by Michael Rowe
“I’ll tell you what, Finn,” Elliot said, reaching out and putting his hand on Finn’s shoulder. “After we go to the police station and you talk to the sergeant, I’ll drive you home, then I’ll take a drive around and look for Sadie myself. I’ll even come back here—well, maybe not all the way up here, since you’ve already looked, but around the lake. I’ll see what I can find. I bet she’s home by tomorrow, one way or another. But we really have to get to the police station, just in case what you found is really important.”
“Promise?” Finn looked doubtful. “You promise you’ll come back and look for her?”
“I promise,” Elliot said. “Now let’s get back down to the car. Have you ever been in police car before? It’s kinda fun.”
Finn didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed past Elliot and started down the path from the cliff towards the lake without looking back.
When the police cruiser pulled into the driveway, the first thing Anne Miller thought was, They found Sadie! Finn would be so relieved. That is, he’d be relieved after he was told he’d been grounded for a month. Mrs. Brocklehurst, the school secretary, had called her that afternoon to ask if Finn had her permission to leave school.
Anne had told Mrs. Brocklehurst that Finn had just lost his dog and was very upset. No, he didn’t have her permission, Anne explained, but she’d appreciate it if the school would look the other way just this one time. She’d speak to Finnegan when he got home and she personally guaranteed he’d be in school tomorrow.
Mrs. Brocklehurst, who had been the primary school secretary for twenty years, loved animals, said it would be fine, and she hoped Finnegan found Sadie soon, too. She’d lost a collie named Mingus when she was a little girl and it just about broke her heart. “I think a cougar got him,” she said sadly. “I have nightmares about it even today.”
Anne hadn’t even considered cougars, or jackals, or anything of the kind, and her heart sank. But she’d thanked Mrs. Brocklehurst and hung up the phone. Then she went to the kitchen and fixed herself a stiff rum and coke, even though she never drank during the day.
When she saw Finn in the back seat of the police cruiser, her hand flew to her chest and she gasped in shock. She opened the front door and said, “Finn, what happened? Are you all right?” The driver’s side door opened, and the policeman stepped out. Anne recognized him, of course.
“Constable McKitrick, what’s going on ? What’s my son doing in a police car?”
“It’s nothing serious, Mrs. Miller,” Elliot said politely. “Finn here was up by Bradley Lake looking for Sadie. I found him and brought him home. That’s all.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Anne replied. To her son, she said, “Finn, the school called, young man. You left early today. You and I are going to have a talk once your father gets home from the mill. Go on up to your room.”
“Actually, Mrs. Miller, Finn found something up on the slope near Spirit Rock, and we’d really appreciate it if you and he could come down to the police station and have a talk with Sergeant Thomson and I about how that happened.”
“I’m sorry, I’m confused—he ‘found something’?” Anne said. “What did he find? And what does that have to do with him coming down to the police station? I thought this was about him playing hookey. Or that you’d found Sadie. That’s his dog. I called the station about her earlier today.”
“No, ma’am,” Elliot said. “No sign of Sadie yet, but I’m sure she’ll turn up. In the meantime, I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about, Mrs. Miller, but there was an . . . incident up at Gyles Point recently, and we just want to make sure that what Finn found isn’t connected in any way to that incident.”
“What on earth did he find? Finn? What did you find?”
“It was a bag of knives, Mom,” Finn said. He wrinkled his nose.
“They’re all bloody and stuff, and they stink.”
“Oh my God,” Anne said, gasping. “And you think they’re . . .”
“We don’t know anything yet, Mrs. Miller,” Elliot said. “But if you
and Finn would come down to the police station, we might be able to put this together and make some sense of it. Then,” he added winningly, winking at Finn, “we can get back to looking for Sadie.”
