Ashley, much as he had refused to buckle until her final breath, it was a fight that he never had any chance of winning. Maybe the odds were the same now, trying to stay out of prison so that he wouldn’t lose Mickey too, but he was going to fight in the same desperate way.

  Richard Jerome stepped into the cafeteria. A difficult man to miss. Conversation muted briefly, then picked up again.

  Crockett mentally shifted gears away from Ashley and Mickey and the weight inside him that every parent who loved his children understood was always there, the weight of the fear of loss.

  One thing at a time.

  “Right up front,” Crockett said, “I’m not interested in taking this conversation past our table. I just want to know who was Jaimie Piper’s real mother.”

  “Why?” Jerome’s voice was rumbly deep.

  “I’m hoping that answer will lead me to other answers that will keep me from going to prison.”

  Jerome leaned back, arms crossed. “Maybe that gives me a chance to threaten you. I’m sorry … I mean, apply leverage.”

  “It’s why I gave you that.”

  “Not tracking.”

  “Obvious you’re a straight-up guy. You don’t like games, I’m guessing. I don’t want to leverage you into something. I just want your help. Easier to tell you this over a foam cup of acid coffee than with you pushing me against a wall.”

  “You wired?”

  “This isn’t television.”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “Okay,” Crockett said. “I’m wired.”

  “Really?” It obviously wasn’t the answer
Jerome expected.

  “It’s a stupid question. If I’m wired, I’m going to deny it. I say no, then you have to choose to believe me or frisk me. Only nurse I’ll let frisk me is female. So why not say yes and get that game over with.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Jaimie’s blood type didn’t match her mother’s.”

  Another long pause. “This is what happened. Two women come into the natal unit at the same time. One’s from a good family, has money. She’d been coming in every week, getting checkups, reading up on being a mother, telling me about the nursery she put together for the baby. Her husband, he’s so in love it’s beautiful. The other one is a homeless woman. Has no idea who the father was. Homeless woman about the same age, but she looked a couple decades older. It’s easy enough for you to guess what happens next.”

  “I’ll just listen.”

  “And I’ll tell it, no meat on the bones. The good woman, ready to love her baby, is fine, but the baby has complications. Homeless woman pops out a healthy girl. Happened so fast. It’s three in the morning, all this stuff happening. They take away the good woman’s baby girl, and you can tell this one’s not going to make it. Homeless woman, she’s screaming, trying to push away her healthy baby, shrieking about demons. Both babies are girls, about the same size, same hair color. In all the confusion, there’s one way to make both women happy and make sure the baby that lives is going to get a decent home. What would you do?”

  Crockett nodded. “Hope someone never came back asking questions.”

  “Like now.” Jerome shook his head. “Then I hear six months later, after what I did to help that little baby, that her parents get killed in a car accident not long after taking the baby home. Baby girl is homeless anyway. Tell you what, sometimes life is bleak.”

  “Bleak,” Crockett said. He wanted to get away from the smell of the hospital. Too much of Ashley in it. Strange, his daughter didn’t exist anymore but still filled him and his thoughts. “This won’t come back on you. The only other thing I need is the name of the homeless woman.”

  Forty

  ext stop for Crockett was an attempt to catch up to Madelyne Mackenzie during her morning time at the office. Forty-five minutes after his conversation at the hospital and glad freeway traffic had been relatively light, Crockett didn’t know if what he’d learned about Jaimie would help—her or him. He was just flailing, grasping, paddling. The alternative was to stay in bed all day, blinds closed.

  Maybe increasing the pressure on Mackenzie might result in something. Especially since he could read her e-mails, and she didn’t know it. Provoke her as much as possible, see what came out of it.

  She was behind her desk, and he’d been forced to bully his way in past Mackenzie’s secretary, a tiny elderly woman, shorter than the potted palm in the austere front office. Not a comfortable sensation for Crockett, playing the bully. Hadn’t been fun at the hospital, and it had not been fun with the secretary. Crockett had been as gentle as possible with her, delivering his threat to go to the media. Still, the woman had scurried into the doctor’s office as if Crockett were trying to share bedbugs.

  “Overly dramatic, wouldn’t you say?” Mackenzie asked. “That message of yours? Heard that saying, catch more flies with honey?”

  “Didn’t work for me yesterday,” Crockett said.

  “This new approach is even less efficient. I’m not interested in hearing you bluster about the media. Instead, I allowed you inside my office so you could hear it from me. Go away. If you come back, I will call the police and have you charged with trespassing and harassment. Good-bye, Mr. Grey.”

  “Good-bye, Dr. Mackenzie.”

  Crockett didn’t move, however. He studied the woman behind the desk. Somewhere, a Goodwill store was missing an entire clothing collection donated from a senior citizen’s home, with Mackenzie obviously determined to model it day by day.

  “I said good-bye, Mr. Grey.”

  “So did I.” He grinned. It was fun, getting her to react. Despite her efforts to be unlikable, he liked her. He couldn’t explain why, not even to himself. “Good-bye is a very polite word.”

  “Ten seconds, then I lift this phone to call the police. ”

  “Excellent. I’ll do my best to time their arrival with the journalist I’ll call. The more publicity the better. I can see the headlines now: ‘Blood-sucking psychiatrist pairs with exorcist to abuse young girl.’ Try to picture it in bold. All caps. Above the fold.”