Anne hesitated. She looked at Finn standing awkwardly beside the police car. His hair was askew and his clothes were filthy. The emotional fracture of his separation from Sadie seemed to have actually bent Finn’s posture, and there was something broken in his demeanour that she’d never seen before. The last thing she wanted to do was go down to the police station right now to discuss Finn’s gruesome discovery just before dinnertime—it was probably nothing but hunters’ debris anyway. At the same time, she realized that if they cooperated now, she’d have the attention of the Parr’s Landing constabulary, which might chivvy them on when it came to looking for Sadie.
“I’ll just call my husband and let him know where we’ll be,” Anne said. “That way he can meet us there. I’d really prefer if my husband was present if you’re going to question Finnegan.”
“Would it be all right if we called your husband from the station, Mrs. Miller?” Elliot countered. “This is sort of important, and I’d rather not waste your time any more than we have to. And we’re not going to ‘question’ Finnegan, we’re just going to ask him some things and take a statement. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Anne looked from Elliot to Finn, then back to Elliot. “All right, if it’s that important. Is it?”
“It is, ma’am,” Elliot said firmly. “It is. I’d appreciate it.”
Without another word, Anne went into the house and took her purse off the hall table and took her coat out of the closet. When she came back out, Finn was already in the back seat of the car, waiting for her, and Elliot was holding the passenger-side door open.
As they drove through town towards the police station, Anne realized she’d never been inside a police car in her life and, fancifully, that Parr’s Landing looked different through its windows. The plain houses and shops they passed—houses and shops she’d passed her whole life— suddenly seemed alive with the possibilities of secret lives occurring behind their closed doors. This must be the way policemen see the town, she thought. She supposed that was what the police were for—to make sure that the secret lives of other people remained, if not pure, then at least contained.
The more practical part of her hoped against hope that none of her neighbours would see her and Finn in the police car and start gossiping.
Anne glanced at Finn, who was staring out his window. He was lost in his own thoughts—doubtless thoughts about Sadie. Anne was also grieving for Sadie’s disappearance, and worried, but she knew better than to break down in front of Finn.
She reached over and gently squeezed his hand.
When Finn didn’t respond, Anne held his hand until he extricated it from hers. Finn did this gently, as though to reassure his mother that it wasn’t her hand, per se, that he found unbearable, but rather that any human contact at all right now was a sorry substitute for the feeling of Sadie’s head under his chin, the soft black fur tickling his neck as he held her body close to his and inhaled her warm dog scent, and felt her heartbeat.
Later, at the station, while Anne tried unsuccessfully to reach her husband on the telephone, Finn told the police everything he could think of about how he’d found the bag up by Spirit Rock. The two cops listened closely, but gave no indication one way other another what they were thinking.
The older one—Sergeant Thomson—put on plastic gloves and looked through the bag. He’d kept his back turned to Finn and his mother while he did so, and all they heard was the clink of metal on metal, and then the sound of the hockey bag being zipped closed.
When he turned around again, Thomson asked Finn a series of questions that Finn answered as best he could while the younger one— McKitrick—took notes.
No, Finn said, he couldn’t think of anything else. No, he hadn’t seen anyone. No, he hadn’t
been alerted by any noise—he’d only gone up that far because of Sadie’s terror of it when they’d walked there that morning a few days ago. He thought maybe she’d gone back up there. He didn’t know why he thought that—it was just a possibility.
“That’s what dogs are like sometimes,” he’d said with a shrug. “I thought maybe I’d find her there. I hoped I would.” He paused, his voice thickening. “I didn’t.”
“I think that’s all, Finn,” Thomson said. “I think we’ve pretty well covered everything we need to know. Mrs. Miller, thank you so much for coming in with Finn. Constable McKitrick will drive you home now.”
“You’ll look for Sadie?” Finn said hopefully. He turned to Elliot and said, “You said you would, remember? You promised.”
“I will, Finn,” Elliot said. He glanced uneasily at Thomson. “I promise.”