  “Picture this one,” Mackenzie said undaunted. “Desperate pedophile thrown back in prison for harassment.”

  She picked up the phone as she studied Crockett. Crockett heard the phone ring outside in the reception area.

  “Marge,” she said, “what time does your watch say?” Dr. Mackenzie listened to the answer. “Thank you. Wait precisely three minutes. If you don’t see Mr. Grey leave by then, you can call the police. Tell them there is a man in my office making threats.”

  She hung up. She reached for a pen and started working on some papers on her desk.

  “I guess the clock is ticking,” Crockett said. “Why take blood from Jaimie Piper? Why pay so much for a DNA analysis?”

  She continued to focus on her paperwork. He’d expected her to flinch, at least.

  “You see,” Crockett said, beginning the story he had mentally rehearsed. “About a week before school ended, I received a phone call from a scientist at the University of Tennessee. Named McFarlane. He wanted to ask me a lot of questions about a student of mine, based on enquiries from a medical person working with this student. Apparently he found something interesting.”

  It was a bad lie. Hopefully with enough diversion to keep Mackenzie from guessing where Crockett might have learned about the blood samples. And with enough truth to provoke her into something. Anything. He had no doubt that Mackenzie knew enough about all of this to help him make sense of it. Crockett was struggling, though, with finding a way to motivate her to share.

  So much riding on this, and he didn’t have much time. The longer this went on, the longer he went as an accused pedophile—and the longer he was a man who would not likely be reunited with his son. Jaimie needed help too. The girl was clearly in danger and needed to be rescued before it was too late. Then there was Nanna. If she was still alive, and that was a big if, how much longer would she remain alive?

  There was the other time pressure. The immediate one. He was very conscious that he needed to be gone in less than three minutes. Mackenzie did not appear to be someone who bluffed.

  Nor did she appear interested in Crockett’s wonderful obscuration.

  “I suggested to this scientist that he’d be better served by perhaps getting a genealogy report on said student,” Crockett said to the top of Mackenzie’s head. “Jaimie’s talked a lot about witches in class. I wondered if that had anything to do with it.”

  Still nothing except for scratching of pen on paper. Crockett felt grudging admiration for Mackenzie. He’d just exposed two secrets that should have staggered her, forced her to demand how he learned them. This woman could play poker.

  “After that,” Crockett said. “I found some tiny goldfish and sucked them up through my nose before swallowing them alive.”

  Finally, she looked up.

  “Just checking to see if you were listening,” Crockett said.

  “You need help,” she said.

  “Then help me,” Crockett said.

  She looked at her watch. “You have less than a minute to leave.”

  “Do you think Jaimie’s demon possessed?” Crockett asked, wondering if this would finally get a reaction. “Is that why you took her to an exorcist?”

  Slight flinch. So her poker wasn’t perfect.

  “Thirty seconds,” she said.

  “What about the hypnotherapy?”

  “Tick. Tock.”

  “I’m going to keep digging.” A lie. He didn’t know where else to dig. If he couldn’t get anything from Mackenzie, he was out
of options.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “Are we finished here?”

  “Not quite.”

  Crockett moved to the wall thermostat and made an adjustment.

  “What are you doing, Mr. Grey?”

  “Raising the temperature, Dr. Mackenzie.” Game over, and he’d lost. Badly. He should have left with dignity. Instead, he succumbed to a petty impulse. “You’re a cold, cold person, and I have no idea what it would take to thaw you out. Maybe this will help.”

  Forty-One

  eaded back to the Fishloft, Crockett decided against taking freeways out of the San Fernando Valley. He was trying to live in the moment, instead of worrying about the future or letting longings about the past drag him too far down. Living in the moment meant top down on the Jeep, taking Laurel Canyon up the hills, across on Mulholland, then down to Bel Air, across on Sunset. As he reached Mulholland and caught a glimpse of the wide valley below, tinged with yellow from smog, he was listening to the Eagles, getting lost in the great mixture of rock and roll and melancholy.

  Then came the first chords of “I Can’t Tell You Why”—his theme song for how the mirage of his marriage to Julie had slowly shimmered into nothingness in the aftermath of Ashley’s death. Up all those nights in the hollowness of defeat, letting their love tear them apart. Two people, living through years in the dark.

  That definitely wasn’t a song for living in the moment.

  Crockett turned down the volume and, stuck behind an elderly couple in a black Lexus, mentally ran through the conversation in Dr. Mackenzie’s office, trying to decide if there had been anything but defeat as he’d made a fool of himself.

  His phone rang briefly. No caller ID; it was the prepaid Catfish had given him. The ringing stopped before he could answer. Cell coverage was sketchy along Mulholland.

  The distraction bumped his thoughts away from Mackenzie and on to McFarlane. The geneticist had asked if Crockett could tell him anything unusual about Jaimie. Was what he’d learned from Agnes Murdoch something worth passing along? Crockett went back and forth between making a quick call or not, until finally the impatience of following the elderly couple goaded him into some kind of action. He waited for a stretch of road that showed a few bars of signal strength on his cell.