“Mrs. Miller, Finn?” Thomson said. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about this for a bit. Don’t tell your neighbours or— especially you, Finn—your friends. Let’s consider this our secret for a while, until we figure out what’s going on. It wouldn’t do for rumours to be circulating about something that may well be . . . well, nothing.”
“May well be?” Anne demanded. “It’s a hunter’s bag, isn’t it? You’re not suggesting it might be something else? You don’t think that someone was . . . well, that people were hurt, do you?”
“Very likely it’s a hunter’s bag, Mrs. Miller,” he replied calmly. “But you know how these stories grow in small towns. Like I said, I’d appreciate it if you folks would just keep it under your hat for a little bit. I will personally call you when we know for sure what’s going on.”
After Elliot had left to drive Finn and Anne home, Thomson stared thoughtfully at the hockey bag for a long moment. Then he put the plastic gloves back on and reexamined the contents. The knives and the hammer had obviously been used to achieve a violent end. If it hadn’t been for the presence of the hammers, he might have considered the possibility that they’d belonged to a hunter, and that the blood was animal’s blood, not human blood. There was hair on the head of the hammer and thin matted clumps of it where the base of the knife blade met the handle.
Thomson lifted the bound typescript from the bottom of the bag and read the first few pages. It was obviously the document that Billy Lightning had told them about, Professor Phenius Osborne’s translation from the original French that he claimed had been stolen from his father’s desk by Richard Weal after Weal had murdered him. Except it couldn’t be Richard Weal, since Weal had apparently committed suicide months before the murder, according to the Toronto police.
Which left Billy Lightning as the only link between the bag and its contents and—very likely—the recent events in Gyles Point.
Whatever else was true, the fact that the bag had been found at Spirit Rock meant that its owner had to be in the vicinity. Thomson sighed— his gut told him that Billy Lightning was no murderer, and he tended to trust his gut in cases like this. But facts were facts, and facts trumped gut feelings when it came to him doing his job.
He considered calling Bill Lefferts, the senior officer over at the Gyles Point detachment, to let him know what they’d found, but he told himself that the situation was still unfolding and he had more questions that needed answering before bringing anyone else into the mix.
Thomson reminded himself to commend McKitrick on having found the bag—or, if not actually having found it, at least having identified and brought it in. He had been checking out the area based on something he’d seen, so if there was to be any credit given, it was rightfully Elliot’s.
As soon as Elliot was back from the Miller house, they’d take another run out to the Gold Nugget to talk to Billy Lightning. Thomson hoped that the professor would be cooperative, because under the circumstances, if he wasn’t, it wasn’t going to go well for any of them, least of all for Billy Lightning.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Night falls swiftly in Parr’s Landing in late October. The sunlight is there, then it’s gone.
It’s not that night comes unannounced, but rather that the announcements themselves manifest in a rapid sequence of shifting light and temperature fluctuations that might be missed by someone not born and bred in the north country. By late afternoon, the sky is already darkening to orange and pale violet, with bands of dark blue and black hunkering down behind the line of trees and cliffs ringing Bradley Lake and Spirit Rock, and the biting, hyperborean wind blowing in off Lake Superior chills everything in its path.
At night, Parr’s Landing breathes in its population and doesn’t exhale them until the morning.
Morgan Parr, who was used to Toronto’s perpetual neon twilight, found the sudden darkness both intimidating and oddly enchanting.
She’d waited for Finn at lunch, and was surprised by how much she missed him when he didn’t show up. After school was over, she walked from Matthew Browning over to the primary school in the hopes of finding Finn and walking home with him, but he wasn’t among the crowd of kids milling about after the bell.
Disappointed, she walked home alone, aware of the change in the light even at four-thirty in the afternoon.
At Parr House, she found the impossibly thin Parr’s Landing phone book in a drawer of the marquetry cabinet in the foyer and looked up Finn’s phone number. There was only one “Miller” in the book, an “H” on Childs Drive. She copied down the address on the small yellow pad of paper by the telephone and pocketed it, then went upstairs to do some homework. By dinnertime, it was nearly full dark.
As she descended the staircase from the upper hallway, Morgan noted that even with the night pressing against the other side, the baronial stained glass windows in the foyer seemed to catch and hold whatever light existed, seeming to burn with a singular lambency all their own, even at night. At Parr House, it seemed to Morgan, even the encroaching darkness was subject to the whims of Adeline Parr.
For once, dinner around the long dining table was more or less civil. Adeline seemed sanguine, as though her excoriation of her son and daughter-in-law the previous night had fed some ravenous private hunger, filling her up and leaving her full and bloated. She asked perfunctory questions of Morgan, easy-to-answer questions about school and how she liked the town. Morgan noticed that Adeline didn’t raise the topic of Finnegan Miller, nor did she ask if Morgan had met any new friends. Morgan doubted this was accidental, but far from being disappointed by her grandmother’s lack of curiosity about her social life, Morgan was relieved by it. It meant at least one fight was not going to break out again over dinner.
For his part, Jeremy seemed entirely lost in his thoughts. Judging by his face, Morgan guessed they weren’t very happy thoughts. Morgan worried about him. She wasn’t sure what exactly had happened to Jeremy growing up here—the specifics had never been discussed with her, nor did she have any indication that questions about his past at Parr House would be welcomed by her uncle—but she sensed that they had not been easy years.
Her mother, on the other hand, seemed to be in a genuinely good mood for the first time in weeks, certainly since they’d arrived in town. Christina smiled encouragingly at her daughter as she answered Adeline’s questions about her day, adding a few comments of her own—comments that Adeline, for once, neither disputed nor mocked. Morgan dared to hope that the evening might well pass without any sort of incident, but it was early yet.
“I met someone very interesting today,” Christina said brightly to Jeremy. “At the Pear Tree. A professor, from Michigan.
“A professor? Really?” Jeremy brightened. “In Parr’s Landing? What on earth was he doing here?”
“He didn’t say, really,” Christina said thoughtfully. “He mentioned something about his father passing away. His father worked here some years ago. He’s Native,” she added. “He knew all about the Landing and the Wendigo legend. It was fascinating.”
“An Indian?” Adeline said. “An Indian professor?” Her mock
ing laughter rang out from the head of the table. “Christina, you’re so gullible. A man could tell you anything and you’d believe it, wouldn’t you. And you met this . . . ‘professor’ at the café in town, did you? Why were you speaking to strange men in cafés, Christina? I should think you’d know better than that, considering.”
“What was his name?” Jeremy asked, desperate to keep the conversation between his mother and his sister-in-law from going in the direction it was most certainly headed. “Did he say where he taught?”
Christina smiled gratefully at Jeremy. Before Adeline could say anything else, she said, “He said his name is William Lightning. He teaches at Grantham University. It’s somewhere in Michigan. I think he told me where, but I don’t remember.”
Both Christina and Jeremy expected another sharp rebuke from Adeline—were braced for it, in fact. When she said nothing, they looked to the head of the table. The colour had drained from Adeline’s face.
“Mother,” Jeremy said. “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Jeremy,” Adeline said, her voice was faint. She fumbled for her water glass, and then took a few sips before shakily putting it back down. “Christina, what did you say his name was?”
Christina looked quizzically at Jeremy who returned her look blankly, as if to say, I have no idea. “His name is William Lightning. Why?”
“You said his father passed away, did you?” Her studied casualness seemed entirely at odds with her pallor. “Did he mention what his father’s . . . what he taught?”
“I think he said his father was an anthropologist, too. His name was something Osborne. He was part of some archaeological excavation here in the fifties. As I said, Billy—Dr. Lightning—said his father just died. Why, did you know him?”
“I believe we may have met when he was here in 1952 for his dig,” Adeline said. Still deathly pale, Adeline seemed to have regained some of her composure, though her voice sounded unusually brittle, even robotic.